 
BOOK ONE OF THE KAGENT TRILOGY

CRASHPOINT

MARK SARNEY
Crashpoint (Kagent Series: #1)

Copyright © 2014 by Great Star Publishing. All rights reserved.

First Smashwords Edition: 2014

ISBN-10: 1-941188-00-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-941188-00-2

Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Crashpoint (Kagent Series: #1)
CHAPTER ONE

The first bounty hunter ran into the Fresh-Pressed Business Suites Hotel gasping for breath.

Everyone in the lobby, the clerk and two businesswomen in the lounge, turned toward the noise. They all froze when they saw him.

The bounty hunter's chest heaved under his gray armored jacket as he caught his breath; his mouth was a tense thin line beneath his black smartshades. His fingers hovered over oversized hand cannons strapped to each hip, their power indicators glowing blood red down the length of the barrels.

The man stared back at the two businesswomen gaping at him. His smartshades scanned their faces and displayed their IDs. They threat-assessed at under four percent probability.

"We ask guests to use the revolving door on cold nights. Can I help you?" the clerk asked, her voice attempting — and failing — to sound calm and businesslike.

He turned toward her, her ID and one percent threat probability overlaid on his smartshades. Tension melted out of his shoulders and his hands came away from the weapons.

"I won't be here long," he said tightly and hurried to the elevators.

A dozen drones the size of ping-pong balls launched from a small hardshell case on his back. With a barely audible hiss they rose to shoulder height and formed a floating perimeter around him.

The Fresh-Pressed hotel chain catered to weary business travelers needing little more than a recharge dock, a bed and complimentary dry-cleaning. The location on South Franklin Street was right in the heart of the financial district. It didn't see many bounty hunters.

The two businesswomen watched the drones buzz around the lobby, looked at one another in horror, grabbed their coats, and left through the hotel's revolving door.

The bounty hunter looked away and touched the arm of his smartshades. "Spies on the street and lobby. Assault drones with me," he said to Cross. She was a Simon, an AI assistant who existed in the nets, and served as his assistant, number cruncher, and guardian angel.

Cross sent the drones on their pre-programmed missions. Any bounty hunter worth his license had his Simon control these multiple flying objects. A multi-tasking bounty hunter typically suffered a fatal drop in focus.

While he waited for the elevator, he flipped through the live hotel security camera feeds that Cross streamed off the Bounty Hunter Network. She posted them as thumbnail videos across the top of his smartshades.

"Room number?"

[437] Cross's texted-reply appeared in the upper right-hand corner of his smartshades.

He checked the BHN video feeds for the bar, the elevators, the restaurant, and in the hallways on the fourth floor. Still nothing to worry about.

[I will alert you to threats.]

The bounty hunter snorted. Despite her eighty years of experience in law enforcement and bounty hunting, Cross sometimes had the street sense of a six-year-old.

"What's my success probability down to now?" he asked. "You said thirty-five percent earlier."

[It dropped to twenty-eight percent while you argued about taking this job. It's up to forty-seven percent now because you arrived here first.]

First. The job had been posted thirty-one minutes ago. With a reward this high, every bounty hunter in downtown Chicago should be converging on this hotel right now. He was first only because he was so close. He figured he was also the most desperate.

The elevator chimed and two intoxicated couples stumbled out. Once the elevator began to rise, the bounty hunter unholstered Bruiser, a disabler pistol made of scuffed dark blue steel.

[You don't need Bruiser; this job's amoeba is a middle-aged woman.]

The bounty hunter winced. "I don't want to know anything about the amoeba. No sex, no age, no name, no voyeuristic bullshit psyche profiles. The Bounty Hunter doesn't need to know."

If The Bounty Hunter had to do something horrible, like, say, shoot a mother of two in the spine for skipping out on her child support payments, distancing himself from The Bounty Hunter helped him cope. Calling a job's target an amoeba — a brainless, ignorant blob — also helped.

[My point is she is most likely unarmed.]

"Like Pedro Matsui was?" the bounty hunter shot back.

[The chance of a quadriplegic having a tongue-fired shotgun welded to the bottom of his wheelchair was less than one tenth of a percent]

"It only takes one outlier to kill me," the bounty hunter chided.

He stepped out on Four and switched his smartshades to tactical. An infrared overlay combined with echo location pinpointed the location of every person on the floor.

He walked down the hall, checking human heat signatures in each room he passed. People watched videos on their netpads, ate, copulated, crapped. A low threat probability floated above each head; no one was poised to jump out and shoot him.

The human heat signature in Room 437 was bent over the bed. He placed his hand on the door handle.

[Unlocking the door in 3... 2... 1]

The lock clicked and the bounty hunter burst in.

In quick succession he saw a queen-sized bed, a desk, and a naked woman with dark, wet hair. She was in the middle of pulling underwear out of a suitcase.

The woman looked up in shock at the bounty hunter, at Bruiser, and at the drones hovering off of her freckled shoulders.

Moist air coming from the bathroom tickled the bounty hunter's nose. "You're coming with me," he said. "Get dressed."

She straightened and quickly covered her breasts.

"Oh my God! Nick Lincoln!"

The bounty hunter froze. He wasn't famous like Borbola or even well known. Mostly because he wasn't even very good at bounty hunting. "How the hell do you know who I am?"

"I'm Kelly Sekma," she said simply. "I'm your aunt."
CHAPTER TWO

"I don't have an Aunt Kelly," Nick said as he closed the door behind him.

The blue stopwatch on his smartshades that had been ticking away since the job appeared on the BHN passed thirty-five minutes. The success probability dropped to twenty-four percent. Another bounty hunter would arrive any minute to kill him, grab the amoeba, and get the reward.

"Get dressed," he said. "We have to leave. Cross, run her damn profile."

[I did, when the job posted. But it didn't mention anything like that.]

Nick checked the feed from the drone outside. The drone had attached itself to a streetlight to withstand the wind gusts and could see several blocks in both directions. No sign of trouble — yet.

"I'm your mother's step-sister," the amoeba said.

He turned to her. "My mother only has a step-sister named Alicia. Now let's go."

"I wish I could say I'm shocked that she never mentioned me," the woman said wistfully, shaking her head. "My maiden name is Hernandez. Kelly Maria Hernandez."

Cross posted the information she downloaded from the BHN for one Kelly Maria Hernandez living at his grandmother's address in Harrisburg. Her yearbook pictures, transcripts of calls, text messages, and medical records scrolled down his smartshades.

[The records stop after she reached age eighteen. Which makes sense if she went offworld. Look at her senior year portrait.]

Nick super-imposed that school picture over the face of the woman standing in front of him. It lined up perfectly, from the shape of her eyelids to the structure of her cheekbones. The only differences were thirty years of aging and a different hairstyle.

The woman standing in front of him was his aunt.

Shit.

[37 minutes, 21% success probability.]

Nick groaned. "We have to get out of here. The reward on your head is so high my competition should already be lined up in the hall."

His aunt grabbed clothes and hustled into the bathroom. He sent drones after her to sweep the bathroom for any hidden weapons. There were none, and he left her alone to change in private.

Nick busied himself tossing her crap into her handbag. "Assuming we get away, then what?" he muttered to himself.

[Is that a rhetorical question?]

He couldn't toss his own aunt in jail. But could The Bounty Hunter do it? It seemed like the Bounty Hunter had snuck out and left Nick to struggle with moral dilemmas.

Aunt Kelly came out of the bathroom dressed in regular Earth clothes, thank God. He didn't want to drag a flamboyant offworlder onto the L.

"We're leaving," he said, tossing her the handbag, and walking towards the door.

She looked at what he had stuffed in her handbag and frowned. She pulled some things out of it and crammed clothes into it.

Impatiently, Nick flipped through the drone feeds and the hotel cameras. No one was coming. It seemed too good to be true with all the desperate bounty hunters in the Chicago metropolitan area. Maybe he really did get the jump on this job.

"Why did they send you?" she asked.

Nick sighed. "I live really close." He opened the door to let the drones take point in the hallway.

[ALERT: Bounty hunters on the street.]
CHAPTER THREE

Nick closed the door and ran to the window. He didn't see anything.

[You can trust me.]

Nick frowned as Cross expanded the feed from the drone outside on South Franklin.

Four bounty hunters were approaching the hotel from about a block away. They wore smartshades, armored jackets, paramilitary gear, and the best muscles that medicine could buy. None had any drones aloft, but in this wind, flying drones for any length of time would just be a waste of power.

"Shit, shit, shit," Nick said. "Michael Flail. We need to go, now."

His aunt raised an eyebrow. "Bad guy?"

"We used to be partners. I got him fired. He may want to kill me when he finds out I'm here."

"Wonderful," his aunt said.

Nick couldn't win this fight. Flail's party had more than twice as many combat drones. Plus, unlike Nick, these thugs could probably shoot straight.

On the other hand, they probably had cheaped-out on buying less intelligent Simons than Cross. And until one of Flail's drones identified Nick and his aunt, they were just another pair of human heat signatures walking around the hotel.

He and his aunt needed to blend in to have a shot at escaping.

He ran into the bathroom and turned on the shower, as hot as it would go. "Cross, hide the street drone," he ordered. "Send the combat drones with me to the elevator and shut them off so they don't show on infrared." Hopefully Flail would think the amoeba's heat signature was masked by the hot water and come up to the room.

His aunt opened the door to let the three combat drones file out, shutting it behind them quickly, like evil was lurking a few feet away. The drones headed to the right, toward the elevator. Cross settled them on the gray carpeting where it met the baseboards and shut them down. Nick powered off the two guns that emitted EM signatures.

[They have launched drones.]

A small flock of drones rose from behind Flail and his bounty hunters, appearing as pinpricks of EM and heat on Nick's smartshades. They were combat drones, each capable of knocking out a human. They formed into a hostile, flying V sweeping down South Franklin ahead of the bounty hunters.

Cross tucked the defenseless spy drone behind the streetlight pole to mask its energy signature.

"Cross, can you control the hotel cameras?" Nick asked.

[Yes, the BHN paid extra for that.]

"Great." At least they didn't have cameras installed in the rooms, he thought. "On my mark, shut them all off."

[Off? Flail will definitely know a bounty hunter is in the hotel.]

"He'll figure it out anyway." Nick opened the door and headed left.

He motioned his aunt to take the stairs up. When they'd climbed two floors to Six, he said, "Okay Cross, kill the cameras."

[Done. Flail noticed right away. They're splitting up now.]

One of the muscled freaks stood guard outside the hotel entrance. Another thug loped down South Franklin to West Arcade Place, where he stationed himself between the hotel's loading dock and the parking garage next door.

Flail and his sidekick entered the lobby. Flail stopped, tapped his smartshades and studied the ceiling, tracking human energy signatures the same way Nick had. The sidekick summoned the elevator and unholstered his Reynolds N-50 handgun.

They didn't know that Nick was here.

Inspiration struck Nick as he and his aunt reached the sixth floor. "Cross, let's feint towards the jack-ass in the back and escape out the front," he said.

[Freight elevator on your left goes to the ground-floor kitchen. Flail and his partner are heading up to Four where our drones can ambush him.]

Nick grabbed a room service cart full of dirty china and pushed it toward the freight elevator, hoping that the motion would make him and his aunt, the amoeba, blend in with the other mundane human energy signatures.

[They found the street drone.]

The drones flying a loose patrol between West Arcade and West Madison spotted the EM signature of Nick's drone and attacked. Seconds later, the feed died along with the drone.

Next to him, the amoeba stabbed the freight elevator button frantically. Gears began turning and a distant whine drew closer.

Flail and his goon were in the elevator coming up to Four.

Nick said, "Cross, activate the combat drones on Four. Keep them low and in front of the doors." The feeds from all three showed that they were hovering two inches above the carpet.

The elevator dinged on Four and the doors began to open.

Flail's drones burst out of the elevator at shoulder-height, to sweep the hallway for threats before the bounty hunters stepped out.

Nick's drones slipped by down at toe height.

His drones attacked the ankle of Flail's sidekick as the lumbering man followed Flail's drones out of the elevator. Each of Nick's drones fired a blue stunner bolt into the bounty hunter's ankle, toppling him into the hallway.

Flail's five combat drones spun around.

Nick's drones were on Flail before he could react. They attacked his shin and knee. Two fired stunner bolts and a third tried to sting him with knockout juice.

None of them pierced Flail's armor. The bounty hunter dove out of the elevator and rolled to his feet.

Cross concentrated the three combat drones on Flail's nearest drone. They blasted it with purple laser beams, popping its electronics like a cheap firework.

Before the drone's blackened aerogel skeleton hit the floor, Nick's drones corkscrewed through the air, firing on the remaining drones as they twisted.

Two more of Flail's drones died and fell to the carpet. But one of Nick's burst apart and another was heavily damaged.

Nick and Flail each had two functioning drones left in the fourth floor hallway.

On Six, a bell chimed. Kelly dragged Nick inside the freight elevator. Nick let her lead him in but kept his eyes glued to his drone feeds. He had a chance to take down Flail and possibly walk out of here.

Cross sent both drones at Flail's knees. Flail swiped at them with his handgun, but only managed to whack himself in the kneecap, causing him to curse in Spanish.

Nick smiled; he had forgotten that the very Scandinavian Flail thought speaking Spanish made him sound tougher.

Nick's drones flew around Flail's body as though the blond bounty hunter exerted his own gravitational pull. Cross kept Flail's body between Nick's drones and Flail's, which couldn't fire without hitting their master. All they could do was chase. Cross kept whipping the drones around Flail, firing intermittently at the bounty hunter's exposed skin. Flail jumped, cursed, yelped in pain, and lived up to his surname.

Flail's drones pulled back, one behind their owner and one in front. Cross hurtled her damaged drone into the one behind Flail. Nick's last functioning combat drone followed close behind, using it for cover.

Flail back-pedaled to give his other drone a clear shot.

The two drones shot each other into crisped shells that fell to the carpet. As his last drone's feed died, Nick saw Flail run for room 437.
CHAPTER FOUR

The freight elevator bounced to a rough stop when it reached the ground floor. Nick unholstered Bruiser as he and his aunt raced into the kitchen. The tile and stainless steel room smelled of fried onions and fresh bread.

A young cook with short-cropped hair stopped scouring a stainless steel pot and ran over to block their way. "This no guest area, no guests!"

Nick wiggled Bruiser at the cook. He let them by.

"Now what?" Kelly asked.

Two junior cooks had propped open a battered back door. They were on the loading dock sneaking gels, oblivious to everything. Beyond it was the twenty-story parking garage.

Nick's smartshades showed a man-sized infrared signature with a hand howitzer standing within view of the hotel's rear entrance, thirty-five yards away. On the smartshades' EM overlay, half a dozen drones circled the thug's head like electromagnetic sprites. The thug was looking the other way, focused on the hotel's actual rear entrance.

"Cross, how many of these cars have alarms?"

[62%]

Nick smiled. This would be totally iron, if it worked. He leaned outside between the gelled cooks, who stared at Bruiser like wide-eyed worshippers of a religious idol.

"Flush me, you tool, what's with the weaponry?" one of the cooks said.

Nick winked at him and powered up Bruiser. He needed Cross' assistance to line up the shot. He only had one chance at this. He put his arm against the hotel's wall, steadying himself. When the crosshairs blinked green, he fired Bruiser with a dull hiss.

The blast straight-lined over a dumpster and caught the thug in the side. He slumped to the ground.

The drones swooped around their fallen master, then banked and accelerated toward Nick. A Simon must be operating them.

[32 yards and closing.]

"Great," Nick muttered. He exchanged Bruiser for the even bigger white hand-cannon he called Thunker. As his partner Mica once said, sometimes you just need to blow a big, fucking hole in the wall. That was Thunker's job.

"Sweet," the older cook said when he saw Thunker. The younger cook backed up a yard. Nick, annoyed, shooed them both inside.

[20 yards.]

He dialed Thunker's power setting all the way up to max. A deep bass thrumming began to increase in tempo inside the gun. Nick back-pedaled until he was just inside the kitchen and braced himself.

"No, don't do it," Kelly said as Thunker's whine became a high-pitched keening.

"Whatever you think this weapon does, I can assure you it's much worse," Nick said.

[10 yards.]

He pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER FIVE

In the small courtyard behind the hotel, Thunker's detonation charge boomed and created a shock wave that scattered the incoming drones like cellophane wrappers in a hurricane.

Nick felt a brief moment of glee before the roaring shock wave picked him up and tossed him like a rag doll.

He slammed into a freezer door, the smell of burned plastic rushing up his nose. He could see car alarms flashing in the parking garage and pots and pans hitting the floor as he slumped to the brown hexagonal tile floor. But he heard nothing.

He stood slowly, despite his inner ear insisting that he was standing on the wall.

Sound returned with a moist, painful pop.

Two dozen car alarms screeched, honked, and bleated outside. He could hear a rumble as the explosion's thunder echoed between the hotel and parking garage, and rolled down the glass canyons for blocks around.

"Are you okay?" Kelly yelled in his ear.

He winced and jerked his head away. He found his smartshades and put them back on.

"Yeah."

He swiveled his head around, looking for Flail. A weapon's heat signature was on the third floor, coming down the stairs fast.

Nick deactivated Bruiser and Thunker to snuff their power signatures. Hopefully with other people roaming the first floor, Flail wouldn't spot him immediately.

Nick guided his aunt out of the kitchen. Kelly wound up to run, but he placed a hand on her arm, forcing her to walk normally. They turned up the hallway that led to the front entrance. As he passed a fire alarm on the wall, he pulled it. Lights strobed along the hallway and a klaxon blatted.

He pulled out Slugger, a dark green projectile gun. It didn't have an energy signature and would keep them anonymous a little longer.

They were halfway to the lobby, Nick could see the front desk, when his netpad rang.

[Rob] Cross texted.

Nick sighed and answered it. "I'm busy with the job you forced on me," he whispered.

"Oh yeah, is everything okay?" Rob asked. "I hear a fire alarm."

Nick and his aunt ran for the lobby. People poured into the hallway behind them, some walking quickly, others running. Perfect, they could slip out with the crowd.

Flail's weapon signature was fighting its way toward the lobby through people pouring into the stairwell from the second floor.

Nick replied. "Yeah, it's great. Did you give me this job on purpose? Remember, Cross can tell from your voice if you're lying."

Behind Nick, someone yelled 'Gun!' The person was pointing at Slugger, which Nick tried to tuck inside his coat. The crowd noticed his smartshades, armored jacket, and trio of oversized weapons, and ran in the other direction.

So much for hiding in a crowd.

Rob said, "This better not be an excuse, Nick—"

Nick shot back, "Did you set me up? Did you know who the amoeba was?"

"No, I have no idea," Rob retorted. "I'm telling the truth, right?"

[He is.]

"Never mind, Rob, what do you want now?"

"I'll be quick," his boss said, "I'm sending you all the scut jobs."

Flail's weapons signature was bobbing its way toward the lobby up the parallel hallway.

"Really?" Nick asked as he rushed Kelly into the lobby. The clerk had donned a fluorescent vest and was locking up the front desk.

Rob replied, "Everyone else is in Berlin. You're it, pal."

A gunshot boomed. The revolving door ahead of Nick exploded into a waterfall of glass shards that flew onto the sidewalk. Someone began screaming from the rear of the hotel.

Nick pulled his aunt behind the decorative wall that separated the lobby from the elevators and shoved her down behind a sofa.

"Is someone shooting?" Rob asked in his ear.

Nick hung up.

He reached around the corner and fired at Flail's heat signature. Studs, drywall, and cheap spray-on wallpaper exploded into an expanding cloud. No return fire came.

He pulled Kelly to her feet and started for where the door used to be. They were no more than five yards away.

"Lincoln!" The scream was primal, feral.

Nick pointed Slugger at Flail, shielding his aunt behind him.

She kept on sprinting out the door and was gone.

Oh, shit.

Flail stepped out of the dust cloud. He looked like an angry drywall demon with a bloody right arm. No weapon signatures on infrared.

"You are one dead hombre," Flail said behind clenched teeth.

His left hand reached behind his back.

Nick, remembering that his former partner kept a gas-propelled, single-shot pistol back there, did the universe a favor, and shot him in the chest.

Flail looked thoroughly surprised as he fell backward into the dust cloud and disappeared.

Nick wished he could gloat over Flail's corpse, but his aunt had escaped. By the time he ran into the street, she was already halfway up the block.

He began to chase her.

Kelly stopped when Flail's last thug came around the corner ahead of her. She was trapped between the two bounty hunters. Sirens whined in the distance.

Nick didn't slow down. He wasn't killing anyone else tonight; he holstered Slugger and drew Bruiser as he ran toward his aunt. He used her body to shield him from Flail's thug.

The thug fidgeted, not wanting to kill the amoeba — the reward was for a live capture.

Nick fired over his aunt's shoulder. The thug slid to the sidewalk like a rag doll.

She turned around, breathing hard, surprised to see him standing right behind her.

He sprayed her wrists with BondCuff before she could react. He didn't stop until it looked like a purple foam python was squeezing the life out of her wrists.

Kelly glared at him. "I'm okay, in case you were wondering."

Nick grunted. "I know. I can read your pulse, blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration."

She gave him an angry look.

He hurried her down the street and west on Arcade before an emergency vehicle appeared on South Franklin. Then the two turned south on Wacker Drive.

Nick didn't fear being arrested, he feared getting tied up in documenting what happened. The Chicago police would want statements from him and his aunt. More competition might show up in the mean time and contest his capture of the amoeba.

"Cross, patch in the audio feed from the emergency dispatch rebroadcast."

The rebroadcast was a ratings bonanza, allowing voyeuristic viewers to know about every domestic assault, heart attack, and rape when they were called in. Then it followed the emergency response in real time with on-the-scene reports and in-studio commentary.

Nick wanted the in-studio commentary, because it a gave a more complete picture of the situation.

His ear piece crackled. "Shots fired, fire alarm activated on South Franklin. Reports of an explosion or fire. Public safety units are responding. Possible bounty hunter activity," the dispatcher said.

"Now," drawled the announcer's voice, "a developing story in the financial district. The police have cordoned off the Fresh-Pressed Suites Hotel, says our reporter on the scene, Boone Frye. There are bounty hunters in the area, but the action appears to be over."

Nick wasn't concerned about Chicago's finest pursuing him. Bounty hunters could operate freely in the city as long as they were working a legitimate job from the BHN.

He was worried about second-rate bounty hunters hanging around the hotel, hoping a lucky break would put the amoeba within easy reach. Without any drones, Nick would lose any fight against a bounty hunter with drones, like sending an infantry grunt against a squadron of fighter planes.

Nick and Kelly ran across the gray, carbon-fiber Adams Bridge, then walked briskly another block. Nick kept his head on a swivel, sweeping the street up ahead, and behind them for drones or weapon signatures. It was clear both ways. They stopped to catch their breath under a pharmacy's brightly lit windows.

The street was nearly empty, with a few couples huddling together against the wind gusts, and half a dozen business-types coming out of Union Station wearing high-end overcoats.

Nick checked the emergency dispatch coverage again. The police were still sweeping through the building and a reporter had unconfirmed reports of a shootout.

He looked up and down the street for weapons signatures or drones. "We're clear," he announced.

His aunt stood up and held out her BondCuffed wrists. "Now let me go."
CHAPTER SIX

Nick scowled; he almost forgotten that he had a choice over his aunt's fate.

"If I let you go, I lose my job, and have to start my entire life over," Nick said. "I'll have to go back to my parents' Stabilized Community. I'll have a miserable life there, the example people will point out: there's the snobby punk who left to make it in the world and failed horribly."

Kelly looked entirely unconvinced. "I could get you set up better than you are now." She held out her hands.

He looked at her purple-coated wrists. If he entertained her offer at all, he needed to see if she was on the level. "I don't know you at all. Where have you been all these years, Aunt Kelly?"

She lowered her hands. "Just call me Kelly. I went offworld," she said. "I went to university in the Belt, worked my way out to Neptune and back, traveled the system. I'm married, have two children, and live on a Venusian hab."

On the smartshades, her biochem telltales said she was telling the truth.

"How come I never met you?" Nick asked.

She sighed. "I left before you learned to sit up. Your mother and I, well, we never got along."

His mother. Anna Hernandez Lincoln famously put family above all other considerations. Nick had found out the hard way that any relative who left the nest was dead to her. Even when he took a bounty hunter job in Chicago, he still came home every Thanksgiving, but was ignored by everyone but his four-year-old niece.

"So if I let you go, do I keep any chance of reconciling with my parents?"

Kelly made a face. "Probably not. No matter what you do."

She was telling the truth, at least in her opinion.

"I don't agree. If I keep my job, I still have a chance to make this work. To convince them I still can be part of the family."

He had Cross call for a taxi and then replied, "You'll stay in prison a few months, or pay an early release fine if you can afford it. Either way you'll walk eventually. If I let you go, I lose my job. I don't have a choice."

His aunt squared her shoulders. "Come with me and join the Kagents. I know you've always wanted to."

Nick smiled. "I get offworld offers all the time. Own a diamond mine in the Belt, be a Jovian porn star."

"I'm a Kagent," she said.

Kagents were elite offworld data analysts who protected privacy and used aggregated data to advance knowledge and understanding. Nick laughed. "No, you're desperate to avoid jail."

"A desperate Kagent then."

"Prove it," he demanded.

"I was staying in a hotel right near where you live," Kelly replied. "Tomorrow I planned to visit you. To recruit you."

Her biochem telltales indicated she was telling the truth. He motioned her across the street to Union Station.

"You want more proof?" his aunt asked. "Tell me what the charges against me are."

Cross had to retrieve the list of charges — Nick never bothered looking at them. "Political interference, cultural trespassing, info-terrorism, economic-terrorism, and so on."

His aunt stopped him behind one of station's mammoth pillars. "That's because of this." She dug in her bag with her BondCuffed hands and retrieved a netpad. She activated it by voice command and showed it to Nick. It's blue glow lit up his surprised face.

The netpad displayed forbidden statistics.

It had complete statistical snapshots of a number of Earth zones, everything from demographics to environmental pollution. And they were all cross-referenced and summarized, as thoroughly as Nick's mint-condition collector's hardcopy of the 2004 Statistical Abstract of the United States.

"You can't pull life expectancy projections and entertainment trends off the BHN," Nick said. The charges against her began to make sense. The penalty was a lifetime ban from the bounty hunter profession, something Rob the Slob regularly threatened Nick with every time he snagged a cool analysis job. Nick had toed that line, but not crossed it. Yet.

Kelly smiled. "I didn't get them from the BHN."

An analytical section let Nick drill down into more detailed stats. There were freedom and prosperity indices he had never heard of before. He was tempted to thumb the links to the endnotes and methodology sections that explained them.

He didn't look up. "Then how did you get them?"

She smiled slyly. "Satellite feeds."

"Bullshit." Sure, Earth had thousands of orbiting satellites, not to mention dozens of orbital habs and stations peering down at the planet's surface. But renting time and re-tasking any of them to cover all of these zones would be enormously expensive. Even if someone did all of that, how could a camera provide the socioeconomic stats he held in his hand?

"I've tried to assemble slivers of information like this for my clients. But nothing like this," Nick said. His best client, Juan Burgess, would flip out if he could deliver something like this. With the data he was holding in his hands right now, Nick would even meet his quarterly revenue quota for a change.

His aunt smiled. "We need a talented Kagent who knows Earth. You would be great, you would love it, and you'd be one of the good guys."

"The Kagents? Really?" Nick said. The only reason he'd become a bounty hunter was because it was the closest terrestrial analog to being a Kagent.

And that was the crux of it. He could never go offworld like Kelly had. When he moved to Chicago and his family treated him like he was dead, he had cried for days. What really hurt was that his niece, Sally, probably didn't remember even having an Uncle Nick. Just like he had never known about an Aunt Kelly.

"I would love to be a Kagent," he muttered, "but it has to be down here."

"That could happen, eventually." Kelly touched his arm and said in a gentle tone, "Prosperous cities are collapsing down here. We need you to help stop it from consuming all of Earth."

Nick knew from experience that there was nothing quite so painful as finding a great opportunity that you knew you couldn't take. It was even worse when you had to stomp on the opportunity; or in this case, toss it in jail, just to save your own skin.

The netpad felt like a deadweight in his hand, a talisman from a universe he couldn't visit. "I can't go offworld. My parents would never forgive me," he said.

Kelly shook her head. "Nick, you'll never win them back. I know that sounds terrible. I've been there, believe me."

He pulled his smartshades off. "Where were you when I was eight and my mother took away the telescope I got for my birthday? Where were you when I was a teenager, the only weirdo who thought there was more to life than living in the Community?"

His aunt's eyes filled with tears. "I'm sorry. I wanted to be there so bad. Your mother wouldn't let me. If I had known you would turn out like me, I would have done... I don't know. Something."

Nick wiped his own eyes. "So now you show up when you want something from me. And you expect me to jump up and do it, at great personal cost, because suddenly you're family? I have a niece who barely knows me. I'm not doing to her what you did to me."

His aunt covered her mouth and turned away.

He put his smartshades back on. "I don't know you. I can't trust you."

Nick knew what he had to do. First, not tell his parents about any of this business. Second, not throw away his job because a fairy godmother made him a Faustian bargain.

The rebroadcast feed kept nattering in his earpiece about ambulances loading up at the Fresh-Pressed Suites.

"Cross, turn off that noise." His earpiece went silent and the only sound was city buses rumbling by. He kicked a stone that skittered across the concrete.

Nick shoved the netpad into his aunt's hand and began walking again. She fell into step behind him. They walked in an angry and uncomfortable silence.

[Do you want to review the first 800 scut jobs? They are ready to go.]

The scut jobs were crap requests that came in from boutique bounty hunter shops who couldn't handle the work themselves. Big corporations like I-4 did these for a nominal fee. It was intern-level work though.

"How many of them are there?" Nick asked.

[50,000]

"Just upload them," Nick muttered. Screw Rob and his passive aggressive punishment. Rob, his aunt and Flail, all in one night. God. A gel gang attack would be just a perfect ending to this.

A six-wheeled Rolling Fortress taxi pulled up, a story and a half tall, covered in bright yellow armor. Garish digital ads for Smork's latest comedy series and Gasmic's cheapest porn subscription danced across the windows.

Kelly scowled at him and said, "If you have to bring me in, at least return my netpad to my colleagues so the data isn't lost."

Nick didn't look at her. "I'm not going offworld. They'll have to come to me."

She locked the netpad and gave it to him. He tucked it in a pocket nonchalantly, despite the thrill running up his spine and the nausea in his gut. He opened the taxi's door.

She stomped in and glared at him as he followed. He told the taxi's nav program to take them to the nearest contract prison intake center. He spent the whole ride looking out the window, pretending not to hear his aunt's muffled sighs and sniffles.
CHAPTER SEVEN

Nick turned in his aunt and took the L home, like this was like every other day after work. His anger had worn down to exhaustion by the time he reached his small apartment. Officially, it had been a good night: he was still employed, Flail was dead, and he had made his quarterly quota for the first time in over a year.

But he was profoundly unhappy.

He dry-swallowed a sleep gel, trying to forget about his aunt, her netpad, his boss, and went to bed. He slept poorly, having a recurring nightmare where Flail's mother demanded to know why Nick had to shoot her son. She was just as much of an asshole as Flail and wouldn't understand. While she yelled at him she morphed into his aunt and then his mother.

He awoke after dawn feeling his usual post-shooting blues. He showered, shaved, and activated his netpad and smartshades like an emotionless automaton.

"You look much better," Cross announced through the viewer's speakers.

Nick shook his head. "Let's avoid any more nights like that."

"You'll be happy then to know that I cleared the scut work before dawn," Cross said.

Nick poured himself a glass of water. "Great. Anything I should be concerned about?"

"Nothing," Cross replied. "Would you like me to check all future amoebas to see if they are related to you? I developed a protocol for that."

"To start with, my Simon friend, to start with," Nick said. "First thing is figuring out who set me up last night."

"You don't think that was a coincidence?"

Nick laughed. "Someone makes her an amoeba on a lucrative multi-award job and it falls in my lap? Right."

"There were at least a dozen different rural zones that offered rewards for her," Cross pointed out.

"I like Rob for this," Nick said. "He knows about my, uh, family issues." The asshole had been trying to force Nick to quit for a year already. First he reassigned Nick's partner Mica, then showered Nick with every shit job that crawled into I-4.

Nick waved a glass of water around. "Anyway, the second order of business: using the rest of this quarter to build up the analysis revenue. No more risking death to make quota." The water tasted flat and bland.

"Yes, with your marksmanship abilities, that is a good choice."

Nick nearly choked on his cranberry protein bar. "Hey! I'm not that bad."

"Do you want to compare your accuracy, heart rate, and respiration when shooting to the average bounty hunter?"

Nick bit off a chunk and shook his head.

"I assumed so. By the way, last night I found refugee activity you asked me to look for each week."

"Really?" Nick asked, looking closer at the viewer.

Cross posted an orbital photo of Tennessee. She zoomed in on a road northwest of Nashville filled with thousands of people walking and biking, either pulling carts or carrying whatever they could. They were all headed northwest.

She zoomed out and mapped out possible routes the refugees could travel to the city of Hamilton in the southwest corner of Illinois. The distance was under a hundred miles and ETA was roughly ten days of walking.

"What about St. Louis?" Nick pointed at the map. "The refugees could go to either city."

Cross replied after a second of hesitation. "A journalist reporting on the refugees sold a story to The Scoop stating that the refugees claim they are headed to Hamilton. It will be published this afternoon. Refugees usually seek out the strongest city. Should I alert Councilor Burgess?"

Nick stared at the photo. "Yes. Time to get to the office."

"You're bordering on happy," Cross noted.

Nick considered what coat to wear. In early May, in Chicago, even after three centuries of warming and climate screwiness, there were days you still wanted a coat. Armored jacket or sport coat? He opted for the sport coat, trying to be optimistic. He stuffed his armored jacket in his bag though.

He was about to leave when Cross asked. "You're not taking any weapons?"

Nick sighed. Maybe if he lugged all this stuff to the office, he wouldn't need it? But if Rob was trying to shaft him with more dangerous jobs, he probably would.

He turned back and grabbed Thunker, Bruiser and Slugger off of their recharge cradles, and dug an older set of drones out of the closet. They were the size of oranges and less than half as effective as the ones he lost last night.

I-4's Chicago office was in a single-level plastic office building located at a crumbling, weed-filled pier south of the Loop. It was a running joke that corporate kept moving the office to cheaper locations to save on rent.

The cubicle farm was empty; all his colleagues were on assignment in Europe. Rob the Slob's light was on in the paper-thin office reserved for management in the back. Nick slipped into the cube furthest away and logged in.

Cross opened a chat window in the cube's wraparound viewer. [Councilor Burgess is awaiting your call.]

Nick wasted no time calling his favorite client.

"Good to see you, Nick," Juan said, smiling his trademark toothy grin when he appeared on viewer. He had thick black hair, like Nick's, but wavy and perfectly coiffed where Nick's was short, straight, and unruly. He stood at a desk covered in netpads, photos of his kids, and empty coffee mugs.

"That's what you tell all the bounty hunters, I'm sure," Nick replied with a smile.

The Hamilton City Councilor laughed. "How are things going? How's your family?"

This question caught Nick off guard every time. He looked down. "No change yet."

Juan nodded sympathetically and held up a picture of his kids. "Don't give up, okay? I've got this crazy job, but my Abby and I, we keep the kids at the center of things, even though we split up, comprende?"

Cross scrolled news items about the Councilor across the cube's viewer. Nick leaned heavily on his Simon to help him appear adequate in making small talk with politicians.

Nick nodded. "How are you? Someone's accusing you of taking payoffs from hospitals for ignoring substandard care."

Juan shrugged. "Yeah, I gripped and grinned with people at a conference who now are in trouble for covering up substandard care in their hospitals. So a fringe blogger is trying to guilt me by association. It's a thirty-six hour story; I'm not worried about it."

Cross analyzed Juan's facial muscles and eye movements as the man talked; green was truthful, red was dishonest. Nick noted that Burgess was telling the truth, except about not worrying.

Juan smiled. "So tell me about these refugees."

Nick sent him the map of the refugees' most likely route. "A story is about to break in The Scoop about refugees heading for Hamilton. I thought you may want to get a jump on the issue."

Juan's eyes darted back and forth. "Okay. Okay. We do need to get ahead of this. We can't be like Detroit in the 80s, and throw away a century of growth like they did."

"What do you need from me?" Nick asked.

"You should brief the Chairman," Juan replied. He waved off Nick's surprised expression. "It'll be good for you, believe me. I want to lay the groundwork to modify your contract."

The city retained I-4 for criminal investigative and forensic services. The data analysis that Nick did for Juan was ad hoc work covered by boilerplate contract clauses.

"What kind of mod are we talking about?" Nick asked.

"Lower the rate per job, which would allow us to use you more, so the money would be the same. I have lots more work for you, but the expense has stopped me. At a lower rate, I think we can get more people interested in your work and then they'll want to pay you even more."

"Load me up," Nick said with a smile. "Keep me off the streets."

"Are you kidding? You're too valuable to be out doing that junk," Juan said. "I worry about you, kid."

Nick shrugged sheepishly.

[How much of my quarterly quota will this fill?] Nick texted Cross in their chat window, his finger sketching out the words on a virtual swipe pad below the desk.

[Over 50 percent.]

Nick wanted to pump his fists in the air. That would almost take him out of the running and gunning bounty hunter life. With a contract like that, maybe he could convince a couple of similar clients to follow Juan's example. There was a chance he could meet his entire quota from data analysis.

But first he had to convince the Hamilton Council Chairman that he was worth it. "Okay, Councilor, when do you want me to brief the Chairman?"

Juan checked the time on his netpad. "You've got an hour. Plenty of time to prepare, for someone as fast as you, right?"

Nick's toes went cold with fear. He knew next-to-nothing about the refugee issue. "Yeah, you bet."
CHAPTER EIGHT

After Juan clicked off, Nick said to Cross, "Let's profile the Chairman."

Cross texted, [I-4's Hamilton contract prohibits a BHN probe of any city resident unless you have a court-approved warrant.]

"Oh yeah, I forgot. An amoeba net probe then. Hopefully the journos did their homework."

[Married, approval rating in the 60s.] Cross scrolled a scorecard of Fen Ferguson stats.

"What do we know about his briefing and decision-making preferences?"

Nick had to approve Cross paying for access to pay-walled pieces on various news sites. It was worth it — journos could make a living only by charging for the most revealing features and in-depth profiles.

"Okay," Nick said after he skimmed them. "Personalize the issue for him. He tries to connect with the people affected first, so anecdotes help. He's not a wonk like Juan is, and once fired a chief of staff who kept treating him like one."

Nick looked over the two dozen briefings he had done for elected officials in the past. "Set up politician presentation template number one," he said finally. "And populate with refugee info based on his preferences. We'll just refine and refine until we're out of time."

Nick skimmed it, scowled, and began re-arranging, cutting, pasting, and adding. Despite eighty years of experience, Cross' writing came across like a terse legal brief, reflecting her legal roots.

"We need to include some action items that they can think about," Nick said. "The feature on Byte says Ferguson doesn't like hearing about problems without also hearing some possible solutions."

Cross posted a summary of the key research on the far side of the viewer. Most zones and cities kicked the refugees down the road to the next town. Some experimented with giving refugees one-way tickets on a bus out of town. Others gave them one-way tickets to a hospital's emergency room.

Nick assembled the more humane, practical solutions. Nothing was a panacea, but hopefully Fen would be inspired by things like establishing a soup kitchen or creating a semi-permanent tent city to house the refugees until a better idea came along.

Nick applied the finishing touches with half an hour left. Then he practiced it out loud twice, incorporating feedback from Cross.

Juan called back right on time, sitting next to Fen Ferguson, Chairman of the Hamilton City Council. Ferguson was bald, with intense green eyes, and a jovial mouth.

"Fen, you remember Nick Lincoln, the analyst pretending to be one of I-4's bounty hunters," Juan said. "He's the real power behind my analyses and statistics. He'll be briefing us today on the refugees approaching the city."

Chairman Fen Ferguson's green eyes flashed and he grinned under his mustache at Juan. "I knew you couldn't be that good on your own, pal. Nick, it's good to see you again. Please, call me Fen. I only make reporters call me Chairman."

"Thank you, sir." Nick split his broadcast image in half and posted a photo of a young woman with two children. She was tending a campfire in a forested glen. "Shannon Navarra is a typical refugee. She's a college-educated, mother of two, who left home because she was worried about the economic cleansing in her region. But the road has not been safe either. The last couple of towns have been almost violently hostile to them and other refugees passing through. She was profiled by a journalist covering the refugees.

"The anti-refugee groups claim the refugees are criminals released from overcrowded jails, or lazy free-loaders stealing jobs from locals. But Shannon is actually a typical refugee. They use this footage I'm playing now to make their point: what you see here is actually footage of a Haitian prison detail. My Simon traced the material to a political campaign against early-release programs."

Nick displayed a map of Tennessee. "Refugee clouds form in response to a 'mass displacement event' such as ethnic, religious, or economic cleansing. Or a genuine economic collapse."

"What caused this cloud?" Fen asked.

"Anecdotal reports are that there is a quiet education cleansing going on in western Tennessee. This woman has a graduate degree in biology and told the reporter that she left Nashville to find work."

Nick ran through a statistical profile of the refugees in this cloud. Distributions of age, profession, income level, assets, health, marketing cluster, and criminal history slid by. From every angle, the refugees were a cross-section of mostly responsible 24th century citizens with solid employment records and credit histories until very recently.

Nick played a decade-old video from the Michigan state police. It showed a satellite time-lapse of refugees gathering as they traveled across Michigan like an ant swarm headed to Detroit.

He narrated, "Since they reached Detroit, refugees have a reputation for lowering wages, inflaming political rifts, and stressing social services. Detroit never really recovered, despite booming for a solid century before then. It's the rallying cry for anti-refugee groups.

"The last five locations to receive refugees were Detroit, Paris, Acapulco, Shanghai, and Barcelona. Compared to comparable cities, four of these five had lower economic growth after the refugees arrived. But they exceeded comparable cities later — driven by increased offworld trade. And I should note that Hamilton absorbed a refugee cloud from St. Louis during the flooding of 2226."

Fen's eyebrows perked up. "We did? When? What happened?"

"I thought you were the local history buff," Juan teased, a smile tugging at his lips.

Nick posted charts of the city's quarterly economic growth in the 2220s. Then he posted another chart showing the flows of data and money through the city.

Nick nodded. "The city was growing so fast it barely noticed."

"That's all I remember hearing about it too," Fen said, and looked at Juan. "Based on what I read in history books."

Juan stroked his mustache. "What can we do to cushion the blow?"

"Barcelona prepared for the refugees like they were a large convention," Nick said. "The drop in economic growth was temporary and their political and business communities worked together. Berlin is facing a refugee cloud right now. They are making similar preparations, but neighboring zones disagree about how to respond."

Cross posted metrics on how rigorous the research was and the latest theories about refugees.

"Most of the academic studies are low quality," Nick said. "They make superficial correlations without controlling for economic conditions, the structure of the local labor force, or degree of offworld trade," Nick said. "Most of it was conducted by pro- or anti-refugee advocates. The more rigorous studies were highly limited by data or funding."

"Can you do something better? Or is this a DAL issue?" Juan asked.

The Data Aggregation Limit, or DAL, was how the BHN kept enterprising bounty hunters from lifting enough data to start a competing data clearinghouse. As the BHN grew in scope to cover the globe, the industry created the DAL in case anyone else became jealous of their monopoly.

Nick doubted that the BHN ever bothered anyone at I-4 about Nick's aggregations. Nevertheless, the DAL prevented Nick from answering many of Juan's requests.

Cross texted to Nick in the chat window, [It is a DAL issue. We would have to aggregate hundreds of thousands of records, possibly millions, to gauge the economic impact. A proper control group for such a study would have to be a comparable city, so that doubles the number. Rob has denied aggregations in the mere thousands before.]

And violating the DAL would give Rob an excuse to fire Nick. To Rob, bounty hunters ran down bad guys, they didn't run down statistics. And Nick needed his idiotic boss to approve any contract mod with Hamilton.

Nick shook his head. "No, I can't do it."

Fen steepled his fingers. "How likely is it that the refugees are headed for St. Louis or Indianapolis?"

Nick said. "According to this journalist's article, the refugees all say Hamilton. The last five refugee clouds went straight for the economically-strongest city in the region. Refugees want jobs and a few want passage offworld. And these refugees are headed straight for Hamilton."

"The only question is which suburb of Hamilton catches the refugees," Juan said. "Which councilor will be most concerned."

Fen exchanged a meaningful glance with his colleague and turned to Nick. "If we can guide them away from Nelsa Park, that would make things much better."

Juan nodded eagerly.

Cross displayed a city map of Council districts and the projected refugee paths. She added a confidence interval on each major approaching route. The refugees could enter the city from any of the districts on the city's south and eastern sides.

"I'm checking right now on what has caused them to change course in the past," Nick said, looking at a series of maps of previous refugee journeys. "The only consistent obstacle that changes their course is road construction. They can't climb through or around ripped up roads with kids and baggage."

Juan rattled off a list of upcoming construction projects. "I'll talk with Contessa in Public Works. We'll have to inform the Council of any major changes though."

Fen nodded his approval.

"Why not just tell the refugees where you want them to go?" Nick asked.

Fen raised an eyebrow. "We're going to face serious political static on this, sure, so I don't think that works for us."

Nick swallowed hard and wanted to kick himself.

Fen turned to Juan. "I'm especially concerned about Norm, Regina, and Jimmy."

[Norman Osprette, Regina Thrall, and James Travis are fellow councilors,] Cross texted. On a city map just for Nick's viewer, she labeled their districts. Norm Osprette's district sat to the east. Jimmy Travis's district was on the city's south side. Regina Thrall's district covered the northwestern corner of the city, which was odd, because it was furthest from where the refugees would reach the city.

Fen asked, "What's the refugees' ETA?"

"They average six miles a day, so about a week," Nick said. He was sticking with what he knew to not wreck his chances at that contract mod.

Fen nodded and looked at Juan. "You have a plan on how to deal with this, of course."

Juan shrugged. "I have the beginnings of a plan. I only found out about the refugees this morning."

"You're slipping; I thought you planned for every contingency," Fen nagged with a grin. "That's why I cover for you at ribbon cuttings. Nick, do you have a plan?"

The cold claws of fear ran up Nick's spine and bit into his ribs. He didn't want to screw up again, but the man was asking for his opinion. "I don't have one prepared, sir," he said, swiping below his desk, asking Cross how cities successfully dealt with refugees.

Cross just said she was checking. Wonderful. Hopefully the contract mod wouldn't hinge on him answering this. Next time, he'd have a plan ready just in case. If there ever was a next time.

Juan interjected into the awkward silence. "If we face this head on, we may dampen hostile reactions. We reassure the public, prep the business community, properly frame the issue of aiding the refugees."

Fen raised his eyebrows. "Uh huh."

"I'm not kidding. We partner with the Sancternal Guard to protect the refugees. Make it positive and high profile, to put any detractors on the defensive."

Fen drummed his fingers on the table. "The female paramilitary humanitarians? They protect refugees now?"

Juan cleared his throat. "Well, uh, no. But I stay in touch with General Fridwulf. She is concerned with the increasing attacks on refugees. If we bring her in, the hero of the Carolina Evacuation, it would add a lot of credibility. Dampen criticism."

Fen turned to Nick. "I'll need the refugees' personal stories, the research, everything you found, if we do try to sell this to the Council and the public."

Nick replied, "Happy to."

Fen smiled. "And Juan tells me that we have a chance to make better use of you with a contract modification. Let's do that."

Nick hoped this was the turning point in his bounty hunting career. "Thank you," he said.
CHAPTER NINE

After the call ended, Nick punched the cube wall a couple times until it hurt. "Yes!"

Cross texted, [Congratulations. The contract mod is ready and here's an estimate change to your revenue stream.]

Nick read it over and smiled. "Great, I'll have to run these by Rob." He began walking out of the cube when his cube's entire viewer flashed.

[DO YOU WANT ME TO TAG ALONG?] The viewer said in large block letters.

"No, I'll be fine," Nick said, grabbing his netpad and pulling up the contract mod.

Rob was in his office, which looked even more cramped than Nick's small cube. It was crammed with grisly trophies from his bounty hunting days and two decrepit guest chairs. The soft clicking of Rob's nebulizer added to the tension.

"Now I've seen everything — you made your quota," Rob pulled his breath mask off his face. "And you almost killed Mike Flail."

Nick's knees buckled. "Almost killed?"

"Yeah, he's in serious condition at County. You missed his heart by so much or whatever. He's an asshole, so watch yourself when he recovers." Rob waved his hand around. "Of course, I got a stream of abuse from his Commandos today. Said you stole their amoeba, accused you of all kinds of crap."

"They tried to jump me, Rob. Hell, you heard it go down."

"I know, I know, it's the usual sour-grapes bullshit. Don't worry, I got your back. I threatened to stop doing their data nips gratis and they shut right up. Speaking of, did you do those scut jobs?"

Nick held his hands up. "Uh yeah. Why was there so many? You couldn't dump them on the new guys? Like that guy you have Mica training?"

Rob shook his head. "They're all in Europe, making big money. You wanted to stay here and take what comes in, that's what you get. I know you hand-checked each one, right?" Rob's bushy eyebrows wiggled, a sign he was joking.

"Yeah right, all ten thousand. I want the payments for that credited to my next quarter."

Rob laughed. "You got it, cowboy."

Nick wasn't sure why that was funny but smiled back just to be safe. "I have more good news. Hamilton wants to modify our contract with them. More money. I might just make my quota two quarters in a row."

Nick sent the modification to Rob, who read it slowly and then coughed. He glanced at Nick and then turned to type madly at a keyboard. It reminded Nick of a piano layout, with alternating black and white keys. Rob was very old school and didn't use a virtual swipe pad like the rest of the world.

"Huh," Rob said, looking at his viewer. "It cuts the rate per job."

"Yes, a lower rate but a higher volume," Nick said. "They have a lot more work. It will be more money, overall. It's a new profit center."

Rob sighed. "That's actually the problem. We still have real work coming in and we're already short-handed. How can you do both? You can't."

Nick stood silent.

Rob coughed. "Did you really think you could drop actual bounty hunter work for this? Let the others bleed on the streets while you drink tea with politicians? Jesus."

Nick straightened his sport coat. "Only bounty hunters can do it, because it requires BHN access. We get triple the revenue per job compared to chasing down deadbeat parents and spying on business partners. And I can clear these jobs faster — I did a dozen in one morning once. Could I make a dozen collars before lunch?"

Rob pulled his breath mask over his nose and took a hit of albuterol. "Yeah, what about the DAL? You know how much garbage I endure about that? The BHN administrators harass corporate about it and then corporate harasses me. Our corporate BHN license is at risk every time you join two records together.

"No other bounty hunter runs these statistics. I told you to let the BHN Simons do the aggregations, like the market research firms do. But no."

Every time Nick heard this lecture, it reminded him of being sent to the principal's office. Once he did try using the Simons at the BHN stats service. When he asked some follow-up questions they claimed he was using too many system resources and ignored him. He suspected that there was a BHN administrator who thought like Rob, and told the Simons to stop answering Nick's questions.

Nick tried another track. "This will make your job easier. We'll come up with a filter to implement the DAL, make it a non-issue. This will make so much money that corporate will want to expand it. Fewer turnovers, higher profit, you get the credit."

Rob shook his head. "Oh, so I just have to find a couple more guys like you, tell corporate not to worry, we'll let a Simon monitor the DAL, sit back, and let the money roll in?" His voice dropped to a gentle murmur. "Sit down, Nick."

Never having heard a human-like tone come out of his boss, Nick dropped into the ripped yellow vinyl guest chair.

Rob folded his hands. "You come in here, you don't fit, so you try to carve your own niche, do your best to make quota, just like I told you to do on your first day. I can't fault you."

Nick nodded, but Rob cut the air with his hand before he could say anything.

"Except," Rob waved the breath mask around, "it makes everyone else uncomfortable. I-4 is a bounty hunting company. So I get hunters coming in here complaining that your caseload is desk work and their caseload is deadly. What should I should tell them?"

Rob nodded at his netpad. "The client here, Hamilton, is a good one. Wealthy, low crime, they pay us a retainer to be on call. So bleeding these guys dry on these ad hoc data requests upsets them. They want a change here, a change there, pretty soon our golden goose is cooked."

Nick shook his head. "But they want to pay us more."

"To do more, yeah. Takes you out of circulation here. I'd have to hire someone to take your actual bounty hunting work. How much further ahead are we then? And the DAL compliance costs? You see, this is a loser for I-4."

Nick opened his mouth to object again but Rob held up a finger. "Messing with the DAL scares the piss out of them. I've been fighting them on your behalf, but I can't keep telling my boss no. Corporate wants you to tell Hamilton that you are unavailable for this kind of work. Effective immediately."

Rob waited for Nick to reply, but Nick didn't know what to say. He stuck around this miserable industry only to do the jobs they were about to stop him from doing. For the first time in years, having an exit plan had jumped from a fantasy to a pragmatic next step. Fuck, he had been so close.

"Look, I'm sorry Nick," Rob took a hit off his breath mask. "It's just not working out. There are fifteen new jobs that popped up on the BHN this morning, ten of them in the city. Mostly missing persons, easy ones. I need you on them."

Nick's shock gave way to anger. That was the real reason. I-4 execs didn't care — this was all about Rob's convenience. Nick wanted to strangle him with the clear tubing trailing out of his vibrating nebulizer. Rob wanted Nick out, but he wouldn't fire him because he needed him on the street, at the moment.

"This is bullshit, Rob. You know this could work. You're choosing being a dick over making a profit." Nick stood up, paused a second, turned on his heel, and returned to his cube.

[How did it go?] Cross texted on the viewer.

Nick switched the viewer off and walked over to the small window that looked out on Lake Michigan. The lake looked foul from this ground level view.

Despite his boss' sticking it to him, Nick knew Rob was right that he couldn't change I-4 single-handedly, much less the entire industry. Even if he dangled lots of cash in front of management's swollen faces. The industry knew its violent business and didn't want to branch out of its blood-soaked comfort zone.

The rewards, the quotas, the bounty hunters fighting each other over an amoeba, it was all just a compliance mechanism. It was a problem that management didn't want solved, they wanted it to persist.

The only way Nick could maintain access to the BHN was to work the streets. His quick path to becoming a Chicago Kagent had been blown into small, sharp-edged pieces. He could try to glue those pieces back together, take the slow road to convince his corporate masters that this analytical work was worth it. How long would that take though? Years, decades, ever?

Nick leaned his head against the window, unable to look at the shit jobs that were no doubt piling up for him to do. It was all scut work.
CHAPTER TEN

Video #:42,368,981,1394.

Current Ranking: #1

Title: Offworld Plague!

Source: The Walt Morgan Post

Date: Today

Walt Morgan: Today I have Daniel Sloan joining me at the post. He represents the Stabilizer Alliance, the people who want us to live more tranquil lives and have been holding protests in the city. Daniel, you're not here to tell me to take it easy, are you?

Daniel Sloan: No, I'll pester you about that off-camera. Thank you for having me here, Walt.

Walt Morgan (laughing): I'm sure, I'm sure.

Daniel Sloan: Usually I talk about how offworld workaholics threaten us economically by making us run the rat race faster. And they threaten us mentally and emotionally because their hyper-competition makes us fall further behind the idyllic work-life balance we had in the 21st century. But today I'm here to warn your viewers about offworld influences that are physically dangerous—

Walt Morgan: Dangerous? Wait, Daniel, wait. Is someone threatening your group? Are the police roughing you up?

Daniel Sloan: No, no, nothing like that. The city has been great to us. People have welcomed us in to their homes. The problem is the police are sick, they have some sort of disease. And we're interacting with them at our protests—

Walt Morgan: A disease?

Sloan: Some nasty, offworld infection, I heard, getting people sick all over the city. Highly contagious and from offworld—

Walt: If this is true that's huge—

Sloan: Cops are talking openly about it—

Walt: Wait, do I understand you correctly? You are saying there's an offworld plague ripping through the city?

Sloan: That's what we're hearing. From the police.

Walt: Could this be just a bad cold, or spring allergies, you know? I mean, it's probably something simple.

Sloan: They say it causes serious respiratory infections, flu-like symptoms, joint pain, we've heard lots of things.

Walt: Really? That's terrible. And the city knows about this? What are they doing about it?

Sloan: I don't know. Ask them. Something, I hope. It's spreading among the police, there's no denying that. Some of them are in the hospital. We have a few people who have caught it too.

Walt: The hospital? The city should respond—

Sloan: Absolutely. It probably has spread into the general population. Your kid's safety officer comes to school, hacking and coughing because of this Martian Cocktail—

Walt: How do you know it's from offworld?

Sloan: Look, Walt, these city cops are really good to us. They sympathize with our cause: no one wants stability more than a cop walking his beat. They've been joking with us, saying: Don't get too close, I got the offworld bug, the Martian Cocktail. They want to protect us.

Walt: What is this disease? Is it a bio-weapon?

Sloan: I have no idea. I doubt it, no I do doubt it, Walt. Offworlders are not out to get us, I have always said that. What happens on the Moon stays on the Moon, ya know? <Laughter> And God knows what kind of toxic germ soup comes out of living like that—

Walt: pretty wild, I hear—

Sloan: a Martian Cocktail walking through customs. This is a direct result of their nonstop rat race. You stress about keeping up with offworlders, it depresses your immune system, and then these super-infections walk right in. This is what we're fighting. And the city is scared that the people will agree with us. I have to keep telling my staff that this bug is not a crowd suppression device, meant to undercut our peaceful protests. Now Walt, Walt, <inaudible> —

Walt: That's crazy, isn't it?

Sloan: Yes, yes, it's a bit crazy. I have met with the city's leaders, Chairman Ferguson, Councilors Travis, Osprette, MacMahon, you know, a lot of them, and they would not poison people they disagree with. Hamilton is not that kind of place. But, you know, we Stabilizers have been mistreated before.

Walt: Okay I want to bring in the head of the city health department. Dr. Carolyn Moser, it's great to have you back. Can you tell us about this illness?

Dr. Moser: It's good to see you Walt. We are investigating multiple illnesses at any point in time; that's nothing unusual. Sometimes it's the common cold, or a flu, or seasonal allergies. So far, it does appear that a respiratory infection has been spreading through the police department. The symptoms include nasal and chest congestion, coughing, sneezing, that kind of thing.

Walt: But that could be anything, like the common cold. Is it an offworld Martian Cocktail, like Daniel described?

Dr. Moser: We don't know. We don't track the origin of non-lethal illnesses like this.

Walt: The city is not even investigating?

Dr. Moser: Since this is a non-lethal illness, that can be treated at home, we don't even know who is infected. It's important that people don't over-worry about this illness. Treat it like any other cold: plenty of sleep and fluids, wash your hands, sneeze and cough into your elbow to protect others. If you have symptoms, stay away from those with weakened immune systems.

Sloan: I have to interject here that the illness itself is just a symptom. Who knows what else is coming down the gravity well? And given how stressed out and sleep-deprived people are, their immune systems are already weakened.

Walt: Doctor, is this city stressed out? Does that make us more susceptible to illnesses?

Dr. Moser: Hamilton is one of the healthier cities on the continent. Health outcomes unfortunately still correlate with income but we are fairly prosperous—

Sloan: Listen, city residents sleep less, eat worse, and get sick more often. The Bucknell study showed why—

Dr. Moser: the Bucknell study is not reliable. It's data sources were suspect, it failed to quantify satisfaction with life, and it was paid for by your organization, Mr. Sloan. It has a lot of problems.

Walt: Let's not debate academic research in our remaining time, okay? Daniel, what would you like to see the city do?

Sloan: The city should just tell the public about this bug, check people coming down from offworld. And it should examine why life in this city wears out its citizens to the point of making them sick. Maybe the Martian Cocktail isn't a bug, maybe it's a result of your way of life.

Walt: Okay, I want to thank you both for joining me here. Next up, shocking accusations that squeaky-clean Councilor Juan Burgess has been accepting bribes. Stay with us.
CHAPTER ELEVEN

Pam Sullivan ran the business negotiation simulation again. On one side were fashion designers based in Hamilton who needed an offworld partner to bring their designs to offworld markets. On the other side was Hybracloth, a fast-rising Venusian textile manufacturing consortium that wanted a foothold in Hamilton.

But after two more rounds of talks, there was an eighty-seven percent chance the deal would fall through. Just like when she ran it five minutes ago with small variations in the parameters.

The tailors were under pressure by terrestrial textile manufacturers to drop the deal or they would pull their products from tailors' shelves. The tailors didn't want to deprive Janey Q. Hamilton of having a dress made in their shops from her favorite material.

As the city's Trade Representative, Pam was supposed to find a way to resolve these sorts of conflicts. As a Kagent, she had an array of tools like this simulation that most other Trade Reps didn't have.

Her netpad chimed. It was Malcolm, the Chairman's assistant, asking her to come to Fen's office.

She walked over to the Chairman's office and nodded at Malcolm. Councilor Juan Burgess was in the waiting area, having an animated discussion with an aide about heat-sink abatement policy along the riverfront. Burgess truly did talk policy day in and day out.

"Pam, how are you?" Juan asked. "What do you know about heat sink abatement projects?"

"Don't you ever discuss sports, like other guys?" Pam snarked.

Juan laughed. "Never. What do you know about refugees and how they affect local economies?"

"Less than I do about sports."

"Come by and talk to me sometime." Juan consulted his netpad. "I'm free tomorrow night. I have a study carrel in the public library."

"Is that a date, Councilor?" Pam asked with a smile.

Juan Burgess looked stunned for a second and said, "No, I didn't... No."

Pam smiled. "Don't worry. I'll be there."

Malcolm ushered them into the Chairman's office.

Fen was standing in the corner of his office with Dr. Carolyn Moser, the head of the Health Department. Both looked dour.

Fen waited for Malcolm to close the door, and then he bit his lip. "What we are about to discuss can't leave this room. Not the press, not any staff, no one. Good? Good. Carolyn?"

Dr. Moser turned to Pam and Juan. "The police are sick with a highly contagious virus that causes an upper respiratory infection. Nothing to worry about, usually. But one of our techs examined some samples of the virus. It's artificial, a restricted biological material."

Juan's dark eyes bulged but he said nothing.

Pam felt like a stone had smacked her forehead. A bioweapon attack. With the refugees coming and the Stabilizers already in town causing trouble. She needed to report this to her fellow Kagents.

"The virus was made offworld," Fen added.

"Do we know if it's an intentional release or an accident?" Pam asked. She suddenly felt self-conscious in her red offworlder cloak.

"We don't know," Fen said. He looked at Juan. "Do you think you could trust that bounty hunter with this?"

Juan nodded. "Sure. And I'll stress again how this can't get out."

"Is that wise?" Dr. Moser asked. "You'll trust a bounty hunter with this information but not the health department?"

"Bounty hunters gain nothing from talking to the press," Fen replied. "But you know that Health has scientists who like to disagree in public over policy matters. Especially to justify budget increases."

Dr. Moser bristled. "I wouldn't let that happen."

"I believe you, Carol, but a good bounty hunter can track down Patient Zero very quickly," Fen answered. "If it is intentional, you would have to turn the matter over to the police anyway — and they would hand it over to the same bounty hunter."

"You want to say that offworlders didn't do this," Pam said. "But what if they let it out accidentally? Trade levels and the economy could take a hit." Pam looked at Juan and he nodded.

Fen crossed his arms. "Dr. Moser assures me that this is not a medical emergency. I would like to keep it quiet, even if it is an attack."

"We're getting a lot of media inquiries," Dr. Moser noted in a cautionary tone.

"Good," Juan said. "Take the opportunity to air some public service announcements and calm people down. Compare the dangers of this bug to summer drownings, fireworks accidents, sunburn, and heat exhaustion."

Pam shook her head. If this virus came from the Rockies, or Europe, no one would care that much, she thought. But fears about offworlders had circulated on Earth for centuries. The lab mistakes of mad offworld scientists spreading to Earth. Zombie spaceships landing full of infected corpses. Fears worsened when offworld gels supplanted terrestrial drugs like caffeine and opiates. An offworld virus attacking the Hamilton police would play right into to those fears.

"That won't address the fears," Pam said. "There will be a firestorm when this news breaks, probably setting off a backlash against offworlders. Chairman, you should hold a presser today, get ahead of this thing, reassure people."

Juan added, "Starke, Osprette, and Thrall could fuel that fallout unless we get ahead of them on this. They will want customs doing chemical and bio searches at the liftport and airports. Inoculations for outsiders before they enter. Preventative quarantines in suspect cases."

"That won't be necessary," Dr. Moser said. "There is a vaccine, also produced offworld. If we can find the money, we can focus distribution on those with weakened immune systems."

Fen was silent for a moment. "And not advertise that it was discovered offworld."

Juan made a cautious sign with his hand. "I'm not worried about Norm or Geoff if Dr. Moser is running the show. But Councilor Thrall, she'll hit you hard on the security angle and imply that you are incompetent, Fen. She wants your job, you know."

"Yes, but she also believes very passionately in improving security," Fen said. "Given her past, I can't blame her." He shivered uncomfortably. "Okay, I'll do a presser with Carolyn. Juan, you need to find out where this virus came from and why. And be quick."

Juan nodded. "I'll call our guy on my way to my next meeting, which I'm late for already."

"What meeting is it?" Fen asked as he walked the three of them to his door.

"Urban heat sink abatement regs," Juan said. "I want to make sure the hearing covers the latest studies out of Denver and San Antonio."

Juan looked at Pam. "So the library, tomorrow night?"

"The library?" Fen said, looking from Juan to Pam. "Is this a date?"

Juan growled at him.

Fen clapped Juan on the back, "I'm kidding. This dork thinks he can be left alone there to stick his nose in a book. But there's always an interruption."
CHAPTER TWELVE

Cross texted, [Juan is calling.]

"Can you make it down here today?" Juan said. "The Chairman has an analysis job for you."

Nick sighed as he walked through the abandoned housing project. He could see his target on infrared, hiding in an apartment down the hall. "I'm in Cleveland," he said.

It seemed that every bounty hunter in the Midwest had taken that juicy assignment in Europe. Except Nick couldn't stray that far from Harrisburg, so now he was risking his life in Cleveland.

He loaded a new clip into Slugger. The first arsonist had armor that brushed off disabler pistol rounds like they were metallic lint. Nick figured he'd have to take down the second arsonist the hard way too.

Juan outlined the Chairman's assignment to quietly investigate a viral outbreak in Hamilton.

"I would love to," Nick replied, "But you probably need to call my boss to convince him. He's not a fan of jobs where no one gets shot." Maybe an urgent request from the Chairman would change Rob's mind.

He fired a round through the wall of the apartment next to the arsonist's head. The arsonist surrendered.

When Nick emailed Rob that he had finished the arsonist job and had to go to Hamilton, Rob didn't object, but threw another day's worth of scut work his way. The bastard. He couldn't deny a paying request from the Hamilton City Chairman.

After the Cleveland police carried off the arsonists and certified his capture of them, Nick headed for the airport and sent a heads up to Serena Greene, Hamilton's chief data security officer. Hamilton required all contractors like Nick to be onsite to access its data nets, which meant an in-person visit.

But Nick wouldn't let it hamper his good mood. Maybe all of Hamilton's requests from now on would be tagged 'urgent' by the Chairman's office. Rob would just have to choke down his unhappiness about it.

That is, if Nick actually could help the Chairman.

Nick took a commuter flight out of a gray, overcast Cleveland. The clouds broke up when the plane turned west but Nick ignored the sun-bathed countryside of rural sovereign zones that passed by the window.

Instead, he devoured everything he could find on the amoeba nets about the Blight 5 virus, or the Martian Cocktail, as the media was calling it now. He wanted to have this whole mystery nailed down shortly after he landed. Maybe the Chairman or Juan would be impressed with his speed and find more work for him to do while he was there.

Cross posted, [Blight 5 is a manufactured virus, accidentally developed during offworld research to improve treatments for various autoimmune diseases. A number of health organizations on Earth have classified it as a prohibited organism, to be handled only by authorized and trained personnel. It causes an upper respiratory infection that is only life-threatening for the very elderly and those with compromised immune systems.]

"And now this has become political," Nick said. "Run the usual political media content analysis."

The content analysis was originally used by culture trackers and trend-hoppers to catch the latest wave before it arrived. Nick had repurposed it to measure the pulse of local politics. The analysis measured changes in coverage, unwritten assumptions, issue framing, agenda-setting, pundit opinion shifts, and image-driven subtext. There were culture, history, and tradition screens to weight results for how Hamilton's populace would digest all of it.

[Discussions of the virus have become politicized since Walt Morgan's show. Ferguson's enemies want to know if there was a cover-up; the Stabilizers are questioning the city's offworld ties. The media coverage is focused on the victims.]

As the plane banked south over Davenport, Nick had Cross calculate statistics on amoeba net queries about the virus. It was a centuries-old trick to track an outbreak — follow queries about the symptoms back to Patient Zero. But with the BHN, Nick could pinpoint Patient Zero and learn everything about him or her, including if they had deliberately infected the city.

Search engine queries about the virus only appeared after the virus story broke on the Walt Morgan Post.

"I don't get how this virus could have snuck up on the city like this. Nearly every other illness is preceded by searches for symptoms, or reports of it moving geographically towards the city, usually by airport or liftport. But this looks like it just started here."

[There is no reports of any laboratory being cleared to handle Blight 5 in this region,] Cross pointed out.

"It is spring allergy season though. Cross, compare the virus' symptoms to allergy symptoms."

[The comparison will not tell you too much. Increasing carbon dioxide levels have caused larger pollen counts and an earlier start to spring allergy season in each of the last four decades.]

"But pollen doesn't cause fevers," Nick pointed out, "and it's too late for flu season. Show me the fever queries for the last two months on a city map."

Cross posted a map showing the timing, location, and changing distribution over time of fever queries. The map was a scatterplot of points spread across the city.

"Cross, compare these symptom queries with past years and other seasons. I bet this is unusual."

His Simon partner posted a series of charts showing the number of queries about fevers in spring across years, with confidence bands around the annual differences. The current spring was more than two standard deviations from the mean.

"It doesn't mean it's the virus causing this. Hamilton has a public health system, right? Can you show me the number of cases treated for fever this spring that were not the virus, and compare that to all fever cases in previous years?"

Cross posted a chart showing the number of illnesses treated that included reports of a fever for the last sixty years. The current year was not significantly different than any of its predecessors.

Nick swept his eyes around the results and found the earliest fever query among adults in the last month. Officer Watson, the patrol officer already identified by the Health Department. A dead end.

The real Patient Zero, the one who infected Watson, would have to be found inside the city's own records, if he or she was to be found at all. Nick could screw around more in the BHN or the amoeba nets hoping to stumble into a lead, but past experience suggested that it wouldn't pay off until he had accessed the city's own records.

Besides, Nick wanted to watch the plane's approach into Hamilton, to pull his brain away from the question at hand so he could tackle this fresh when he got into that windowless room in Civic Center.

The plane flew south along the Mississippi River, already descending. Nick logged into the plane's exterior camera to gawk at the city skyline in the sunshine. He liked Hamilton; it was the closest he would come to ever going offworld and he felt a thrill every time he saw it appear over the horizon.

Chicago and most other cities on the continent had been built during the age of steel and glass, and their skylines reflected it.

Hamilton had grown out of a sleepy little town because of orbital engine manufacturing. The city's architects inhaled all the offworld architectural styles they could, morphed them with the latest terrestrial construction techniques, and rode Hamilton's century-long economic boom to create a metropolis that echoed the offworld cities.

Keeping in mind the river flooding that swept away St. Louis, 22nd century architects designed Hamilton to absorb river flooding with minimal destruction via a massive subterranean freight transit system that doubled as a floodplain.

The city's skyscrapers curved and undulated upwards, able to withstand both spring's tornadoes and winter's ice storms. Several had tiered green aprons that rose five stories above the street. The Diamond Building was a twenty-story urban greenhouse that took its name from its shape, a shiny glass diamond standing on a narrow point. Athens Tower was a white column rising sixty stories into the sky surrounded by flying buttresses of vegetation-sprouting aerogel columns.

Shimmer was a business tower with pixel-sized modules that transported small amounts of water, heat, and cooling around the building's surface according to the building's needs at the moment, causing the building to appear to be moving continuously. Nick liked to walk up to its external walls and watch the faux bugs move around in seemingly arbitrary patterns. It reminded him of surfing the BHN data.

These buildings made up the city's Palisades district and surrounded and complimented the nature preserve's sixty-foot trees, whose root systems helped buffer the city from the Mississippi.

Beyond the Palisades, high-rises stretched out like a bar chart of the city's population density, sloping down to the suburbs and the rural districts beyond.

From the air he could see the multi-story buildings built on modern biomorphic techniques popping above the tree canopy. Thin walls of temperature-moderating resins from Africa and South America made buildings cheaper to operate, and injected a vivid tropical color to the city.

The plane banked west over the river to land in Keokuk, a throwback to the days when Keokuk was the only town large enough to rate an airport. Now only big enough to handle the city's regional commuter shuttles, the airport was minimalist and designed to scoot passengers to the transit systems and taxis waiting outside.

Nick took a taxi across the river into the Palisades. The early afternoon sun shone down and the nature preserve was speckled with white, pink, and lilac blossoms. The streets were full of people wearing the gear and clothing of every continent and offworld system; a family of Jovians playing in the park, hooded Martian folk hurrying into Shimmer with briefcases in hand, someone in traditional, heavily-padded Belter garb asking a police officer to take his picture next to the Perma-Wax statue of Meade Werner.

If Nick squinted hard he could forget he was on Earth for a second.

The Civic Center was across the street from the nature preserve, in an office tower that formed the letter 'c' from overhead. The city occupied the basement and bottom floors and rented the remaining space, which was mostly occupied by businesses that spent a lot of their time in Civic Center anyway.

Nick had met with Juan here a number of times. Before he entered the plaza he had Thunker, Bruiser, Slugger, and the drones ready for the security guards to lock away.

Serena Greene, the city's infosec chief, met him when he cleared security. She was a rail-thin woman in her early sixties with short, curly white hair. "Good to see a bounty hunter I like for once. If another bounty hunter pitches me on adding our databases to the BHN, I'm going to scream."

Nick laughed. "How many this week?"

"Two..., no three. They get so upset when I explain our privacy laws. Can't you stop these pests?"

Nick shook his head. "I'm trying to wean myself off of shooting people."

Serena laughed, thinking he was joking. She led him into the basement offices, through a locked door to a nondescript room with terminals on waist-high tables.

"Smartshades off, shut off any recording devices, you know the drill. You want the usual setup?" she asked as she activated a terminal.

"I need a connection to the Health Department systems. And a fast-track for warrants from the DA's office, in case this virus investigation goes criminal."

Serena nodded and highlighted those data systems. "Ask the resident Simon for access to anything else. And let me know if there is anything else you need, but nothing that won't get me fired, okay? I still owe you one, from that one time." She closed the door.

Nick smiled and shook his head. Serena had a wayward niece that he had tracked to the precipice of a gel-addicted death spiral in New York Jersey's Village. He hadn't charged for it; it was good to have your favorite client's IT people owe you.

He stood at the table and dug into the records of the health and police departments.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

An alarm chimed on Lisa Quinton's viewer and it blinked red for her attention. The door to the basement had opened and she could see on her security cam that her boss and mentor, Daniel Sloan, was descending the steps.

She was less than five meters away, but she couldn't hear his feet pounding down the forma-wood stairs. Her secure communications vault was a self-contained space inside the basement, with vacuum-layer sound-proofing, and ambient noise cancellation.

If the city of Hamilton was spying on this townhouse, the basement would appear to be a quiet, dark hole like basements usually were.

She unlocked the heavy door and activated the white noise machine.

Daniel attempted to scoot right through the comm room doorway, but Lisa held up a hand. "Wait for the scan."

"I was only upstairs, darling," he replied, laying on his Appalachian accent thickly to question her common sense. He re-entered the room slowly and the door frame's scanner pronounced him free of recording devices.

"Okay, what's our status?" Daniel asked, turning a chair backwards and straddling it.

"Let's see the social networks," Lisa said. She displayed a map of clusters of interconnected nodes. Each node had a thumbnail photo of the person it represented. The lines represented relationships and varied from big thick bands for spouses, dashes for business associates, solid thin lines for friends and acquaintances.

"Here are the social relationships among business, politicals, media, and the high-society types. Our penetration factor is fifty-five percent, but we're still recruiting locals. We should be at eighty-five percent in a week."

Daniel nodded. The Stabilizers recruited volunteers using psych profiles of the well-connected but disaffected. That allowed them to penetrate a city's social network from multiple directions.

Lisa brought up red dots in the center of every cluster. Unsurprisingly, City Council members were near the heart of their districts' social network.

"Now here's your contacts." A new set of green nodes appeared. Some connected to the political-social network, but many didn't. Daniel had a gift for making friends and hobnobbing with the powerful. He had been building relationships among the Hamilton glitterati for months now.

Lisa much preferred the shadows. It was why they made such a good team.

She ran the time index forward. Most relationships stayed stable, but others weakened or strengthened. New nodes appeared while others faded, like a slow-motion kaleidoscope.

"I need to study this," Daniel said, spinning the display around with his finger. "I'm in tight with Norm Osprette. Made small talk with Geoff Starke at a victim restitution charity ball last week... Juan Burgess barely even shows up on this map, huh?"

Daniel pointed at Councilor Burgess' node deep in his district's cluster. He rotated the map to provide a clearer picture of Burgess' connections outside the cluster. Most of the connections were grayed out and disappeared.

"He's not a social butterfly like you. Let me see." Lisa tapped away at his profile. "He's more connected with academics, the bureaucracy, and an odd smattering of people. Lots of one-time contacts with people, but not a lot of close relationships since his divorce was finalized last year."

Daniel winced. "Divorce, huh?"

"Yes, his profile says the job caused it. He's a Buzz Ratrace if there ever was one."

"Trying to work away the pain," Daniel agreed in an ironic tone. "We know how treating the illness with more illness works." Divorce rates in Stabilized communities were a quarter what they were in places like Hamilton, according to internal Stabilizer Alliance polls.

He looked at Lisa a long moment before returning his attention to the map. "I haven't had a meeting yet with Regina Thrall."

Lisa made a face. "She won't meet with us."

Daniel smiled that smile of his, but Lisa was one of the few people who seemed immune to it. He could have seduced his way through his three-decade career of killing cities, Lisa thought. But in the ten years she had known him, he never gave any sign he would ever cheat on his wife Judy, despite being on the road nine months a year.

"Hmm, you're right, but we need to find a way. I was looking at the political map last night and she's too rich a target to pass up."

Lisa brought up the political network map. The entire organizational chart of the city government showed up in gray lines, with the Council and Chairman Ferguson on top. Each councilor was connected to several clusters outside the government; constituents, advocates, and partisans. At at the outer edges were the punditry, colored orange to indicate where politicians and the media overlapped.

Daniel highlighted Councilor Thrall. "A quarter of the Council either supports or tries to appease her on most issues. She has set the agenda for forty-seven percent of the issues discussed in the media or behind closed doors. If we could twist her — and you saw her profile, there's plenty of places to twist her — that could really pay off."

"Daniel, maybe she can probably be twisted easily by anyone but us. She despises us. You're better off lobbying the Chairman."

He brushed her off. "Hardly. All I need is the right connection and a slim slice of common ground."

Lisa sighed. Politics was such a mess of personal and political factors that she tended to overlook it in a target city. The local board, council, dictator, or assembly obviously wanted to prevent a crash, so they were useless to her, unless they could be twisted easily. Regina Thrall was the poster child for the opposite of being twisted easily.

"We have some movement in the business networks," she said, trying to change the subject. She and Daniel had been killing cities for a decade to limit the influence of the offworld rat race on humans. The business networks were where they needed to focus.

"You're trying to change the subject," Daniel said.

"Me? I would never try to distract you from some hopeless quest," Lisa replied.

Daniel clapped his hands. "Right. So, dear Lisa, how about that business network?"

The business network clusters were geographic and industry-specific, naturally. Unfortunately, Hamilton's major employer was the offworld launch vehicle industry, which meant stiff resistance to the Stabilizers trying to cut the city off from offworld contact.

"We had a twenty-three percent response rate from businesses fighting offworld competition." A small piece of the business network map blinked on and off, with the Stabilizer contacts flashing green. "Some of them are lobbying against trade deals, others are interested in using our business practices, most of them are willing to sponsor us."

"Great. Our pundits can make a lot about us having the support of local businesses. How about our application to start a Stabilized community across the river?" Daniel asked. Most of the time it was a ruse, part of their sham protest operation, to float the idea of starting a Stabilized Community in the target city. It gave their black-bag-ops a cover, and every once in a while, the city residents, no doubt seeing the end in sight, actually bought a franchise.

Lisa shook her head. "Not a lot of interest. The Keokuk Councilor, McMahon, made noise about blocking it. We haven't had a lot of interest from anyone local."

"I'll drop it. Makes us look more pure to the media if we don't have a business interest pending."

"Speaking of media," Lisa said. She switched to the media social network map. Local news personalities, pundits, weather forecasters, reporters, bloggers, videographers, stringers, and freelancers all appeared. Gray nodes and clusters representing the political networks and red ones for business appeared around, and on, the map's fringes.

Lisa said, "We're in good with Scoop and Byte. The Penny Twain is a regional news site, by far the most popular. We haven't made a dent in them."

"Are they a threat, though? Local media outlets usually are pimps for the status quo, for the rat race money."

Lisa shook her head as she posted the media analysis results. "They are neutral on the offworld question. They don't pick favorites on the Council or have an ax to grind."

"What about the Juan Burgess scandal? How is The Penny Twain covering that?"

Lisa smirked. "It's not much of a scandal yet. Just a Scoop story about a blogger making accusations. We're pushing the detailed accusations tomorrow, with 'records' surfacing to show that the payoffs were mixed up in his divorce settlement."

Daniel raked his nails across his scalp. "Yeah, it'll be a good test to see how they handle that story. We can twist Scoop and Byte pretty easily, just feed them enough sensationalized events and let our well-paid pundits do the rest. Keep an eye on the Twain."

Lisa nodded. "Last thing: Is the call bank running upstairs?"

Daniel looked up at the ceiling. "Yes, and they're making a damn racket up there. All that noise is no way to run a secret headquarters. You would hear them if you weren't hiding down here in your soundproofed hole." He looked around at the secure communication equipment, the white noise machine. "This is where the real action is. I have to thank these idiot volunteers for misspelling protest signs and remind them not to fight their own cops."

"They shouldn't even get near the cops, remember?"

"I know that. I just want to rub that damn virus of yours all over some of our volunteers' lips. They're going through their rebellious phase now, but they'll snap back in a few years. Become just like their ladder-climbing parents."

"Not everyone does that," Lisa said quietly. Sometimes, a young person's rebellion was heartfelt and life-changing. The Alliance made an effort to recruit those true believer converts, because they were harder-core than people like Daniel, who grew up in a Stabilized Community and just thought the whole world should be as tranquil and advanced as their hometown.

"Are we still in baseline mode on the poll's offworld questions?" Daniel asked.

Lisa brought up the poll results for the last three months. Since winter, the Stabilizer Alliance had been polling Hamilton residents about their attitudes about offworld business, the stress in their lives, and the pressure to be workaholics.

"For the next two weeks it will be a straight up poll, then we start the push polling. The Burgess bribery scandal will be peaking and he'll be too distracted to call us out when our methodology changes. We make the pundits push it hard, and there's your public dissatisfaction meme."

Daniel nodded. "Excellent. So headquarters thinks we're on track overall?"

"We are in great shape," she said.

Daniel smiled wryly and rose from his chair. "But Hamilton isn't like the other cities. It was built on offworld trade and it adores the rat race. I don't know."

Daniel was a people person, not a numbers guy. So Lisa didn't bother telling him that there was a ninety-three percent chance that Hamilton would crash by the end of the summer. He would scoff at a prediction like that.

Instead, she waved at the social network and media maps on the viewer. "We have a lot more tactics in play here than we've ever had before."

Daniel shook his head as he put a hand on the handle of the door. "We can't compromise operational security."

Lisa nodded. The Stabilizer calamity in Shanghai was still a fresh scar in Daniel's mind, even though it happened before she met him. Someone on the inside tipped off the Shanghai authorities that the Stabilizers were bringing radioactive material into the city and the whole operation fell apart.

"I'll jaw at headquarters if they push things too far," she lied.

For the decade she had worked with him, Daniel believed that Stabilizer headquarters in Celebration, Florida, crunched a bunch of numbers, developed the plans, and sent the orders to Lisa to relay to Daniel.

The truth was quite the opposite.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Lab results had come back confirming that the so-called Martian Cocktail was indeed the Blight 5 virus.

"Just because it is artificial does not mean that it was intentionally used to infect the police," Cross said over the small netpad speaker.

Nick stepped away from the terminal and paced back and forth to stretch his legs. "Are there any other outbreaks?"

"Not in the last decade and a half, on Earth. I have no access to offworld records—"

"Of course—" Nick said.

"But media reports suggest Blight 5 can be obtained with the proper medical credentials."

Nick flexed his fingers before engaging the old fashioned air keyboard. "Let's find Patient Zero."

The health department had traced the infection's spread to a police officer named Watson who worked out of a northwestern precinct. They needed a bounty hunter to pick up the trace from there.

Nick pulled up Officer Watson's duty records on the police department's intranet. During the five day incubation period, she patrolled several neighborhoods in the southeast, patrolled the highway across the river in Keokuk, and worked crowd control at the riverfront jazz festival.

"How much of that 120 hours do we have video of?" Nick asked.

"Is time really the correct metric?" Cross asked. "Shouldn't you be focusing on potential infection vectors?"

Nick winced. Something rubbed him wrong about that. "Yes, but I just want to rule out a deliberate attack. If it was, then hopefully there is a sign."

"Fifty percent of her time is recorded, because she wears a shoulder cam on duty and her cruiser has its own cameras. She worked ten hour days during that time and was spotted on city surveillance a few times while off duty."

"Do we have any legal trouble with probing her on the BHN?" Nick asked.

"All police officers consent to personal probes when they join the force, to make sure they don't compromise security. A department Simon named Sylvester oversees all such probes. I will run things by him."

Nick nodded. "How much more can the BHN say about when she was around people during that time period?"

"Another ten percent. Mostly footage of her in various retail shops."

"Okay, fifty percent, but really that's like eighty percent if we count the time she slept."

"You're being awfully thorough," Cross noted.

"Of course. I have to get this right to keep these requests coming. Otherwise, it's run and gun jobs until I get killed or quit." Nick thought for a moment. "How many times could she have caught the virus?"

Cross scanned through the footage in a blur on Nick's netpad. "7,802. Remember, I said she worked crowd control at a jazz festival."

Nick blew out a breath and walked away from the terminal. Sometimes changing the scenery helped him think. How was he going to narrow this down? "I don't know, is there any chance someone sneezed in her face? What is sneeze distance, anyway?"

"About fifteen feet. And yes, there were two-hundred, twenty-three instances of sneezing, coughing, laughing, or talking that occurred within range during her infection period."

Nick's shoulders slumped. This would be a slow slog through the data, most likely. "Can the BHN tell us how many of those people were already infected at that point? The Health Department said many people didn't report the illness because it's hard to distinguish from the cold or allergies."

"The BHN has an epidemiological screen for cold remedy purchases, mentions of illness in communications, and fluctuations in water and food intake," Cross said. "But nothing shows up before Officer Watson was infected."

He could lose hours floating around, trying to find something of use. It was fun when it was on his own time, but he had to show the Chairman that he could deliver quickly on a labor-hours job. He said, "Try this shortcut; how many of these instances were by people who were not city residents?"

"The jazz festival brings in a lot of tourists," Cross replied. "A quarter of the people who sneezed or coughed at the jazz festival are non-citizens."

"Okay, let's assume that you were deliberately trying to infect a cop. You wouldn't infect yourself and then hope that you would infect them through normal interaction. Still, tell me if any of those people became sick at the same time or before Officer Watson."

"Negative."

"Did anyone spray an aerosol around Officer Watson?" Nick asked.

"No."

"I have to review this footage myself, don't I?" He shook his head in despair. This could take him days rather than hours and the chances he would spot the moment of infection were slim.

"It is only fifty hours. I've just run through it half a dozen times."

"Screw that, Cross. Divvy it up into two categories — interactions with other people and physical contact where the germ may have been transferred. Someone probably brought in Blight 5 from the outside. Prioritize the people contacts by non-citizens and then citizens who recently traveled. Do we have to run the travel record query by the DA?"

Cross posted a status bar for his query that began to fill even as she answered him. "The Simon in the DA's office has given us pre-approval of anything short of a full probe."

The status bar filled and Nick began reviewing video clips. The first five clips were of Officer Watson at the jazz festival talking to people who were gelled out of their skulls. Nothing fishy.

The next three were traffic stops on a highway outside of the Keokuk district. Officer Watson issued speeding tickets and searched vehicles for smuggled gels.

Watson pulled over three guys in disheveled clothing driving a yellowed plastic delivery truck. Her shoulder cam caught her arm reaching into a bag and then holding something up to her lips.

"What the hell did she just do?" Nick reversed the video clip on the terminal. "Did she just lick her fingers?" He sat back, stunned. "Cross, give me all the clips where she eats, licks or sniffs something."

Cross whistled. "You have an urgent message. On the netpad."

Maybe someone was claiming responsibility for Blight 5. He didn't have time to read it; his every instinct warbled that he was on the verge of a breakthrough here. "Summarize it."

"It's from a Kagent who needs your aunt's netpad very soon."

Nick finally looked down. "Oh," he said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

His aunt's netpad. He had almost forgotten it. Someone had actually contacted him about it.

From: Christian Roberts

Nick,

I am a Kagent who needs to recover Kelly Sekma's netpad. However, I am not coming down to get it, given what's happened to Kagents recently. In fact, I'm leaving the Earth system on Thursday, May 4th, 19:00 Central. You must bring the netpad to me at the Too Screwed Casino on the Moon before then or I will destroy it remotely. Message me when you arrive in Gateway.

"Damn." Nick's voice caught in his throat. "Cross, when would I have to leave to catch this Kagent?"

"Considering transit time to the Moon, the last possible flight from Hamilton leaves in two days at 6:20 in the morning. From Chicago, the last flight is tomorrow night at 10:25. Are you considering doing this?"

"No, of course not," Nick said quickly. His parents considered anything outside Earth's atmosphere as offworld, and going there would get him disowned. "You know that."

Except he was considering it. He would have to wrap up this Hamilton job quickly, and somehow convince Rob to let him go.

"I can reserve a seat for you, just in case," Cross replied.

"It's a waste of a reservation fee. I'm not going," Nick said, and then blurted, "but make it from here, in case I don't get back to Chicago in time."

"Done," Cross said.

There were times when Nick appreciated his Simon not having much of a personality. "Back to Watson eating random shit by hand. How often did she do that?"

"Over sixty times in this period, including meals and a precinct birthday party," Cross said. "Every time she suspected someone of smuggling gels, department procedure for identifying them is to see if they fizzle on the tongue."

Nick threw up his hands. "Now what?"

"We could probe everyone who gave her something to eat."

"Even the officer who threw the party?" Nick shook his head. "That's just thrashing the haystack, hoping the needle comes flying out. But I don't have any better ideas."

Cross requested that the DA obtain surveillance warrants, as they called them in Hamilton, while Nick perused more exciting shoulder cam footage. Officer Watson eating dinner at the concession stand at the jazz festival. Officer Watson handed a water bottle while on patrol. Did the water bottle vendor slip the virus into the water?

The DA returned the warrants a few minutes later. Nick probed the non-citizens first, which excluded the water bottle vendor. Cross posted thumbnails of each person on the netpad as their BHN probe results came in.

Cross had focused each probe on any signs that the individual disliked the city. She scanned their communications for grudges and complaints, their medical records for mental impairments, and their social networks for connections to groups hostile to the city.

Nick sorted the people by who was most likely to want to harm the city.

Juan called just then and asked for a status update.

Nick knew that was politician-speak for wanting him to be finished by now. "I wish I had some good news to report."

"Yeah, I understand, it's early. Is there anything I can do to help?" That was politician-speak for really wanting him to be done.

"No, I just have to churn through all the leads and dead ends," Nick replied.

"Yeah, yeah, I understand," Juan said. "I'll be at the library later, if you need to reach me."

"Thanks, I hope to have something for you before then," Nick said. Juan hung up. Knowing that Juan was waiting impatiently made Nick's hands sweat.

He continued finding leads that went nowhere and it took another hour to rule them all out. Each time he returned to the shrinking list of possible suspects, his doubts increased. Running out of shortcuts was always a sore point with him, like an admission of failure.

But he slogged onward anyway. The afternoon dwindled into evening and with it his chances of knocking out this job quickly and impressing Chairman Ferguson.

He could hear the cleaning crew in the hallway outside and his fingers went rigid on the terminal's old fashioned keyboard. He had to stretch them to work the tension out before he could continue.

Nick exhausted the list of 'highly likely' suspects when the cleaning crew moved on. He was back to unknown non-citizens.

He queued up another video of Watson putting something to her lips at a traffic stop. She sniffed, tasted, and ate way too many damn times for Nick's liking.

He pulled up the profile and video of the driver Watson had pulled over. Melanie Logan, another out-of-towner. She drove an ancient Lenovo Station Wagon III. Watson had pulled her over for speeding and driving erratically with the auto-drive off.

Manual highway driving was dangerous and tiresome. Nick tried it once on the trip from Harrisburg to Chicago, just to see what it felt like. It was twenty minutes of terror until he pulled over and switched back to auto-drive.

Watson did her usual gel-runner routine. Search for warrants, search the car, search the driver, and test for gels. Nick had watched half a dozen of these videos and Watson was consistent in her routine.

Watson licked some blue sprinkles that were in a box of baking supplies in Melanie Logan's trunk. When she bent over to inspect the box, her shoulder cam revealed that the box also contained spoons, spatulas, and measuring cups. The sprinkles turned out not to be gels, according to the analyzer on Watson's belt.

And that's when Nick's instincts tickled. Something was wrong here.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He reversed the footage to when Watson dug around in the box. He watched Watson test the suspected gel material in her analyzer. He was missing whatever was wrong. He played it again, focusing on the blue sprinkles. That wasn't what bothered him.

What was it about baking? When his older sister Dez was a teen, she and her friends took turns hosting baking parties. The host either supplied the ingredients and the visitors brought recipes, or vice versa. Nick would volunteer to clean up just so he could hit on Dez's friends.

He snapped his fingers. "Why does this woman only have sprinkles? It's the only food item in there. The rest are cooking implements."

Cross replied, "Are you asking a Simon a rhetorical question?" Which itself was a rhetorical question.

Nick was intrigued by the baking supplies. He reviewed the shoulder cam video again. He froze the frame when Watson held up a prescription medication bottle with Melanie Logan's name on it, an anti-viral medication. The bottle was empty.

"Cross, run that prescription through the BHN. Where did she get it and who prescribed it?"

Cross replied in seconds. "There is no record of that prescription. The pharmacy listed in Memphis does not exist."

Nick sat up straight. "Double check everything about her. School records, communication and financial trails, medical records, the works."

On the surface, Melanie Logan's records were all in order. Grew up in southern Virginia and Tennessee. Had office jobs doing accounting at a variety of construction companies.

But Cross started posting discrepancies as she dug deeper. No call records older than five years ago. No medical records older than twenty years. The records Logan did have didn't cross-reference with her listed addresses at the time.

Nick suspected her financials were similarly Swiss-cheesed. People remembered to falsify food and rent transactions, but they typically forgot about buying the once-in-a-while necessities.

Like towels.

And Melanie Logan had never bought towels. Ever.

"So we have an imposter carting blue sprinkles down the highway, driving so badly she had to be pulled over. Did Watson's chem analyzer identify what those sprinkles were?"

"That analyzer model is limited only to identifying gel molecules," Cross replied. "The more thorough unit is too expensive to equip the police with."

"Fine. Scan the city for Melanie Logan's face and body type. If we find her last known location, we may have a suspect."

Cross obtained a surveillance warrant in seconds, linked to the city surveillance network, and searched every frame of street and overhead footage for Melanie Logan.

Nick stood, stretched, and walked around the room full of terminals to loosen up his leg muscles. Apparently he had tensed them up as he had closed in on his prey. After a full circuit around the room, Cross hadn't reported any results yet. "What's up?"

"I haven't found her," Cross said.

Nick returned to the terminal. "She was driving east toward Keokuk, into the city. Maybe she drove straight through. Track her car from the traffic stop and see where it went."

While most zones were lucky to rent time off a low-resolution satellite cam that passed over every ninety minutes, Hamilton had nearly two-dozen High Altitude Platforms, or HAPs, hovering 100 kilometers over the city at all times.

"She exited the highway after the traffic stop and there is no further sign of her. The rural satellite coverage is limited."

"What? This city has top-shelf overhead surveillance," Nick whined. The HAPs tracked weather, traffic, and supplied bandwidth to the city's comm networks. They also were the choice defense platform because they were easy to replace, too high to knock down without serious air supremacy assets, yet low enough to aid tactical situations in real time.

He didn't want a boring chase through the Hamilton region looking for surveillance-dodging phantoms. He had a flight to catch tomorrow. Or not.

"She must have reappeared somewhere. Where was her next financial transaction?"

"There are no transactions, calls, ID checks, facial recognition, nothing," Cross said. "She completely disappeared, visually and electronically."

Nick zoomed on a still frame of the phantom Melanie. Dark, spring-curly hair, dark eyes, in her mid-twenties. She was five feet five inches, above average bust. There was a real person there, dammit.

"Search for someone matching her description in concentric circles from Hamilton. Out to Chicago, Kansas City, anywhere that is several days away. She or her car has to show up somewhere."

While Cross chewed on that, the door to the room opened and Serena Greene stuck her head in.

"I'm leaving for the night, Nick. Are you staying long?"

Nick jerked his head above the viewer. "Am I keeping you here?"

Serena shook her head. "No, the room will lock on it's own. There's an overnight tech on duty, if you need help. Are you going to be back tomorrow?"

Nick swallowed nervously. "No, I think I'm close. Thanks for everything."

She smiled, said goodnight, and closed the door.

Cross said. "There's no sign of her after that traffic stop. And yes, I searched for women with her body type. There were over 2,400 in the region who met that description. They all have valid IDs and histories and none are a facial match for Melanie Logan."

"I've never had anyone drop off the BHN like that," Nick said. "How does that happen?"

"In my younger days," Cross said, "about sixty years ago, it was the tail end of the time when nation-states could fund espionage operations. There were techniques for avoiding other countries' surveillance grids, but they were customized to fool those specific systems."

"Would any of them work now?" Nick asked.

"No," Cross said. "Technology has improved greatly since then. But it is possible to avoid surveillance."

"She must have been wearing a good disguise," Nick said wistfully. "Assuming she is a she."

Here was someone who took the time, expertise and money to craft a disguise that could beat facial recog and bounty hunter search techniques. The idea that anyone could figure that out and execute it unnerved him. He put a lot of faith in the BHN; its data was his eventual ticket off the streets. The thought that someone could compromise it made him queasy.

The key question was: was she operating alone or as part of a group? A group would make the financing and logistics easier, but one person could do it alone. Heck, rumor had it that the famous bounty hunter Borbola pulled stunts like this as a hobby.

Nick's curiosity made him reluctant to stop digging, but he had answered the Chairman's questions. Anything more would chew up the city's labor hours contract, which would mean less work for him.

His stomach rumbled. "I'm forwarding everything I have to the police," he said to Cross. "I'm telling them that the virus is probably not an accident, but the perp got away."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Nick was at a candlelit soup shop in the Palisades down the street from Civic Center, spooning tomato bisque into his mouth, when his netpad chimed.

He snapped the netpad up with one hand, knowing this would happen. You couldn't drop a shitbomb like that on the police and amble away. They would call back.

Sure enough, it was the Chairman's assistant Malcolm. Nick's report on Melanie Logan had set off a firestorm. The budget people were questioning the police department's claims about its expensive airtight street surveillance. The police chief wanted to prove that the surveillance grid didn't have dead spots and coverage holes that any criminal could avoid.

And since Nick was already in town, the Chief wanted him to test the city's surveillance system to prove that there were indeed holes that a phantom virus-bomber could have exploited. Specifically, test the east side of the river across from Keokuk, where Melanie Logan likely entered the city.

The police wanted him to test conditions at night, when Logan disappeared, and in the general area she would have passed through. They highlighted a one mile long stretch of Breadbasket Avenue that cut across the city's southern half.

[No surveillance grid is foolproof,] Nick texted back to Malcolm. [You want to pay me at a high hourly rate to prove that?]

Malcolm replied, [Yes. Upload your results ASAP.]

Nick bit off a chunk of sourdough bread and thought about it. He was curious how Logan had managed it.

"We can do this tonight," Cross said into his earpiece. "We'll use the drones and have you test only those routes that look the most promising."

This wouldn't prevent him from catching a flight to the Moon. Not that he was seriously considering that. He paid the check, grabbed the sourdough, and took a taxi down to the bridge.

A stiff breeze tossed grit against Nick's smartshades as he stepped out of the taxi. The Keokuk district lights reflected in white shimmers off the Mississippi below him on his right. On his left, the scuffed, faded surfaces of the Breadbasket neighborhood stretched east into a grimy mix of multi-colored lights, gray stone, and the cheap resin siding used in poorer housing projects.

Breadbasket Avenue headed nearly due east before angling northwest toward the highway into midtown. Here by the river, the street ran through an industrial area fronted by a commercial strip. At the bend, it was a mix of retail and low-rent apartments.

Nick drank in the neighborhood's demographics in a glance: most residents were in the trades with below-average income. They were the type that kept to themselves but would come running to help someone in need, especially if it involved a broken machine of some kind.

They reminded Nick of his brother-in-law. He didn't need to power up any of his weapons. These folks loved justice-dealing bounty hunters.

The air felt like cold stainless steel on his fingers, and the few people on the street wore thick, dull coats or flashier jackettes with light piping that pulsed purple, green or blue.

"Show me the BHN coverage map," Nick said. "And alert me whenever you can spot a drone on the BHN feeds for the area."

Cross texted on his smartshades, [I'm giving you one drone to control, to see if you can beat me to discovering a hole.]

Nick smiled. The first half mile looked completely saturated in coverage between street cams and business owners' own cam coverage, and Nick confirmed this when his drone was spotted in less than five seconds.

Cross sent drones down five other paths, exploiting every gap in coverage. But the buildings were cinderblock industrial boxes with clear sight lines, bright external lights, and few blind spots. The Simon's first attempts all failed within thirty seconds.

[Next, I'll have my drones use any dead spots, even if they are too small for human adults to use.]

Nick nodded. His drone hovered off his shoulder, awaiting instructions. He studied the BHN coverage map and turned it around to see all the angles. He didn't see anything that looked promising.

First one, then two, then three alarms sounded as Cross' drones were picked up on surveillance linked to the city or the BHN.

"I'm trying up top," Nick said. His drone rose into the night sky until it cleared the three-story white-shingled roofs. The drone began its run from atop a corner building that had a grocery on the first floor and medical offices on the upper floors.

His drone lasted ten seconds before it was caught. As it flew back to him, Nick brought up the source that covered the rooftops. It was one of the city's HAPs.

Cross' last drone went the distance undetected. She had steered it through alleys, side streets, and hid it behind dumpsters and shrubbery. The final stretch involved the ping-pong ball-sized drone sliding underneath cars. It wasn't a path a person could take, however.

[I'm optimizing and will try again.] This time three out of her five drones made it down the street undetected.

"Could she have changed her disguise and walked right down the street without being detected?" Nick asked. "That's the real hole in the grid that the city will worry about."

[Hamilton doesn't use ubiquitous retina scanners or card-sniffers. Just under half the people passing by any particular street cam are unidentifiable. But connect these segments and they are nearly all identified.]

"Even at night? The lighting may not be good enough," Nick pointed out. Breadbasket Avenue had standard city lighting: overhead streetlights of white light and lines of curb-edge guide lights. Despite being rundown and grimy, there were no streetlights out of service along the avenue. Over eighty-five percent of the curb guides worked. But there were deep shadows under trees, gloomy alleys, and doorways where ill-defined forms shuffled about.

Nick suspected that the city had infrared cams set up that were off the publicly-available grid; most cities did in higher crime areas, but the facial match success rates from infrared was a dodgy proposition. He didn't have access to them out here anyway.

"Can the cams isolate non-residents?" he asked.

[Not in Hamilton. Visitors, tourists, and short-term residents make up about ten percent of the city's population in a given year. This neighborhood has above average turnover.]

Nick began walking east along the avenue, trying to get a feel for the place. Past a string of fast food joints were mammoth warehouses that connected to the city's underground freight transit system. Beyond them was a medical clinic, transient housing, a cheap motel, and apartment buildings with broken blinds in the windows.

[The facial match rate at night drops to less than a quarter because of the low light levels.]

Nick blew out a visible breath. "Let's try this. Show me the dead spots for facial match. I'll walk it and see if it can identify me. I want to see if Melanie could pick a path where she may have been spotted, but not ID'd."

Cross posted the map and Nick stepped up on the curb into a dead spot behind a transit shelter.

Cross flashed a "look left" on his smartshades as he walked to the next one. Nick swiveled his head to look at the brown metal garage door of a car repair shop. A city cam only saw the back of his head.

He ducked under a construction tunnel covering the sidewalk, the plywood and plastic obscuring him. When he was past that, he stepped right two paces to hide in the gloom created by a tractor trailer that blocked the streetlight.

[Turn left at the corner. The cam at the end of the street is blocked by that oak tree forty yards away.]

Nick stopped and leaned against a cinder block wall. "How did I do?"

[Not enough for a facial match.]

Nick clapped his hands. "So Melanie Logan may have been spotted, but perhaps not identified," he said. "To do that though, she would need to have real time access to the BHN and a Simon to map the route for her. There's the surveillance hole, but it's not big." He thought about Melanie Logan's lack of existence. "If she is wearing a disguise, how much harder does it get to track her if she changed disguises?"

[The probability of identifying her becomes very small.]

Nick was afraid of that. "Then we better tell the city they probably got virus-bombed intentionally. And the bomber is free and untraceable."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Nick had just stepped inside his hotel room when Rob called. If it weren't for Cross saying it was urgent, Nick would have ignored it. He didn't feel like arguing with his boss about when this job would end, or when he would be back in Chicago to handle Rob's brutal caseload, or whatever Rob's problem was.

But Nick did trust Cross. So he let the call go through.

"Juan Burgess was just shot at the city library," Rob said.

Nick dropped his overnight bag in the dark doorway. Did he mishear that? No he hadn't. This couldn't be happening.

"The city requested you, by name, to investigate," Rob continued. "This is too big a retainer for us to lose, so don't screw it up."

"The city wants me to investigate?" Nick asked. It felt like his ears were ringing and his brain had seized up.

"Are you functional right now, Lincoln?"

"Yes, other than deep shock."

"Well, shock yourself the fuck out of it. They need you at the main city library now. And yes, they requested you specifically." Rob hung up.

"Shit," Nick said. The awfulness of the situation fell on him in waves. Juan shot? Why would someone do that?

Nick's next thought, which made him feel horrible, was to worry about how this would affect his budding analysis business with the city. Would the Chairman continue his contract?

He shook his head to banish that thought. Not now. Juan wasn't dead, so far as he knew, and the city needed Nick onsite now. He tossed the overnight bag on the bed, turned the lights on, and spun around on his heel a few times. He wasn't sure what to do.

He went to the window and looked out. It didn't make sense; he was facing the wrong direction to even see the Palisades. Maybe he was looking for police car lights, or roadblocks, or something.

The Chief must have requested him by name because he had just finished the surveillance grid test. It made sense. He needed to go, leave, go to the library. Now.

He was about to step out of the door.

"Nick, are you okay?" Cross said from far away. Her voice came from the netpad's speaker, back on the bed, where he had thrown it without realizing it.

He realized he had no gear on.

He walked back to the bed, then turned around and went into the bathroom. His stomach felt sick but he closed his eyes, splashed water on his face, and took a deep breath. He stood and looked in the mirror, straightened his shoulders, and marched out.

He collected his gear: Thunker, Bruiser, Slugger, smartshades, netpad, drones.

He touched his aunt's netpad in his thigh pocket. Oh God, he'd nearly forgot about Christian Robert's ultimatum. The last flight to the Moon would leave tomorrow morning. How could he leave in the middle of a high-profile shooting investigation?

He could use that data in his aunt's netpad to make his quarterly quotas, without spilling blood. If Juan died, Nick's work for Hamilton would likely die with him. Meeting Christian Roberts may be his only chance to do Kagent work. Otherwise he would probably carry that dead netpad for years, becoming an embittered bounty hunter, or possibly a mercenary when Rob finally fired him for missing quota.

Damn it, he was an asshole for standing there, thinking these things at a time like this. But he couldn't help it. He rushed out of the room.

[A Hamilton police squad car will take you to the scene,] Cross texted on his smartshades, which he didn't remember putting back on.

Nick checked the local news while he rode to the ground floor. Nothing yet, but that would change any second.

"Cross, post the countdown to the orbital flight in the corner of the smartshades."

[I thought you weren't even thinking about that.]

"I'm keeping my options open."

[Do you know what you're doing here, Nick?]

"Yeah. Juggling."

[9.5 hours]

Nick slapped the hotel's door open just as the flashing red and blues of a city police car appeared around the street corner.
CHAPTER NINETEEN

The sergeant in the police cruiser had a murderous look in his eye. It had to be a terrible night for Hamilton cops, especially for one assigned to babysit a bounty hunter.

"You don't look like a bounty hunter," the sergeant said, looking at Nick's sport coat. "Let's see ID."

"I'm more of an investigator than a mercenary," Nick explained as he handed his ID over. He had left his armored jacket in his overnight bag back at the hotel. He didn't expect to be gunning dangerous felons tonight.

His ID cleared and the sergeant let him in and activated the nav program. The cruiser pulled into traffic, its lights flashing and sirens blaring.

Hamilton's major downtown streets were semicircular boulevards that allowed impromptu traffic trains of vehicles to move through the city non-stop.

Hugging the Mississippi was the dark leafy mass of the nature preserve. The squad car left the trees and river behind and slipped between the towers of the Palisades. The skyscrapers each had an apron of green space around their trunks. As the squad car zoomed around them, it looked to Nick like a gardening deity had grown the buildings from fertile, green plots.

Even this late at night, the business district was alive and kicking. There was always a financial market open somewhere in the solar system, so someone in Hamilton was always at work. Juan had once shown Nick how the business district had a lively nightlife because it never closed. Poor Juan.

The shooting and the night life caused a deep traffic jam that even a police car couldn't part. The nav program choose another route and took a steep ramp underground into the city's freight transit system. It was a subterranean lair of brightly lit highways and streets that were limited to freight and emergency traffic and flood control.

The freight transit system was a series of long straightaways and intersecting side streets, arranged in a typical urban grid, with limited exits to the surface.

The cruiser sped upwards of sixty miles an hour and the traffic system pulled trucks and tractor trailers to the shoulder so it could pass.

Nick scanned the local news on his smartshades. All the local sites had jumped into live, vapid, repetitious coverage of the shooting. They reported the security arrangements of elected officials. They pontificated on the lack of safety procedures at public libraries. They even questioned whether public libraries were to blame somehow.

Nick killed all of these feeds: he didn't need punditry, he needed to know everything the police knew before he arrived on the scene.

"How do I plug into your department's feed?" Nick asked.

The sergeant sneezed and gave Nick the code to the cruiser's wireless hub. Nick logged in and grabbed the police feed.

The feed said the crime scene was sealed and waiting for him to arrive. City surveillance was set to alert level one. Juan was in emergency surgery. The shooter was dead and there was a picture of his face.

Nick texted, [Run the shooter for ID, motive, the full profile. With the shooter dead, this should be a quickie.] Based on previous cases, he could close a murder in an hour. The BHN could fill in most of the holes, the drones covered the crime scene investigation, and Nick put it all together.

Cross posted a map showing an address. [The shooter is Joseph Winthrop. Lived in Cornwallis Shares, a couple of zones over. I am running the usual in-depth profile, but it will take a few minutes.]

Nick replied, [Be thorough. We need to wrap all loose ends and have answers to even the loopier questions, because Juan is a politician.]

"How's it going?" the sergeant asked, watching Nick making texting swipes in the air, but unable to see anything else.

Nick turned to look at him. "With the shooter dead, I'll be done soon."

The sergeant did a double take. "What? What about motive? And accomplices? Interviewing witnesses? Collecting enough evidence to stand up in court? You can't tap away like that and close the case in the car ride to the scene."

Nick replied, "The shooter is dead and I have his ID. The motive won't take long, if there is one. In less than an hour I'll know more about this guy than his mother or lover ever did. There's a reason the city calls in a bounty hunter for this work."

The sergeant shook his head in disbelief and looked out the window, his jaw muscles flexing.

[There is one witness, Pamela Sullivan, the city trade representative,] Cross texted. [She was meeting with Juan at the time and shot the assailant. You'll have to interview her. I am analyzing her communications and network usage on the city networks.]

Nick wrote back, [Map her movements around the city. See if they overlap with the shooter's.]

[The city's security cam footage covers Winthrop for nearly his entire time in town. He never crossed paths with Ms. Sullivan. He didn't interact with anyone that the cams saw.]

Cross texted, [The last person to have an off-camera conversation with Winthrop was back in Cornwallis Shares. About the weather.]

[I'll consider talking to that person if we come up empty on a motive,] Nick replied. He watched footage of Winthrop bussing into the city earlier in the evening. An hour ago he entered the building, exited the elevator on the library's main floor, walked past the circulation desk, and went upstairs to the second floor. The cameras lost him as he approached Juan's study carrel.

Nick didn't need to hear how Mr. Winthrop was such a quiet man. He'd leave that to the jornos, who would descend on Winthrop's life like a pack of starved hyenas.

The police cruiser took the exit ramp back aboveground and bounced into a kaleidoscope of emergency lights ricocheting off the Palisade's skyscrapers. The city's main library was on the eleventh floor of the Athens Building.

Nick and the sergeant ran into the lobby straight to a waiting elevator. They exited on the eleventh floor — the library's second floor.

Nick and the sergeant faced a sea of frantic police. Everyone looked eager to do something, but no one was sure what. They must have cancelled sick leave, Nick thought, because he saw one feverish-looking patrol woman and half a dozen officers sneezing or coughing.

"Tell the Chief the bounty hunter is here," the sergeant told the cop who checked Nick's ID and let him past the inner ring of security.

Nick launched his drones. The clunky grapefruit-sized orbs were obsolete five models ago, but even these back-up units were better than any forensic tools in the city. Two-thirds of his drones zipped away to map the crime scene and scrape every surface for tissue and fiber samples. The rest scattered across the library, mapping its every aisle and nook.

The drones fed their raw data to Cross who input them into a suite of forensic models. Nick would do the meet and greet and handle the people side of things. Then he would file a report and get the hell out.

Cross identified the Chief and posted his bio: [Hampton J. Reese; twelve years on the force. Degenerating back condition from a gang fight fifteen years ago in San Diego, been on the beat twenty years total. Married, meat and potatoes type, fisherman, quiet, and mopey.]

[Probability that he is a suspect?] Nick texted.

[Personal communications: clean, financial records: clean, motive: none. Reese is most likely not a suspect.]

The Chief shook Nick's hand and introduced him to his underlings. Cross posted their names above each of their heads, but Nick ignored them; he didn't plan on sticking around long.

"The shooter is dead, a John Doe at this point," the Chief explained. "We don't know if there are accomplices. The Trade Representative witnessed the whole thing and she's shook up, but lucky to be alive."

"Your shooter is Joseph Winthrop," Nick replied. "Lived in Cornwallis Shares, a couple of zones over. I'll have more on him in a few minutes. How is Juan doing?"

The Chief frowned. "You know him?"

"Yes, I've been working with him. Data analysis, not the usual bounty hunter stuff."

The Chief's brow furrowed and he stepped in close like a protective older uncle, his voice low. "Are you sure you're all right to handle this?"

Nick was sure he could work a puppy massacre right now, with this flight to catch. "Not a problem."

The Chief said. "We need a professional, impartial investigation."

Nick nodded. "I enjoy working with Councilor Burgess. Great client. But I'm on retainer to the city, not to him personally."

"Okay," the Chief agreed. "Still, if Councilor Thrall hears that you knew Juan previously, she'll want an investigation of your investigation. And you won't be able to bill us for that time if you're the one being investigated. Understand? I never said that, by the way."

"Didn't hear it," Nick said. Becoming mired in city politics was the last thing he wanted. Another reason to wrap this up quick-like. "So how is Juan doing?"

Big sigh. "He took a frier in the gut, so..." The Chief shrugged and looked away.

Nick's stomach sank. A frier bolt was specifically designed to obliterate its target. Upon penetration, it launched tiny explosives with enough force to filet major organs, incinerating tissue and bone within a three-inch diameter. The force of the penetration and the dispersal often threw the victim backwards. Literal overkill.

Rest in peace, Juan, Nick thought.

Investigating this shooting would turn into an assassination investigation; one he still needed to wrap up in a hurry.
CHAPTER TWENTY

Nick nodded sadly. "So how did it happen?"

The Chief said, "The Councilor and the Trade Rep were seated, talking. Shooter steps in and fires. She returned fire and killed him."

"The Trade Representative returned fire?" Who the hell carries a weapon when they hit the books? Nick had assumed this was a homicide-suicide extra value combo. "Okay. My drones are documenting the crime scene now, I'll interview the Trade Rep, find the motive, and give you a thorough report."

The Chief nodded. "The Council Chairman insists on coming here and getting briefed. He and Juan were close, like brothers. This is awfully tough for him. So be respectful."

"Yes, sir."

Cross posted to Nick's smartshades a bio on the Chairman in case he need it. Fen Ferguson was in his third term as Chairman, approval rating in the low sixties, a standard deviation above the mean. He had won on a combination of primary and secondary votes in the city's ranked voting system. Cross confirmed that Ferguson's profile suggested it was highly unlikely he was a suspect.

The Chief asked, "Do you really think you can brief the Chairman in half an hour? Really? Can you be thorough that quickly?"

Nick would have to work fast. No politician ever elected would wait around at the scene of a colleague's assassination while a scummy bounty hunter took his sweet old time.

Nick nodded. "You've got the shooter already. I'm just documenting the crime scene, interviewing the witness, finding the motive, and documenting the ballistics. The average time to close a shooting investigation is less than an hour."

The Chief looked uncomfortable. "No, but certain, um, Councilors won't believe whatever the department says. Not unless there's outside verification. I never said that either, by the way."

Nick let it go and toggled the smartshades to read the Chief's biochem telltales. "Tell me what you know about the victim."

The Chief said several nice things about Juan that Nick already knew: Juan was a class act, a good-government crusader, a nice, shy guy who somehow fell into public service.

"He helped me win funding last year to begin an air force," the Chief said, and concluded, "he was a good man."

The biochem telltales indicated the Chief was honest. Yeah, the Chief was not a suspect.

[Remember, don't ask about Burgess' personal life. In Hamilton, there is no police surveillance of someone without a court order, especially elected officials.]

Nick frowned. This was unusual: security heads in other zones dug into a pol's personal life with the nonchalance of a pilot checking the weather forecast.

Cross posted Juan's profile from the BHN. Nick paged through it by twitching his index finger up and down. [Divorced, two small children, rents a two bedroom apartment. No romantic attachments. The divorce and child support left him in poor financial shape, but he never complained about money in his electronic comm records. No outstanding health problems, strange hobbies, or odd purchases.]

Cross signaled that the drones were done and she had a preliminary estimate of how the shooting had happened.

"The Trade Representative, Pam Sullivan," he asked the Chief, "am I looking at her as just a witness? Or a suspect? She did have a weapon."

The Chief said, "Witness. I'm pretty sure. But she's an offworlder. Make sure you are thorough enough to satisfy the conspiracy nuts."

Nick nodded and excused himself to personally inspect the crime scene. The only job the police had with respect to the crime scene was to seal it off without disturbing it. City law stated that only a qualified, independent investigator could properly document a crime scene. Once Nick presented his credentials to the cop standing guard at the yellow tape, he owned the crime scene.

He peeked in the destroyed study carrel with his smartshades recording everything he saw.

One bloody chair was behind the table. The other chair was knocked askew. A red cloak lay on the floor.

The table contained a single city-issued netpad and a blackened bullet crater. Nick didn't have time to be distracted by something interesting that Juan had been working on. And yet, he had to know what was on the netpad, to be thorough. He verified that the drones had scanned it for fingerprints and genetic material and then picked it up.

The netpad woke up. It displayed information about the Stabilizer Alliance and its activities in various cities. Nick set down the netpad.

"Cross, was the shooter connected to the Stabilizers?"

[No]

Even if he was, it wouldn't mean anything, unless the motive remained elusive. Nick looked around the room for a few more minutes. Cross compared his smartshade footage to the drones' recordings. Once in a while Nick spotted something that the drones missed, and vice versa.

[Everything matches up, Nick.]

With the shooter bagged-and-tagged, and the crime scene mapped, he just had to interview the witness, maybe find the motive, brief the Chairman, and race to the liftport.

Nick looked at Sullivan's ID photo. Large dark liquid eyes, shoulder-length brown hair, no piercings. Pretty. She was wearing a blood-red offworlder cloak. Apparently she wasn't overly concerned with fitting-in down here. But an offworlder representing the city to offworld interests did send a certain message that probably eased the way when negotiating business deals with offworld entrepreneurs.

[Cross, the city okayed running her through the BHN, but if she's an offworlder, the BHN won't have much. What can you find?]

The Simon posted the results ten seconds later, laid out across the smartshades just the way Nick liked.

First came the scorecard of vital stats: physical measurements, financial records, comm traffic, medical history. Most of the categories were empty since she had just arrived in Hamilton a month ago. There was a collection of video clips from surveillance cameras around the city and inside Civic Center.

She was a business consultant who had pundited on offworld news and business sites in recent years. Nick grimaced; he disliked questioning someone when he didn't know the answers already.

She had been on Earth a couple of times before, but for short stays in Johannesburg, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. There was video of her walking and eating in restaurants with other people from those visits.

Damn, he would have to gather her information the old fashioned way: footwork. Ignorance was a pain in the ass when you were in a hurry.

She was loosely guarded by a couple of uniforms in a study carrel a distance away from the crime scene. The guards fidgeted, glancing at her like they didn't know what to make of her: witness, suspect, or just offworld weirdo.

Pamela Sullivan sat still, looking pale and thin, staring vacantly into the stacks. She wore a red offworlder jumpsuit that matched the cloak Nick saw lying on the floor. A vamped up Little Red Riding Hood who packed heat.

Nick stepped into the study carrel. "Ms. Sullivan?"

She looked up at him and there was a flash of recognition. "Nick Lincoln?"

He scowled. Was his name taped to his chest? If he had become famous, he needed to figure out how to cash in on it. "Are you my sister?"

She stared at him like he had toenails growing out of his cheeks. "What? No." She frowned. "One of the officers mentioned your name." Her voice was sharp but silky, with each word crafted individually and rapidly. Or maybe his gonads had screwed with his ears.

But his gonads hadn't screwed with the biochem telltales on his smartshades, which indicated that Ms. Sullivan was not telling the truth.

Just great.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Nick guided Ms. Sullivan down the hall to a quieter spot. "Maybe we should start over," he said. Sometimes just saying that was enough to reboot a situation. "I need you to tell me what happened."

"The Councilor and I were discussing Stabilizer protesters when this person comes in and, without a word, starts shooting. I dropped to the floor and returned fire. I wasn't even aiming. When he fired back at me, I guess I escalated."

Escalated. Interesting word choice, Nick thought.

Cross texted, [Truth]

Ms. Sullivan continued, "When he was hit, I kicked his gun away, did what I could for Councilor Burgess, and called for help. The shooter died before help arrived. Which I don't understand: my weapon only had disabler rounds. He should have been unconscious."

"Non-lethal, huh? You may not have killed him then. His name was Joseph Winthrop," Nick said. "Have you heard of him? You seem to know a lot of strangers' names."

She smiled sadly but shook her head.

[Truth]

Nick asked, "Why did you have a weapon here tonight?"

Pam replied, "It's an offworld disabler. I have a permit."

"But why did you have it?"

"Oh. For personal protection."

"Well, you saved your life and maybe Juan's, too." That last bit sounded flat and she locked onto the slip.

"He's not going to make it, is he?" Her eyes teared up.

"Probably not," Nick said. He wanted to comfort her. He said in a soothing tone, "Do you need a moment?"

"No." She waved a hand in front of her face. "I'll save it for later. I'm still in shock." She took a deep breath. "Losing Councilor Burgess will be a terrible blow for the city, though."

"Who would gain because of that? Who would have a motive?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure. I have only been down here for barely a month."

[Lying]

Nick saw it too: her biochem readings spiked. She was hiding something. Every one lies in an investigation, Nick had learned the hard way years ago. It may not be a relevant lie, but the lies were always there. He let the awkward silence stretch forward, so that the tension may prompt her to say more.

Finally she said, "I model negotiations, business relationships, sometimes political alliances. The Stabilizers crossed my mind, but they have a strict vow of non-violence. I don't know enough about local politics yet to have an informed opinion."

[Truth]

She stopped talking for few seconds. "Will you just say something?"

Nick blinked. Her biochems had returned to normal. He tried to sound casual. "I'm stalling while I try to retrieve your personal information."

She shook her head. "You won't find anything. I'm an offworlder."

He knew that, but he grinned and answered defiantly anyway. "Yes, I will."

"No, you won't. I could send you all the offworld data about me, but you wouldn't accept it, would you?"

"Of course not."

She cocked her head to the side. "Do you hide behind those shades when you rifle through people's personal lives to give you distance? You probably need a buffer."

Nick took the smartshades off and put them on the table. Their sensors would still record her biochem readings. "This better?"

She studied his face for a few seconds. A lock of dark hair fell over her eyes and she smoothed it back. "Yes, that's better."

Nick didn't know what she was thinking behind that intent gaze of hers, but it made his palms sweaty. He said, "You're right, I can't find anything about you except, uh..." he slipped the smartshades back on, "...clips of you on offworld business news shows."

He lowered the smartshades down his nose and made eye contact. "So I don't have anything to answer suspicions about an offworlder, who shoots the assailant before he can be questioned, and turns out to be the only survivor."

She folded her arms. "You said I didn't kill the shooter."

"Probably didn't, at least not with a disabler," Nick said. "But you could have killed them both."

Her jaw muscles clenched. "I didn't."

[Truth]

Nick played coy. "I'm wondering about what you know about the city's enemies."

She gulped. "There's only so much that I'm cleared to tell you. Let's just say that this city has a lot of challenges coming in the near future."

"I'm only looking for the motive and accomplices behind this assault," Nick said. "Not digging for state secrets."

She gave him a cold look. "Everything you collect here is fed into the Bounty Hunter Network, sellable and usable by any merc, right?"

"The city contract requires me to keep everything confidential. So tell me about Burgess' enemies."

Pam put her hands on the table. "Enemy enough to kill him? None I can think of. He's not a polarizing figure, from what I can see."

[Truth]

Nick smiled a bit more than he should have. "I need to head off the conspiracy theorists who will dig up odd circumstances, coincidences and loose ends. And figure out if you are a suspect."

Her voice dropped a notch on the thermometer. "You don't need more of my private data for that."

The countdown clock for the last flight was under eight hours. "Maybe," he said. "But things can change, and you should think about that. Thanks for what you did here." He walked her back to her two uniformed shadows.

"Nick," she said as he turned to go. She pronounced his name carefully in a super-serious tone. "The city needs to know why the shooter did this. Especially if he acted alone. The city is facing plenty of problems already."

"Sure. And thank you for what you did here tonight," he said. He meant it: if Winthrop killed himself, it was probably because she had fired back at him. Otherwise he might have walked away, made sure Juan was dead, or killed more people. He was also glad she had done him the favor of not having to chase after Winthrop. That would have made the investigation take days rather than hours.

He found a quiet spot to prepare for the briefing in the computer science section. Each section of the shelf-length viewer came to life as he paced by, showing him the latest, most viewed, and highest rated computer science journal articles.

"Cross, what's the latest on Winthrop?" Nick said. The Simon had set one of her search results blinking for immediate attention. He selected the result and read it.

He stopped in the stacks, his eyebrows stretching for his hairline. He reread it.

"Flail?" Nick skimmed Cross's report. Flail was flagged in the analysis of Winthrop's relationships and communications. "Check out the secondary job listings, too."

Cross posted the results for all of the listings of bounty hunter jobs. Winthrop had used Flail several times and on jobs all focused on Burgess. "What? How?"

Cross added each job's date completed, the nature of the request, third party transactions, and total billable charges.

Nick squeezed his eyes shut. A horror story unrolled before him on the smartshades. "No, no, no, no."
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Nick stood in a library conference room in a grim panic as police technicians with smartshades like his swept the room for bugs and explosives.

Satisfied the room was clean, they left and were replaced by a wall of uniforms that formed outside the door. And only then did Council Chairman Fenimore James Ferguson hustle in, followed by the Chief and a gaggle of other city officials.

Nick was trapped.

"Nick," the Chairman said, shaking Nick's hand and putting a fatherly hand on Nick's arm. He looked tired and forlorn. "Thanks for coming so quickly."

Nick nodded as his stomach rolled. "When I heard it was Juan..."

The Chairman patted him on the shoulder and looked away. "I know," he mumbled.

Nick had spent the last five minutes trying to screw his head back on. He and Cross had triple-checked the information on Winthrop. After finally accepting what Cross had found, Nick had spent a couple of minutes asking himself how the hell he would explain it all. He still didn't have an answer. All he could do was dive in and figure it out as he went.

"Wait, where is Pam?" The Chairman asked, looking at the Chief.

The Chief looked at Nick and then back at the Chairman. "As the only witness, she may still be a suspect. Is that right, Nick?"

Nick looked at his netpad; his smartshades were tucked in his jacket pocket. "The probability that she's culpable is under five percent. About the same as yours and the Chief's."

The Chairman nodded sadly. "I want her in here, she deserves to know what you've found out."

The Chief sent a female sergeant with short gray hair out of the room to retrieve Pam, and the two women returned less than a minute later. Pam looked pale but she did her best to present a professional demeanor.

"Before we get started," the Chairman said, "the update on Juan is that he is still in surgery. So it's too early to give up hope. Go ahead, Nick."

Nick swallowed. "First, I'll illustrate how the shooting happened."

Cross posted the digitally-reconstructed crime scene on the conference room's viewer. Juan's study room appeared as a composite from the photos that Nick's drones had taken. Green wireframe skeletons marked the location of Juan and Ms. Sullivan sitting on green wireframe chairs at the wooden table.

Nick spun the image around slowly so they could see the reconstructed scene from every angle. Then he ran the virtual footage forward to the point where a third wire frame skeleton, this one in yellow, entered the study carrel. This third one was fuzzy, owing to the uncertainty of exactly where the shooter stood, and how he held his gun.

Juan's wireframe was blasted in its chair. The middle of the chair back, where the frier round exited and punctured the fabric, were outlined in bright blue.

"The blue highlighting shows actual damage, the yellow indicates projected actions," Nick explained. "Ms. Sullivan's first disabler shot probably came from right above the table, according to the ballistics analysis," Nick said. The shot hit the wall above Winthrop's head, sparking a blue dot on the glass wall.

Nick paused the simulation and zoomed on the blue mark of the impact of the disabler round. The round failed to crack the glass and fell to the carpet. Nick zoomed on the disabler round, highlighted in blue. "That is a tranquilizer dart, not a bullet. Nonlethal," he explained.

Everyone looked at Pam as if to comfort her.

Winthrop's return fire hit the table in front of Pam, each shot lined in blue where it shredded the oak.

Pam's next shot, a full second later, nailed Winthrop square in the chest. The fuzzy red wireframe keeled over and became solid in its position on the floor.

"How can you be so exact?" Fen asked.

"I integrated ballistics, forensics, and debris patterns," Nick said. "Then ran it a thousand times to flesh out the envelope of possibilities. This is the most likely scenario of what happened based on the physical evidence. It also happens to agree with Ms. Sullivan's statement."

Nick displayed a photo of Winthrop's driver license. "Second: the shooter. Joseph L. Winthrop, born in the Chicago Zones Confederation, lived in the Cornwallis Shares gated community. Twenty-six, widowed, was an accountant at a telecomm company. No children. No criminal record. But I do have his motive."

The Chairman glanced at Chief Reese. "A motive? Already?"

"That's why we have a bounty hunter on retainer," the Chief responded.

Nick felt his throat tighten. It always happened when he tried to talk too much and too fast. "His wife died in an accident last year, possibly due to an error in her treatment afterwards. After she died, Winthrop spent a lot of time online. Some people find support groups or new relationships on the nets after a tragedy like that. But Winthrop made an enemies list."

Nick displayed a message on the viewer:

To: healercircle.hospital@custserv.omegacare.bus

From: jwin@pubnode@cornsharecomm.mail

Subject: Killed my wife

My wife passed away in your facility a few months ago because we couldn't afford better care. You can claim it's not true but we saw it in the doctors' and nurses' eyes. We didn't have any insurance after the accident and your bill collectors took our savings. People have to keep sacrificing their lives to your obsession with money, overwhelming every decent value. It is genocide against those of us who are not your ideal consumer segments. You took her. For that, you will pay.

"The hospital site led him to the parent company site and then to the political contributions that company made to elected officials in his zone. He obsessed over these politicians for a while, but one went to jail, another died, and the third is terminally ill. Then he saw this."

Pictures flashed by of Burgess greeting those same officials at a regional conference five years ago.

"He latched on to Councilor Burgess," Nick said. "I don't know why. Maybe he had the highest profile. He was nearby. Winthrop could have had any number of reasons to fixate on him."

Chairman Ferguson nodded and said, "No Hamilton Councilor takes donations. We have publicly-funded campaigns. This is common knowledge."

Nick nodded. "Maybe not to outsiders. Ms. Sullivan was right that she didn't kill Winthrop. He probably poisoned himself before she zapped him; he had searched the net for how to poison oneself to avoid capture," Nick said. "The autopsy should confirm that."

"Accomplices?" asked Chief Reese.

"He searched for info on Burgess online by himself. He found Juan's history, address, education, family, political career. All the merc shops flat out refused to help him when he contacted them. He tried several bounty hunter outfits, but they all turned him down, including mine."

"Why didn't any of them warn us?" the Chairman asked, incredulous. "Why didn't they report this potential threat?"

Nick tried to inject some sympathy into his voice. "We maintain confidentiality. Like lawyers and clergy."

Reese cracked his knuckles, loudly. "Mr. Chairman, if they ratted on every cheating husband or thieving business partner, their industry would die."

"At least they didn't assist," Pam pointed out.

The Chairman patiently kept his eyes on Nick, sensing something. This guy must be an expert at reading people without smartshades or a Simon.

"Who did help him?" Chief Reese demanded, his voice low and threatening.

Nick paused to catch his breath. "This is complicated, so, um, please bear with me."

Reese actually took out his netpad and stylus and started to handwrite, his jaw flexing angrily with each stroke.

"Winthrop contacted a small firm two weeks ago. They refused to help him, which, knowing their low ethical standards personally, I took as a sign something was not right. The second sign was that they provided information instead."

"The name," Reese demanded, his stylus hovering over netpad.

"Michael Flail's outfit, the Flail Commandos. Bounty hunters in name only. Not much more than a bloodthirsty merc shop, in my opinion."

"You know him?"

"Yeah. I shot him two days ago."

Gasps ran around the table, except for Ferguson, who simply raised an eyebrow and waited. He knew there was more to this.

"Do bounty hunters typically shoot one another?" Pam asked.

"We were competing on a stringer job." To jail my own aunt, Nick thought. He was already having one hell of a week. But it was about to get much worse.

She looked away, disgusted.

"A 'stringer' job is when a number of clients string together a series of rewards for the same person. Attracts bounty hunters in droves. Like I said, it's complicated," Nick added.

The Chairman stayed on point. "How did this Flail help the shooter?"

"He provided a dossier on the Councilor, all publicly available material. Plus, he didn't charge for it. But bounty hunters always charge. Profit margins are almost non-existent and, well, Flail never forgets to charge. Here is what he sent in the first file."

"How do you know he did all of this?" Ferguson asked as Nick flipped through the material.

"Winthrop's account provider gives any bounty hunter full access to their customers' data. No questions asked."

Reese scowled as the pages of material flipped by. "It's just news pieces on Burgess, his website and his public disclosure documents." He looked up at Nick, puzzled.

"Winthrop asked for more," Nick said. "Flail's people highlighted when Councilor Burgess' security was weakest, when he was alone. Here's a feature piece on the Councilor titled 'The Midnight Council' that mentions his late night library meetings. Here is one about Council security after Councilor Starke's car was run off the highway six years ago."

Pam gasped. "Flail's people planned the hit for him."

"Exactly, but the problem is, Flail and his goons subcontract this work to bigger firms after they break it into smaller tasks. They pretend these jobs are for different clients to avoid raising the red flags that bigger firms, like I-4, would raise about this kind of thing."

Reese was sitting near Nick, so Nick saw him write "news", "library feature" and "subcontract" on his netpad. That last notation told Nick how his next nugget of info would play to this crowd.

"Who was this other firm?" the Chief asked.

Nick put his hands on the table and locked eyes with Chairman Ferguson sitting at the far end. He ignored the countdown clock, which was down to six hours. If he had just handed his aunt over, Flail's goons might not have answered Winthrop's pleas for assassination assistance. Juan would be alive right now. It really could be all his fault, in a way.

"My employer, I-4," Nick said. "I didn't know it at the time, or who the client was, but I was the one who provided the information that Winthrop wanted."

The room went nuts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Despite knowing him for over a decade, Lisa concluded only tonight that Daniel Sloan was no good at cursing. She had heard more competent swearing from kids in grade school. But unlike her schoolmates, Daniel had much more valid reasons right now to swear his ass off.

The live news coverage had grown shriller now that Councilor Burgess was confirmed dead. Lisa muted the audio when the news anchors began repeating themselves.

The comm vault filled with silence as Daniel's lame cursing petered out into frustrated mumbling.

Lisa and Daniel hadn't lost a single campaign since he had recruited her at Bucknell University over a decade ago. They had traveled all over the world, engaged unusual cultures, and killed their most prosperous metropolises.

Lisa was sure that their city-killing streak would end here in Hamilton.

"We have to go into 'Juan Burgess grieving mode' right away," Daniel said. "Not a bad word about him, not a syllable about our issues. Make sure our pundits know that. We keep our heads down and chant what everyone else chants until things return to normal."

Lisa said, "What will normal be? This city has never experienced an assassination before. It has almost no military and no history of civil unrest."

On a continent drunk on Local Control ideology, where crumbling national and state governments could not maintain the peace, Hamilton's idyllic experience was unusual. The city maintained good relationships with its neighbors and potential economic competitors, which made plotting against it much more difficult than, say, New York Jersey.

"Everyone will have to grope around until we find the new normal." Daniel blew an exasperated breath into his cupped hands. "We wanted Burgess disgraced, not martyred," he said. "This shitcans everything we've worked on. And the city," he said slowly, "will come after us. You shitting watch."

Lisa shook her head. "But this assassination doesn't have anything to do with us."

Daniel shook his head. "If only that mattered. They may crack down on any perceived disorder or unrest, any adversaries or problems. Our overt ops may bring them down on us and wreck the covert ones. How horribly ironic."

Lisa brought up the psych profiles of the City Council. "I doubt that will happen on Fen Ferguson's watch. He handles power like it's a ticking bomb."

Daniel swiped away the psych profiles and brought up the government social networks. He pointed at two nodes with a thick relationship between them. "See how close Fen was to Burgess? His death is intensely personal for Fen. He may lash out at all the city's problems, the refugees, us. And if he doesn't, Thrall, Starke, even our friend Norm, will try to force him."

Lisa didn't want to believe him. Fen's psych profile suggested that he wasn't the type to act in anger. But, she couldn't entirely discount her boss' take either.

Her viewer blinked a warning. The news was reporting that the city's Trade Representative was with Burgess when he was shot.

Fear flooded Lisa's body. Pam Sullivan was an offworlder, a Kagent. Lisa had been watching this woman closely. Supposedly, Pam was simply a negotiation expert, but Kagents made Lisa's skin itch, especially if they were nearby when she was trying to kill a city. If Lisa were ever to violate the Stabilizers' non-violence directive, it would be on an arrogant, self-absorbed Kagent like Sullivan.

She inhaled slowly, telling herself that not all Kagents were alike. A business negotiator was not the same as the other Kagents Lisa had known. Sullivan may not be there solely to fight the Stabilizers. She had not ventured outside of her portfolio, according to Councilor Norm Osprette. Osprette watched Sullivan closely and disliked that she wore offworlder clothes despite working for the city government.

"You're deep in thought," Daniel remarked.

She blinked and put off hating on Sullivan for a less emotionally-wrenching night. "Sorry. We need to remap the networks without Burgess. It changes the Council dynamics, it changes everything."

Daniel shook his head. "It's worse than that. The political frame for everything we were doing is completely gone now. Security issues will dominate. If this shooter turns out to have an agenda like ours, we're cooked to hell. Or, if someone points out that we benefit politically from Burgess' absence, which we will, that's almost as damning as killing him ourselves. God help us."

"It's like someone is framing us," Lisa noted angrily. "We have to be ready for them to probe us."

"How fast can you move this vault out of here?" Daniel asked, putting a hand on the thick walls.

"Two hours."

"What about just your comm equipment?"

Lisa swallowed. She was supposed to destroy the comm equipment if there was a serious chance of discovery or capture. But without that direct link to headquarters, well, that could seriously complicate her work. She'd much rather move it. "Five minutes."

He nodded. "We may have to abandon the entire op. We have to be ready for a raid." He looked around the vault. "You should take this down just to be safe."

"But—"

"Any time someone sees a vault they know something valuable is inside. You need to take it down."

"Daniel," she said. "You're overreacting." They couldn't give up on Hamilton, but she couldn't tell him why. "There could be an enormous opportunity here."

He scratched his head, looking confused. "How so?"

Lisa said, "We pretend Burgess was close to our positions, talk about striving for stability and peace again. We send people to whatever vigil is held, attend the funeral, the whole works. You spin this as a sign that the city needs to take stock. It's another symptom of the rat race life. Toxicity boiling over or something like that."

Daniel drummed a thumb on his thigh. "That could work, but only after the mourning is over. And depending on what they discover about this shooter."

"And you'll have to respond to accusations that we may have been behind the shooting, or at least benefitted," Lisa said.

Daniel pulled up the media map and shook his head. "Hamilton doesn't have anyone fringe enough to make accusations like that. We're not the Flashing 12s, we don't do violence. Everybody knows that."

She nodded. "I agree, but just be ready. It may be worth it to straw-man the accusation anyway, to prevent anyone from going there. We don't want to be tied to the shooter in any way."

Daniel scratched the back of his head furiously, a sign that he was nervous or uncomfortable. "Headquarters says hold off on protests until after the funeral. Duh. The Burgess funeral will be tomorrow. He was Jewish. Will the offworld infection burn itself out before we can take advantage of it?"

Lisa replied, "We should have two more weeks, according to the supplier. There will be a lot of fear with the outbreak and this assassination happening so close together. We'll get a bounce out of the virus one way or the other."

Daniel kept playing with the social network analysis. He zoomed in on Juan Burgess. Lisa expected him to remove Juan's node and see how the network reshuffled itself. Instead, he highlighted each node connected to Juan's.

He said, "Funny thing about funerals, they can change the deceased's network as much as his own removal. All of those people coming together can create new connections. I need to work that funeral to give us a leg up."

He cocked his head at the viewer. "He was an odd politician. He has..., er..., had only about a third of the connections his fellow Councilors do. And look at these connections to city managers, academics, a lot of people outside the city who couldn't vote for him."

"He's definitely not a meeter-greeter like you or Fen Ferguson," Lisa said. She stared hard at the connection between Burgess and the Trade Representative, the only known Kagent in the city government. The media had not said what the two of them were discussing before the shooting.

Daniel nodded. "What do we know about the outsiders he was connected to?"

Lisa checked for profiles on each one. Bounty hunters were expensive and the ones the Stabilizer Alliance had hired only profiled people close to each Councilor.

In Juan's case they had dug further to build up the bribery accusations, but that still left over half of his connections untouched. "Not a lot," she said. "Just what's publicly available."

"Who is this, a bounty hunter?" Daniel asked, highlighting a vaguely Hispanic man's photo ID.

"Nick Lincoln, he's on the city's retainer contract for investigative services." Lisa peered at the mentions of him on the public sites. There wasn't much. The Alliance's bounty hunters' report said that he was more of an analyst than a bounty hunter. She checked the Stabilizer darknet herself and found a match. Nick Lincoln grew up in a Community. Interesting.

"Look at the frequency of communication between these two. And the additional charges to the city for services rendered by this bounty hunter." Daniel sat back. "That's not a casual business connection."

"What did Burgess need a bounty hunter for anyway?" Lisa asked. "He had a reputation for being an iron wonk, not for personal vendettas."

"Maybe the bounty hunter played a role in his divorce?" Daniel asked.

Lisa shook her head. "You think every man who gets divorced is gay."

"I do not. Some of them cheat with another woman," Daniel said.

Lisa gave him the smallest smile she could muster. "According to Burgess' profile, his marriage lost a fight with his schedule, nothing more. He used this bounty hunter for city business, most likely."

"Spying on fellow Councilors?" Daniel asked.

Lisa looked at the Councilor's profile again. Juan Burgess never seemed to care much about his fellow Councilors' personal lives. He was all public policy, all the time. On the other hand, Burgess consulted the only Kagent in city government, and he worked closely with this Lincoln guy. That bothered her.

"What if he had this bounty hunter investigating you?" she asked. "You're the public face of our campaign."

Daniel hadn't considered that. "A bounty hunter wouldn't get far profiling me," he said. "My personal info is locked up in the Alliance darknets. What about you?"

Lisa shook her head nonchalantly. "They wouldn't even know who I am," she said. "And even if they did, my personal info is just as hidden as yours."

"Maybe Juan Burgess was investigating the entire Alliance," Daniel suggested. "Do you think he was smart enough to see us as a threat?"

Lisa shrugged. There was no way to tell. But someone with sufficient data could pose a threat to their campaign. She didn't doubt that the Kagents were sniffing around, but they didn't have the resources on Earth that bounty hunters did.

She made a note to watch both of those groups very carefully.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The police interrogation room had monochrome gray misery on every surface, lit by the cold glow of cheap white lights. Nick found himself swimming in air scented with sweat and piss.

When the police arrested him, they took his smartshades, his drones, and his weapons. They let him keep his two netpads, which were useless in a room that blocked all net signals. They hadn't charged him or put him in the system yet. Nick suspected that they didn't know what to do with him.

He had been here more than an hour without anyone checking on him; they either forgot about him or were letting him sweat. Normally he wouldn't worry, but indefinite detention seemed to be a possibility with him being a suspected accomplice to Hamilton's first assassination.

He grieved for Juan and his family. He felt sorry for himself, picturing his lunar flight taking off without him. He had to get out of here, with Aunt Kelly's netpad, in the next four hours to make that flight. But the arraignment probably wouldn't be scheduled until sometime after dawn tomorrow.

There was an entire market niche in the bounty hunter industry for the data-nipping scut jobs that Flail used to screw him. Term paper research, finding a lost friend, market research on sportswear retailing in the greater Santa Fe zones, or which band sang that recent Russian mobpunk song about burning pipelines and Black Sea beauties. Shit like that. Outsourcing routine queries increased industry efficiency. A middle-aged Simon could handle most of them by itself.

I-4 didn't bother listing the requesting firm or the client. These jobs were so meaningless that most were done for free. What wasn't billable wasn't tracked. I-4 did flag suspicious requests — poison gas recipes and creepy stalking surveillance — to prevent them from slipping through. No one wanted to be a co-conspirator to a nutjob — at least not without charging the appropriate premium.

Cross had taken care of the Burgess request and the rest of the scut work with little effort. She had asked if he wanted to review them, but he had declined. But he would have signed off on them just the same if he had reviewed them.

The requests about Juan had been for publicly available media coverage, with an emphasis on his personal life, personality, recent comings and goings. Could have been a kid's school project, a girl crushing on him, or a reporter looking for feature pieces to steal angles and phrases from. Cross had noted that I-4 received about thirty of these types of inquiries per quarter for each major politician in the Midwest. It required more collating from the amoeba nets than data mining on the BHN.

And now, Nick was stuck holding a big steaming bag of shit for not noticing that somehow these innocuous requests signaled danger for Juan. If he had looked at those scut jobs, maybe he would have figured it out. That was his special talent: connecting the dots before most other people even saw that there were dots.

No, no, no. There had been too many jobs for either him or Cross to scrutinize each for its moral implications. Flail knew how to disguise them too. And it would have cost Nick his job if he had refused to do them. He was just guilting himself and assuming some lost opportunity to save Juan that probably never existed.

Then the thick steel door opened with a hiss.

Chief Reese entered with two uniforms and the one person, of all people in the world, who Nick didn't want to see: Rob the Slob. Nick's boss must have hustled his ass out of bed and exchanged his albuterol mask for his best suit. But pant leg creases and Rob did not go together. His ample gut stretched the hell out of his jacket.

Nick should have felt like the guilty kid brought in to the principal's office to find his unhappy parents sitting there. Instead, he was positively joyous for some reason he didn't understand.

Chief Reese looked like he had swallowed a diseased pigeon. "We're not pressing charges. Your Simon verified that you had no way of knowing what these requests amounted to. And given the effect that Juan's death will have on your work and his positive reports about you, you would have had every reason to stop Winthrop if you knew about it. You're free to go, but you understand why we can't let you work on this investigation any more. You also cannot talk to the media, obviously."

"Thank you, Chief," Rob said before Nick could say anything. "I-4 will have a replacement out here tomorrow morning."

The Chief turned to Rob. "I thought someone had already told you. We won't need I-4's services any longer either. We're canceling the contract."

Rob did a double-take so violent Nick nearly smiled. "N-no sir..., no one... no one told me," Rob spluttered. "Why?"

"We have concerns about your business practices." The Chief turned to leave the room.

"Chief," Nick said, folding his hands on the gray metal table, "before you go, I can wrap up the rest of this case for you. Right here, right now."

Reese looked puzzled and stretched his back with a grimace. He just wanted away from these bounty hunters. "How's that?"

"You wanted the accomplice who knowingly aided Winthrop in planning the assassination. He's right there," Nick nodded at Rob.

Rob barked his way through a coughing jag that sounded like he had taken a strong whiff of chlorine gas. He began wagging his finger at Nick before the fit tapered off. "You're crazy. And fucking fired, by the way."

Nick's mouth was a grim line. "You set me up."

"You're a goddamn liability. Your research fetish and piss poor marksmanship were bad enough. But you are out of your mind."

"Profitable research fetish, ass clown," Nick said. He said to the Chief, "He didn't deny it, did he?"

Rob blanched. "What the hell? You've compromised this investigation, contributed to the death of our client and lost our contract with the city. You may not go to jail, but you are damn well finished in the industry."

Nick ignored him because the Chief hadn't left. "You knew that I had the Hamilton account; you hate the analytical work I did for Juan in spite of the fact that it was more profitable than gunning people down. You assigned me those data nip jobs and told me I would be fired if I refused them—"

"That doesn't mean—"

"You buried those requests among thousands of others and dumped them all on me with no time to review them. It's very neat: you get rid of Juan's work and me all at the same time, while making a killing off of the follow-up work for the city. But to do that, you had to at least suspect that these requests would lead to Juan being harmed."

Rob looked at the Chief. "This is a bunch of paranoid, sour-grapes bullshit."

"Chief, when you called I-4 to investigate Juan's shooting, did you request me by name?"

The Chief looked surprised. "No. I didn't know who you were."

"Funny, Rob here told me the city requested me by name."

"You little shit. You want me to get nasty?" Rob's double chin quivered angrily. "I can bury you in severance expenses. Office space, net fees, replacing all those damn drones you keep losing. Plus the cost of your Simon."

Nick crooked a grin. "The Simon and the drones are mine. By the way, you still haven't denied it."

Rob took a breath and lowered his voice. "Your access to the BHN is gone. You're an amoeba again, Lincoln." He started hacking again, leaning against the table.

Nick turned to the Chief, who had been taking notes. "It's at least worth having your new bounty hunter contractor investigate. I'd recommend Harbingers or SRQ."

"I will." The Chief nodded at the camera in the ceiling, then turned to Rob. "Have a seat right here."

Rob kept staring hard at Nick and then jerked his head toward the Chief. "What?"

Nick stood and offered his chair. "Mine's nice and warm."

He wished he could stick around to watch the theatrics, but he had a flight to catch. He left his former boss in the interrogation room, hacking away as the uniforms read him his rights.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The first leg of Nick's flight to the Moon was an orbital shot from Hamilton's liftport. He still had a slim chance to catch it, if he retrieved his weapons and cleared his name quickly.

But the grizzled uniform piled on a stool at the evidence window looked like he hadn't seen daylight, a shower, or any physical activity in more than a decade. He turned over Nick's smartshades, netpads, and drones in the slowest possible manner.

"I also have three weapons on my property list," Nick said.

"We release weapons only during day shift," the uniform replied.

"Chief Reese personally assured me that I could get them back now. I'm leaving town early this morning," Nick said.

The cop regarded him with a look of enthusiasm. He rarely got to argue with anyone down here on the night shift and Nick had just volunteered. "The reason I lost the day shift was because I gave someone their firearm and they killed someone before my shift ended. I learned my lesson. You need to talk to Jeannie."

Nick had less than two hours before his flight left. And he still had to verify that his arrest was cleared or he wouldn't be allowed to board the flight. He needed those weapons with Rob, Flail and who knew who else wanting him dead. But it was either making this launch or having his weapons. And liftport security would be quicker without them.

Nick gave up and ran to the information desk, where a Simon clerk verified that Nick's arrest record had been cleared. He took a taxi to the liftport and made it with an hour before launch.

According to the Simon running the liftport ticket kiosk, the police had prohibited Nick from boarding any flight out of Hamilton because of his arrest. Some database had miscommunicated with another in the police department.

Nick sighed and opted for a human ticket rep to fix this. After ninety agonizing seconds a puffy-faced young man named Ivan came on line to help him.

Ivan repeated what the kiosk Simon had already told him.

"Someone made a mistake," Nick said, keeping his tone bemused rather than angry. According to the ticket agent customer service manual that Cross displayed on his smartshades, Ivan had been trained to stop listening if Nick became belligerent. Ivan promised to work on this and blanked his end of the video linkup.

The close timing of his arrest being entered and removed from the system had to be the cause. Especially on a night like this for the police department.

Despite the cosmic justice he knew he deserved, the last thing Nick needed right now was to be the victim of a data entry error. To make himself feel better he imagined that Rob was now in the arrest system as well.

Four security guards appeared behind him, alerted by his flight ban. They stood in a semi-circle around him, hands on their holsters.

"Cross can you get Serena Green? She owes me," Nick said as he turned to face the guards.

"Nick? I only pay back favors during daylight hours," Serena said in his earpiece.

"Serena, I'm putting you on speaker so these nice liftport security guards can hear you," Nick said, and quickly explained the situation.

"Mmmph. Okay," Serena replied and gave them her department ID number. "I'm logging in from home right now. Hold on."

Nick stared at the guards and they stared back at him. One of them was becoming anxious.

"Serena, you still there?"

"Yes. Someone entered your arrest five times, and it was deleted four times in between. Hang on while I contact the officer who keeps re-entering it."

A minute stretched out as Nick and the liftport security guards eyed one another.

"Mr. Lincoln," the lead security guard said, "let's find a quiet place where you can get this all sorted out."

Sweat trickled down Nick's back. If he stepped away from this kiosk, he'd never make his flight. He had one more chance before the guards dragged him away. "I think it'll be sorted out soon, right Serena?"

There was no response. She must be talking to whoever.

The guard motioned for Nick to come with them. Nick began walking slowly and the guards formed up, two behind and two in front of him. He wondered if his aunt's netpad would hurt him when it self-destructed in his pocket.

"Nick," Serena said over his netpad, "you're clear. Have your ticket kiosk helper person try it again."

Nick stopped and looked at the guards. They nodded and he returned to the kiosk, never so happy to see Ivan.

Ivan flipped off the mute switch but kept pecking away at his viewer. Nick gave the guards a nervous smile. Finally, Ivan replied, "Yes. The hold has been lifted."

"Serena, I'm good. Thanks so much. We're even."

"Goodnight," she said and clicked off.

The guards melted away. Nick had half an hour before boarding. Without any firearms, he breezed through security and reached the gate with ten minutes to spare.

He sat down, staring outside at the shuttle in the pre-dawn twilight. He tried to stop his head from spinning over everything that happened in the last day. The important thing was that it was all behind him. He was about to make a quick trip offworld that his family would never know about.

Then his netpad rang.

Cross texted, [It's your father.]
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

M,

I'll be okay, thanks for asking. I've thrown up three times and don't feel tired yet, which is why I'm writing this now. Fen called me an hour ago to tell me that the assassin killed himself with some kind of suicide capsule; he didn't want the assassin's death on my conscience. Yes, he is that kind of considerate. He told me to take tomorrow off. Couldn't ask for a better boss, everyone says down here. Rumor has it that Regina Thrall chewed out her staff on security issues when news came out about the attack.

I'm starting to ramble. Sorry. I've been a bit scattered tonight, watering the same plant twice, that kind of thing. Oh, I wasn't joking about the press requests. They started coming in a few hours ago for interviews, feature pieces, eyewitness docudramas, soundbites. There will be no way for me to stay nameless and faceless like we planned. I hope this doesn't compromise my work for you or my work for Ferguson.

You asked about Nick Lincoln's status: he was freed from custody an hour ago and the Chief says he was headed for the liftport or airport when he left. No word on where he was going. The city will bring in a new bounty hunter to validate everything he did tonight, naturally.

Will the city ever trust him again? Probably. He may play at being a bounty hunter, but he isn't like Borbola. There's no bloodthirstiness there. He was intense talking about the crime scene reconstruction but somber when talking about a gunfight with a rival of his.

He apparently knew Juan Burgess, so it was a tough situation for him. It was a tough night to screw up, too. Apparently he had done good work for Counselor Burgess and Juan's word was golden even before tonight. Nick was exonerated pretty quickly, but then his company fired him, so he is at loose ends now. The Chief told Fen that he thought Nick didn't look as upset about leaving the bounty hunter ranks as he figured. Oh, and apparently he implicated his bounty hunter boss in the assassination while sitting in a holding cell with no net access. The Chief is still shaking his head about that one.

Do I think he is the one you want? On the technical points, I don't know enough to say; he clearly has some kind of talent. But you asked for my gut reaction. It is positive: he is decent and honest. He is clearly looking for something better than bounty hunting, but I don't know if he knows what it is or how to get it.

Do you have any other prospects besides him? After today, I don't even want to think about how much longer this city may have left. I can tell that Fen is fighting to keep his head above water with everything coming apart at once.

I finally feel a bit sleepy. The tea you suggested may be working.

—Pam
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Someone must have died, Nick thought. Pop hadn't called him since he moved to Chicago. Nick always had to call him. "Pop, what are you doing up at this hour?"

Over the background hiss of road noise his father said, "Taking ambient outdoor sound samples of new listings. It's all the rage now. Buyers want to hear how highways, animals, and the neighbors sound at night and early in the morning." His father was a real estate agent. When Nick was a kid, afternoon errands had often turned into trolling for open houses and stopping to photograph commercial real estate.

His father said simply, "You were arrested and fired." It was a recitation of fact, as if he was working out how to tell Nick's mother, Anna.

His father was the most poised and balanced person Nick knew, a cool-headed dealmaker who people begged to join their civic organizations. He should have been a successful corporate exec. He had the business guile, the high-wattage grin, and the low key manner that drew people to him.

But he and Nick's mother had joined the Stabilized Community in Wertzville, close to family in Harrisburg, after they married. They abided by the Stabilizers' family-centered lifestyle rules: limited hours on day shifts, no business trips or golf junkets in the Caymans. His father usually ran interference for Nick with his mother, but he had become icy, too, ever since Nick moved to Chicago.

Nick sighed. "My boss contacted you, is that it?"

"Yeah," his father cleared his throat. "He said you were arrested." The road noise died away. Pop had stopped the car and his face appeared on the smartshades, lit up by the dashboard and a dawn that hadn't reached Hamilton yet.

So this was a face-to-face then. Nick took off his smartshades and held up his netpad. People considered unemployment worse than an infectious disease these days. Finding a job on population-crashed Earth was very difficult unless you lived in one of the jet-set cities like Hamilton or Singapore. Especially if you were frozen out of your industry, as Nick assumed Rob had made sure to do to him.

"He framed me as an accomplice to the assassination here in Hamilton. And let my best client get murdered," Nick said. "Now he's the one sitting in jail. But I'm still fired."

His father shook his head. "You're lucky you're not in jail. Come home, Nicholas. There's nothing to keep you away now."

Nick stared out the window. The sky had brightened, but it was too early for dawn. "I can't do that."

"It will soften the blow. Otherwise, it will be a long time before your Ma will even let you in the house. I'm trying to help you out here."

But his father didn't mean stopping by for a visit. He meant Nick packing up his life in Chicago and shipping it to Wertzville permanently. Nick would never do that. He stated flatly, "This isn't a good time."

"Flight 7460 to Odyssey Hab has been changed to Pad 14," boomed an announcement in the terminal.

Nick winced, forgetting for a second that his father could see his face.

"An offworld trip?" his father asked, as if Nick just announced nonchalantly that he was in New York Jersey on a sex tourism jaunt and the ass was mighty fine. His father shook his head. "Jesus, Nick. We can't forgive that."

The sun peeked between the immense trees that surrounded the liftport. In the dawn's fiery-orange glow, Nick could see technicians finishing their work on the single-stage shuttle that would shoot him off Earth.

He was so close he could taste it. After everything that happened this week, he wouldn't give up now. None of this would be a problem if his parents didn't turn it into one. It was their stupid Stabilizer ideology that required all family members to live close by and everyone to work part-time. It was a regimen that brooked no deviations, no possibilities other than an extremely cloistered, lesser life, that people like Nick could never live.

He ground his teeth to keep the anger gurgling under his tongue from bursting forth. He retorted, "Are you going to disown me, like Ma did with her own sister, Kelly?"

His father sucked in a sharp breath between his teeth. That was his way of signaling that Nick had crossed a line. Or he just didn't want to discuss it.

Nick continued though, "Yes, I know what happened. It's been over twenty years now, and Aunt Kelly has a family and a life offworld. And I never even knew she existed." That she was sitting in jail now because Nick was afraid of losing the job he had now lost, just to have a shot at reconciling with his parents, only made him angrier. "Ma has never met her nephews and nieces. It's unconscionable. These narrow-minded Stabilizer mandates only drive families apart and force these horrible decisions. They do more damage than physical distance."

"Family has never mattered to you," his father snapped. "Even when you're unemployed, your career matters more to you. You disgust me."

A lump formed in Nick's throat. "You and Ma stuck your Stabilized heads in the damn ground and put that above family. Aunt Kelly never abandoned anyone, did she? It was the other way around."

His father looked away. "Kelly left on her own. You don't know anything."

"Ma issues ultimatums about how to live my life if I don't want to lose you guys. But I'm not appeasing her anymore. You two can choose your Stabilized life over me, fine. This either/or choice exists only in your heads. I'm done with it, finished. Now, I have to go, Pop. I hope you call me sometime when you decide I am worth more than your asinine ideals."

The line went dead.

"Boarding for Flight 7460," the flight attendant announced over the PA.

Nick stood up, wiped away the tears, and walked to the gate.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

When her netpad rang, Lisa was sitting in her secure communications room, reviewing speeches made at the Burgess funeral. She needed new public relations angles based on the media's adoring tone and statements by the city's major players. They were all making Burgess into a martyr for all that was good and decent.

The call was encrypted and from Daniel. "A friendly pundit wants to file her weekly column and asked for a reaction. She wanted our take on recent events, and it got me thinking about next steps. What do you think?"

Lisa kept scanning footage while she answered. "I figure we hold off for two or three more days. I'll have a push-poll done by the end of the week that will show over sixty percent of Hamilton residents worry the city can't protect them. The poll will get virtually free coverage on Scoop."

She continued, "We'll have one of our fringe front groups release a nasty ad: 'The shooter was a loner, twisted and crapped on by an adrenaline-buzzed world, who finally lashed out. If the city can't protect its own, how can they protect us from offworld viruses?' The media has already portrayed the shooter as a ten-foot-tall demon. The ad will take advantage of it. What do you think?"

"Scoop and Byte will give it free air time," Daniel said. "The more respectable news sites like Nusion, No Comment, and Broadsheet may air it to report on the 'controversy.' The pundits and talkers will go crazy with it. We can probably expect Walt Morgan to play it for a week. If asked for a reaction, I'll denounce."

Lisa replied, "As long as we have no connection to those statements. We can't be seen to score points off the assassination in any way, publicly. Have the fringe astroturf imply that Burgess had it coming, and we can denounce that, too."

Daniel grunted. "Our undermine-Burgess strategy is shot; all we can do now is contain the damage. We'll have to let our pundits battle it out with the others. Do we have a statement on Juan Burgess for the discussion though?"

Lisa nodded. "'We regret that Burgess wasn't better protected and two lives were lost. A city councilor shot, in public, and not a single guard nearby.' Toss a cupcake on security issues to Osprette, Thrall, or even Starke."

Daniel laughed. "Hopefully they won't stomp on us in return. 'And what kind of person keeps libraries open in the dead of night anyway?' We can use our old saw: you can tell how healthy a community is by how early the stores close. Working stiffs will be reminded that they were asleep in bed when this all went down. Make a city that never sleeps sound like a bad thing. Implies Burgess was a bit odd, too. But it has to be subtle," he warned.

"It is. It focuses on the library, which is in Athens Tower. Lots of cutting-edge firms working 24/7 there, an innovation hub. Our guys will gently hint that the 24/7 culture enabled this. Not responsible for, but enabled."

"Innovation hub," Daniel uttered it as if it were the word 'tumor'. And in a way, Athens Tower was a tumor, malignant to a tranquil lifestyle. It sucked up all the jobs and made the offworld insanity harder to avoid. "Maybe we should focus on innovation hubs instead of liftports on the next go around."

Lisa replied, "You mean after you retire, right?" Any Stabilizer operatives with families, who were away from home more than thirty hours a week, were forced to shorten their careers considerably. Daniel had been in the field for over twenty years and had yet to eat Thanksgiving at home even once. After this campaign, he was finished despite being under fifty years old. At most he might get a telework job consulting for the Alliance.

He grumbled. "Yes, yes. After I retire. What if someone tries to tie the shooter to us? Issue an outraged denial and reiterate the organization's commitment to peaceful political change?"

"No, that won't be enough," Lisa said. "We say that Winthrop was our real enemy: that we were eager to work with Burgess, he understood our concerns, wanted to help us. No one can argue with that now. We adamantly refute the notion that we might benefit from this. If I were paranoid I'd suspect that someone killed him just to sabotage us. Hey, that's good, you ought to say that."

"Isn't that a bit much?"

Lisa smiled. "Yes. But it will make you sound more sincere."

Daniel sighed. "Okay. That should widen the split between Thrall and Ferguson. If I put that bee in Thrall's ear, she'll squeeze it for all it's worth. Could be her path to the Council Chair."

Lisa shrugged. "So long as she doesn't get it till after the crash and we're long gone, that's fine with me."

When Daniel hung up, Lisa hummed a childhood song to herself as she composed the talking points for the pundits, reporters, and news sites they had co-opted, schmoozed, or simply bribed. The song was a little ditty about how important it was to enjoy your work and she was beginning to enjoy hers again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Nick's flight connected at an orbital hab, where he vomited his troubles away in micro gravity while boarding a fast, kettle-shaped shuttle that chucked him to the Moon in half a day. He touched down at the lunar city of Gateway six hours shy of his meeting with Christian Roberts.

Gateway's motto, 'Venice of the Stars,' was plastered on ads on the tram from the liftport, across the major entranceways to the city, and projected on city streets. The city reminded Nick more of Old Vegas than a new Venice, if Old Vegas were a domed, organized crime-themed amusement park. It was over-lit and flooded with multiple dance beats under the clang of tokens hitting metal trays in game machines. It was cheesy and artificial; a parody of a parody.

Rather than hide, the criminal organizations that shared responsibility for running the city used their presence as a marketing shtick. The Five Families: the Fat Ninjas, the Dons, the Hombres de Noche, the cockney-accented Hooligans, and the Gangbangers each rotated management of different areas and city functions. Mafia matrix management at its finest. There were staged 'gang wars' that erupted on the grimy streets three times a day, complete with stunts and harmless hostage-taking.

Today the Fat Ninjas ran customs. Gangbangers, in their sloppy, urban getups had security duty inside the casinos. The Dons were on paramedic duty and the Hombres were safeguarding the casino money carts. The bald-headed Hooligans strutted through the streets on patrol.

"Da fuck you lookin' at me for, mate?" an odorous Hooligan said when Nick glanced his way.

Nick shook his head and hurried past in an amateur lunar shuffle. Bounty hunters generally had free range up here because they did a lot of work for the Families and the Moon was neutral ground between Earth and offworld. But Nick didn't want them demanding his bounty hunter credentials.

The tourists filling the streets hailed from Earth and every offworld settlement. Half the people he saw looked like retirees from age-qualified complexes scattered around the rim of Gateway's crater. They had the money to escape Earth's oppressive gravity in their weakening years and travel with a tour guide. Why retirees consistently flocked to desolate hellholes near a party zone was a centuries-old mystery, but at least they weren't stuck in Stabilized communities like Wertzville. Most of the rest were college-aged offworlders, slumming on the Sin Satellite.

Nick entered the Too Screwed By You casino fifteen minutes early. Of all the casino come-ons, this was the cutest: it advertised itself as going broke because too many people won there. Shabby carpeting and poorly-dressed staff contrasted with pictures of big winners hung askew on every wall. Jackpot sirens whooped from various corners, temporarily drowning out audio testimonials from past winners. All the cards are marked: you can't lose!

Despite the advertising, Too Screwed was the standard cavern of obnoxious lights and the tang of complimentary stay-awake gels. The first floor's transparent ceiling reflected the flashing "winner" signs over several machines underneath. But all Nick saw above and around him was the ebbing tide of anxious and unhappy survivors from the previous night's financial slaughter.

He crossed the gaming floor to the Eagle Landing Bar to size things up. He was nervous about this meet, and it wasn't just because he wanted to keep his aunt's netpad. Maybe it was because he was offworld for the first time. The weak gravity made him slightly puffy-faced and ill. He felt out of his element.

The bar was dark, creating a crowded intimacy at the tables. There were two entrances, one from the casino, and one from the street outside. A different type of music pumped into each of the half dozen sections. Soundproof alcoves ran around the perimeter for discreet conversations.

Nick took an alcove in the light jazz section. It had a light, minty-sour smell of gels mixed with the heavy musk of fried food. Fresh fruit was probably not on the breakfast menu.

A minute later a waitress bounced to the table in a tattered black showgirl outfit.

"Hiya. What can I get ya?" She handed him a menu pad.

He looked at it and frowned. "Why is water so much?"

"I know, I know. The only thing we produce locally and it's still expensive. You should see my water bill. Ha ha. They've got to fly it in still, they say, which makes no sense to me. But that's the price. You want something else?"

Crap. But he considered his scratchy tongue. "Just water. I'm meeting someone, so I'd like some privacy..."

"Sure, just remember that on the tip, hmmm?"

He nodded and settled back in his seat to wait. He had a clear view of the street entrance and anyone approaching his table would have to come straight on to threaten him from a distance. He was ready for Roberts. The waitress returned with the water and left him alone.

The meeting time came and went. Nick checked the message and a map of Gateway to make sure he was in the right place. He gulped the water and massaged his sore sinuses. He would never access the statistics on his aunt's netpad if Roberts had bolted early.

The waitress returned five minutes later bearing a netpad with a message for him. Her bouncy cheerfulness had been replaced with a sympathetic look. She probably thought a date had stood him up. Must happen a lot what with the highly-advertised desperation in this place.

The netpad displayed a still image of Christian Roberts and a short text message. [Nick, I can't meet with you. The ones who put you on to Kelly are after me, too. I leave you in the safest of hands though.]

What the hell did that mean? The casino? The waitress? He looked back up and saw that she was staring straight ahead, her eyes round with terror. It suddenly occurred to him that these privacy alcoves also greatly limited his field of view.

He forcibly calmed himself, trying not to signal that he had realized anything was amiss. He activated his drones to get a better look outside the alcove.

In the next moment, two things happened that he never expected.

An error message appeared on his smartshades. He had never seen an error message for all of his drones at once.

Then the notorious bounty hunter Eldred Borbola stepped in front of the waitress.
CHAPTER THIRTY

"Shit..."

Borbola spoke softly, "All your systems are disabled so don't bother trying anything." His voice was deep, cold, and lifeless.

The waitress backed up a step and made herself scarce.

Something brushed the back of Nick's neck, sending chills down his spine.

"That's a taste of the juice you get if you misbehave."

Nick didn't see Borbola's drone on visual or infrared. He lifted his hands slowly.

Borbola shook his head and slid into the booth. "You must be getting stupid. You should've had a drone perimeter up when you walked in. Mine's up now even though I have nothing to fear here." He gestured to the empty air with both hands and gave Nick a mischievous grin. His drone must be one of those pricey stealth models, hovering right above his head.

"Give me your smartshades, your earpiece, and your netpad," Borbola said quietly. Nick's heart froze at the thought of losing his aunt's netpad but Borbola frowned. "Keep your aunt's. You left yourself wide open to getting probed over that, you know. Supposed to be a ruthless bounty hunter, all iron, doing the bidding of whoever has the glassbacks."

When Nick didn't say anything, Borbola drank Nick's water and continued. "I'm not being tough on you for shits and grins. I want you to realize you aren't meant to be a bounty hunter."

"I'm not." Nick handed over the equipment, then sat there like a dumb, blind amoeba.

Borbola smiled wryly. "Sure, sure. You want to be a Kagent, huh? You think Kagents get scammed because of a guilty conscience? You think the Kagents want a gullible idiot on their team?"

Okay, Borbola set him up and somehow knew about his aunt coming to recruit him. But why drag Nick all the way up here just to set him up? Why not just grab him back on Earth?

"Pay up, we're leaving."

Nick paid and Borbola escorted him across the noisy casino floor to the elevators. "Flail's put a lethal contract on you. Quiet, off the nets. No, I'm not taking him up on it. Good thing about being a target is you can drive up your own price. Bad thing is you can never collect. But it's a great time for you to be kidnapped offworld. I'm doing you a favor."

"Then who hired you?" Nick asked petulantly.

Borbola just smiled at Nick and prompted him into the elevator with some excited gamblers who had hit it big. Borbola and Nick stayed quiet and exited on the 28th floor.

Borbola led him to a room at the end of the hall. His fingers danced across the security pad and the door unlocked. He shoved Nick inside, followed him in, and locked the door behind him.

The tiny room was like an oversized closet with a bed, table, chair, and a viewer opposite the bed. The curtain across the bathroom cubicle was a giant obnoxious sign warning occupants that water usage was charged by the liter. The window provided a stunning view of the lunar surface. The Too Screwed's hotel was one of the towers ascending above the city roof that Nick had seen when he flew in.

Nick still didn't see any of Borbola's drones. Maybe the lower gravity had left him light-headed and prone to missing details.

Borbola cracked a cocky grin, his gun aimed at Nick's crotch. "The Kagents paid me to grab you. They're pissed that you turned in your aunt and helped killed Burgess, albeit accidentally. But they're so desperate, they think they need you.

"Take it from me, they're no different than I-4 management. They'll exploit you, grind you down, and spit you out after you sacrifice for them. And for what? So they can interfere with Earth and make things worse, just like how your bumbling got Burgess shot."

Borbola shook his head. "I can't let them do that. It's over your idiot head, but believe me when I say what I'm doing here is for the good of planet Earth. Too bad you're stuck in the middle and it has to come to this."

Nick's heart hammered away as he waited for Borbola's gun to fire. He looked for any way to escape, knock the gun away or find cover. But it was point blank range and Nick had no options.

Borbola didn't pull the trigger. Instead, Nick felt a sting on his neck. A second later his legs buckled. Borbola's words swirled around his ears like an audio typhoon. He still hadn't seen a single one of Borbola's drones.

The carpeted floor grabbed his knees, then his shoulder, and finally his head, right before his world went dark.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Hammerfuck.

Bridge Radisson seethed as he waited in line at Gateway customs. While some people lost control when they grew furious, he grew even more in control of himself. He turned cold and silent and he hated it.

The source of his current anger was one Eldred Borbola, an all-around pain in the ass. He had contacted Bridge yesterday, telling him he could find Nick Lincoln in a Too Screwed hotel room on Gateway. On Earth's moon. Bridge had been in Chicago searching for Nick, time was already too short, and Borbola had deliberately slowed him down.

Nick had turned down every offer the Kagents had made him. Each time he supplied a vague, half-hearted excuse for the rejection. With their other Earth recruits, like Borbola, fizzling or failing, they thought they would have a better chance to recruit Nick with a personal pitch by his aunt.

But then Nick jailed her. And with Pam nearly killed in a public library and Hamilton reeling toward a crashpoint, he didn't have time for Borbola's games.

Bridge had asked any Kagents near Nick to contact him in person while Bridge finished up his assignment in New York Jersey. Nick wouldn't jail everyone who offered him his dream job, would he? But somehow Borbola had found out and lured Nick offworld. Knowing Borbola, this hotel room would be the first stop on a time-consuming wild goose chase.

He arrived at Gateway customs just as the Hooligans took over for the Fat Ninjas. A Hooligan sized him up as he handed over his Kagent credentials. The Families running Gateway didn't hassle Tessans like him because they brought the money to this scrubby dive of a city.

"You carrying, guv?"

Bridge opened up his gold cloak and tapped the stunstick hanging on his belt. The Hooligan allowed a thin grin to crease his ruddy face. "You watch where you stick that, right?" He waved him through.

Bridge did the best he could to walk quickly across town to the Too Screwed. People saw him coming and made a hole as he strode through the casino and boarded an elevator. The bright gold cloak had its uses.

He exited on 28, walked to the door at the end of the hallway, and punched in the code Borbola sent him. He launched thirty drones to record whatever evidence he would need of Borbola's treachery, exhaled slowly to dissipate his annoyance, and opened the door.

Nick's body was lying motionless on the bed. Hammerfuck.

The viewer came to life. "Bridge! About time! How's business? Meredith doing well?"

It had been a decade since he had seen his former student, when Borbola quit training and returned to bounty hunting on Earth. Borbola was a nasty and effective bounty hunter, but a mediocre and reluctant Kagent. The man had a destructive spark in him that a Kagent just couldn't harbor. And he was a first class asshole.

Ten years down the road, the lines in Borbola's face ran a bit deeper, but his eyes twinkled with the same old bullshit. He was wearing top of the line offworld gear, confirming rumors Bridge heard that Borbola had done well as an independent bounty hunter. It looked like he was sitting in the cockpit of his ship, the Grey Jester, probably still here in Gateway.

"There's your savior," Borbola said. "Don't drag your feet crediting my account, old man."

"What did you do to him?" Bridge asked, checking for a pulse. He couldn't find one, but Nick's head was too warm to be dead. He dropped Nick's wrist and felt around his neck. Panic blossomed in his gut.

Borbola grinned. "I remember how much fun it was when you trained me. How could I let others walk into that unaware?"

"Asshole." Ah, there, a steady pulse. Nick was running a fever under Borbola's knockout sauce. Wonderful.

Borbola smiled. "Hey, he's a choice investment. A lot of people on Earth are pissed at him. Not just bounty hunters that he shot or turned in; I mean real players."

Bridge turned to Borbola. "And on top of that news, you've screwed us over badly here as well." Despite their disagreements, Borbola had never actively thwarted the Kagents before like this. Or maybe, Bridge thought, we just never realized that he had.

Borbola always had three or four purposes behind each of his moves. Bridge didn't dwell on what the other goals may be at the moment: drawing Nick and Bridge away from Hamilton right now was bad enough. Bridge was sure he would discover Borbola's ulterior motives sinking their teeth into his ass in due time.

Borbola said, "I should tell you how I tricked him up to Gateway. It was brilliant."

Bridge ran a hand through his beard, trying to figure out what was bothering him about Nick's condition. "No."

"It's critical." Borbola told him about the job on Kelly and how she entrusted her netpad to Nick. "He's a gullible puppy dog. Big weak spot in a recruit, if you ask me."

Bridge gave him a deadly glare and the bounty hunter laughed until he coughed.

"How long will he be out?" Bridge asked, trying to figure out how to get Nick back to Earth in this condition. He'd have to wake him up and dump him on a shuttle bound for Hamilton. Try to figure out what this fever was on the way down.

"Probably another hour or two. But he doesn't look good. Maybe you aren't going anywhere for a while." Borbola pressed a button on his console.

A low klaxon howled inside the hotel room and the lock cycled loudly on the door. A soothing voice began murmuring about bio-chemical contamination procedures.

Borbola smiled. "Looks like you may be there a while. Take it easy, Bridge," he said and hung up.

Hammerfuck.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Years ago, Lisa remembered Daniel teaching her that amateur terrorists study a street map to determine where to plant a bomb, but professionals study a relationship map to determine who to twist to destroy the city from the inside.

In the prep for the Hamilton op, Lisa hired bounty hunters to map the city's social networks by analyzing the contacts and call logs of everyone in the city's upper crust: politicians, business leaders, celebrities, and socialites. The local Stabilizers identified fifty-eight strong relationships, sixteen illicit affairs, two hundred eighty-three weak acquaintances, as well as twenty-four social butterflies and seventeen trusted nodes in the city's spiderwebs of social networks.

Riley Harris was a central nexus between the entertainment, business, and political circles of Nelsa Park, the upscale district represented by Regina Thrall. Riley loved to play matchmaker, whether it was a match made for business, politics, romance, or simply friendship.

After hearing an earful of Daniel's platitudes about security and stability at her weekly dinner party two months ago, Riley began lobbying both Daniel and Regina Thrall to meet.

Daniel had reluctantly agreed — right before the Burgess assassination.

Lisa urged him to keep the meeting and tagged along. She clutched a stack of netpads, disguised as Kimmy Duvall, Daniel's perky, over-achieving assistant.

Councilor Thrall's suite was easy to find inside Civic Center. The suite was guarded by a pair of Dragoon troopers, their fluorescent-yellow armor and mirrored face-shields incongruent with the marble walls, dark wood paneling, and subdued lighting. Another pair, outside the Councilor's personal office, checked their IDs and waved them inside.

Councilor Regina Thrall stood behind her desk, her short stature, feisty expression, and tightly wound bleach-blonde hair making her look like a school principal having a bad day. She leaned over her desk and gave Daniel a brief, insincere handshake. Her sharp blue eyes bore him only malice. "Daniel Sloan, welcome."

When she turned toward Lisa, her expression softened. Her eyes turned gentle. "And you are?"

"Kimmy Duvall," Lisa said in a Texan accent, extending her hand.

Kimmy had stick-straight shoulder-length blonde hair, contact lenses, and plus-sized fat-padding. Lisa's disguise made her look very similar to Thrall's beloved, late daughter Nicolette.

Thrall grasped Lisa's hand in both of hers and shook it slowly, and then glanced at the corner of her office. Framed on the wall was a blood-spattered orange and white handbag with a bullet hole in the middle, a grim memento of that terrible day in downtown Houston five years earlier.

Thrall and Nicolette were shopping when they were caught in the crossfire of a gun cartel shootout. Nicolette, who was about Lisa's age at the time and Thrall's only child, had covered her head with the armored purse now hanging on the wall. But the gun cartels used armor-piercing rounds, and Nicolette was shot in the head by a stray round.

Thrall had recovered physically from multiple gunshots and moved north to Hamilton to start over. She rode enormous public sympathy to a career in politics with a back story the media repeated ad nauseum.

Daniel smiled warmly. "Thank you so much for meeting us."

Thrall turned back towards him. "Yes. Have a seat."

As he and Kimmy sat, Daniel said, "Please accept my deepest condolences on the loss of Councilor Burgess. I can only imagine that this must be an especially hard time for you."

Thrall constructed a thin smile. "Thank you. I appreciate it. I will be blunt though: we're only having this meeting so I can get that girl Riley Harris to stop badgering me."

Lisa expected they would get the cold shoulder. Thrall's dislike of the Stabilizers and what she called their 'disorderly practices' had long been on the record. Co-opting her was out of the question, but they only needed to twist her.

Daniel smiled warmly. "Riley sometimes knows when people need to talk, even if they don't. I trust her."

Thrall folded her hands. "So do I. Okay then." She waited for him to speak.

Daniel leaned forward. "We thought you may want to talk about safety issues." He nodded to Kimmy.

Lisa spoke in Kimmy's high-pitched voice, "Stability and order can't exist without safety, as you have so often said, Councilor. We have worked closely with the police and it has worked out well. We hope to do the same with your Dragoons."

Thrall replied coldly, "With the police ranks sick with this bioweapon and then the assassination, we had no choice. The troopers will be no trouble to you so long as you keep out of Nelsa Park."

According to the medical records Lisa's bounty hunters had rifled through, Thrall hadn't recovered emotionally from the loss of her daughter, having sworn off therapy and treatment. She channeled her pain into her work, but it bled through via sharp-tongued accusations and poorly-concealed conceit.

Her manner had alienated her from her Council colleagues in short order. Bringing Dragoons into her ward, rather than relying on the Hamilton police, was the latest faux pas. People were noticing that she didn't seem to care the least about others' opinions.

"Oh, we won't cause trouble," Daniel replied. "But a lot of our volunteers live in your district. Your young adults appreciate stability, which is a testament to how much they love living here. Riley Harris is the poster child for that concern. The Dragoons can be intimidating to them."

"Your people have been spotted in my ward on thirteen occasions this week," Thrall replied, checking a netpad on her desk. "Waving clipboards, accosting residents, upsetting families. There have been a lot of complaints, frankly."

Daniel looked aghast. "I do apologize! No harm was meant. Kimmy, please make a note to remind our folks about proper decorum."

"Yes sir." Lisa would make him pay for that later; she knew where he stashed his favorite candy.

Thrall raised an eyebrow. "I strongly recommend that you avoid Nelsa Park entirely. I brought the Dragoons here to keep tempers from boiling over. They are complying with all city laws."

A handful of silent seconds stretched into something almost uncomfortable.

"Do we have anything else?" Daniel asked Kimmy.

Daniel had called Thrall a one-hit bully, someone who had to keep jumping to higher office ahead of the wave of alienation following fast behind her. But, he'd told Lisa, an elected official's damaged psyche was a terrible thing to waste.

Kimmy consulted her notes. "Refugees."

Thrall said, "Are you afraid they will steal your spotlight? Change the subject?"

Daniel hunched forward in his chair in his best roll-up-the-sleeves posture. "Even if they are not dangerous, they are disruptive. They threaten your jobs and our Communities. If we cooperated on the refugee issue it could build some trust between us."

Thrall's nostrils flared. "Refugees are a dangerous mob of anarchists — but they're not here yet. The only disruptive outsiders threatening my city, and its liftport, right now, are the ones brought here by you, Mr. Sloan."

"We're not interested in the liftport," Kimmy said. "The refugees claim that a Hamilton city councilor invited them to settle here. There was a news article about it, but no one noticed with all of the assassination coverage."

Thrall's eyelashes fluttered, her mental wheels spinning. If her psych profile was right, she was trying to figure out how to leverage the refugees to gain more power.

She looked at Daniel. "Have you mentioned these 'migrant invaders' to anyone else on the Council?"

Daniel shook his head. "No. You have..., uh..., resources, to dissuade the refugees from staying here, that the other Councilors don't." He waved his hand towards the office door, where the Dragoons stood outside.

"Not even Norm Osprette?" Thrall asked. It was an open secret that Councilor Norm Osprette was sympathetic to the Stabilizer cause.

Daniel shook his head. "The city has been lenient toward 'migrant invaders' going all the way back to the St. Louis Flood refugees in the 2220s. We fear the Council will brush off our concerns. We can make some noise about the issue, on the nets and here in Civic Center."

Thrall harrumphed. "Good luck talking any sense into Osprette."

Lisa fought back a grin. Thrall and Osprette hated one another, according to a two-year-old news report that intimated that the two had been in a shouting match once and hadn't spoken since.

Daniel nodded. "We have to agree to disagree with Councilor Osprette on this one. We are seriously considering street protests on this issue until the city does something."

"Please don't," Thrall said. "Your street protests only undermine order and make it harder for us to work together."

Daniel gave her a stern look. "We think it's worth it, to protect the city's workers and their families from the unemployment and social unrest that migrant invaders can bring. Don't you?"

Thrall smiled at him with poorly feigned sweetness. "Thank you for sharing this, Daniel. But I must be on to my next meeting." She was rushing them out the door.

"But," Kimmy stammered, confused, "shouldn't we coordinate? We were hoping y'all would want to pool information, maybe share resources, too. Do you have staff we could contact?"

Thrall made a face. "I'll be straight with you, honey; my constituents want the Dragoons to throw you all in jail. Nothing you can say will change that. Now, I must press on to my next meeting."

She handed them off to her communications director, who gently murmured threats about what would happen if Daniel tried portraying this meeting to the media as anything more than a friendly social call. Daniel and Kimmy acted sad and left.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Daniel and Lisa made a show of disappointment for the surveillance cameras as they exited Civic Center. They kept it up until they climbed in their compact rental car in the subterranean parking garage.

Lisa was certain someone was watching them; each of their safe-houses had reported plainclothes and uniformed police poking around ever since their first protest. And Lisa always acted like she was under surveillance in a target city unless she was tucked away safely in her vault. She insisted that anyone involved in covert Stabilizer ops in the city use disguises to throw off the police.

Daniel programmed the car's nav to take them home via the scenic route, through a number of surveillance dead spots that Lisa read off of her netpad. The car drove itself out of the parking garage and began looping around through the gently curving boulevards of the Palisades.

Lisa swept the car for listening devices, polarized the windows, and gave the all-clear as the car headed east.

Daniel turned to her. "Do you think it worked?"

Lisa chewed her lip. "We'll see what she does when the story breaks today."

The story was a Stabilizer-created news segment that claimed the Hamilton government had invited the refugees into town. After foreboding shots of thousands of tired, dirty refugees trudging along the highway, the money shot was an interview where a refugee explained that Hamilton had invited in the St. Louis refugees a hundred years ago. But the footage was edited to make it sound like the offer was new.

The Stabilizer PR head in Orlando had leaned on an old friend at Byte to post the piece. The story careened across the Midwest's public nets: Scoop, The Walt Morgan Post, Nusion, The Penny Twain.

An hour later, a law and order pundit on the Stabilizer payroll posted a rant about the economic dangers of refugee incursions. He raised the specter of Hamilton becoming another Detroit and enduring decades of economic gloom.

At that point Lisa sent the 24/7 news hyenas at Scoop a canned ten-minute 'special report' on refugees. Most of it was old footage from previous refugee incidents, mixed with bits of the new segment on Hamilton's refugees.

Scoop aired it within the hour because their just-in-time content model grabbed any 'placed' features like this without much editorial oversight. They followed it with a panel of their usual news contributors speculating about how this would affect Hamilton's political scene.

After the special report, Daniel issued a press release lamenting that city residents would have to bear the economic burden of refugees taking their jobs at such a difficult time and called for a protest march. An hour later he did a live interview with The Penny Twain from the makeshift studio they had in an upstairs bedroom.

Lisa stayed in her vault, scanning the news sites, and planning an anti-refugee protest. She documented how the refugee story was playing out on media outlets around the world. Among Hamilton news stories, the refugee issue was trending a close third behind the Martian Cocktail and the assassination. Pushing a meme into the nets was a tricky proposition, and she needed every datapoint she could grab to refine the technique.

But what she was really waiting for was Thrall's reaction. Thrall's psyche profile said she had an overriding need to be out front on law and order issues. She also voiced her opinion before all the facts were available. It didn't win her friends on the Council, but it kept the media coming back for her juicy sound bites.

Councilor Carla MacMahon was unlucky enough to be a guest that night on the Walt Morgan Post. She had been invited to discuss heroes in the city's volunteer community. She was also the only high-level city official in reach of the media at the moment.

Lisa pulled MacMahon's psyche profile. Carla was the prim and proper matronly type, serving on the Council just to do her civic duty. She sweated the small details, like human resources policy and the parks department's leash laws. She was non-ideological and her Council voting didn't fall into a predictable pattern. Except that she went out of her way to avoid upsetting Regina Thrall.

Walt Morgan said, "Joining me tonight is Councilor Carla MacMahon, who represents my home town, good old Keokuk. Welcome Carla."

"Great to be here."

Walt continued, "We'll talk about volunteers in a minute, but first we have to get into this refugee story."

Carla blinked nervously.

Walt said, "There is a report that Civic Center invited the refugees to settle here. Who was behind the invite?"

"I don't know about anyone inviting them here," Carla said. "But it is no secret that we welcome everyone."

"Even if they take our jobs," Walt countered, his voice dropping into a gruff tone.

"We don't even know if they will come here," Carla said. "Let's worry about their safety and health first. Our volunteer community is ready to assist with water, medicine, supplies, if they come here."

Walt nodded. "Let's say the refugees want to settle here and take residents' jobs, would you vote to keep them out of the city?"

Carla shook her head. "I don't vote on hypotheticals. But I can say that our city can rise to whatever challenge it faces. We have hundreds of volunteers waiting to help—"

Walt furrowed his brow and grumped, "That's great, but—"

He touched his earpiece and turned to the camera.

"My producer just told me that Councilor Regina Thrall has issued a statement. She demands that Chairman Ferguson investigate who made this offer to turn the city into what she calls 'a refugee camp'."

Lisa grinned. Thrall demanded two investigations before breakfast every day, the second one to make sure the first was carried out correctly. "Come on, Regina," she whispered. "That is weak to the solar max."

"Also," Walt said, "she's announcing that the number of Dragoons patrolling the streets of her Nelsa Park district will increase by several thousand."

Lisa paused, shocked. She grabbed her netpad and looked at the Stabilizer master plan. She hadn't expected Thrall to go that far. Migrant invaders indeed.

Walt turned to his guest. "Councilor MacMahon, your reaction to this? Thrall is picking a fight with the Chairman and forming her own army?"

Carla looked at Walt for a long moment, her skin pale under the studio makeup. "Well..., I think the Council would have to approve any kind of action like that," she said finally.

"What if she doesn't wait for Council approval?" Walt asked.

Lisa wondered the same thing.

"Come on, Councilor," Walt goaded, "you must have a reaction to that."

The Councilor's mouth hung open, then she shook her head. "Well, I can tell you it's not a positive reaction," she said.

Lisa grinned and turned to her netpad. Political schism forming on the Council? Check. She started paging through the contingencies for municipal secession and breakups.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Nick woke up slowly. He was still in the hotel room where Borbola had zapped him. His gear sat on a tiny desk by the window looking out over the lunar surface. He propped himself up on his elbows, anticipating the headache that usually came after being drugged. Instead, he felt queasy and his sinuses were clogged.

"Cross, you still there?" he said.

No response. He crawled across the bed and turned his netpad on. His brain wasn't ready for the information density of the smartshades. He called for his Simon again.

Cross spoke over the netpad's small speaker, and she sounded to Nick like she was whispering from another room. "You have an infection and have been quarantined in this room. The hotel's front desk says you set off their bioweapon sensors."

"What the hell is it?" Nick blurted and began coughing.

"The Blight 5 virus. It is non-lethal but contagious. You were given an antiviral treatment an hour ago and should feel better in another twenty-four hours."

Another cough careened around Nick's lungs on its way up. "I don't feel like I'm on the rebound."

Someone flushed the toilet in the room's tiny bathroom cubicle. A middle-aged man with a bushy blond beard and wild, curly blond hair emerged, wrapping himself in a gold cloak. The man brightened when he saw that Nick was awake.

"I'm Bridge Radisson. You look as shitty as I feel. Unfortunately, we're both stuck in here." The man shook Nick's hand and sat in the guest chair.

"I'm sick and pissed," Nick said. "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm here because Eldred Borbola is a real ass. He got you to jail your aunt, then kidnaps you and tries to pin it on me. And now he's trapped us both here."

"Wait, what? Slow down. How do you know my aunt?" Nick asked, puzzled.

"I sent her to recruit you."

"She wanted me to return this to you." Nick dug his aunt's netpad out of his pocket and handed it over. If this guy could unlock it, he had to be the right one. God knows Nick had failed to crack the login.

Bridge pecked at the screen for a second, pressed his thumb against it, and showed Nick that he was in. "Thank you for returning it," he said.

Nick stared at it. "I hoped to keep it." He looked at Bridge. "I'm sorry about arresting her. I was trying to keep my job, which I lost anyway."

Bridge nodded. "Forget it. Borbola enjoys creating finely-crafted fuck-ups like that. He had you jail your own aunt to take her out of play at a critical time, and it allowed him to run this scam on you. So, to recap, our need is great, Borbola is a dick, time is short, and you're our prime recruit." He launched into a coughing fit.

Dangerous or not, Nick had never wanted to kill anyone as much as he did Borbola at that moment. He wondered if Borbola had killed Burgess too. But no, Nick was sure Winthrop was the lone assassin, except for Rob's contribution. "You're infected too, aren't you?"

The older man nodded as he coughed. "Call it payback for having you kidnapped unwittingly. We can only hope that sweet lady justice managed to infect Borbola too."

Nick poured himself a glass of water. As soon as he slugged it down he felt a clear, wet beam of life shoot down his throat, converting condensed Nick Lincoln into the real thing. Hopefully it was a sign that the antiviral was working. He slumped back on the bed. "How long are we stuck here together?"

"Gateway Medical says a week, to be sure the antiviral worked. Which we don't have time for," Bridge shook his head. "Borbola managed to take us both out of play, just like your aunt, and we'll probably hate each other after a week in here together."

The Too Screwed Hotel left room service outside the door. It consisted of bar munchies. The Gateway health department may force the casino to feed them, but it didn't mean it had to be healthy.

Nick swallowed lukewarm cheese fries, although he doubted they would boost his immune system and speed his recovery. "Why do you want me?"

"Ha! It's simple: we need you to save humanity," Bridge said with a flourish, and then coughed.

"I'm serious."

"So am I." Bridge grinned. "But that's in a nutshell. Tell me, what's your favorite part of the work?"

Nick made a face.

"Not bounty hunting; the thing you love to do. Analyzing statistics or data trends."

Was this was an ice breaker or a test? Nick said, "It sounds strange, but as I pour through data, or statistics, I can almost hear different pitches. When I hear the right tone, I know I've found something."

Bridge nodded. "And how do you feel then?"

Nick remembered losing himself for hours and the thrill at finding insight in the numbers. He never felt like that when running and gunning as a bounty hunter. "It's like I can function much faster."

"That is the optimal state of being we call 'streaming.' You enter stream space when you do something you excel at and enjoy, when you're at your best. Those who stream the most are more happy, more innovative, and more productive than others."

"Sounds Buddhist," Nick said.

"Maybe. Offworld economies' productivity gains and innovation depend upon the labor force maximizing their stream time. Innovation accelerates, productivity soars, social structures become more complex and more advanced, and society progresses faster. That's why offworld societies are so far ahead of the old blue marble."

He indicated Nick's netpad. "I've unlocked access to our nets for your Simon to show you. Check the living standard indices by planetary system. We're kicking your ass to a statistically significant extent."

Cross had displayed several graphs by planetary system: productivity rates, stress and mental illness prevalence, and happiness indices. Earth was far behind Tessa, the Belt settlements, and hab communities from Venus to Saturn.

Nick tried imagining everyone blissfully losing themselves in their work, making discoveries, innovations, widgets, and fortunes. "A lot of people I know work only to pay the bills."

Bridge shook his head sadly. "That's Earth's culture, not human nature. 'When all you take from work is money, it takes more from you than you receive. So fill your days with work you love and happiness will never leave.'"

Nick made a face. "Cute philosophy."

"Philosophy? Hell, that's one of our nursery rhymes."

"A nursery rhyme about job satisfaction?" Nick shook his head. "Did some human resources hack concoct that to keep employees quiet?"

Bridge laughed. "No! It teaches children how to stay happy. But we do have several entertaining ditties about decompression sickness, if you like something darker. Remember, 'Ring around the Rosie' was about dying from the plague."

Nick didn't have a comeback for that. Not with a bioweapon rattling around his bloodstream.

Bridge continued, "On Earth, the number of cities advancing toward a stream-based society has been dropping. Stabilizers are inducing Earth's major cities to cut themselves off from offworld." He leaned forward. "Hamilton is Earth's tipping point. If it crashes this year, the rest of Earth will follow. And Earth is humanity's tipping point. If it crashes, a cascade of crashpoints will spread offworld and destroy civilization."

Nick folded his arms. If Kagents were this detached from reality, Borbola may have a valid point about blocking their interference on Earth.

Bridge ran a simulation on the room's viewer. The perspective hovered in orbit over Hamilton, which was tagged in blue but suddenly turned red, signaling a crashpoint. The simulation zoomed out to show red tags spreading like a rash across North America. Solar civilization disintegrated over the next century as particular catastrophes were announced underneath. Growth on Titan stopped. Oxygen prices skyrocketed. An armed skirmish broke out in the Belt over biomass trade. The stream societies all regressed as their freedom indices dropped. Settlements were abandoned as economic shocks hit. Wars even broke out.

Nick had heard that the Kagents predicted the future, but he assumed it was the kind of short-range market forecasting that businesses used to estimate quarterly earnings. He wanted to play with this solar system-spanning simulation but it almost felt too good to be true. "Slick doomsday pitch, but it's all speculation. How likely is it?"

Bridge stopped the simulation. "Ninety-four percent probability, they tell me. Are you having a stroke? Look, societies progress as the costs of transportation and communication drop and the returns from cooperative efforts increase. The result is more interaction, more interdependence, more complexity, and a faster, more efficient exchange of ideas. Do you understand, so far?"

Nick nodded.

"All of this spurs more innovation. But gains in innovation require the labor force to work at full potential and that requires streaming. Maintaining a stream economy requires high levels of personal autonomy and widespread cooperation. Transportation, communication, autonomy, cooperation: take those building blocks away and everything crumbles. Even on Tessa."

"Tessa?"

"What you blue marble bumpkins still call Mars."

Nick paged through the stats that Cross had posted. Earth was a backwater by almost every social and economic indicator. He was mesmerized: he could analyze these statistics for hours without growing bored. "How can Earth bring down a super-charged offworld society?"

Bridge got up and poured himself a glass of water. "My wife Meredith could explain this, if she had a free second."

Cross jumped in and said, "The solar economies are all in a symbiotic relationship with one other. Some need oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, or biomass from Earth. Others need Earth's customers, immigrants, and tourists."

Bridge nodded. "Yeah, something like that. Earth's cities are connected to one another in the same way. And they have been crashing over the last decade or so; you probably haven't realized how many." He rewound the simulation's time index three decades and then ran it forward. Seoul, New York Jersey, London, Amman, Houston, Shanghai, Caracas, Rio, Miami, Glasgow, and Atlanta all toggled red.

"Each crashpoint follows a pattern," Bridge said after swallowing a gulp of water. "A thriving city on Earth — always a key hub of offworld trade — suffers a seemingly unique mix of crises. These crises break up or cut off its offworld trade. In each case, the Stabilizers lurk in the background, we think, pounding on the city's pressure points until it implodes."

"Hamilton is a textbook case. It will reach a crashpoint in roughly two to eight weeks," Bridge said. "Four months ago we projected that there was a small probability it would not crash until the fall. Then the Stabilizers arrived, this virus appeared, and Juan Burgess was assassinated."

"The assassin was not a Stabilizer," Nick said. "I ruled out any accomplices, other than my former boss. And he didn't know this guy would assassinate Juan; he was just trying to frame me."

"Well," Bridge replied, "that could be. Except that the timing is damn suspicious. Anyway, we're dealing with probabilistic projections here, forecasts. I would love for them to be wrong, for once."

"Really?" Nick asked.

Bridge nodded solemnly. He posted a list of explanatory variables in a crashed city or zone. The number one factor common to all of the crashes was a Stabilizer protest.

"Now, my wife tells me that's just correlation. But other cities also crashed at the same time that didn't have refugees, natural disasters, or economic shocks. And other cities faced some of these same factors but never crashed."

The viewer identified those cities with yellow tags.

"Our Simons throw all that together into a statistical stew and we get this: there's a 99 percent probability that the Stabilizers have been the driving factor behind Earth's crashpoints for the last fifteen to twenty years."

"So they are deliberately targeting cities to crash them." Nick held up his hands. "What are you guys going to do about it?"

Bridge smiled in a way that made Nick feel uneasy. "Beats the hell out of me. We were hoping you can tell us."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Nick coughed for several seconds. "Me? I couldn't cut it as a bounty hunter. You Kagents are the elite geniuses."

Bridge wagged a finger. "I wish. Kagent is short for Knowledge Agent, a cutesy marketing term, but it works well enough. We produce knowledge from aggregated data, use the data to make projections."

"There's no Kagents on Earth," Nick thought for a moment, "because the BHN owns all of the data access on Earth."

Bridge nodded. "Bounty hunters took over the data brokerage industry centuries ago and exchanged privacy for cash. Offworld societies, being descendants of space-obsessed libertarians, adopted very strict privacy laws. The two professions split apart over this. That's why bounty hunters can't access the Kagent nets and Kagents don't normally use the BHN."

"Normally?" Nick said. "So sometimes Kagents do access the BHN?"

Bridge pulled a leather-bound binder of hardcopy from his luggage. "The Privacy Council issues a Privacy Warrant in special situations, like criminal investigations. The Warrant allows Kagents to access individual data where ever we can find it, including the BHN. But most Kagents never see a Warrant."

Bridge patted the binder. "This Warrant allows me to probe anyone connected to the Stabilizers efforts in Hamilton." He handed it over to Nick. "It's only the fifth I've ever seen in over thirty years in the business."

"The bounty hunter industry barely pulls a profit selling access on everyone to anyone," Nick noted, his eyes on the Warrant. "You guys must be nearly bankrupt."

Bridge grinned. "Truth is, we're turning away work. Legitimate, non-intrusive work. The market for selling knowledge is much bigger. But right now the universe-saving is on Earth, where we are thin."

He hesitated for a second and Nick realized why. "You're not sure I'm a good pick, are you?" he asked.

Bridge flinched backwards like Nick had slapped him. "No point being coy around you, is there? Look, usually we do an employment-level background check. But we received a Warrant to dig deeper in your case. We needed to be right about you."

"You profiled me," Nick said. He was creeped out by the idea of anyone knee-deep in his personal history, as ironic and hypocritical as that was given his bounty hunter past.

Bridge folded his hands. "You grew up in a Stabilized Community and your mother is a true believer. We have to make sure the apple falls far from the tree. We did the same with your aunt."

What did they see in his communications, in his actions that suggested that there was any doubt? Did they think his devotion to his family was a sign of Stabilizer sympathies? "Are you sure you probed far enough? Sometimes the apple rolls down a steep hill, falls in a river, and floats out to sea."

Bridge smiled and replied, "You have been trying to reconcile with your parents ever since you left home."

Given his recent falling out with Pop, he had to squash any notion that he may morph into a Stabilizer because of family history or sympathies. "You never realize that you're growing up in a Community when you're a kid," he said. "Kids don't know about politics or pace of life ideologies. I knew that Pop was home for dinner every night and the whole family went to my sister's soccer games and my mathlete competitions. The kids were the first priority; what kid doesn't like that?"

Bridge winced but Nick ignored it. "But when I grew up I learned about the restrictions, the expectations. I had to get out. I heard about the Kagents and that became my dream. My parents didn't understand why finding a crummy part-time job nearby wasn't good enough for me.

"I thought bounty hunting out of Chicago would be a good compromise. But to my parents, compromise isn't possible. In their eyes I abandoned them." He gave a quick summary of what happened in the Hamilton liftport.

Bridge nodded sadly. "Can you fight the Stabilizers without reservation or hesitation?"

He would do that even if it wasn't necessary to become a Kagent. Nick nodded with a toothy, eager grin.

Bridge shook his head as if Nick didn't understand. "This could cause collateral damage to your personal life. Some roads can't be uncrossed with family. Trust me."

Nick thought of that last call with Pop and about what his aunt must be suffering. "Fine, I'm in, what's next?"

"Whoa. It's not that easy; there's an initiation, bloodletting, ritualistic slaughter. We had to get tougher after Borbola."

"Borbola was a Kagent?"

Bridge waved his hand. "Years ago. Let's just say it didn't work out. It's been a long time since we recruited a bounty hunter."

"I'm not Borbola."

Bridge winked at him. "I know; I don't even want to kill you yet. But the quarantine is young."

Bridge called the front desk and began an extended argument about moving them to a bigger room. The hotel handed him off to Gateway Medical. They put their foot down though, and Bridge cursed enthusiastically for a minute, coughed, and then called the front desk again to demand that they at least replace the room's furniture.

It took the rest of the day, including waiting for the hotel to deliver tools to disconnect the double bed bolted to the floor, but Nick and Bridge transformed the room into a flexible living space. By then, the hotel brought dinner, retrieved the tools, and both men slumped in convertible chairs with plates of quesadillas, salsa, and tortilla chips.

Cross chirped for Nick's attention. "You both need to check a news channel," she said, activating the room's viewer.

Bridge and Nick watched frantic reporters, scratchy video clips, and then read the breaking news scrawls.

Bridge muted the announcer's breathless ramblings and buried his head in his hands. "Hammerfuck."
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Walt Morgan: Welcome to this special edition of the Walt Morgan Post. I'm sure you, like the rest of us, have been watching the heartbreaking story out of Berlin today: Dragoon security troops, mercenaries, and bounty hunters slaughtered over three hundred refugees and wounded hundreds more. Also killed were dozens of Berlin citizens who came out to give the refugees safe passage into the city, gunned down alongside those they were trying to help.

My guests today will help us understand all sides of this terrible tragedy. In the studio we have Daniel Sloan of the Stabilizer Alliance, which advocates for adopting a tranquil lifestyle instead of engaging in the hectic offworld-driven economy.

Also in studio is security expert Tanya Nelson, who has consulted with dozens of districts and was once the security director for Charleston in the South Carolina Republic.

Live from Berlin, where it is early tomorrow morning, we are lucky to have General Avis Fridwulf, leader of the Sancternal Guard, the paramilitary all-female humanitarian army that rescues innocents from peril in war zones. General, you are a bona fide war hero, my daughter has your action doll, I am honored to have you on the show.

General Fridwulf: Thank you.

Walt: Let's start with your report on the breaking news out of Berlin.

Fridwulf: We're still picking up the pieces here, Walt. Hundreds of wounded have flooded area hospitals and the dead are being shipped out in tractor-trailers. At least two dozen of the dead are children and that number will climb. The surviving refugees are being placed with volunteers for the time being. The local residents are in shock.

Walt: How did this happen?

Fridwulf: Eyewitness reports say that bounty hunters and Dragoons attacked the refugees south of Berlin. The refugees had nowhere to go. They were surrounded; they never had a chance.

Walt: Could your group, the Sancternal Guard, have helped in this situation?

Fridwulf: I don't know. We have never protected refugees before; we are dedicated to defending innocent noncombatants in actual war zones. My people arrived here six hours after the Massacre and since then have been helping arrange assistance and investigate why this happened.

Walt (nodding): Terrible, General, just terrible. Will the authorities prosecute the Dragoons for killing unarmed civilians?

Fridwulf: Unlikely. The zone where the Massacre happened agreed not to prosecute after receiving a large grant from the Dragoons' corporate headquarters.

Walt: These refugees look like regular people to me. Daniel, why are they seen as a threat?

Sloan: We think the refugees are victims, and our hearts go out to them and their families. It's sad commentary on our society that these refugees felt compelled to leave their homes, families, and communities to look for a decent life. It's the creative destruction of this toxic 24/7 economy. This isn't an isolated incident.

Walt: Is that right, Tanya? Are people now purchasing their own armies to protect their jobs?

Tanya Nelson: It looks like it, doesn't it? Every zone makes these security upgrades for any number of reasons. Many do so to keep out folks they don't want. The key failure here, and we've seen this many times before, is that the Dragoons deviated from commonly-accepted ROE for law enforcement-

Walt: ROE? What's that?

Nelson: Rules of Engagement. Let's not forget that the bounty hunters were in charge in Berlin and they don't have any ROE, at least none that I know. That could explain why this tragedy happened.

Walt: The Dragoons' corporate mouthpiece says that if the refugees came any closer they would have dispersed into the city. They also say they are reviewing the situation. These PR pukes always call these things 'situations', which is why I absolutely refuse to have them on this show. They say they will make changes 'as appropriate'. Are these security companies out of control, Tanya?

Nelson: The Dragoons clearly were in this case. They shot unarmed civilians because their clients were afraid of economic competition. Sadly, this may be good for their business. There are a lot of tinpot dictators out there. But not all security firms are so ruthless.

Fridwulf: If I could interject here, Walt, not all of the bounty hunters who were here joined in the slaughter. There are reports of bounty hunters shooting refugees with tranquilizers to take them out of the line of fire. There are also reports that some of the bounty hunters turned on the others and killed them to save refugees and the citizen volunteers.

Walt: Is this the Angel of Berlin that we have heard about?

Fridwulf: Yes. I'm looking into that.

Walt: Now, I want to address the local angle to all of this. Tanya, you touched on this already. We have these Dragoons here in Hamilton right now, brought in by Councilwoman Regina Thrall for her personal protection. Now she has them patrolling the streets of her district. She says they are supplementing the police, whose ranks have been thinned by this offworld virus, and to provide more security after the Juan Burgess assassination. Is it a good idea, having Dragoons around after what happened in Berlin today? Daniel, let's start with you.

Sloan: The Dragoon troopers have harassed our volunteers in Nelsa Park; people who did nothing wrong and were just handing out information. Now with this atrocity in Berlin—

Walt: It wasn't Berlin proper, it was south of it—

Sloan: South of Berlin, this makes for an enormous chilling effect on free speech and free association in Nelsa Park. My people were already afraid of these troops, but now they are terrified. Is Councilor Thrall trying to terrorize visitors to her district and her own constituents?

Walt: Tanya, what do you think?

Nelson: I think it is important to remember that the Dragoons do what their client wants. Security contractors take on different kinds of missions. 'Serve and protect' in Hamilton is different than 'border security' in Berlin. The question is, what does Councilwoman Thrall order them to do?

Walt: General?

General Fridwulf: I disagree. Councilor Thrall should remove these troopers right now. They have become the face of this massacre. At the very least, she ought to be very clear about the chain of command, what their ROE is, and what the mission parameters are.

Walt: Tanya, would you keep them around after Berlin?

Nelson: Well, Walt, other zones want to. There are rumors that the Dragoons already are seeing an unprecedented amount of interest from many zones and districts out there, because of Berlin.

Walt: Wait, are you saying that there are government leaders out there who are envious of this massacre? Who want to copy this tragedy?

Nelson: That's what I'm hearing.

Walt: That's unbelievable. Unbelievable. We've heard about similar incidents before, but not like this. I mean, this was a massacre! Children died!

Sloan: We haven't discussed how to prevent this from happening again.

Walt: Quite right, but we are running out of time. I'll give you the last word.

Sloan: Thank you. Real quick, this tragedy has happened before and it will happen again because it has a root cause: our hyperactive lifestyle. And we're not addressing it. The frustration that people feel with their lives makes them possessive, overly competitive, and insensitive to others. You see it on the streets of Hamilton and in many other cities. Everyone has to realize that this is the price we all pay. We need to focus on how to remove some of the chaos, some of the destruction, and restore some peace of mind.

Walt: Thank you all for joining me. Next on the Walt Morgan Post: eyewitness accounts from Berlin as part of our continuing coverage.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Pam Sullivan had never seen a deer before. Animals were rare offworld and they generally were small: insects, birds, dogs, fish, and frogs. But the deer she saw at the edge of the meadow was almost as tall as her.

Pam guessed it was a doe hidden by the sun-dappled shadows of nearby maple trees blowing in the hot breeze. She had such big, dark eyes, and a noble head sitting on muscular legs. Her light brown pelt was spotted with gauzy white spots on its flanks that helped disguise her among the beige and taupe tree trunks. She bent her slender neck to pick at the tall grass on the meadow's edge. Pam could fall in love with these creatures. She wished she could run over and pet it, but it looked skittish.

The meadow where the doe grazed was meant for the sheep who were clustered chewing grass a hundred meters away. Pam couldn't tell if this was part of Norm's farm, which he called Marmalade, or was just a really big backyard. Earthers had so many terms for their land property, it was hard to keep them all straight.

The doe looked up, watching warily as Pam and the Councilors crossed the meadow. Pam followed behind Fen and Jimmy Travis, Geoff Starke, Norm Osprette, and Carla McMahon.

The politicians crossed from Norm Osprette's ancient cobblestone farmhouse to a white, wooden gazebo in the center of the meadow. The doe watched their progress and when it was clear they were headed away from her, she turned back to nibbling the undergrowth.

"What a spread, Norm," Jimmy Travis boomed, waving his arms at the vista around them.

The doe didn't like his sudden movement and crashed through the underbrush and into the woods. A crow protested loudly and there was a flapping of wings among the trees the doe sprinted past.

The inside of the gazebo offered a break from the hot summer sun. On a plain wooden picnic table were pitchers of lemonade, baskets of banana bread, and jars of marmalade.

Councilor Regina Thrall had introduced a bill to endorse her use of Dragoon troopers in her district. The other city councilors had lined up in favor or against the bill. These Councilors were undecided swing votes who would determine the fate of the bill.

Yesterday, Norm had insisted to Pam and Fen that this backdrop would encourage his fellow Councilors to relax and be reasonable. It was an important point to make, especially after Pam had shown him and Fen that her analysis of their voting patterns indicated they would need every possible advantage to change these three Councilors' minds.

The heat was unexpected though and Norm wisely moved the proceedings from his sun-baked back porch to the gazebo.

Fen sat at the head of the table. "Thank you, Norm, for your hospitality, your beautiful home, this view, and the food. You all dig into this bread while Pam reports on the economic effects of our recent troubles."

And so began Round One.

Pam had modeled every outcome of this meeting. This particular arrangement was the only successful one in at least half of the five thousand permutations she ran. The probability of failure was just a little less than the probability of success.

She cleared her throat. "Market analysts have downgraded the city's business climate. Our bond rating has dropped, inflating interest rates across the Midwest. The city's economic growth may contract next quarter." She wished her throat would unclench; she always clenched-up when the stakes were high.

Fen eyed each councilor in turn. "Public approval of Thrall is in the low seventies. For the Dragoons, it's in the mid-sixties. Mine is forty-five percent. The Council is wallowing in the thirties. I won't feed you a line that the public is behind us on this issue. They aren't."

Around the table jaw muscles flexed; Geoff blinked rapidly.

"I don't see how we can vote against her on this proposal," Carla said. "As much as we may want to."

When Pam was building the profiles of each Councilor to feed into her negotiation model, Fen told her that Carla wanted to block Thrall's rise to power but she didn't want to be on the wrong side when it happened.

Fen looked around at the sweaty group in the gazebo as he drank lemonade. "Don't worry, we can turn this around." He took a slice of banana bread and waited for them to react.

That's it? Pam thought. Earlier, Fen had made it sound like he had some elaborate way to sway them.

Pam's modeling had predicted that at this point the Councilors' anxiety would be high but their resistance to voting against the Dragoon measure would also be high.

She simulated business negotiations for clients so they could hone their strategy and reach the most advantageous deal possible as quickly as possible. Her models used game theory, behavioral psychology, and stochastic miscommunication algorithms to predict where each discrete round of negotiation would end up.

The model she'd chosen to simulate this meeting had required Fen and Norm's expert opinion on the councilors' interests, influence, and the salience of each issue to them. The model had laid out a downward spiral just like this one.

Norm's leg pumped up and down nervously under the table next to Pam. He was fearful and pessimistic by nature; he must be worried out of his mind. "I'm sure Fen will tell us next how this will all work out okay," he said.

If the goal of Round One was to increase the Councilors' anxiety, in Pam's opinion they had over-achieved.

The risk was that anything else said to these Councilors after Round One wouldn't matter. She had warned Fen about this. The Councilors were like that skittish doe, looking for a reason to bolt. And he had just handed them several reasons.

Sweat trickled down Pam's back as no one spoke. She didn't need smartshades to see that Fen's gamble had failed.

If Fen was as unsuccessful during Round Two, Thrall would get her army; and once she had it, who knows what she would demand next.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Fen smiled at the politicians gathered at the picnic table and said, "Are you ready for the good news?"

That grabbed everyone's attention, but then he bit into his banana bread and chewed slowly. Everyone stared at him, transfixed, as he finished chewing and wiped crumbs from his hands.

"You better have some great news, Fenimore, my boy," Jimmy said.

Fen nodded. "Those approval ratings I mentioned? Yeah, they are about to drop," he said. "Partly because of the bad news coming out of Berlin. Two bloggers, an investigative reporter, and two news service stringers are working on anti-Dragoon pieces. But sharks need some blood in the water before they bite."

He unrolled a portable display and activated it. "Like this."

A graph showed the number of complaints about the Dragoons had climbed steadily. The district attorney considered only ten percent of Dragoon arrests valid, compared to eighty-nine percent of police arrests.

"The Dragoons aren't making us safer," Fen said. "I know, pretty pedestrian. But this will hammer the point home."

He played a video clip of Dragoon troopers in fluorescent yellow armor beating someone outside a convenience store. The bystanders' horrified faces said everything about who was the bad guy here.

The horrified expression spread around the Councilors at the picnic table. Geoff was almost purple with rage. Abuse of authority was his pet peeve. He'd made the most outraged statements about Berlin, even breaking down on camera.

Fen continued, "The victim is Paul DiBartino, the store's owner. The Dragoons didn't like his morning salutation."

Fen paused while they watched the Dragoons swing batons at the man's head and stomach. "The beating continues for several minutes. DiBartino will do a press conference when he is released from the hospital and files a lawsuit."

Jimmy groaned loudly. "And I got people asking me when I'm going to hire Dragoons. Can you believe that? After Berlin? My son is a city cop, for Christ's sake. You gotta get this video out there, Fen."

Carla glanced around the table. "The vote will happen before this can gain traction."

Fen held up his hands. "I'm not asking for you to vote against the resolution tomorrow. Just delay the vote for two days to review these arrest statistics. By then the media's attack pieces on the Dragoons will have dropped and DiBartino will hold his press conference. Then you'll feel real pressure to vote against it."

Geoff narrowed his eyes, "How come this video isn't out already?"

Fen spread his hands. "A group called The Friends of Hamilton received a copy from the DiBartino family. I asked them to hold off until I could show it to you. I didn't want any of you caught by surprise."

Geoff grunted. "Lest we react in some way you didn't like."

Fen shook his head. "FOH has a full-scale anti-Dragoon campaign planned: viral ads, news contributors, rapid response public relations, and 'background' for the press. It starts tomorrow. Public opinion of the Dragoons will crater. But if it happens after the Council has approved them, there may not be much we can do about it."

No one said anything. From off in the woods a crow cawed.

Each councilor was busy running political calculations in his or her head and checking the others' expressions. Carla's stiff posture suggested she was unconvinced. Jimmy and Geoff looked unsure. Fen needed all of their votes to kill the bill.

Jimmy flicked his napkin with his fingernail three times before he said in an unusually quiet voice, "I'm sorry Norm, Fen, I'm catching too much heat on this right now. I dislike Regina, too, but she's struck a chord in my district."

Norm's hand cut the air, "If we can just delay the vote, it would buy enough time to sow some doubts."

"How would Regina react to that?" Carla wondered. Her fear was almost as tangible as the picnic table's wood planks.

"It's pretty cold-blooded to sit on your hands while her Dragoons are brutalizing people," Geoff said. He didn't say 'no' though; Pam was surprised someone as diametrically opposed to Thrall as Geoff would be on the fence. Fen had confided in Pam that he suspected Geoff wanted something in exchange for his vote.

The pause that followed meant that Round Two had ended and Round Three had begun. This round's theme: cut a deal.

Pam was not sure how that would happen though. A business negotiation had a limited scope, and a deal involved a limited number of variables and side issues. But a political negotiation could touch on a myriad of unrelated issues, influenced by past negotiations, and with an eye toward how it would affect future negotiations. This complicated things beyond a point she was comfortable simulating.

"We don't have to delay if we're all planning to vote 'no'," Norm said to Geoff. "What's it going to take to get everyone to that point?"

It was a nudge to see what it would take to make a deal.

"We need critical thinking in preschool," Geoff replied. He had campaigned publicly to teach children to question authority and to think for themselves. "So our kids won't fall for things like Regina, the Dragoons, and idiotic media coverage. We have to deal with the root causes of the fear affecting us."

Carla shifted in her seat. "The teachers don't think that material is appropriate for preschoolers."

Complication, Pam thought: if the side issue split their two likely allies, they could lose them. She and Fen exchanged a glance.

"That's because preschool teachers are control-freaks," Geoff retorted.

"Yeah, they're afraid the kids will rise up and demand bigger snacks," Jimmy said.

Carla glared at him. Pam could see the whole thing unraveling at this point.

Norm snatched the banana bread out of Jimmy's hand. "No snack for you if you don't help."

Jimmy scowled at Norm. Jimmy's waistline was a testament to his love affair with food.

Carla shook her head. "I can't support it if the teachers are opposed."

They both looked at Fen.

"I'm not afraid of savvier voters," Fen joked. "What if we provided it outside the school system? The school system wouldn't object then, right?"

Carla nodded.

"It would help if that video came out tomorrow and I was at the announcement," said Jimmy. "I could vote for a delay then and not get too much abuse from my district."

Fen smiled and looked at Carla. She wouldn't return his gaze.

"I can't vote for a delay," she said quietly.

"What if Regina Thrall never held power in the city again?" Norm asked her. "Would that change your mind?"

"What the hell are you going on about, Norm?" Jimmy asked. Pam wondered the same thing.

The elder statesman returned Jimmy's slice of banana bread and grinned evilly. "There is an attendance bylaw that allows the Council to remove a Councilor after seven unexcused absences. When was the last time Regina actually showed up to a Council meeting?"

Jimmy tapped at his netpad, accessing Council records. "She's missed eight of the last twelve meetings. She only shows up for the 'big' meetings, like the budget."

Fen's face had gone pale. Pam took that as a bad sign.

"But you said they have to be unexcused," Geoff pointed out.

Norm poked a thumb at his own chest. "I'm the parliamentarian. I haven't approved any of her absences. She never gave advance warning or asked for them to be excused."

Fen replied, "Getting absences excused is a technicality. It's a courtesy, the Council never requires it."

"Until I took over the parliamentarian chair," Norm said.

Fen looked distinctly unhappy.

"What would keep her from running again?" Carla asked.

"Or suing to overturn the removal?" Geoff added.

"The bylaws ban any removed Councilor from running for any city office for three Council terms," Norm said. He turned to Geoff. "She can fight it in court, but they won't approve an injunction to allow her to remain in her position while they sort it out. I already ran it by the Council's legal counsel."

"We probably don't have the votes for that," Fen warned in a low tone.

Norm looked at him. "We do. I've talked to Abby and the other yes votes. Bringing in the Dragoons was the last step for them. They are afraid she will grab more power and become more dangerous."

Norm had set Fen up. The older man's hatred of Regina Thrall was well-documented by the media and by at least a dozen anecdotes Pam had heard. When they reviewed Norm's profile, Fen had said Norm was a wily old coot. He'd had to explain to her what a 'coot' was, but now she understood.

"We need a vote to remove her from the Council," Carla said. "She's a menace. If you want my vote against the resolution, we have to throw her off the Council."

Fen looked like they had all decided to commit suicide together. "Let me get this straight, you've gone from voting for the Dragoon bill to throwing Regina off the Council?" he asked Carla. When she didn't answer, he swept his gaze over his other colleagues. "Have any of you thought about what she will do in response?"

"What can she do?" Carla asked, staring at the table. "The Dragoons won't report to her any more. Do we have a replacement in mind?"

Jimmy replied, "How about her security advisor, Phil what's-his-name? Levinson."

"What if she doesn't go quietly?" Fen asked. "I mean secession. Her approval rating in Nelsa Park is in the eighties. They may back her over the city."

Pam swallowed hard. She wasn't an expert on crashpoints, but a city breaking into hostile pieces seemed to fit the definition pretty damn well.

"Come on, Mr. Chairman, that's a little extreme, don't you think?" Norm laughed and waved his hand dismissively.

Fen glared at him and interlaced his fingers. "She's power-hungry. She will act wronged. She has the Dragoons. And she doesn't see any of us as legitimate."

"So what happens if she does fight back?" Carla asked.

"At that point, what choice would I have?" Fen said, spreading his hands. "I'd have to send in the police. Do I put the police up against the Dragoons? Or do I activate the city guard?"

"You're talking about a civil war," Carla said. "That wouldn't happen. The business community can talk her down. Money talks, right Pam?"

Pam swallowed. "A civil war could destroy the city's business climate. Especially in her district. She would have to know that." But the whole idea made Pam's mouth dry. She had no idea what Regina Thrall would actually do.

Carla beamed at Norm. "They'll call this the Marmalade Summit in the history books."

"If it works," Jimmy added, but he was smiling, too.

Norm tapped his finger on the table insistently. "It will."

Fen chewed his banana bread and kept his face neutral. That meant he wasn't so sure, Pam thought, and she agreed. The Dragoon resolution would not pass, but the price might have been too high. Norm would remove Thrall from the Council, but he couldn't guarantee that would be the last they heard from her.

Pam felt so alone down here — where were the other Kagents? Where the hell were Meredith and Bridge Radisson? They had promised help, but so far nothing had come of that. The few other Kagents on planet, like Kelly Sekma, were either in prison or had simply disappeared. Pam wondered if it was her public position as city Trade Rep that had spared her the same fate.

Fen needed someone with the skills to model this situation, advise him on how to navigate the crises, the political minefields, and the damn Stabbies. The worst part was that he refused to recognize that he needed it.

Bridge or Meredith had better hurry, she thought. Otherwise, she was afraid she had a front row seat to a slow-motion disaster.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Two more days in quarantine had made Nick anxious. His energy had returned and he wanted to do something. And partly it was because Bridge had been jabbering into his netpad day and night since the Berlin Massacre, which made Nick feel useless.

Bridge was coordinating the offworld relief supplies and assistance for the German city. No Kagents were native to Earth and only a few, like Nick's aunt, spent some time there when they could. The older man hopped from one conference call to another.

Finally, the two men converted their beds back to chairs. The casino sent up a breakfast of crepes and some mushroom-based meat substitute called fausage, which tasted like sausage.

When they were done, Bridge tossed his own netpad aside in disgust and said, "It's time to begin your training."

He placed a different netpad on the small table. "Read the confidentiality and privacy rules and the Kagent Code. Then thumb your approval. These aren't like Earth non-disclosure agreements, full of legalese. They are clear, simple, and in a large font: here are the rules, you violate them and you're out, forever. Applies to everyone, no exceptions, no loopholes. These rules are strict, but it's how we protect privacy."

Nick forced himself to slow down and study the documents. There were no vague, open-ended, ass-covering clauses that he might violate simply by drawing breath; as Bridge said, the rules were as clear as they were strict. If he lost a netpad connected to the Kagent nets, he was out. If he violated the privacy code, he was out. If he abused the Kagent nets, he was out.

"So my aunt was kicked out when she gave me her netpad?" Nick asked.

Bridge shook his head. "No. She's smart — her netpad wasn't connected to the Kagent nets. She gave it to you just so the data would make it back to us."

Nick nodded and thumbed each approval box in quick succession.

"Congrats, you're now a Kagent," Bridge said. They shook hands. "One more thing," he said, turning solemn. "No Kagent has ever lost a netpad. Every copy is registered and traceable 24/7. There's a monthly identification challenge each Kagent must complete or the netpad kills itself. If there is any chance it may be captured or confiscated, destroy it. The Sphere's data could be used to cause a lot of harm. The penalty for losing it..."

"I get banned forever. I know."

Bridge smiled. "Welcome to the Sphere, Kagent."

Nick initialized the netpad to his own voice and thumbprint and then activated the Sphere. He expected to see an amazing program.

Instead, Cross' voice came out of the netpad. "Good morning, Nick."

"Uh, hey, what are you doing on here?"

"Bridge upgraded my personality."

Nick looked at Bridge in alarm. A Simon was supposed to fit its human user like a glove. He and Cross had worked together for years and functioned seamlessly. A change now could be really disruptive. Especially if there was universe-saving to be done.

The older man waved away his concern. "She's the same Simon you know and love. She just has our latest advances in AI. She can point out your cognitive biases, which will improve your decision-making, and push you to expand your analysis. No more walking into Borbola's traps so blindly."

"Like you did?" Nick laughed. "Hey, how come I haven't heard from your Simon?"

Bridge made a face. "He just tells me I'm being stupid, so I ignore him."

Nick chided with a smirk, "Maybe you should get another."

Bridge scratched his leg. "I'm fine with the way things are now."

"Based on our previous work together," Cross said, "I could help you avoid over two-thirds of the analytical dead-ends you have encountered in the last year. Primarily in avoiding cognitive biases and reminding you of blind spots in your thinking."

Nick raised an eyebrow. "Such as?"

"You're used to working alone. But I can confer with a thousand Kagent Simons. The Kagent nets offer a distributed analysis system including humans and Simons, distributed computing for really thorny forecasts, and a well-managed prediction market all rolled into one."

That actually sounded cool. But Nick was impatient. "Okay. Now open up the Sphere program. Nicholas wants to play."
CHAPTER FORTY

The Sphere's main screen was a real-time map of the solar system. Under each planet and the Belt was a menu with tabs for commerce, population, self-sufficiency, government, environment, and more. Red beams pulsed between locations.

Nick was in love.

Bridge came around his chair and peeked over his shoulder. "The first time I saw this, I got a headache. Do you need help? Good. Cross can probably answer any of your questions. I really should rattle my contacts on the ground." He returned to his chair, inserted his earbuds, and went to work on his own netpad.

Cross zoomed down to the Northam continent where Hamilton twinkled alongside the Mississippi River. An empty 3D chart hovered over the satellite feed and began to rotate.

[The probability that Hamilton avoids its crashpoint is on the vertical y-axis and time is on the horizontal x-axis. Crashpoints occur when a line intersects the horizontal axis.] A dot appeared in the center of the vertical axis, which represented the state of things today. The line sloped downward and hit zero in July.

[This is one projection: the best likelihood scenario according to the current meta-models. The z-axis indicates how much variance in the results we can expect if the assumptions and interactions differ from the best likelihood path.]

The graph populated with thousands of potential paths running through the three axes. Together, they resembled paint flying in slow motion from a kicked-over can: they splattered down on the x-axis in a long splashy streak. The median path, where half the crashpoint paths happened either earlier or later, hit zero survival probability in two months.

The paths formed a cone shape, with the tip starting in the present and spreading as the varying assumptions produced diverging results. Eventually the paths narrowed as they dropped toward the x-axis. At best, Hamilton would not survive through the end of the year.

[These models tend to be more accurate when lumped together in a meta-model.] She populated the graph with thousands of paths generated by models of models. The outcome cone this time was much tighter at the narrow end but its wider base was frayed like a wind-whipped flag.

Nick was equally thrilled by the Sphere and sickened by the projections of doom. "Is this crashpoint inevitable?"

[No. The Kagents believe it is artificial. It is highly unlikely, even for a black swan-type event, that recent events could happen in just this order. You can see how the projections change when I run different scenarios.]

She displayed a subset of projections; these hovered over the time axis but never touched it, and the probability of a crashpoint fell from ninety-seven to eighteen percent. [This is what happens if both the Stabilizers and Dragoons pull out of Hamilton this week.]

"That's wishful thinking. Control for other factors," Nick requested. He wished he could show this to Juan. He could run an entire consulting business out of just a subset of these projections.

Stats poured down the netpad's screen as the model accounted for dozens of other factors. The probability that the projected crashpoint would be unrelated to the Stabilizers was less than one-tenth of one percent.

The Stabilizers didn't realize how transparent their moves were to statistical analysis; there was no Earth-equivalent to the Sphere program to tip them off. That disparity, Nick realized, could be the Kagents' biggest advantage in preventing the crashpoint.

Nick drank an entire glass of lukewarm water and kept poking around the Sphere. "Cross, what happens if two people use the Sphere against the other?"

[It's never happened. Only Kagents can access the Sphere.]

Nick laughed. "And Kagents never compete against one another?"

[Generally not. That's why they screen recruits so thoroughly. Should I run that simulation for you?]

"Yeah, I'm curious."

[No, you're thinking about facing Borbola again.]

Nick grinned. How well did she know him? "Maybe. Maybe it's a way to test these models by putting one's butt where one's mouth is."

[That sounds unclean. Besides, Borbola no longer has access to the Sphere.]

Nick played with the projections, trying to reduce the crashpoint probability. Time slipped away from him as he failed again and again until he heard Bridge turn on the shower. According to the hotel alarm clock, it was early evening. Outside the window, it always looked like a clear, starry night.

When Bridge reappeared, his blond hair hanging down in wet strands over his bare shoulders, Nick said, "We have to tell Hamilton how bad this looks. They won't believe me, but—"

"Relax," Bridge interrupted. "Pam Sullivan is our liaison to the Hamilton government. It's up to her how much we tell them about the projections."

Nick gaped. "Pam Sullivan is working for you too?"

"She's working with us," Bridge corrected. "She's a business consultant and trade negotiator. Not all of us can be action heroes like me."

"But they need to know," Nick said, incredulous.

"We may have told Juan Burgess, eventually," Bridge replied, shaking his head, "but most Earth politicians can't be trusted to know how accurate the projections are. Some would turn on us, some would tell the public, others would disregard the projections as a threat to their authority."

Cross spoke up from the speaker of Nick's netpad, "Don't worry about selling the solution to Hamilton. Finding the solution in time will be the harder part."

Nick knew it took a solid decade to become an expert in anything, yet they wanted him to master the Sphere in a few days to solve a problem their experts had been wrestling with for years. The pessimist in him said that Hamilton would crash, and the Kagents would make him the scapegoat.

On the other hand, if there was a person better situated to succeed, they wouldn't have come to him. That was either a shot of confidence or a sign the situation was already completely fucked.

Nick smiled. "Does the Sphere predict that I will save the universe?"

Bridge didn't laugh. Nick suddenly realized that was exactly what the Kagents had done. They had modeled the scenario where a talented rookie Kagent like him jumped in, and it must have improved the odds enough to justify recruiting him. Shit.

Nick shook his head. "I can't be your best possible option. I'm not ready for this. I'll screw this all up. You can't afford that."

Bridge was unconcerned. "That's why combat lessons begin tomorrow."
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Two days later, Nick was sick of fighting virtual pirate ninjas. Flamboyant and stealthy, ruthless and invisible, they were as ridiculous as they were deadly.

It didn't matter that Bridge outfitted him with a new set of drones.

On Earth, bounty hunters prided themselves on how large their fearsome hovering drones were. So Nick was surprised when Bridge explained that Kagent drones were the size of a gnat. Instead of the usual dozen metallic ping-pong balls or plums, Nick was now the perplexed owner of three thousand flying robo-gnats made of nano-cellulose. They fit in a small clip-on compartment on his belt. Top-of-the-line, offworld models. It must have been what Borbola had zapped him with.

Nick practiced all morning on his smartshades in a virtual combat air patrol, or CAP.

Virtual Nick pulled a shuriken out of his virtual neck and quit the sim. "I missed something," he said. "Again."

[Drones 2342 and 2561 spotted a hostile you forgot about. But your drone CAP was much better,] Cross texted.

He pulled off his smartshades and swiveled to face Bridge, who was again jawing at Gateway Medical about ending the quarantine early.

Bridge finally hung up and looked at the clock. "Forty-five more minutes and I call the hotel and demand a hammerfucking hot tub." His strategy had evolved into irritating Medical by calling directly and pissing off the Too Screwed with outrageous demands so that they would badger Medical, too. "How's practice?"

"I can't keep track of all these feeds," Nick replied. Tracking two or three drone feeds was manageable, but tracking three-dozen drone feeds wasn't. Especially when each feed was made up of dozens of individual drone video feeds giving you a 360-degree field of view.

Bridge smiled. "Let Cross watch the feeds and consolidate the information for you. She'll track the threats better."

Nick preferred to eyeball every feed from his drones. Tracking hostiles with a cheesy master display while Cross spoon-fed him highlights sounded disastrous. It was his ass if she missed a single hostile, or failed to interpret body language, or any number of other things he had no confidence in a Simon doing.

Nick huffed and gave it a try.

After two sessions, the ninja pirates didn't get close enough to throw even one virtual shuriken.

"Great. Time for Phase Two," Bridge announced.

Nick wiped sweat from his forehead. "Two? Can't I enjoy Phase One a little longer?"

"Actually, Phase Two is Phase One. Phase One was just a warm up. I didn't expect you to cling to your amateur habits," Bridge said. "Phase Two is swarm combat tactics, akin to clouds of gas fighting one another. Tactics centered on maintaining cohesion and quickly focusing overwhelming force on a small area."

Bridge posted a tactics cheat sheet on the room's viewer. "The most conservative attack is the Flying Wedge. It provides the most protection to the attack drones and flies the slowest."

"Curling Pincers, my favorite, creates multiple, smaller Flying Wedges that approach the target from several directions. You strike much faster but do less damage because you can't mass the drones' electrical shocks and beam weapons.

"Dropping Mist disperses the drones over a wide area. They can sneak up on a target almost invisibly. It takes longer to coalesce, but is terrifying when it does.

"Reverse Dropping Mist makes the attacking swarm 'disappear' into thin air. Truly scary."

Nick ran through the Phase Two exercises for hours until taking down the ninja pirates became easy. Their cutlasses and katanas barely disrupted the airflow of Nick's virtual swarms.

"Can you defend against a swarm at all?" Nick asked while they prepped for another room service lunch.

"Do you plan on fighting another Kagent?" Bridge replied.

Nick put away his netpad. "Does Borbola count?"

Bridge groaned but projected more formations on the viewer. "The Thick Wall defense chews up a Flying Wedge by concentrating multiple drones on each attacker. Floating Buzzsaw counters Curling Pincers even if the defending drones are outnumbered. Dropping Mist is best countered with something called Zone Defense. Defenders guard specific zones of space in successive layers and pick off attacking drones as they enter their zone."

Bridge added hostile swarms to the sim. "Your opponents are now ninja pirate Kagents," he joked.

Nick went several rounds but managed to fend them off less than half the time. "You're not holding out on me, Bridge, are you?" he asked.

Bridge retrieved lunch from the hallway. It was instapizza, a cheap foodstuff reconstituted from a powder packet, a cup of water, and a microwave. An emergency ration. The Too Screwed may be trying to starve them out.

Bridge smiled. "Just keep close to me if there's any combat, okay? Remember, you're the brains, I'm the brute."

"Why don't you carry a gun then?"

"Because, I don't need more than my drones and this." With a flourish he withdrew from inside his cloak a silver cylinder about ten inches long. At first glance it looked like a nightstick. It had a handgrip on one end, but the business end was a highly-accurate chrome model of an erect penis, complete with a glans and a crooked vein.

Nick nodded casually. "So you sodomize opponents."

Bridge grinned. "Anything that gets through a drone CAP tastes this. One touch puts down a hard-charging asshole instantly."

Bridge fluidly whipped the stunstick around his body. It looked like an erotic interpretive dance by a golden-caped madman. It was funny until he finished with the cold metal glans pressed against Nick's windpipe.

Nick asked, "Okay, what's with the dick?"

Bridge stepped back and admired it. "It's easy to get past security. And no one wants to be knocked unconscious by it."

"Let me make sure I understand," Nick said. "A Kagent standoff is two guys throwing pixie dust at one other. And if that doesn't work they swordplay with dildos?"

Bridge raised a mischievous eyebrow. "This is more mature than shooting everything full of little metal lumps like some childish asshole."

Nick chuckled. "Believe me, pal, Earth is full of childish assholes."
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Bridge's multi-pronged plot against Gateway Medical finally paid off after lunch; they agreed to end the quarantine at midnight if both men were no longer contagious.

Then Pam called him. Bridge put her on the viewer's speaker so Nick could hear.

"I had to tell Fen about the Sphere's forecasts," she said. "He wanted to know more about how my negotiation projections were done," Pam replied. "Now he wants an update on the crashpoint projections from Nick."

Bridge grimaced, but said, "I'll make sure he's ready to do the briefing."

With only a few hours to prepare, Bridge hustled to find seats on the next shuttle flight down to Hamilton, while Nick began a marathon session with the Sphere.

He quickly slipped into a stream state. At some point, Bridge held out Nick's arm and a goofy robot in a paper hospital gown with blue balloons took a blood sample. Nick hadn't heard the robot enter the room, didn't notice it leave, but just kept on working.

After the robot left, Bridge stomped around the room, cajoling and browbeating someone on the netpad about hurrying up and ending the quarantine.

Pam called back. "Fen is already enlisting other zones and outside organizations to help the city," she said.

Nick sighed, dropping out of his stream state. "Fen should've consulted with me before doing that. It could backfire."

"I'll make sure to pass that along," Pam replied dryly.

"Sorry, I didn't mean he needs my permission," Nick said. "But I don't know what strategy he's working off of."

"We need to give him a strategy," Pam said. "He's a pragmatic politician, he feels his way through situations and does political calculations in his head that are often better than my negotiation models. What's the downside to bringing in some allies?"

Cross messaged that she was pulling up those results. The outcome cone shifted farther ahead in time when others aided the city. And the optimistic outliers stretched further into the future with external aid.

"He's right that it helps," Nick admitted. "But it's not enough. The median outcome shifted ahead about four days. About twenty percent of the outcomes became worse. There's a high probability that now that she is off the Council, Thrall also grabs for outside help. The worst change in outcome is one where the city becomes a proxy battleground for other zones fighting each other. We need a comprehensive strategy that accounts for the likely possible responses by Thrall, the Stabilizers, the media, and the public."

"There's two problems with that," Pam replied, "finding the right strategy, and selling Fen on it."

"If I find a solution, I'm sure you can sell it to him. If it saves the city, it shouldn't be hard to get him on board?"

Pam smiled. "Are you actually that naive, or are you just being cute?"

Bridge gave him a look and Nick smiled bashfully. He was serious; what was she talking about?

Pam continued, "Fen won't back a low-probability proposal. And if he hasn't figured it out for himself, even if you find the magic solution, he will be extra skeptical."

Nick shook his head. "But it's okay, because there are probabilities attached to each outcome."

Pam furrowed her brow. "And you think he's willing to bet his city's future on your probability estimates?"

"I'm using all the Kagent models I can find," Nick said. "We can make this happen."

"Alright," Pam folded her arms. "What do you have so far that pushes the probability above 75 percent?"

Nick opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

"Above 50 percent?"

"Above 33 percent?"

Bridge shook his head and walked over to look out the window.

Nick held up his hands. "I have barely gotten started. I have the baseline scenario, including Fen getting external assistance, at a 77 percent chance the city crashes in the next two weeks. That is with Fen doing everything he usually would. So the question really is, how much can he improve his chances? So far, about five percentage points."

"That's it?"

"I've barely started," Nick reminded her. "I just had the city take the same actions that other cities that avoided crashpoints took when the Stabilizers were active. I don't know for certain that those actions actually helped, only that they are outside of the city's probable options. I didn't even see what the actions were. Hang on. Cross can you post them?"

Cross listed them down the left side of Nick's viewer. "Uh, declare martial law, give birth, get shot, have an offworld firm announce 5,000 new jobs by opening a distribution center in the city."

"So we're screwed, basically."

"Shouldn't you have more faith in a fellow Kagent?" Nick said.

Pam had to smile at that. "Maybe. But you better start streaming, Kagent, you have to brief Fen soon."

Out of nowhere, Bridge whooped victoriously and chivvied Nick out of his seat. "The quarantine is over!" Bridge yelled into the viewer, his face gobbling up the image Pam was seeing.

"Eww. Good. Get your asses down here," Pam said.

Bridge ended the call.

"Hey, we were still talking," Nick said, punching Bridge on the arm.

Bridge smacked him on the shoulder. "Who gives a bullshit? We're outta here."

Since they never checked in, they exited the hotel without checking out or paying for anything. They took a tram to the Gateway liftport and boarded an Earth-bound shuttle.

Nick kept the Sphere running on his smartshades the entire time, so casinos and Hooligans whipped by in a blur of overlaid model projections. Nick barely noticed the acceleration forcing him deeper into his seat, the Moon dropping away, and the Earth growing larger on the viewers as he and Cross wrestled with the projections.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

When Cross texted that it was time for the briefing, Nick looked up and saw that the shuttle was entering Earth orbit. He felt like he had failed a timed test: he couldn't shove the median crashpoint probability below 75 percent. Why did he always have bad news for Fen Ferguson?

Nick felt doomed when Fen and Pam appeared on his viewer. Time to speak truth to power again. At least this time Fen wouldn't have him arrested.

"All of the typical policy responses are insufficient to prevent the crash," Nick said.

Fen raised an eyebrow, expecting to hear something more positive. "Even with public opinion coming back our way? What if we received outside assistance?"

"That's already built into the projections," Nick said. "Assistance should boost public confidence in the city. It could even alter the dominant media narrative from a 'Custer's last stand' storyline to something more dramatic. But it's not enough to nudge the median crashpoint probability under 75 percent."

Fen nodded. "That's all?"

"The outcomes vary, but half of them are no better than that, and half are worse."

"How it could be worse?" Pam asked.

"Other zones could retaliate by recognizing Nelsa Park as an independent zone and send Thrall money, weapons, even troops."

Fen rubbed his bald head in dismay. "We're talking with the Sancternal Guard about protecting the refugees and with offworld allies to provide material assistance. What else can we do?"

"Make the Stabilizers leave," Nick replied.

Fen sat back and folded his arms. "Nick, you're doing a great job in such a short time. And while fighting a Blight 5 infection, I hear? The important thing is we are making progress. What looks most promising?"

"I'm sorry, I wasn't joking. That is all I have so far that you're going to like."

Fen tapped his chin. "At this point, I'm open to the uncomfortable."

Pam said, "Invoke emergency powers."

Fen's pale skin went two shades whiter.

"Bear with us," Pam said. "Nick, tell him what happens under that scenario."

Cross displayed the most likely scenario if Fen adopted a Churchillian response, vowing to fight to the death, and invoking perfectly legal, and temporary, emergency powers. The outcome cone shifted a month later, but the crash would still happen.

Fen threw up his hands. "The media will say I'm as bad as Regina. They already portray us as each other's nemesis. And this still doesn't work?"

Nick spoke cautiously. "Public opinion would rally to you; the public wants strong, decisive leadership, which is why Thrall gained so much support early on. These powers would allow you to pursue unconventional tactics."

Fen grimaced. "What does that mean?"

Nick replied, "Nothing violent. I'm still figuring out what would work, but probably changing perceptions of—"

Someone offscreen handed Fen a netpad.

Fen's eyebrows climbed as he read it. "Nick, I'm sorry, but we have to go," he said in a panicked tone.

"What happened?" Nick said. Some part of his brain lamented having to rerun the projections again. The fateful part said that this was it, they were too late.

Fen handed the netpad to Pam, whose face went ashen.

"Nick, we'll be in touch," she said. And then killed the connection.

A minute later, the shuttle pilot came on the PA. "Sorry, people, but all flights to Hamilton are being diverted to Chicago."

Bridge and Nick exchanged a look.

"Hammerfuck," Bridge said quietly, so the toddler across the aisle couldn't hear him.

"Crashpoint," Nick uttered back.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The limo roared out of the city parking garage, slipping into the middle of the motorcade. Police Rolling Fortresses pulled up on either side, encircling Chairman Ferguson with armor and firepower. The motorcade surged into the night, sirens blaring and lights flashing. The red and blue light strobed across the limo's compartment between Pam and Fen.

Chief Reese had doubled Fen's security detail when Juan died, and doubled it again a few minutes ago because of the latest tragedy. He and his security detail now had a symbiotic relationship: if they protected him, he could protect them from Thrall handing over their jobs to the Dragoons.

Fen pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes as the limo approached his own district. Pam had never seen him under this level of emotional strain. Not even when Juan was killed. Everyone's eyes would be on him tonight, especially because this happened on his home turf.

All they knew so far was that an orbital cargo shuttle launched from the downtown liftport, suffered catastrophic engine failure, and crashed somewhere in Fen's district. No one knew how it happened, or how many casualties there could be.

"Goddamn spaceships are supposed to have redundancies and fail-safes up the ass," Fen muttered, breaking the silence.

Pam cleared her throat and shifted uneasily on the seat's crushed velvet.

He looked at her. "How bad will this affect things?"

She scowled. "Is this the right time?"

"It's okay, I need to focus on the bigger picture, just to help...," he paused as the words caught in his throat, "...help me stay collected enough to deal with this... situation."

Pam struggled with what to say next. "It depends. Will we let this crash affect liftport operations?"

The city's liftport and airports had stopped all flights after the crash. Normal procedure was to resume flights within an hour as the flight controller Simons rechecked everything.

He looked down at his netpad in disgust. "My box is full of messages from heartless SOBs only worried about the liftport and airports. Christ-fire and shit-polish."

"Someone has to keep their eye on the bigger picture and prevent more tragedy," Pam said. "But, like I said, we don't have to do it now."

Fen folded his arms. "Yes, please, let's address this now."

Pam took a breath. Having an argument now was just stupid. "What do you need from me right now, Fen? Let me help you."

In the dark, she couldn't be sure, but she thought she saw his eyes well up. He looked out the window and she actually saw tears running down his face.

He exhaled roughly. "Talk to me about the liftport. It's okay; this is the best my mental state will be for a while."

"It is the lifeblood of the city's economy," Pam said. "I assume the economic heavyweights will lean on us pretty hard to keep it operating."

"The Council may not give me a choice on this, I'm afraid," Fen said. "Norm messaged me that he wants to close the liftport until we sort out what went wrong. He'll get the votes."

Shit on a stick. After Marmalade, Pam had assumed that Fen had tamed the Council, pulled them over to his side. She hadn't thought success would be that temporary. "How can this happen?"

Fen grimaced. "Security concerns, plus wariness about offworlders, and raw emotional fallout from the assassination. It may turn back our way after a few days. Or it may not."

Pam shook her head. "A closure that lasts beyond, say, tonight could be the end," she said. "The offworld community will begin moving money and jobs out of Hamilton immediately. The orbital stations will want to know when to resume shipments, how to settle accounts, the works. Really, they will be asking if it's time for them to move on."

Fen looked at her and wiped his eyes. "I know. But there are times when it's better to go with the crowd to slow them down a little than to stand against them and get trampled."

Pam handed him a tissue from the convenience bar on the limo's door. "I saw something like this happen once to a Belt community during a trade dispute. They shut down trade for a week and the futures markets for orbital shipping firms tanked. There was no climbing out of the hole for a long, long time. Everything they did was too little, too late."

Fen's jaw set and his mustache became a horizontal line. "I hear you, Pam."

"I think you have to reassure everyone publicly, tonight, in your statement. At least give a timetable for re-opening the liftport."

Fen picked up his netpad and frowned. "You're right. But also wrong. There is no wiggle room on this issue, right now."

"I see," Pam said. "But Nick mentioned that in the last thirty years a liftport closure precedes eight out of ten crashpoints. It's a standard Stabilizer tactic. Think about it, if our liftport stays closed, refugee aid won't get through. Nick and the other Kagents won't get through."

Fen wagged his finger at her. "That doesn't mean that Stabilizers are behind it. It could have been an accident — although one with horribly convenient timing."

The motorcade swung around a traffic circle at high speed, forcing them both to the limo's right side.

Her eyes swept the floor between them. "How long will the investigation take?" she asked.

"A month. At least. Hard to reconstruct until they find the black box. But safety checks should be done in a day." Fen gave his netpad to her and folded his arms. "What do you want me to tell the media?"

She tapped for a full minute. She hoped this would sound okay. She gave the netpad back. "Here." She pushed her hair out of her eyes while he read.

His eyebrows shot up. "We wouldn't be able to back away from a statement like this. I may need to stay vague about when the liftport reopens. Also, it's inappropriate to address when victims' bodies haven't cooled yet. I have to be the shoulder to cry on and manage the recovery efforts. But at the same time keep the economy going and people happy. Tonight I have to be the shoulder."

Pam nodded but replied, "If you don't provide an estimate, the press will ask."

He looked out the window at the Fortress pacing the limo on the left. "Let them. I need to hear from the liftport people first. If the media wants to look heartless, I'll chew them out without losing it."

Pam frowned. "What do you want me to do?"

"I need you to stand there beside me. Your presence will help soothe the people we're about to disappoint."

He worked on translating his remarks into the cryptic notes he used when he made a speech. The limo stopped as he finished them up. Times like this he mostly spoke from the heart anyway; from a sympathetic, somber place that brooked no hatred or anger.

The door opened and the noise and burnt smells of the disaster rushed in as Fen bounded out. Pam followed close behind.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Lisa's hand shot to her mouth.

Luckily a few other people around her also gasped, too, so no one noticed. But she wasn't shocked for the same reason they were.

Everyone in the townhouse was gathered around the viewer in the front room, watching Fen Ferguson announce that the city had found four bodies at the crash site. Ferguson added that it was unknown if they were the ship's crew or people on the ground.

Lisa knew.

The crash was just supposed to scare residents about the offworlders and pressure the Council to close the liftport. No one was supposed to be hurt – the incident was supposed to be a wake-up call that avoided real tragedy. The orbital lifter that crashed was remotely piloted by a Stabilizer; it had no crew.

But people had died.

Lisa's eyes began to sting. She needed to leave this room right now. She looked at the front door, wishing it was an option, but not without an hour to prep a disguise.

Instead, she slipped through the crowd gathered around the viewer and hurried towards the kitchen, making a beeline to the basement door.

Daniel paced the kitchen floor on his netpad, making a statement about the tragedy. Lisa hurried downstairs to her secure vault without looking at him.

The tears kept coming.

She had chosen the construction site for the crash because it was on two deserted acres in the heart of the city. The general contractor building an apartment complex there had gone out of business a month ago, after digging a deep pit. While the legal fighting continued about breach of contract, the site was abandoned, closed, and surrounded by a twelve foot temporary wall. The entrances were all locked-up tight.

No one was supposed to be there tonight. Lisa even had the pilot check the site an hour before liftoff.

The dead must have snuck into the construction site afterwards. Their deaths were an accident, a fluke. Like the assassination happening as a result of the Stabilizers' phony corruption charges against Juan Burgess. Lisa had taken all the precautions she could, and still, people managed to die because of her.

The Stabilizers' non-violence directive was the pillar that she and Daniel built all of their actions on, both overt and covert. It wasn't just a moral principle; research had shown that violent terrorism was self-defeating and self-destructive. Nonviolent terrorism was ignored, often called dirty politics, and was highly successful. She had never questioned it. She had never even tried to circumvent it.

But there was still blood on her hands. Sure, everything came with risks of injury or death. Deliberately crashing an orbital spacecraft in a densely populated city was altogether different. The chance of something going horribly wrong was much higher than spreading a cold, faking a political scandal, or staging a protest at a liftport.

That additional risk was the real reason she hadn't told Daniel or headquarters about the orbital lifter ploy. Plausible deniability was an easy excuse to use for moral shortcuts. She simply added it to the other secrets she kept from them.

Maybe Hamilton was too big a prize, and her desperate eagerness to crash it had clouded her judgment. The stakes had loomed so large, maybe she had subconsciously dismissed risks and threats that would have stopped her otherwise. Maybe this moral failing was a change in her, driven by the relentless campaigns over the years. Maybe it had changed her without her noticing.

For the first time, Lisa considered quitting the Alliance. The orbital crash was so far outside what anyone in the Alliance would do. It said something about her moral makeup. She didn't fit the organization. In fact, she had become a liability who was endangering the organization and its cause.

She had no idea what she would do if she left though. Curl up in a Stabilized Community and live the tranquil life she had fought so hard for? She had imagined getting married and having ten kids. But that idea just never seemed appealing enough to do something about.

She sniffled one last time and turned her viewer to the city's press conference.

LIFTPORT CLOSED INDEFINITELY said the site.

Lisa's jaw dropped.

This was more than she could have hoped for. A closed liftport meant that the Stabilizers were on the verge of victory, or further. The city was that dependent on offworld commerce.

Lisa watched the Trade Representative stand silently next to Chairman Ferguson as he took questions. She looked pissed and defiant, standing there as Ferguson explained how the closure would work. That cold-hearted bitch probably only saw the lost money of the closure, not the lost lives of the crash.

A closed liftport meant that offworlders like Sullivan could no longer drop in on the city. Which meant, among other benefits, no more Kagents coming down to interfere with Stabilizer ops.

Too bad Sullivan hadn't been in that construction pit.

Lisa scolded herself for thinking that, despite her Kagent hatred. The tactical problem with death and violence in our business, Daniel had told her a decade ago, is that it can spiral out of control very quickly and very easily. It was why the Stabilizers didn't target cities with a high potential for violent outcomes.

Maybe they should have avoided Hamilton then. The city had already experienced an assassination, beatings by Dragoons, and now a deadly accident. But its crash would be such an achievement that it had compelled Lisa to ignore her own moral boundaries.

She wiped her eyes one last time and reviewed her intel, as inaccurate as it may be. But it confirmed her own intuition. The situation in Hamilton would disintegrate. The liftport closure would spark enormous economic frustration. Then the refugees would show up, with Regina Thrall's Dragoons ready to reenact the Berlin Massacre.

Would the police stand by if Thrall's Dragoons attacked the refugees? No, they would charge in, guns drawn, and no one would stand down.

If the city geysered blood, the crashpoint would happen instantly. But it wouldn't matter; it would be meaningless to the Stabilizers. Everyone would blame Thrall or a series of accidents, anything but the buzzer lifestyle.

For this crashpoint to count, it had to look natural, caused by the city's own residents rejecting Buzz Ratrace and his high-stress, money-obsessed lifestyle.

She had to figure out a way to prevent any more violence; or tonight's deaths, Juan Burgess' death, the liftport closure, everything, would be in vain. She couldn't rely on headquarters or Daniel.

Lisa realized in a flash there was only one way to pull this off.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Cross woke Nick the next morning by turning the viewer in his living room to net sites blaring bad news. Nick sat up on his couch, rubbing the stiffness out of his muscles, and learned that Hamilton's airports and liftports were still closed and all flights were cancelled.

Cross replayed the highlights: a burning crash site at night, long shots of fire companies hustling to put out the blaze, Fen's news conference. Pam was standing behind him.

Nick said, "What if Bridge and I drive to Hamilton?"

Cross gave a derisive snort. "Every traveler and kilo of air freight hit the crumbling highways yesterday."

She posted a live traffic feed of metallic ant lines creeping from Chicago toward the southern horizon. The viewer crawl said transit officials estimated the traffic delays at sixteen hours.

"Helicopters are also all booked for the next several days," Cross added.

Nick played Fen's press conference again. Pam stood prominently in the background, looking sad but defiant. The liftport administrator made a brief statement about safety checks. There wasn't any hint of when air or orbital travel would resume. Not good.

An hour ago, Councilor Regina Thrall put out a press release, taking credit for the liftport closure, and criticizing Fen's handling of air safety.

Bridge emerged from the bedroom naked and bleary-eyed. He padded over to squint at Thrall's image on the viewer.

"You're a fucking Napoleonette sitting on a fucking throne of psychological problems. I want to piss right on your perfect hair," he said and then padded into the bathroom. Bridge was not a fan of early morning crises, apparently.

Nick heard pee on porcelain through the open door and hoped this wasn't the sum total of the Kagent plan to save Hamilton. The older Kagent reappeared a few minutes later, dressed and looking somewhat calmer. He flopped down on the couch.

He and Bridge ate messy omelets and tacos delivered from a takeout place down the street. As they shoveled the food in, Cross showed them the new projections that incorporated the orbital crash and the liftport closure. She displayed them on the viewer so they both could groan in unison.

The outcome cone now tilted downward more severely: the city may have no more than a few days left. The most pessimistic projections indicated that the crashpoint began last night. Nick chose to ignore them.

Bridge grunted miserably, then started making calls and pacing around the apartment. Nick dug through the new results and called Pam on the pretense to update her. He really wanted to know why Fen had not consulted him on closing the liftport. And he wanted a chance to talk to Pam.

"Nick. You're not in Hamilton, are you?" she said when she answered.

Nick shook his head. "Chicago." He walked her through how much worse closing the liftport had made the projections. "When will it re-open?"

"There's a hell of a fight over that," Pam replied. "Norm Osprette and others on the Council want to block Fen's power to reopen until he agrees to have all ships hand-inspected before they land or launch."

"I thought Norm Osprette was on our side."

"When it comes to opposing Regina Thrall, yes. But this is a much different issue and is much more salient to him. He's not a fan of anything offworld, I've noticed."

"Not including you? No."

"I don't care," Pam said.

"Can't you use your witchcraft to change his mind?"

Pam gasped. "Excuse me, what witchcraft?"

"The models that simulate personal interactions and negotiations. You know, find his soft spots and brainwash him."

"You're starting to sound like a blue marble bumpkin," Pam said. "It's not cute."

Nick winced and cleared his throat. "Why didn't Fen consult me before closing the liftport and the airport?"

Pam sighed. "Politically, he had no choice. He heard an earful from me about it already. It's up to the Council now to decide how long the liftport and airport are closed. Tell me you have some good news."

Nick dug around in the projections. The Sphere's content and narrative analyses showed the media's coverage of the tragedy had mostly worked against the Stabilizers. The media had emphasized the city's excellent air safety record and the emergence of a Fen versus Thrall narrative. "The media coverage seems favorable to Fen."

"Great," Pam said. "Fen was right about that. See, no witchcraft. Now you and Bridge find a way down here before it's all over."
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Bridge continued pacing through the apartment like a lost, angry, yellow bear. That had to stop or Nick might have to kill him.

"What can we do from here?" Nick asked.

"Nothing, absolutely nothing. I need to get on the ground there," Bridge said.

Nick opened a live feed of an overhead shot of Hamilton. "Whatever it is we can do it from here, I bet. Come on."

Bridge huffed but looked at the feed. "This could get tactical very quickly. They go after the liftport every hammerfucking time. We need to give the city the earliest possible warning if the Stabbies are about to rush it. We need to find their base of operations, point the police at it."

"Sounds iron to me," Nick said. "Cross bring up footage from the latest Stabilizer rally."

Cross displayed an overhead shot of a crowd in a park in Carla MacMahon's district across the river in Keokuk.

"Back up the footage to see where they came from," Nick said. "Only sixteen percent are residents. Let's see where they came from and returned back to."

Bridge shook his head. "That won't work, they were across the river. See," he pointed as the rally broke up and people began to leave. "Cross how many of those people are heading into the subway system or a bus?"

[Eighty-seven percent.]

Nick said, "Tag people going into the subway or on a bus. See if we can pick them up when they appear elsewhere."

He turned to Bridge. "Between their hair, clothes, walking gait, and a rough height estimate, we'll match most of them when they come out. Bounty hunters track people across big city transit systems like this all the time."

Nick zoomed out from the subway station to watch the tagged Stabilizer protestors emerge from other stations and fan out to their homes or hotels, like purple ants crawling on a city map. The purple ants broke up into smaller and smaller clumps until the last few individuals disappeared into buildings on the city's eastern edge.

Bridge was about to say something, but Nick held up a finger to silence him. "Hold on, I'm not done there, Mr. Patience."

"Cross, drop everyone who is a city resident, everyone who entered a restaurant or takeout place. See? The rally ended during the dinner hour. Also highlight locations where more than three of the protestors entered with a purple 'X'. If it is a retail establishment, track them when they leave."

The image on the viewer blinked with twenty-two purple 'X's. Bridge squinted at the addresses. "Some of those are residential housing."

Nick noted the time index when each protestor entered a location. "This is probably where they stayed overnight. Could be Stabbie residents. They are probably not headquarters or a safe-house. Cross, run the same analysis of where they came from on their way to the rally."

Cross posted these additional purple 'X's.

Bridge looked at Nick, expecting something else.

Nick grinned. "Okay, Cross, query the ownership records for those locations. Highlight rentals, any that changed hands in the last year or two, or any connected to a suspected Stabilizer company."

He turned to Bridge. "You said the Stabilizers are good at hiding their tracks."

"Yeah, and you're not going to find them. The people who show up to the rallies are the window dressing, Nick, the cover for the real operatives. The Stabilizers know the authorities will watch them. The dangerous people are nowhere near there."

The real estate records came up.

"Most of those corporate shells listed as the owners," Bridge said, "are Stabbie fronts. I've seen them before." He shook his head. "What I need to do is get down there on the street and check them out."

"So you think they spent all that money for their front operation and house the real operations separately?" Nick asked. His mind boggled at the expense. "They would spend double this much just renting space for nothing? How loaded are they?"

Bridge sighed. "We've never gotten a handle on their finances. They're data is locked up on darknets, they're not on the BHN, they're completely inaccessible."

Nick laughed. "I could have told you that. All of our back home net access was run through those darknets. They blocked as much coming as they did going out. When I was an angsty teen wanting to leave home, I assumed they were blocking the real world, because it was so much better."

Bridge spread his hands. "Regardless, who cares about a bunch of college kids programming e-picket signs? The police need to know where the real bad guys are hiding."

Nick thought about it for a few seconds. Something about the real estate ownership data – he snapped his fingers.

"Would they use a separate set of front companies to purchase the real estate for their covert spaces?" he asked. "Cross, show us all other real estate transactions for any company or person involved in getting these properties."

Four more locations appeared.

"Any overt Stabilizers going in and out of those locations in the last couple of months?" Bridge asked.

[None]

Nick said, "Try to ID anyone coming or going from them. If they're Stabbies, they won't be on the BHN."

Cross scrolled a list who, like Nick before he left home, had almost no BHN record. She had organized it by the locations where they were sighted.

"Good work, Nick, can you give me that list of locations?"

"I thought we were handing them to the police," Nick replied.

Bridge laughed and slapped him on the back. "Yes, of course. But my specialty is to put feet on the ground and check things out without staring at a viewer all day. I'll make good use of them, whenever the hell we get into town."
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Thanks to Pam, Nick and Bridge were on the first flight to touch down when Hamilton's airport re-opened at sunrise the next morning. The liftport would remain closed.

Nick thought it was odd how peaceful the city appeared as it woke up. The early morning could lull you into thinking the city's troubles had faded away. But across the city, he knew a bunch of people saw this same morning as a fresh opportunity to rip the city apart.

When Nick and Bridge climbed in a taxi to head to Civic Center, Bridge announced he was too exhausted to be of any use.

"I didn't sleep at all last night," he explained. "I can't see straight, much less think clearly."

Nick relented: Pam needed him, not Bridge, at Civic Center ASAP. He directed the taxi to drop Bridge off at a hotel that Cross picked out for them.

After Bridge lumbered out, Nick pointed the taxi at Civic Center and caught up on the local news on the drive over. While the Council had opened the city's three airports, it kept the liftport closed. The Stabilizers had announced large street rallies to celebrate.

The media was working itself into a frenzy over the refugees due to enter the city in the next two days. Reporters stalked every Councilor in hopes they would comment on the liftport, the refugees, the Dragoons, or the Stabilizers. The pundits and talk show hosts were in round-the-clock mode already. And then Fen's office announced he would make a major address later that day.

The fate of the city could rest on his speech, a pundit said breathlessly on Scoop, only to be called naive by the show's host, who proclaimed the city dead already.

"Cross, display the media narrative trends," Nick said.

On his smartshades, a graph appeared with time on the X-axis and the degree of trending by various narratives along the Y-axis. Nick had flagged the narratives he thought the Stabbies benefitted from the most: job loss due to the refugees, costs of the buzzer culture, and the Martian Cocktail.

He added the spaceship crash narratives to the dangerous narratives list. There were two narratives competing for eyeballs and ad space: the pro-Stabilizer focus on offworld dangers and the pro-offworld reporting on the economic havoc caused by the liftport closure. So far, the dangers narrative was far ahead, but it was beginning to crest.

"Mark the time of the accident and then compare the narratives in other cities after similar accidents," Nick said.

[I have to generalize across several cities and incidents,] Cross texted. She posted a new graph that showed competing media narratives about a tragic accident or incident and how they evolved over time.

The dangers narrative always crested as the incident caused a wave of fear that then subsided. The costs of a closed bridge, liftport, or other impediment to offworld trade matched and then exceeded the fear of more low probability tragedy. In other words, life went on.

Nick fiddled with the chart. He compared cities that had Stabbies against those that didn't. He wasn't surprised to see the Stabbie-afflicted cities had a bigger ratings bounce for the offworld dangers narrative than other cities.

"Is this Stabbie difference significant?" Nick asked.

[Yes. Do you think the Stabilizers have influenced the media somehow?]

"Yes. I don't know how, maybe their pretty boy Sloan, or some other way." Nick stroked his chin.

The taxi approached Civic Center. "We still don't know how the Stabilizers have influenced the media narratives. Cross, dig into who is pushing these narratives. Isolate the media sources and then compare to what they have done historically. Flag anyone who changed their tune after the Stabilizers came to town but before public opinion swung their way. Ignore the pundits and politicians who have always been sympathetic to the Stabilizers. I want to know who started singing a different tune when they came to town."

The taxi pulled up to Civic Center and Nick hopped out. Pam met him in the lobby after he cleared security. She had a tight-lipped smile, her hands clasped together, and gave him a cold, curt nod.

He wondered why he got that reaction. Was it because they were in front of guards and cams, or was it the accelerating crisis? Maybe he had done something wrong.

"I think the Stabilizers have some control over the media," Nick said.

Pam didn't look at him. "Interesting, but that won't help us right now."

Nick waited for her to elaborate, but she said nothing. He followed her up to the eighteenth floor where the Council offices were located.

They passed by mostly empty offices and dark cubicles in the Chairman's suite. "Awfully quiet here," Nick remarked.

"Fen ordered most of the staff to get a decent night's sleep," Pam explained. "After this Stabilizer rally, he may need them pulling long nights."

Nick had seen other elected officials let the adrenaline of a crisis march them and their staffs into a mind-frozen exhaustion that led people to make horrendous mistakes.

"How come that doesn't apply to you?" Nick asked gently.

She looked at him as she opened the door to a conference room. "Someone has to be on-call. And they probably won't need a Trade Rep very much when the crunch comes," she said. "But I hope you are fresh, because you need to work your magic before Fen gives his speech."

Nick laughed at the impossibility of performing magic when he hadn't learned enough tricks yet. But Pam didn't even smile and he murdered his chuckle with a strangled gurgle.

"We need to neutralize the Stabilizers before they do anything else," Pam said. "But we can't have this appear politically-motivated. We need probable cause for search warrants. Which means you have to analyze city records, public cam footage, anything within the bounds of the privacy laws so the police can disrupt the Stabbies. 'Roust them' is the term the Chief used, I believe."

"Roust?"

She nodded and activated a viewer that had video feeds coming from the city's Emergency Operations Center. "The EOC will let you access police intel, deployment of city resources, and most importantly, overhead surveillance, all from one source."

Nick would have a bird's eye view of the entire city. More importantly, it would give him the speed he needed to rifle through the city's databases as fast as he could rifle through the BHN.

"I'll need to go to the contractor room in the basement to use this," he said, starting to get up.

Pam gripped his shoulder and sat him back down. "Not any more. You're a Kagent now. Since you comply with the city's privacy codes you can access the city nets right from your netpad. I'll help get Cross linked up. You just have to be onsite to retain access."

Pam led him out to the cubes and activated an empty one. She took his netpad and talked Cross through how to sync up to the city's intranet.

While they walked through protocols and security handshakes, Nick's focus bounced around like a grasshopper. "What about the refugees? Councilor Thrall made threatening noises in their direction."

"Don't worry about Thrall," Pam said with a smile. "And we have outside help for the refugees. Focus on the Stabbies. The judges are waiting to approve surveillance warrants. We need something in hand at least an hour before Fen's speech at four." She looked at him carefully. "Do you think you can do that?"

Nick wanted to say 'hell no', but Pam didn't look like she would accept that. Her hand was warm and steady on his shoulder. He liked the way it felt there.

Instead, he nodded and said. "Sure. That's why you recruited me, right?"

She patted his shoulder and left.

Nick found an interface scheme he could use to navigate the city intranet as fast as possible. Another of his tricks that made him appear fast but really just reduced wasted time.

Maybe the city intranets had something he could hang a warrant on. He noted how fast three o'clock was approaching and cleared his brain of distractions.

"What's the plan?" Cross asked.

Nick carefully set his netpad down next to the terminal. He looked from the viewer to his netpad and back. "Not sure. So let's do the usual: take some shortcuts, grind our way through, and hope inspiration strikes. The Kagents wanted me because I am fast, right?"

"Given the circumstances, they probably took you because they are desperate," Cross pointed out.

Nick replied, "Thanks for the confidence boost."
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Bridge had actually slept fine the night before; he just needed to lose Nick for a while. He checked into the hotel and was back in a taxi less than two minutes later, heading to the central hub of the city bus system. His netpad displayed the map of Stabilizer safe-houses that Nick had created. He purchased a pass and hopped on a bus.

This was not the time for a personal errand with the entire solar civilization on the verge of crashing. But he rationalized. He was still on the job, casing the Stabbies, right? He had full authorization from the Kagent Privacy Council. So what if it happened to coincide with personal business?

In the space of ninety minutes, Bridge scouted an office building the Stabilizers used for logistics and administrative support, a warehouse-turned-Stabilizer hostel, and the floor above a hair salon that the Stabilizers rented for demonstration prep.

A Kagent with a couple thousand drones can cover a lot of ground quickly. His gnat-sized spies squeezed under doors or through window screens to scan the faces inside.

Each time, Bridge felt a fresh stab of disappointment when he saw the results, despite having braced himself for failure. He would catch the bus to the next location, consoling himself that at least he was identifying dozens of Stabilizers ahead of their street protest.

By noon, he was thoroughly discouraged. There was nothing to suggest that the woman he was searching for was here in Hamilton. At least, nothing other than his instincts.

His discouragement was not just because his search so far had been fruitless. He eavesdropped on the other bus riders, to hear firsthand what the city was thinking and feeling. He needed to see the body language and hear people speak their minds. After the Hamilton crisis was over, he would train Nick in how a bus ride could be more informative than a thousand fancy projections.

The orbital lifter tragedy and the Dragoons patrolling swaths of the city had people worried. Even the kids dangling their feet from the plastic seats looked wary and uncertain. He overheard one rider wonder if it may be time to move to Cascadia.

The last stop on his bus tour of Stabilizer safe-houses was a heavily-wooded street of brick townhouses. The shades were drawn in every window and there was no sign of life.

Bridge sent a pair of drones to slip under the front door but they couldn't slip through. The door had a sweep along its bottom edge that sealed the doorway almost airtight. The vents were sealed up too. Could be a coincidence, or maybe the Stabilizers here knew how to keep Kagents from poking around inside. Hope began to rise.

He couldn't hang around out here on the street; a loitering offworlder may prompt a nosy neighbor to call the police. He parked a drone on a tree branch to watch the townhouse's front door and another to watch the back. Then he walked back to the main boulevard and hailed a taxi.

An old model Rolling Fortress pulled up and he climbed inside. The drive program asked for a destination. Bridge cracked the window open and told it to stay put. The meter started running.

While he waited, Bridge checked Nick's latest projections and groaned. The median outcome path projected the crashpoint to happen this week. Nick was probably in way over his head, but there wasn't much more Bridge could do to help him. But what choice did they have?

Once again he debated whether he should be bothering with this errand. But his reasons for doing this were just as urgent, if the crashpoint was imminent, as the reasons to go help Nick. He faced a balancing act of opportunities and regrets.

Thirty minutes later, Bridge's Simon sounded an alarm.

He hoped to just sneak a drone inside when the townhouse door opened, but when he saw who exited the townhouse, his heart leapt into his throat. He had half-believed this was just another lark, a long-shot guess that she might be here with the Stabilizers. Just like his last two trips to this planet where he had come up empty-handed.

But there she was, in plain view. Like his Simon, he recognized her face in an instant. She had changed: she was a decade older and a lot heavier. Her hair was blonde now. Although he remembered it being copper, similar to her mother's, things like that can change several times for women over that many years. It was tucked into a wide-brimmed hat protecting her pale face from the sun.

She walked in a series of quick, tiny steps that seemed unlike her, but then again, he had never seen her walk in an Earth gravity environment.

She climbed in a tiny car at the curb and took off, with his drones clutching its roof. Two turns later and she passed right by his taxi. Bridge recovered the drones through the window and had the Rolling Fortress slip into traffic behind her.

She parked at an open-air market in the retail stretch of town. Bridge followed her to the food court. She bought food at a German salad place, sat at a table, and read a netpad as she munched away.

Bridge moved in.
CHAPTER FIFTY

Nick said, "Okay, Cross, as a fallback, scan the HAP archives and ID city residents identified at the Stabilizer street protests. Send the list to the city judges for surveillance warrants for full-on BHN probes."

[That could be over 800 warrants and counting. It will take them a while to work through them all.]

Surveillance Warrants. A lifelong Kagent with such a Warrant in hand for the first time in her life probably felt an illicit thrill at accessing something as forbidden as individual-level data. But for Nick, it was like being a coroner dragged out of retirement who realizes the autopsies she used to do by the dozen were much more upsetting than she remembered.

"Let's hope so," Nick replied. Once he had those Warrants in hand, with nothing else on the Stabilizers and time running out, he would be forced to use them. Probing each protester wasn't just distastefully intrusive; it was most likely fruitless. They were probably like his parents, innocent true believers who were an unwitting diversion from the covert ops.

So he had to find something before the Warrants came through: a second deadline to work under. Between the Kagent nets, the city's intranets, and non-intrusive queries on the BHN, he had to find something.

"Did you scan all audio by identified Stabilizers for anything suspicious?" Nick asked. The cams had mics as well.

"The Stabilizers know how to stay quiet," Cross said. "The city hasn't even caught their spokesman Daniel Sloan plotting openly, despite over twenty hours of footage."

Yes, the Stabilizers were incredibly secretive for a public advocacy group. Their leaders stayed out of sight, letting slick public relations operatives like Daniel Sloan be their public face.

Nick snapped his fingers. "Does Sloan show up at all on surveillance?"

Cross displayed a number of videos of the middle-aged Stabilizer leader at a protest and entering or exiting various safe-houses. [He doesn't appear to hide.]

Nick's heart rate ticked up as the Chairman's staff trickled back to work. The background noise rose to a frantic but subdued hum of activity. It reminded Nick that he was running out of time.

The covert Stabilizers were mixed with the overt protestors and advocates, like Sloan. How could he separate them? They had to move through the city somehow, unless they were stuck in their respective safe-houses. But to run these covert ops, at least some of them would have to be out and about.

"Tag everyone coming and going from a Stabilizer location," Nick said to Cross. "See if any avoid public surveillance for an extended period. In the areas with lousy coverage, compare to other people in that same area, to isolate those who really made an effort to avoid detection as opposed to chancing into it."

A sandwich and a bottle of water appeared within arm's reach – somebody was wheeling a cart around to feed and water the staff. Nick ate in quick, distracted bites. It was some kind of seafood paste on sourdough that stuck to his tongue. He reached for the water bottle as Cross posted results on the viewer.

Five women came up, or at least people who looked like women.

Nick watched clips of them moving through the city. All five failed facial recog checks, even the more advanced Kagent ones, by hiding their faces with hats, sunglasses, long hair or other headgear. All five had a skin tone shared by about 40 percent of Hamilton's population – pale, Caucasian skin, lighter than Nick's.

"Can they be the same person?" Nick asked. "Compare their body shapes, see how many different ones there are."

Cross posted silhouettes of all five according to the same scale. She measured bust size, hip width, shoulder width, torso and leg proportions, and even head size.

[They could be the same woman, if she used extensive body prostheses to alter her proportions.]

"But the minimum torso, leg, and head proportions wouldn't change," Nick said. His instincts were tingling like an arm that fell asleep. "Is the walking gait analysis the same for all of them?"

Cross played clips of the women walking while she ran the analysis. [They appear to be different, but not significantly. Shoe differences make it too difficult to know for sure. Some of them are in high heels, others are using orthotics, one has a slight limp that looks fake.]

"A fake limp?"

[The limp varies beyond the standard variance of limps.]

"You averaged limp variances?"

[A surveillance researcher in London did. Someone faking a limp can be spotted easily compared to those who have a limp as part of their natural walking gait.]

Cross posted a bunch of formulas on the viewer related to lateral shoulder and hip movement, but Nick waved it away.

He doubted that a squad of covert Stabilizer ninja women were slipping around the city at will, unidentified. "Let's assume it's one woman. So how does she compare with the virus bomber?"

[How do you mean?]

Nick waved his hand in circles. "Surveillance avoidance. Would she need a Simon or a partner to feed her the precise directions to dodge it, like we did in the test?"

[Yes, the only way to exploit all of the coverage holes is to make certain movements at precise moments. Turning your face one way, turning your body another. These women or woman have done that.]

"Is she using the same techniques each time?" Nick asked.

[I can't say with any statistical confidence.]

"Let me have a look then."

[No. When you have done a visual analysis in the past, you fixate on insignificant factors and fall victim to cognitive biases.]

Nick emptied the water bottle. "Fair enough. Is there any way to track her? To find out which location she was last at if the police want to grab her today?"

Cross posted stills of the disguised woman. [She has no visible scars or tattoos, and the use of facial disguises makes it nearly impossible to provide a sketch. With all the traffic at the Stabilizer locations, it will be difficult to spot her quickly enough.]

"Okay. We'll have to use her minimal body dimensions. Wait," Nick said.

He peered at a still photo from the video footage.

"Give me all the stills you have of her bare arm, right here," Nick drew a circle above the back of her right arm above the elbow. "And magnify that area."

[Do you mean zoom and enhance?]

Nick sighed. Cross had a weird sense of humor. "Yes."

[Say it.]

"Zoom and enhance."

Three more stills appeared onscreen. They showed a birthmark slightly darker than the skin around it, about five centimeters above her elbow. The phantom woman may not even know it was there.

"I think there's one phantom woman and she's trackable when she wears short sleeves," Nick said. "Luckily, the weather is getting warmer."

[I will run a constant scan for her on the city surveillance grid.]

"If she wears a jacket," Nick said, "try to isolate her using the minimum body shape profile."

Just after noon, Cross finished searching for the phantom in other cities that had been crashed by the Stabilizers. The same phantom woman appeared in each one and in warmer weather she had the same birthmark.

"How is it going?" Pam said, appearing in the cube entrance.

Nick beamed. He updated her, trying to stay calm and professional. He was about to tell her how he had figured out how to track the phantom, when he realized Pam looked distracted. "How are you?" he asked.

She looked at him and smiled. "Starved. Want to get lunch?"

Nick pointed to his half-eaten sandwich on the desk and shrugged. He realized the subtext too late: she was asking him out to lunch, not if he needed to eat.

Pam eyed him uncertainly as he squirmed. She reached out and snatched the sandwich off the desk. She kept looking at him as she took a huge bite. Then she leaned against the cubicle wall and chewed. "You were talking about a ghost or something?" she asked.

"A fake identity and an untraceable person. She vanished after a traffic stop where she probably infected Patient Zero with Blight 5. She knows how to elude city surveillance."

Pam swallowed. "That should be impossible, even for a bounty hunter. There are cams and sensors everywhere. Do you have any water?"

Nick pointed at the empty water bottle. "It's possible to slip through surveillance, but you need a Simon to tell you how. Cross and I tested that, but this woman does even better."

Pam stopped chewing. "Really?"

"She uses disguises and alters her features and even her walking gait. And she has stopped at almost all of the Stabilizer locations that Bridge and I discovered."

"Can you tell where she is now?"

Nick shook his head. "No, but we know how to track her. The weather has been warm enough for short sleeves." He told Pam about the birthmark.

Pam nodded and brushed crumbs off her hands. "You're saying that Blight 5 can be connected to the Stabilizers? To Sloan?"

"Tangentially, but it's enough for probable cause on a search warrant. Maybe even enough to bring Daniel Sloan in for questioning." Nick pointed to new results showing up on the viewer. "Phantom woman shows up in each city the Stabilizers have been in for the last decade. She's even been out in public with Sloan."

"Here? Recently?"

Nick brought up a series of images. "She and Sloan visited several Council offices here in Civic Center just recently."

Pam's eyes widened. "And she's the same woman who spread Blight 5?"

"Probably. The Stabbies have been visiting Council members frequently for the last six months. But this was the only time I spotted her in Civic Center. After the assassination. If she passes through security, she doesn't pose as much of a threat as Bridge, I or any cop who was infected would."

Pam wrinkled her nose. "Yes, that makes sense."

Nick grinned. "But she's our only lead to the covert Stabilizers. We could bring Sloan in for questioning to give her up. Maybe we can expose their covert operation." As soon as he said it, he felt like an over-excited six year old.

"Don't get too excited there. I mean, you did great work here, Nick. I just don't want you passing out right here in the damn cube farm." She laughed. "Send a summary to me, the Police Chief, and the Chairman's assistant Malcolm. And get back to saving the city." She gave him a warm smile and left.

"Oh, and Nick," she said as she walked away, "Thanks for lunch."

Nick bowed his head to her, feeling giddy but trying not to show it.

His good mood pissed away like tea thrown on lava when Cross posted the new crashpoint projections.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

"No decent spinach-pizza wraps on this planet, huh?"

Lisa jerked around as if someone had plunged a knife between her shoulder blades. "Oh my god!"

Bridge waited for her to stand and hug him, but after an awkward pause, he slid into the seat across from his stepdaughter. There was a day, not all that long ago it seemed, when she would've jumped into his arms and tried to squeeze the breath out of him.

Instead he tried to gloss over the awkwardness. "How are you? It's been a long time."

"Yes it has," she said guardedly.

Their history replayed silently between them. A cycle of teen angst fermenting into philosophical arguments, ad hominem attacks, yelling, tears, threats, and reconciliations. Meredith, the unmovable block, versus Lisa, the unstoppable force, with Bridge caught in the middle.

One day, when she was sixteen, neither woman would reconcile, and Lisa sent her mother an emancipation notice. Bridge, half asleep and looking for a breakfast burrito in the kitchen, found his wife slumped against the cupboards, clutching her netpad, weeping and cursing.

That was over ten years ago.

Lisa recovered from her shock. "You've been looking for me."

"Every chance I get. What do you expect? You haven't called. For a decade. We're worried you were dead."

"Why would I call? Did you forget why I left?"

"I know there were problems, but you and I," Bridge smiled, "we were special. We always could talk things out." He kept the smile running but it became more and more forced as she did not return even a slice of it.

She stabbed at her wrap in angry half-thrusts, but the disposable fork came up empty each time. "It's because of her, not you."

"Lying to me won't make me feel better."

"Well, it was you, too." She finally scored some food and took a quick bite. She looked at him warily as she chewed.

Bridge hung his head. "It is hard to accept that you believe the things you do, given everything."

He looked around the crowded food court, the hurried eaters and clattering loud-talkers. He wished he and Lisa could go somewhere else for this talk. "When you get older, you value your loved ones more. These disagreements are meaningless crap in the grand scheme of things. People don't always get along; it doesn't mean you have to cut them out of your life forever. After all this time, couldn't you have let us know that you were okay?"

"Mom doesn't know you're looking for me, does she?"

Bridge swallowed. "I didn't think I'd find you."

She pushed her food around the plate, looking glum. "Tell her I'm doing well, Bridge. I want her to know that. How is she?"

Bridge swung out his netpad and showed Lisa a recent picture. "Good as ever."

"God, you guys are getting old," Lisa mumbled and then smiled.

Bridge grinned. "Yeah, my knees and back can't handle this gravity like they used to. But you're older, too. Time is passing. We've missed you. We've been worried, knowing you're with the Stabbies."

Surprise flashed through Lisa's eyes, followed quickly by anger. "I hate that term."

"Sorry. You've been with them for a while now, right?" Bridge put the netpad away. "Moved up, seen how dangerous they are."

She regarded him with a silent snarl he remembered seeing a decade ago. There was a darkness behind her eyes now though, the years of experience seeping out as she said, "You have no idea how much I know."

He couldn't believe she had seen the things he knew about and still chose to stick with them. "This city won't give up. This will get ugly, Berlin-ugly. I don't want you around for that."

Lisa straightened her shoulders. "I can take care of myself. And I don't think there will be any massacres here."

Bridge leaned forward. "This situation is the most out of control I have ever seen, Lisa. There are Dragoons involved. This is serious."

She smiled confidently and replied, "Are you arresting me?"

"Not a bad idea, actually." Nick, Pam, any other Kagent would drag her in for questioning. It would take her out of play for the duration, protect her from whatever was coming.

But hauling her in would only drive her further away from him and Meredith. And doing so could possibly drive Meredith away from him, too. He was trying to sew his family back together, not rip it apart even more.

He clasped his hands. "Please, please, take a pass on this one. Move on to the next zone, the next campaign."

She folded her arms. "Why don't you? Like you said, you're getting too old for this."

He pulled a half grin. "Never! Besides, I can't sit this one out."

She shook her head as if to clear it and answered in a calm, measured tone, "And neither can I. I didn't ask you to come here, but I am glad we got to see each other." She took his hand. "And I don't want to see you hurt either, Bridge. Really, I don't."

Her guard dropped for a moment. "Maybe after this is over I'll get in touch with you, try to patch things up. If you asked me ten minutes ago, I would have said 'no' without giving it a second thought. But now, it is a maybe. And maybe I won't. But none of that can change my work."

She looked around, let go of his hand, stood up, and sniffled. "I, I can't be seen hanging out with an offworlder like this. Especially a crazy one. Hurts my rep." She grinned for a moment.

"Lisa, come on..."

She choked out, "Send Mom my love," and then hurried away. His little stepdaughter, all grown up, strutting off to battle. Against him. Hammerfuck.

He stared at her unfinished spinach wrap rather than watch her leave again. This had not unfolded at all like he wanted. Ten years down the road and they still could not connect.

It was only later that afternoon that it occurred to him that he had unwittingly divulged something important to her. He had the strong feeling it was something really important. Was it about Meredith? Or the city's situation? Or what he knew about the Stabilizers? After all these years, Lisa could probably still read him like a book, like she did as a teenager.

For the life of him he couldn't figure out what it was. Something had gone terribly wrong in that conversation, and it gave him a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He could not fuzz out the details but he knew that it was really, truly bad. He had really screwed something up.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Nick stared at the line of city survival probability as it sank to zero by tomorrow. That was the most likely scenario. The outcome cone stretched from today to only two weeks into the future.

He spun the graph around on his smartshades, hoping a different angle would reveal some hidden, positive aspect of the results. But a turd viewed from multiple angles was still a turd, he thought.

His stomach twisted, the air fled his lungs, and cortisol flooded his bloodstream, with his heart hammering away like a piston of fear.

[You cannot think clearly when you're that upset,] Cross texted.

"Easy for the emotionless Simon to tell the gland-driven meat puppet," Nick groused. "How did the earlier projections turn into... this?"

Cross posted an animated chart that showed how the outcome cone shifted in the last three months. She tagged the disasters on the timeline to show how each one pulled the outcome cone down closer to a crashpoint. As the time index scrolled closer to the present, the outcome cone shrank, like a trumpet smashed into the ground in slow-motion.

Nick shifted his weight from one foot to another. He wanted to sit down, he wanted to lie down, but the cubicle desk was at waist height because it was meant to be stood at. So he kept standing.

[You need to tell the Chairman.]

"No one will believe this," Nick waved his hand at the outcome cone. Quantifying something made it more real and a lot of people were distinctly uncomfortable with anything more than a feeling that a horrible situation existed.

"I barely believe it," he added and highlighted the median path among the most likely scenarios. "How does the crashpoint ultimately happen?"

[Either the city fails to contain the Stabilizer protests tomorrow, or Thrall's district is recognized by another zone, or the liftport stays shut a full week, or the refugees are hurt by the Dragoons, or the Dragoons and police fight one another. There are any number of paths to a crashpoint.]

"But there still must be uncertainty that any of those events will trigger a crash."

[Crashpoints are political phenomena. Altering the public's opinion about whether the city will survive is difficult to estimate.]

Nick selected the median path, while recriminations intruded into his thoughts. He didn't know the Kagent models, data or methods well enough. The city wouldn't jump into action with a novice Kagent fumbling around, trying to explain things.

"I need to see how this one path was projected," Nick said.

[You don't have time for that. You need to keep moving.]

"If I can't explain what's going on, they won't buy anything I say. I have to make this real to them and address every doubt they express."

[How about just the median path? It came from a Kagent meta-model named Fizz626. It aggregates other models' projections to account for discrepancies and limitations of individual models. It has a high accuracy rate.]

She posted Fizz626's inputs on screen: thirty-five macro-projector models, seven agent-based simulators of City Council interactions, twenty-five agent-based simulations of the media outlets and the resident population, and another fourteen micro-projector models of the population.

Fizz626 reran those underlying models with the most likely events and parameters for how the political, media, and resident populations would react to the most likely events.

"Okay. What are its limitations?"

[Critics say the model has a conventional wisdom bias; sub-par long-range accuracy; and discounts unconventional situations too much, such as low-probability, high-risk events and disasters.]

"Which is particularly relevant to a situation with the Stabilizers pushing the crashpoint. How does it rank against other meta-models?"

[Top five.] Cross displayed the other ranking statistics, but Nick didn't read them.

Instead, he went to the discussion threads on the Kagent nets that debated the validity of the models that Fizz626 aggregated from. He quickly found that Kagent researchers tended to write essays full of block paragraphs and loved to footnote.

He threw up his hands after two minutes of getting lost in intricate technical critiques and dueling academic experts. "Cross, can you tell me what proportion of these experts think Fizz shouldn't be used?"

Cross scanned the entire discussion thread. [Five percent. Almost 20 percent felt strongly that at least one of the underlying model's projections were fatally flawed, but did not undermine Fizz626's results.]

A model of models? He imagined explaining that to a roomful of nervous politicians looking for any reason why his projections were too gloomy. He had no choice but to look over these individual models.

"Let's step quickly through Fizz's background," Nick said.

Cross posted the material and texted alongside of it, [Fizz626's underlying micro-projector models represent a cross-section of that niche: they use a variety of data sources, imputation methods, and projection techniques to forecast the population of a given Earth city or zone. Each model is based on a large sample of actual Earth residents and ranks high on the Kagent nets.]

[The underlying macrosimulation models feed off of the Sphere's own data on trade; demographics; indices of economic and political health; and population metrics such as health outcomes, education, and happiness.]

"So where's the downside?"

[Fizz's macroeconomic indicators contradicted themselves when the Stabilizers are factored in. They project that Hamilton would continue to boom economically given it's own past, but adding the Stabilizer presence results in a near-term crashpoint.]

[The agent-based simulations use a diversity of rules to simulate behavior of individual residents, organizations, and political and media people. One subclass simulates residents' social networks. Another projects media narratives and estimates of how much those narratives will alter the political debate. The rest are negotiation models like Pam uses, but focused on the Council, business leaders, and others who could have an outsized effect on events.]

"So none of these models simulate the Stabilizers, yet they all show the Stabilizers crashing the city," Nick said.

[The presence of the Stabilizers in a city is the major driving force behind every model's crashpoint projection. None of these models specifically model the Stabilizers. For example, the presence of the Stabilizers affects interactions on city councils or assemblies, but no one knows how.]

Nick tapped his chin. "Okay. Now we just need to figure out what can stop the Stabilizers before Fen speaks. God, Cross, can you get rid of that damn countdown to Fen's speech?"

[Sorry.]

"I'm overreacting. Sorry. Let's go through the other meta-models and see if we can isolate some common faults. Maybe they are systematically missing something that can be the solution."

[Sounds desperate.]

"It is."
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Lisa told the car to floor it back to the townhouse. Her thoughts boomeranged around her skull like rockets firing out of control as the sunny afternoon whipped by outside.

Her past had just ambushed her. It left her breathless. She kept telling herself that she had to focus on the big picture here, but her mind kept flitting back to her stepfather. She kept telling herself to ignore the anger that gorged up like bitter vomit. But apparently she wasn't listening.

Bridge must have arrived before the liftport closed. Maybe he had been on-planet for a while already, which was worse. Either way, the fact that the old Kagent was here, now, watching Stabilizer safe-houses, told her everything. He and Mom must have projected how important this crashpoint would be. She couldn't slide this crashpoint by the Kagents like she had hoped.

Shit. This wrecked everything. She needed to start from scratch again. Rethink everything. It was enough to make her hyperventilate in the closed confines of the little car.

She looked for a bright side as she slowed her breathing. Bridge must not have known that she was in the Stabilizer leadership, or what she was really doing, or he would have taken her in. She had brushed against a total disaster, both personal and professional. She needed to disappear and revamp the Stabilizer plans — again — to account for the Kagents breathing down the Alliance's neck.

She sat in the car outside the townhouse, trying to figure out what to tell Daniel, and trying to regain her composure. She'd always hidden her past away from her work. She'd carefully covered her offworld roots before she joined the Stabilizers and taken the surname Quinton.

God, what if someone saw her in public talking to a gold-cloaked offworlder? She needed to make sure her past didn't reappear again, or she would be finished in the Stabilizers.

She stepped into the townhouse, instantly besieged by the rank and file who needed her attention on a dozen things. She and Daniel had been a team for a long time, but his impending retirement had shifted more of the workload to her. And tomorrow was the big day for protests and a bunch of other things the volunteers in the townhouse didn't know about.

She double-timed it to the kitchen where Daniel usually held court. He was at the table, tapping away on his netpad. He had spent the morning working the Council, lobbying to keep the liftport closed, even though the airports had re-opened. To him it must have been a pleasant, rare surprise to accomplish their publicly-stated goals without doing any dirty work. If only he knew the truth about the orbital crash, she grimaced mentally, he may not be so chipper.

But actually, he already looked unhappy. "Lisa, glad you're back. The liftport is still closed, but Ferguson will get them to open it soon. He's making a special address today."

She gave him her best bitter frown and nodded to the basement door. He nodded back, understanding, and silently fell into step behind her, and they clunked down the stairs.

Once he was inside, Lisa secured the vault door and turned on the white noise generator's soft snow of comforting static. Every day she swept the room for bugs and rechecked her encryption software, the best on the planet. But if Bridge had found her here, it meant all of this security was only a paper-thin wall. "I was just followed by an offworlder. A Kagent."

"A Kagent? Maybe he thinks you're cute."

She made an uncute hand gesture. "He warned me that the city and offworlders will come down on us hard. Mentioned Berlin." The way that came out, it sounded like Bridge had threatened her, which he hadn't. But if it helped convince Daniel of how serious this was, she was okay with that. "I think the offworlders may force the city to stay open."

Daniel wasn't impressed. "Come on. That's never happened before. The offworld businesses will just divest and move their operations somewhere else. They wouldn't fight back. You're just shaken up."

She bit her lip. Daniel didn't know how the Stabilizer Alliance picked the cities to crash and in what order. He was the PR guy, the figurehead. He thought that headquarters named the next target, mandated the tactics, he and Lisa executed them, and they succeeded. For ten years straight.

The two of them regularly complained about headquarters' paternalism and its secrecy. But they never discussed how headquarters divined its knowledge, how it kept making the right calls time and time again. She knew Daniel assumed headquarters had a large stable of adept spies and analysts that were just scary-good at their jobs. He acted like Lisa had made the same assumption.

She never told him otherwise.

"Are you worried about your safety?" Daniel asked. "Yeah, I don't think you should either. Do we really need that damn white noise on anymore?"

She shut it off.

His face became grave. "Okay, on to more serious matters. What should I bring home to the girls when this is over?"

Back to familiar ground: how to handle his daughters. He was trying to distract her and cheer her up. She shrugged. "You worry too much. They'll love whatever you bring because it means their dad is finally home for good."

He shook his head in horror. "I'm doomed."

"Nonsense. Buy them clothes."

Daniel smoothed out his hair. "I know a fashion designer in New York Jersey, Tribeca Zone. Yeah, I know, weird, but we met at a protest when Craig and I were trying to get the Secaucus Brigade to invade Manhattan as a stunt. Yeah, I'll ask him."

Daniel knew everyone. Lisa would miss his endless connections and his effortless ability to add more in each city and zone he swept through.

The comm unit gave a high priority chirp; headquarters had sent an urgent text. Daniel leaned over her shoulder so they both could read the viewer.

[Preservationist allies of the Alliance from Concordia, Tessa, had discovered that twenty ships had left for Earth two days ago. They were nearly all freight haulers or multipurpose escorts. Projected arrival time in Hamilton was any time in the next two days.]

[According to eyewitnesses who helped load the ships, the cargo included food, medical tech, and armed troops. It is an armada.]

"I guess the city plans to open the liftport," Lisa deadpanned. If she needed confirmation that Bridge's presence here was not a fluke, she had it now. The Kagents knew what Hamilton meant and were bringing all they could to stop the Alliance.

Both sides were throwing all of their assets on the table. The situation could spin out of control any hour now, like Bridge had predicted. This was no longer spy versus spy; it was army versus army.

Except the Stabilizers didn't have an army. Yet. Would Daniel understand now how much the situation had deteriorated? Would he approve of what she had to do? He fronted as a PR guy, but he was in full command of every aspect of the operation that Lisa kept him looped in on.

She would have to twist him, no matter what headquarters ordered. It shouldn't be hard; she had done it several times before. But it had always been smaller issues and the stakes had never been so high. She hadn't needed to push him so far beyond his comfort zone before, like she had to now.

She realized he hadn't spoken for a few seconds, so she looked at him.

His mouth hung open in shock. "My God, it's an invasion. They'll force the liftport open. Now we'll be forced to occupy it."
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Nick stared at the gray cubicle wall in stony silence for several minutes. He had no idea what to do next. A cynical voice in his head began calling him an amateur who was out of his depth. What could he realistically expect for being on the job less than a week?

He drummed his thumbs on the cubicle desk. "What now?"

[For starters, relax, loosen up, slow your breathing and pulse rate. You can't think creatively tensed up like this. You can't stream.]

Stream in the face of imminent failure? Fen's speech was less than two hours away. Nick wondered how he could strangle a Simon that was spread across various net clouds. "How the hell do I do that?"

[Say something funny. New ideas originate more easily when you are careless and carefree. Humor can tap into your subconscious, your instincts.]

"I'm a smartass who doesn't know shit and you're a Simon with no sense of humor. We're screwed. Hammer-screwed, in fact."

Cross belly-laughed in his earpiece for several seconds too long.

"Gah!" The laugh was like taking a buzz saw to his brain. Nick whipped the earpiece out of his head. "Why are you laughing? How's that funny?"

[I'm trying to encourage you.]

Nick threw his hands up. "What do you want me to say? The Stabilizer protesters are just extras in a movie shooting in town? How about we just have to wish the problems away?"

Mechanical laughter.

"Maybe I'll tell Fen that the refugees are tourists, college students. I don't know."

Canned applause.

"How about the refugees are with a circus or are salespeople here for a convention? Give them name badges and swag bags and they'll leave town," Nick said.

Someone walking by said over the cube wall, "Maybe Regina Thrall needs to get a puppy."

"That's not bad, thanks," Nick replied. "When's a liftport not a liftport? When it's a shopping mall. Maybe this is just a branding problem, Cross."

Nick continued, "Maybe the city can host weddings in empty liftport terminals and use the landing pads for tennis courts. The Stabilizers won't attack a wedding reception, right?"

Cross giggled and it sounded completely fake. [Keep going.]

He rifled off lame jokes and sarcastic comments for another two minutes. It felt good to vent, but he didn't hear any genius ideas come out of his mouth. While he described some bizarre scenario involving Mark Twain re-enactors running Daniel Sloan out of town, Cross listed every joke on the viewer.

Cross grouped each crazy utterance by theme. Refugees, Nelsa Park, Dragoons, liftports, public relations, public opinion, etc.

A snarky scenario about fitness centers using video of muscular Dragoons beating scrawny citizens in their ads died on his lips.

The pattern jumped out at Nick immediately: to be funny, he had juxtaposed the perceptions and narrative framing of the problems he was trying to solve. Weaknesses became strengths and negative aspects became positive. He had deliberately ignored common perceptions in his jokes to connect issues in a unique way, like the refugees being placated with swag bags.

"Link these scenarios to similar assumptions in the models," he said.

[Good idea.] Cross searched millions of sensitivity analyses for scenarios where refugees were really not refugees.

Cross whispered in his earpiece, like she was delivering bad news during a wedding, "These outcomes are all extreme outliers from the sensitivity analyses. The highly optimistic, rose-colored fantasies."

"I've been tilting at this all wrong," Nick said, shaking his head. Didn't he predict that he would screw this up because it was all new to him? What seemed obvious now was a groundbreaking revelation thirty seconds ago.

He had focused on avoiding the crashpoint by anticipating what may cause it and then trying to find ways to avoid or mitigate those causes. But failure has a million neglectful fathers, analysts like to joke, and no solution could address each one. He should have started with the successful paths, no matter how ludicrous, and then figured out how to make them happen. "I told Bridge I was a rank amateur at this."

[In the land of the ignorant, the amateur is an expert. It's a Tessan saying.]

Was she trying to buoy his confidence? If so, it worked, well, at least a little. Getting manipulated emotionally by a Simon only worked to a limited extent.

Cross showed him every successful path from the new results in an outcome graph that formed a plateau rather than a cone. In none of the scenarios did the survival probability reach zero and signal a crashpoint. A few even trended upward.

The solution had to be in there. When is a liftport not a liftport, he mused. He plunged into the individual scenarios, looking for the factors that kept the city alive.

The results paths thinned considerably as he narrowed the list of possible factors. He scrutinized the remaining ones, starting with the paths that had the highest survival probability. The common thread among them was changing public perceptions. A crashpoint, after all, was simply a massive shift in public opinion on the question of whether a city was a good place to live and conduct business.

An option's possibility of success depended on how much public opinion on the related issue could be influenced. How much Fen and the others could change any public perceptions on the eve of disaster was the critical question, but Nick pushed that question aside for now. The important thing was that there were viable scenarios for preventing the crashpoint.

He had Cross run new projections using each successful factor in isolation. He also had her run them together in every possible permutation. After examining the results, he discarded some, refined others, and repeated the process.

With each iteration he felt himself closing in on a solution. But time was running out faster than he was approaching a workable solution. He had less than an hour left.

Most of his projections came from models that estimated how the media and individual actors or organizations would respond to specific situations. The key was to predict how the interested parties' goals would affect their reactions when circumstances changed.

He still had to jam the Stabilizers into the models exogenously, treating them like a political advocacy group in some scenarios, and old-fashioned violent terrorists in others. If they really were dropping spacecraft out of the sky, they were the latter, even if they pretended to be the former.

Cross fed him new results piecemeal so he could study them while she crunched the next set. He would give her new parameters for further runs and then would look at what she had just finished processing. They volleyed runs like this in a steady back and forth. With each repetition the crashpoint receded further into the future and the city's survival probability climbed. And the set of options to do that grew crazier.

Pam and Fen stopped by his cube at half past two. Nick was relieved he had the beginnings of some answers, for once. He showed them the latest projections of events, media analyses, and opinion poll data in rapid order. Then he walked them through the outlier outcomes and how re-framing the issues opened up the possibilities.

Hope dawned on Pam's face. Maybe he had finally impressed her. She may not be the kind of Kagent that did this kind of work, but he would take any compliment from someone he considered a 'real Kagent'.

Fen, on the other hand, was appreciative but melancholy. Something was weighing on him. Nick feared that Fen thought the emerging strategy politically impossible, but didn't want to dampen both Kagents' enthusiasm.

"We have a briefing in half an hour," Fen said. "Will you have a plan ready by then?"

Cross returned another set of results. Nick tried not to peek at it and instead focus on the Chairman. "Yes, but it will probably be highly unconventional."

Fen nodded, his expression clouded for a moment. "I suppose that makes sense. The usual tricks are not up to this kind of crisis."

"You don't think there's a chance in hell you can get the Council on board, do you?" Nick asked.

The Chairman smiled. "I think I can. It's always a question, but don't worry. These are the times when you spend political capital and dig deep in your bag of tricks. But that's my job. This is miraculous work, Nick, thank you."

Fen turned to go, and when his back was turned Nick gave Pam a questioning look. She shrugged. Given Fen's habit of keeping things from them, Nick's instincts told him that there was another shoe waiting to drop.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

"The Kagents are behind the armada," Lisa said. "Don't worry about the liftport, worry about the people pulling the strings."

Her boss looked at his shoes and shook his head.

"Daniel, look at me. Look at me. Take a deep breath. The Kagents are the real threat. They may be able to see through our covert ops. If they are working with the city, they can probably spy on us, too. They may be able to stop us. And they'll definitely be able to stop our allies tomorrow. We need to hit them first."

"Who paid them to interfere down here?" Daniel asked.

Lisa shrugged like she didn't know. But she did. No one paid them; it was The Great Kagent Cause that drove her parents to neglect her, which in turn drove her to abandon them. Mom probably figured out what the Stabilizers were doing and sent Bridge down here to stop it.

Daniel shrugged. "Maybe Pam Sullivan is coordinating the whole thing from down here. You saw her at the liftport press conference: she looked like Ferguson's right hand. But her expertise is business negotiation."

"When she's not shooting assassins," Lisa added. "Let's see if these Kagents are connected."

She contacted the Harbingers, the bounty hunter firm they had on retainer. She had a Simon over there dredge up a still photo of Bridge talking to her at the food court earlier.

She asked the Simon to find Bridge anywhere in Hamilton in the last month. She wanted ID on all of his companions, too, besides herself. And she wanted to be alerted if they appeared on any surveillance grid in the city.

Harbinger's Simon reported back in a minute. It warned her that the BHN could not access the city's surveillance grid and that cut out most of their usual data sources. It was lucky that Bridge had been caught by a retail shop's camera as he passed by on the street.

The only companion spotted with Bridge was Nick Lincoln, Juan's former bounty hunter. Was known in bounty hunting circles as the number-cruncher who couldn't shoot straight, according to industry scuttlebutt. Lincoln had ties to Juan Burgess and the city, too. He had been dismissed from the Burgess investigation.

Interestingly, Lincoln grew up in a Stabilized Community but he had rejected all of that for the buzz of bounty hunting in Chicago. Perfect true believer for a Kagent recruit, Lisa thought.

Lisa pointed at Lincoln's picture. "If he is paired with this Kagent, then he's the brains. That means he's the real threat. Have you ever heard of him?"

Daniel shook his head. "I guess lobbyists and bounty hunters don't work the same ends of Civic Center, I guess."

If he hadn't abandoned his family, she would have entertained using Lincoln's family to rein him in. But it was too late now; a taxi company cam showed Lincoln going into Civic Center just this morning.

The temptation to have Lincoln killed hung there before Lisa like a warm piece of red velvet cake. She could find a bounty hunter or a merc who could keep his mouth shut and keep her hands clean. Was she ready to accept her amoral nature and become intentionally violent? Even for a Stabilizer-turned-Kagent like Lincoln, she couldn't bring herself to do it.

She'd have to grab Lincoln on her own. The only way that would work would be to surprise him, catch him off-guard. Use all of her knowledge about sneaking around and past Kagents. If she could hide from his surveillance, in theory she could sneak up on him. And then capture him, somehow, and not end up dead or captured herself. She groaned.

"You need to take a break," Daniel said. "Let's go upstairs, get you some fruit."

She followed him to the kitchen. Years on Earth had caused her to develop a taste for artisanal cheeses, apples, and peaches. Daniel made sure to keep the fridge stocked with all of them to keep her happy.

She walked around the townhouse with a peach and a chunk of gouda. Every room was full of local volunteers prepping for the big day tomorrow, making signs, studying the protest route, organizing logistics.

She came to the front door, sealed against any air flow or drones getting in. Bridge knew she was in here and he would be watching the townhouse now. Only an extensive disguise could hide her. For the first time she felt truly trapped here. And even worse, she couldn't spy on Bridge, or his buddies Lincoln or Sullivan. They had a huge asymmetric advantage. She hated it.

"Are you okay?" It was Daniel, standing at her elbow.

She said in a low tone. "We have to neutralize them."

Daniel scratched the back of his head. "Neutralize? You don't mean killing them."

Kill a Kagent? The idea seemed farcical. But Daniel had never seen a Kagent in a fight. When she was about seven years old, the idea of someone killing a Kagent terrified her. She was old enough to understand that her Kagent father had died tragically and that the stepfather she adored worked the more dangerous side of the business. She worried constantly that Bridge would be killed, too. She worried about it most at bedtime. Bridge and Mom had to come in and reassure her night after night.

Bridge had reassured her with the same words every night. "It's very, very hard to kill a Kagent. A bad person either has to get real lucky or take away every single one of our advantages," he had explained. "Our sensors, our Simon, our net access, our weapons, our smarts, everything that makes a Kagent a Kagent."

Lisa thought about all those Kagent accessories and how vulnerable a Kagent was without them. In her wildest teenage fantasies she dreamed of nuking the Kagent nets to put her parents out of business so they would have a normal life at home.

Could she knock out all of the crutches a Kagent leaned on? Something that wouldn't hurt Bridge or anyone else; just leave them all in a sputtering, blind rage. Especially Lincoln. He had to be new, raw, inexperienced. He should be a lot easier to trap and capture.

She looked at Daniel, her eyes wide. "We don't have to target the Kagents personally to stop them," she said. "We just have to target their tools."

Daniel clapped her on the shoulder. "That evil grin means you got it covered. I'll put out a political response to this armada. We have to put the city on the defensive, stir fears about offworlders, get what mileage we can out of it. Remember, at its heart we're attacking public opinion."

Lisa nodded and hurried back down to the vault. The diversion she had in mind would distract the Kagents, but it may fail or only delay them temporarily. She may need a backup plan to deal with Lincoln.

Lisa had once done a stint with the Stabilizers in Colorado Springs. The Stabilizer chapters in the Rockies were unusually militant and heavily armed. They had been known to take potshots at orbital habs if they pointed sensors towards them for too long. Their paranoia about offworlders was a badge of honor they wore proudly.

She made a secure call to an old pal in one of those chapters. She said, "How much do you charge for missile strikes?"
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

The last person Nick expected to see at a closed-door briefing for Hamilton city officials was Mica Hardaway, his old bounty hunter partner. Wearing a purple business suit, she stood out among the throng of police brass, Council members, their staff, and heads of city departments.

She was just as surprised to see him.

"What are you doing here?" they said in unison.

Nick shrugged. "I'm a Kagent."

She pinched the purple fabric of her jacket. "I'm with the Sancternal Guard. I signed on after Berlin."

"God, you were at Berlin?"

She nodded sadly.

"Hell, Nick, don't you read the news?" Bridge asked from behind him. "She's been called the Angel of Berlin. She saved dozens of lives by tranquilizing innocents. Shot the bounty hunters with live ammo, too."

"Michael Flail was in charge," Mica explained.

Nick rolled his eyes. Of course. His failure to kill the bastard in Chicago tore at him like a barbed hook. He indicated his new partner. "Mica, this is Bridge Radisson, my Kagent mentor."

Bridge shook her hand. "We're so happy to have the Guard's help."

Mica nodded. "I wish we could do more, but we have no experience protecting mobile refugees."

Pam approached and Bridge gave her a big hug. Nick suddenly seized up and gave her a quick nod. She smiled and turned to Mica. "You're Nick's former partner?"

"I taught him everything he shouldn't know," Mica replied and stage-whispered back, "I have serious dirt on him."

"She doesn't know anything, really," Nick said trying to sound smooth, looking to Bridge for help. Bridge just smiled, enjoying Nick's awkwardness. These people had no manners or empathy.

The commotion drew Fen's attention. Nick introduced him to Mica and Bridge, and the Chairman shook hands with both.

"I'm happy to finally meet you both in person," he said. "Avis told me all about you, Mica. It's an honor. And Bridge, we couldn't do any of this without your help and Meredith's genius. Thank you."

He motioned everyone to take their seats at the oval conference table. When they settled in, he said, "The General Counsel's office has ruled that Regina Thrall forfeited her Council seat. The Council has appointed Phillip Levinson to fill that seat until the special election in the fall." He motioned to a man in his forties with sandy blond hair sitting across the table. "Phil used to be Ms. Thrall's security aide. I've known Phil for years and am thrilled he has joined us."

Everyone applauded. Nick was unsure if it was approval of Levinson or relief that Thrall was gone. The way Norm Osprette was banging his palms together, he figured it was the latter.

Fen continued, "Second, the liftport will reopen, but not any time soon. We want to avoid any confrontations there until the other crises are addressed. We will not strangle our own commerce out of fear, though. To sustain our orbital trade, this morning we reactivated the older liftports on the outskirts of town and began quietly handling the backlog."

Councilor Norm Osprette looked stricken and said in a low rumble, "Each departure should be inspected again, Mr. Chairman. Any ship that deviates from its flight path should not be allowed to make it to the ground."

"Yes," Fen replied, "but we'll use our standard flight control rules until the crash investigation can tell us how it happened."

"Third, these troubles are not an accident, or fate, or a number of coincidences. Other cities have succumbed to the Stabilizers. That ends here, not just for us but for cities everywhere. Now, while legally I can round up and jail all of the Stabilizers immediately," he paused while that sank in, "I will not. That would play right into their hands."

"They are a dire threat," Councilor Levinson said. "We should deal with them on our terms."

Councilor Osprette nodded vigorously.

Chief Reese said, "A preemptive strike will give credence to their claim that we're persecuting them. We must have probable cause, and arrest warrants to back a move like that."

Pam nodded. "He's right. Offworld businesses are concerned about the city becoming repressive. Jobs, business deals, and investment are at stake here and one misstep can start a panic."

"May I point out that Councilor Levinson is obviously not my sycophant?" Fen added. Everyone chuckled and the mood lightened a tiny bit.

He continued, "The Stabilizers want us to lock the city down, so we will do the opposite, especially since security theater doesn't make us safer. We can't sacrifice our freedoms for the illusion of safety, and then not even get the additional safety. I'm removing the security checkpoints at public buildings, for example."

Osprette was taken aback. "That's crazy! You're inviting criminals and terrorists to run wild."

"That's what they said in San Diego twenty years ago, when the gang wars got bad," Chief Reese countered. "The curfew, the widespread DNA testing, the roadblocks, the transit permits, they're all still in effect. People think the problems will come back if those activities stop, but they won't. Even when it wrecks your economy and kills your community. You turn yourself into an impoverished police state."

"Please tell us how we're safer with less security," Councilor Starke said. Clearly, he was not a fan of Reese.

Chief Reese smiled sagely. "Security theater doesn't add any additional security. It actually degrades the others, because people working the other security measures become more lax, despite themselves. It's human nature. But the bad guys are even more challenged to prove they can circumvent it, and they will. The best security is hidden from everyone, even the other layers, so the bad guys don't know what to defeat, when they're being watched. And each security layer and tool thinks it may be the only one, and so they step it up."

Chief Reese said, "We have the most extensive and redundant overhead and indoor public surveillance system on Earth. Hassling families visiting the Fine Arts Museum only stretches our security resources thin. We have redeployed those guards and devices from the library to dealing with the Stabilizer protestors tomorrow."

"Why do you think that will work?" Councilor Osprette asked skeptically.

Fen nodded at Nick. "Nick Lincoln is a Kagent and has been studying how to defeat the Stabilizers. His projections indicate that the plan I will announce in my address will work."

The skeptical looks from Reese, Osprette, and Starke all made it clear that they only saw the inept bounty hunter who had unwittingly aided the Burgess assassin. That he was framed, cleared, and had been helping the city recently didn't matter.

This should go well, Nick thought, and leaned forward. "Every one of us projects the future, every day. How to make the boss happy, whether to take an umbrella, where to open a new business, how much revenue the city will collect next year. I'm just using a lot more data and sophisticated techniques that have been extensively tested and validated." He summarized the concepts behind the offworld Kagent community and the Stabilizers' involvement in other crashpoints.

Osprette grunted. "What if his projections are wrong?"

Fen smiled graciously. "Nick has access to all of our intelligence, plus additional offworld data on the Stabilizers. He has already been an enormous help: he linked the Stabilizers to the virus attack." A gasp ran around the table, except for the cops. "Yes, Daniel Sloan is wanted for questioning in the virus attack and will be detained immediately. The Stabilizers won't have their key leader tomorrow."

"They will claim police oppression," Starke pointed out. "A lot of people will believe them."

"We will bring Sloan in for questioning only. No charges. Yet," Chief Reese said.

Osprette looked back at Fen. "You didn't answer my question: what if the projections are wrong?"

Fen clasped his hands and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "The Stabilizers don't need to do a single thing more to destroy the city. The probability that we survive is pretty low already, if you must know."

Osprette closed his eyes. "How low?"

Nick twirled the outcome cone graph around on his netpad as Cross crunched the median likelihood. Nick set down his netpad. "South of 12 percent."

Osprette winced. "What's the probability if we crush the Stabilizers immediately?"

"Assuming the other problems are not resolved," Nick replied, "28 percent, give or take 5 percentage points."

Fen nodded soberly, "We need to proceed extremely carefully. There are several moving pieces to this strategy and they all need to work. If we succeed, it should give us a 63 percent chance of averting further disaster. So here's the plan."

Everyone leaned in.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Fen paused, smiled, and raised his hands like a preacher welcoming his congregation. "Our city is famous for welcoming all people. We'll use that reputation to save it. Talented, hardworking people coming here to rebuild their lives are an opportunity for us. They are not a threat.

"Thanks to information from the Sancternal Guard, we know that the majority of refugees are highly skilled and well-educated. Engineers, academics, business owners, and technology experts. They are refugees simply because of ethnic and economic cleansing in the zones far to the southeast.

"The centerpiece of our plan is to treat them well. Instead of pariahs, they will be prizes. I will announce that we want them to stay here. Nick will explain this strategy further."

Nick added, "We'll use the main liftport for refugee intake. We will open the terminal, the concessions, and the customs stations. Even invite the media in to observe. And then we take good care of the refugees. A liftport is designed to process large numbers of people quickly. Since it is closed to regular orbital traffic, this move will twist the media coverage of the closure from something negative to something positive. It will keep the Stabilizers away from the liftport and the Dragoons away from the refugees."

He looked at Pam. "Thanks to the Trade Representative, offworld businesses have sent a convoy of personnel and supplies to help us. Several of these firms will offer the refugees free transit anywhere in the solar system to resettle, if that is what they want. The offworld societies need settlers and workers, and they pay better than most Earth cities. This isn't charity for them; it's an investment.

"The convoy lands tomorrow night at the main liftport, not because it is a liftport, but because it will be a refugee camp. Why threaten a liftport when it's not a liftport?" Nick smiled.

"The Stabilizers called this convoy an invasion force, but that idea is not getting much media traction. And when humanitarian assistance comes off those ships for the refugees, that claim will look ridiculous."

Councilor Levinson asked, "What if the Stabilizers attack the liftport anyway? The refugees would be endangered."

Mica scowled at the idea of using refugees as political pawns who may be caught in the crossfire. Nick saw that and replied, "Councilor, the convoy has armed Kagents like myself aboard the ships to conduct operations on the ground. They are not a military force, but they can protect the convoy against a mob, if need be."

The Chief added, "The Stabilizers will have to choose between a closed liftport downtown and operational liftports in the exurbs. Plus, the refugees won't enter the city until after the Stabilizer protest ends. My officers will escort the refugees to the main liftport and keep the Stabilizers away from them."

The Chief pointed at Mica. "Mica Hardaway, here, is the Sancternal Guard assigned to the refugees. Mica, you told me earlier that you are certain you can't direct the refugees away from the Dragoons in Nelsa Park."

She nodded. "That's right. No one is in charge among the refugees. They are suspicious of anyone grabbing authority. Without the refugee camp at the liftport, I would expect the refugees to disperse when they reach the city, including to Nelsa Park."

"We have asked the Sancternal Guard for help," Fen said. "A hundred Guards, personally lead by General Avis Fridwulf herself, will oversee refugee operations at the liftport."

"If necessary, they will provide a last line of defense if the Stabilizers break through the police lines," the Chief said. "The Stabilizers are not equipped to face an armed force like the Guard."

Councilor Starke didn't like what he was hearing. "The Sancternals are peacekeepers, not auxiliary police. Ms. Hardaway, won't this damage your organization's reputation?"

"This wasn't an easy decision," Mica said. "We don't take sides in local conflicts. Doing so threatens our operational security as a neutral party. We agreed to help because the liftport will serve only as a refugee care center."

"We have to keep the refugees away from Nelsa Park." Nick posted a city map on the viewer on the wall. Yellow markers indicated checkpoints, armored vehicles, and fortified positions that formed a ring around the major roads into the rebellious district. "A police escort will shield the refugees from the Dragoons in Nelsa Park."

"I have quietly informed the Dragoons that they have four days to leave or be expelled," Chief Reese added.

A voice from the back of the room chimed in, "Chief, let me handle the Dragoons."

Everyone swiveled around to see who said that. A dark silhouette stood against the bright daylight coming in from the hallway windows. The man stepped into the room. He was short, with dark skin and a Slavic face. He wore an expensive gray business suit that looked like an offworld cut to Nick. With a supremely confident smile, the man looked like an entrepreneur who stepped into the wrong meeting but thought he could make a deal here anyway.

Nick uttered the man's name in a surprised exhalation: Eldred Borbola.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Fen didn't miss a beat. "Mr. Borbola, thank you for coming."

All of the cops in the room began to stand up but Reese waved them off. "We will handle the Dragoons. You could help us elsewhere though. We need help securing the liftport."

"Liftports don't interest me," Borbola replied softly. "Leave the Dragoons to me. Not only will they no longer be a problem in this city, they'll start hemorrhaging clients afterwards, I promise."

Borbola must not know there were hundreds or thousands of Dragoons in the city.

"We can't let you do that," the Chief said, taken aback. "Vigilantism is illegal. It makes it look like we have lost control over the city."

Yes, exactly, Nick thought. The cops should cuff Borbola and drive him to the city limits right now. He didn't even want to think what a shitstorm like Borbola would do to the city's carefully laid plans, much less to the projections.

The notorious bounty hunter shook his head and smiled. "People just can't seem to do the trig on this. I'll pay you for the chance to beat the hell out of the Dragoons. You're under-gunned, out of diplomatic solutions, and lives are on the line." Borbola spread his hands. "I'm giving you a solution here. Be practical."

"Eldred," Bridge's voice boomeranged around the room, loud but calm, "we can't work against each other like this. A city that looks out of control is out of control. The business community is nervous already, and trade is this region's lifeblood. You have to respect those sensitivities."

Borbola shot him a cold look. "If you respect them so much, offworlder, why don't you let them sort this out for themselves?" He turned back to Fen. "I have plenty of juicier job offers than this."

"We can't accept those conditions," Fen said in a resigned tone. Was he digging for a counter-offer, Nick wondered. He'd never seen anyone negotiate with Borbola.

Borbola paused a moment, waiting for something else to be thrown on the offer. When it was clear Fen wouldn't, the bounty hunter shrugged. "Your loss, Chairman," he said.

The Chief said, "No vigilantism. No excessive force. Your help is not welcome unless you follow our rules. My officers will arrest you on sight if you take matters into your own hands."

Borbola nodded, turned, and left. Everyone was silent, puzzling out what just happened. It felt surreal to Nick.

Osprette looked at Nick. "Were you counting on that bounty hunter's help to save us?"

Nick realized he had been holding his breath the whole time and let it out in a single blow. Getting Borbola out of the room was his immediate concern, but right behind that was making sure Borbola didn't screw up the city's one chance to avoid a crashpoint. If anything, he was counting on Borbola to not intervene at all.

"No. Nick didn't know that I had reached out to Borbola," Fen added, without looking at Nick.

"Let me phrase that differently," Osprette said. "What happens to your projections if that bounty hunter goes on a rampage through the city?"

Nick held up a finger while Cross posted those projections to his smartshades. "This is kind of rough, but anything he does against the Dragoons and Regina Thrall will benefit the refugees and the city in the short term. But longer term, there's chance it would add to the media narrative that the city is spiraling out of control."

Something else about the Borbola interruption bothered him, but he couldn't pinpoint what. Other than that Fen had gone lone cowboy on him again. Fen thought he knew what he was doing, but he wouldn't be right every time.

"That's just speculation," Osprette said dismissively.

"Informed speculation," Nick corrected politely. "I have run scenarios where the Dragoons are hindered in idiosyncratic ways. Thunderstorms, re-supply problems, Nelsa Park citizens turning against them, and so on. Borbola falls into the same category, or has no effect at all. He is only one person. The city comes out ahead from almost anything bad that happens to the Dragoons at this point."

Osprette clenched his jaw, but said nothing.

Fen looked around the table, from face to face, ending with Councilor Starke. "I have one last announcement. This city is facing its biggest crisis ever. When I speak to the city this afternoon, I will invoke the city's emergency powers law."

"No, Fen, no," said Councilor Starke under a waterfall crescendo of gasps and chatter. "Not you."

Fen waited for the noise to die down. "It allows me to take action without Council approval for the next ninety days, after which it expires, unless the Council extends it."

The police brass barely reacted at all. Counselors Osprette and Starke, respectively the nervous and the paranoid, both looked nauseous.

"I don't take lightly the sacrifices the people will probably have to make. Nor do I take these emergency powers for granted. They are far beyond what any elected leader should possess. I did not want to take this step. However, during extraordinary times we must all pay extraordinary costs. The least I can sacrifice for this city is my political career. I will announce in today's speech that one month after this crisis passes, I will resign and never run for any elected office, ever again."

The meeting erupted into gasps of surprise, shouts of "No!" and stunned expressions. Somewhere in the back of Nick's brain, a voice pointed out that Fen hadn't consulted him about this either.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Stabilizer headquarters in Celebration, Florida sent new orders while Daniel was being smuggled to a backup safe-house in Hamilton's arts district. The townhouse was compromised because of Bridge and because they had heard the police wanted Daniel for questioning.

Lisa decrypted the new orders without a hint of curiosity; she knew what they would say because she wrote them.

The city's unorthodox strategy had to be dealt with in an unorthodox way, headquarters explained. Yes, the city had changed the endgame's rules, but in doing so they had exposed their plans. She was ninety-seven percent certain that Ferguson and his Kagent masters could not project how the Stabilizers would react.

Lisa had her offworld comm equipment bounce calls all over the world to avoid terrestrial detection. Verbal passkeys were matched with people on the other end. She discussed timelines and logistics with people across the continent. People who Fen Ferguson's vaunted political mind would never imagine were working with the Stabilizers.

With the calls done, she went down to the building's loading dock and waited, out of view of any surveillance. The movers arrived five minutes later with four wooden crates that were three feet high. They hauled them up to the backup command center and she escorted them back down to their truck.

She locked the door and stuffed a towel under it to block any nosy Kagent drones. She activated the white noise machine before grabbing a crowbar. She wasn't taking any chances with Lincoln and her stepfather in town.

The wooden top of each crate creaked and groaned under the crowbar, its steel nails squeaking as she pried the lid off. The lids fell one-by-one to the floor in slow succession.

Daniel climbed out of the fourth crate and took a deep breath. His hair was matted with a thick sheen of sweat. "The police didn't raid us, did they?"

"No, it would be a public relations disaster. The headlines would say Chairman resigns after botched raid of Stabilizers."

He tossed a netpad on her desk. "I didn't think so either. I drafted responses to Ferguson's power grab."

The press release on his netpad raised hell about an imminent invasion of armed offworlders, Ferguson declaring himself a dictator, and claiming his offworld masters would impose economic and cultural repression on Hamilton.

Another statement scoffed at the baseless accusations that the Stabilizers were behind the Martian Cocktail and condemned Fen Ferguson for playing politics during a crisis. Another expressed sympathy for the refugees who would be sacrificed to the grinder that was Hamilton's labor market.

"Refugees need jobs that support their families," the final statement said, "not indentured servitude which destroys them." Daniel had hit all of the right public relations points, she thought.

She handed a different netpad to him. "Our new orders."

"Goddamn, why can't Celebration flood again? Those damn swamp runners have never trusted us."

Lisa clucked her tongue. "Now, now, they aren't meddling because of you, Mr. Sloan."

He looked at her. She had lost this argument years ago, but she couldn't tell him the truth, no matter how comforting it could be for him.

His eyebrows hiked higher and higher as he read the orders. When his eyebrows sank back down, Lisa asked, "Will all that actually work?"

He smirked and said in a low tone, "There's no way the city survives this. They brought it on themselves by twisting the refugees and liftport together, didn't they? Our pundits are right: Ferguson is desperate. Are our new allies ready to go?"

Lisa beamed and felt giddy. "Yes."

Daniel furrowed his brow. "But even they don't know everything that will happen, right?"

Lisa shook her head and laughed. No one but her knew everything in the plan. "Everyone will be surprised."

Daniel smiled and clapped her on the shoulder. "Then let's get go kill a city."
CHAPTER SIXTY

When Nick returned to the cube in the Chairman's suite, Fen's staff was in an uproar, as expected, over his surprise resignation announcement. Some were in tears, others paced past his cube holding tense, whispered conversations on their netpads. Three were arguing in the corner over the announcement's political merits.

Nick tuned it all out so he and Cross could review every Stabilizer operation from the last fifteen years. He was looking for a significant predictor of Stabilizer tactics that might apply to the current situation. He found nothing.

It dawned on Nick that there was no way to project the Stabilizer response to an unconventional strategy. It was a total unknown. Another lesson about being a Kagent for him to learn, one the city could not afford right now.

Pam stuck her head in and said something.

"I'm missing something," Nick replied. "Sloan is hiding, inciting people to march. He's gearing up for something big, but I don't know what. If my wonderful intuition is supposed to read Sloan's mind, then we are, to use Bridge's term, hammerfucked." He looked up at her. "Fen wants an update on my progress?"

"That's not what I asked, Nick," she said gently.

He realized he had no idea what she had said. He made his clueless face. She leaned over and searched his eyes carefully, looking for signs of a concussion. "I asked if you want to get something to eat. You need a break. You're pushing so hard you've jammed your face into a corner. You can't see anything around you. You can't even think clearly or hear what people are saying to you any more."

Nick made a face. "It's called 'working hard'."

"It's working hard, not smart," she retorted. "If you can't find the answer, looking harder won't help. Focus on something else, like having dinner with me. Let your subconscious sort it out in the background and give your brain some fuel to do it."

Cross said, "Maybe you'll listen to her instead? Either way, you should share your findings with other Kagents. They may be able to help."

Nick rolled his eyes. Cross kept telling him to seek the opinion of offworld Kagents. Cross shot down all of his objections to asking for help, including a nifty privacy protection excuse Nick was quite proud of. He remembered fondly when he could bullshit Cross. Now, she appealed to others to overrule him and avoided his cognitive blind spots. It was entirely possible that his Simon was now savvier than him.

Pam said, "Nick, listen to your Simon. We are quicker and more innovative than you lone wolves on Earth because we collaborate. Upload your results to the Kagent net. A stream is more than one trickle of water."

He cocked his head to the side. "Is that more Tessan pop psychology? Bridge taught me a rhyme too."

"Yes, we have tons of these sayings. Now let's go."

Nick grimaced. "What if someone leaks this to the Stabbies?"

"It won't happen," Pam said confidently. Her experience with human nature must be vastly different than his.

"Do you want the probability estimates for a Kagent turning to a Stabbie and that said traitorous Kagent knew about your work and knew you would upload it today?" Pam asked.

"Yes. Yes I do," Nick said, but he felt himself caving despite his defiance.

"The number is really freaking low, Nick. Didn't Bridge tell you about the importance of asking for help?"

"He actually hates it when people do that."

Pam scowled. "Don't waste my time after you've already lost the argument. I hate it when men do that."

Nick smiled and threw up his arms in surrender.

Cross uploaded the latest results to the Kagent nets and included a request for assistance.

This will just be dinner, Nick chanted in his head, as he policed up the cube. Forget the dark-haired woman who was eyeing him, doubting his sanity. Just dinner. There was a lot of work still to do.

Pam frowned. "I'm cooking at my place, a few blocks from here. And work isn't allowed. Click?"

Nick sighed. "But there isn't time. Hey—"

She swiftly popped out his ear bud, swiped his smartshades, and snatched his netpad. She started walking out of the Chairman's suite. "Cross, that upload done?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," the Simon said from the netpad's speaker.

"You're the best," Pam replied and flicked off his netpad's power. She turned to Nick. "I'll keep this to make sure you don't try anything."

"You didn't have to do that," Nick said as Pam strode out of the suite. He pointed at his temple. "I'll just keep going up here."

She snorted. "I doubt it."
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

The setting sun blinded Nick as he stepped outside, trying to keep up with Pam. Without his smartshades he felt naked and vulnerable.

Pam lived east of the Palisades in the mixed-use mid-rises that were the center of the city's hipster scene. They passed sidewalk cafes, clubs, and experiential galleries. People were kicking back after work despite the crisis.

Nick squinted. "So you are a Kagent, huh?"

"I'm a historian by training," she said. "I studied how districts interact with the business community during downturns. During the fall of Seoul, a Tessan news site asked me to comment on how it could affect the local business community. Next thing I know, I'm a talking head and a consultant."

"And the Kagent part?"

"Preservationists killed some of my relatives before I was born. Broke my parents' hearts, and I grew up with that loss like it was a sibling." She shrugged. "So fighting an existential threat by strengthening interplanetary trade had a certain appeal."

Pam's apartment building was ten stories high and she insisted on taking the stairs, explaining that she needed all the strength training she could get with Earth's gravity. It wasn't until the seventh floor that she mentioned she lived on the roof. Nick didn't feel he could spare any breath for a retort and kept climbing.

Her apartment was a converted rooftop greenhouse filled with bushy shrubs, leafy trees, flowers, and vines. It was more humid inside than the early summer evening outside. A fresh, sweet scent of flowers and fertilizer surfed up Nick's nose on a gust of humidity when she opened the door.

She hung her cloak by the door and ducked into the kitchen. Underneath the cloak she had on a form-fitting, one-piece Tessan business suit of the same deep red color.

She parked his netpad, smartshades, and earpiece on the counter. He could take them back easily, but he knew that grabbing for them would not win him any points.

"Warm in here," he remarked loudly, pulling his shirt collar away from his neck. "A sauna, really."

"And what do you have in your place?" She sliced fruit with short, sharp clanks against a cutting board. The crinkle-sizzle of hot oil in a frying pan came from the stove.

"Prisms. They create beautiful rainbows."

She chuckled and a strand of hair fell over her face. She smoothed it back. "Cold glass that fractures and distorts light. How nice."

Nick frowned. "I have a big picture of a sunflower."

"I bet your walls are a drab gray," she replied.

"It's a really colorful sunflower," he said. A strong ammonia tang of simmering onions and garlic made his mouth water. "So are you down here for good, or is this a temporary arrangement?"

She smiled. "Nothing has been permanent since I left home when I was sixteen."

"Sixteen?"

"Yeah, I went to upper university early. What do you call it down here? College? Yeah, that." She shrugged. "I'm kind of a free spirit. It's my parents fault. They had the wanderlust too."

Nick felt the tips of the leaves on a spider plant. "Will you 'boomerang' eventually?"

"Boomerang?"

Nick nodded. "You know, people leave home but return eventually."

Pam shrugged. "I never know where I'm going next." She winked at him and then tucked her hair behind her ear. "Do you have family? Will you boomerang?"

"Never." He shivered at the idea. "My sister boomeranged. Came right back home when she and her husband had my niece. My mother was thrilled."

"Do you have mama issues?"

Nick smirked. "Did I mention my parents live in a Stabilized Community? My mother and I don't agree on a lot."

She stopped stirring a boiling pot of something. "You're a Stabilizer?"

"No, just was raised in a Community. Left as soon as I could. Are you married, seriously attached?"

"No," she said. "If the right person comes along, great. If not, I won't be weeping over a bucket of ice cream every night."

Nick looked around at the wall-to-wall greenery. "Is the right person a gardener?"

She concentrated on stirring but raised an eyebrow. "He has to know how to handle his seed."

He laughed. "You're pretty self-confident."

Pam blinked at him in surprise. "Oh no. No. I'm not. I'm honest about what I'm certain of and what I'm not. There's plenty that I'm scared shitless about."

"Such as?"

She dished food onto plates. "We're not talking about work."

They sat down at her small kitchen table and stared at each other for an awkward moment. She smiled; he got busy looking for his fork. It's just dinner, he told himself.

It was an offworld meal, fausage grilled in onion and garlic, a plate of raw peppers and spinach, fruit salad, and a side of angel hair pasta. There were three dipping sauces: cold and sweet, warm and spicy, and white and creamy.

He began a strafing run on the pasta bowl, but she blocked his fork with her own. "That's dessert. We don't eat mounds of this stuff like people do here."

"Oh," Nick said. He speared the fausage and was about to douse it in spicy sauce. Then he thought twice about the consequences for his breath.

"So what is it like to be a bounty hunter?" she asked.

Nick didn't see this subject as one that would make him look at all appealing. "Miserable. You get to meet horrible people, on their worst day, and make it worse."

"A lot of killing?"

He winced. "Too much. I tried to shed as little blood as possible."

She regarded him coldly. "Except when you wanted to kill someone. Like that Flail guy who set you up."

He looked at her for a long second. "Believe me, it would have saved lives. He was at Berlin, remember."

She thought about that a moment and then seemed to accept it. Was this a test? Was she watching his reactions?

"What's it like being a media darling?" Nick asked to change the subject.

"Terrible. Most of the time you're talking to a tiny little camera on a netpad, trying to be personable, intelligent, and entertaining. It always makes me sweaty and itchy. I don't like the spotlight; I'm a behind-the-scenes type."

They ate in silence for a minute.

"What were you like as a kid?" Pam asked. She held up her fork and pointed at him. "I can't picture you as a kid."

Nick smiled. "I was precocious, my teachers said, and it was not a compliment."

Pam laughed. "Oh, I get that. But did you play? Run around? Or read books all the time?"

"I loved to play tag." He remembered being six and chasing his older sister Dez around the yard. He noticed a clock on the wall and blinked. He had not thought about work for two hours. He was sure he hadn't gone two hours without thinking about the Sphere since he learned it existed.

"This has been terrific, Pam, thank you. But I have to go." He stood up and took his plate to the sink.

She followed him. "Don't bother, I never clean dishes right away."

He turned around to see an amused look on her face. She was standing too close. A feeling stirred down below, but he clamped down on it. Time was ticking by. The Sphere, when was the last time he looked at the Sphere?

"If you wait to clean the dish, pasta starch will turn into glue," he said. She smelled like fresh flowers. "Then you have to scrub off each bit. You shouldn't have to do all that on my account."

"You serious? I have an enzyme soak for dishes." She reached past him and tossed a spongy tablet into the sink bay, turning the water into a bubbling, frothy, murky brown. "No scrubbing."

Nick looked at his netpad and smartshades out of reach and said, "I have to get back."

She gave him a toothy grin and leaned in closer, looking at his mouth. "You don't want to leave yet."

He kissed her. She pulled him close and his hand slid through her silky hair. The thick greenhouse air squeezed out from between them. Her tongue found its way into his mouth while she held his head in both of her hands.

She exhaled heavily. "We shouldn't do this now."

"We simply don't have time," Nick agreed.

"Glad we got that out of the way," she said, and kissed him deeply and urgently.

When they pulled apart, there was a gleam in her eyes. She took his hand and pulled him towards the bedroom.

Things began tumbling outside of the small universe of an eager kiss in the doorway. On him, off her, around him, off him, on her. He pulled her down on to the bed, her small, pale breasts jiggling under an enormous smile. Their clothes had melted off during the kiss, for all he knew, and they may have turned into plant food for all he cared.

She ground her hips against his belly and inhaled noisily. He cupped each breast as she traced her fingertips from his nipples down to his knees. His hand slid down toward a moist spot where she sat on him. She closed her eyes, bit her lip, and braced herself above him with her arms.

A minute went by where all he did was watch her react to each caress. She shuddered and smiled triumphantly. Then she plunged him inside quickly and efficiently.

She brought her face inches away from him. Her dark eyes searched his. They lay completely still for a moment. The intimacy of the eyeball-lock was intense; Nick felt like he should look away but didn't want to. Her eyes were a sanctuary that he..., eh..., he... couldn't complete the thought.

She tucked her hair behind her ear and began to kiss him gently. Her tongue came at him, devilish and urgent. Her thighs gripped him and they fell into a rhythm.

The universe collapsed inside Nick's head in a reverse Big Bang. Everything drained out of him at that second, all the tension in his lower back and the anxiety in his chest. He felt weepy.

When he opened his eyes she was staring at him. She looked like she had known him for decades. "You look like you recognized someone you've known for decades but didn't remember until just now," he said. His brain was still figuring which way was up.

She laughed and pulled his hand over her heart, which was still beating rapidly, and then pulled it down until she purred. As they lay there, she idly fondled him.

"I have had this dream for years about the perfect man. My soul mate, husband, father of my children, ward of my plants."

Nick snickered.

"He would make love to me and then we go for a walk in the rain, hand in hand, off to the rest of our life together. The odd thing was that it never rained on Tessa."

What the hell was he supposed to make of that? "You tell all the guys this, don't you?" he asked. Truth was, her handiwork was making it er, difficult, for him to concentrate on words.

"Absolutely. That way, if they flee, I don't have to share the bed for the night. So are you going to leave?"

"Hmm... nah. I like it here."

"Good," she said, her hand working faster.

Nick gulped. "Well, so long as Mr. Perfect doesn't come back."

She laughed. "I never knew Mr. Perfect's face until I saw you in the library the night we met. But I didn't want to think about it then."

He didn't know what to say. Simply telling her he felt the same was so far from true it was ridiculous. Things were moving too fast. Like her damn hand.

"Nick, baby, are you having trouble hearing me?"

He reached over and massaged her nipple, feeling it harden under his index finger. She groaned and her hand slowed down.

"Back. At. You. Missy."

She laughed but kept going. It wasn't long before he felt very sleepy and entirely content.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Ah, tranquility.

Nick stepped out of Pam's building on a quiet, sunny morning. The air was cool but held the promise of summer-like warmth. The un-enhanced scene of a bright morning in the hip section of Hamilton looked gorgeous to Nick's naked eyeballs. He was in no rush to turn on his netpad, don his smartshades or deal with Cross. Even the buzz saw growl of a police drone whipping by overhead could not wrinkle his good mood.

He was focused, relaxed, and energetic. Being with Pam felt as right as streaming in the Sphere. It was like rediscovering your home or finding a piece of yourself that had always been missing. The tumblers of his psyche had fallen into place. Even Borbola waiting for him at the next corner didn't perturb him.

Borbola? The rogue bounty hunter wore that same gray business suit Nick had last seen him in. He watched Nick with his arms crossed and his smartshades down low on his nose. He looked like a lethal investment adviser scouting gullible clients.

Borbola looked at Pam's building as Nick approached and cracked a grin. "Funny, no record of you renting a place here. Not a Stabilizer hangout either. But the Trade Rep lives there. Puzzling. Very, very puzzling."

Nick walked right past him.

"Call me Eldred," Borbola said, turning to match Nick's stride.

"What do you want, Borbola?"

"Don't tell me you're pretending to be outraged about what happened on Gateway. It was just business. You wouldn't have done any different."

"A Kagent would have."

Borbola shook his head sadly. "You got all preached-up by Bridge, huh? But what did he teach you about loyalty?"

"I owe you something for kidnapping me?"

"No, I was thinking about Kelly Sekma, the Kagent you almost killed. Mother, wife, and your aunt, right? Now a political prisoner, thanks to you. Haven't given her much thought lately, have you?"

Nick's mood dropped a couple of levels. "I didn't know who she was until it was too late."

"Too late? A Kagent wouldn't say that. But you were just doing your job, is that it? You didn't care to do anything about it after you collected the reward either. Or even now, when your back down here."

He held his hands up defensively before Nick could respond. "I don't disapprove, believe you me. I'd do the same, which is what I was thinking about when I set you up for that job in the first place."

He wasn't talking about just the ambush in the Two Screwed lounge, Nick realized. "You piece of shit. You set her up as the target, expecting me to do the dirty work? How could you do that?"

"Hey, I'm not on her side. She became a meddling pain in the ass to some of my clients. I tried to take two pieces off the Kagent board by tossing her in prison and turning you against the Kagents. I didn't expect you to sign up for Bridge's bullshit after he had you jacked. See? I'm human after all, making mistakes and all that."

Borbola stopped walking and handed Nick a netpad. On its viewer was the map of a prison. "Not hard to find your Aunt Kelly. Minimal-security, low-rent contract dump in Louisiana. We could go in and grab her, make things right."

When Nick didn't say anything, Borbola showed him a picture of a young woman on his netpad. "Her youngest, your cousin, graduates from university next week. Good kid, overcame some learning disabilities, pride of the family, and all that. It will really hurt if Mommy misses it. Memories that can't be replaced. Offenses that may never be forgiven. You know how that goes."

Nick frowned. "Don't grope my heartstrings. I haven't had a chance to help her. What are you playing at with your bullshit?"

"I thought you would want to reunite her with her family. But what do I know about how your family works?" Borbola slipped the netpad inside his suit jacket.

He grunted in disgust. "Look, as one former student to another, Bridge and Meredith don't mind leaving people behind if it serves the cause, family or not. I thought you were better than them."

Nick waited for him to speak. "Are you gonna tell me what the hell you're referring to?"

Borbola actually looked ill at ease. "As much as I disagree with Bridge and Meredith, they are good people. They've never done me wrong. I want you to understand that I'm not airing their family troubles for funsies here."

"But..."

"But..." Borbola paused. "But. I've heard that the whole... episode with their daughter is relevant to what's going on here. You should ask; you have a right to know about it. That's all I'm saying."

Borbola slapped Nick's back and steered him to a street vendor who was setting up a white and blue cart. A sign on the stand said it had the best offworld snacks.

Borbola addressed the vendor. "You sell real chocks?"

The vendor smiled. "The best. Imported every week."

Borbola bought a bag and turned to Nick. "Chocks, I love'em. Not that we'll get them around here much longer."

The vendor did a double take. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh, just that your business is about to go under. When the Stabilizers shut down orbital imports, your offworld customers and suppliers will disappear."

"That's not funny, mister. This here is my living."

Borbola popped a few of the steaming chocks in his mouth. "Well then, I'd sell this cart to an unsuspecting fool while you still can. These chocks taste great by the way. A shame."

After blurting an apology to the vendor, Nick hurried after Borbola. "That was quite a deft job of sowing panic," he snarled.

"I like to spread the truth, cut through the propaganda. Don't tell me you're different. Try a chock."

Borbola nearly shoved a peanut-shaped chip into Nick's mouth. It was buttery, salty, and had the crispiness of lightly toasted Italian bread.

The bounty hunter continued with his mouth full. "The Dragoons are not even the real problem, but that's where we start today's lesson in How Shit Really Works.

"Local Control is an ideology of fear and distrust. Because of it, small sovereigns are played off against one another until they all bleed dry. One by one, they turn themselves into police states, or worse."

"You might sound more convincing if you didn't talk with your mouth full," Nick said.

The bounty hunter scowled. "I'm hungry, so kill me. The Dragoons, they've introduced retail mass-market tyranny. Hell, they couldn't buy advertising as good as Berlin. Every tinpot dictator sees them shoot refugees and says, 'Sign me up!'"

Borbola shook his head and continued. "Eighteen months later the Dragoons will install a new mayor, a new board or new judges who sing their praises and look the other way when they start beating people. The Dragoons will have twice as much power down here within two years. They know it; they build business plans around it."

Nick asked, "Even if that is true, how does that make them worse than the Stabilizers?"

"Stop them and the zones won't allow the Stabilizers or the Kagents to tell them how to live."

Nick retorted, "What about the Stabilizers?"

"A whiny political movement. They think they're orchestrating disasters to weaken their opponents. The reality is they just show up when a tottering city is ready to topple. Meredith calls it scientific terrorism. Terrorism is always the last gasp of the lost, not a tool for winning. I don't buy it. Fear and force are much more dangerous. Like Dragoons occupying this city's high-rent neighborhoods, boots on the ground running the smoothest protection racket ever devised."

Nick lowered his voice. "What about the Kagent projections showing the Stabilizers are behind this?"

Borbola scowled dismissively. "EIECO. Expectations In Equals Conclusions Out. Happens with any model, any predictor, any analytical package. And that leads you to garbage in, garbage out—"

"I know, GIGO."

Borbola nodded. "Back to reality. The Dragoons recruit from high crime areas they control. Not the victims, or law enforcement, but the perps. They ship these professional assholes off to some distant zone to terrorize strangers. Brutality recycled and repackaged. An evil, ingenious business model."

Nick asked, "And the Kagents missed all of this?"

"Having the information is one thing, interpreting it accurately, that's entirely different. The Kagents have a hard time believing that outright oppression can be carried out against wealthy, free people who should know better. But they are millions of klicks away. You and I know what it is like down here."

Nick got that sick feeling in his stomach that he used to get when his parents argued and he was confused about who was right. "But the Stabilizers are the ones threatening Hamilton," he said. "If they're not stopped, this city crashes. And that could be the turning point."

Borbola shook his head sadly. "It's already happening. This crashpoint cascade will probably happen, too, and Earth will isolate itself. Maybe it could use a break from offworld meddling."

A woman in bright pink spandex jogged around the corner towards them, pushing a stroller. Borbola stopped until she jogged in and out of earshot.

"You need to think about how we get through the chaos that will result, Nick. We have to stop those enabling the Stabilizers: the Dragoons. They induce Local Control believers to isolate their districts from one another."

Borbola shook his head. "There was a time, before Local Control, when you didn't need a visa to cross the continent. No highway checkpoints. Have you ever driven across this continent? Of course not. A couple of liftports saved or lost won't reverse all of that damage."

The bounty hunter stretched his back and looked even more out of place in a business suit. "I can't do this myself. The city's politicians can pretend they don't want me to help, but they do. That little show yesterday was so they have plausible deniability. But they know there's not a damn thing they can do about the Dragoons. It's up to you and me."

"Did they say that to you explicitly, Eldred?" The name dripped off Nick's tongue coated in acid.

"Look, I'm the only one being completely honest with you here. Bridge and Meredith, the politicians, your new squeeze there, they are playing other personal and political angles. I'm only here to keep the Dragoons from terrorizing people. Nothing more.

"Now, you have the data, the training, and the gear to hit the Dragoons. Really take them down, Nick. Without all that, I'm left with blunter tools that, well, you don't like and that won't make me very popular. But I'll do what I have to, win or lose. That's my pitch."

Nick had to admit that Borbola had hit all his soft spots. The analysis of any complicated situation became clouded with personal subjectivity. He might even buy some of this pitch if he didn't know the pitchman was completely untrustworthy.

An urgent call came in from Bridge. "Hammerfuck, where have you been? I've been trying to reach you. It's started. Someone took out all of the city's satellites last night. The net is down."

"Which net?"

"All of them," Bridge said.

Nick shot a look at Borbola. "What? How? When?"

"Couple of hours ago," Bridge replied. "Just get down to the operations center." He hung up. Or was cut off. Nick put on his smartshades and had no net signal. No Cross. No Sphere. Nothing.

"Oh shit," Nick said, "I don't have any net access. Do you?"

Borbola coughed into his hand.

Nick glared at him. "You know, I can't quite put my finger on why no one fucking trusts you."

Borbola raised his hands defensively. "Hey, I've been more truthful with you than I've been in years with anyone. And I've been much more upfront than your friends."

The odd thing was, Nick believed him. He suspected Borbola was somewhat right about the Dragoons and Kagents. He would have to look into that.

But Nick felt a small ember of instinctual faith glowing inside himself. Faith that the city was not lost yet. Faith that the Sphere projections weren't wrong. Faith in people like Fen, Bridge, and Pam. Faith in himself.

Well, faith and a desperate hope that he hadn't discovered the Sphere only to see it and everything it stood for destroyed.

Better to let Borbola think his dishonesty was his critical mistake, that Nick was too pissed about being manipulated. It might make the bounty hunter more honest with his next mark.

"No," Nick said, "you're the con man who cons himself when he tries to be honest for once, Eldred. For all I know you're right, but that's the problem, I never know with you. So fuck off." He started to walk away.

"Come on Nick!" The former Kagent yelled after him. "We'd be a great team. Where did I lose you? Was it your aunt? The kidnapping? Come on, I want to know: I'm taking a survey."

Borbola laughed at himself, shrugged, and headed the other way, gobbling his bag of chocks.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

Nick spent the next ten minutes trying to get back to Civic Center. Without access to any nets, including the general public one, he didn't have a map of the city, and became lost within three blocks.

He ducked into a Rotty's convenience store to buy a flimsy paper map, but their checkouts were all down. No net access, no check out.

Caffeine-deprived customers with gels and water bottles in hand were yelling at the store manager until they realized their netpads had no signal either.

Nick walked up to an angry man clutching a box of chocolate cupcakes and asked for directions. The man was so taken aback he said sure and told him calmly. Then he went back to yelling at the poor store manager. Nick thanked him and left just as a pair of Dragoons walked up, attracted by the commotion.

As he approached Civic Center, Nick catalogued the noticeable breakdowns caused by the loss of net access. The traffic grid was functioning spastically, making crossing the street an exercise in head-swiveling and vigorous hand motions.

People were hanging out in the street because they couldn't work without net access. Some had run out for breakfast muffins and gels only to find that their electronic currency was useless and they couldn't buy a thing.

Clumps of people stood on the sidewalk in the early morning sun trying to catch a signal to make a call. The age-old problem of telecomm failure reared its ugly head: everyone was trying to call everyone else to say they were okay or ask what the hell happened, increasing the system's load, and crashing the intermittent bandwidth that flickered on Nick's smartshades. Without Cross or net access, there was little else he could see on his smartshades.

He finally found Civic Center and was escorted down below the basement level. He caught up with Bridge at a security checkpoint there, where they both had to check-in their weapons.

"We're dead fish without the net," Bridge said by way of greeting. "Where've you been?"

Nick felt himself blush as he remembered the last twelve hours. He mumbled something about being embarrassed that he had fallen asleep and how, without net access, Cross couldn't wake him, so he had slept right through it.

It was only a little lie, but it made Nick anxious. It also made him unprepared to press Bridge on honesty issues. Or mention his run-in with Borbola. He gritted his teeth in frustration though; at some point he had to know if Borbola's accusations had any credibility.

As much as he distrusted Borbola, he didn't completely discount what the bounty hunter said. Which meant that he and Bridge had some issues to discuss. But not now, he told himself. Now was a bad time.

He was more than happy to let the Kagent brief him as they entered the city's emergency operations center. The EOC, as the city government folks called it, was a subterranean complex, with sections for each department and a command vestibule where the entire city leadership could observe each department. There were at least thirty people staffing the EOC at any time, day or night.

"Without our god-shitting virtual eyes and ears, we're just well-equipped jerkoffs," Bridge said. "There are plans to put in motion, decisions to be made, and communication that needs to happen."

Nick asked, "What the hell happened to net access?"

Bridge narrowed his eyes. "Every one of Hamilton's HAPs and satellites were destroyed in a predawn missile barrage. Combat platforms first and then the defenseless ones were picked off. Someone has completely blinded the city."

"Whoa-shit," was all Nick could say.

"The loss of the overhead telecomm capacity has dumped so much traffic onto the city's ground-based systems that they are crashing repeatedly. No street cam feeds, which come over the net. No overhead surveillance. Voice/text message service is unreliable. We are fuckdeaf and fuckblind."

Nick checked the time on his smartshades as they neared the command vestibule. "Do you realize how bad you are at cursing?"

Bridge shook his head. "The financial markets open in two hours. If the city's investors are cut off from the nets, not only will the futures markets plunge, but they won't be able to slow the damage."

"Wait, the finance markets work on the weekend?" Nick asked. That seemed completely foreign to him.

Bridge just shot him an exasperated glance as they stepped into the vestibule. The dead viewers around the EOC meant there was no net access to be had here either.

"It's like the city has been thrown back to pre-industrial communication methods. Runners and short-range radios," Nick said. Was there an outcome in the cone for this? He bet not.

"Yeah, and you and I are crippled without access to the Simons or the Sphere," Bridge muttered. "But don't mention it to the clients."

Chief Reese waved them over. "Cams up on the orbital habitats traced missile launches from zones in the desertified plains out west. We hired a local bounty hunter there to investigate the launch sites."

"Also, we've rented out as much communication satellite bandwidth as we can to satiate demand. A radio advisory will broadcast soon, urging residents to stay off the net and reduce their bandwidth consumption."

Bridge nodded. "Thanks, Chief. How long until comm bandwidth is restored?"

"One surveillance HAP may launch in the afternoon, but the crew is wrestling with some stubborn technical problems. We have all of our air drones up to provide spot coverage on the ground, but that's pretty limited."

"So we're blind and dumb on the day the Stabilizers march, the refugees arrive, and a couple of days before the Dragoons are supposed to leave," Bridge summed up.

The Chief nodded and looked at Nick. "Any suggestions?"

Nick said. "Well, we know several new things. First, this was a deliberate, well-planned attack that cost someone a lot of money. Second, the attackers bought themselves a day-long window to move without being spotted, so they probably expect to do everything they need to today. Third, by doing this they have telegraphed the kind of action they have planned, but they think we're unable to see it coming."

Chief Reese asked, "Do you think the Stabilizers did this?"

"No. It's too bold, too overt, too military," Nick replied. But something told him his answer was wrong in some way. "But I'm not sure we can rely on their past actions. They may be responding to our novel strategy in a unique way."

"Thrall's Dragoons might benefit from the added freedom of movement and Thrall may look better because the city looks weaker, but that's a long shot as well," Bridge added. "Of course, this is all speculation without access to the projections."

The Chief scowled.

Bridge snapped his fingers. "I can give the city access to Kagent satellites already in geosych orbit over the city. They are micro-sized and not as good, but some overhead coverage is better than none."

Nick perked up. "Can they provide net access?"

Bridge shook his head. "They are sensor platforms, not relays."

Chief Reese told a junior officer to get someone named James over here. Then he turned to Bridge. "Out of curiosity, why do you have sats spying on my city?"

"Studying traffic patterns," Bridge said, hands spread innocently. "Soil usage, air pollution, energy output, that kind of thing. No violation of privacy laws. They can barely make out a single block."

Reese was still skeptical, but turned to a guy in dreadlocks who came up behind him. "Rave James, this is Bridge Radisson. I want you to link his satellites to our secure comm feeds. And be quiet about it."

Rave and Bridge huddled together in a far corner.

"Chief," said the deck officer, "your other mountain bounty hunter is calling in."

The Chief let his shoulders slump slightly. "I'll take it in the conference room. Come on, Nick. You know how to speak bounty hunter."

The bounty hunter on the line spoke with a ragged, craggily tone that sounded like rocks starting an avalanche. "I live near the launch sites. The wind and sand erased any trace of the attackers. There's nothing to test. I wish I had something more to tell you guys."

The Chief hovered a finger over the button to end the call. "Thanks for looking into it. Reimbursements will be in touch." He hung up and looked at Nick.

Nick couldn't analyze the missile attack without Cross, the Sphere, and a heaping mound of data. He shook his head. "I don't know anything more than I did before."

The Chief nodded. "Me too."

Bridge came back, clapped Nick on the shoulder, and announced that he had to get to the liftport. Before Nick could ask why or confront him about what Borbola said, the viewers sprang to life. Everyone in the EOC cheered, except Nick.

He scrambled to direct the dozen satellite cams. There were critical areas where the refugees, Dragoons, and Stabilizers were. Each viewer showed several feeds from the Kagent micro-sats and Nick worked feverishly to get it all organized. Without Cross he had to do that manually.

During all of the commotion, Bridge slipped out, headed for the liftport to help the Sancternals guarding it. When he noticed, Nick felt relieved.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

At noon, Fen arrived at the EOC to observe the Stabilizer protest. Nick suspected that he also wanted to bolster the spirits of the people working in the EOC, many of whom were deep into their second or third straight shift since the satellite attack last night.

The Kagent sats showed a hot, cloudless afternoon in the city. The streets were filled with people enjoying no net access, no work, and the hot weather. Interspersed with them were scared, angry people, most of them in sweat-stained suits, freaked out by the same.

"Net access is still not reliable at this point," Nick said apologetically to Fen. He had only very brief and intermittent contact with Cross, even after the center ran a dedicated groundlink to the net. Telling people to stay off of their netpads had caused everyone to do the opposite. The traffic load kept spiking and the ground lines couldn't even handle a normal situation. "I'll have new projections at some point, when the results get back to me."

Fen settled into a seat in the command hub. "Today, I need your brains more than projections anyway."

The police air drone feeds showed several hundred city police in riot gear lining both sides of the Stabilizer protest route along Werner Avenue.

About one hundred and fifty Stabilizers, many hundred fewer than Nick expected, gathered a kilometer from the main liftport. Such a small group couldn't take it over.

At the head of the protest, absorbing as much media attention as sunshine, was a family who looked like they had stepped away from a summer fashion catalog shoot. A curvy mom with straight blonde hair under a wide-brimmed straw hat was stuffed into an aqua-colored sundress. She wielded a double-wide stroller containing two cherubic kids. Next to her was a polo shirt-wearing dad with a chiseled jaw, perfect teeth, and straight brown hair.

The woman began pushing the stroller and the protest march began.

The other protesters, the cops, and the media followed her doggedly. The Stabilizers made up for a lack in numbers by betting that confronting such pretty protesters would be a public relations disaster for the city.

Nick noted that all of the Stabilizer women wore wide-brimmed hats that concealed their faces from any overhead sats or drones. He would never find his phantom lady in that crowd. Nice touch. But it was another confirmation that the phantom woman was indeed a Stabilizer and knew the city was looking for her.

Half a block into the march, the protesters started chanting.

"Can we have audio?" Nick asked.

The usual bubble and murmur of street noise filled the operations center but receded as the chanting grew louder.

"Hey hey, ho ho, we need a city that takes it slow!"

After ten minutes of repetitive textbook protest theater, Nick became bored and scanned feeds from the other satellites and police drones. He spotted a group of about eighty strong approaching the Stearns liftport, which had just opened. They had coalesced out of nowhere. They were younger, grungier, and tougher-looking than the telegenic Stabilizers prancing through downtown.

Traffic halted as this small mob blocked the liftport entrance. A dozen peeled off from the main group and picked up a heavy trash can on the sidewalk. Uh oh.

They heaved it through the windows of a nearby office building. Before the glass finished shattering, they were running to the next one.

Bystanders scattered as everyone on the street realized something had gone very, very wrong.

Nick frowned. He and the Chief had discussed the possibility that the Stabilizers might rush the newly-opened auxiliary liftports while the police were busy with the protest downtown. If he remembered correctly, this was a low probability contingency, and with scarce police resources, the Chief had decided not to cover it. Nick had agreed with him.

"Damn it," the Chief muttered.

The liftport's officials called the EOC. The Chief glared at Nick and put the call on speaker.

"We have violent activity outside," the liftport administrator said. "We're locking down the entrance. Send what you can, our security is already strained."

"Strained?" the Chief repeated.

"Yes, we have a lot of irate travelers because of the flight delays and the closure. Our holding cell is full. If the hostiles try to breach our security, we won't be able to stop them."

One of the viewers above the command hub showed a live shot of all police cruisers. There were two in the area of the Stearns liftport. Bridge's Kagent sats were proving invaluable.

Chief Reese said, "Send cruisers."

Something compelled Nick to blurt "No!" He remembered something like this happening before. Normally, Cross would help fill in the blanks but now it felt like half his brain was missing. And Reese was glaring at him, waiting for an explanation.

"Chief, everyone thinks we're blind and that the comm network is out. The attackers, the Stabilizers probably, think they can move with impunity. We have a huge tactical advantage, but only so long as we don't give it away. Until it really counts."

"A violent mob is tearing up the city. I'd say this counts," the hulking police chief replied. He looked at Fen and then turned to the dispatcher and nodded.

Nick shook his head. "They think we can't see them. And so far they haven't hurt anyone. We have to let them think that we are blind. No one should arrive on the scene in less than the average response time. Taking longer would be better. We can see what else they are up to."

Reese folded his arms defiantly. The dispatcher looked from Nick back to the Chief. Reese finally nodded and the dispatcher ordered the squad cars to hold off.

"I could lose my job for this," Reese said.

"So could I," Fen said.

Nick didn't answer either of them. If the Stabilizers figured out that the city could see them, the two of them would be out of more than a job.

Three minutes passed as the mob continued destroying property. But they didn't assault anyone in the rubbernecking crowd that formed to watch them.

Five police cruisers finally pulled up and the mob immediately melted into the rubberneckers. The officers pursued on foot, catching less than half a dozen.

The Chief harrumphed. "Good call, Mr. Lincoln."

Nick nodded and asked Cross to track the individual protesters so the police could pick them up. But she was still offline. Or rather, Nick was still offline.

Another Stabilizer mob appeared in the Palisades and ran down a street approaching the Nelsa Park border where Dragoons were out in force. The lack of double-wide strollers and flimsy sundresses spoke volumes to Nick.

A squad of city police in riot gear saw them and pursued on foot. City police, Stabilizers, and Dragoons began to converge on one street.

"We can't have a fight between the Dragoons and our people," Fen reminded the Chief. "Goddamn Stabilizers don't know where they're going. The liftport is in the other direction."

The Chief looked at Nick.

"This is where a civil war could start," Nick added.

Reese nodded at them both and borrowed the dispatcher's headset. He murmured something about rules of engagement to the sergeant leading the pursuers. He watched the satellite feed intently with his arms crossed.

Activity throughout the operations center quieted as everyone else followed the drama in the Palisades.

The Stabilizer mob reached the boulevard that bordered Nelsa Park. The police were thirty meters behind them and gaining. The mob paused at the sight of armed Dragoons across the street and turned right, careful to stay on the other side of the street.

The Dragoon troopers began pacing them up the sidewalk, with their rifles at the ready, as traffic passed between them.

The Stabilizers paused midway down the block, appearing uncertain about where to go next. The intersection ahead featured Dragoon troopers entrenched behind sandbagged checkpoints at each corner. A Bearcat armored infantry carrier blocked the street into Nelsa Park, and the mob was already within range of the machine guns mounted on its roof.

The police came around the corner and now controlled the other intersection.

"Clear the traffic on the street," the Chief ordered. People in the transit hub scrambled to redirect the traffic grid. The street emptied and the Dragoons began to cross the street.

The Stabilizers were trapped.

The Penny Twain news site somehow had a live feed of the standoff from a bystander's netpad. The feed died again and again as the net overloaded and crashed. The site looped earlier footage from 'moments ago' alongside intermittent live images. This only heightened the drama, forcing the audience to take quick peeks at a morbidly-fascinating accident unfolding, while oowing and awwing at the dramatic recorded loops.

The feed showed the Dragoons and police carefully surrounding the Stabilizer mob. The Dragoons outnumbered the police three to one. The cops were panting under their riot gear after the long sprint in the heat. The Dragoon troopers looked like androids behind their mirrored face-shields and armor.

Nick held his breath, hoping that a fight wouldn't break out. Next to him, Chief Reese continued whispering into his microphone calmly.

The Dragoon commander and the police sergeant made exaggerated arm motions as they each ordered the mob to disperse. But the only way out was past or through the other armed party. The Stabilizers, all men with meaty forearms and hard-ass looks, stood their ground.

The Hamilton police sergeant took off her riot helmet, revealing a shock of short gray hair. The Stabilizers did a double take.

She walked over to the Dragoon commander with a smile on her face. The Dragoons watched her, faces unreadable, tracking her with their weapons. The Penny Twain's bystander moved to get a better view, causing the video feed to wobble.

The sergeant thrust out her hand at the commander. He shook it. They talked for a minute until they were both nodding. Nick couldn't hear what they were saying but the Chief nodded along like he had an audio feed.

The sergeant turned and approached the tense Stabilizer mob.

She picked out one Stabilizer goon and began talking to him. The Penny Twain's feed showed the Stabilizer's facial expression shift from hostility, to apprehension, to resignation. She motioned to the Dragoons and her own squad to back off.

The Stabilizer turned and passed along orders. Shoulders slumped across the mob.

The exhausted cops escorted the Stabilizers back to the only Dragoon-free corner, cuffed them, and led them away.

The Penny Twain commentary started layering on the superlatives about the peaceful outcome.

All across the operations center, people sighed with relief or whooped in celebration.

"That was close," Fen said. He clapped the Chief on the back and motioned to the Chief's headset. "I want to thank that sergeant."

The Chief handed the headset over. He turned to the Transit people. "Open traffic on that street. Thank you everyone."

But Nick didn't feel like celebrating. He had already spotted two more mobs coalescing in different locations. And he didn't need Cross to tell him that there were not enough police to contain them all.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

Throughout the afternoon Stabilizer flash mobs kept popping up. The cops and Dragoons chased after them while avoiding each other, the mobs dispersed, and the whole process repeated in another part of the city.

Since the Stabilizer march had remained civil, Chief Reese cautiously diverted police from covering it to handling these flash mobs. The level of police strength, already reduced by Blight 5, ticked downward as injuries, heat exhaustion, and the need for a rest took more officers off the line. A map showed how much of the city would experience an above-average response time from the police. The area grew like a slow-spreading set of puddles.

Conversely, the Kagent satellites showed the number of Dragoon troopers in Nelsa Park's streets had jumped fifty percent. The Dragoons also had moved more Bearcat vehicles to key intersections.

As afternoon turned to early evening, the Stabilizer mobs disappeared just as suddenly as they had appeared. The Stabilizer protest continued peacefully. While the protest had crept to within eight blocks of the main liftport, the press had stopped covering it live, having lost interest after hours of boring peace and repetitive chants.

Nick noticed that the protest's optics had changed though. The attractive stroller-pushers had been replaced by angry young men like the ones who had threatened the Stearns liftport. The number had slowly tripled, too, as the setting sun made people harder to spot in the lengthening shadows.

"They're wearing us out," reported the watch commander. "Most of our guys are still weak from the Martian Cocktail and have been on foot for hours, in riot gear, in the heat. Now we're outnumbered at the protest site, too. You watch, the Stabbies will try to break our lines."

Nick's instincts agreed like a Greek chorus.

Reese said, "I'm scrambling everyone I can to cover the protest. If we can't hold them, though, it's up to the Sancternals inside."

Nick asked out of the corner of his mouth, "How many are at the liftport?"

"Only a hundred," the dispatcher replied. "They are guarding the skeleton crew of liftport staff preparing for the convoy."

The convoy. Nick checked the city's orbital traffic monitor. The convoy had entered orbit and was lining up for a reentry trajectory that led straight down to Hamilton.

"Nick," Chief Reese said, "We need you at the liftport."

"You need me here though," Nick replied, waving at the viewers.

The prospect of combat without Cross or any net access was not enticing at all. And he didn't want to confront Bridge about Borbola's accusations. All things considered, staying in the EOC seemed like a much better idea.

Before Reese could push the point, Fen shook his head. "The Dragoons won't bother us today, not after 'the handshake.' It would kill Regina's credibility."

He motioned to the viewer where local media coverage snapped on and off as net access flickered. The police-Dragoon handshake had gone viral. The media sites, broadcasting over the open air to route around the intermittent net performance, were speculating that reconciliation talks had to be underway between Thrall and the city.

Nick suspected the media were pushing the rumors to fill a lull in the action, as an excuse for showing those dramatically-compelling visuals over and over. They had nothing else to show but their in-house pundits reacting to the footage.

Pam entered the EOC behind a pack of technicians hurrying in with spools of cable. The dispatcher next to Nick mentioned something about getting feeds from short-range receivers on the roof. The receivers would catch all of the net-alternative frequencies the media and others were using.

Nick didn't pay much attention to the dispatcher as he watched Pam. She was wearing a gray version of her red cloak and one-piece body suit. Her breasts seemed more hidden and he realized she was wearing body armor.

The technicians disappeared down into a level under the floor, leaving a trail of yellow cable in their wake.

Pam beelined it right to the command hub. She and Nick locked eyes for a brief moment but her gaze swept over to Fen.

"I've got calls coming in from all over, but hardly any can get through," she said. "I assumed we're on a press lockdown."

Fen nodded. "Yes. The markets aren't taking this very well I suppose?"

Pam held up her hands. "Who knows? I've been running around all day trying to connect to the nets. I was hoping this place had a dedicated landline or something."

"We have some Kagent satellites for surveillance," Nick said, pointing at a viewer, "but nothing that will pull down net access."

The techs working under the floor gave a thumbs up and net access returned to the workstations. They had connected to the short-range transmitters on the roof.

Pam poked at a workstation. "The futures markets slid all day, but the late-hours markets have jumped since the handshake and now that the protest appears contained." She looked up. "It's better to be poorer than bankrupt."

Nick had no Sphere results to back his instinct that her relief was misplaced. The protest, even now, seemed like a diversion. He bit his tongue and toyed with the controls to the satellite cams. The other shoe was dropping, he could almost hear it whooshing as it dropped through the air, but he couldn't see it or guess where it would land.

Since he had eyes on the satellite feeds, he was the first one to see it. His tongue stuck in his throat, but he managed to sputter, "The Dragoons are leaving Nelsa Park."

Every head swung from watching their life savings crumble to the satellite viewer.

A dozen Bearcat personnel carriers were leading a convoy of rental trucks and troopers on foot. They were heading straight into the Palisades. Downtown. The closest police units were tied up containing the protest.

"What are they doing?" Fen asked, rising out of his chair.

"Heading east, towards the protest," the dispatcher reported.

Nick never considered the Dragoons taking the offensive, outside of Nelsa Park, against the Stabilizer protest. Doing so would only boost support for the city, unless the Dragoons made the Stabilizers sympathetic by beating them senseless live on camera.

A cold, sick feeling crept into Nick's gut. Maybe this motorcade would head for the refugees and engage them outside city limits, like they did at Berlin. All they had to do was position themselves between the liftport and the refugees coming from the south.

But the motorcade turned north, then east, going around the Stabilizer protestors.

"They're headed for the liftport," Reese blurted.

"Why?" Fen wondered. "To attack the refugees?"

Nick sincerely hoped not. All of the scenarios where the Dragoons stormed around the city resulted in a civil war and an immediate crashpoint.

Chief Reese tried calling Thrall's security director, but turned to Fen with a sheepish look. "He and I are supposed to keep comm lines open to avoid any misunderstandings, but either I can't get through, or he's not answering."

Fen looked sick. "Keep trying. I'll try to reach Thrall. This can not happen now. Pam, go with Nick to the liftport. You are the city's official representative. Negotiate, delay, shake their hands, whatever it takes to prevent the Dragoons from shooting at the Sancternal Guards. Or the Stabilizers. Or the refugees. God help us."

Reese tossed a key fob to Pam. "Take my car."

Pam and Nick hurried out of the operations center. A cop handed Nick his three handguns, retrieved from Evidence. As Pam and Nick rode the elevator, he strapped on his weapons and checked their power levels.

The elevator deposited them inside a maintenance shack in the forest in the middle of the city's nature preserve. Night had fallen and crickets were chirping.

His smartshades flashed familiar icons: net access was back and so was Cross. And the Sphere. And the projections. The new HAPs must have just come online.

"Cross where have you been?"

[I was here all the time, where did you go?] Cross retorted.

Nick followed Pam as she ran for the cruiser parked on the street. "Never mind. Send me the scenarios where the Dragoons occupy the liftport."

Cross posted them as Nick reached the police cruiser's passenger door.

Either those scenarios had Nelsa Park temporarily allying with the city to guard the liftport against the Stabilizers, or an all-out civil war. But there was some factor missing. Maybe the Sphere couldn't factor in the world turning batshit crazy.

Pam punched in the drive path. When Nick closed the door, she grabbed his chin and gave him a kiss. "This is a crazy night," she said. She hit the go button and the car rocketed onto the road from a cold start.

"How bad is it?" she asked.

Nick lowered his smartshades and raised an eyebrow.

"Great," she replied as the car skidded around the first corner, its sirens wailing.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

The city's replacement HAP had gone live just as Nick got in the cruiser, but the high altitude platform was instantly overwhelmed by traffic volume. The return of net access meant the net was jammed all to hell and gone as everyone checked their mail, called their family, and streamed news feeds about the crisis.

Nick anxiously watched as his net connection crawled, dropped, reappeared, flickered, and faded as he and Pam sped to the liftport. The traffic grid did the same, and he tensed as they flew through intersections, waiting to get clipped or broadsided by another vehicle.

"Cross, load my netpad with software to run the drones, some city maps, and the latest projection results. For when we get cut off again."

No response. The signal had died. A second later it came back.

[Done.]

Nick sized up the tactical situation in the brief glimpses he got from intermittent net access. The city's main liftport occupied a footprint about half the size of New York Jersey's Central Park. The liftport used its surrounding forest as a sound barrier and to hide the concrete, glass and dull metal of an orbital launch facility from the rest of the city.

The city map, drawn from a series of street cameras, showed the liftport's main entrance connected to a massive traffic circle where five other streets converged. The traffic circle's median had a grassy lawn surrounding a four-story metal sculpture of a single-stage orbital transport taking off into the sky. At night the sculpture was illuminated and the traffic circle itself lit with lane markers and streetlights.

The liftport entrance road that connected to the traffic circle was a six-lane roadway, with three lanes coming in and three heading out. On either side of the entrance was a low stone fence and a plastic guard shack.

Dragoon troopers and personnel carriers had taken positions on three of the streets that fed into the traffic circle. A block away, more Dragoons moved in to surround the traffic circle and liftport entrance completely.

Three Sancternal snipers were on the liftport terminal roof and about a dozen more hidden in the woods on either side of the entrance. The rest of the hundred, along with Bridge, were behind two parallel walls of hastily-placed jersey barriers that blocked the entrance roadway at the traffic circle.

Against unarmed Stabilizers, a hundred armed Sancternals would have been more than sufficient. But Nick feared they would be little more than a speed bump for the Dragoons and their Bearcats.

"Hit the lights; maybe it will slow them down," Nick said to Pam. "And block the main entrance with the car. We have to buy time for the police to reinforce the Sancternals."

Pam updated the nav and the car screeched to a halt right where Nick wanted. "Once we get out, they'll know we're not cops."

Across the traffic circle, the lead Bearcat ground to a halt when the police cruiser bathed the traffic circle in red and blue strobes. Behind the Bearcat were hundreds of Dragoon troops, a stomping sea of yellow, magenta and green armor under the streetlights.

Each Dragoon carried an oversized Balzar U9 rifle, a full-blown combat weapon. It was much more lethal than a riot control popgun, a souped-up taser, or Nick's own Slugger.

The Dragoons looked a hell of a lot scarier in-person than they did when Nick saw them as pinpricks of heat on a viewer.

The troopers hung back, uncertain what to do. If they bought time through confusion, that was fine with Nick, too.

A portly, sweaty guy in a business suit exited the lead Bearcat and walked towards Pam and Nick. He stopped ten yards away, nixing any chance of a photogenic handshake breaking out.

Pam said. "I am Hamilton's Trade Representative."

He folded his arms. "I'm Jerry Craftchek, Nelsa Park Security Director. And standing next to you is Nick Lincoln, an ex-bounty hunter and wanted fugitive. Are you turning him over to me as a goodwill gesture?"

"What do you want with me?" Nick asked. He racked his brain for any transgression he could have made against Nelsa Park, or the Dragoons, but couldn't think of one.

"We have a warrant for your arrest," Craftchek said.

"Mr. Lincoln works for the city," Pam replied evenly.

"He's a Stabilizer spy. Grew up in one of those Stabilizer communes. The city is getting pretty sloppy with its background checks."

"He is not the issue here," Pam said.

Craftchek shook his head. "Honestly, missy, I expected a Councilor, or maybe Chief Reese. Not a, uh, very young offworlder woman."

Pam ignored the slight. "What are your intentions here?" she asked. "You're pretty far away from Nelsa Park."

"The liftport behind you has been overrun by a mob, like the ones that your Council have let run wild today," Craftchek said. "Nelsa Park has to secure its economic base, since the city has abandoned its security responsibilities."

"I can assure you that is not the case. If you would like to assist the city, I can facilitate that. I can put you in touch with Police Chief Reese."

"Look, there are many other stops on my dance card tonight, so step aside," Craftchek said gruffly. "You are outnumbered, outgunned, and surrounded. This liftport is Nelsa Park's lifeblood. We'll use lethal force to protect it. Like the Dragoons did in Berlin."

Pam tilted her head in a condescending manner. "I must have misunderstood you. Attacking us would mean civil war between Nelsa Park and the city, which I'm sure you want to avoid," she said calmly, gauging his reaction.

He merely shifted his weight from one foot to the other impatiently.

"There will be collateral damage, casualties, even deaths. No one wants that. Certainly not Regina Thrall, given her tragic history with violence."

Craftchek glared at her.

"Come," Pam said, "let's look at all of the things we have in common. We both want to defend this city and help it thrive. We don't want innocents hurt."

Craftchek grinned and spread his hands. The Dragoons massing behind him made for an imposing backdrop. He nodded at Nick. "Turn over Lincoln and your vaginalantes can leave peacefully. We are the city now."

Pam took out her disabling pistol and thumbed it on.

Craftchek looked at it, smiled, and shrugged. "It's your funeral." He turned and walked away, motioning to the fluorescent army behind him to advance.

Pam shot him in the back. He collapsed in a heap on the roadway. Her pistol made such a soft whine that the Dragoons needed a second to puzzle out why he toppled over.

Nick looked at her. "Citizen's arrest?"

Pam sneered and dove behind the cruiser, pulling Nick with her. A gunshot boomed, echoing around the traffic circle, and the cruiser's windshield cracked. Waves of birds flew out of the trees towering twenty meters above them.

Dozens of shots followed, plinking against the cruiser and thundering overhead.

The civil war had begun.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

Pam and Nick vaulted over the jersey barrier behind them as gunfire ripped apart the police car. They landed next to Bridge and General Avis Fridwulf.

Fridwulf was a real-life hero straight out of a Sancternal Guard docudrama. Five and a half feet tall, platinum blonde hair in a ponytail, somewhere north of forty-five but in top physical condition, holding a Viper S9 combat rifle.

Nick figured now was not the time to tell her that he had a teenage crush on her.

Bridge yelled over the Dragoon gunfire, "Where's the police? And the tanks? I was expecting tanks."

Pam held up her small disabler pistol, the one that didn't even manage to hurt Burgess' assassin. "We're it," she said. "The police are tied up with the Stabilizer protestors about eight blocks away."

"No reinforcements? No reinforcements," General Fridwulf replied and tossed a deadly look Bridge's way. She seemed to think they would lose this fight badly and quickly. "We're all that stands between these Dragoons and the refugees, who are nearly to the suburbs."

Bridge waved his hand dismissively. "It'll be fine." He raised his voice over the booms of automatic weapons. "There's three Kagents here. That's triple what it was five minutes ago."

"I don't have any drones," Pam reminded him. "I'm a business consultant."

Fridwulf grunted with disapproval. "Pam, get back to that parking garage. Nick, I'm sending you encryption keys and frequencies for our tactical net. Every friendly will be able to see your drone feeds, the Kagent satellite feeds and you'll see the cam feeds from each Guard's visor."

A 3D battlefield map appeared on Nick's smartshades. It tracked each Dragoon's ammunition use, accuracy rate, and estimated each Dragoon's remaining ammo.

An effective Dragoon was tagged a 'Sharpie' and the rest tagged 'Cupcakes.' The Sancternal snipers systematically picked off the best Sharpies while the Cupcakes wasted ammo.

Fridwulf looked at each Kagent. "Stay close, but don't get me shot."

Two of Bridge's drone swarms circled his head and he gave a debonair salute as they flew off.

"Cute." Fridwulf clicked her radio on and said, "It's time, ladies. Remember Berlin."

Calls of "Berlin!" echoed on the comm net. Inspiration crackled down Nick's spine. It was just like every Sancternal documentary he had seen. Hell, it was a Sancternal documentary. With the Sancternal tactical map on his smartshades, he realized all they had to do was edit the footage and add a narrator track.

Across the traffic circle came the rumble of Bearcat engines starting, followed by a couple of muffled, explosive thumps.

"Tear gas," Bridge announced. "Not a problem."

A gas canister landed near Nick, covered in Bridge's drones. No gas came out.

Bridge grinned at the general and turned to fire over the jersey barrier. "Told you."

Nick pulled out Slugger, his traditional projectile-thrower, and put it over his head, using telemetry from his drones to nail a couple of ambitious Sharpies. But his non-lethal ammo, meant for civilian Stabilizers, could only knock down these armored thugs.

He reloaded Slugger with hard stuff that would pierce their armor. He shot the Dragoons as they popped back up and this time they stayed down. He activated Bruiser, dialed up its power level, and fired them both over his head.

With spy drones lighting up targets and the software adjusting for ballistic conditions, he had a ninety-one percent hit rate with Slugger in the first two minutes. He had never done that well before.

The Sancternal snipers on the terminal's roof did even better. The Dragoons halted their advance with heavy losses.

Bridge said, "They're moving snipers up to the windows of these surrounding buildings." He pointed to the mid-rises that looked over the traffic circle.

The Dragoon snipers peppered the top of the jersey barriers, keeping the Kagents cowering too low to return fire. A Sancternal sniper was hit. Fridwulf hissed commands to take out the Dragoon snipers. No one had a clear shot though.

Bridge hunkered down, his back to the jersey wall, no firearm in sight, flicking his fingers to direct his drones.

"Nick," Bridge yelled, "Send in the drones."

Nick's combat drones took down one hundred percent of their targets, slipping under the mirrored face-shields and up sleeves to inject knockout juice. One by one, the Dragoon snipers across the traffic circle and ten floors up went horizontal and stopped moving. He put down a whole squad of Sharpies. But the drones used up all their power on the attack and fell, dormant, next to the snipers. He and Bridge couldn't sacrifice drones like that for very long.

Around the fallen Sharpies, the Cupcakes were unsettled by what happened and stopped advancing.

"We need to talk, Bridge," Nick shouted over the din of weapons fire.

"Can it wait?" The older Kagent's fingers flicked over his netpad. Two dozen more Dragoons on the street became fluorescent litter.

The Dragoon squads hid behind the approaching Bearcats, which were busy pivoting around the traffic circle.

"They have us pinned. They could send a couple of squads to kill the refugees," Fridwulf said.

Nick didn't think they would. Something bothered him about this entire Dragoon assault. "I really need to run new projections."

"Some other time," Pam yelled. She was on a call with Reese, but Nick couldn't hear what she was saying.

The Dragoon Bearcats advanced across the traffic circle. A squad rushed from behind one Bearcat to take cover behind the shot-up police cruiser.

Pam smiled. "Watch this." She carefully aimed a shot at the abandoned police cruiser's undercarriage. The round hit with an odd pinging noise. A second later, the cruiser's fuel cells exploded, taking down the nearby troopers. Secondary explosions blew shrapnel into the Dragoons coming up behind them.

For the first time, Nick could hear painful yelps from the Dragoons wounded by Pam's attack. He felt little sympathy.

Oily black smoke poured from the burning cruiser, creating a roiling smokescreen.

Nick and Bridge's spy drones switched to thermal imaging and continued pumping intel to the Sancternal tactical net. Pam made a run for the cover of the parking garage.

Dragoons dropped at such a steady clip that Nick felt the momentum begin to shift to the city's side.

With the pop and crumple of metal crunching, the lead Bearcat rammed the police cruiser's burning remains, and sent them skittering out of the way. The Bearcat came barreling toward the jersey barrier wall.

Small arms fire from the Sancternals scored the Bearcat's armor but did nothing to slow it down. Behind it, lines of fluorescent troopers advanced through the dissipating smoke.

Nick fired a charge from Thunker behind the Bearcat. The explosive arced over the vehicle and detonated behind it in a blinding flash. Thunder followed and Dragoons flew in every direction. The Bearcat's engine stalled and died.

Bridge said over the comm, "Now how we doing, General?"

Fridwulf grunted. "May buy us five minutes. What else you got?"

Bridge scowled. "Actually, nothing. Nick?"

Nick wished he knew what they needed. The latest projection results Cross was trying to shove down the congested net to him were irrelevant now, thanks to this attack.

If the Dragoons won here, the crashpoint would happen, he was certain. Thrall had no idea how stupid she was acting. Or maybe it was short-sightedness? Nick couldn't think straight with all of these damn people making all this damn racket trying to kill him.

Nick radioed, "I have the very strong feeling that we can't lose to these guys, no matter what."

From the twilight gloom on their left, a flash reached out toward them, followed by a whoomp like God's own subwoofer just overloaded.

Sancternal snipers fell from their perches in the trees. The Sancternal tactical net sent an alert that those were concussion grenades set to detonate in mid-air.

Brilliant flashes crashed down on the liftport entrance. Over eighty percent of the grenade throwers were Cupcakes, allowing the Sharpies to keep the defenders pinned. The Dragoons had adjusted to the Sancternals' targeting strategy.

Too many grenades were coming in too fast for Nick and Bridge's remaining drones to intercept and defuse them all. Instead, Nick's drones tagged every incoming grenade on the tactical net as it left the thrower's hand to give everyone a few seconds of warning to get clear.

"Fall back to the parking garage!" Fridwulf ordered over the comm.

The parking garage was a hundred yards back and a Sancternal fired all-spectrum smoke grenades to provide cover for their retreat.

Almost immediately, a concussion grenade landed close enough that the explosion tossed Nick into the jersey barrier behind him.

When he looked around, he saw that Fridwulf was down.

"And she thought we needed looking after," Bridge grumbled in Nick's earpiece.

Nick used three hundred drones to take down five Cupcakes winding up to toss another volley Fridwulf's way. Their already armed grenades fell to their feet, knocking out the rest of their squad when they blew. Yay.

With the Sancternal snipers no longer covering the flanks though, the Dragoons were setting up a crossfire.

On the tactical net, he saw Sancternals on the entrance road fall. The parking garage was receiving Dragoon fire from two sides now. The defenders wouldn't be able to hold out for more than a few more minutes. And he, Bridge and Fridwulf were pretty much cutoff.

They were out of time.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

It was time to kick Dragoon ass again.

Borbola knelt at the roof's edge and watched video feeds of the liftport battle that was thundering and popping a block away. Satisfied that the Kagents were losing in a timely fashion, he returned to checking the gray plastic box at his feet.

The charge indicator on top of the box glowed a dim, solid amber in the rooftop gloom. A dozen boxes just like it were tucked among the roof's shrubs and grasses. He had rushed through setting them all up because he figured that the Sancternal Guard and the Kagents would fold quickly. But the liftport defenders had surprised both him and the Dragoons. The defenders would get overrun soon, he had no doubt. And he wasn't lifting a finger to the fight Dragoons until after the Kagents were soundly beaten, killed, or captured.

His carefully-planned assault would be the culmination of a campaign to cripple the Dragoons via a humiliating destruction of their brand.

Months ago he took out a Dragoon guard post in Kentucky in broad daylight. It was so embarrassing it cost the Dragoons their contracts in four rural Kentucky zones.

During a midnight raid in Yuma last month, he made sure a security cam ID'd him so the media would report that the Dragoon garrison was beat by a single bounty hunter. That had been picked up by Arizona media and then the story spread across the planet.

Berlin had woken up the media to the Dragoons' true nature and news site crews had descended upon Hamilton to put the Dragoons under their brightest, harshest spotlight. Borbola had been only too happy when Fen Ferguson asked him to shovel Dragoon dirt to the media. He had plenty.

Regina Thrall's coup attempt was a ratings windfall, and all the major news sites were here trying to cover the liftport battle. After The Penny Twain's reporter drones were downed by Dragoon snipers early on, it stationed a reporter a few blocks away from the action, doing breathless, 'from the scene' color commentary.

The Scoop ran live reports from local stringers who were paid by the news bit for echoing each other's rumors, hearsay, and gossip.

The Byte was relaying shaky netpad video of the liftport battle from some enterprising idiot hiding in an oak tree at the northern end of the liftport. Hiding at night was especially dumb when both sides had thermal imaging and neither had tagged you as a friendly, but the idiot hadn't managed to get shot yet.

This media spotlight provided the global stage Borbola needed to destroy the Dragoons. He had hinted that they would want to be on the scene to report on this epic battle. When the Dragoons executed a pincer movement to fold up the flanks of the liftport defenders, he sent alerts to the media to watch closely.

He took the stairs to the ground floor, sending five drones high above the liftport to recon the situation. Timing would be crucial, and it wasn't quite time yet.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

Nick fired a burst to cover Bridge as the older Kagent dragged Fridwulf behind the last wall of jersey barriers. A round 'spranged' off the metal siding of the shot-up guard shack. Nick was alone behind the first row of jersey barriers.

He scrambled to avoid a concussion grenade but its shockwave tossed him down the asphalt, bruising his chest, and scraping his cheek. When his vertical hold on reality snapped back, all he heard was the ping and pock of rounds on the other side of the jersey barrier. The concussion grenade barrage had ended.

The tactical net showed why this was actually a really bad development, especially for him. The Dragoons on both flanks had driven the Sancternals back from the trees. The long-term parking garage, where Nick was supposed to retreat to, was taking fire from two sides. The Dragoons were slowly surrounding the Sancternals.

With Bridge providing cover fire, Nick crawled on his belly behind the last line of jersey barriers. His ribcage yelped with each movement.

Bridge pulled him in through a gap in the barriers. The Dragoon troopers on their flanks had them nearly surrounded and about to be overrun. The jersey barriers wouldn't provide any cover in a few more moments.

Fridwulf woke up. "I'm good," she said, her eyes fluttering open. Without net access, Nick didn't know if her self-diagnosis was even remotely accurate.

It didn't matter. Nick, Bridge, and General Fridwulf were trapped. The Dragoons had reached the outer jersey barriers only ten meters away.

The only way out was over a killing ground of open roadway for a hundred meters back to the parking garage. At least three Sancternals lay shot on the road. Nick had no idea where Pam was.

A Dragoon Bearcat battered its way through the first jersey wall. It backed up to allow troopers to pour in behind the second jersey wall.

"Drone perimeter defense," Bridge said.

He and Nick's remaining drones swept over the barrier and attacked the advancing troopers. Fluorescent pink, green, and yellow bodies hit the ground as the troopers were stung and shocked unconscious.

But neither Kagent had enough drones to keep it up for long. Nick noticed Fridwulf had produced a huge knife from somewhere. She, in turn, was staring at the dildo-shaped stunstick Bridge gripped tightly in his hand.

"Is that a dick in his hand?" she asked Nick.

"I'm just glad it's not his," he yelled back.

She turned to Bridge. "What the hell is that?"

Bridge pulled an insulted look. "I cold-cock people with it. Our drones won't hold out any longer than thirty more seconds."

Nick holstered Thunker and pulled Slugger and Bruiser into each hand.

"No heroics," Fridwulf said. "We each run for it. Let our people in the parking garage do their job. We don't need to kill ourselves out here to buy three more seconds. Is that clear?"

Both Kagents nodded.

"Okay, boys, in three... two... —"

"We surrender," Pam announced over a public address system. There was a finality in her voice that wrenched Nick's gut. The Dragoons ceased fire.

The liftport entrance fell quiet.
CHAPTER SEVENTY

Borbola texted 'now' to each media outlet as he headed down the stairs. Before he reached the ground floor, The Penny Twain's reporter touched her earpiece and made vague statements about a new development. As Borbola stepped out into the street, he muted his earpiece, shut off his netpad, and tried to stop smiling. But this was so much fun.

Streetlights penetrated the dusky gloom of the deserted avenue between him and the three Dragoon troopers with rearguard duty at the other end. He sauntered through these pools of light, hands up in the air, head down, not looking the least bit dangerous.

He knew the troopers would not shoot him yet. He had studied twenty years of Dragoon operations across three continents. He had eavesdropped on their internal communications, interviewed reporters who had covered them, and interviewed the victims whose lives the Dragoons had wrecked. He learned the Dragoon corporate structure, its strengths, its blind spots, its training procedures, and its penchant for cruelty. He knew how it turned consulting contracts into boots on the ground, cowed local media, and engineered the election of autocratic candidates to do its bidding.

Standard operating procedure for rear guard detail was to menace all bystanders to suppress any threats to an ongoing Dragoon operation. And all of these armored thugs had orders to arrest him on sight.

The troopers trained their weapons on him when he was ten yards away.

"Hold up!" one of them said, his voice mechanized by a speaker in his mirrored faceplate. Their face-shield HUDs would show that his guns were all powered off.

They hesitated, unsure what to do next. Probably requesting orders.

Borbola adopted a classic bored-with-your-hassle stance. "Well, boys?"

"Drop all of your weapons, Borbola. Do it slowly."

He complied, drawing back his duster with his gun arm to show them his unpowered weapons. He unholstered each one slowly and laid it on the ground carefully.

He knew they were wondering: he was unarmed, now what do we do? They looked at his five weapons on the pavement, up at him, and back down at the weapons.

He stepped back and raised his hands again.

"What are you doing here?" one of the troopers asked.

Borbola slumped his shoulders in exasperation, but kept his hands raised. "Surrendering, of course."

And he just couldn't help it. He smiled.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Nick's eyes were squeezed shut.

"Get up slowly, weapons down," a digitized voice said.

He, Bridge, and Fridwulf stood. The troopers confiscated his three weapons. Then they took a long look at Bridge's phallus-themed stunstick before removing its power cell and handing it back quickly. They took Fridwulf's knife and rifle.

Questions swirled around Nick's brain. Did they buy enough time for the police to disentangle themselves from the Stabbies and get here? Would Thrall let the convoy land if she held the liftport? Would she order the Dragoons to fight the police, too? The image came to mind of exhausted cops being sandwiched between Stabilizers on one side and Dragoons on the other. What a goddamn catastrophe that would be.

Then his instincts reared up like a mental kick in the balls.

The idea was insane. Thrall hated the Stabilizers. They stood for everything she abhorred. And the Stabilizers would never cut a deal with a local politician who would turn on them the moment she gained power. And she would never bargain away her district's economic prospects to gain the support of a bunch of loud-mouthed protesters who wanted lower, slower living standards. She didn't need them to make this power grab. Did she?

He suddenly understood what the Stabilizer mobs had actually accomplished. They had dispersed the police, exhausted them in the heat, and tried to draw them into a fight with the Dragoons. The defeat of the city police, followed by a coup, would induce the crashpoint without a doubt.

The mobs also had delivered a rationale for Thrall to take over the city: to restore order. What was the probability that the Stabilizers had lucked into Thrall taking perfect advantage at just the right time? Somewhere out in the outskirts of extremely unlikely, he bet.

If Thrall and the Stabbies were united against the city, what would Dragoons do now to the Kagents and Sancternals?

Nick looked at Pam, Bridge, and General Fridwulf. "Oh. Shit."

"Don't sweat it," Fridwulf said, misunderstanding him. "I've been nabbed a couple of times. The key is to not get groped, because that kicks off a whole bunch of bad stuff. We'll get released in a week, two weeks tops. Hopefully we bogged them down here enough that the police can step in."

If only it were so simple. The Bearcats stopped in the traffic circle, but kept their motors running. Nick noticed they were all turned in the direction of the Stabilizer protest, not the direction of the refugees.

As the Dragoons disarmed the Sancternals at the parking garage and advanced towards the terminal, Nick wondered if the crashpoint had occurred already.

No, his instincts said. Not yet. Which meant that he had to escape. He had to test this all out and then get word to Chief Reese. Fen needed his projections on how to handle losing the liftport and fighting a civil war with Thrall. The convoy would need to land at any minute too.

"Kagents?" the trooper guarding him asked someone over the comm. "Hang on."

A trio of Dragoons marched Pam from the parking garage up to the shot-up jersey barriers. They moved Fridwulf some distance away.

The Dragoon nodded. "I have all three right here in front of me. Yes, sir."

Nick waited for the troopers to shoot them down.

"Turn over your netpads," the Dragoon ordered.

Nick, Pam, and Bridge exchanged looks.

"Fuck no," Bridge said.

The nearest Dragoon clubbed him in the gut. Bridge doubled over, gasping for air.

"Hey," Nick retorted, waving his netpad, "these are not weapons."

The Dragoon extended his hand and the others pointed their weapons at him. Nick stared down the gun barrels. He thought becoming a Kagent had meant not having to do this again. He should have stayed in the EOC.

He traded helpless looks with the other two soon-to-be-former Kagents and all three handed over their netpads.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

This will be so choice, Borbola thought.

He froze, his empty gun hand held up limply in the air, his weapons lying inert on the street in front of him. The squad of Dragoons closed on him reluctantly, rifles raised, waiting for him to perhaps attack with a martial arts move, or mental telepathy, or firing laser beams out his nostrils. Being a larger-than-life legend had its perks.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw dust drifting through the nearest cone of pale, white streetlight. It almost looked natural.

"Can't leave a neck unstomped, huh?" he asked.

"We have a warrant for your arrest," the nearest Dragoon announced, as if that would induce Borbola to cuff-bond himself.

Borbola rolled his eyes instead. "I haven't done anything yet. Not that something like that would matter to you."

Gray stains spread across the necks of the troopers, each stain actually thousands of gnat-sized drones, each of them little more than capacitors with wings and sensors. Borbola couldn't stop the biggest-ass smile from wriggling on to his face. And here he had promised himself he wouldn't laugh.

"Can the bullshit! We're taking you into custody... Whaaatt?"

The others clutched at their helmets and began to yell. Suddenly they dropped to the street, out cold. The last one managed to wrench his helmet off and swatted at his face. Blue sparks danced across his cheeks and he collapsed seconds later. The gray drones took off, seeking new targets.

Borbola calmly collected Bessy from the pavement. Bessy was an old fashioned mini-railgun, a modestly over-sized personal artillery piece that fired small, energized bolts. He wouldn't need her for this any more than an orchestra conductor needed her own violin. He holstered Bessy and followed his swarms.

His tech guys back in Concordia had cooked up the biggest, baddest batch of drones ever created. Because of their greater numbers, they were smaller and more specialized than the drones he had used for years to scare his opponents shitless. Swarms, they called them.

The standard load-out for a Kagent was a couple thousand drones. Borbola had a hundred thousand in each box. And he had a dozen boxes on the roof. An air force in a box.

The swarms fed him a detailed picture of this area of the city. The police had finally contained the Stabilizer protest, but they were not ready to rush to the liftport. He saw meter-long media drones observing the Sancternals' surrender at the liftport. His recon swarms showed the Dragoons advancing toward the liftport terminal.

He targeted the nearest Bearcat personnel carrier on his netpad. His combat swarms entered the vehicle's air vents and disabled the engine. Its crew and electronics were disabled seconds later.

More combat swarms came down from the roof and flew over the Dragoon vanguard. They coated the troopers rounding up Sancternal prisoners at the parking garage and the ones marching on the terminal behind it. The swarms worked their way backward toward the traffic circle, where the Dragoons were handcuffing the stupid Kagents.

His Simon alerted him to a Bearcat at the traffic circle that had swiveled its anti-personnel cannon in his direction. He took cover behind the disabled Bearcat as a dozen trank darts meant for him thudded into its hull.

The attacking Bearcat turned and advanced towards him, bringing its heavier artillery to bear. Borbola didn't feel inclined to see if the dead Bearcat could provide cover against a blast from a live one.

He sent a swarm after the offending Bearcat. Five seconds later it crashed through the front of an Italian restaurant. Its crew was incapacitated, but the engine kept running, pushing the Bearcat against the restaurant's brick oven. He ordered a dozen drones inside the engine to disable its power cables and the Bearcat shut down. Clearly, the designers would have to rethink the air intake design.

His attack on the Dragoon vanguard, coming just as the liftport defenders surrendered, sowed confusion. Some troopers dropped their weapons and ran from one swarm straight into another. Others, buoyed by the victory, batted the swarms away by hand, and received a long nap for their trouble. Some just shot their rifles into the air.

The growing heaps of unconscious troopers spread from the parking garage back toward the traffic circle. The Sancternals added to this by pressing forward toward the traffic circle.

The Dragoons finally broke and fled, making great footage for the news sites who had swooped in to cover the action. The braver — or stupider — troopers took cover behind Bearcats or in the woods.

The swarms pouring out from the direction of the terminal and parking garage were not deterred by darkness or tree branches. They simply flew over the Bearcats and descended on the troopers hiding behind or inside of them.

Amidst the distant crack of the Dragoons' Balzar rifles vainly trying to shoot gnats out of the night sky, Borbola heard an ominous plunk nearby as he strode up the empty street toward the traffic circle.

It was a round hitting close by. Someone was gunning for him. He looked for cover, but he was fresh out of dead Bearcats.

He ducked into the doorway of a boutique shoe fabricator and slipped on his smartshades. Each Dragoon on his street was a red dot. The Dragoon column the next street over was a mass of yellow dots. Yellow dots appeared on infrared, approaching his street through the higher floors of the buildings. Snipers. The first one was about seven stories up and shooting out of a window at him.

He swarmed the snipers. After the yellow dots in the building flipped to gray, he walked across the open street and into the traffic circle, duster billowing, netpad in hand, with a big grin on his face.

Some Dragoon ordered a retreat; the red and yellow dots were withdrawing to the east, outside of his swarms' range. It couldn't have been Jerry Craftchek, the ass-clown merchant of fear and, Borbola knew first hand, a total coward. But Sullivan had helpfully zapped him in the back, but he wasn't laying on the ground any more.

The liftport firefight re-ignited as the Sancternals took advantage of the Dragoon panic. Nick and the other Kagents took cover as Borbola's swarms swooped by.

The Dragoon retreat burst into a panicked rout, all caught by the newsites. Running in fluorescent armor while flailing at invisible insects looked more ridiculous than Borbola could have hoped.

He did not pursue the fleeing troopers; the swarms had a limited range and were too expensive to sacrifice needlessly. The media had enough footage to ruin the Dragoons. And the Dragoons had taken enough casualties to no longer threaten the city. He had made his point.

He ordered his swarm back to their boxes and approached the liftport entrance. The air reeked of burnt plastic and armor. He stepped around unconscious troopers and a burning police cruiser. A dead Bearcat had smashed through a wall of concrete barriers. An ambulance siren wailed in the distance.

The Kagents were all alive and most of the Sancternals didn't look too worse for wear either.

"Don't go thanking me," he said before anyone could do exactly that. They ignored him. "I just embarrassed the Dragoons, made them want to lash out, say, at refugees. That's the direction they're headed in now."

He saw Nick sitting on the ground, retrieving his netpad from an unconscious trooper. "What happened to you, Lincoln?"

Nick stood up slowly and looked at Bridge and Sullivan. "The Dragoons were ordered to round us up."

"Probably hoping to find me," Borbola said.

"No," Nick shook his head. "The trooper said Kagents. They were ordered to take our netpads."

What did that mean? Had the Dragoons discovered the true extent of Kagent possibilities? Borbola realized that both he and the Dragoons disliked meddling offworlders. But he dismissed it. The Dragoons were a profit-maximizing entity that had concluded the Kagents were a threat.

Borbola smiled and turned to his old mentor Bridge. "Glad I interfered? I just saved your savior. Not to mention, you."

Bridge flapped his arms at the unconscious Dragoons sprawled all over five streets. "What the hell do you call this?"

Big grin. "Stopping a civil war. Single-handedly."

"Footage of your drones is all over the Penny Twain, Byte, and Scoop," Pam retorted. "I had to convince Chief Reese that they were not bioweapons."

"What's he going to do, arrest me?" Borbola looked around for a cop. "Maybe they'll ban Kagents from the planet, force you all to leave us the hell alone. For once." Borbola took note of the sour looks the others beamed in his direction. He smiled again. "Well. I can tell when I'm not wanted. You're welcome, by the way." He started to walk away.

"We need help protecting the refugees from the Dragoons," General Fridwulf yelled at his back. He kept walking.

"Eldred," Nick said, hurrying after him, "I think the Stabilizers and Regina Thrall's Dragoons are working together. We could use your help."

Borbola turned around. Nick must have hit his head on one of those jersey barriers. Or maybe he'd learned how to bullshit without setting off the biochem telltales.

"I did my part," Borbola said. He never did more than what he set out to do. Plus, he needed to recover the swarm boxes before the cops arrived and locked everything down. And, frankly, he was tired of helping out ingrates who returned the favor by tossing a pile of crazy at his feet and expecting him to pretend it was genius.

He kept walking.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Nick pulled his mentor out of earshot of the others. Pam was on the netpad with Reese about getting the police to the liftport and warning him about the Dragoons pursuing the refugees. Fridwulf was calling Nick's old partner Mica about the same thing.

"Borbola tried to recruit me this morning," Nick said.

Bridge snorted as he watched Borbola walk off into the night. "He thought you would trust him again?"

Ah, the trust issue. Nick forced the next words out one at a time. "He said you haven't been straight with me."

Bridge looked back at Nick in surprise and laughed. "You've seen the projections. What am I holding back? Oh, wait, he told you how the Dragoons are the real threat, right? He's serious about that, you know."

"No. He said I should ask about your daughter."

Bridge's smile disappeared. In fact, he looked like he just crapped barbed wire. "What else did he say?"

Nick pressed on. "He thinks you owe me an explanation. He was pretty uncomfortable about the whole subject, actually."

Bridge looked past Nick's shoulder, weighing what to say. Finally, he shook his head. "I can't say. Okay. She's my stepdaughter. Her father died when she was real young. And as far as the rest... it's a family matter. I can't say any more. I don't owe you an explanation. Click?"

No, no damn click. Bridge had dug into Nick's personal life, including his family squabbles, because they feared it would compromise him. How was this any different? It wasn't, but he couldn't alienate Bridge now. "If she's involved in this, anything you tell me could be critical. The situation can go either way after all this. Every bit of information helps."

Bridge's facial muscles held anguish awkwardly, as if they were unaccustomed to the expression. "Borbola's trying to wedge us. Trust me. It doesn't affect anything. Really."

"Is she a Stabilizer? She is, isn't she?"

Bridge winced. "How the hell—"

"Does she know you're here? She does. Dammit, Bridge. How could you not tell me about this?"

The older Kagent held up his finger angrily. "Lisa and I didn't talk business. It was personal. It's been ten years since we heard from her. Even Meredith doesn't know I talked to her."

"Bridge, she saw you; she knows the Kagents are in town. And if she knows what Kagents do, then the Stabilizers do, too. She does, doesn't she? How much? Does she know about the drones, the netpads, the Sphere, the satellites? The projections, what about the projections?"

Bridge blinked a few times as he realized the full extent of the shit he had stepped into. "Uh, maybe not the sats. Hammerfuck. I never thought about it that way. But it's too late to worry about all that now anyway," he said thickly.

"The hell it is, Bridge! This changes everything. Ever-y-thing. Jeezus. They probably planned the crashpoints with her help. They must know how to evade our surveillance techniques. She's hid from you for what? Ten years? That's great. They probably know every Kagent trade secret that we thought gave us an advantage."

"Okay, okay, it's bad," Bridge retorted, his hands on his hips. He flung his arm out towards the liftport terminal. "But what should we do?"

"Do?" Nick bit his tongue. What was he supposed to do? Ask for her picture and fingerprints? Some people would do anything to protect the worst person if they were a relative, others would let an innocent relative hang. And some could change their mind on that question at the worst possible time. He ought to know.

Nick did not want to throw himself into this roulette wheel of dysfunction if he could avoid it.

Bridge laid a hand on his shoulder. "I can't help you catch her. But you don't hold back in any way from doing what you have to do. Nick, seriously, in any way. Click? It's important that you understand this."

"Click," Nick said. He knew he had to get away from Bridge now. For both of their sakes.

Pam ran over to them. "The EOC has a solid net connection now, but the comm system is too overloaded to link to it out here. We need to get back."

The comm blackout. Nick's head snapped up as another piece of the puzzle tumbled into place. "The Stabilizers attacked the city's airborne comm grid to cut the three of us off," he says. "If we can't access the nets or the Sphere, they know it levels the playing field."

"But the Stabilizers don't know about the Sphere," Pam said suspiciously, looking from Bridge to Nick.

Nick ignored that and looked at Bridge. "Are you and I okay here?"

"Sure," Bridge said sarcastically. "I'll fight the Stabbies myself with my charm and my stunstick."

Nick smiled and retorted, "Which means just your stunstick. Seriously, they aren't coming. I need to get back to the EOC and net access. I have a feeling the Stabbies are planning something even worse."
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

Nick's ribs protested as he climbed in the police cruiser. That last concussion grenade had thrown him into the ground harder than he first thought.

The traffic circle outside the liftport was filled with police cruisers. A dozen officers were rounding up the Dragoons who could walk and restraining the ones still snoring on the pavement.

As the cruiser raced through dark and empty streets to the EOC, Nick explained everything to Pam. A chunk of it was speculation, but just a minute of net access would verify it all. Pam grew quiet and clasped Nick's hand. That scared him more than the doom tumbling from his own lips.

When they entered the EOC, the net access indicator lit up on Nick's smartshades and they came alive with streaming information. He felt like he had his first breath of fresh air after spending a hot day inside a wet dumpster.

Nick said, "Cross, good to see you're back. Run this one projection immediately." He selected the parameters.

[No one has ever asked for something like that before. It may take longer than usual.]

"I'm not surprised," Nick replied. He drank in the feeds from the overhead viewers and tried to ignore his ribs. He needed to stream on his feet and to roll with every fucking punch tonight.

He stepped into the command hub and drank in the Kagent sat feeds on the four viewers to get his bearings. The first showed the city with its trouble spots blinking. It cycled through overlays of visible light, infrared, ground traffic, and EM signatures.

The second showed friendly blue police officer icons rounding up Dragoon icons at the liftport. Air traffic control tags on each of the convoy's ships showed that the convoy had just touched down safely at the main liftport. One more disaster averted.

The third feed showed the Stabilizer protest breaking up a kilometer short of the liftport. The police officer icons were blue dots, protesters were red, and unknowns or media crews were yellow.

The last feed was an infrared shot of green-tagged refugees pouring off the highway. A yellow dagger of Dragoon brutality moved to intercept them. The Dragoons still had several functional Bearcats and over two hundred troopers, which was about one hundred and ninety more than they would need to wipe out the refugees. And no Borbola hanging around to save them this time. Damn.

"We're dispatching four planes to hit the Dragoons," Chief Reese explained. "If that signals that we have surveillance overhead, so be it."

Nick nodded. "Agreed. Take out the Bearcats first, it will slow down the troopers. Where's the police?"

Reese shrugged sheepishly. "Every creep thinks we're blind and they won't be caught tonight. I've got officers running all over town on calls. We're stretched too thin to respond."

"And the Sancternals are at the liftport, several kilometers away," Nick said. His too-clever plan had left the refugees completely bare-assed in a hail storm of Dragoons.

This is what happens when you build your strategy from one of the outlier scenarios, snarled the hyper-critical voice in his head. It was the voice that chimed in every time he failed at something, to inflate his doubts and stomp his belief in himself. And sometimes it was right.

He ignored the voice. The voice thought he was a total screw up. It would just take a dump on every solution he came up with, too. Listening to it was counterproductive, he told himself.

When was a liftport not a liftport? The refugees would never make it to the liftport to get that help. What was a refugee camp without refugees, but with spaceships? Well, it was a liftport. He considered that for a moment. A liftport.

He turned to the Chief. "Can the convoy ships take the Sancternals to the refugees? No one else will reach them in time."

"Can those ships take off that soon?" Fen asked.

Pam nodded. "Sure. Pilots and launch facility crews regularly drill on emergency turnarounds."

Chief Reese called General Fridwulf. Within seconds overhead surveillance showed the tiny people on the liftport launch pads stop and change direction. A few sprinted across the concrete tarmac, waving their arms at others. Maintenance crews came running out to each ship.

[Projection is ready,] Cross texted.

Nick scanned the numbers and charts on his smartshades, wishing he could have been wrong this time. The projection reported a probability of less than one percent. It made him sick to his stomach, but his instincts chimed like bells.

He turned to Fen, "We need to talk. Now. Privately. The situation is much worse than I thought."
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Fen led Nick and Pam to a secure conference room. Nick took off his smartshades and locked on to Fen's pale blue eyes. "The Stabilizers and Regina Thrall have allied with one another."

Fen shook his head. "That makes no sense." He looked at Pam.

She held up a hand and said, "Hear him out."

Nick said, "The Stabilizers' flash mobs spread the police thin and the protest tied up a good number as well. But the Stabilizers didn't gain anything from doing so. However, the Dragoons did because it gave Thrall a rationale to grab for power, starting at the liftport."

"Destroying the satellites did nothing for the Stabilizers. They already thwarted our surveillance. But it gave the Dragoons cover to blitz the liftport. We wouldn't have had advance warning if it hadn't been for the Kagent sats."

"Why would the Stabilizers help Regina Thrall?" Fen asked, shaking his head. "Thrall is ten times worse for the Stabilizers than the Council is."

Nick replied. "Because a civil war is a surefire way to cause a crashpoint. If the Dragoons took the liftport, the projections say it would have been as bad for us as if the Stabilizers had. The Stabilizers knew this. They just want the crashpoint to occur. In return, Thrall gains control. For however long the city lasts."

"Wait a second," Pam said, "Are you saying that the Stabilizers know about the Sphere projections?"

"Not exactly," Nick said. He took a deep breath. "They have their own Sphere projections."

She shook her head. "They don't. They can't. That's impossible. No Kagent netpad has ever been lost. They would have been caught the second there was an authorized access to the Sphere."

It all seemed clear to Nick, but he struggled to explain the murky logic behind his instinctual jumps. "Over the last decade, the Stabilizers caused a series of crashpoints that will lead to a civilizational crashpoint. How did they know what events in each city's unique situation would cause each crashpoint? Did they luck into the exact sequence that would cause it?"

Neither Pam nor Fen answered, so Nick continued. "The probability that they did this all accidentally, without the Sphere, is less than one percent. Which is to say that there's a ninety-nine percent chance that they have access to the Sphere."

"I can't believe that," Pam said. "The Sphere would list this as a possibility before."

"But we never allowed the underlying models to have that as a possibility. Like you said, it's impossible without a Kagent netpad."

Pam let out a long, slow, defeated breath.

Fen swallowed hard. "This means the Stabilizers can counter our every move, doesn't it?" He caught on quick.

"Yes and vice versa," Nick said. He had asked Cross to run what would happen if two adversaries, each with a Sphere, went at each other using the exact same models. The results were inconclusive, his Simon cautioned, because no one had ever run that particular scenario before. But, if both had access to the same results, unless one side failed to execute their countermoves properly, neither side would win.

Nick looked from Fen to Pam. "We are in a stalemate, but that is just as bad. A stalemate will eventually induce a crashpoint too, it will just take longer. The public won't tolerate the constant turmoil without a resolution."

"Of course," Fen said. "This has to end now."

Nick agreed. "Neither side will end this stalemate until one side loses access to the Sphere. Which explains why the Dragoons wanted our netpads, Pam. The Stabilizers know that if we lost our net access or our netpads, they could break the stalemate."

Nick took a deep breath and faced Fen like he did in the briefing in the library less than a month ago. His stomach was knotted, like it was that horrible night. "They have been trying to thwart Bridge and I. They cut the city's net access to cut Bridge and I off from the Sphere. And then they had the Dragoons take our netpads. If it weren't for Borbola, it would have worked." And, Nick realized, he must have had some inkling of this before, maybe just in his subconscious, when he didn't want to go to the liftport.

"The satellite and HAP attack make more sense then," Pam said.

Nick bit his lower lip, staring at the table, and said, "I also know the Stabilizer woman who has Sphere access. It's the same phantom who has eluded both Kagent and bounty hunter surveillance. She poisoned the police. She met with the blogger who accused Juan of corruption and set off Winthrop."

"Who is she?" Fen asked, his nostrils flaring.

Nick nodded, "Bridge Radisson's estranged stepdaughter."

Fen and Pam simply stared at him in shock.

"He admitted to me that she's in town and that she's a Stabilizer."

Pam shook her head. "No. Did Bridge betray us?"

"No," Nick said. "He doesn't know she has Sphere access, or her connection to the assassination or Blight 5. When I confronted him about it, he said I should do whatever I needed to stop the crashpoint."

"Anything?" Pam asked.

"Anything," Nick repeated. "He was pretty emphatic."

"But fighting against your own child," Fen said and shook his head. He looked at Nick with his brows furrowed. "How do we break this stalemate?"

"The stolen Sphere has to be recovered or destroyed," Pam said. "Nick, you have to find Bridge's daughter. Even if you have to go all bounty hunter to do it."

Nick nodded. "I don't know where she is and it could take a while to track her down. If I can find her boss, Daniel Sloan, I think I'll find her."

There was a knock on the door. Chief Reese poked his head in and said he needed Fen. The Chairman stood and put his hand on Nick's shoulder, "Whatever you need, Nick, just say so. You can do this. You have to do this." He nodded at Pam and left.

A moment passed between Nick and Pam. She scowled at him. "She's really dangerous, isn't she? Don't do anything stupid."

She kissed his cheek, and he breathed in her scent. A police officer was waiting outside the conference room for him to show him a shortcut out of the EOC.

"Cross," Nick said as the officer lead the way, "I'll lose net access when I leave here and be blind again."

Cross texted on his smartshades, [Kagent surveillance experts think you can track the phantom woman by following her surveillance evasions. The chances of a woman of that minimum physical build repeatedly evading surveillance and not being Lisa Radisson is less than one in ten million.]

"Good, point me at the most recent sighting," Nick said. "We have to find her."

[I downloaded everything I could to your netpad's memory. I'll text you updates. But what happens if I can't locate Sloan or Lisa?]

"We learn to live like cavemen."

[That's a bit extreme.]

"Just find her, or Sloan," Nick said. He and the cop had stopped in front of what looked like a massive bank vault door. "Where am I going?"

The cop handed over power cells for Nick's weapons. "This is an evacuation exit that avoids the media camped in the lobby," the officer said, unlocking the massive door.

He took Nick down a long hallway of maintenance rooms that ended at another vault-like door. Nick looked down a tunnel that ran for fifty meters and ended at a metal ladder. The cop wished him luck and locked the door behind him.

Nick sprinted to the ladder and emerged, breathing hard, inside a maintenance shed deep in a heavily-wooded section of the Nature Preserve. He could see the police cruiser waiting for him by the street, its lights painting the tree leaves in blue and red.

As he ran, Cross texted him that there had been no sign of Sloan since Fen's address to the city. Sloan could be anywhere in the city or far away from it and Lisa Radisson could be even farther by now.

Even if he found Lisa, his Kagent tactics would be useless. He would have to do something different. A wave of bleakness washed over him.

His netpad rang, but before he could answer it, his net access choked and died. He climbed into the police cruiser and fed the nav program the location of the Stabilizer townhouse where Sloan was last spotted.

The cruiser surged into the night with its sirens screaming.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

"I'm curious about something," Izzy Goodburn said over his shoulder as he piloted the Longburn. "When did Hamilton declare war on the Dragoons?"

Bridge's mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about Nick and about Lisa, despite reminding himself a thousand times to focus on the task at hand.

He checked the Longburn's outboard scopes and saw the dull white lights of a mall parking lot swing underneath the interplanetary ship as it circled to land. Small silhouettes on the ground were running. Refugees. In the distance were the Dragoons, advancing and firing like soulless robots in their fluorescent armor. Tracer fire and muzzle flashes gave the scene a sick sense of urgency.

He sighed. "It's been a long day."

"Yeah," Izzy said. "This whole fucking planet is crazy as loops."

An explosion above the ship ripped the black sky in half. The Longburn rocked backward as a shockwave punched the hull. Bridge gritted his teeth as his stomach sloshed.

"What the hell was that?" Izzy asked.

"Rip V's hitting those Dragoon vehicles," Bridge replied.

"Rip V's?"

"Remote Piloted Vehicle," Bridge replied. Apparently the city had found some. He wished they had found them a lot earlier. He eyed Izzy. "You ever do anything like this before?"

Izzy's face was a mask, illuminated by the Rip Vs' tracer fire slicing through the night. He mumbled something about seeing this done in a movie once.

Bridge unbuckled himself and stood unsteadily. "Load as many refugees as you can and take off again. We'll provide cover." He left the cockpit.

"Fine, but you keep people clear when I takeoff, understand? Roasted refugee is out of season this time of year."

Bridge frog-marched down the passageway toward General Fridwulf. He stopped to brace himself against the bulkheads as the ship banked into a tight turn to descend.

General Fridwulf hung onto a bulkhead during the bumpy ride. She had an easy confidence and a relaxed, almost goofy, grin.

How many nighttime combat drops had she done? Bridge remembered at least four from the Sancternal documentaries he saw.

For his part, he was seriously considering never leaving the ground again. He would call Meredith and tell her to bring his ratty bathrobe and the picture albums. He would find a nice, ground-level condo here, near an ocean. Any ocean. At sea-level.

The Longburn's scopes showed a firefight underway in the parking lot below. Hundreds of refugees were fleeing.

The Dragoons were bottlenecked for the moment, pinned between the shopping center and the street. But they were surrounding Mica's position, which was underneath a tree in a green island in the middle of the parking lot.

The Dragoons' left flank, out on the street, was where she needed help and needed it fast, before she was surrounded.

Fridwulf said, "I shouldn't have let Mica do this. She's not ready yet." She powered up her Viper rifle. "The faster we hit that flank, the faster we reach her."

To Bridge it looked like Mica had held up better than they had done at the liftport, but what the hell did he know. Borbola probably spooked the hell out of these troopers.

Still, he was about to argue for extracting Mica first, but Fridwulf cut him off by saying, "There's no time. Refugees first."

The Longburn skidded to starboard and Bridge's overwhelmed brain failed to compensate. He fell hard on his ass. Fridwulf leaned over to help him up but he waved her off. "I'm fine."

The Longburn touched down behind the mall's loading docks, its exhaust frying dumpsters and melting brick retaining walls. The refugees stayed well away, but looked ready to pounce on the ship the first second they could. More refugees packed in behind them like dust bunnies in a depressurizing room.

All right, Bridge thought, a straight up firefight was shit he understood. No weird family melodramas, no brainy Kagent brats to train, just full-on action.

Bridge, Fridwulf, and a mix of Kagents and Sancternals pounded down the landing ramp as it lowered, drones boiling ahead of them in an angry swarm.

He skidded to a stop at the bottom of the ramp. His cloak billowed around him in the breeze.

The refugees didn't expect armed people to come charging off the ship at them. It wasn't immediately obvious if these strange-looking people were there to help them or the Dragoons.

Despite the fact that there were Dragoons shooting at them from behind, the refugees halted at the sight of the Sancternals' Viper rifles, the combat visors, and the swarm of drones whipping by overhead.

The refugees began to back away, panic spreading across their faces.

Hammerfuck.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

Before any of the refugees could yell 'gun' or start a stampede, Bridge draped his arm around Fridwulf and smiled idiotically. "General Avis Fridwulf! And the Sancternal Guard! Here to rescue you! Let's hear it for them, huh?"

The refugees looked away from the business ends of all those weapons to Avis' famous face and famous purple combat fatigues. Countless Sancternal movies and public relations appearances paid off as recognition dawned. Relief replaced panic as it spread across dozens of faces. There was a pattering of applause that grew and grew.

"That's right!" Bridge yelled, clapping too. "Here to save you! Now clear a path so we can get the bad guys. Thank you!"

The Kagents and Sancternals couldn't run through the crowd, but they managed a decent jog. The refugees slapped their backs, pumped their hands, blessed them profusely or just touched them. Behind them, Sancternals began ushering the refugees onboard.

"Be nice if the press saw this!" Fridwulf yelled to Bridge.

Bridge winked at her. "They will. The drones are relaying footage to The Penny Twain." It was his little contribution to nudging the public opinion needle back in the city's favor.

When Bridge cleared the rear corner of the mall, it felt like he had stepped into a different universe. Refugee bodies were strewn across the parking lot. The Dragoon flanking maneuver had allowed them to pick off refugees scrambling between the mall and the road.

The Kagents' drone swarms flashed by under the parking lot's lights. The Dragoons on the road got a face full of drones just as Fridwulf, Bridge, and the others unloaded a barrage of weapons fire. The Dragoons' left flank crumpled.

A refugee five meters ahead of Bridge was shot in the thigh and fell screaming into a disabled parking spot.

Bridge turned to help him but a thin young guy appeared out of nowhere.

The young kid looked like a college student except for the elephantine sidearm tucked in his belt. He tore the wounded man's pant leg open and slapped a battlefield bandage on the wound. Battlefield bandages were probably not standard issue for a refugee, Bridge thought.

The Sancternal troopers continued to advance towards Mica's position as the kid put his shoulder under the wounded man's armpit.

Bridge crouched next to them. He sent his drones to take down the Dragoons who shot him, all Cupcakes spared at the liftport.

The young guy looked Bridge up and down. "I'm Herco Radius. Mica said I should find a general wearing purple or an offworlder wearing gold. What do you need?"

"You're doing it. Get these people to the ship."

Herco nodded, sparing a glance at the smoke that marked Mica's position. "You've got to help her," he said before half-carrying the wounded man towards the Longburn.

Bridge saw on the Sancternal tactical net that Mica was still alive and holding off the Dragoons, but she was pinned. The Sancternals raced forward towards their colleague, covered by the drone onslaught. A couple of Guards were hit, but most came back up and kept advancing.

A Rip V streaked by overhead, stitching the Dragoons with tracer fire. The Dragoons had enough and began to fall back.

"Go help Mica," Fridwulf ordered over the comm.

Bridge signaled the Kagents nearby. Their drones disengaged from the retreating Dragoons and swung toward Mica's position. Her opponents, it turned out, were not Dragoons but a half dozen bounty hunters, which Bridge thought was odd.

The firefight blazing around Mica was fierce. The drones' feeds showed bounty hunters sprawled on the ground by the entrance road, nearly encircling Mica, and crawling closer behind a furious rate of covering fire. Over two-dozen huge, old drones were moving in to finish her off. Both sides seemed oblivious to the Dragoons' withdrawal. Maybe this was personal.

Mica's return fire suddenly stopped.

"I can't read her vitals," a Kagent reported over the comm.

Bridge hoped that it was just EM interference from all the weapons fire around her position.

Rounds zinged and pocked around Bridge as he and the other Kagents closed in on the bounty hunters with half a dozen Sancternals.

Then an invisible foot kicked Bridge hard in his left shoulder. Off-balance, he spun halfway around and belly-flopped to the pebbly asphalt.

Everything went dark.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

Bridge came to a few seconds later when something flew by overhead. Something big and noisy with a fuselage like polished orange coral. A Tessan spaceship.

His right hand clumsily verified that his armor had stopped the round. His entire left arm felt numb and flattened though.

The ground drummed underneath him as the Longburn took off.

He sat up slowly, gravity clawing at his battered old Tessan body.

"Damn, that was close," he whispered. The second he had been shot it was his present, not his entire life, that flashed before his eyes. Meredith back home, Lisa down here, Nick chasing her, friends and relatives scattered everywhere, doing their thing, not thinking about him. He had nearly lost all of it.

What to do with a second chance, he wondered. An image of Nick tracking down Lisa formed in his mind. He could see Nick shooting Lisa or Lisa shooting Nick. He recoiled in horror. Had he really sent Nick after his own daughter? A barely trained Kagent who still packed lethal force and knew how to use it? And then he had washed his hands of it? Bridge realized now that he had made a terrible mistake.

The numbness in his arm was replaced, nerve by nerve, with pain and the promise of more pain later. He flexed his stunstick in his left hand, testing out the shoulder. The joint hurt, but it was functional.

The tactical net showed that the fighting had moved on without him and that these bounty hunters fighting Mica should have fled when they had the chance. Maybe this was revenge for what she did in Berlin. Either way, bounty hunters seemed to really dislike one another.

The Kagent drones fried the power circuits on the bounty hunters' over-sized weapons, but didn't attack them. The sounds of gunfire died out.

Bridge stood up and lumbered towards the other Kagents.

"Linkfu wants some exercise," a Kagent explained behind a bemused smile.

Bridge walked closer with a grimace as his entire arm now throbbed. He didn't want to miss this fight.

The monstrously tall Kagent named Linkfu Grunda twirled a shock baton. He charged into the half-dozen unarmed bounty hunters, who stupidly rose, eager to brawl the gangly offworlder.

Bridge remembered feeling that way before he sparred with Linkfu that one time. Bridge had never sparred with him again.

Linkfu's shock baton zinged through the humid night air. The thin offworlder dodged and weaved around his opponents. He swung the stun baton with minimal movement as he pirouetted; touch an arm here, slap a face there, graze an elbow, poke a groin, smack a hand. Seconds later, Linkfu was surrounded by six unconscious bounty hunters.

The other Kagents clapped.

"Well, he was cooped up on a ship for a few days," Bridge muttered to himself as he jogged back to a crowd of Sancternals kneeling over Mica.

Mica was barely conscious. Bridge didn't see any obvious wounds. A Sancternal pulled a small dart from Mica's neck. "Paralyzer," she whispered. Someone tapped the Sancternal on the shoulder and she stepped away. Paralyzer ammo could be lethal, cause permanent paralysis or just carry a sleep serum. There was no way to tell until they got her to a hospital.

Bridge kneeled down gingerly. "Mica, are you hurt?"

She stirred, her eyes fighting to stay open. "Bridge? The refugees? Did you see Herco? I gave him my backup gun."

Bridge looked across the parking lot. There were people scattered all over the ground, but most of them were still moving. Many had dropped and crawled just to avoid being shot. Maybe a handful dead or mortally wounded.

He squeezed her hand. "You did good. Herco is fine."

She smiled, winced, and drifted off. A silence settled over the parking lot, broken by the distant groans and wails of the wounded. Sancternals seemed to be everywhere with medical kits.

One started tending to his shoulder after they carted away Mica. The tactical net had flagged him as wounded.

"The armor stopped the round, but you should get it checked out anyway," said the Sancternal tending to him.

Bridge shook his head. "I'll take a gel for the pain. Night's not over for me yet."

The Sancternal looked at him, waiting for an explanation, but he kept quiet.

A Sancternal ran up to them sniffling. She whispered to another, who broke into outright sobs. The Sancternal tending to him saw his confusion and said, her voice quavering, "We've lost her, we've lost her."

"She might make it," he replied, surprised at her pessimism. Mica had been breathing right here, a moment ago, for crap's sake.

"No," the woman said, tears running down her cheeks. "I meant General Fridwulf."

He saw a group of Sancternals clustered together twenty meters back, hands on their mouths and shoulders quaking. A tall woman with long dark hair slumped to her knees and pounded the pavement with her gauntleted fists.

Avis Fridwulf couldn't die here, in a parking lot, under the dull pink glow of signs advertising discount specials on bath towels. She was a global hero. This was so hammerfucking stupid.

Bridge felt like he had been punched in the stomach. Tears streamed into his beard. The senseless loss, the unnecessary killing of Avis, of Juan Burgess, of these poor refugees, it was too much.

The killing had to end. He had to find a way to protect Lisa and stop her. Or barring that, just protect her. The thought of her dying now made him nauseous and enraged.

He and Nick could find a way to stop the Stabilizers without more killing. He had no idea how, but he just needed to convince the younger Kagent, help him understand. Together they could neutralize Lisa without hurting her.

What if he couldn't convince Nick? Nick may think Bridge had gone soft, that he was compromised. Bridge needed a plan that kept everyone alive, but still saved Hamilton.

The Sancternals packed Mica and the other casualties onto stretchers. Every ambulance on this half of Hamilton had already zoomed away with the critical cases. Locals had arrived, offering to drive the less critically wounded to the hospital.

The bounty hunters were cuffed and drooling on the pavement. A Sancternal gathered up their weapons, dumped them in Bridge's arms, and walked away before he could object. God, did he hate guns.

Bridge wanted to toss them away. Most of them were depleted or out of ammo. All he needed was one for show. But what if he needed an insurance policy? To make sure Nick listened to him? He tucked a pair of weapons into his pants.

He checked for a net connection on his netpad. It was there and Wes, his Simon, had a number of updates for him. None of them had to do with Nick or Lisa though.

Linkfu lumbered over to him. "What's our next move?"

The other Kagents looked at Bridge expectantly. Dumbass, you are in charge of them on this mission, he thought. He looked around, getting his bearings, and wiping tears off his cheeks.

The Sancternals were on autopilot, their training kicking in despite their shock and grief. The purple-clad women were tending to the remaining refugees and guarding the perimeter.

Bridge looked each Kagent in the eye. "We need to find the Stabilizer leaders as fast as possible. Use the bounty hunter network if you need to, my Simon will forward you a copy of the Warrant on the Stabilizers." He squirted the profiles of Daniel Sloan and Lisa Radisson to their netpads along with the Surveillance Warrant on the Stabilizers. "Take them alive."

"Why?" asked a woman in the back, her anger apparent.

"The woman is Meredith's daughter. She knows Kagents inside and out, and is extremely dangerous. Just call me if you find her. No more deaths tonight, okay?"

Everyone nodded.

"What are you going to do?" Linkfu asked quietly. His normally sad eyes were a notch sadder.

Bridge patted him on the arm to show he appreciated the concern. "I have to find Nick Lincoln."
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

When Nick got the call, he stood in the empty townhouse that had been a Stabilizer safe-house up until yesterday. He was tired and not in the mood to take shit from the city, or Bridge, or anyone else who expected one more damn thing from him.

His hopes of finding Daniel Sloan had diminished with each of the last four Stabilizer safe-houses he busted into. He just wanted to wallow alone in his defeat for a few more moments.

At each Stabilizer location, Nick searched quickly for signs of Sloan or Lisa. Without any drones left, he was unable to run any DNA or fingerprint analyses. All he could do was verify that the premises were empty, ask clueless neighbors if they had seen Daniel Sloan, which they had not, and venture on to the next location. But this townhouse was the last one.

His netpad rang again.

He crossed the creaky floorboards to the front door, taking a last look around the townhouse in hopes of spotting something, anything, before he left. But the place was stripped bare, right down to the sweep ripped off the brown front door that had peeled some of the paint off the bottom edge. The furniture smelled of disinfectant and every room had that disturbed, recently-moved-out look.

When he checked the cupboards for a netpad, it brought home to him how much the scope of this crisis had shrunk so fast. A week ago he worried about planetary economies and human civilization. Days ago he was obsessed with how just the city of Hamilton could survive. Hours ago he worried about hundreds of Dragoons, Stabilizers, and refugees. Now he was after a single Kagent netpad.

But there wasn't time to cover all the details. The damn thing could be tucked inside a cold air return and he'd never know.

His instincts told him he was wasting his time here.

Bridge and the other Kagents, having fought off the Dragoons, had immediately scattered to the airports, liftports, bus terminals, and highways in hopes that they could nab Sloan. Every security guard and cop in the city had his picture. Cross polled the nets every few minutes to see if Lisa had appeared and disappeared.

But there was no sign of her.

Nick took a long, steady breath. It was almost midnight and the neighborhood was quiet. Nick walked to the police cruiser.

His netpad started ringing again. Unknown number. He cancelled the call. Again.

It rang again.

He sighed, defeated. If this was some intrepid reporter, or even Fen or Reese asking for an update, Nick might seriously lose his cool. He answered it on the third ring.

"This is Lisa Radisson," a woman's voice said. "Why didn't you pick up earlier?"
CHAPTER EIGHTY

Nick's mouth went dry.

Lisa waited a beat and then said, "Rumor has it that people tried killing you today."

"Actually it's been like that all month. Their sloppiness must be disappointing," Nick replied, buying time to stop his head from spinning around.

"The Stabilizers don't condone violence, Mr. Lincoln," she admonished him.

"You know how to hide from Kagents, don't you Lisa?"

She answered, "Had to: once I was a teenager with Kagents for parents. Can you imagine how rotten that was? I never got away with anything, could never sneak out, but they managed to ignore me at the same time."

"Is that why you want to blow up the world now?" Nick asked.

"You don't know what you're talking about. Here's the deal: I give you my copy of the Sphere. You leave me and the Stabilizers alone."

Nick squinted. He didn't see that coming. "Am I that much of a threat?"

"You outmaneuvered us here. You may do it again. Even worse, you figured how we work. We'd rather you didn't. This is in your long-term interest anyway. You'll regret fighting us later on, when you come home to the Stabilizer Alliance."

Come home? She made it sound like a natural outgrowth of aging, like gray hair. Like he was away on a grocery run but would be back soon. "That will never happen."

"Well, your parents live in a Community," she said.

How did she know that? Nick's mind raced to the worst conclusion: did Bridge tell her after he had profiled him? No, no, that made no sense. She must have had him profiled, too. After all, all she needed to do was find a bounty hunter. He needed to calm down.

"When you get a bit older and the thrill of being a buzzer wears off, you'll come around to your parents' point of view," she said. "Most people do."

"You, too?"

She laughed. "People want stability in their lives when they get older and wiser. I was just ahead of the curve. Some never grow up though, like my parents. You know my stepfather."

Nick smiled, despite an urge to avoid talking about Bridge. "Where are you right now?" he asked.

"Oh, the maintenance corridors under the main liftport terminal," Lisa said. "Let's meet. Just you and me. No police. And you must keep Bridge away from here."

Nick gripped his netpad. "How do I do that without making him suspicious?"

"I don't care," Lisa said in a tight growl. "Just keep him away."

The drone equipment and his netpad had tracking beacons built in. Bridge could track Nick right to her. The only way to lose Bridge was to shut down the Sphere, his drones, and his net access. She must have known this.

Shit, shit, and double shit. This had to be a trap. And he would have to stroll into it unarmed and half blind. Did she know he couldn't shoot for shit?

"Maybe I can have him arrested for extreme facial hair," Nick said.

"Try anything sneaky and it's refugee stew all over the terminal's walls," she retorted ominously.

"Pretty violent threat for a Stabilizer," Nick said. He texted Cross, asking her how he should handle Lisa.

"The Stabilizers don't condone using violence for political ends," Lisa said, adding, "You have ten minutes. And keep the line open so I know you haven't called for help."

Nick hustled to the cruiser. Riding sirens through the city would get him to the liftport in less than four minutes, the nav program estimated.

Great, Nick thought, while the cruiser raced down the street. Now he just had to figure out how to deal with Bridge.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

What kind of titanic family shit-storm had Nick stepped into? It was considerably less than brilliant for Bridge to reach out to Lisa. Nick had a feeling that the fallout of that error would resonate for a long, long time. But he never expected to be caught in the middle of it, with the crashpoint hanging in the balance.

Did Bridge consider that Nick may have to kill Lisa? Her parents would always blame Nick if something happened to her; he had no doubt about that. That's the way people were when it came to their kids. Could Nick go through with it though? He had killed people over a lot less as a bounty hunter.

He called Bridge with Lisa still listening in. "Bridge, a witness spotted Sloan ten minutes ago at Athens Tower. Can you back me up?"

"Hell yeah. I'm on my way."

"I got you a taxi," Nick said. "But I'm keeping the police away. Just you and me. We can't spook Sloan or he will disappear again." He hung up.

Midway between Athens and the liftport, Nick's cruiser ducked down a side street to avoid the taxi carrying Bridge the other way.

"Tell me how to find you," he said to Lisa when he arrived at the liftport's main terminal.

She replied, "Go to the baggage claim, concourse B. Next to the bathrooms by the escalators. There is a door leading down to the basement. First door on the right."

Nick had two minutes left and he wasn't even in the terminal yet. There was a long line of refugees waiting patiently to enter.

He sprinted to the front door, flashed his Kagent credentials at the cop and Sancternal.

"Do you need help?" the Sancternal asked.

Nick said, "No," and kept walking.

Once inside, volunteers handed him a Hamilton Rockets baseball cap and oversized white t-shirt, which they were giving every refugee.

The cheap white t-shirt had the latest city promotion slogans repeating across the front. The Rockets cap had a brim which could hide some of his face from the liftport's cams. He pulled the t-shirt on, took off his smartshades, and covered his holsters. The cap he pulled low over his eyes and raced into the throng.

Cross whispered directions into his earpiece. The terminal's cavernous main level was dotted with ticketing kiosks and filled with luggage carts and refugees. Everyone wore the same t-shirts and caps; Nick blended in perfectly.

Nick ran past the ticketing area and through lines of refugees standing at the food vendors. Toddlers clung to parents and wailed at the late hour, their hunger, and the chaos.

Lines at the food concessions stretched straight across the width of the terminal, creating a series of barriers for Nick to wiggle through.

Once he was through he nearly ran into a pack of older kids standing in a circle. They were negotiating complicated deals to trade items from the goody bags the volunteers were handing out. Nick had to dodge around the teens, leaving a trail of mumbled excuses and hurt feelings.

One minute left.

Concourse B was to his right. Nick hurried down the escalator, squeezing past more refugees, to the baggage claim below. His earpiece beeped as his net access and connection to Cross died. Great.

The baggage claim had become a makeshift shelter. Refugees slept on cots and even curled up on the baggage return itself. The only light came from emergency lighting in the floor. The hubbub upstairs was background static under a smattering of snores.

He slipped through the service door to the basement level. He tucked in his flowing t-shirt to expose Bruiser, Slugger, and Thunker. Without his drones, he felt blind and exposed.

He opened the door to a dark room that housed the bowels of the baggage return system. Gray conveyor belts wide enough for a car wound up, down, and around an open, cluttered space that stretched beyond what Nick could see through the metallic forest of machinery.

Security scanner stations stood guard over the belts like tollbooths. A pair of workbenches had motors in various stages of disassembly or repair.

The ventilation system was loud, filling the space with a constant high-pitched whine. The humid air smelled of lubricants and the tang of ozone from hot machinery.

"I'm here," he announced. He drew Slugger and Bruiser, sensing an ambush. He donned his smartshades and toggled them through various enhancement modes: infrared, millimeter wave radar, energy emissions, electronic activity, and so on.

Lisa's body heat signature was tucked behind a scanning station ten meters away.

She stepped out of hiding, pointing two guns at his chest. Her face was silhouetted in the dark room.

"Nick Lincoln, the pleasure is all mine," she said, sounding relieved.

He pointed Slugger and Bruiser at her. "I agree."
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

"Where are the bombs, Lisa?"

She gave him a wry smile and pointed at the tangled canopy of ductwork, wiring, and plumbing in the ceiling. "You're on time. Barely."

Her bio readouts showed a normal heart rate, lower than his, and steady hands. The lighting was too poor to see her face clearly. Lisa had done her homework in picking this spot.

"Are the guns necessary?" he asked.

"Yes. And they have deadman triggers. If you knock me out with a drone, you take a pair of frier bolts to the chest."

Nick stepped inside the room. "That's kind of rough; we just met."

"Nothing but the best for a Kagent."

Wonderful. He looked around. "Where is the netpad?"

"Over there," she nodded at a brightly lit workbench to Nick's left. The netpad was hidden behind a disassembled motor. Retrieving it himself would let her escape. He had no choice though; that netpad was everything.

They circled each other clockwise, step by step, two pairs of gun barrels swinging around each other mere meters apart.

Lisa took one step backward towards the exit. Nick wiggled Slugger and Bruiser at her and she stopped.

He reached for the netpad with the hand holding Slugger. The rogue Kagent netpad had an odd design. The rubbery light green case was older and beat up, unlike the sleek metallic body of his. But it was clearly designed offworld, not bulky like the Earth-made bounty hunter netpad he used to have.

He activated her netpad and brought up the Sphere program. The splash screen was different and listed a build number, like it was a prototype. The interface was different too. Maybe this was a knockoff or a crude copy. Either way, it worked properly, although Nick was careful not to access the net, lest it attract the attraction of other Kagents. Satisfied, he shut it down and slipped it into a pocket.

He circled back toward the door, one step at a time, forcing her away from it. Lisa stopped him after two steps with a wiggle of her gun barrels. Neither one had an open path to the exit now. He was tired of staring down gun barrels. Having Bridge wave a metal dick at him sounded like a pretty good alternative right now.

"I can't let you escape," Nick said.

"I don't plan to," she said quietly. "At least not before I take your Sphere."

She laughed at his shock. "The one I just gave you is a prototype, almost two decades old. If I linked it to the nets even once to update it, your Kagents would have discovered it." She cocked her head and smiled. "You probably thought we were in some kind of stalemate. Right? Actually, you've had the advantage all along. Until now."

He had rushed in to prevent a situation that would not have happened if he hadn't rushed in. Nick's gullibility blanketed him like thick mucus.

Was she right? Did he and the city have the upper hand all along? It sure as hell didn't feel like it. But maybe the Stabilizers had been scrambling worse than the city had been.

"My netpad is no good to you," he pointed out. "It's tracked at all times."

"There's ways around that," she said.

It would be a smart play if she could pull it off. The Sphere would stay up to date enough for the Stabilizers to mount their next effort, especially if Hamilton didn't crash.

But there was no way he would let that happen. And she had to know that too.

Nick shuffled to his left, towards the exit. With both netpads now, he was the one who needed to escape. But a wiggle of her gun barrels halted him again.

Lisa's heart rate began to climb.

"You're going to kill me," Nick realized.

Her biochem telltales were starting to spike. She readjusted her aim and her lips parted. She blew out a breath and steadied herself. She began to bring up one of the guns, a classic amateur tell before shooting, and Nick lined up the telemetry to shoot her right through the heart first.

"No one else dies," Bridge declared from the door. He had two guns pointed at Lisa and an angry, anguished look on his face.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

Lisa tossed a furious look Nick's way. He pictured hundreds of snoozing refugee children about to be shredded when the metal baggage carousel under them exploded.

Bridge said, "Nick didn't know. I tracked his netpad here, even though it's off. It's really no good to you, Lisa."

"Get out of here, this is between him and I," she snarled. She swung a gun toward Bridge while keeping the other on Nick. "I warned you."

Bridge stepped into the room. "And I warned you, Lisa. We can't hurt one another though. We're family."

Despite saying that, Bridge didn't lower either gun. Wasn't this the same guy who chastised Nick for carrying firearms?

Nick saw on infrared that Bridge had drones moving in on Lisa.

"Bridge, back off. Her guns have deadman switches; I don't want my lungs deep-fried."

Bridge's drones stopped, hovering halfway between stepfather and stepdaughter. Lisa stepped tentatively toward Bridge and the exit.

"Bridge," Nick said. "She poisoned us with Blight 5. She started a civil war. She sent the Dragoons to slaughter the refugees. She was probably behind the liftport crash and shooting down the city's net access. She had her own copy of the Sphere. She knows how to evade us. We can't let her go."

The old Kagent looked heartbroken. "That all may be true. But she doesn't have the netpad now, does she? The Stabilizers will be crippled without it. And she can't go back to them: I told them she's an offworlder. She has nowhere to run to."

Lisa's mouth hung open when she heard that. And then her shock gave way to a murderous fury.

"She's too dangerous." Nick matched Lisa's steps, despite her still pointing a gun at him. "We need the police."

Bridge shook his head. "No."

Nick spared a glance at him. "Yes."

Bridge turned one of his guns on Nick. There were tears in his eyes. "We have to let her go."

"The fuck are you doing?!?" Nick automatically pointed Bruiser at Bridge's chest, while Slugger stayed on Lisa. He had never doubted Bridge's loyalties, even when he found out about Lisa. Until right now. Would Bridge really betray him? Betray the Kagents? Betray civilization?

Nick blinked rapidly to clear his head. "Whose side are you on?" he asked.

"The right side. Our side," Bridge snapped. "But let's be smart about this. No one else has to die."

"Talk to her about going overboard," Nick pointed out. "She's not leaving here without killing me and taking both netpads."

"That won't happen," Bridge stated flatly, glaring at Lisa. His drones hovered over her head, poised to strike.

Nick kept his eyes on Lisa but said to Bridge, "You're betraying me if you let her go! And the city. And the Kagents. And the future."

Bridge shook his head. "I'm not. But I can live with you thinking that I am. I can't live with sacrificing her."

"Can you live with getting me killed?" Nick retorted. "Because I can't."

"No one else dies," Bridge repeated softly. He looked at Lisa, who flinched ever so slightly. "Just walk away, honey. This is your last chance. Please."

"Lisa, if you move, you die," Nick barked.

She lifted a questioning eyebrow at her stepfather.

"Damn you, Nick." Bridge said through clenched teeth, tightening his grip on both guns.

They stood there in a triangle of death and betrayal, each with guns locked on the other two, nothing more to be said. Bridge blocked the doorway, his arms ninety degrees apart. Nick was on his left, Lisa on his right.

Lisa raised a foot to step toward the exit.

On his smartshades, Nick lined up the kill shot with Slugger. Right under Lisa's armpit, through her lungs, heart, and out the other side. His heart thundered in his chest as he watched her foot rise from the floor.

He needed to shoot her now while he had the chance.

Nick sucked in a ragged breath, one voice in his head screaming shoot, shoot, shoot, the other screaming stop, stop, stop. Don't destroy another family.

Save a family that was cosmically screwed up, its dysfunction amplified by the Stabilizers and Kagents and now threatening the world? Nick could squeeze ever so gently on Slugger's trigger and crush the life out of it. He should. Lisa had ripped her family apart quite deliberately a long time ago; why should he throw away all of human civilization to try reversing that?

But he saw the anguish in Bridge's face. It was morbidly hypnotizing, like seeing the mangled bodies from the Berlin Massacre. He couldn't stop thinking about Bridge and his wife and what the aftermath would be if he pulled the trigger. There was a family's fate in his hands, again.

He couldn't shoot her.

Lisa reconsidered mid-step, as if it sunk in that she really could die here. She lowered her foot slowly. When it was a few centimeters off the ground she slammed it down on the concrete, making an audible click.

The world glowed brightly for a half second and then flashed into black oblivion. Blinded, Nick fell to a knee, bracing for a fatal shock wave that never came. Bruiser was dead, the smartshades were dead, and every powered device in the room emitted an unsettling sigh of power-loss.

In the silence that followed, Lisa began shooting.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

Wearing dark sunglasses in a blacked out basement was a distinct disadvantage in a firefight. Nick whipped off the dead smartshades but his sight didn't improve. The only light was blurry muzzle-lightning competing with the spots dancing around his vision.

Lisa must have detonated an electromagnetic pulse that overloaded and fried electronics. A perfect antidote to drones, powered weapons, netpads, and other Kagent tools.

She must be firing non-electronic ballistic weapons, like Slugger.

Nick rolled to his right, towards Bridge, towards the door. He didn't want to shoot Bridge accidentally. The traitorous bastard didn't deserve the courtesy, but Nick would rather face only one adversary while blind and lost.

He came up in a crouch, Slugger held at the ready, but he didn't shoot.

Bridge pleaded to stop, but he was drowned out by more shots from Lisa.

Nick rolled back to his left, where he thought Lisa was when the lights went out. He holstered both weapons and prepared to tackle her.

A round pinged off something behind him, too close. She might have heard him. Nick settled for lying still on the floor.

He got a snoot full of dust bunnies along the way. His nose tickled. His sinuses clenched. He would not begin sneezing during a firefight. He wriggled his nose and tried to concentrate on the last muzzle flash.

The tickling grew worse though. He sneezed loudly.

The firing stopped abruptly, as if Lisa could not believe she heard a sneeze and stopped to check.

Nick sneezed again. And again.

"Jeebus Lucas, Nick," Bridge said incredulously from somewhere in the dark.

Lisa's next shot hit something that crashed to the floor behind Nick. He covered his head and promptly sneezed again. Panicked, he rolled away. He had no idea where in the room he had ended up.

The last gunshot echoed around the room like a thunder clap searching for a way out. He could hear the swish-fwipt of fabric on fabric right near him. Then footsteps running.

Nick stood and ran for what he thought was the exit. He banged his foot on the leg of a workbench.

"Nick?" Bridge called from close by, but somewhere near the floor.

Nick bumped into something, maybe the conveyor belt. His eyes were slowly adjusting to the gloom. He could see a faint outline of a doorway. Some light must be filtering in from the hallway. He took a step toward the door. "Bridge, are you okay?"

"No," the older man said in a low, teeth-gritting tone. There was rustling to his right. A hand grabbed Nick's right ankle.

"She shot you?" The footsteps, Lisa's footsteps, sounded more distant now. She was out in the hallway, getting away.

"I have to get you help," Nick said, pulling his ankle from Bridge's hand.

He had to catch her. True, without a Sphere, she was not much threat to the city. But her counter-Kagent skills and a death wish for him meant he couldn't let her walk. "You can apologize later."

Bridge wouldn't let go. He laughed weakly. "No apologies. No regrets. Doing this for you and her both."

Doing what? Nick felt a cold metal phallus creep up the back of his leg. Bridge's stunstick must have been fried like all the other electronics by the pulse. What was he doing? Leg-humping him?

He was about to tell Bridge to cut it out when there was a small, sharp stab where the glans pressed against his calf. A spring-loaded syringe.

Bridge fell back onto the floor with a satisfied grunt.

Nick's leg felt tired and rubbery on his next step toward the door.

Shit.

Nick stripped off his belt and tied a tourniquet around his thigh as he stumbled into the doorframe. Hopefully it would slow whatever crap Bridge injected him with long enough to catch Lisa. He limped into the hallway.

He did a shuffle-run to the stairs. How powerful was that EMP grenade? If it fried every circuit in the liftport, it would take months to repair the whole facility. The Stabilizers may have taken out the liftport after all, in the sneakiest, quietest way possible. Lisa was pretty damn slick, and he began to doubt that he would catch her in a simple footrace.

He spotted a dim light above him, at the top of the stairs. It was a faint, white light seeping in the bottom of the door to the baggage level. Maybe the whole liftport wasn't fried.

He toed a bottom stair and stepped up, but the effort made exhaustion wash over him. Bridge's sleepy juice was past the tourniquet, no thanks to his own increased heart rate. He was running out of time.

He gripped the railing and pulled himself up to the third step, but his body sagged on legs that felt thin and hollow. His torso was lead and even his sore ribs had stopped throbbing.

His knees buckled in slow motion.

The thought of Lisa strolling out of the liftport, maybe wearing a souvenir t-shirt, propelled him up another step on his elbows.

He wouldn't catch her, he realized. He had no idea if the city had been saved, or if Bridge would survive, or if Lisa had been wounded. She could be bleeding out on the other side of that door. She may need as much help as Bridge. He couldn't let her die.

Before he passed out, he had to alert someone who would get help for Bridge. He just had to will himself to do it. He lifted his head up over another step and laid his cheek on the step's cool concrete, but the effort made his eyes blink in stages. That door above him may as well have been on the moon.

He forced his eyes open again and could see the dim beam of light with dust swirling in it. So close. He knew he wouldn't make it out into the corridor.

Slugger weighed a metric fuck-ton, but he somehow managed to prop it on the step. He aimed for the top of the door in case anyone was standing on the other side. Maybe that made him an optimist.

The blast shocked him awake and he squeezed off two more. The recoil knocked him back down the stairs.

His eyes slivered open and he saw two holes through the door letting more of the weak light through.

Had anyone heard the shots? Maybe they were muffled bangs, or pings. Everyone was asleep out there. No one expected to hear gunshots at the liftport, especially exhausted, sleeping refugees.

He fired again. The deafening noise, muzzle flash and recoil blurred together; his brain was no longer able to sort out input from different senses.

His eyes closed while the last roar echoed in his ears, or maybe his eyes. His forehead touched the cool concrete step. The sensory blur in his head turned to gray mist and then, finally, dark.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

"Nick," someone said, "wake up."

A familiar voice.

His eyes fluttered open. Pam's face hovered in view, framed in ceiling tiles above her. He was on his back, shirtless. Voices conversed in the near distance while murmurs burbled further away.

His brain booted up, one thought at a time.

Glancing to his side at the multitude of cops spurred a wave of dizziness. He closed his eyes. "Bridge was shot. Downstairs. First door on the right."

He opened his eyes again and studied Pam's knowing, grief-stricken face. She shook her head gently.

Nausea arrived and Nick felt naked and weak. Every ache he purchased today cried for attention and the floor felt cold and sharp on his spine. His face flooded with tears, hot and wet.

Bridge had died alone in the dark. No way to call for help, or say goodbye, or ask for forgiveness. No one to comfort him. It must have felt like the whole universe had turned away from him, from his new partner to his stepdaughter, right on down to light itself. He was left alone with his pain, the darkness, and his guilt.

Nick sat up and fought down the nausea that rose with his head. "I think he, he tried to save Lisa and I from one another," he said, wiping tears away. "He couldn't let her be captured but would not let her kill me."

Pam caressed his face. "An impossible situation."

He showed Pam the two dead netpads. "The pulse fried everything. Probably knocked out the liftport's concourse cameras too. She walked away. Until I see the outcome cone, the projections, I won't know for sure."

"It's over," Pam said. "The police arrested Thrall. The Dragoons left. Jerry Craftchek's rental car was found abandoned in the middle of a highway out of town. And the media declared victory for the city."

Nick processed all that for a minute and then Pam helped him to his feet. A hundred refugees stared at him from behind police tape. A medic in her eighties came by and told him she had wrapped up a cracked rib on his left side.

She was followed by a woman wearing stylish smartshades, a pantsuit and tapping furiously on a netpad as he gingerly put his shirt back on. The only sign that she was a bounty hunter and not a lawyer was the grapefruit-sized drone hovering over her shoulder.

"Mr. Lincoln, I'm Tammy Nyguen, collecting information for the city and for a Stabilizer Alliance audit. I need your statement."

"Audit?" Nick looked at Pam, who shrugged.

Tammy replied, "Someone tipped off the Stabilizers that they had an offworld mole by the name of Lisa Quinton."

Nick closed his eyes, letting the pieces fall into place in his head. "The tip came from Bridge Radisson."

Tammy stopped tapping her netpad. "How did you know?"

Because Bridge told him. Sort of. The next hour crawled by as he talked his way through the statements, questions, and answers. Eventually the bounty hunter was finished interviewing him. The police had no use for him either.

Pam insisted that he stay at her apartment for the night and he wasn't in the mood to argue. Tomorrow would be full of more statements, briefings for the City Council and taking care of Bridge's body, she said. He nodded, depleted, and let her steer him into a taxi.

Pam turned on Scoop and the gratuitous use of inflated adjectives filled the cabin. The city had survived, Nick gathered, and then ignored the coverage to watch the actual city slide by. The taxi detoured around streets blocked by burning Bearcats, wounded Dragoons, and celebrating crowds.

Guilty recriminations fell over him like wet wool. If only Bridge had explained his plans to out Lisa. If only Nick had agreed to let Lisa go. If only he had convinced her to walk away. If only he had stayed with Bridge in that dark room rather than chase her. If only he had shot Lisa before Bridge arrived. Yeah, right. The impossibility of that notion made the rest of the self-blame evaporate.

Bridge knew exactly what he was doing. He had intervened to save Nick from Lisa and Lisa from Nick. But he also intervened to save the city from the Stabilizers by not letting his stepdaughter take Nick's netpad. Yes, he helped Lisa escape, but he also ended her terrorist career. Things between them had reached the point of no return, but Bridge probably thought it was the least he could do for his stepdaughter. Bridge's death and Lisa's escape were those details no Kagent could hope to project accurately. Nick racked his brain but couldn't think of anything he could have done to prevent it.

Anyway, the city wouldn't crash and the Stabilizers had lost. He itched to see an updated outcome cone, but all the proof he needed was out the window and coming through the taxi's speakers.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

The two Kagents stepped into Pam's apartment building, apprehensive about the noise inside. They were conflicted and exhausted, with one of them carrying lots of dead equipment and numerous injuries but both carrying personal grief.

Music thumped from an apartment on the second floor. People clogged the small lobby, each landing, and every staircase, linking separate floor parties to the lobby. They hoisted cups of water and tossed back gels.

A grumpy, disheveled man on Four gripped the banister and complained loudly about needing to sleep. He was laughed back into his apartment.

The building was home to types who kept late hours anyway, who had come to Hamilton to follow a dream or just live on Earth's bleeding edge. The after-hours crowd had been cooped up inside all night, watching the local news through hands covering their faces. Now they were releasing the tension.

They greeted Pam as a conquering hero. Her gray jumpsuit and cloak stood out and people crowded around her. She and Nick were handed food, water, gels, and pressed to recount their adventures.

Nick hadn't eaten much all day and his exhaustion dropped a notch as food hit his stomach. The raucous mood was contagious, even though every jubilant face reminded him of Bridge.

Pam shrugged and smiled sadly. "Let's take the good times when we can."

He nodded, if only because it delayed whatever crap he was feeling from overwhelming him.

After most of an hour, the crowd thinned and they were able to climb the stairs. Once inside the apartment, Nick eased himself down on the couch. The two sat side-by-side to record a tearful video message to Bridge's wife Meredith that relayed the terrible news.

Afterwards, Nick retreated to the bathroom to wash up. He looked up to see Pam leaning against the bathroom doorway, blocking his way out. "What are you feeling?" she asked.

His ribs were throbbing and he was exhausted. He wanted to say he was okay when he noticed that the look on her face made plain that bullshitting was unacceptable.

"Too many different things," he said with a sigh. "And you?"

"I keep thinking, 'and now what?' and then realize I need to slow down. But then I do and the same question pops up."

She was asking what was next, for him, for her, for them, for the world. Her job in Hamilton was done, as was his. She was from offworld and he was not. But both were at loose ends, with little holding them down.

Nick nodded. "I need to go to Mars—"

"Tessa—"

"Tessa. To meet Meredith in person. Explain what happened to Bridge. And Lisa. And maybe get properly trained to be a Kagent. But I also keep thinking about my niece in Harrisburg. I want to visit her." Nick smiled. "And I really want to bring you along with me."

Pam brightened up. "Let's do it then. But I thought your family..."

Nick rubbed his chin. "Bridge told me that there are some roads you can't uncross. But I have to try."

<<<<>>>>
Here is a sneak peek at the first chapter of the next book in the Kagent series, Twistpoint (coming in 2014):
CHAPTER ONE

When Craig Lassiter knocked over Sudhur's market stall, he wanted to apologize to his friend and constituent, but he had a Chinese bounty hunter chasing him. And it was highly unlikely he would ever need Sudhur's vote again.

Craig dodged left through the crowded market, toward Muhammed's kabob-and-flapjack stand. He grabbed a stainless steel spatula out of the old man's hand as he ran by. Muhammed smiled at Craig's antics, confused.

Craig swiveled around and swatted away two plum-sized drones, studded in cameras, syringes and zappers, that were diving for his neck. They retreated out of reach and fell behind.

Since he wasn't watching where he was running, he plowed into little Jagdish and his friends, who toppled over like empty trash cans. Craig hopped on one foot, trying not to fall over, too.

He saw the bounty hunter hustling through the crowd, his face shiny with sweat in the unforgiving midday sunshine. His pursuer was younger than him by three decades if he was a year, but he was wearing heavy body armor and carrying a huge gun.

Craig was in his usual thin shirt, shorts and sandals. Plus, after a decade of living in central India, he had grown used to the heat.

He continued to spin on his one sandal and then sprinted. The bounty hunter was blocked by the adults picking up Jagdish and friends, who were more indignant than injured.

Friends, neighbors, people who voted for him, now looked shocked and concerned. They saw the mayor of Barabanki City running pell-mell through the market, chased like a common thief by two drones and a one-man Chinese combat brigade.

"Behind you!" shouted Rajendra.

The drones approached from his left and right. He swatted at them again and they backed off. They could follow him around until he tired out. His lungs were burning already.

He needed to get off the street, out of sight. He dodged around an old woman and knocked over a display of hats to block the path behind him.

"Victor, stop, it must be a mistake," Fernando said, grabbing his arm.

Craig shook him off and kept running. There was no mistake. Craig had lived here under the name Victor Champlain for over a decade. But now the game was up.

A drone's buzz grew louder as it dove for his unprotected scalp. Craig dropped to his butt and swung hard over his head. The spatula connected with a crunching thud. The drone spun away into a bush.

The bounty hunter fired his personal cannon into the air.

Before the gunshot's thunder stopped rolling, the crowd panicked, yelling, crying, shoving, pushing, and stepping on Craig.

He grabbed a hat that fell to the ground and bounced up to his feet. He followed the stampede down a side street, hoping to lose the drone in the crowd.

The crowd slowed down and dispersed a block away from the gunshot. Other people came running out of shops and workplaces to see what was going on.

Craig reached the next corner and found himself at a residential cross street with a cafe on the corner.

Someone next to him pointed at a drone coming down the street, scanning people. Craig stepped into the cafe, headed to the bathroom and locked himself in.

He listened at the bathroom door but all he could hear was anxious commotion from the cafe patrons. They wanted to know what was happening and where the police were. After two minutes, he emerged from the bathroom and joined them looking outside.

The police had just arrived on the corner in a three-man buggy. Craig didn't want to talk to them. He exited the cafe through a side door so they wouldn't see him.

He had practiced his escape for years. He had kept a cheap apartment under another name in case this happened, but it was on the far side of the market and the bounty hunter. He had to detour around it, go through the florist, and down an alley to Conroy's.

But entering the florist would mean seeing Basu. Talking to her. They had done a stellar job avoiding each other in this small village since she ended their engagement.

He took a series of back alleys and storm drains to the street Basu's florist shop was on. But a drone appeared ahead, at least twenty feet up, its lights blinking against the clear blue sky.

Out of nowhere, a red and yellow soccer ball hit the drone, knocking it into a muddy puddle in the street where it bubbled and went still. A kid cheered his kicking prowess, but it didn't matter; the drone spotted him. Craig hurried toward the florist shop's door.

Just as he reached it, the bounty hunter ran around the corner up ahead.

Oh shit. Craig banged open the door to the flower shop and ran in.

The fragrant humidity coated him. Basu had always smelled so wonderful. He was drawing the bounty hunter right to her, but Craig didn't feel all that bad though.

She was there at the counter, startled while working on an arrangement. For a brief moment she looked happy to see him, like she always had. But then she saw his sweaty, panicked face and her expression turned to horror. "Vic, what's wrong?" she asked in that low, sultry voice he adored.

He didn't answer, didn't even slow. He ran to the back storeroom, brushing past her new husband. Behind him, he could hear the shop's front door opening.

He sprinted into the narrow alley behind the shop. He yanked open the backdoor to Conroy's. Conroy was slicing vegetables, unperturbed that someone came in the backdoor without knocking.

Craig locked the back door behind him. "Today's the day."

The old cook's face fell. "Ah. I'm sorry to hear that, Vic."

He followed Craig to the dining area. Craig ducked through a side door into the stairwell that went up to his apartment. Conroy announced to the patrons that a round of naan bread was on the house.

Craig dashed up the stairs, fumbled with the door, and burst inside. Nothing was moving in the apartment except for dust motes drifting in the windows' lazy sunbeams.

He hadn't lived here since Basu dumped him. He grabbed his old beige rucksack from under the sink and was out the door in under twenty seconds.

He climbed the stairs to the roof. The sun seemed brighter and hotter when he emerged. A drone buzzed in the distance, swinging around toward him.

He squinted at it, wiped his brow, and ran through the garden. The plants slapped against his bare legs as he powered through it. When he reached the roof's edge, he jumped.

He landed with a thud on the roof next door and fell into its thorny plants, getting scratched in a dozen places. He scrambled up and sprinted across three more roofs in quick succession, the drone still in pursuit.

He slid down the fire escape overseeing the street. A blue Pradeshevy four-seater pulled up to the curb. Conroy had alerted either Mohindar or Svetanka that he needed a ride. It was Svetanka, waving wildly at him from the car window.

Craig ran for the passenger side and jumped in without looking around. He was afraid of what he'd see.

"You're the best," he said as he planted his face on the floorboard.

"We are headed to the train," Svetanka said, activating the nav.

The windshield crackled and a gunshot rang out. The round went clear through to the back seat above Craig's back. Svetanka gave a tiny shriek and ducked her head.

The bounty hunter was ahead of them on the sidewalk, shooting at the car. The car switched to the right lane and turned right, away from the train station.

"What are you doing?" Craig asked from the floor.

"Misdirection."

Craig dared a peek out the back window and saw the bounty hunter heading down an alley, presumably to cut them off.

"Are you hurt?" Craig asked.

Svetanka shook her head. "I'm fine."

Before they reached the next intersection, Svetanka took the car off auto and spun the steering wheel. The Pradeshevy was a small car, a distant descendant of a battery-operated cart, really, and it did a tight one-eighty. The car was headed in the opposite direction before Craig's stomach had finished whirling around.

Craig watched out the back window as the drone receded in the distance. They drove past Faizabad Road, against the afternoon traffic, and to the train station. Craig began to open the door, his bag in the other hand, but Svetanka swiveled around in the driver's seat and grabbed his arm.

"Basu is an idiot," she said and kissed him deeply on the mouth. "This was my only chance," she added with a sheepish grin.

Craig returned the grin with interest. "We'll always have Barabanki. You were a hell of a friend, Svet."

He hurried through the station and boarded the train to Lucknow. He booked a flight out of Lucknow. While he watched to see if the bounty hunter would show up, he admired Barabanki City, the verdant fields and the mountains to the north. "It was a nice life," he said.

He stayed by the door to make sure the Chinese bounty hunter didn't board at the last second. The train accelerated out of the station with no sign of him.

Craig wasn't stupid though. If there was one bounty hunter, who found him, there would be others. Lucknow was a big city with plenty of surveillance for bounty hunters to tap into. He needed more help to escape.

He made a call. It had to be early morning back home. It was answered on the third ring.

"Daniel Sloan? It's Craig Lassiter."

"Craig Lassiter? I thought you were dead years ago."

"Since Shanghai. I hid in India, made a life here. But a Chinese bounty hunter just found me; my old sins catching up with me. I'm headed to Lucknow. I need to get out of India, someplace safe. Can you help?"

Daniel sounded oddly pleased to hear this. "Are you interested in coming back?"

"The Alliance? Are you kidding me? I think the lifetime ban was for life, Daniel."

"Well, times change. Have you followed the news lately?"

Craig grimaced. "A little. Sounds like you all have done fine since I left." It still stung a little, after all these years, that the Stabilizers found success after his colossal Shanghai fuckup; like he was the bad luck charm the Alliance had to cut loose to become successful.

"Not quite," Daniel said. "We hit a rough patch. I'm retired but they really could use your help. That is, if you've learned from your mistakes."

Craig watched the topsoil farms zip by. His mistakes. Craig was an embarrassment, a cocky sonuvabitch who stretched the notion of nonviolence to its breaking point: using radioactive contamination of downtown Shanghai to render it uninhabitable. In retrospect, he was glad the Chinese had discovered the plot before he could execute it.

He shook his head. "Yeah. I'm not that man anymore. But I didn't think you all would ever take me back. I was just hoping you could pay for a plane ticket to the ass end of nowhere until I figured out where to hide next."

"Times change. I can probably get you a consulting contract with the Alliance," Daniel said. "If you're interested."

Craig had no idea what the hell anyone would want to pay him to consult on, but that was all happy talk and he didn't take it seriously. He just needed Daniel to give him a ticket and a place to stay back home.

"I'll get you over here," his old friend promised.

"Thanks. That's... more than I expected," Craig said, relieved. He was headed home again, to the welcoming arms of the Stabilizer Alliance. What the fuck.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

I typically find acknowledgements not very reader-friendly. Either I am looking for a name, or want to know more about how the book came together, or where the author's research came from.

I'll try to deal with all of that below, be thankful to those named below, concise for curious readers, and helpful to fellow writers looking for resources.

This novel was ten years in the making and was rewritten, almost from scratch, several times. A crowd of unsuspecting Balticon friends in 2006 were ear-lashed by a long, rambling synopsis that was nine parts enthusiasm to one part coherent. The errors and junk that are still in here are strictly my own.

Family: Wendy, Karenna and Jaden for putting up with me and my need to "type", "write", "get my words in", and attend cons.

Alpha readers: Stephanie Dray, Dave Shoffner, Ron Toland, who put up with some awful dreck years ago.

Beta readers: Joni Lavery, Matt Lesko, and Nolan Smith-Kaprosy, who put up with less awful dreck more recently.

Editing: Lyn Worthen at Camden Park Press

Cover and formatting: Glendon and Tabatha Haddix at Streetlight Graphics

Blogs on indie-publishing: Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Joe Konrath, David Gaughran 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Sarney began writing as a geeky, contrarian kid in Rochester, NY. He created fantasy worlds while raking leaves, imagined that his elementary school was a Rebel base, and gave the pilots of his Lego spaceships their own backstories. He went on to wear a Chuck E. Cheese costume, become a Washington policy wonk, and practice the craft of arranging letters in an order that entertains others.

He has been published at Daily Science Fiction.com. You can follow him at marksarney.com and on twitter.com/marksarney.

Mark, his wife, and two children live in Columbia, MD.
