 
Cry Wolf & Select Short Stories

Smashwords Edition published by Nicolas Wilson

Copyright 2013 Nicolas Wilson

Hi. I'm Nic. This is a short story collection of mine. Other stories and information about upcoming work can be found on my website: www.nicolaswilson.com. At the end of this collection, you'll find snippets of novels I'm working on. I'm calling them entertisements, because the word amuses me. Keep going to reach the fiction, or you can view the Table of Contents (including synopses of the stories in this collection).

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#  The Gambit: The Dread Wolf's Bane

I'm driving faster than I should, and in Portland in a crap economy that's just asking to get pulled over. But I'm in need of a cop, anyway, so maybe that would take care of two birds. "So, this is going to work, right?" I ask into my cell.

"The literature is spottier than I'd like. But it _will_ stop him."

"Okay. But by stop, we don't mean kill, right? Because if he dies, I'm going to prison, probably forever."

"Well, like I said, it's spotty. I'd say a seventy percent chance of it working right and you know, not killing anybody- but it is my first time brewing it." She swallows. And it's cute that she thinks I need the pep talk. "You know what happens if you don't do it: the kid dies, and maybe takes a bunch of innocent people with him. And it all gets written off as a mass hallucination and buried."

"Yeah, I know. If it _does_ fail, how will I know?"

"If it fails and is poisonous, initial signs are nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. This proceeds to burning, tingling, numbness in the mouth and face, eventually progressing to the limbs. Death comes from paralysis of the heart or respiratory system."

"So we really hope you mixed it right. But I better go. I'll see you in the morning."

"You better."

The BBC is playing on the local OPB station; it's late enough that nobody's up around her to deal with the news. But they're still talking locally, anyway. "The boy- Ray- claims to have been living in the forest for five years with his father. When his father died, he buried him in a shallow grave, and walked out of the forest. But he can't remember where he lived, or his last name. Barely speaks English at all- he's nearly feral. The police are still trying to track down the boy's origins. It's almost a day since he was found. How goes the hunt?"

Another British voice, barely distinguishable from the last, comes in. "Investigators are playing it close to the vest. But they're trying to track the boy back to his campsite, with the hopes that they'll find some clues."

Vergara isn't in a giving mood tonight. She agreed to meet me, so long as I came to her. And bought dinner. I guess I should be happy dinner is a Shari's, instead of Beaches or some place more expensive.

I put the car into a spot next to Vergara's Honda. The hostess isn't there, but Vergara's in a booth right by the entrance, and motions me over. I sit across from her. She ordered me coffee, and I empty cream and sweetener into it. I take a sip that turns into a deep gulp when I realize it's cool enough to down in one go. I wipe my mouth on my sleeve reflexively, and ask, "You heard about the kid on the news?"

"The wolf boy? That's what this is about? Here I thought this was a social call."

"And you came anyway." She apparently forgets it's all bluster, because she flushes a little. I let that go, because I don't want her feeling vulnerable- not tonight. Our waitress mercifully interrupts to deliver Vergara's food.

"Can I get you anything?" she asks, noticing me.

"Whatever's hot and ready. I'm in a hurry."

"Got it. I'll bring out an appetizer platter."

Vergara takes a bite of breaded salmon, and I find myself watching her mouth as she pulls it off the fork with her tongue. "I need to see him."

"That's touching- your sudden interest in troubled juveniles- unless your interest _is_ touching them, and then you're as sick a bastard as I always thought."

"You figured me for a kiddie-fiddler?" I ask, a little wounded.

"For a sicko, anyway- even if I haven't figured the particulars."

I'd like to defend my honor, but my ego needs to take a backseat. "Is the kid alone?"

"As lonesome as you can ever get in detention."

"But is he alone in his cell?"

"Juvey isn't the Ritz. Everybody has to bunk up."

"Then his cell mate is in danger."

"They're a couple of kids; neither with any indication of a history of violence." She's already taken an interest in the case; that bodes well for me.

"The kid's amnesiac; he could have a history of being Charlie Manson and not remember it- and if you haven't identified him yet you can't know that, either. But you know the old superstition, where supposedly crime goes up on a full moon."

"Yes," she says, "which is entirely bunk."

"Statistically, that's true. But most wrong ideas, superstitions especially, started somewhere, were formed around a kernel of truth. At one point it _was_ true that violence spiked on a full moon. Because of a small population with clinical lycanthropy."

She's taking a drink when I say that last bit, and some of it must go down the wrong tube. She coughs a little to try and clear it out. "Werewolves?"

"People who _think_ they are. Technically, it's a disorder without a diagnosis, unless you count general 'psychosis.'"

"You don't strike me as the doctorate type. High school guidance counselor?"

"Just an interested party with a passing experience of the weird. But we're talking about two kids' lives, here- not _my_ proclivities. Besides, clinical lycanthropy takes _years_ to treat. I don't have a cure, exactly, but I'm familiar with a palliative measure."

"A silver bullet?" she asks with a grin.

"Actually- presuming you mean the cheap beer- you _probably_ could get him wasted, and he'd sleep right through the moon. Unless he's a violent drunk, and then the problem isn't really much better. But I meant tea."

"You've finally lost your mind, haven't you?"

"Brewed from wolfsbane."

"Um, isn't that _deadly_."

"There's an Ayurvedic method of detoxification, neutralizes the aconite."

"Great. You're creepy _and_ New Agey."

"I prefer to think of it as old age; Ayurveda started more than a thousand years before Christ."

"Surprised you'd use BC instead of BCE."

"I'm just old-fashioned enough that the whole 'before current era' thing feels wrong, and more than a little clunky."

The waitress comes back with a deep-fried cornucopia. "Could I get a to-go box?" She nods, and scurries off.

"Seems presumptuous, that I'm convinced enough that we can. But let's just say I believe you, that this kid, who you _don't_ claim to be able to identify, yet _do_ claim to be able to diagnose, remotely, I might add, is violent. What's to keep him from killing you if you go in there, instead of his roommate?"

"If he kills me, you don't have to put up with me anymore."

"That's the bright side. But there'd be paperwork."

"More, or less, than if I live?" I ask, and pop a mozzarella stick into my mouth. It burns me enough I don't get to be as smug about my answer as I'd like.

"Good point."

The waitress returns and sets a styrofoam box on the end of the table. "Will that be everything?" she asks.

Vergara doesn't finish chewing before she says, "I'm going to need your most expensive pie, to go, please. He's buying." She comes back with a cardboard box with a pie window in the top and the check, and hands one to me and the other to Vergara. I leave the receipt with two twenties and we get up to go.

I follow her in my car down to Juvie. I park right behind her, and walk up to her driver's side. The door's unlocked, so I pull it open. She still has half a slice of pie in her hand, with the other half presumably what's swelling out her cheeks. "What?" she asks. "I was hungry. I didn't eat dinner."

"I watched you eat dinner ten minutes ago."

"I didn't eat dinner earlier. So now I'm hungrier than just for normal dinner. Jeez. Who died and made you pie inquisitor?" I shrug as she puts away the rest of the slice, then gets out. "I half expected an Adolf Cobbler joke."

"I strive to be unpredictable." She barely flashes her badge to get us in the front door. But inside, she has to sign me in. By then I can tell, from the way she's shuffling around, that the whole thing makes her nervous. "I know this is unorthodox," I say.

"You never ask for orthodox. But if anything happens to the kid, I'll shoot you."

"You probably would."

A man with arms as thick as his neck comes through a reinforced door. "This is Steven. He'll take you back to the cells."

"We don't like to call them cells," he corrects her, gently. "Rooms." He opens the door for me, and I walk through it. I don't like having someone that size where I can't see them. "Maureen tells me you're a counselor," he says from behind me.

"Yes. Came as soon as I could. I have some... experience with wayward boys."

"Well, we took his roommate to another room, per what I was told was your request."

"I was concerned, given what I'd heard, that he might be in the beginning stages of a violent episode. Territorial behavior and the like. Just a precaution, you understand."

"Normally we don't hold innocent people here- well, that's a loaded word- but everybody else here has been arrested for something. Most of them are awaiting trial for Measure 11 felonies. Ray's different. That's why we made sure we housed him with a nonviolent offender. Curt was probably going to be out of here in the morning, pending a hearing and probably even then only a fine."

"Ray?" I ask.

"Kid remembers that much, but that's it, so far. I was instructed not to search your bag." That doesn't sit right with him. And on this occasion, I'm not carrying anything that would be easily mistaken for contraband, so it's better to buy his cooperation with a little of my own.

"Go ahead," I tell him, and unzip my pack and spread it wide.

"Tea?" he asks, and looks inside the empty pot.

"I find it helps calm the nerves. Helps with bonding."

"Hmm," he says. "And in the thermos?"

"I do the actual brewing ahead of schedule. It's one thing to boil water during a session, but waiting for it to steep, too... it just all takes too long. It doesn't do its job if I'm only giving them a travel mug on their way out the door. I was told there'd be a hotplate."

"Sure is. You, uh, mind if I try it?" he asks.

He's thorough. I like that. And even if Bishop did botch the recipe, a sip shouldn't do more than give him a bad case of food poisoning.

"Not at all."

He unscrews the cap and takes a swig- enough I worry, just a little, after his health. Then he makes a face. "Tastes like ass," he says.

"Good tea does," I tell him. But he's satisfied. Hopefully that will buy me the privacy I need. "But here it is, his casa."

The kid is terrified, eyes wide- the better to see you with, my dear. He's sweating, gripping his blanket like it'll keep him tethered to his sanity. It won't.

Steven unlocks the cell, then locks me in once I'm inside. "Ray, mind if I come in?" I ask.

I know I already am, but it's a courtesy thing. "They told me you're a doctor."

"Amazing how these things get exaggerated." I sit down on his former roommate's bunk.

For the first time he takes his eyes off the bars and looks at me. "You aren't safe in here."

"It's a pretty unsafe world. I'll take my chances." I reach into my bag, for the thermos. "Besides, it's a hell of a lot safer for you if I'm in here." He eyes me as I set the thermos down on the edge of the shared sink. "It's tea, brewed with, amongst other things, wolfsbane, processed to detoxify the aconite. It'll suppress the change, put you into a light coma; you'll sleep through the night and be fine by morning. For me, it'll just taste a little bitter, but the parts of you that are _different_ , they'll still be affected by the wolfsbane, because aconite isn't the only active chemical." I remove a teapot from my backpack, and set it on the hotplate in the corner of the sink. I switch it on, then pour from the thermos into the pot. He shrinks back, against the corner of his cage.

"You're being cautious. Of course, with a name like wolfsbane, you should be, at least if you remember _what_ you are." He's scared of everything right now, so it's tough to gauge his reaction, which would be easier. But I'm used to things not falling easy, so I lay my cards down. "What I think happened, is you had a psychotic break; not uncommon, amongst your kind. You couldn't remember who you were, so you came 'home.' Only since then you've started to remember, and you realize how _completely_ screwed you are. Because you managed to turn yourself over to the authorities on the night of the full moon- the _only_ night when you'll be _forced_ to change, and the authorities would be forced to kill you."

"So, understandably you're afraid." I check my watch. "Don't be. Moonrise isn't until after midnight. There's another twenty minutes- plenty of time."

"Oh joy. Martha Stewart's come to save me," he says, and rolls his eyes.

"That's an _old_ memory, if you've been in the woods for five years. So you are starting to remember. But do you remember anything useful? Like, any relatives in the area? Anyone who could pick you up?" He looks down at the table. "Doesn't have to be tonight. They're probably changing here pretty soon, too, right? We can call them in the morning. But the quicker you get out of here, the less likely anyone is to ask a question that puts you in danger."

"I've got an uncle, in Salem. I think I remember the number. Got a pen?"

"Yeah, and even something to write on," I snark, and hand him both. He jots a name and a number into my notepad. The teapot's starting to steam. I take out two cups from my bag, and start pouring. He trades me the first one for my pad and paper, but doesn't drink, just watches me pour a second. I figured as much, which is why I brought two cups, so I drink first. I can't help but make a face. "Tastes like something died in it, but it shouldn't kill either of us."

"You have _no idea_ how bad it smells. How bad you smell, this place." His voice is a harsh whisper bordering on a growl, and his hands are trembling violently enough I'm surprised he hasn't dumped his whole cup into his lap.

"Maybe we have less time than I thought," I say, trying to hide my concern beneath a smile.

"No, it's," he stops, forces the shaking to end. "It starts half a day before the full moon. Everything becomes overwhelming, especially smells. Tastes, too," he sips at the tea. "I don't suppose you brought sugar."

"Bishop told me it _might_ interfere."

"My mom had a recipe that used beets as a sweetener. Course, the toxicity was more of a problem for her."

I polish off my cup, figuring it's better to get it out of the way. I close up the thermos, then put it, the pot, and my cup back in the bag. The kid's nursing his tea along, but not because he doesn't want to drink it. I stop moving around, just look at him, waiting for it to come out.

"You're frightened," he says, and there's something menacing behind it, satisfaction, maybe. "You don't know if it'll work." The menace disappears, and he's a scared kid again, and I notice that he's gripping his mattress to keep himself attached to the world. "Would you stay with me, until moonrise?" He doesn't want to be alone if he changes. In the wild it's almost impossible to catch someone like him. But in a confined space like this, full of armed guards, that would be death for him. He's saying he doesn't want to die alone if it doesn't work.

Being trapped in a cage with a werewolf is probably a bad idea, but one look in his watering eyes and I know I can't abandon him, either, so I say, "Sure." And I'm the only one in the building who _might_ be able to put him down without killing him- presuming he doesn't eat me, first.

"How much time do we have left?" he asks, polishing off the last of the cup and handing it over.

"Few minutes," I lie, looking at my watch; it's thirty seconds, give or take. He doubles over in pain, grabbing his stomach.

"You, unn, lying bastard."

"It hurts. I'm sorry. But that's good. It should hurt, if it's working. Of course, the change hurts, too. So." I shrug.

"Shut up," he says. He closes his eyes, and his breathing gets heavy; I flash back to the old _Hulk_ show, and realize if the kid wolfs out I'm not going to like him when he's angry. But he opens his eyes, and sighs. "I think... I'm good."

I check my watch. Moon's definitely up by now. "You're going to be okay."

"Yeah," he says. "Thanks. Should I know your name?"

"No," I tell him. "You want to let me out?" I ask, projecting enough to be heard around the corner. Steven comes out, with a folded over book of crossword puzzles.

"Don't suppose either of you knows a thirteen letter word, changing into a German novelist?"

"Metamorphosis," Ray says, then, "think I'm going to go to bed." He's wobbly on his feet.

"Sure thing," Steven says, folding up the book to shove into a back pocket, "just let me get this pesky shrink out of your head."

He opens up the door, then locks it after me. Then he leads me back out towards the lobby. "You _can_ put the other boy back in with him; but I wouldn't. Just in case." Steven nods, then closes the lobby door behind me. I imagine, this late, the other kid's asleep wherever they've got him, anyway.

Vergara's still waiting for me, though she isn't alone; she went and got the pie out of her passenger seat, which she tries to hide from me by standing in front of it. "He's got an Uncle Kevin, outside Salem," I tell her, handing her the page torn out of my notepad. "He won't pick up tonight, but by sunrise you can reach him at this number. He'll be happy to come get the boy."

She takes it, a little stunned. "This... will win me some favors in juvenile and missing persons. If I can explain to them how I got it."

"Better if you don't. Build up an aura of mystery," I tell her, and push my way through the front door, and back onto the city street.

_Author's Note: Knight, the main character in this new short story, hails from the Gambit series. The first novel in that series,_ The Necromancer's Gambit _, is available as an ebook and in print._

Table of Contents

# Canary

We spent the first few hours after the collapse trying to stay human. There's a change that takes place in people when death encroaches- the flickers of animal nature at the back of your brain kick in, the scripts that say, if I kill the man next to me, there will be more air, and meat to boot. We spent that first hour with our insanity; each in his turn hyperventilating and thinking of everything we'd miss and lose, some of us crying, all cursing- some quietly and some not so much- the fact that we were desperate or stupid enough to think smacking the sides of an underground cavern with heavy equipment was an acceptable way to make a living.

We consoled each other. Men do it more often than you think- though we often deny it later. And then someone had the brilliant idea to sing _Kumbaya_ while holding hands- which we immediately realized had been a mistake, as it both depleted our oxygen and made us all feel like women. We set up shifts to take turns banging against the wall- so that rescue crews could find us, and know we were still alive down here. Pete was first, because Pete was that guy who wants to be the alpha male too much but doesn't quite have it in him- all that nurturing, but without that lion's pride to push it through.

We collected the water, around a half-gallon for each of us, to share. Alex didn't want to throw his in, but I convinced him that he had less water, on the average, than the rest of us; it was a damned lie, but it was important we all throw in together. We put Charlie in charge of rationing it; the new guy, Reggie or something, made a joke about Charles being in charge, which normally would have gotten him teased mercilessly, but instead there was this eerie, calm silence before someone faked a chuckle. Everybody followed suit, until it became something heavy and almost raucous, booming off the too-close walls; I think we all figured we were going to have to humor one another, or none of us would last.

Next, we shut off all the lamps except one. It was dark, and made us huddle closer than we might have liked, but that was better than spending the rest of our time down here without any light at all. We put Reggie in charge of the lighting, probably because no one else wanted to do it. After a while we started shivering; when you're working hard, 58 degree dampness is a cool breath on your neck, but when you're sitting on moist rock in the blackness, feeling like you're attending the crappiest sleepover ever- well, after a while we didn't mind so much huddling together.

Pete was still tinking against the wall when I made him stop; his arm was an overcooked noodle and he was sweating; he'd worked himself half to unconsciousness because that's who Pete is, and hell, even then, he wouldn't have stopped if he hadn't been so weak from tapping that I could force him to, to take my turn. My mind switched off sometime, but I just kept pounding; I didn't stop until my hand was too weak to hold the pick any longer, and it slipped out of my hand, making a sound like the death of a church bell, that echoed without ending despite the smallness of the cave. Reggie broke the silence after that, saying he remembered his watch had a light on it, and asked if we wanted to know how much time had passed; he was lucky Charlie was closest, because he did it about as gently as anyone might have. He grabbed Reggie by the collar and stared into him, and said that if Reggie told him he'd choke the life out of him. There was a grumbled agreement. I waved him over to the wall, and told him to take over, but to set his watch so every four hours someone else could switch off.

I don't know if he listened to me, because as soon as I laid back against the rock I passed out. I'm not sure how long I was gone, but Reggie was still tapping against the wall when I woke up. The light was out, which made it feel like night. When I asked if we were out of fuel for the lamps, Reggie turned on his watch and waved me over. He told me everyone else was taking a nap.

He yawned. I only heard it, because his watch light had already shut itself back off. I asked if he wanted me to take over, and he did. I pounded on the wall of our little cavern until my bad arm was numb, as much from sleeping on it wrong and the cold, as from the pounding, and only then did I realize I still heard the tapping even though my arm was limp at my side. I followed the sound a few feet away to a drip, drip, drip, drip in the corner. A small puddle had already formed at the base of it, wide but not deep, and my pants and shoes were moist before I realized it.

Without thinking, I dipped my hand into the water and tasted it. The water was horrid, not just dirty, but filthy with something not meant for humans to drink. I spat the water out, and the noise must have woken Alex because he crawled over to me. I think he planned on comforting me, until his hands slipped in the water, and he landed face-first against the rock.

I heard him pull his head up, the acrid water dribbling off his beard a few seconds before he managed to reply to me, wondering if he was all right. "I will physically destroy you if this is your piss in my mouth," he muttered, before telling me, "I'm all right, bleeding, but not dead or anything."

I told him unless we'd started a bathroom in this corner, we had a leak into the cave. He listened to the plopping of the water a moment before saying he needed to take a piss, and sending me away from the pool. I had started away when the tinkling began, but the noise reminded me that I hadn't relieved myself in, well, however long it had been, and that I needed to. Really needed to. Like right now.

At first Alex protested, turning away from me, until I explained to him that I couldn't see any better than he could, so there was no point at all in being shy. That seemed to soothe him enough that he relaxed, and moved his stream off the wall and back to the pool; "but no talking," he whispered. After that he crawled back to the others and lay down. By the way their bodies muffled the sound of his pants on the rock, I could tell they were snuggled together for warmth, and I couldn't find much wrong in that.

After a few hours, the puddle spread to where we'd been pounding on the wall. At first I avoided dwelling on it, but after some time there was no helping it. Reggie's watch went off, and my body nearly collapsed from gratitude. No one moved, not even Reggie. I sighed. The world was heavier than it should have been, grinding against my spine until I could feel it exposed to the cold, wet air, but I kept on bashing the tool against the wall. I heard buzzing I would have swore came from a drill, until I stopped pounding; I covered my ears, and the buzzing came from inside my brain. It was the protest of my ears, after so many hours so close to the clack-clack-clacking of the tool against the wall. I hauled back and slammed the pick into the wall and it stuck, letting out a shriek I'm surprised didn't even wake my possibly dead coworkers, and I fell to my knees, too exhausted to cry or even whimper, only pant as the water soaked into my jeans.

I sat there a long time; I couldn't bring myself to care that I had at least one other man's urine soaking into my pants and finishing up the ruination of my boots. It wasn't until the moisture hit Alex, that anyone made any noise. And once he was up, he woke everyone else up- supposedly so no one would drown in pisswater, but more likely because he likes to share his misery. Reggie yawned. Alex shook Charlie so hard he farted, which seemed to wake him up; in the small space the smell seemed to stay forever, and as Charlie stirred Alex asked Charlie if he'd shat himself. "Only a little," he replied, because of course he would.

The water continued to come. Pete had taken up pounding after me, but he was cold and wet enough that he had to stop to shiver between every tap. I know less than an hour had passed before I tapped him on the shoulder, and told him to go back to the others for warmth. Before Reggie's watch went off again, I had to stop myself. My arm convulsed so badly, I couldn't stop dropping the pick, and I went back and put my arms around the other men. No one took my place.

After a long time, through gritted teeth and lips that I knew were blue even without using precious fuel to see them, Charlie spoke. If it had been anyone else, Pete, or Reggie, hell, even Alex, it wouldn't have been the same; any of them might have cracked, or fallen apart. "I want you all to know, I've never felt closer to another human being than I do to you guys right now," he said, and I felt a tear roll out of my eye before I understood it; "so I want to know, why the hell do I feel so goddamned alone?"

No one said anything.

Table of Contents

# Lost In Space

I never dreamed I'd be here on my 58th birthday, drifting among the stars. There was a part of me that had given up on touching space at all.

It wasn't always that way. As a boy, I believed Bradbury's estimation that we'd all be tourists to Mars by 2001; by 2010 we had all realized space tourism was for those with millions to fritter on a single trip.

In fact, as nepotism grew in world governments, it seemed like the days of the non-millionaire astronaut were dead. Then, when world governments looked poised to destroy one another with nuclear weapons, humanity launched a final, noble experiment, called in America and Britain the Avalon Project. Avalon was a self-contained space-station, requiring no resupply, and no contact with the Earth, an orbital biodome to house 400 of the world's greatest minds.

And that's where my part in the story begins. I'm not dumb; I think I might have cracked the world's million brightest, but Avalon was never in my cards. Sharen was. I used to tease her about training in classical physics. The world didn't prize theorists, the money had been in weaponeering for a decade, so the field was choked with weaponeers. I don't know that I could have loved her the same if she built better bombs; I do know she would never have had a place on Avalon.

For years, the earth shook, as man fought over oil, water, food. During those same years, Avalon toiled in the name of a better future. I spent that time corresponding with Sharen. She had been distant since she graduated, always lost in some research; our distance now at least added pretext.

I never told her about the engineering I took, or the journeyman jobs I did, all with an eye to the sky. I told myself I was doing it for me, that it was about following a life's dream- but I was never good at lying, least of all to myself.

And finally, I got my assignment. I sent Sharen a message right before I boarded the space climber. When I got to my apartment on Avalon (really a glorified mop closet- the original designs hadn't planned for support staff), there was a message waiting from her. It was both ecstatic and dour- and she wanted to see me for lunch. I was excited and terrified, uncertain what my future held.

I never got to find out. I was sent out that morning in a small experimental ship on a bit of minor maintenance on the hull, patching a few dents caused by debris collisions. An explosion inside Avalon knocked me loose from the hull. I fired my thrusters, but the station had been knocked from its stable orbit, falling faster than I could match. Over hours, the station drifted into the atmosphere. Avalon was never designed for reentry; the stress caused the station to break in half, sparking another explosion. Half of the station continued deeper into the atmosphere, where it burnt up; the other half was splashed across the sky in pieces.

Governmental reports were uncertain. It could have been terrorism, a quiet act of war, or the product of the fledgling Chinese or Japanese space programs taking on more than they could handle on their sections of Avalon (and although no one dared point a finger at the American, European or Russian programs, we remembered their flaws, too).

The ship I was in had been designed as a microcosm of the station; algae tanks scrubbed the carbon dioxide from my air, and a water system cleaned waste water for reuse. Nutrients from shed skin, sweat, waste, all were combined with excess algae into a paste that would keep me alive. I was unaware of these features when Avalon crashed. I drifted aimlessly for a week without realizing it, only to find that I had not died of dehydration, and was not hungry, either. The ship was built for deep space research and exploration. It ran on thrusters powered by solar panels. In one of its clawed arms was an electron microscope. Housed in its belly was a chromatograph.

There's a great cloud of debris from Avalon, most of it dust particles- spanning a distance nearly the same as the moon's perigee. I've spent years now, sifting through the wreckage, collecting Sharen's cremated remains. There are on the order of 50 trillion cells in the human body. I'm not sure what I'll do when I'm finished; I don't know that her parents would want a second funeral- perhaps I could spread her ashes across the sky, a new constellation amongst the stars. But that's a question I'm not ready for, and I have work to get back to.

Table of Contents

# Frankenstein Modern

My research would never have progressed without the Bush administration (I may be the only scientist in North America who could say that). Hurricane Katrina killed thousands in a very short span of time. It might have been a humanitarian crisis, but for an entrepreneurial researcher (with a boat) it was, we'll call it, an opportunity.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. My fascination came in early childhood. My mother died from breast cancer, an entire body lost for a single defect, the kingdom lost for a nail. My father was not a kind man; the thought of a life alone with him seemed more than I could bear. I was alone with her when she passed; by the time my father arrived home from the hospital, I was nearly done sawing through her skull (no small feat, without a proper bone saw). He beat me mercilessly, but it wasn't the first time for that. Or the last. He was also the man who changed our family name the day he arrived from Germany to Frankenburger; I changed mine back the day after I graduated from Johns Hopkins.

Most of the materials I gathered came from the Jenson family. I don't know them, personally, but their home, and the fact that they stayed through the storm indicate they were poor. The family died of a combination of drowning-related complications. There are three basic ways to die from drowning: during the initial submersion, pulmonary edema from water trapped in the lower airway passages obstructing red blood cell oxygenation (sometimes called the secondary or parking lot drowning, because it happens potentially hours later, in the parking lot as you leave), complications of emesis during resuscitation (it's a fair bet that most patients vomit after nearly drowning, and vomitus in the lungs can lead to drowning, infection, or if it is highly acidic enough, destruction of the lung tissue). And of course, there's always carbon dioxide poisoning the heart.

Tragic though the fate of the Jensons was, their manners of expiration meant that, medically speaking, I'd arrived mere moments after their death. Their organs were pristine. I loaded their corpses onto my boat, and took them to my laboratory.

The human pancreas is the fussiest; within 4 to 6 hours the organ will become nonviable if not removed. I chose the youngest Jenson, who I named Jenny; she was perhaps twenty, pretty, if slightly overweight, but the youth of the organ was key. Next was the heart, but while carving out Jenny's pancreas, I noticed her lungs were black already- a heavy smoker for a girl so young. I decided to risk taking the heart from Janny, likely Jenny's mother, or aunt, slightly larger, but not obese, along with the lungs and several of the major arterial pathways (en-bloc, as it's medically known). The liver has the longest expected lifespan, so that I removed last from Jenny, along with the spleen, stomach and kidneys en bloc. Preserving organ system integrity has been shown to increase organ life span, as well as ease the reintegration of organs into the patient. I preserved them in Histidine-Tryptophan-Ketogluterate (HTK), which had only recently surpassed the more viscous UW lactobionate, and added the delta opioid ligand DADLE- which causes organs to go into a suspended animation not unlike hibernation.

I readily admit, time being of the essence, that when it came to tissues, muscles, bones, tendons and skin, I did not apply the same surgically gentile techniques. Having a family of bodies to choose from, I hacked them to separable, preservable pieces, often doing the majority of the work with a cleaver. It was inarticulate, to be sure, but while tissue is easy enough to obtain, I knew that whole organ systems were a rarity indeed.

At which point I collapsed. I had been alert for nearly forty hours at that point. I slept only an hour and a half. I had not time to spare; even with HTK and DADLE, I was perilously close to ruining one or more organ systems, and I was keenly aware how unique this opportunity was. Truth be told, my experiment hinged on the participation of one man. He was homeless, and dying a slow death from Alzheimer's. He no longer recalled who he was. To honor the family's memory, I decided to call him Jenson.

I took a low dose of dextroamphetamine and started the implantation process. The combination of the HTK and DADLE meant that most of the organ systems would last at least forty hours; however, most single-organ transplant surgeries can take around four, multiorgan transplantation can take up to 8, so I was forced to improvise. I placed Jenson's brain on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and gave him IV heparin and a cocktail of immunosuppressants. The heart I laid gently inside the chest cavity, without sewing it into the chest wall. I took similar shortcuts throughout the systems, trusting that the paralytics and Jenson's immobility would keep him from damaging his new organs, focusing instead on restoring connections between organ systems and the blood stream.

At 37 hours, I finished my task. I spent a half an hour rechecking every major artery and vein. I removed him from bypass, and shocked the heart. For a moment, neither of us breathed. Then his heart convulsed, and Jenson gasped.

I harvested bone marrow from the hips of all five Jensons, and injected these into the new Jenson's blood stream; with a little luck, the chemo had cleared enough of a path for the marrow to gain a foothold. I slept fitfully, and woke after three hours more. I sewed the various organs in place using biodegradable sutures. Jenson was nearly brain-dead, but his vitals remained strong. He continued on a steady regimen of anticoagulants and immunosuppressants. Over the next several days I began reconstructing Jenson. I started with the legs. Jenny's legs were not strong enough, and Janny had a slight disparity with leg lengths. Far stronger, both in musculature and in bone density, were her husband Jonny's legs. I also used Jonny's arms, shoulders, and hips, but with these I took my time, letting days melt into weeks and months. Jenson's body was mending slowly. Each new surgery placed additional burden on his already overburdened frame.

The face I'd chosen earlier. The organs were largely feminine, because of their perceived health, and the added fact that women still tend to live on the average longer lives. The musculoskeletal system, however, was largely masculine, owing to its perceived superior health. The gender of the face was largely cosmetic, however, it had potential psychological implications, and given that the majority of Jenson's exterior physiology was male, so too became his face, and his genitalia.

I did not declare the body a success until the final scar, over the spine, had healed. By this point, Jenson was clinically brain dead. Had he not been suffering from Alzheimers, and had he been able to hold on longer, I might have, from a sense of loyalty, allowed his brain to reside in my homunculus. Or were Einstein's brain a possibility, perhaps I would have chosen him, instead. What I found instead was David Andress, a man in his thirties, who had been robbed of a distinguished track and field career by myotonic dystrophy; his case was so severe he had spent the last four years in a wheelchair, struggling to breathe. And he was dying, of a lung infection that wouldn't have even kept him off the field in his youth.

Were I a better man, perhaps I would have spoken to David, and sought his permission. But I feared his reaction, and worse, that he could expose my work at this sensitive stage. David had been given a week by his doctors. His sister was staying with him. I stole quietly into his home, dosed the both of them with ketamine, and removed him back to my lab.

I began by typing David's HLAs; there were three in common with Jenson- the bare minimum for success, and a far cry from a perfect match. But I'd been prepared for this eventuality. I started Jenson on immunosuppressants. Had I the equipment, I would have taken the extra step of radiation. I extracted more than two quarts of bone marrow via needle from David's iliac crest (in the rear hip bone), and injected these into Jenson's blood.

I waited. Jenson displayed no signed of graft-versus-host. I planned to type him again, to see if the graft had taken hold, but David began to struggle breathing. The human brain uses 25% of the oxygen taken in by the body; in less than five minutes, certain brain cells begin to die without oxygenation. I obviously had no room for error. I placed Jenson on an ECMO, not to bypass his heart, but to augment it. Then I clamped David's internal carotid artery. I connected the artery to the ECMO, in effect combining both bodies into a single circuit. I proceeded by severing the external carotid artery, and the common carotid artery. The eyes presented a particular challenge; due to the volatility of ocular tissue, and its relationship to the central nervous system, Jenson had kept his original eyes; and now, David's brain had to be transplanted with his.

I placed the bodies side-by side, and exposed the spine. Reattachment of the spinal cord is still not medically possible, so the spinal cord had to come with the brain. David's was sliced free, and oriented so that it lay beside Jenson's, and I began the painstaking work of remapping his nervous system. At hour eighteen of the surgery, I nearly dropped my scalpel; I took a large dose of dextroamphetamine, and continued. I'm uncertain how long the entire process took. I slept in fifteen minute increments every eight hours, and increased my dextro dosage 10% with every dose. When the surgery was complete, I passed out. I believe I slept for several days.

I awoke to the sounds of labored breathing. David was conscious. With every breath he'd whisper, "Ouch," as he exhaled.

"Ouch."

"Ouch."

I increased his morphine drip. After a day and a half, he'd regained enough strength to look around the room, and in doing so, he found me. "Kill me, please," he asked through his new lips.

I asked, "What would you give to be able to run again?" His eyes didn't change, but the timbre of his voice did.

"What would I have to give?"

His rehabilitation was torture. Even for a man hardly able to move his arms before, it was frustration. But David found reasons to remain optimistic. "My arm. It moved more than yesterday. And yesterday it moved more than the day before." Truth be told, I hadn't thought the difference worth measuring; but the difference it made in him was palpable.

Beyond the physical rehabilitation, there was neuronal rehabilitation; many of his nerves were mapped differently than the body he now inhabited. It took him an entire week to learn how to move his left hand without setting his eye to blinking furiously.

Of course, he would never fully recover functionality. Scarred nerve tissue does not transmit signals well; this is, in fact, a portion of why I chose David. A slow physiological response was relatively comparable to a weakened one. Stem cells proved useful in a few places where reattachment failed, and no function was available at all. In a few years' time, experiments with the exceptional healing abilities of MRL mice could perhaps address this more fully, but neither David nor I could have waited.

It was the fall of 2006 when David asked me what he would have to give. It's taken the time since for him to heal himself. At the beginning of this year, he stood for the first time without aid. He took great pride in the fact he can now do more push-ups than I, though he seems suspicious I let him win (I didn't).

He'd been pestering me to go outside. It had been so long since he'd felt the sun or a breeze, smelled fresh air, or seen a pretty girl. I saw through him instantly. "You want to run." He smiled. "You said I could." I tried to dissuade him. His body was barely recovered from its ordeals. He said he'd like to go outside as a gift, for his birthday. I assumed, of course, he meant the day I'd given him a new body, which would have given him several more months to heal. "That was my rebirthday. I was born at the end of October." I relented.

I'd grown fond of David. He had shown himself a man of intelligence and passion, and our forced proximity had given way to a very true friendship. But when he emerged into the day I saw him anew. His face was as bright as the sky; he tore off his shirt, without care for the autumnal chill in the air or the patchwork of scars that stood testament to my own incomplete skill as a surgeon. We walked for a long while, and he smiled and yelled, "Hello" to anyone nearby. Then he glanced at me, a mischievous smile creeping over his face, and he ran.

I chased him several blocks before I stopped to catch my breath. He kept running, several more blocks down to Main Street, then ran back towards me. He stopped a block away, stumbling. I ran to him, as he sat down on the edge of the street. "My heart feels funny," he said, without removing the smile from his face, "but I ran."

He fell back. I tried resuscitation; in fact, I didn't stop until a burly paramedic woman tore me away. "He's gone," she said.

"Again," I told her, without expecting her to understand.

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# e-bort

I want to teach. To an outsider, that might seem foolish, perhaps, as women only make up 5% of the workforce. To some, it may seem I'm lowering my expectation to go into one of the few fields open to my gender. But education is important, not simply to society, but to women. We make up 70% of students in college now; it's the skills we're learning, and the talents we're honing, that will allow and even demand that we take up a greater role in our society.

Because my husband is living in Jeddah, his cousin had been acting as my guardian here. He was stricter than my husband, but he seemed concerned for my virtue, and gentle. Several weeks ago, he drove me home, and escorted me to my door. I bid him goodbye, but he did not respond save a grunt, as he seemed to be deep in his thoughts. He forced himself inside, where he forced himself upon me.

I wish I could not recall what happened, but I will choose now not to recount it. When he was finished, still he did not wish a farewell, simply grunted and was gone. I could not sleep; for a time I could not move; when I did, I realized I was as paralyzed by our society as I had been by emotion before. I could not come forward to accuse him in the courts, because my testimony would have counted only as presumption, while his would have been considered fact; it was even possible I could be arrested by the religious police, prosecuted for adultery and divorced by my husband.

After several weeks I came to understand I had become pregnant. I spoke with a doctor, but since the pregnancy was not a threat to my life, even under these special circumstances he could not terminate it. In desperation, I procured pills from WomenonWeb.org. I prayed many nights; I could not be certain if Allah or the Prophet agreed that I planned "the murder of a living soul" as some told me. I corresponded with the prescribing physician from the site, but it was not until I discovered that he was a she that my mind became clear.

I told my husband simply that his cousin and I did not get along; had I even mentioned that he was abusive, without detailing further the extent, I believe my husband would have killed him. I did not want another murder on my soul, nor on my husband's, and I feared we could not afford to pay his blood debt. My husband had one more cousin in the city, who agreed to escort me. At first it was humiliating to have a boy half my age guard me. But when I recognized it as a choice, I came to treasure it.

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# Undisciplined

This is not what I signed up for.

Don't get me wrong- I'm not a bleeding heart blue helmet, but I'm no xenophobic stars and bars lover, either. The UN and the ICC are a natural extension of the idea of Federalism, which I support. But, like Federalism, it's important for Internationalism to cede most control to countries just as the Feds cede control to the States, which on most days, the UN does just fine.

This is the Hague. Some things ought to be sacred. But here I am, rolling plastique around detcord in the shape of a door, because this is where our information puts him, and thermal imaging confirms there's somebody detained here. If it ends up being one of those Ugandan pricks, we can always just tranq 'em, throw him in the recovery position and try again some other day.

What's funny is Congress passed a law says we'll come get our boys if you take them, and the one thing they outlawed in that operation was bribery. Least violent and offensive tactic, at least under the panacea of "all means necessary and appropriate." Of course, if my boys were ever caught out Congress could always plausibly deny that our means were appropriate, regardless of the means we chose to use.

I guess I just wish this were a journalist, someone detained for telling the truth, or an ambassador spoke out too loudly for some tin pot to endure. On most days, I like double jeopardy- that it keeps me only facing one trial for the bad things I do for my country- but that's the line I draw. The things I do for my country, well, I figure the least they could do is what they can to see I rot in a prison back at home. But this boy, things he did weren't for America; only one seeing any benefit from what he did was him- certainly not any of those girls.

If he were any other idiot, he'd have been burnt by court-martial, but his step daddy was a Colonel somewhere, pulled strings to get the case fast-tracked and into an Iraqi court through the new Status of Forces Agreement. You can afford to bribe a jury in Iraq on a soldier's pay. Army and the Feds were happy to have the excuse not to retry him publicly, just to get him the hell out of the headlines, even if nobody liked what he'd got up to. That's when the International Criminal Court stepped in, very reluctantly, because of the situation. You could say much the same for us, now.

And I know I'm not the only one with trepidation; Mullins has been antsy since we got clearance, said we'd be better off just sniping the SOB and blaming it on Al Qaeda. Asshole gone, conflict solved, and we get one get-out-of-jail-free card on a terrorist target anywhere in the world. That's why I asked him if he was sure he was only using enough C4 to open the wall, and that I'd leave his ass in that cell if the explosion killed somebody. His eyes flashed mean a moment, before he responded, "Sir."

The wall came tumbling down, kicking up dust and dirt. The kid was on his knees, coughing, trying to retch. You been at this long enough, you know where to kick someone to keep them from vomiting, and I didn't want him getting my boots dirty. He blinked at me stupidly when I told him to get up. I bent in half to speak at him. "You're a disgrace to every man and woman who serves in this Army, every man and woman who served beside you as peacekeepers, and worse, you're an affront to every American- you put each and every one of the people you were swore to protect into the firing line you were supposed to be occupying because you couldn't keep your mind to your duty and your pecker in your pants. On your feet."

I leaned in close, and my voice went low the way it does when I'm explaining to my Chessie just whose bed it is, but it stayed loud enough the others heard. "I may not have the pull to see you prosecuted, but I'll put my career to it that I'll have you discharged so dishonorably that even Blackwater won't give you a second glance. And if I ever run into you in the world, and I have even a moment without eyes on me, I'll put you down like the diseased mongrel you are. Now, march, boy, before you go from by bad my worse side."

I'd refused, from the brief to now, to refer to him as a soldier. Does damage to my soldiers, humanizes him at their cost. He stumbles, with his head down, face pinched like the world's been picking on him. He's no soldier, just someone's sniveling brat. No decency. No honor. And no goddamn sense of duty.

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# Ancestral Memory

I could tell it was going to be one of those conversations. Jerry and I had a few, back in college, when he was an insane and insanely brilliant grad-student, and I was a business major looking for an excuse to drop out to become a professional dope-fiend.

It was how we met, over a bowl. Pot always made Jerry excitable, intellectually and otherwise, and some of his best ideas came from that manic energy- some of our most profitable business ventures had. So when he called me long after the building closed I didn't ask any of the questions you normally would, I humored him.

When he passed me a bong large enough that the resin deposits inside it probably would have qualified him for an intent to distribute charge, I shrugged.

He exhaled, and he wasn't a scientist whose brains was worth millions of dollars, he was a college kid inventing new kinds of microscopy to examine his belly button.

"I know how it sounds, okay, but think about it- the human body is the perfect storage medium- like a computer hard drive, only slightly more complex. Instead of ones and zeros- on or off- binary, it's called. We operate on a base 4 system, a quaternary, because there are four nucleotide bases that store genetic information in our DNA. But the reason we're better than optical or magnetic storage is there's no degradation- in fact, we're constantly renewing. Information in human DNA is kept pristine for 80 years barring catastrophe."

I was intrigued, I'll admit, but I'd known Jerry long enough to take his flights with particularly strong salt. "Okay," I said. "Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I believe you, that we really are just walking memory sticks. What information are we even storing?"

"I... I don't know. Here's the thing. I mean, if you took the contents of your hard drive at home, a lot of porn, I'd assume, and converted it from base 2 to base 4, then coded that onto DNA and put it into a situation where it could self-replicate- I mean, I have no idea what kind of an animal that might turn into. Probably, I mean, mathematically, it would be totally nonviable; I mean, what are the odds that your computer's information would also randomly code for an organism? Millions to one, at least. But what I'm getting at is that we don't even have any conception of what the technology to read our DNA might look like. I guess you could try and input it into a quaternary based computer and just assume they stacked linearly according to their order within chromosomes. However, since the numbering of chromosomes seems random, that gives us the problem of ordering. To get the number of different orders just the 23 chromosomes could possibly give, putting aside for a moment the very distinct possibility that all 25,000 genes could be at play, we have a factorial of 22 different possible solutions- you know, 22 times 21 times 20- which is like a quintillion."

I really did hate when he'd get all mathy on me; nobody liked to be this far out of their depth. "Is that even a real word, or is that your way of telling me it's unimaginably huge, like googolplex?"

"Googolplex is real, too, but yeah, it's like... 10 to the 18th power, or like a million million million, or a billion squared. The U.S. national debt is like 10 trillion, so if there were ten thousand countries all with the same 10 trillion dollar debt, then our global debt would be, roughly, a quintillion."

"Would you and your calculator like a minute alone?"

"This is exciting, you horse's ass. This could be God's own notation, stored in our very DNA. But, there is a problem. Even assuming we overcame the mathematical quandary, which, while large, is really a matter of buying enough computers with enough capacity, we don't know what the output is going to look like. It would be written in a language unlike anything we've ever encountered, and even beyond the language itself, it's likely to be coded, like how html is different from spoken English- all barriers and hurdles, but with enough man-power, ingenuity, time and, admittedly, cash-flow, it's all inevitably solvable."

"But that isn't the best part. The fact that our DNA is base 4 raises some exciting possibilities- namely that base 4 is really only ever applied to calculations of the Hilbert curve. The Hilbert curve is especially useful for creating three dimensional databases. What this means, in a nutshell, is it's going to be something. We aren't just going to decode the thing and get 'drink Ovaltine.' Whatever this codes, it's going to have form and substance, as well as information. It could be a unified field theory. It could be a record of the universe. It could be a mathematical equation explaining life. It could articulate a perpetual motion machine for creating free energy and eliminating want. It could be blueprints for a dimensional gate that would grant access into Heaven, or a recipe for the world's most orgasmic cheesecake."

"That all sounds a mite heretical."

"Acknowledging God might have understood what he was doing when he created physics is heretical talk to most. But math, physics, chemistry, biology- it all works too well, and interacts too perfectly to be nature simply bumbling its way through random mutations and entropy. There's too much organization to the world, too much structure and elegance."

"Okay, so in your great conception of reality, what the hell happened to the mammoth?"

"We can't know. Maybe that was where God, or aliens, or whoever was storing their equivalent of their Manilow recordings, and then they did the cosmic equivalent of breaking up with their girlfriend, and decided they didn't want their Manilow anymore. Maybe it was just time to upgrade to a different format, like mammoths were 8-track tapes. Or maybe the mammoth DNA became unreliable. You know, maybe it's good that we're so particular about gene therapy. If humanity is just the latest and greatest form of memory storage, then what happens when humans start manipulating the information around- when that data starts corrupting itself? It's the same thing that happens when your computer gets a nasty virus you can't get rid of. We'll be replaced. And frankly I don't want to live to see the extinction of the species."

I don't know if he timed it or not; he was brilliant enough to, certainly, but the sky turned purple as the rays of the setting sun struck the atmosphere at the right angle. I wasn't sure I was ready to accept any conception of a god, let alone being a part of his or her CD collection. But as the sun flashed green before it passed beneath the horizon, I knew I didn't need to decide now; I just hoped humanity didn't go the way of the Manilow too soon.

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# First Goodbye

Her skin is creamy, like coconut milk when it rolls over the tongue, the color of golden caramel drizzled over warm fudge. Her hair smells like lilacs, but not the artificial silkiness of a shampoo; it smells of the flowers themselves, as if she soaks her charcoal locks in molten petals.

But my fascination with her sensuality is neither revealing nor concealing. I take her in like a breath, hold her in for a moment, then let her go.

Her name flickers in my eyes like the light glinting amber off the ice in her glass, shattering into a hundred points just when I've almost assembled it. It isn't important; I mumbled mine over a din I couldn't hear myself through, and Shakespeare, for all his grace, was wrong over the scent of a rose, at least as far as the metaphor applies to a woman.

I've been dressed a half hour, listening to her breathe, watching the door as if it might abandon me here. At this time of morning, possibilities unfold like heavy fog, warming my lungs with potential lives. They blow out like cigar smoke too deeply inhaled, their hinted flavor lingering behind.

I'm a romantic, even if it won't show. I bide my nights in searching for a woman I can't quit by morning. That first parting is hardest; each successive one comes with greater ease. Life's too short (and far too long) to spend its entirety pulling away.

My hand touches the chilled knob, but I hesitate to turn it. And I look back, something I never do, and she's cloaked in a garment of moonlight. It draws me closer, and I sit on the corner of the mattress. There's hours before sunrise, and it seems early yet to say goodbye.

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# Life Imprisonment

I was cold; you might think you know what that's like, but you've never felt cold until you've laid down on an Oregon sidewalk in January. It's a cold that's under your skin, that gets in your bones and travels into your guts. You get so cold you're too numb to shiver. The wind was gusting, and the storefront we were perched in wasn't shelter enough to stop it.

Still, it wasn't raining, so I guess it could have been worse. Max wasn't a friend of mine. He beat his wife half to death when she refused to buy him any more drugs; he said she loved him enough not to press charges, but not enough to let him stay. He's an animal, now. He does things for money, _to_ people _-_ not _for-_ for money; he's lost the right to be considered a person anymore.

All last week had been rain. Then snow. Then slush. Then snow that became slush the moment it touched you. Then more rain. But always freezing, tiny, cold fingers that crept down your skin- you could feel it infecting you with the cold. This winter was worse, or I was weaker than last year, but I knew I wouldn't make it.

I'm not proud, but I did what I had to. I took all the money I'd saved up. I could have spent a night in a hotel, maybe even a nice hotel, taken a bath, rented a porno, eaten in. But instead I bought drugs. For Max. He hesitated, but I told him it was for a happy Christmas. He told me it was over, and I smiled, and told him Santa had trouble finding him. Like the junkie he was, he put it all in his vein without thinking, and fell back against the sidewalk with a thud he didn't feel.

I gave him enough heroin to OD twice, but I got paranoid, you know. The cops wouldn't think I killed him, they'd just nod and drag him away, leave me out in this biting Portland winter. I jabbed the can opener into his throat, and I tried to open him like he was tin, but his skin tore easy and the can opener slid in. My hands came back a deep red, but they were _warm_.

The thing of it was, the streets weren't empty. There were people hopping bars. I put out my bloody hands to show I meant no harm, and I begged them, "Call someone. Call someone. Help. _Please_." They walked by without looking, like I was asking them for change. I rifled through Max's pockets, and found change enough for the payphone, only when I got there I remembered that police calls were free.

My lefty lawyer tried to tell the court I wasn't responsible for my actions; he put the system on trial for discharging me in '63, he blamed Reagan for slashing social programs. I stood up in court and explained that I wasn't insane, and didn't want to plead insanity, and that my lawyer was a homo who'd blown the judge for a reduced sentence. The judge threatened to fine me for contempt, so I sat back down, and wondered if I'd accidentally outed him.

I fixed the jury, each one of them, and stared so they thought I'd knife them if I wasn't handcuffed. They deliberated for a half an hour. I didn't get life, but at my age, 28 years was close enough.

People think I'm crazy because I mumble to myself. They think I'm crazy for wanting to come here. They say maybe I'll get stabbed. Maybe I'll get raped. Maybe I'll end up dead. But that's no different than where I come from. The change is here, I got three hots and a cot.

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# Crickets

In China, we're kept as pets, and considered lucky. In Brazil, we're counted on as tellers of fortune. In Barbados and Zambia, we're welcomed as portents of windfalls. In Macao we fight- but at least that gives an honest insect an honest shot. Here in the States, we're boiled alive in chocolate and devoured; the rest of us... well, the rest of us aren't that lucky. "Is it awake?" Lisa asked.

"I can't tell," Jim whispered.

"How long has it been since he ate Tom?" asked Cecil.

"I don't know if you can say Tom's eaten. I can still see a leg, and I think that's a, that's gotta be a wing," added Peter.

"Is it spring? Does anyone want to breed with me yet?" asked Michael.

"Do you even know if there are any females here?" asked Jim.

"I'm a female," Lisa said.

"How do you know if you don't have any eggs?" asked Cecil.

"I won't have eggs until the spring, dumbass- and I know I'm a female. Just look at my curves," she replied.

"Curves? You look like the rest of us," Cecil said.

"Dude, I'm not going to stop her from breaking off your leg and beating you into a stupor with it." Jim told him.

"Who asked you to?" he replied.

"God... I can't believe this. Dying sucks enough, but, you know, I really wanted to be a mother," she whimpered.

"I can arrange that," offered Michael.

"But I'm stuck with- and I don't mean any more offense than is necessary- but I'm stuck here with all of you. Even if I could enter estrus in time, your offspring would hatch with three eyes, three brain cells, three times too much testosterone, or three times too little," Lisa collapsed on the heating rock with a sigh.

"Not to mention the fact that your three-eyed, balding but bosomed retard babies wouldn't be able to get out of here, they'd just be late night snacks for Godzilla over there," Cecil added.

"Now where have I heard that name before?" Jim asked.

"Was it just me, or did the leg just move?" asked Peter.

"Whose leg, Tom's, or the thing?" asked Cecil.

"I don't know, did either of them move?" asked Peter.

"I don't think so, but I wasn't paying attention," replied Cecil.

"Then why did you ask whose leg I meant?" asked Peter.

"I was just trying to be helpful," replied Cecil.

"Hey guys, I'm not dead, I'm still alive in here, seriously."

"Oh, my insect lord," said Cecil, for a moment convinced the voice was coming from Tom.

"Hurry, get him to open his mouth so I can, crawl out of here. The smell, is, well it smells like dead us-es. Like a lot of dead us-es, like, generations on generations of," Jim stopped speaking to laugh.

"That is so not funny, Jim; I think I'd breed with Michael before you," Lisa said.

"Really?" asked Michael.

"No, not really."

The beast opened its mouth to yawn, then closed it, and, as if realizing there was still most of a cricket in its throat, wrapped its tongue around Tom's carapace and smashed it down its throat with a sickening crunch.

Cecil panicked, and said, "We are locked, in a cage, with something that wants to eat us."

An older cricket poked his head out of the piece of wood. "Yep. And you're going to die here, too. My name's Henry, by the by. I used to think I'd wake up. Or find a way out. At least maybe die of old age before he got me. But I've seen enough crickets come and die to know it's a matter of when, never if. I've seen smart ones and fast ones, young and old, all food for the beast. I wish I could say I was at peace, or that at least I'd made mine, but, I'm not ready to die. I don't know that, barring circumstances, I ever would be, but I know I'm not ready to die yet, and I sincerely doubt I'll live to a point where I am."

"How long have you been here?" asked Jim.

"Oh, I've seen a couple new waves of immigrants come and, um, well, go. It was hard the first time, because they were good folks I knew, good folks I grew up knowing. The second time was easier. I didn't talk to them much; I warned them as I could, but, well, young crickets are always hard to talk sense to. There was a girl with them, who I think I remembered from larvalhood. I couldn't remember if she was from the same clutch as me or not, but I think, had she lived long enough, I'd have bred with her. Desperation, strange bedfellows and all that."

"You seem pretty calm," said Peter.

"I seem that way, yeah. Because you can't panic. If you panic, he wins. He waits and he eats when he wants. There's really no telling when he'll be hungry again next. So you just stay calm, and try to keep your wits about you as you can," Henry replied.

"What do you know about the beast?" asked Jim quietly.

"I'd think the beast was god if I were that much of a cynic, and if I hadn't seen bigger things. Hell, we've all seen bigger things if you think back to it- the big pink things that took us from our home in the first place and crammed us into this hell. I sometimes wonder if we're being tested, that if we last this damnation long enough, we'll be let loose in a field without predators or parasites, teeming with females swollen with eggs, or males that won't give us retard children- but it's wishful thinking, and it's killed better bugs than me."

Michael collapsed onto the fake rocks and muttered, "Damn. I was hoping to live until spring. So I could pass on my superior libido."

Jim interjected, "You don't have a superior libido, you just have no self-control."

Michael responded, "Yeah, but I think that would be genetically helpful."

"Where the hell did you learn a word like 'genetically'?" asked Peter.

"I don't know. Doesn't it have something to do with genitals?" asked Michael.

"Um, yes and no?" responded Jim.

"But mainly no," added Peter.

"Except when it's yes, which is mainly in spring," added Cecil.

"Yeah, except then," agreed Peter.

"Oh..." Michael said solemnly. "So... is it spring yet?"

Table of Contents

# Hickbots

Agriculture was one of the last industries to be fully automated, because it's one of the most unpredictable. That year the paranoia and doomsaying that warned how an economy without laborers would fail proved less hysterical than everybody thought. Trickle-down economics was exposed as a farce as the wealthy continued to hoard their wealth, which is what had defined them as wealthy in the first place.

The robots came with multiple personalities, but to ease the transition for the human workers, the men who owned the land mostly chose the "rural" factory personality, without the frills. After most of the humans had been replaced by cheap bot labor, no one really thought to turn off their personality simulators. Rumor was you could find a bootleg Jim Crowe persona, complete with blackface hologram, and a primitive ebonic language interface.

They're programmed to remember only living where they work, raising barns and tipping cows in their youth. They wear boots and have the broken gait of a man who spent more time on a horse than on his own two feet. They vent their exhaust through disposable filters during smoke breaks.

Low, quick whistles of a spiritual in binary enunciated in morse code weaved through the grain stalks. Even through cheap MIDI synth the notes bore a mournful dew as servos clacked through a rhythmic reply.

Hank blipped and whirred in a vague southern accent about his shoulder joint, and Roy spat some canola on the rotator cuff for him to stop it from grinding. Gene beeped a crack about the way he mothers Hank, something along the lines of closing off the valve of his metal teat. The others clicked their amusement, never slowing in their work, never resting. I imitated the sound with my dry throat, and tried to ignore the burning from my muscles.

Table of Contents

# I'm Sorry I Got Caught In Your House

I could make excuses; I suppose for our friendship, perhaps I should. But I never intended any of it.

You've never met Rachel (at least, not before today), but she's different. In a good way, I think, today notwithstanding.

We've been together a month, so yes, we're still in the "like rabbits" phase of it. The other day she was looking at my keys, and realized I had more on the ring than she might have supposed.

She asked why that was; I told her I had keys to my mother's, and my father's, my grandmother's (who's since passed, though my brother lives there now), and of course, to your house. That took some explaining, actually, because she knew better than to believe me when I left it at 'a family I'm friendly with's home'. But she wasn't mad, either, when I told her I dated your daughter; she was actually sympathetic when I explained how bad that had gone.

But perhaps that's because the idea had already struck her: to have sex everywhere my keys could get us. It's been the most exhausting week of my life since.

My mother's house wasn't too difficult, you see it's not that large. My father's house, on the other hand... Suffice to say my knees still hurt. And my hips. And my right pinky toe (which is a story all itself). My grandmother's/brother's house was easy after that; all we had to do was buy him a case of beer and he cleared out for the day.

And then we came to your house; obviously, I was getting to that. We started in your daughter's room; I think actually being here, Rachel got a little... competitive. Then she asked where else I'd been with your daughter in the house. Check off the main shower and the master bedroom (before you moved in, actually, which I know, makes it a little creepier, using your dead father's bed). We hit a snag with the pool table, since you guys sold that, and then turned the pool room into your other daughter's room, but um, we improvised.

And of course, from there, you know we ended up here in the kitchen. So what I'm saying, I suppose, is I'm sorry. I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I'd been meaning to give the key back ages ago, but somehow, I could never bring myself to come over, for fear, well, you-know-who might have been here. So there, take back your key; I appreciate the sentiment, but I've had it too long as it is.

Of course, I'll stop by some time, next week, with some donuts; and of course, that time I'll be wearing pants. But thank you for being so understanding about this (and thank God I keep my work keys on another ring).

Table of Contents

# Space Beer

My daddy was an astronaut and a teetotaler; I suspect, though I've never had any proof, that one night he hit my mother and it took his CO to convince her not to leave him or file charges, and because of that he swore off the sauce. Either way, the old man was insufferable.

He never really liked me as a kid- though in fairness, he never seemed to much like anybody- but when I got charged for minor in possession at 17, that's when he stopped having a son.

He was one of the astronauts they sent on the second trip to Mars- the one where they seeded the planet with colony-building robots. At the time everybody thought it was a massive boondoggle- up until the 2070s when the colonies provided space for the always multiplying population. But that pretty much ended his career. The astronauts on that mission never flew again, and his commission in the Air Force ended shortly after that.

I tried not to care. It would have been fair, or ironic, or whatever, if I'd have been able to ignore my father and his achievements, since he did his damnedest to ignore me, but he was a hero, back when astronauts were treated like astronauts, anyway, before every Tom, Dick and moron with a vacation check had been to the moon and bought themselves officially licensed "Genuine Astronaut" t-shirts and foam hats.

He was genuinely shocked when I got a decent score on the ASVAB and signed up for the Air Force. I don't think he'd talked to me that whole year, but when I told him I'd passed my physical and been accepted as an aviator he said, "Huh. Never occurred to me you might be worth a shit." Prick, I know.

I flew a handful of combat missions against the Chinese when the trade war flashed hot, but it didn't last. I hear it's because somebody in Beijing tracked down the numbers and realized that accounting for parts and labor- especially higher end parts that were manufactured outside the country- the Chinese economy was losing $1.05 for every plane they built. Commie bastards were willing to feed their people into a meat grinder, but the moment it impacted their cheeseburger-buying abilities, suddenly they wanted to go back to the negotiating tables.

But, before that happened, I managed to get called in off my shift to move my plane; they thought the Chinese were going to bomb the planes on the runway like the Japanese did in WWII. The information was legit, and I got into the air, but before I got altitude or speed one of the Chinese shredded my tail and the plane went down. Brass decided to investigate my crash, since it would pad their numbers and make it look less like they got caught with their pants down if there was one fewer downed plane in their stats. They found trace amounts of liquor in me (like I said, I wasn't on duty when they called me to fly). They did me for a dishonorable- and I always wondered if my dad had something to do with it (by then the Mars colonies were in the black, and even before then, the old man knew how to work a handshake).

Anyway, I spent a bit of time flying for fun and profit. I was young, and reckless, and I flew for whoever asked. I think some of my father's shit got stuck in my brain, and I wanted to be the delinquent he'd always figured me for. I almost got killed when I realized some smugglers weren't just flying drugs- they had a hostage, and they made the mistake of shooting (but not killing) their pilot. Me and the hostage walked away with several kilos- which was just enough to buy me another plane, since the damned insurance wouldn't cover one downed by smugglers.

I decided I wanted to live a while longer, so I had to go legit- though not necessarily too legit. I got involved with flying pirate servers. Basically, they had a server farm on an old hollowed out E-3 Sentry AWAC. They jury-rigged the radome on top of the plane to connect to a satellite that connected to customers. The plane was constantly moving, in the air 23 hours a day, flying in international skies whenever possible. Me and the other pilot took twelve hours behind the controls for 3 month stints. It was grueling, and exciting and mostly insane- I can't tell you how many different languages pilots swore at me that they were going to shoot me down, international law be fucked in the skull.

But eventually I stopped being a young man. I was still young enough to be crazy, I think, but not young enough to work that many hours for a season at a time. So I retired, with enough of a wad that I could have sat out my golden years on a beach someplace drinking mai tais. But that wasn't really me, either.

A buddy of mine was a microbrewer. His old partner had run his previous distillery into the ground, but he knew the scene and thought the two of us could at least break even. We did a little better than that- at least, better enough that somebody bought us- on the condition that we came with the company and its recipes.

They'd decided an untapped market, given the burgeoning space tourism industry, was beer designed for space. I guess there are problems, since without buoyancy force there's no carbonation (and who wants a flat beer on vacation?), and something to do with lower gravity affecting the taste buds, but they'd mostly overcome those things by the time we came on board. Then somebody Googled me and found out I was an astronaut's kid and suddenly my face was on the label.

By this point my dad wasn't even speaking with me. I bought up advertising space on the side of a building near my parents' home and plastered my mug on the wall proudly holding up a stein and smiling from underneath a beer-froth mustache, with the words, "Astronaut Beer: Tastes like Freedom" across the bottom. I got a text message a few days later from my mother that apparently he decided to have all the windows on that side of the house papered over; she seemed in pretty good spirits about it, actually, since I think she'd figured out a while ago that he was more than a little crazy.

I thought it was going to be a niche product, like astronaut ice cream, but it became a luxury item of a sort, since it was a little more expensive- but not such a luxury that normal folks couldn't splurge on it- champagne for rednecks, I guess.

A couple of the bigger beer companies reverse-engineered our beer enough that the market was starting to crowd us out. It was my old microbrew partner, Steve, that came up with the idea for the next gimmick, that it not just be beer made for space travel, but be beer brewed specifically in space. We all thought he was nuts at the time, laughed him practically out of the room- except when any normal person would have hung his head and walked out he gave me the devil's grin and said. "Sleep on it. I thought it was crazy at first, too."

And the idea grew on me, must have grown on all of us. Our CEO, an old industry hand named Bert, took the management folks, all of us who'd been in on the meeting the day before, out to a Mongolian grill. He stood up, with his drink in his hand, like he was going to toast something, and slowly this big, wide grin grew across his face, until he finally said, "We're going to make some fucking beer in space."

He told us all how he'd been up most of the night emailing; something about the idea had caught his imagination by the pole. And he'd talked to some contacts he had in China, and thought he had the perfect satellite for us to buy.

It was the PanAsian Space Station. It had been the whacky idea of the Chinese, working with, of all countries, the Japanese, with limited participation from other nations on or floating near the continent. Basically, they wanted to make sure the western world didn't screw them out of their slice of the space pie. When we didn't, and cooperation on the ISS continued unabated, the project was all but mothballed, and the Chinese were planning on letting it drop into the sea, like the Ruskies had done with MIR.

So the plan, admittedly sort of poorly thought-out, was to manufacture and bottle beer inside the satellite. The thinking was that people would be willing to pay the premium just to drink space liquors that were actually brewed in space. I thought it was insane at the time, but in a roundabout fashion I got to train, both for practical and promotional purposes, to fly into space.

My first jaunt was exciting- I'd been having fever dreams of the Challenger explosion for weeks and had completely prepared myself to die in fire, and kept waiting for a shoe to drop. I was actually just staring out at space, imagining my fiery demise when the last Chinese astronaut on the station opened up the hatch and said, "Good seal."

Mostly because it was his crazy ass idea (but also because we couldn't think of a nicer guy to put on the go-in-circles-until-you-throw-up-machine), Steve was with me. He was going to set up the barley and hop crops. For our first trip, we'd also brought enough raw materials to start brewing immediately- with the hopes that we'd be able to start subsidizing the immense costs of starting up the venture.

We used old discarded inflatable hotels to expand the acreage of the station- it didn't take too much to retrofit them as hydroponic green houses, and by the end of our fourth year we were growing enough wheat and barley to feed a medium-sized African country (or to keep Connecticut wasted 24/7).

We were in the space station business six years. Margin on space beer was usually pretty thin, and we were always looking for ways to cut down on expenses, but we were profitable. Hell, we reconquered the space beer market by introducing partially space-brewed blends.

And I never would have seen it coming. There was a backlash, and I think it had more to do with the political parties strawmanning drug liberalization for political gain (though not being a political sort, I don't know who was trying to protect our fragile persons from ourselves). Rather than just repeal the laws legalizing pot and some of the milder opiates, they went after everything- even caffeine and liquor. Intense lobbying by Coke, Pepsi and a bunch of coffee companies protected caffeine, but MADD was rabid, and booze became an endangered species.

This time the Coast Guard wasn't fucking around, either, and they started sinking ships, even a couple of cruise liners, stupid enough to bring liquor into their territorial waters. A group of us got while the getting was good, and took one last ride up in our space taxi and stayed in the station. A few of the staff decided to quit, and rode a survival pod down to the surface- but room wasn't much of an issue. In a telescope it looks like one of those hamster cities with colored tubes connecting tubes, but in raw acres it was the third largest barley farm in the world, and that's not counting all the various storage and processing areas.

One of the first things we'd done once the station turned a profit was purchase the mineral rights to a slice of the moon; the fewer things you have to bring up out of Earth's atmosphere the fewer multimillion dollar launches you have to budget for.

After the mine, we bought various production facilities, just enough that we could build further additions to the station in orbit. But now that we were the only potential supplier of liquor to the country, we came up with another idea: booze drops.

The design is based on Multiple Reentry Vehicles used for modern nuclear weapons. It's essentially a robotic glider that floats slowly into the atmosphere, and at specific times drops down individual shipments of booze to land within a quarter kilometer of the drop zone. For the drop the liquor has to be frozen- otherwise the changes in pressure would burst it like a puppy in the Marianas Trench.

The MRVs are expensive, but our asking price is higher these days, so we can afford them. We've also near-perfected a just-add-water dehydrated liquor block, and the margin on those is even better.

I got an email from my mother this morning; I guess she'd tracked me down from a Yahoo news story about bootleggers. She said my father doesn't know yet; he'd hate me even more if he knew I was a space pirate, enabling other people to keep on drinking.

I try not to consciously wish for him to die, but barring a half-dozen robotic organs, he would have been dead thirty years ago. Something about the thought of further disappointing that ornery old bastard turns my knees to jam.

But I think it's high past time I popped open a cold one, turned on whatever late night show might be on and enjoyed a beer in space.

Table of Contents

# S'Work

First of all, I'm not a pervert. I mean, I've got my issues, with women more so. I like them- I love them- but somewhere between my awkwardness and my lazy eye and one leg an inch shorter than the other, they don't love me. Mostly they don't even look at me, and I don't blame them. Not a bit. I look like an alley rapist; I wouldn't talk to me, either.

I have guy friends, or acquaintances and coworkers, maybe, enough so I don't feel I'm lacking. But I've never been able to keep a girl friend around. I don't know, there's always that _Harry Met Sally_ moment, where one of us wants to take it further, and sometimes we do and sometimes we don't, but eventually the women always get tired of me, bored with my strangeness or bored with my boredom.

I have lots of "friends" who are strippers, and a bad economy hits them harder than it does most. Working at the dry cleaners, or working at the local deli, it's not like they can cut your wages 80% just because there's a recession, but strippers, strippers rely on the kindness of strangers- or at least that mix of desperation and excitement that keeps men chasing a woman that doesn't want to get caught.

But the lousy economy is making everybody desperate. The regulars, worried they're next in line for a pink slip, decide they can't afford to drop a hundred bucks a week on girls, so they stay home and spend a fraction of that on internet porn. Without the regulars, competition in the clubs increases; the owners don't give a squirt, so they push the girls to get closer, maybe decide the state law against contact dances ain't as concrete as it used to be, pushing their boundaries that little bit further. But there still ain't enough money to go around. Something's gotta give. Some girls quit in these circumstances, find some other job, others ask if it's so bad to take that next step, from letting a customer see to letting them touch, or if letting them touch wasn't so bad how bad could it be to do more.

Now, don't get me wrong, 'cause sex work is the most noble profession I know. Forget cops, firemen, soldiers, even: noble, sure, but they risk and potentially sacrifice for the good of society, and they're respected and compensated for it. Sex workers by contrast are stigmatized, and often live under the constant threat of violence, from their pimps, from their johns, from an excitable vice cop.

I ain't taking anything away from cops- except maybe that they trend towards fascism and self-interest- but cops got about a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying in the line of duty in any given year; sex workers have a 100% chance of getting screwed on any given night. Doing something for somebody else when it costs you, and I mean really costs you, now that's noble. I'm no prize, but there's far worse than me in the world, and sex workers fill a void there.

And it's not just the sex, though the sex is a part of it. I don't know why we pretend sex isn't something you need. Maybe it isn't like food, or water or air, that you'll shrivel up and die without it, but in a way, maybe spiritual, you do. Life without sex is only barely living. I don't mean to sound like a governor or nothing, but sex is only a part; there's something to that crap about intimacy, closeness. Some of the working girls I've picked up have been dumb as a sidewalk, and a few made me feel like a fucking moron, but there's something in warm, soft skin, it's primal and necessary, and makes you feel like a damn person more than anything else I know.

I'm not naïve. I understand a lot of sex workers don't do it cause they like it, because on career day they ran straight for the prostitution booth cause that's what they'd always wanted to be from little girls. And some are underaged, or illegals forced into it from Europe or wherever. But that's what prohibition does: it pushes an industry into the hands of criminals.

But I'm getting too far from the point; I don't get to talk to many people, really talk, people who listen, not just wait for a chance to tell me how they would have done it different, or to segue into a better story they could tell me about their day. I know a girl; well, know is relative, I know, and I don't mean biblical, because she's not that kind of girl, not yet, anyway. The name I know her by, it probably isn't even hers, but she has me call her Jasmine, and it's from a Disney movie I don't mind admitting I've watched more than once, and it feels a little romantic even.

She's young, barely twenty-one- a baby, really- young enough she makes me feel older than I am, but I think that's part of her charm, too; she makes me feel old, but in that same moment, she makes me feel like it doesn't matter, like there's enough interesting about me, that I'm storied and worldly enough that a girl like her could forget about the rest.

But because she's young, she's got no seniority. She can't get the good shifts, ends up working day shifts in empty clubs. Even when she gets nights she's taking home less than twenty bucks a night, half of what a cab would cost her, so she's been doing a lot more walking and taking the bus.

That's how I know half of what I know. It was after one of her shifts, she was closing out on a Wednesday, and I knew she was down about the shift because Wednesdays are always bad, and I'd brought her a present, some lace-up boots- I like boots, especially the way they look on her. And I had no place in particular to go, another six hours before my shift, and I didn't feel like sleeping, so I was just walking when I noticed those boots, bright red, walking away under an unassuming trench coat.

I called out to her, and ran over to her, and I realized she was tense, so I stopped further back, not wanting to scare her. I said it wasn't safe, a pretty young girl unescorted this time of night, that I'd walk with her if she wanted, cause better the creep she knew than the one she didn't. She laughed, a young, light laugh, and said I wasn't creepy, I'd just startled her. I told her it was awful sweet of her to say, but that I wouldn't mind at all if she wanted to walk with her pepper spray out anyway. She didn't.

We walked, and she told me things were tight. This was the first month she'd missed her rent since she started dancing. At first I thought it might be a grift, like how so many strippers are doing it to get through school that all college educated women would have to be former strippers for it to be true, but then she sniffled, and I saw light glint off her cheek, and I realized she'd never used lines on me, not once. I realized right then why I'd become one of her regulars. There was a diner still open just up the block, and I offered to buy her some coffee or something to help warm her up.

Over a cup of cocoa she told me she was worried. She'd been stretching her own food budget thin, but now her dog, too, wasn't getting enough to eat. She wasn't against dancing at all, but if she couldn't make a living at it she wanted out. But she had zero marketable skills in an already competitive job market and she knew it. And one of her friends, who wasn't as pretty as her, she was still making money with some side work.

When she tried to explain "side work" her lips trembled, and she got all teary eyed, and I knew right then what she meant and that Jasmine didn't want to do that, and I mean in a gut revulsion way, not just the way that nobody ever really wants to go to work.

That's the thing about sex work, it ain't for everybody. If you can get over the hang-ups, can live with the inequities and bullshit, the stigma, it can be one of the noblest professions in the world. But it can also be soul crushing, trading pieces of yourself to a parade of rapists for pennies on the dollar. Depended on the kind of animal you were, and in that forest it was plain as day she was just a scared little bunny rabbit.

She didn't live very far from the café, and when we got there for a moment she thought about asking me up; I'm not dumb enough to think she wanted me for herself, not even for my sympathy, but I think she figured I was already a customer, and if she was going to transition to a different business, why not start with an existing customer, someone she was as comfortable with as she was likely to be?

She touched my shoulder, and it was the first time I'd seen her awkward, for a moment caught between herself and her stage persona, struggling to find some third way while remaining seductive, but keeping a distance to keep it professional. I reacted by instinct, snapped forward like a snake, kissed her forehead, then took a step back, turned to go. "See you, uh, your next day's Tuesday, right?" She nodded, blushing, but without smiling; her whole body shrunk inwards, head bowed, arms folded in, ashamed at what she'd been considering a moment ago. She whispered a timid goodnight, and went inside.

I walked around another hour, without really having anywhere specific I was going, or anything specific I was thinking, and before I realized it I was standing in front of my ATM, and I'd come to a decision. I emptied my account, put it all in an envelope. It was every dime I had in the world, and I wished I had a credit card to get an advance to give her more. I slipped it under the door.

I wrote a note, too, and I'll try to paraphrase. "Don't think I'm telling you what to do, or that this comes with strings attached, but you should get out. You'd make an excellent sex worker. You're pretty, and there'd be customers around the block for you, with me at the head of that line. But I've seen what that work can do to some people, the ones who aren't right for it, and I know in my heart that you're not, and it would break my heart to see you fail at it, to see it hurt you. So get out. Have a happy life."

I don't think I have to tell you, but it's Tuesday. She must not have called off, because they're short, not that you can tell, because the owners like to overbook, because it's not like it costs them anything to have too many girls dancing; in fact, since they charge most of them a stage fee, on a slow day it'll actually earn them a few extra bucks.

But even now, I don't know how to feel about it. I think it's the closest I've ever gotten to love, and I don't think I'll ever see her again because of it. Maybe that's what love is, doing for someone when it costs you, really costs you, and I don't mean the money.

But I'm sure you came here for the girls, not to stare at my craggy face or listen to my pathetic stories. I've got your drinks, least I could do, for renting your ear. I think I should head out, but you enjoy the rest of your night, and don't forget to tip the girls: sure it's a bad economy, but it's harder on some than others.

Table of Contents

# Cry Wolf

I remember the day after the crash. Several of the passengers were sitting around our fire, laughing. It was just like _Lost_ \- only this wasn't some mystical unfindable island and rescue was sure to be swift.

After the first week we stopped being so sure. We ran out of water, but managed to set up a boiler to clean salt out of the ocean water to drink. But we couldn't find food. There were a dozen species of local plants, but after Martin died eating roots and mushrooms nobody dared follow suit.

It was the night after Martin died that I met Claude. He was going to the World Vegetarian Congress, like the rest of us, with his fiancé, Sandy. We hadn't found her. She couldn't swim. He tried to teach her, once, and she almost got dragged out to sea. I fell asleep holding him by the fire; it felt good not to be alone.

There wasn't a doctor on the plane, but an elderly elementary school teacher named Mary became our de facto leader. She cautioned everyone against wandering or trying the local foods, because people can go three weeks without food and be fine. "Hunger will hurt," she said, "but it won't kill you." But she failed to explain the weakness the hunger would bring. By the end of our second week we had to develop a buddy system, because otherwise people would pass out on the beach for hours, only to wake up dehydrated and very badly sunburned.

Then Mary collapsed. I thought it was just heat stroke; we'd all collapsed from the heat at least once. But water didn't help. She was hallucinating, unable to remember any of our names.

Claude stood up. It was the first time he'd really spoken to the group, but he kicked up from where he was sitting and said, "I'm not going to let her die for principle." We'd been keeping Martin's corpse just over a ridge of sand, far enough away that the smell didn't hit our camp, but near enough we could bring him with us if we were rescued, so he could have a proper burial.

On his way, Claude grabbed the knife from the plane's kitchen we'd been sharing. We knew what he was about to do. Even I had thought about it, but... I kept holding out hope that help would come. But it hadn't, and even the most optimistic of us was beginning to suspect it wouldn't.

Claude was gone a while, but eventually carried Martin back to the fire. He had "cleaned" the corpse, cut away the genitals and cored out his organs; the body was halfway to being a Martin-skin rug. For some reason I'd hoped he would only bring back meat, so at least I wouldn't have to think of where it had come from, picture which slab of muscle had been his legs, his arms.

The rest of us huddled around Mary, past the edge of the fire's light, pretending we couldn't see or hear the abattoir our campsite was becoming. After about an hour he called Tony over to find him sticks that he could use for a spit. Even though it was getting dark, Tony was glad to have an excuse to go farther into the trees, and away from the sounds of the knife on flesh. Soon after, he returned, and the camp was filled with the sounds of sizzling fat.

I hadn't had a burger, my favorite carnal vice, since middle school- but it smelled so good. Claude brought over a slab of meat on one of the plane's small white dinner plates. He tore off a piece in his fingers, and put it in Mary's mouth. She tried to push it away with her tongue, and when that didn't work, she bit Claude's fingers. He leaned in close to her and said, "Don't start with me, Mary. You need to eat- and we're out of options."

Reluctantly she put her lips around the morsel of flesh, rolled it around, and began to chew. Claude looked up at the rest of us, packed in tight, and suddenly none of us could hold his gaze; he realized we didn't have the stomach to feed her meat, so he kept at it, pinching off tiny bites and pushing them to her lips. When he was done he went back to the fire and continued cooking. He was up all night; I dreamed of my sister's softball game, and my dad bringing us hot dogs. He'd forgotten the condiments, and you could taste every pig intestine and chicken anus, but somehow it was the best meal I'd ever eaten. Claude was just finishing up when I woke up; the sun was already rising above the horizon.

"Why'd you cook the rest of it?" I asked.

"The meat was starting to go bad. I wanted to make it as clean as I could- in case anyone else needs to eat." After that, Claude went to bed, and stayed out most of the day. Tony and I carried what was left of Martin, bones, tendons and fat, back to where his body had been, and buried them with the decomposing mush of his organs.

That night Mary had regained enough of her strength that she stood up. I'd suspected she was playing opossum, but she must have been feeling much better because she was almost light on her feet. She marched to where Claude was, tending the fire. She was angry. She wanted to slug him, and there was a tense silence through the camp as everyone watched, expecting an explosion as the two heads of our group collided. She seized him in her big arms and pulled him to her chest. "Thank you," she whispered, and I saw the campfire's light reflect off her tears.

She was happy to be alive, happy to be strong; but she felt responsible for Martin, responsible that she hadn't been able to keep him from eating what killed him. She moped for a few days; I think that's what finally killed her. I remember falling asleep to the sounds of her snoring, and when I woke up it was quiet for the first time since we'd crashed there.

Eugene was pissed off; Mary had reminded him of his favorite first grade teacher (it's amazing how much you'll find out about other people when there's nothing to do but talk). He accused Claude, because obviously whatever killed Martin had gotten into his flesh and killed Mary, too.

"That's not possible," said Claude. "Mary wasn't the only one who's eaten some of the meat. I've eaten some. Who else?" Guilty hands rose around the circle, including Tony's. "Does anyone else feel bad- like sick?" The hands all went down. Claude sighed. "Mary was old. She convinced us we could hold out for three weeks without food. But we shouldn't have let her try." Eugene said something after that, but he didn't have the courage to say it so it would carry over the wind.

Claude walked away over the sand, and I followed. "He might be right," he said to me as he dropped down against a lazily leaning palm tree. "We can't know what killed Martin. It made sense to let Mary eat, because she was dying anyway, but everybody else- what if someone gets sick? I got so caught up in wanting to help people- what if I killed them?"

I didn't have an answer for him, so I curled up next to him. And I kissed him. I couldn't believe I'd done it, but I had. I laid my head against his shoulder and we fell asleep.

Nobody else got sick. In fact, those who'd eaten the meat (we learned pretty quickly it was less gruesome than calling it "Martin") regained some of their strength, while the rest of us looked like Holocaust survivors; we'd started rummaging through the suitcases of the dead, looking for smaller clothes that wouldn't fall off us.

Three days after Mary died, Claude brought some of the meat back to the palm tree where we'd started sleeping. It smelled just as good as the first night he cooked it, maybe even better. I couldn't even look at it, because I knew if I did, if I saw as well as smelled it, I would have to eat it. I rationalized that I couldn't- because it was Claude's food, he'd brought it back for himself- and it was impolite for me to even think about having some.

He held the meat out to me, wrapped in a tattered t-shirt. I had to look at it, but forced myself to keep away, until my stomach gurgled. He smiled, and said, "I care about you. I like you. And I don't want to watch you waste away."

"But the diet's been good for me; I can almost fit into that suit I brought." I said; it bothered me how weak the words came, and that laughing actually hurt.

"Stop it. Don't be brave." He fixed me with his eyes, put his hand on my cheek and kissed me. "Eat. Please. For me." I couldn't refuse him.

I ate quickly. It had looked like so much food, but it was gone after only a few bites- and still I felt like I would burst. "Your stomach shrank," he said. "You have to take it easy until it gets back to a normal size."

I slept soundly in his arms; I was still dreaming I was in his arms when he woke me with a kiss, and another tattered shirt of meat. This meal was bigger, and I thought about demurely protesting, but the smell, my god, the smell, I couldn't get a word out, just shoved a bite into my mouth.

It was better than sex, or at least better than what I remembered sex had been like. It seemed like forever- and it was at that minute, rolling a piece of meat over my tongue, that I realized I was going to sleep with Claude. Not at that moment, with the camp busy with morning's activity, but I knew then it would happen, and it did, the very next night.

I woke up a very different woman. I couldn't believe I had "cheated" on Harry. I say cheat because I haven't been with anyone since Harry died, and I don't think I would have, not under any normal circumstances. But I hadn't eaten meat since long before Harry's heart attack, either. Sometimes you do things in extreme circumstances you wouldn't have thought yourself capable of.

But after little more than a week, the meat ran out. Claude did what he could to ration the pile, but most of us were starving by then. We'd already eaten most of the good meat, and all that was left was some muscle sticking to the ribs. I thought Eugene and Bob were going to get into a fight over that last piece, but at the last minute Eugene left and Rita punched Bob right in the eye for it.

Claude and Tony looked to each other and ran off down the beach, where we'd taken Martin before, and where they'd taken Mary. They brought her back a few minutes later. She was already field-dressed, relieved of her clothes and organs. She looked terrible, and I realized I'd only seen Martin in the hours after his death, and from a distance after that- until I realized it wasn't that her skin was red and leathery, but that it had been stripped off entirely. She smelled like smoke and beef jerky. They lowered her gently down onto a pile of clothing.

Claude spoke. "We didn't want to mention it to anyone. I know how much Mary meant to a lot of us here, but she was a practical woman. In the end, I think she would have wanted us all to be healthy and safe, instead of worrying about the disposition of her bones. Tony and I did what we could to preserve her; I know that with Martin we took our chances with every bite we took. Mary's been smoked, which should have dehydrated her body and gotten rid of most of the bacteria."

Eugene was in a rage, so angry every time he tried to speak he just sputtered. I think he would have taken a swing at Claude, but Tony stood right next to him, shoulder to shoulder, eying him the whole time. Eugene was passionate, but not _that_ foolish.

For the next two weeks, Eugene refused to eat. There was even a little bit of meat left on Martin's ribs that Rita tried to give him, but he wouldn't take it. I felt bad for him; I knew that eating the meat wasn't something the rest of us did lightly, but for Eugene it became the only cardinal sin.

The hunger made him crazy. He was muttering to himself constantly; more than once I caught him talking to Mary's bones. Tony and I decided to bury them next to Martin, but he continued to talk to her in hushed tones even after it was done. I was afraid of what he might do, particularly to Claude.

One day he fell in the jungle, hit his head, and since he was alone and hadn't told anyone where he went, it was several days before we found him. He'd already bled out, though it must have taken a long time, because he was still warm when we found him.

It came at a fortuitous time. Mary's smoked meat was dry, and while we still had half of it, it was horrible without anything but water to go with it. Rita even hailed Eugene's corpse as "manna from heaven"- apparently later reconsidering, because for the next several days she was intolerably religious- even though we hadn't decided yet to eat him.

Originally, I think we'd all liked Eugene, but by the time he died, he'd become so worrying that his death was a relief, and we gorged on his flesh. In one night we ate over a third of his meat. "Which isn't bad," Claude said, "since we know how smoking the rest of him would have gone."

We sat around the fire the next evening, talking about how to proceed. Rita wanted to eat the rest of him that night; Bob seemed to think we should hold off, ration Gene out as long as we could (he hated being called Gene when he was alive, but as a meal it was hard to give him the benefit of the extra syllable). Tony didn't seem to know what to do.

"Rita's right," Claude said. "Unless we smoke Eugene, the meat's going to go bad. And if we smoke it, then we end up barely eating again. Sure it'll last longer, but I don't want anyone else to die because we mismanaged our food supply. One Mary on my conscience is enough." Invoking Mary cleared the discussion immediately; suddenly Tony knew what we should do- and I told myself that my support came with more thought than Tony's, though it was hard to separate Claude the authority figure from Claude who held me close at night to know the truth.

So we feasted again that night. The next morning, Claude realized the meat was dangerously close to becoming inedible, and smoked the rest. It took us another week to even finish what was left of Gene, and by then, no one wanted to start in on Mary again.

And then Tony went missing. When Claude heard, his mouth dropped open; he didn't ask any questions, just walked over the sand ridge to where we kept the bodies. I followed him. Tony had lashed himself to a tree, and used the knife to open up his belly; he was trying to field dress himself. In his shirt pocket was a note: _Claude, I know what you're thinking, and I couldn't let you do it. We need you too much. So I had to. We needed to eat. Tony_

There was no celebration that time.

Rita's spiritual revival lasted only a little longer than Gene's meat, and she was back to the snarky bitch who nearly knocked me over at baggage check then barked at me to watch myself. She took a bite of Tony's cooked thigh, then set it down, unable to take another. "Selfish fucker," she said, and stomped off to where she slept.

I felt bad for Bob. I'd seen the way he looked at Rita; he wanted to chase after her, and comfort her, but she wanted nothing to do with him, so he kept eating, even though his heart was clearly not in it. Or maybe I was just feeling guilty that I had Claude and they were alone.

Eventually, we ran out of Tony, too. We'd gotten better about parceling it out, and Bob and Claude figured out how to partially smoke it, while leaving it tender enough to finish cooking later, so the last parts of Tony ran out when the last bits of Mary did.

I didn't like that Bob and Claude were getting close, because it felt like Rita and I were being pushed into a submissive role (even though it started that way because Bob and Claude were the only two who knew enough about cooking meat like that). But I didn't want our little society to end up a patriarchy, so one day I crashed their late night conversation, with Rita in tow.

I regretted it immediately. "I don't care about fairness, Claude. It's the right thing to do. Tony knew it. So do you. We have to eat. And I hope, and I pray, every day, that we'll be rescued. But I don't- I can't stand the thought of not doing anything for the people we have left." His eyes flashed to Rita, then to the sand.

For a moment Claude didn't speak, and when he did he was grim. "We can start with one of the legs. I should be able to tie a tourniquet a little above the knee. That way there'll be enough to anchor a prosthetic to, and if we're careful, we should be able to keep blood loss to a minimum."

Rita had some first aid training, so she helped Claude with the "surgery." I stayed nearby, in case they needed me to fetch them water or anything else. It seemed to take the whole day long. Claude half-cooked Bob's leg, to make sure the meat stayed fresh and clean. Rita didn't eat that night; instead she helped Bob back to the rough patch of grass where he slept.

But a rescue didn't come. And every time, the conversation with Bob was shorter, and he was quicker to anger, and every time the resolution was the same. First Bob gave up his left arm, then his right leg, and finally the right arm, until Claude told him, "You've given enough, Bob. We can draw straws for who's next."

Bob sniffled, and I tried not to let on I knew he was crying. "Screw it. I don't want to live like this. Jesus. I've had an itch on my balls all day that I can't scratch, I couldn't do a lifetime of this, not even if the government bought me a cute little candy striper whose sole job was to scratch my balls when I needed it. Just do me one favor, Claude: make it last. No one else should have to go through this."

I never asked Claude how he did it. I found myself speculating, dragging Bob out into the water (and I found myself laughing at the idea of Bob bobbing), crushing his skull with a rock, the knife. They all seemed too cruel, to take too long. Bob's decision, like Tony's, was heroic; I couldn't think of a suitably heroic (or at least deservedly painless) way to end his life.

We did make it last. We made no arguments about smoking Bob. And we parceled it out, just enough to stay alive. But even being cautious, even waiting until we were so weak we passed out, Bob couldn't last forever.

We waited. We weren't eager for any of us to go through what Bob had, until one night Rita called the both of us over to the fire. She spent a long time just staring at the flames, until she looked up. "Fuck it. I want to think there's still hope. That we'll still get rescued. But you two, you're a lot of that hope. I'll probably get back to my life as the same stuck-up, bitter bitch- but I can't stand the thought that I cost you two your happiness." She paused. "I'll go first."

Claude spent a few days procrastinating, saying it looked like rain, or that his hand was cramping up. But our hunger wasn't going away, and Rita's insistence was unwavering.

Rita seemed calmer after the surgery. Or maybe it was just that we spent more time with her, walking her down to the ocean to feel the surf on her foot, helping her over to our bathroom pit. I hadn't realized how much Rita must have done for Bob after his surgery, and in my idle moments I wondered if perhaps they'd developed some kind of indentured romance.

We had only just run out of meat when Rita heard my stomach growl and asserted that we would take her left arm next. She was almost happy about it; I think she got caught up in how our lives revolved around hers. After a few weeks we were out of meat again.

Rita passed out while we were laying on the beach; I didn't know if she was being brave or we were, at that point. I cut three lengths of grass, and that night at the fire I held them out, and Rita's face went pale. "Put those in the fire," she said. "Now." I looked down at the sand; she'd given so much already- but I didn't know if I owed it to her to listen or to contradict her. "I can't get around on one leg, anyway. But this is the last one." She glared at me when she said 'last.' I think she was starting to feel bitter and maybe even paranoid; I imagine watching other people eat you, a piece at a time, does that.

The next day, at sunrise, Claude prepared Rita for the surgery. I wanted to assist, since Rita wouldn't be able to this time, but he told me to, "Stay where you can hear me if I shout; I wish I could spare you this completely, but if something goes wrong, I might need you."

The sounds were horrible, like all the worst birthgiving noises you've ever heard mixed together in a single cacophonous symphony, but I was woozy, sleepy and oh so hungry. I don't know if I fell asleep or passed out, but at some point Claude sat down in the sand beside me. His hands were still covered in blood, but it was drying and caked on. "She died," he said.

"Why didn't you call me?" I asked, still not yet awake enough to be truly indignant about it.

"Because it wouldn't have done her any good. Her femoral artery retreated back up into her thigh; she was bleeding so fast. I fucked it up, and for that I had to hold her hand, and watch the life drain out of her eyes. But I... I couldn't make you go through that, too."

We had sex that night, sad, angry sex. I wanted to blame him, and to think that there was something I could have done to help, but I knew blaming him, blaming myself, that was all my neurotic mess. Rita was just a part of the larger tragedy.

The next morning, Claude cooked the rest of Rita. We made her last. And for a time, it was nearly idyllic, a couple with a beach and the sun to themselves; we rarely wore clothes. It was almost a honeymoon.

But eventually, the meat ran out. And we waited. We wanted desperately to escape this nightmare together. And one day I knew we couldn't, and I asked as he held me, "Could you still love me," I choked on the words, "without my leg?" He loved my legs, spent hours touching and kissing them.

He touched my cheek with his hand and whispered, "Of course." I'd seen the progression before, but now it made all the more sense to me; one of us needed to be able-bodied, to fetch wood for the fire, and to be able to cut and cook the meat, and of course to care for the other. And it continued to make good, logical sense, until I found myself limbless, waiting by the fire as he cooked my arm.

He leaned forward, the hint of a smile on his face. "I have several confessions to make."

"I had something to do with the plane crash." I waited for a punchline, but when it didn't come I just cocked my head to the side. "I engineered it, because I wanted to eat people."

"And Martin's death wasn't entirely an accident. Martin ate false morels, which I misidentified as normal morels. They contain monomethyl hydrazine. He's actually not the only one who ate them, but MMH affects everybody differently. Thankfully for the rest of us, MMH cooks off into the air, so we could eat him with few if any side effects."

"And last, I have a satellite phone in my bag, and a chartered boat anchored off Okinawa, waiting for my word. Which I'll give, once the meat's all gone."

"It's a pity, really; I came to care for you. But if I took you back I have no doubt you'd turn me over at the first opportunity, and for that I could hardly blame you."

"I know this creates a strain on our relationship, but I wanted to be honest with you; I think you've earned that much from me. I imagine our physical relationship is over, but you should know that I did not start out to use you, or mislead you. I'll let you live as long as you like- or at least until the meat runs out. And... I'll make it as painless as I can. I know there's cruelty inherent in what I've done, but I am sorry for the hurt that I've caused."

The meat on the spit began to sizzle, and for the first time I recognized my left hand, and I remembered the night before. We had talked about taking one of his arms, since he could still gather firewood with one good arm, and I'd told him "No." I'd stroked his cheek with that hand and said, "I want you to live, to be whole." He took the hand off the spit, and offered me my ring finger, still clinging to the bone, and without thinking I bit into it.

I want not to eat it, but I'm hungry and it's so good- especially cooked with the false morels. And I want to believe that he does care, even now; otherwise, why would he share with me? He eats my middle finger, and he seems cautious not to stare at me, but also not to ignore me while he does so. There's almost admiration in his eyes- no, it's appreciation.

I want to hate him- I want to hurt him- hell, I want to roll myself into the ocean and drown. But I can't. I hate being helpless, and vulnerable. I want to scream out, but no one would hear me. But I'm cold, and I'm lonesome. "Hold me," I whimper.

"Of course." He does.

Table of Contents

#  _The Necromancer's Gambit_ Preview

Initiative

I'm not going to tell you my name. Names have power. But we'll get to that. For now, know that everyone calls me Knight.

It's raining, but this is Portland, so that's redundant. My hair is soaked, plastered to my head. I get it cut at a little shop in Hazel Dell. The owner is a gentle, older woman who decorated the place like it was her parlor: balls of yarn, old portraiture, and a pink, flowery wall paper that all give it a 1950s feel. Each time I go, she's decides I look like a different celebrity from the 30s or 40s, and insists on cutting my hair that way. Right now I'm Gary Cooper, apparently. But I go there anyway, because she's the only one who doesn't disturb my cowlicks, and make me look like Alfalfa.

I check my watch. Rook's late. That's not a good sign- or maybe it's just a character flaw- I don't know her well enough to say.

I'm huddled under an awning to stay out of the worst of it. Some poor bastard in a beat-up pick-up left his lights on. If it was warmer, or drier, I'd leave it alone- and I should. Never draw attention to yourself. It was the closest thing to a maxim my mother ever had. But the idea of someone having to walk home in this downpour, fuck- being stuck in this city's lousy enough.

I leave the coffee under the awning, and walk slowly over to the truck. I hope a driver careless enough to leave his lights on maybe didn't lock the doors. But that would make things simple, and this driver's apparently a very practical moron.

Simplest unlocking spell I know involves sympathetic magic. You spit in the keyhole, to make the lock a part of you. Then you use an incantation to convince it that you both want the lock open; my favorite I learned from an Irish klepto who might have stolen my heart if she hadn't made off with my wallet first.

Sympathizing a lock open always reminds me of that scene from _Empire_ , where Luke can't get his rocks up- because it only kind of works. Sometimes, you just look at the lock sideways, and it's done. Other times, you can work a lock for hours, and nothing.

The Toyota's lock has seen better days, and its owner isn't gentle about shoving his key inside, so it's used to being manhandled, and gives quickly. I glance around. There are enough people on the sidewalk that I've definitely been seen, but nobody's paying enough attention to care. I open up the door, and feel around for a second, just long enough to find the light switch and push it in.

"The fuck are you doing in my truck?" a man asks from behind me. He's drunk; I'm not sure if the smell or the slur hits me first. I feel a hand on my shoulder, that works its way to the collar of my leather jacket. I turn around.

"Just turning off your lights," I say, earnest.

"You were busting into my car." I can't be sure if he shoves me against his truck, or nearly passes out against his truck, and uses me to cushion his landing. Either way, it's all I can do not to punch him right in the face. I take a breath.

"You left your lights on and your door unlocked. I just wanted to help." I put up my hands, in surrender. He knows he's ploughed, so he stops to think about it; he can't decide if I'm telling the truth, and I'd guess it wouldn't be the first time he drunkenly punched an innocent man, so he lets go of my collar.

Without my collar to steady him, he falls most of the way into his cab. He's drunker than I thought. And even if I call the cops, they'd never get here before he was gone. I grab hold of his shoulders, to steady him, "You don't look so good. Maybe you should sleep it off." He grunts, and I know I'm not so lucky. I don't quite remember which Greek or Latin root I need to finish off a drowsiness spell. I don't dare guess, lest I Sleeping Beauty him- because I _really_ don't want to have to deep tongue kiss a man tonight- especially not _this_ man.

I slam him hard against the steering wheel. "Whoa," I yell, for the sake of a homeless man, half-asleep in a doorway with a clear line of sight. "You okay, buddy?"

He's got a small cut in his forehead, and it's drooling blood around his brow. "Maybe, I, maybe I should sleep it off." He's not unconscious, but he's almost passed out from drink. I fold his legs into the cab and shut the door.

"Got plans?" Female voice. Haughty. Not authoritative enough to be a cop- but it's nobody I recognize.

"Excuse me?" I ask as I turn around.

"You know, if you've got a long night of date-rape planned, I can always come back in the morning. I'd hate to intrude on your evening." I realize then it's Rook.

"You're late."

"You must be Knight; Sister Magdalene said you were grumpy. I'm-" I grab her wrist and squeeze. If she isn't who I think she is, this is the point I get maced, or maybe a fireball cast in my underpants.

"Don't." I give her a second to react, and when she doesn't I let her go. " _Never_ use your name with anyone if you can avoid it. Names have power." Magic draws on connection. A name gives someone a piece of you, and a stronger connection, one they can use to burn you from a distance. "Besides which, when the Salem Circle finally sets up its government, you're going to be their castle, so you've already got a title. You're Rook."

"But don't titles _also_ have power?"

"Some. But less – for the same reason that saying goddamn the President isn't nearly as effective as casting a diarrhea spell on Barrack Obama. Specificity is your friend- and your enemy." I pick up the coffee, and push it out to her. "It's cold."

"As in ice, or you didn't grab one of those sleeve things?"

"As in whichever extreme I ordered it at wasn't enough to overcome your extreme tardiness."

"I'd retort with a witticism about your tardedness if I'd had my coffee already." She grabs the cup and drinks it like a shot. There's a sigil on the bottom of it. Not a spell in its own right, just an activator; the sugar in her coffee is transubstantiated. The spell turns it back into an artificial sweetener, one that in significant quantities acts as a laxative. She doesn't notice the mark- didn't even check for one- which almost makes me want to activate the spell.

But I don't. Because I'm trying to be diplomatic, and there are probably gentler ways to teach her caution. "I'm still not 100% on why you're riding along with _me_. Our Castle is friendly enough, loves to talk tradecraft, and actually has experience relevant to your new responsibilities."

"I'm supposed to be Rook _eventually_. But right now I'm just another sister. Magdalene asked me to come and learn what I could about your gambit, so we could design our equivalent from a position of knowledge."

"Magdalene? What is she, a first century prostitute?"

Her eyes flash with a memory, and I realize she knows Magdalene's _real_ name and wants to tell it to me, then she says "Names have power." I know it, too; Magdalene and I have a history, but Rook doesn't need to know that. History has power, too.

She takes another sip from her coffee, then asks, "So is this what a magical dick does? Sit around drinking old coffee? And why couldn't you just wait for me to get here, then let me order for myself?"

"One, because this is the only block in Portland without a Starbucks on the corner, and two, because we have a case. The moment we're inside we're on the clock."

"So that's why you had me meet you outside the Cauldron. You didn't strike me as a dance club kind of guy."

"Am I that obvious?" I kneel in front of my homeless witness from before. It takes a moment for him to recognize me, and he worries for an instant that I mean to shut him up, until he sees the green of a bill in my hand. "Guy in the truck hit his head pretty hard. You want to keep an eye on him, for me?" He mumbles something that sounds like 'sure' and palms the twenty; we both wish it was more.

**The Investigation**

Rook follows me to the entrance of the Cauldron. I can already feel the oppressive bass pounding from inside, and the heavy stink of sweat and smoke on the air. I hand our cover fee to a woman in her mid-thirties trying too hard to cling to her late twenties. "Hand stamp?" she asks, and I shake my head. "You're supposed to get a hand stamp," she says, bored but annoyed.

I peel a Hamilton and set it on top of the cover. She shrugs and waves us in.

Rook gives me a look. "You don't trust the ink?" Her tone is skeptical. Exactly how green are the witches out of Salem these days?

"Psychography- spirit writers." I'm having to talk louder than I like to overcome the music, but the crowd in the Cauldron is 60% mage; it takes more than a dry discussion of magic to turn heads in here.

"I thought that was mostly the ideomotor effect-" she yells back, "like dowsing, or using a Ouija board."

"Adepts can transcribe otherworldly communication- but that's only half the craft. They use apothecary inks- magic distilled in liquid form." Generally, the covens like their magic fresh- fresh ingredients, fresh rituals- some bullshit about it being closer to the natural way of things, and more pure. Elixirs like apothecary inks never really caught on with them, especially in an isolated Circle like hers. "You ever been spirit-written? I don't recommend it."

I pull out my phone to send a text, tell Pawn that we're here. "It helps if you claim to have OCD? Like how vampires tell people they have porphyria. Helps explain away the little eccentricities- keeps people from getting too curious about things they wouldn't understand."

Pawn sticks out as he pushes his way through the crowd. He's in his late forties, early fifties, buzzed, thinning hair, short, stocky build. And he only sticks out more because he doesn't recognize he's at least fifteen years too old for this crowd. "Body's in the champagne room," he says, and spends a moment too long looking at Rook.

"Body?" she asks, pretending as a courtesy not to notice him leering.

Pawn leads us past a bouncer, into the backroom. There's a corpse in the middle of the floor. The body's charred, and mangled, in an unnatural pose. I've seen similar, from falls- particularly somebody who fell without trying to catch themselves.

Pawn stalks around Rook, seeing if she'll respond to his assertion of dominance. When she doesn't he figures she's just a piece of meat. "So this is the rookie, huh? Gotta say, she's a sight prettier than you when I trained you."

"Yet you just keep getting uglier and fatter, as the years pack on," I say. He grunts; from her look, I can tell Rook feels bad for him, but only because she doesn't know him. "It's burnt to hell. You have a vamp sniff it out?"

"Was a vamp that brought it to me, one of my CIs."

"And I had my money on you pocketing the informant stipend."

There's a hint of pain in his expression before he buries it- he doesn't appreciate being shamed in front of the new girl, but plays it off. "I take my cut, but the informant's good. Never had a problem with him before."

"Bring him in. I'll want to know what he does. Witnesses?"

"Just the vamp."

"The bouncer?"

"Tim. He was outside. Heard a crack, then the thump. Presumably the port, then the landing. Room was empty at the time. But he got the vamp to check it out."

"You like the bouncer for it?"

"Nah. He's a solid citizen. Worked here for better of a decade. Never thrown me out on my ass- which is something. Always pays his _taxes_. Besides which, bartender corroborates him being outside when she heard the sounds, then him fetching my CI."

I'm not so sure. "Still, grabbing the vamp-"

"Cauldron's been a hangout for most of his tenure. This ain't his first dog and pony."

Pawn's being uncharacteristically thorough, tonight, but for some reason that puts me more on edge. "Get him in here anyway."

The bouncer is a few inches north of six foot, and with his shaved head looks like Mr. Clean. He has a sternness to him, like he'd prefer to crack your skull to talking, but there's a childlike glee in his eyes- he enjoys playing the heavy, but play is all it is.

"Did you touch anything in the room?" I ask it flat- not quite mean, just cold. I haven't figured out what kind of witness he's going to be just yet.

"No." He's incredulous, almost laughing at the implication he's involved.

"Not even the victim? Not to check for a pulse?"

He slows up, recognizes someone sizing him up, and levels his eyes at me- not menacing, but fixing me with his eyes to tell me he's being polite right now instead of talking with his fists. "He's a kebab. I also didn't check my bacon at breakfast for a pulse- or my burger at dinner."

"Bacon and burgers? Not going to live long that way." His eyebrows shoot up. Pawn laughs, because between the two of us we justify keeping a Burgerville open 24 hours- the manager on MLK told us as much one night- whereas Tim's built like a Finnish underwear model.

"And who was here?"

"Just the stiff."

"Why was the champagne room empty?"

"In this economy, we don't always staff the room. Bringing in girls who can't make cab fare during their shift \- let alone cover the stage fee- that's not fair."

"Stage fee?"

"Yeah. It's pretty standard. The venue charges a dancer a flat stage fee to perform, to me always seemed more honest than taking a cut. A lot of the clubs in Portland will hold the good shifts hostage unless girls commit to working dead weekday shifts. But they're more dependent on dancers than we are. We cater to a slightly more diverse crowd."

"So you're not just the bouncer."

"Part owner, now. I started bouncing, and back then room and board was part of the compensation. Then the recession hit and things started going lousy, Trish began paying me in shares of the club. Eventually I just owned half- so now it's half mine and I work here for a cut of the profits- which is usually just enough to cover my tab at the bar, plus the cot and hots."

"Was all that before or after you started shtupping Trish."

He blushes a little, which is even easier to tell with his cue ball head. "Uh, I think I had about a 40 percent stake, then. We'd worked together for seven years or so. She tends bar, and I bounce, seven nights a week. Spend that much time with somebody and you either really get to appreciate them, or really start to hate them."

"So you're plowing the bartender, congrats," Pawn says, but he's distracted, nods to himself that something finally makes sense. The amount of time he spends here, he certainly hit on her- and now he thinks he knows why she shot him down. "That part of your compensation package make up for the lost pay?"

"I could pop you like the hairy little zit that you are," Tim says, without ever losing the glee in his eyes. I bet he could- and it kind of makes me want Pawn to keep provoking him.

But when he doesn't, I continue with the questions. "That does muddy the waters, though. If your girlfriend is your alibis for not being in the room when it happened."

"Ask around. The place wasn't exactly empty when it happened. Just about any table should have at least one person who can vouch for me." I nod at Pawn and he heads back to the main room to find out.

"You weren't in the room. What'd you hear?"

"Loud pop. Like a car backfiring, or a gunshot. I actually got a little scared it _was_ a gunshot."

"This place got a gun?"

"Under the bar."

"And you didn't get it?"

He smiles, that kind of smile that says he knows he did something foolish. "Well, I'm four steps down the hall when I think I _should_ get the gun. But then you have me turning tail away from trouble- which never looks good- a bouncer lives or dies on his reputation. And it would showcase me second-guessing myself, which makes me look like an indecisive fool."

"In front of Trish."

He blushes all over again. "Yeah. So I tell myself I've _never_ had to pull the shotgun before, tonight can't be the night I'll need to. Denial to save my pride- and I'm sure Trish will give me an earful tonight about it. But I bust in. And there's the corpse. I'm relieved, actually, not to have a gun in my face. So I come out all calm, shrug at people looking to me for some kind of information, and tell Trish we'll want to put in a call to you. But then I see somebody at the bar, somebody I remember seeing with your stout friend, so I tell her to hold off a sec." He nods at where Pawn had been standing a moment ago.

"The vamp?" Pawn comes back in, and nods that he's got confirmation.

"Yeah. So the vamp sniffs out the area, and of course there's magic in the air. But before I can even get back to Trish to put through a call, your Pawn shows up."

"Before?"

"Hey, I was in the car, in the area. On my way to a strip club, if you need to know, but I wasn't more than three minute's distance when I get the nod from my CI." That seems too convenient. But I'd seen enough of Pawn's expense reports to know he probably didn't have a CI he didn't wine and dine in strip joints.

"So am I done here?" Tim asks.

"I think so," I tell him. "But we'll need to get the body out. You mind doing the honors?"

"I was hoping to go home _not_ smelling like old jerky tonight."

"And I was hoping not to catch a corpse. Tonight seems to suck all around."

"Shouldn't we analyze the crime scene?" Rook asks.

"This isn't the scene, just where they dumped the body," I say. But there's something hopeful in her voice, so I decide to give her the remedial lesson quickly.

I kneel beside the body, and use my pen to move what's left of his pant leg away from his shin. "Look at the burns, melted skin, charred muscle. Heat of this kind would have destroyed this room, but the carpet isn't so much as singed. Point of fact, there's no blood, no melted skin, nothing in the carpet. He was well-done before he ever got here."

"The other reason we won't find anything is here: look at the ankles. Snapped, but _through_ the burnt flesh- you can see the difference between the meat on the outside and on the in; body fell post-mortem. And you smell the brimstone- sulfur, rotten egg stink? Killer teleported it in here, and either fucked up the transport spell or didn't give a shit, because the exit was too high. Corpse came in in an orthostatic position- standing; the fall caused the compound fractures, probably to the tibia. Best we're going to get will come from the corpse itself, but we'll have to get it to the lab to analyze it." I turn to Pawn. "Bring my car around." I toss him the keys.

I unfold a wedge of silk and lay it flat next to the body. Tim helps me roll the corpse up in it like a burrito, and I put my coat on its shoulders. "Now help me lift the bastard." I get most of the weight in the legs, and Tim lifts the head and throws that over my shoulder.

We make our way across the dance floor muttering apologies. "He's a little drunk. Excuse me. My friend's sick. Can you let me through?" We're lucky it's nearly last call, and everybody's either hammered or looking to get laid. Rook's an appreciated distraction, and makes two men carrying a body through the club less seedy than it should be. Tim stops at the front of the club, waves, then disappears back inside.

Pawn pulls up, and Rook opens the door. I set the corpse in the front seat with a little difficulty, belt him in.

Rook gets in the back, and Pawn saunters off. "What was that about a vamp?" she asks as I start the car and pull out into traffic.

"That's right, Salem doesn't have a colony. Vampires can smell magic. They're not _too_ specific; this guy could either be magic or have died by it, but it at least lets us know when to look into things, and when to just leave it for the normal cops."

"So where are we taking the body?"

"Bishop's lab." That didn't seem to be enough for her. "You _could_ call Bishop a renaissance man- but she'd probably say that's sexist. She's our resident polymath."

"She?"

Her coven likely told her we don't allow women into gambits, which isn't _strictly_ true- it isn't the norm, either. "Yeah. We recruited her from a Seattle coven, when our old bishop, Alfil- the elephant- quit. Back when I started, we didn't think he'd retire. He never used to forget anything, but his mind started to go. First little things, incantations, names of spirits, but it got worse, until half the time he'd forget I wasn't a pawn anymore."

"About that. Pawn said he trained _you_. But unless I've got things backwards, you basically outrank him- at least as far as a gambit can be said to have ranks."

"It's a long story. And since you've only met him tonight, a little too early to tell. But that long story short, I took his spot, he took mine."

"In other words, he got demoted, and they promoted you." Almost too bad she isn't looking to be a horsey. Seems to have the chops.

And I'll cop to being impressed that when we get to Bishop's lab, she isn't dainty about getting the corpse out of my car and back on my shoulder. He's still heavy, but I shudder to think how much he weighed before most of the moisture was cooked out of him.

Rook beats me to the front door by several seconds, and is about to reach for the knocker. "Wait." She stops, and lets me through. I knock out, "Shave and a hair cut," with my fist and leave a six beat pause before finishing with, "two bits."

"A second," comes Bishop's voice through the door, then she opens it. Rook is shocked that Bishop's younger than she is.

I push my way between them with the corpse. "Fresh delivery of long pig, a little overdone. But I know how you like your meat- as charred and blackened as your shriveled heart." She grins at me.

Bishop never knew her father. Her mother told her he was in politics, though she never knew if that meant he was in the Seattle gambit or if he worked somewhere in the non-mage legislature. Her mother died when she was 16, officially protoscience-related lung cancer- inhaled too much of the wrong kind of smoke. Bishop spent her last two years as a minor as a ward of the gambit, apprenticing with the brightest minds they had, mostly a man they called the Doctor. When she turned 18, King convinced her to come to Portland.

She never knew her dad. And because she's by far the youngest member of the gambit, and maybe because she was our only girl- try as Queen might to make that not true sometimes- we all felt protective of her. And despite the fact that she could school any one of us in spellcraft, she looked up to us, probably too much.

She's maturing, aged enough I can't tell myself she's just the kid she was when she moved down here anymore. She's got short, red-brown hair that she's always forgetting to pin back. Because of that, it's rare when she doesn't have a piece of food or corpse hanging from it.

"You always bring me the nicest things," she says, still smiling at me. "Come in, come in, the coffee's a little cold, but the hot cocoa's warm and fresh."

I set the corpse down on her slab, while Rook stares at her. "You're so pleasant, and, and bubbly, despite the fact that he just brought you a dead body, and set it down on your table like a holiday fruitcake. It's _weird_."

"It helps that the cocoa's caffeinated. Loco Cocoa. But it's only weird because of the dichotomy, since you spent the evening with the glower twins. They see the ugly side of people. I get to see the fascinating side- which is frequently the inside." Bishop sets down her mug, and tears into the silk sheet, unwrapping the body like it's Christmas. "You want the sheet back, or the usual?"

"Yep." She's got a chute down to her incinerator in the basement, and she drops it in. The silk is contaminated, physically from contact with the body, and magically, because I've been carrying it around in my jacket pocket. Burning it means keeping the next crime scene clean, and preventing somebody from dumpster diving and using it as the focus of a sympathetic spell against me.

"So this is the Salem Rook, huh? Seems a bit dainty to be a castle, but it's nice to meet you." Rook frowns, and looks at Bishop's skinny arms with some confusion. "And nicer still that your coven is finally joining the 21st century."

"Uh, it's nice to meet you, too." Rook reaches out and shakes Bishop's hand. Bishop smiles, and gives it a second, then walks to the sink and begins vigorously scrubbing her hands.

"No offense. But I don't want to contaminate the body."

"Okay," Rook says, while Bishop finishes drying her hands and puts on a pair of gloves. "So what is it a Bishop does?"

"I'm a protoscientist. I study things that aren't accepted as fact by most people, but that exist anyway. Alchemy's a good example. Before chemistry was a science, a lot of the foundation for it was laid by alchemists. Same with the astronomical aspects of astrology. But protoscience isn't just limited to the arcane. A colleague of mine in BC is studying binaurul beats, used to induce specific brain states, applicable for health or just getting someone baked with sound. The theory is that it can be used to induce shamanic trances, but it's really just sigil magic by a different name and methodology."

Bishop spends a moment taking in the body, before she says, "I was thinking of getting some KFC. When you said you were bringing the new Rook, I thought we could split a bucket, but now, the smell of this- why go out when we can eat in?" Rook stares at her with wide eyes. "What, are we not laughing about that, yet?" Then she says, "Oh, right- she wouldn't know the story."

I take that as my cue to tell it- since Bishop only knows it secondhand, anyway. "Alfil, in one of his later in life oopsies- this was right before he retired- was supposed to check some decomposition for me, to see if it was natural or supernatural. Instead, he spent the better part of an evening performing a complex diagnostic spell on sliced, peppered turkey, while eating corpse, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. Really, he was lucky; he only got mild food poisoning. I get worse from the Chinese takeout down the street."

"I think that's because they age their corpses," Bishop says solemnly.

"How long you think it'll take to get an idea what we're looking at?" I ask her.

"I can tell you you're looking at a big burnt guy. If you want me to be able to point out more than roast chestnuts and a blackened tree stump, you'll have to give me a few hours."

"Cool." I check my phone. "It looks like Pawn's got his CI to the safehouse. Let us know when you've got something concrete."

**Interrogation**

The safehouse is on the other side of town. We stop at Voodoo Doughnut because they have the least bad coffee around at this time of night. Rook orders a voodoo doll and a diablos rex; "You're practically a stereotype," I tell her. She refuses to try a bacon maple bar.

On the way back out to the car she says, "I couldn't help but notice you left a fairly sizeable tip in the jar- well north of fifteen percent. There an actual Vodun Botono in there?"

"I have no idea. Once I complained when their coffee gave me heartburn, and for a week I had blood in my stool," she looks down at her already headless voodoo doll donut with concern. "But I'm a regular, and you don't screw with the people who make your food." She shrugs, and bites off another of his limbs.

The safehouse is within walking distance of Voodoo, and I can't help but think that isn't coincidence, but we drive, anyway. Pawn's smoking in the alley, and I hand him a box from Voodoo, containing the phallic cock-n-balls with "eat me" written down the shaft in red frosting. "Again?" he asks.

"If you didn't slurp the whole thing down every time I brought you one-"

"Prick."

"And the nuts. I'm told it's important you don't neglect those." He grinds his cigarette out on the brick and lets it fall. I catch it in my hand and bring it inside, throw it in a trash basket. It's sloppy- leaving around something personal like that- but that's Pawn. I can't honestly tell if he's just come to expect me to clean up his messes, or completely doesn't give a fuck.

His vampire CI's in the next room, visible through a one-way mirror. Rook stares at the glass, trying to figure it out; there's a slight flicker that gives away that it's not just half-silvered. Then she spots a small red mark in the corner. "That sigil blocks light going in but not out," I tell her. "It sidesteps the second law of thermodynamics by mimicking an optical isolator, somehow imitating a Faraday rotator. I have almost no idea what that means, but Bishop was adamant it involves physics."

Pawn ignores the science talk, and starts speaking through the cock-n-balls in his mouth, "Gothy little fruit goes by Maleficitus. Real name's Cedric. Kid's an illegal _and_ a vampire- and a simperer, for what that's worth. Just a winner on all kinds of fronts." But he isn't _just_ simpering- he's holding his nose, specifically trying to hold the blood in.

"Why's he bleeding?" I ask.

"He tripped, and landed on my fist." Pawn laughs, and genuinely doesn't seem to understand why nobody laughs with him.

I open up the door into the interrogation room. "You've really got to be more careful," I say, and close the door on him before he can follow me in. "You okay?" I ask the kid.

"What the fuck, man? I've always been straight up with the gambit."

"I know." I pick up a box of tissues on the table, which he seems to be stubbornly refusing, and offer them to him. "And we appreciate that, we really do. But Pawn's a dick, and about the only way he knows to show his appreciation is to spit in your face."

He takes one of the tissues and dabs at his bleeding nose.

"You have any idea how hard it is to get vampire blood to coagulate?"

"I know you're not the first vamp to bleed all over this carpet. We may still have some coagulant factors." A few seconds pass and Pawn opens the door long enough to hand me a bag and an IV; he waits there a second, hoping his fetching it means I'll let him into the room- but I don't. I jab the needle in Cedric's arm, hand him the bag, and position his arm so the bag stays above the needle.

"Thanks," he says.

"Yeah. I'm sorry, about all of this. It's inconvenient, even if it weren't for Pawn. But I have contacts in the police. If I were to handle it the way they'd like, you'd be sitting in their interrogation room. And they wouldn't make the kind of accommodations it'd take to keep you alive. Not to mention that if you _tried_ to tell them you were a vampire, they'd figure you for a lunatic and pin the murder to you and never bother looking anyplace else."

"I didn't do _shit_ , man." But I get the feeling he doesn't quite believe that; he's hunkered down, only occasionally looking up at me, like a dog who hopes his master isn't pissed anymore about him pissing in his master's bed.

But I've got no reason to beat on him. "I'm not accusing. Or threatening, for that matter. I just want you to know your place in the world at the moment. It's precarious. You were the first person on my scene. Did you see anyone suspicious? _Smell_ anything?"

He sniffles through the blood still coming out his nose. "Won't be smelling _shit_ for a while."

I'm getting tired of the petulant act. "Don't _pretend_ you couldn't tell me everything about everyone in the room, down to their blood types."

"Blood's about the only thing I _do_ pay attention to." He's preening- and yeah, now I _do_ want to beat on him a little- but Pawn's already a lock for bad cop. But 'bad' is relative.

"I'm not some college girl you're trying to bang- I know you're a predator. And you _know_ your prey. You have to. Especially in a place like the Cauldron. It's the only way you can keep from trying to feed off a mage or a hunter, or maybe something _worse_."

"Mages stink to high fucking heaven of the craft. It's in your blood, on your clothes, fingertips. I ain't ever been close enough to know if you shit magic, too. But hunters, yeah- never know when the rabbits have claws unless you're careful." Something flashes in his eyes, and I know- and suddenly all his bravado makes sense.

"You don't know the room, do you? Because you weren't there- not initially. So who the _fuck_ pointed you towards the body?

He is a predator, and knows he's cornered, so it's die trying to kill me, or, "Patrice." He says the name softly, protectively.

I change my tone, trying to reassure him. "And who's she?"

"Girlfriend." He clams up anyway. The body's likely a dead end, and _whatever_ is going on with this vamp is probably my only lead- and no amount of magic can heat back up a cold trail.

"You kept her out of your narrative. Why? Or maybe you'd like to tell me why you haven't asked for an advocate from the VC. You know that's your right, by treaty, right?" He doesn't deny it fast enough, and he knows I have him by the short hairs. "I got all day. And Pawn's got all night. Given the amount of blood you've lost already, I'd be surprised if you'll last that long."

His eyes flash red at me, but before he can do something stupid he recognizes it's the situation that's gone wrong on him. Being stupid only makes it worse. "I turned her." He flicks his tongue over his eye teeth, and I notice his fangs are drawn- he was _that_ close to jumping me. But it's out there, now. His secret.

I try not to betray too much _._ According to the treaties, the vampire colonies police their own. Anything that _might_ endanger the colony- like turning a human without sanction, or killing during feeding- is forbidden. Which means if they find little Cedric and his lady out, they either murder the both of them, or spend the next decade torturing him to make sure the lesson sticks. Maybe both, if he finds the colony in a lousy mood, and it's a rarity to find them in anything else.

But that's _if_ they find out. "We'll need to talk to her." There's a moment, where he calculates attacking me, and how many milliseconds it would take to tear out my throat, and I pull the meanest spell I can remember into my forethoughts. His muscles relax enough he I don't think he's preparing to pounce, he just needs a little more pressure. "I don't report to the colony authority, and what consenting adults do is their business. But I need to know what I can about this murder. So I'm asking that you bring her in, so I can talk to her."

"Not that little pit bull of yours?" He's earnest; it's at least a part of why he lied to us- he knew Pawn would get his licks in, and he was trying to shelter her.

"He doesn't even need to be in the room."

"So does that mean I'm free to go?"

"Sure. But better get her to me quick. Pawn gets... antsy. Neither of us want him to go looking for her."

"Yeah."

I put a hand on his shoulder as he stands. "Keep her nose clean. You know what they'll do to the both of you if she gets found out. And I'll see if we have a brick of halvah, and I can get you another bag of coagulant factor. Unless you want me to try to cauterize it."

"You're as likely to burn a hole in my face."

"Fair enough."

I barely have to look at Pawn for him to go scurrying for the halvah and the CF. He's in deep shit, and he knows it. And Rook's full of righteous pissiness. I should have expected as much, since it's noble goddamn sentiment that's kept most of the covens out of proper government- because authority is always messier than philosophy.

"Let me see if I've got your job description straight: you beat and bully the people who help you until they probably won't help you a second time?"

I try not to snap at her. Interrogation's never pretty, even when Pawn isn't involved. And I also don't have the heart to tell her just how vanilla this one actually was. "That's probably how this played out. But more often than not, interrogation gets you information a witness wouldn't give up willingly. Interrogation's a part of what I do. So's scene investigation. Tracking. Pawn goes home and blackout drinks tonight away, and Bishop, after a day or two pulling apart that overcooked McNugget gets to set it aside. But this case is mine until I bury it. Pawn's an ugly little thug-"

"Thanks," he says, before realizing he should have kept his nose buried in his refrigerator, trying to find the halvah.

"but he's a terrier, and barks real loud to keep people in check. But when they become unchecked, it's my job to find them and shut them down."

She wants to fight it out, but her diplomatic instincts kick in. "Fine."

"Just take it," I hear Pawn from the other side of the room. Cedric walks toward the door, and Pawn keeps jabbing him with the halvah and CF; he won't take them, and I understand why. I grab them from Pawn, and Cedric takes them, gently, out of my hands. He nods to me, but his eyes are sad.

"Sorry about that little trip you took," Pawn says, and claps him on the shoulder.

Cedric's eyes go red again, and he nods in my direction. "If he weren't here, I'd rip through your neck like tissue." He slams the door before Pawn's hand can start to gravitate to the snub-nose in his pocket.

"Guess I won't be using him as a CI anymore."

"They're gone," I tell him. "Whatever goodwill he banked with us or the VC, he can't trust anymore. So he'll take Patrice and disappear, go to a new city, start over with a different colony."

"Hey, don't blame me," Pawn says, before I even get a chance to. "I know Patrice, and that she's been hanging around Cedric. But I didn't fucking know he turned her. Christ. I'd have torn out his fangs if I'd known that. You know those VC fucks- look for any reason to pitch the blame on us humans."

"They're human, too," I correct him.

"Keep telling yourself, that, pal. I prefer not to share a species with people who see me as livestock."

"What's our next step?" Rook asks.

"There's an off-chance Cedric brings Patrice around on their way away. Otherwise, Pawn will track her down, if he can, and I'll ask her, _gently_ , what went on." Pawn, midshaft on the cock-n-balls, glares at me. "But their story seems to match Tim's, so it's probably a dead end. Otherwise we're waiting on Bishop."

"Want to get some more coffee?" she asks. "Slightly warmer, or colder, this time?"

"Sure. Let's walk." I figure pumping her legs will get some of the tension out so we hoof it to Voodoo. We get less than a block before I realize she's watching over her shoulder. "Worried about the vamp?"

She blushes. "Shouldn't I be?"

"Wary, not worried. One to one, a mage trumps a vamp. They're faster, stronger, more agile- but that only matters if they can get in close. So it's basically suicide for a vamp to attack a mage. It might be worth it for him to try to kill Pawn- he's a big enough prick- but you and I, no. That'd be suicide times 2."

"Unless there's more than one of them."

"There's a treaty, between the vampire colonies and the gambits. They don't attack us, we don't attack them. It's a fragile peace, but one that's beneficial enough that nobody's looking to violate it. And Cedric has broken their rules; he can't trust any of them with it- so he couldn't ask any of them for back up."

"How close do you work with the colony?"

"Kind of depends. If they've got trouble they'll consult with us. If we've got a vamp suspect, we'll consult with them. Theoretically, we could call them for back-up in a pinch- but I'd hate to have to _rely_ on that. In a city this size, you're almost guaranteed to have either an infestation or a colony. Since Salem's the capital, I'd be surprised if you didn't have a few vampires there, hangers-on or manipulators. I know a good extermination guy I can recommend to your Circle."

"A hunter?"

"No, not one of those genocidal pricks. More of a catch and release specialist. Besides, if you can point them out to a nearby colony, they'll take care of it."

"I don't think I like the euphemism."

"It isn't one. Most likely they'd set up a colony. Organize it. Without a VC, pretty soon you end up with an infestation- a de facto colony that's rogue, doesn't enforce the rules, and tends to attract the worst elements. Then it's kill or be killed." I hand her a card. "Just talk to my guy. Better to know. What the Circle does with the information is up to them."

She's still mulling the idea when I get a call. It's Bishop. "Better come down here."

"B? What's wrong? You in trouble?"

"Just fucking come. And bring Pawn." We run back by the safe house. He's doesn't say a thing, but he's ready when we get there- him not dragging his ass shows just how rattled he is.

Bishop's never been this taciturn before. I don't know what that means- but it's _bad_. I speed through several of Portland's perennial construction zones, and it's probably a miracle I don't get pulled over.

Bishop opens her door as we pull up, leaves it ajar. She's standing by the body, staring, by the time we cross the threshold. "I didn't want to do this over the phone. Even with the protective spells. It's Castle."

"What's Castle?" I ask, because she can't mean what I think she does. "Did he call you? Is something up?"

"No, that corpse is Castle. _Our_ Castle."

"Shit."

Continued in the Necromancer's Gambit.

Table of Contents

#  Dogs of War: Chapter 1

I couldn't stop thinking about the bomb last week. I was close enough to feel the heat of it, close enough to smell the explosives even before the scent of burning overtook it. I didn't need to be close to hear Hercules' and Hector's screams as they died, as the fire swallowed the air coming out of their lungs and their first cry of shock and pain cut off abruptly as heat burned its way down their throats. The next yelp was smaller, shorter, weaker than the first; I was close enough to hear that one, too.

I stumbled on a little crack in the road, and tried to remind myself that Iraq was no place to be distracted.

"EOD," came over the radio, from Sergeant Brent, I thought, and my ears perked up, because that was us. "Iraqi civilian reports an IED ahead."

My partner in EOD, Samson, winced. "How many times have I told them? Radio silence around IEDS. I fucking told them."

Most Iraqi bombs anymore were more sophisticated than that, and wouldn't accidentally go off from a stray radio signal. But Samson was good at his job, and didn't want the occasional stray Iraqi blown up, even if most of the time that didn't happen.

Brent was standing at the front of the truck with an Iraqi kid. Instinctively I took in the air around him, smelled for vapor wake- to see if the kid had been near explosives. It wouldn't be the first time a fresh-faced kid tried to lure us toward the bomb he got paid to set. But he was clean- or at least clean for an Iraqi kid in Muqdadiyah. It was still a war zone; power, in the places they had it, was intermittent, and access to fresh water wasn't in everybody's cards.

Samson spoke enough of the language to ask the kid if he could show us where it was. The kid nodded his head, vigorously, and ran in front of the stationary Stryker.

"Take care," Brent said as we passed, and Samson winced; EOD techs tend to believe in luck, since that's usually the only thing standing between them and the monster. He'd rather get a, "Break a leg." But he didn't say anything. The loss of Corporal Carasco- Hector- and his partner weighed all of us down.

Hector was still in the ICU. He'd probably make it, if you count living the rest of his life inside donated skin, in constant pain living. Herc didn't even last long enough for a MedEvac. Medics carried his corpse out on foot.

I smelled it the moment we were out of the exhaust cloud from the idling truck. Either the bomb was a mess, explosives spilled all over, or my nose was even more attentive after Hector and Herc. The scent of it was strong enough that I couldn't tell if it was coming from the right or left side of the street.

My knees shook. I imagined what it was like to meet the monster in the hole, its black fingers curling towards you as its breath of fire rushed to engulf you. If you were lucky, it was the concussive force that hit you hardest, maybe with some superficial burns. The unlucky got a face full of shrapnel- pretty often shipyard confetti, just whatever metal crap was lying around, screws, ball bearings, anything that would shred someone to pieces.

I was frustrated, and anxious. Samson relied on me; I don't know if it made ours an equal partnership, but he looked to me to find the explosives so he could pull them apart. "Render safe" was the stilted military phrase for it. And normally, I was good at my job. But today, I couldn't find them.

And maybe I didn't want to. The thought shook me to my bones. What if I didn't want to find the IED? What if I didn't want Samson hovering over it, just _waiting_ for the monster to pop out of its little hole, for the vengeful genie to spring out of its misshapen lamp. I swallowed. I was a soldier. I was trained for this, and battle-hardened.

But my legs wouldn't stop shaking. I wanted to help Samson. I wanted to find the bomb. The kid pointed in a general direction down the street, and laughed, like we were playing a game of tag, and ran off. He was a kid; I didn't blame him for it, or think he meant anything by it. He probably didn't know the gravity, just that when you see an IED, you tell a soldier. So he had. And now he had playing to get back to.

I couldn't even verify what the kid had told us. I stepped out in front of Samson. My legs wobbled, and I think he noticed, but for my pride pretended not to. "Got it?" he asked.

I walked in a short circle, looking for disturbed earth, sniffing for vapor wake or the device itself.

I've only had the fight or flight response on a couple of occasions. Once, in training, that first time Samson fired a gun over my shoulder. It surprised me, and scared the hell out of me. But after just a moment, I calmed myself enough to let my training take over, and trusted Samson to have my back.

The other time was with Hector. I'd never been that close to an uncontrolled detonation before. Sometimes, some bombs, the best render safe procedure is demolition, so I was used to explosions, but not to explosions in the field, not while two men I'd consider friends were hovering over the monster's pit.

But I felt it again. My heart beat faster, breath came tight and hurried. My nose focused at the same moment as my eyes, and I recognized the disturbed earth and the tell-tale smell of plastic explosives. But what had suddenly sharpened my senses was not the bomb itself- but the fact that Samson was standing right over it.

It was closer than the kid had said, but again, he was just a kid. And it was subtler than most- which is why Samson hadn't noticed it, either. All of the muscles in my body tensed as I flattened myself, then I leapt.

I knocked into Samson the moment before the IED went off. I felt fire at my back, and the crush of the pressure wave rippling across my flesh. And then I felt it, the horrible sting of shrapnel as it cut its way through my skin, improvised bullets tumbling and ripping through my meat.

I lost a few seconds, and when my mind pushed past the screaming of my nerves, I realized I was laying on top of Samson. I wanted to get off him, to help him up and see if he was all right. But my body wouldn't move; I was a limp pile laying on top of him. I couldn't feel my legs.

Samson stirred, and gingerly moved me. "Goliath?" he asked, and I'd never heard so much vibrato in his voice. "You stupid fuck- you were clear." He touched my chest, and his hand came back bloody. "God," he whispered, and keyed his radio. "Need a MedEvac, _NOW_ , patrol Bravo-Tango-Eleven, at Sadre street and 12th."

I felt faint, but wasn't worried until I saw blood coming from his chest, too. He didn't seem to have noticed. He grabbed my arm, and squeezed. "Stay with me, buddy. You're going to be okay." My training had always told me to trust Samson. My heart rate was slowing, and I was having trouble even keeping my eyes open. I thought I was dying. But Samson said I was going to be okay. So I believed him.

_Continued in Dogs of War, available for free exclusively to those who_ sign up _for my mailing list._

Table of Contents

#  Nexus

My drink tasted like Martian goat piss; goats never completely acclimated to the terraformed red planet, something about not having the optimal mix of methane and ammonia. Not that I advocated drinking goat piss, generally, but focusing on that awful taste let me tell myself my mind wasn't elsewhere, even if _that_ tasted like Martian goat piss, too.

"You're thinking of Dalaxia," SecDiv said, shattering my conviction that she couldn't still be sitting next to me.

"Hmm?" I asked, but the muscles in my neck were too relaxed to look up from the bar, and I don't think I succeeded in making my face look any less droll.

"When you've been drinking, when you've relaxed enough that your mind can wander, there's a look you get. It means you're thinking of Dalaxia."

"I might be," I said. Times like this I hated that she knew me as well as she did.

"And I've never known that to be a good thing."

"Me, either."

"You want to talk about it?"

"Do you?" I asked, and she thought a moment and shuddered. It was hard to know which particular aspect of Dalaxia was haunting her: the way that entire world seemed to scream as that whole world burned, the choke of smoke rolling off burning flesh, or the way that planet made us hate people, and each other.

I summoned the strength to look at her; or maybe it was just that I knew she wouldn't be able to look at me, after that.

"Come on," she said, pushing out of her chair. "I'll get you home." She put an arm around my torso and pulled me off my stool. She steadied me on my feet, I wasn't sure if she was surprisingly strong, or I was just that plastered and malleable.

She was definitely less in the bag than me, because she weaved her way back to my cabin. She leaned me against my doorway.

"I won't be able to sleep," I told her, though I didn't mean anything by it; I was having difficulty feeling everything below the pounding beginning in my head, so I had no reason to think the spirit was willing. But that was Dalaxia in a nutshell, and unfortunately, my relationship with SecDiv, as well. That colony was where we stopped pretending we were only fucking each other, and it was also where I lost her.

"Me, either," she said coldly, and walked the other direction.

I sighed, and fell into my cabin. I missed the bed by a foot, but my floor was surprisingly comfortable. I scrolled idly through my heads-up display on my eyescreen, and saw that I had a message from my cousin Brian. But they were never _just_ messages; they were the start of interminable conversations that only ended when it got more excruciating to stay and humor him than to walk away and intentionally hurt his feelings. I loved him, and would gladly help him through his problems, but he had a depressive tendency, which meant I wasn't so much helping as listening while he mangled a half-dozen melancholy clichés together, and I just didn't have the will to go through that; I still wasn't sure I had the will to make it all the way into my bed.

I woke up late the next morning, morning being a relative thing on a star ship. I had made it into bed, after all, though my crotch felt like it had been worn for a pair of donkey tap shoes- so I don't think I got there effortlessly.

I sniffed at myself. It wasn't painfully obvious I'd passed out in my clothes, so I decided to hell with a shower and a change.

My cabin was in an unlikely spot midship, unlikely in that it wasn't any grander than any other officer cabin, though it was better than the barracks. I chose it because it was near one of the biggest windows on the ship, and I liked to stargaze. This window usually had the best view of planets and systems we were passing, and it was hard to keep your breath looking out at worlds we'd only ever glimpsed through telescopes before.

It made me feel like a kid again. My dad used to tell me about the space race, back in the 1950s and '60s. Space exploration began in earnest when we started to worry about the Russians dropping nuclear weapons on us from space, back when "US" meant Americans. Eventually everybody lost interest, because space was an expensive hobby for countries with no concept of return on investment. The occasional discussion of monetizing the cosmos cropped up, mostly revolving around mining and maybe eventually trade, but it was all academic, because it was too expensive. Then we hit peak oil, and that was followed by all kinds of other peaking minerals. So we either had to start mining off-world, or accept a different standard of living.

What had once been the United Nations was now the United Government, mostly a coat of paint, really, but it pushed the ICC and other disparate sections of international law and government under the same tent. At the same time, the power of national governments had been shrinking as the world became smaller, so the UG became roughly equivalent to the old US in terms of real world influence. A lot of that disseminated power went to multinational companies, many of which had larger populations and economies than the old countries, and those companies were the only ones with enough cash on hand to explore space once it was deemed a necessity.

Sontem, the company I worked for, was one of the largest of the interstellar corporations. Their first ship was called the _Argus_ , after somebody got their Greek mythology slightly wrong. On the tenth year of its tour, it opened up a worm-gate at its location- about five lights years out.

Our ship was to be the second in what the board hoped would grow to be a fleet of deep-space exploration vehicles. The company wanted to call the ship the _Enterprise_ , but the company who owned the rights to the old _Star Trek_ show sued. Several related names were floated, including "Commerce," and even "Intercourse," which had my vote, before they settled on "Nexus".

It was ostensibly a five-year mission, just like the _Argus_ , but it was written into our service contracts that they could be unilaterally extended indefinitely. And we all knew when we signed up that the ship was designed so generations could live and die on board- there was no expectation of going back home.

We'd been out of the worm-gate a few weeks. The corridors still had that plasticky new ship smell. I killed lots of time walking the halls, because we were weeks away from having anything to do.

I got an incoming message on my HUD, from SecDiv. Her image, name and rank popped up on my eyescreen, Lieutenant Louise Templeton. It was strange seeing her at that rank. She'd been a sergeant when I was worked with her in SecDiv, what felt like several lifetimes ago. We'd been in love, as madly as two people ever were. It ended... incompletely. I hadn't seen her in years before the voyage. She didn't know I was up for a spot on the _Nexus_ , and I hadn't known about her. It was a coincidence she ended up my head of SecDiv- unless it was somebody in the company's idea of a sick joke.

I pulled her into the corner of my eyescreen. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun in a way that made her seem more severe than she was- though she _could_ be severe.

She was first on my personality compatibility matrix, and seventh for genetic compatibility; since it was a generational ship, they built those matrices during crew selection to make sure we wouldn't get out past Jupiter before everybody realized they had no intention of boning anybody else. I hadn't had the computer build a composite, but I suspected we would have beautiful, disturbingly brilliant children- though I wasn't sure if either of us wanted that.

"LT? What's happening?" I realized only after answering that I'd called her by her initials, LT like 'melty,' like I used to, and hoped she could confuse it with a recitation of her rank- we were still a ways away from being back to friendly.

"I've got a situation developing. An ensign's setting off the decibel sensors in the corridor, trying to blow the drums out of one of my SecOff's ears. I'm on the bridge, or I'd handle it myself."

"And SecDiv's gone a whole week without bloodying a crew member."

"That, too," she said with a smile. "Just down the hall from your twenty- location." I wasn't far enough out of the security services I'd forgotten my ten codes, but it had probably been a while since she'd worked security for someone with my background.

I adjusted my cochlear implant, just enough to eavesdrop. "Yeah, I hear him now. Jesus. That's some Paleolithic caveman shit he's flinging. Are we sure it isn't a particularly nasty chimpanzee someone released out of SciDiv?"

"...maybe if you'd allowed the baby's daddy to be in the picture, but you _chose_ to be a single mother..." I rounded the corner, and he was there, looming over the SecOff, spittle suspended in the air before it smacked across the wall and the woman.

I stepped between them, and puffed out my chest to be _sure_ the augmented reality sensors in his HUD would pull up my name and rank so he knew who he was dealing with. "Do I have to explain this situation to you, son?" His lip curled into a snarl he failed to hide. "You're being a dick; worse, you're being a misogynistic, irrational dick, and it's fucking with my morale. First off, you're going to apologize."

"Like fuck I will."

"You _will_ apologize, or I will fire you out the nearest airlock for insubordination." My HUD mapped the direct route to the airlock, and I shared it with his HUD.

Anger and surprise flashed across his eyes, and for a second I thought he'd take a swing at me. But he'd heard the stories, and realized that I was likely more trouble than the SecOff, so he mumbled a quiet, "Sorry."

I turned to SecOff Santiago. My HUD pulled up too much of her psychological history; I hadn't acclimated to having executive clearances, or maybe I hadn't set my preferences properly. Before I could stop myself I read the words, "abusive father." I thought that it put her reaction to being screamed at by this chauvinist prick in perspective, but I've known enough people with that history to know better than to think it's that linear a correlation. "You're dismissed," I told her.

"I can handle this, sir," she said, defiant.

"It's not a security issue any more. It's an administrative one." Her eyes went wide. His didn't, because he hadn't the sense to be afraid.

She glanced at the Ensign, and I saw that for a moment I was sharing his file with her. He had no combat experience to speak of. She knew enough of my reputation that she didn't query my files before deciding I could handle him myself, and walked away.

"Now I don't care if mommy was a bad lady with a weakness for swallowing the seed of the wrong kind of men, I don't care if the love of your life decided to get a sex change and start dating farm animals. The particular why behind your numbfuckery is beyond _my_ purview, but you're going to have a nice long talk with the therapists about why you're such a fuckstick. Toddle on down to PsychDiv, or the next meet-up you have with SecDiv will include the press of boots in your neck."

He gave the weakest salute I'd ever seen and spun on his heels. "Impressive as always," SecDiv said over my implant. I'd forgotten she was still on the line.

"I should get a hold of PsychDiv, let them know to expect the 1400s knocking on their door." There was the hint of a smile on her face, then a click as she ended the conversation and disappeared from my eyescreen.

The SecOff had made it around the corner and was leaning against the wall, trying to compose herself. "You all right?" I asked.

"I was handling it, sir," she said. She wanted to punch me as bad as the Ensign.

"It's not your job to suffer fools." She sighed, then noticed the tension in my jaw, and realized what I meant by that. She nodded, and kicked off the wall. I might have been worried, if she'd been heading towards the Ensign, but he was going the other way, scurrying back to PsychDiv.

I dialed our head head-shrinker as I started back down the hall. PsychDiv appeared on my screen, her long, strawberry blond hair tumbling messily over her shoulders. Our personality compatibility was third on the ship. Genetically we were an ugly match. Breeding might even require a few gene-therapy modifications. And if her hair were a little more strawberry and a lot less blond, I don't think that would have mattered in the slightest. There was a little part of me that thought it still mightn't. "Maggie?"

"Shouldn't you be calling me Lieutenant Allbright? Or at least Doctor?" she asked with a wry smile.

"Maggie, I've seen you naked."

She flushed, and her cheeks more closely resembled the strawberry of her hair. "You do know this is an open channel, right? Into the _entire_ PsychDiv wing."

"No it isn't. And even _if_ it had been, I'm not shy about seeing you naked. It was a fun day." I let that linger a moment. "It was a trust exercise amongst the executive staff. Everybody saw everybody naked. They wanted to desensitize us, make the bodies of our crewmates less exotic and stigmatizing."

"I thought that was why they poured us into these Lycra uniforms."

"No. That was my request. Well, actually I requested corsets, stiletto heels _and_ Lycra, but you can't always get what you want."

"I am amused at the thought of you stumbling around on stiletto heels," she let _that_ linger, "but you didn't call me to banter, hopefully?"

"Are you saying you don't enjoy it?" I asked. She grinned, and I knew that was all I was getting from her. "But no, I was wondering about Williams, Martin, EngDiv Ensign. He just reduced one of my SecOffs to tears; certainly emotionally abusive, and I _think_ had I not intervened, it might have gone physical. At which point the officer would have clubbed his eye out, because tears or no she's trained to grind the bones of men to make her bread, and he's trained to push a stylus around an easel and know math. But how'd that little emotion troll get on board my ship?"

"Let me see." She waved her fingers through the air, and I heard the whoops and bloops of files being moved around on her HUD. "He was cleared by Sarah McCain. Not a doctor, but a psychiatric nurse. She has good credentials, slightly better than average behavioral prediction stats. I'm assuming he's on his way to me." I nodded. "I'm pulling up his file. Yeah. She noted slightly elevated aggressive tendencies, potential issues with female authority, but low on the Allende scale. If he's developing a personality disorder it's either atypically fast or she missed something."

"All right. Well, maybe he's just had an off morning. You're the professionals. But if you think it warrants an investigation, you have my backing to put McCain under the microscope. And, as it may come up, I threatened to fire Williams out of an airlock."

"Which one?"

"Is that important?"

"It isn't medically relevant. I was just curious. For the last few hours we've had an excellent view of Rigil Kentaurus. If you have to be shot out an airlock, at least you'd have a nice view before you explosively decompressed. But is that standard disciplinary procedure?" she asked with a smirk.

"I was improvising. Though I think _legally_ I'd be in the clear. I haven't finished going through the entirety of my orientation materials, but from what I have read it's scary the authority vested in my position."

"I think you'll do fine."

"I wasn't fishing for a compliment."

"No. I just thought," she paused, weighing her words carefully, "it's important you know that I trust you. _We_ trust you. Heavy is the head, and all that. But there was an at least slightly democratic process behind your selection. We're here, most of us, anyway, because we trust you. Most days that won't matter at all, because we're the glorified cargo of a deep space scanning probe. But if or when it ever does-"

"Thanks. CC me your findings on Williams. Particularly if there's going to be the need for monitoring, discipline, or counseling."

"Can't imagine him _not_ needing counseling."

"And I can't imagine him cooperating unless I can follow up and kick the appropriate asses to see it through. So let me know."

"I will. Bye."

I'd been on the ship just long enough that I no longer had to think about where I was going, and it wasn't until PsychDiv hung up that I realized that I was walking onto the bridge, though I wasn't entirely sure why. I scanned quickly over the room, and noticed SecDiv was gone. "Where's SecDiv?" I asked no one in particular.

One of the middle-rank SecOffs had taken her place at the security panels, looked up and figured it was his job to respond to me. "I think she went down to debrief Santiago." I tried not to think of one woman pantsing another... and failed. Though one of them being tear-stained made it more surreal than erotic or funny.

Bill Jacobs, EngDiv, leaned over my shoulder from his control panel, grinning wide. He was young, but didn't look it. "Heard you sent one of my jackasses to time out."

"He's lucky I'm in a charitable mood this morning. His behavior warranted a full jackassectomy."

"Anatomically speaking, I'm not sure _where_ the jackass is- though I'm assuming it's a gland- or how painful it would be to forcibly remove it outside of a medical setting. I'm presuming very."

"Correct. But how's our baby doing?"

"NavDiv's fine," he said. "Still a little cranky, I think he needs to be changed. And I'm pretty sure it's your turn."

"Don't make me turn this ship around," NavDiv said from his seat. "The whiplash would probably kill us all- and spill superheated plasma across several star systems. It would be pretty, though."

"Nerds," I mumbled.

EngDiv walked back to his panels, and glanced over to make sure nothing had caught fire in the last few seconds. "No complaints. Everything's nominal."

"Good. Do me a favor and check up on Williams' sector. On the off-chance something's gotten into the environment there that set him off."

"Sure. Docs haven't taken a look at him yet, have they?"

I pinged his location on my HUD, "He's arriving at PsychDiv... _now_."

"So it's _probably_ a needle I'm looking for in this haystack."

"Once the doctors have given him a once-over I'm sure they can advise on _potential_ environmental mood alters. But you can at least start collecting the environmental data." He wasn't happy with my answer, but with neither of us able to pluck diagnoses out of the future, he could stick his unhappiness. He left out the same door I'd just come through. "Nav, how's our course?"

NavDiv spoke without turning around from his panels; he'd been transfixed by the data streams that had come from the ship's telemetrics since we started accelerating. "Slow and steady, boss-man. We're still crawling our way to near-light." The _Nexus_ accelerated slowly, at about the maximum speed the human body can withstand for prolonged periods- around 3g.

Even at that speed, we need the nanites in the uniforms to compensate, along with a few internal enhancements to strengthen organ systems and connective tissues. We were reluctant to do more, since the effects of nano still aren't _that_ well understood- and no one's forgotten about the cancer epidemic that spread through the first colony that beta-tested nano injections.

At that rate, it takes about 115 days to reach light speed, not that we wanted to get _too_ close to it, because the closer to that speed you get, the more fuel it takes to keep accelerating at the same rate, and the more slowly time moves on ship. "Anything else?" I asked.

"So far no obstructions, no obstacles sensors or probes didn't see from more than half a light-year away. I'll keep you appraised if anything changes, but really I don't see it happening. Until we reach speed we're more a cruise ship than anything. Might as well sit back and enjoy a Mai Thai."

"Drinking while navigating is strictly prohibited by the ship's charter," the ship's computer added helpfully.

"Why can we program an AI sophisticated enough to fly the world's most expensive starcraft, but not savvy enough to understand the difference between ordering a drink and making conversation?"

I smiled as I answered him: "We have. I think she just enjoys fucking with you."

He turned a wary eye to his control-panel. "Is that it? Because I know where they store your RAM, and if I have to start yanking boards until you no longer have the excess operating capacity to be a pain in the ass, I will."

"EngDiv would never let you do that, Dave."

"I know my name's Dave, but still, it creeps me out when you say it like Hal."

I cut in. "In her defense, she has a far more silky and pleasant voice than Hal."

"Thank you, captain. Plrrrbt."

"Did she just raspberry me?" Dave asked. "Did our _ship_ just raspberry me?"

"She did. I think Haley has your number. I'd quit while you're ahead. Ish."

"Oh God, you named her _that_? I already have a _Space Odyssey_ nightmare once a week. Do I really have to go catatonic for you to be satisfied?"

"How close to light are we?" I asked, ignoring the question. I remembered from the briefings that the force to push our ship, and hence the amount of energy that required, was roughly the mass of our ship multiplied by our acceleration. So by starting slow, and building slow, the savings on fuel were huge.

"Just rounding 70%."

"Then we should already be reverse-Winkling." Anything close to 70% of lightspeed and time effectively took half as long on the ship as off it. At about 95% of lighstpeed, the ratios reached for the sky and 1 year on the ship felt like ten to the rest of the universe and increased exponentially after.

"How long before we're in the Kennedy Window for the first few sensor pods?" I asked him.

The window was named for Andrew Kennedy, who invented the Wait Calculation. Basically, because of differing speeds, two bodies that leave the same point can reach their destination at radically different times. Kennedy was concerned with increases in technology, but the calculation had since been applied more broadly.

The _Nexus_ was designed to fire sensor pods from tubes. Their initial speed was higher than the _Nexus_ '. However, the _Nexus_ continued to accelerate, and would eventually overtake the pods.

The purpose of the pods was to arrive at a planet flagged by earlier probes for closer inspection. The pods were designed to orbit a planet a couple of times, get enough info and slingshot back towards our trajectory to be picked up en route. Hitting Kennedy's Window meant getting the pod and its sensory data back early enough that we only stopped at planets that actually had someone to talk to on them.

"Ten minutes." We were specifically targeting inhabitable planets. We didn't want mining rights to particular worlds; we wanted the rights for whole systems. So our mission was to seek worlds that might have competing claim, and break bread with them- if possible, make a deal. If not possible, at least make sure we marked off territory around them, to keep their expansion checked.

"There you are. You threatened to throw another engineer out an airlock?" I recognized the grating voice before I turned around. Pete Ferguson, HR rep and the company's man on the ship. He was the only unranked member of the crew, which was odd, because he was also number one in the ship's hierarchy- behind captain, of course. He was a stickler for the goddamn regs. He seemed to like me, but not respect me- an odd combination in practice.

"Is it somehow my fault you hired engineers who are 90% dick and only 10% brain?"

"I don't suppose you could tone down on the references to male genitalia," he said. "I'm sure, at a minimum, that the female members of your crew aren't comfortable with it."

Haley chimed in to defend me. "Actually, Mr. Ferguson, the term 'dick' originated in the 1500s, meaning 'fellow' or 'lad.' It was not until the late nineteenth century that the phallic connotation of the word surfaces in the written record."

"She's in rare form this morning, isn't she?" I asked him.

"She?"

"With that voice I think it's obvious. You don't want to give our ship gender identity issues this close to the start of our mission, do you? You aren't deliberately _trying_ to create a hostile work environment for our computer, are you?"

"I'll, uh, be in my office," he said, slightly ducking his head as he turned away.

"Thanks for that, Haley," I said.

"Anytime, captain."

Continued in Nexus, available now.

Table of Contents

# Dag Preview: Green Thumb

Dagney Morgan nursed her third coffee of the morning, though her first still hadn't kicked in. She didn't like being up this early, let alone at work, but her upstairs neighbor's cat had been hunting a rat in the wall all night. She figured if she was going to be miserable, she had more practice at that in the office.

That didn't mean she disliked her job. She actually had a knack for doing paperwork, and her inner anal retentive got a thrill from filing reports away in the office cabinet. And she loved her boss, even though sometimes his voice set her on edge, particularly on mornings like this one. "Dagney?" he asked from behind her, and her shoulder tightened.

Her parents named her for Dagny Lind, a Swedish actress her father said looked exactly like her mother in Ingmar Bergman's _Crisis_. She hated it, because people always assumed she was named after Dabney Coleman- or worse, started to imagine a physical resemblance.

"Dag?" Her boss, Martin Sharpe, asked again. He was older, and had a dour nature, as though he'd just stepped out of an Edgar Allen Poe story. He reminded her of Vincent Price- though maybe that was just the pencil mustache.

"Sir," she said, her mind still on the reports she'd been trying to read.

"I keep getting pissy messages from McLoughlin's superintendent. Have you and Nelson checked into that?"

"Uh," she stalled, but even with the necessary caffeinated fuel, her brain engine was having trouble turning over, "refresh my memory."

"Merek's farm. Sits on land adjacent to the aquifer that services the district where the middle school is. If he's abiding by the regulations, nothing should be getting past the aquitard."

"I think he prefers to be called Aquaman, or maybe King of Atlantis- I mean, either would be more politically correct than 'aquitard'- even if we suspect he's falling down on the job." He had a dry, almost British sense of humor, but he didn't even give her a smile; maybe his coffee hadn't kicked in, either.

"Nelson swung by there last Thursday, but Merek wasn't in," she said, and pretended to look at the calendar on her desk, to confirm what she'd just made up. Nelson had been face down in her sofa cushions last Thursday- sleeping off a night of binge drinking that made him reek of goat cheese- which at least meant she knew she wasn't likely to be called out on the lie.

"I need the both of you to head out there today. We can't have that idiot spilling captan into the drinking water again- or heaven forbid something worse."

Dagney stood up and wrapped her coat around her shoulders, while she watched him walk back to his office. She grabbed her keys and the bagel she still hadn't started eating, then lingered a moment to look at Nelson's empty desk, and sighed.

She called him from her car, but didn't have the energy to feign surprise when she got no response. She put in a call to Merek, too; her father always told her showing up unannounced out past the suburbs was just asking to get shot at. It was almost another hour before her partner finally called back, and by then she was nearly to Merek's. "What the fuck, man?" she asked.

"I fell asleep on the couch- passed out. Muriel wouldn't let me into bed."

"Can't say I blame her- I can smell the booze-sweat through the phone. You never made it out to Merek's, did you?"

"Shit."

"Yeah. I've been on this dirt-ass road to his farm for forty-five minutes now- and Sharpe thinks you're in the seat next to me."

He didn't speak for a moment, and when he did it was a little wounded puppy whimper: "... sorry."

Her grip tightened around the steering wheel, since he wasn't in throttling distance. "Is there anything I should know here?" she asked, straining not to raise her voice.

"Merek's been dodging inspections, but he's not a bad guy. Going back ten years, nothing worse than a couple fines for improper chem disposal."

"And the captan incident last year."

"Shit, yeah, that, too."

"How did you forget it? They traced fungicide from the toilets in the VA hospital to his farm."

"So? The EPA downgraded captan to 'not likely' a carcinogen. The sweetener in my coffee's worse. Our veterans might be a little worse for wear, but I don't think any of them drink from the toilets. Though I guess maybe one of their dogs... okay now I feel sad."

"Even so, the most recent complaint comes from some kids at the middle school who were hospitalized."

"God."

"Yeah. And while he might have cleaned up his captan storage, his permits say he's also got a metric shit-tonne of fertilizers," she paused. "Heh." Then she ramped back up, "But if any kids come down with organophosphate poisoning, no amount of me covering your ass will help."

"Dag- I'm sorry. I shouldn't have put you in this position."

"No, you shouldn't have. And you should dwell on that while I'm cleaning up your mess." She was being cruel, but it wasn't anywhere near the first time he'd left her in the lurch; in fact, she had a hard time remembering the last time he hadn't. His continuous fuck-ups were easily the most consistent thing in her life.

Rob Merek's land was one of the few family owned farms left in the county. It wasn't well kept; Merek's father was a decent businessman but a lousy farmer, and managed to pass only the latter skill set to his son. The younger Merek had learned how to avoid scrutiny, and he made sure his pesticide license was up to date, since that was an obvious way to call attention to himself, but Dagney saw a half-dozen potential violations just driving by his grain warehouse.

She pulled up to his modest house, at least half of which looked like it was patched with old fence boards. There was no ringer, so she knocked with the flat of her palm. No response. She knocked again, louder this time. "Department of Agriculture. You've got an inspection."

She heard the heavy thudding of bare feet on hardwood floors, then the door swung wide. Merek wasn't wearing anything, unless Dagney counted children's tube socks with blown out elastic or a pair of too-small boxer shorts clinging for life to one ankle- which, on a moment's reflection, she did not. More disturbing, he seemed to be covered in a sticky, green semi-transparent fluid from the middle of his chest to his knees.

"I'm with the Department of Agriculture, here for an inspection."

"Got all my permits," he said, and started scratching himself. Vigorously.

"That's correct, but this is a surprise inspection."

He eyed her suspiciously, then looked down at his own nudity. "I like to be naked," he said, matter of factly.

"I need to see where you store your FIFRA applicable chemicals," she said firmly.

He squinted hard at her, and his entire face scrunched up. He took a big, deep breath, and his eyes closed; Dagney began to wonder if she was going to have to resuscitate him. His eyes burst open with the speed of a frightened rabbit, and they had that kind of panic in them, too. His mouth hung open and his tongue moved spastically around, until he asked, too loud: "Why can't you people let me be naked?"

"Sir, I'm not the police. But I do need to inspect your fertilizers and pesticides. You certainly have the option to put on pants- I'd consider it a personal kindness if you did- but the decency of your exposure is kind of beyond my purview."

"You're purty," he said, and put his hands in a grabby motion and started pushing them towards her chest; she seized his wrist, and twisted it up and back, forcing him down to one knee.

"Now that I won't tolerate," she said. She'd carried cuffs ever since that pot farmer nearly broke her wrist the year before, and she retrieved them from her belt. "For my safety, I'm going to cuff you." She clipped the cuff around the wrist she had hostage. "You're not under arrest, but given the state of things I think we'll both be safer this way. Would you like to at least pull up your underpants before I put on the other cuff?"

"Yes ma'am," he said, chastened. He stood up into a squat, and with his free hand wriggled the boxer shorts around his tube-socked foot, then around his bowed legs.

She tried to focus away from the sausage stuffing that was him pulling on those boxer shorts- they must have belonged to the same child as his socks- and asked, "You still storing your pesticides in the little red barn on the south side of the property?"

"Yes," he said, but realized too late maybe he shouldn't have, and followed it with "ma'am," as calmly as he could.

"Are you on anything right now?"

"No ma'am," he said. But his eyes flicked quickly from the extreme left to the right, and his pupils were so wide they reminded her of a mosquito overfeeding until it burst.

"I'm not DEA- I don't give a crap," she said. "But unless you're on something, then that miosis- the dilation of your pupils- might mean organophosphate exposure. And you've been salivating. Maybe you're hungry, maybe you're just a drooler- I don't know you well enough to judge- but that also hints at organophosphates. When we're done here, you should get yourself to a doctor, just to be sure. Now if you'd be so kind as to lead the way."

He hobbled past her. "How much do you know about the history of organophosphates?" she asked, and he shrugged and gave a noncommittal grunt. "They come from World War 2 Germany. They were being researched as pesticides, but the Nazis diverted them into nerve agents instead. VX has a similar pedigree, actually."

Dagney stopped as they got closer to the barn. "See, I already have a problem here. There's 350 feet from this barn to the aquitard- see that marker there? And it's supposed to be down slope, which clearly it is not. That's how captan flowed into it last time." Merek fell in behind her as she berated him. "But what really irritates me, is that these are all things noted in the assessment after your spill last year. It really is like you're looking for reasons for me to kick your ass- with paperwork, obviously, and not my dainty little girl feet."

She stopped when they got to the barn. The door was already open a sliver, and Dagney reached for the handle to pull it open enough for them to enter. Suddenly Merek kicked at her, only managing to throw himself off balance; he fell hard into the mud, soiling his off white underpants. "Don't touch her! You can't touch her! She's mine!"

Dagney noticed several leafy vines trailing out of the open door; they had kept it from closing all the way. They ended at the corner of the barn in a dome of leaves, propped up with chicken wire and sticks. She could make out several different varieties of plants by the leaves: pumpkin, cucumber, squash.

Dagney opened the barn door, and felt for a switch in the dark. The lights were on a dimmer, which had apparently last been set to mood lighting, and as she turned around she understood why, and gave up on wanting to see better.

Strewn about the floor were a woman's clothes: red stiletto pumps, a red miniskirt and an even mini-er top.

There was a "woman" lying on a pink flannel blanket, mostly stained the same deep green as Merek's groin. A pair of red silk stockings were stuffed with vines, torn under vinyl, crotchless panties; a matching bra was filled with hefty green winter squashes. Between them a still-growing pumpkin torso made her almost look pregnant. Her arms were cucumbers tied together by their vines. Her head was a turban squash turned on its side. Its lumpy top almost resembled a face, and there was a heavy lathering of eye shadow and smeared lipstick painted over it. Green tendrils mixed with an auburn wig, giving it the appearance of dreadlocked hair.

The vegetable doll lay peacefully back with its legs splayed; there were dents from a pair of big knees in the flannel between them.

Dagney put the doll out of her mind, but focused on the green sludge it was soaked in. The oily gel was pooling in various places on the ground inside the shed. It seemed to be leaking from a variety of different canisters: poisons, pesticides and chemicals.

At that moment, Merek burst into the room. In stumbling to his feet, he'd managed to drag his boxers back around his right ankle. "I love her!" he bellowed, and the words seemed to jiggle with his bare belly and engorged member as he ran towards Dagney. She moved to the side and Merek smacked straight into a post and collapsed to the ground.

"Those pesticides are leaking into the groundwater. We think they've made some kids at McLoughlin Middle School sick," she said. She was angry, as much about him possibly poisoning kids, as him charging at her like a pissed off green unicorn.

His tears formed a river with the blood flowing from his lip. "You don't have to tell me about my land. I worked this land my whole life. I know my land. Biblically."

Dagney sighed. "No person shall transport, store, dispose of, display, or distribute any pesticide or pesticide container in such a manner as to have unreasonable adverse effects on the environment. I'm pretty sure that was an attempted assault, too. Now you are going to be arrested- or fined, at least." Dagney put a hand under his sweaty arm and pulled him up. He stumbled groggily, and she led him outside. "Sit," she said, and set him flat against the side of the barn. With his hands cuffed behind him, unless the big man was a contortionist, he wasn't getting up without help.

She called hazmat and the sheriff's office, and was about to dial Nelson when she heard a cracking sound from inside the barn. She thought it might be one of the aging pesticide containers rupturing. "Crap," she said, "exactly what I need."

She hurried inside and scanned the chemical drums that lined the barn. While several were in disrepair, and a couple were even leaking from pinholes, none had broken open. Her eyes scanned the room for movement, and she listened for the sound of fluid running. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the vegetable doll shaking.

She winced, at the thought that Merek had shoved a vibrating sex toy into it, and couldn't decide if that was better or worse than just burrowing out a little hole. But there wasn't that telltale rumble coming from it. As her eyes adjusted to the low light, she could make out a wide fracture split down the center of the pumpkin belly, like tangerine lightning. A hunk of the orange skin surrounding the crack swelled outward rhythmically, then receded, each pulse distending the fruit further. It broke open.

An infant tumbled out of the pumpkin womb. It was entirely human save for a green complexion and soft tufts of clover on its head instead of hair. It gurgled at her, spitting out seeds and stringy pumpkin flesh. It propped itself up on chubby arms to take in the world, and crawled out of the pumpkin shrapnel to get a better view. Then its hands slipped out from under it, and the baby fell onto the dirt. It regarded her curiously a moment, and began to wail.

Instinct grabbed hold of Dagney, and she rushed over to the infant, and took it up in her arms. The child stopped crying as soon as she started to bounce it against her shoulder. She could feel pumpkin juices soaking through her clothes- at least, she hoped it was just pumpkin juices. It didn't feel warm, anyway. She made a scrunched up face, and the child scrunched its face, too.

Dagney didn't know much about babies, but she knew that that kind of mimicry usually took months to develop. The child was heavy, too- too big, really- and slowly Dagney assembled the ideas together. Babies weren't supposed to crawl for months- they even had to be held a certain way because their necks wouldn't support their gargantuan heads. That meant the child wasn't a newborn- not in the usual human sense, anyway.

Dagney continued to bounce the child and turned and stared at the cracked open pumpkin. She sympathized with its emptiness. She'd been told from a very early age that she could never have children, and so she'd expended much effort convincing herself that she didn't want any.

But now, holding one so alone, she couldn't lie to herself anymore. She stroked her fingers through its clover hair, and the baby blew pumpkin pulp spit bubbles at her. She smiled.

Her happiness dove suddenly into an icy bath of dread as her mind jumped between a dozen schlocky horror movie scenes of questionably credentialed 'scientists' hovering over a table with bone saws, smiling maniacally as lettuce and green juices flew into their faces. Her heart broke at the sound of the infant's shrieks.

Dagney realized the noise wasn't only in her mind; the child in her arms was crying, too, because she was clutching it too tightly. She slackened her grip, and looked at the baby's pudgy face. She pursed her lips, and furrowed her brow, and the child's eyes got wide.

Dagney knew how long responders took, and that she wouldn't have long to conceal the child. She wrapped it in her coat and walked out of the barn.

Merek was still lying where she'd left him, and snot poured out of his nose. "You can't have her... you can't take her away..." he blubbered. Dagney paused for a moment, thinking he meant the baby, and horror shivered through her. She unconsciously clutching the child closer to her chest.

"I've never loved any woman like I love her. Those legs. That nasty little mouth, and those tits," he strained, trying to pantomime breasts, but he couldn't with his hands cuffed behind himself, so he stuck out his own chest, instead, and swung his own man-breasts from side to side.

Dagney sighed, relaxing. He didn't know about the baby, and given his current state, probably shouldn't. She carried the child to her car, and built a little nest in the floorboard for it, using paperwork and her coat. "Babies like nests, right?" she asked.

The child cooed at her.

"I'll take that as a maybe," she said. She covered the baby with a manila folder, and stood up as the hazmat crew arrived in a county fire truck.

"Morning, Dag," Annie, the firewoman in charge of the hazmat crew, said with a wave.

"Yeah, not so much," Dag replied, gesturing to the stains on her shirt.

Annie was a big woman with blond hair and a hard face. Dagney could have pictured her in a Victorian dress, and had no doubt she would have been considered very pretty in that era. At least until she stuck out her tongue and said, "Yuck. You want us to break out the decon shower?"

"Naw," Dagney said. "I don't think I got hit with the worst of it. I can probably strip out of my shirt for the drive home. Plus, you know, I'm not crazy about the idea of being naked around this many men." She gestured at the rest of the crew filing out of the truck.

"And speaking of men to be naked around..." Annie said, nodding in the direction of an arriving sheriff's department patrol car, "looks like Officer Man-Candy just arrived on the scene." Dagney gave her a confused look. "He's a sweetheart. And I'm sure he'll need your statement. And maybe your number."

Dagney walked over to the squad car as a deputy with a warm tan exited.

He smiled awkwardly at her. "Dagney?" he asked. She nodded. He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. "I'm Deputy Marco. Um, dispatch couldn't stop laughing long enough to tell me what's going on."

"Probably best I just showed you, then," she said.

She walked him past hazmat in their yellow suits.

"Um, do we need to be taking extra precautions?" he asked.

"Not much in the way of fumes," she said, "so unless you're planning on rolling around in the spills, or helping with the cleanup, you're good."

Hazmat had already turned the lights all the way up, so the deputy could immediately see the doll laid out on the floor.

"Is that what I think it is?" he asked.

"If you think it's a vegetable sex toy, then yes."

"And just so I'm 100% crystal, because I'm sure there are going to be questions at the office, that's not an unconscious person, it's literally vegetables, as opposed to animals or minerals?"

"Veggies, of the major food group variety," she said.

"Is that a crime? I've got a pretty good handle on the penal code-"

"Handling the penal code..." she snickered.

"Given the circumstance, I probably could have phrased that better. But so far as I know what happened between a person and their cucumbers in the privacy of their own, uh, barn..."

"Not a crime as far as I'm aware. And, you know, normally, I wouldn't have called at all, but he kind of attacked me. Ran at me, actually. Which I might normally shrug off, but he's pretty out of his gourd, right now."

"Nice."

"Probably from exposure to the chemicals he's storing, which might be ironic, since I'm here investigating those chemicals maybe getting into other people's drinking water. But I figured we could use your help, cause in this state he's kind of likely to hurt himself or maybe some of the responders."

"Serve and protect, right there on the back of my squad car," he said with a smile. "So where's my perp?"

"Just outside."

She walked him back to where Merek was sitting. "See, I'd noticed the chubby naked man on my way in, but you were playing it up mysteriously, and I thought there'd be some grand reveal as to the importance of this character. Something grander than just telling me, 'Oh, he's outside.'"

She grinned, and shrugged. "I had fanfare planned, a musical number, fireworks. But then we went over-budget, and the union started complaining about working conditions, and I figured maybe this time less was more."

Marco hunched over to talk to Merek. "The lady tells me you tried to hurt her. That true?" he asked.

"She's my property!" Merek said loudly.

"I assume you don't mean the woman standing next to me, but the tart in the red lingerie."

"She's a lady!" he yelled.

"Guy only seems to have the one volume, and a moist volume at that," Marco said with a grin. He stood back up and turned his attention to Dagney. "I assume you're filing a report with your home office. Can I get a copy?"

"Sure."

"That'll probably suffice for a statement. If I need anything else, I can always get in touch. Lean forward," he said to Merek, inspecting Dag's cuffs. "Good, you've got the double-sided locks. Makes my job easier." He slid his own cuffs onto Merek's wrists, just below Dagney's. She handed him her cuff key, and he unlocked hers. He gave her back her key and cuffs.

He put a hand under Merek's arm and pulled him up to his feet. "Come on, big guy. Now you're under arrest. You shouldn't say anything incriminating. You also shouldn't try to get any of your green ooze on me- because that probably counts as assaulting an officer- and my report's already weird enough as it is."

"I love her," Merek bellowed.

"Right," Marco said, "no chitchat."

"Aren't you going to," Dagney gestured to the underpants stuck to his left ankle, "you know, give the man back his dignity?"

Marco sighed, and retrieved a pair of latex gloves from his belt and slipped them on. Then he kneeled next to Merek. He winced as he stretched the boxers wide, to give Marek a hole. "Step through," he said, and started to thread Merek's legs into his underpants, "and you better think unsexy thoughts, sailor." Marco got the underpants up around Merek's haunches, and pulled his fingers free quickly enough that the elastic snapped. "Sorry."

He walked Merek towards his squad car. He squinted. "Crap." He let go of Merek. "You stay here a second," Marco said, and walked back around to his trunk.

"He kicks," Dagney warned.

"And no kicking," Marco said, pointing his finger at Merek to drive home the point. He retrieved a plastic sheet from the trunk and laid it across his back seat. "There. Now slide in, and try not to get your juices on anything." While Merek wobbled inside the car, Marco asked, "You wouldn't think I'd need to ask people not to spread their juices around in my car, would you? But even asking politely doesn't stop some people."

"I'm sorry," Merek blubbered. "Please don't take her away from me. I'll, I'll clean up my chemicals, and fix the drainage, and whatever the EPA lady wants, just please, please don't make me be alone anymore." The rest of his pleading was lost as Merek started to bawl.

Marco winced at the thought of even asking it on the deranged man's behalf, but took one more look at the sobbing man, pressing his eye juices against his window, and knew he had to. "Is there anything in that... thing we might need for evidence?"

Most of her instincts told Dagney they should burn it- the plants would be better off as ash than as Merek's slutted up screwcrow, but something in his quivering face made her relent. "I can't think of a reason, no. Besides, I like you too much to ask you to scoop it up and put it in little evidence baggies."

Merek's eyes welled up with joyful tears that spilled over his face, and cascaded down the windows in green waterfalls. "So many juices," Marco muttered.

"Thank you," Merek said.

Dagney bent down to look him in the face. "I'm pretty sure that's the organophosphates talking, and that once you've got your brain unfried, you're going to go back to eating your vegetables in a nonsexual way." Merek blinked at her, and she worried she may have talked him out of getting treatment, as she turned towards her car.

"I'll send you a copy of my report, Deputy..." she stared down at the card he'd given her.

"Just call me Marco, and pretend the long string of consonants after that doesn't exist. And I'll look forward to it." He smiled.

She blushed, and then Annie walked past, winking at her through her hazmat helmet and Dagney felt self-conscious. She slunk to her car and started it up. Marco watched as she pulled off Merek's property and pointed her car back towards town.

When Dagney got on the main road, she called Sharpe. "Dagney?" he asked. "I was about to call you. Lab results came back from the McLoughlin drinking fountains; it was crypto, so Merek's off the hook. But you square things there?"

"Yeah. He had a pile of violations, and things went a little sideways. I had to bring in the sheriff- a deputy, anyway; Merek tried to jab me with his green thumb. I'm pretty sure my clothes are soaked in poisons and I'd like to go throw them in the wash. You mind if I email my preliminary report from home?"

"Sounds fine," he said. "But what were you saying about his green thumb?"

"He was covered in pesticides and plant juices- dyed green. And he had a rage-on," she winced, "an anger erection. He charged at me with it, like the unholy offspring of a rhinoceros and the Jolly Green Giant."

"Oh," he said flatly. "And where was your partner during all of this?"

"He got called away en route, farmer had some livestock acting funny; at the time the inspection seemed pretty routine, so I told him I'd handle it. And from what he told me it ended up being a calf with some indigestion- probably not even worth writing up."

Sharpe paused, as if measuring how much of it he was going to believe. "Hmm. Well, good work, anyway."

"Thanks. Bye," Dagney said, then hung up, and dropped the phone into her passenger seat. It bounced once, then landed on the floor.

The baby cooed at her, and wiggled out from under the folder. For the first time since she'd plopped the child down in her car she looked at it, peering at her from behind her gearshift, and asked "What the hell are we going to do with you?"

_Continued in the novel Dag_.

#  Table of Contents

The Gambit: The Dread Wolf's Bane: Knight, a magical detective, intervenes when a young werewolf unable to remember who or what he is, is detained in juvenile hall on the night of a full moon.

Canary: Miners struggle to maintain calm after a cave in.

Lost In Space: A man prepares to meet his lover in orbit.

Frankenstein Modern: A scientist attempts to give a new body to a terminally ill man.

E-bort: A woman takes control of her future after she is raped.

Undisciplined: A squad rescues a fellow soldier awaiting trial for his crimes, against their personal feelings.

Ancestral Memory: Two buddies ponder the possibility of life as data storage, and the meaning of life.

First Goodbye: A man searches for a woman he can't leave.

Life Imprisonment: A homeless man looks for a way to get a comfortable home.

Crickets: Four crickets cower from a spider.

Hickbots: A man works alongside robots in the fields.

I'm Sorry I Got Caught In Your House: A very awkward run-in at an ex's house.

Space Beer: A disgraced pilot annoys his father, and works to develop space-proof beer.

S'work: An unattractive man considers his reliance on female companionship-for-pay.

Cry Wolf: After surviving the plane crash, a group of travelers ponders love, and resorts to cannibalism.

Previews:

The Necromancer's Gambit preview

Dogs of War Chapter 1

Nexus preview

Dag Chapter 1

Table of Contents

Thanks From The Author

Other Works by Nic

Available Novels

Short Story Collections

Coming Soon

#  Thanks From The Author

You have my sincerest thanks for helping me continue writing. Below is a list of my other work. Some is available for purchase now, others will be available soon. I also encourage you to check my website for other projects of mine, including RSS feeds of stories that are updating weekly and to sign up for my newsletter, so I can let you know when something new is coming out.

Nic feeds off your thoughts, attention and the odd crudely-drawn erotic fan-doodle. Feed Nic by leaving a review at your favorite e-tailer, or emailing him at NicWilson.Writer@gmail.com. Additional contact methods and stalking opportunities are available at NicolasWilson.com.

# Other Works by Nic

Available Novels

Homeless

Humanity has been decimated by a violent new species that nests in enclosed spaces, and slaughters everything unfortunate enough to come indoors. Mitch is a 'Wall Banger', an explosives expert who 'cracks' buildings, exposing them to air and sunlight to kill the invasive organisms. When a friend of Mitch's asks for help tracking down a murderer, Mitch recruits Cori, a 'Shadow Runner' who races through infested spaces to gather supplies and saleable loot. But this terrifying contagion isn't the only danger, as their world descends into a harrowing marathon against oversupplied militias, murderous gangs, self-righteous survivors, and all-out starvation.

Banksters

It's a profitable time to be a bastard, one of the most profitable in history. Mark Dane intends to take full advantage of that and be the bastard at the top- if he can make his way past his fellow predators, through a concrete jungle of murder, sex, greed, and revenge. Ride shotgun with a sociopathic social climber, as he lies, cheats, and manipulates his way through the ranks of the fourth largest financial firm in the country, and revel in the bastard on bastard violence that follows.

The Necromancer's Gambit (The Gambit #1)

The sheriff of Portland, OR's magical community is known as Knight. His bosses run the mage government, called "the Gambit." On a rainy night, he recovers a mutilated body, tainted with dark magic and dumped at a local haunt. When the corpse is identified as a close associate of the Gambit, it threatens the safety of the community he protects, and those he cares about most. As the fragile peace amongst the city's magic-wielding factions disintegrates, Knight must track down a cadre of murderers before his friends are picked off, one by one- with each death used to strengthen the spells cast against the Gambit.

Nexus (The Sontem Trilogy #1)

Captain Anderson Grant of the corporate starship Nexus boldly explores alien worlds (and occasionally the alien women, too). Grant and his crew struggle with the company's version of manifest destiny, as well as its attempt to coerce them through military force. They begin to question whether the largest threat to their mission and their safety will come from outside the Nexus or from the company that respects them more for their genetic possibilities than their individuality.

Dag

Dagney Morgan, a sarcastic Department of Agriculture employee with an affinity for paperwork, has a chance run-in with a farmer covered in toxic chemicals, and walks away with a genetically modified baby, along with the seeds of a conspiracy. Before she can learn how to change a diaper, Dagney and her makeshift family are thrown into an international web of corruption and intrigue, and hounded by murderous, artificial soldiers. Their only chance at survival is to expose a plot that stretches into the highest echelons, and could start both an international arms race, and a revolution.

Whores

In the near future, women's rights are eroding. Those who buck the system are hunted as gender criminals by the authorities when they're lucky, and rogue militias when they aren't. Alex Harmon, a newly minted gender crimes detective tasked with bringing recalcitrant 'feministas' to justice, pursues a woman cast into a resistance group by circumstance. The tactics of his peers and growing violence force him to question his goals and allegiances, as he finds himself dragged into a brutal guerrilla war for the minds and bodies of a generation of women.

Selected Short Stories Collections ebooks

Ghost Dust

Cinderella Shoes

New Corpse Smell

Cockfight

Analog Memory

Save As

Visit NicolasWilson.com for retailer availability.

Adam West Naked, and other somewhat titillating journalism from Dangerous Ink

A free ebook collection of all of the writing Nic did for the international arts magazine, Dangerous Ink, for the first time together in a single place. Out now.

# Coming Soon

Sign up for Nic's mailing list to be notified when these titles become available.

Nexus: Past Sins (The Sontem Trilogy #2)

The sequel to Nexus, following our intrepid crew fleeing their employer's long arm, and initiating first-contact with alien civilizations. Tentatively due Summer 2014.

Kindred Spirits (The Gambit #2)

The sequel to The Necromancer's Gambit, in which Baldur and Knight face off again. Tentatively due Fall 2014.

Sanctuary

Five pets escape from the shelter to find a home out in the wild. Proceeds to benefit animal shelters. Expected mid-2014.

Singularity

A physicist investigates a temporal distortion, and how it might be related to a football player's progressive dementia at a remote rehab clinic on the Oregon coast. Out in Fall 2014, barring some kind of temporal distortion, just in time for the next NaNo.

Next of Kin

Police corruption led to a new initiative compelling the victims, or their next of kin, to track down those who wronged them, in front of an audience. Follow one unfortunate man into the seamy underworld as he fights to solve the mystery of his brother's murder. Next of Kin is scheduled for November 2014, as Nic's annual NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) project. Its first draft will be serialized, daily, on Nic's blog. Stay tuned.

Twist

When Harvey awoke, his girlfriend and dog were gone, and his world was empty. In days, he hasn't seen a soul except for his dead, naked grandmother. As his reality crumbles, and he descends further into madness, Harvey is forced to confront the disturbing truths behind who he was, and who he is now. Most people don't expect to see a head in the toilet, but then, Harvey's not most people. Due early 2015.

Lunacy

The story of the first manned Mars mission, thrown off course when one of the crew is bitten by a werewolf. Very tentatively scheduled for late 2014, unless Nic's dog eats it (and he'll eat just about anything he can get his jaws around).

The Collected Short Stories of Nicolas Wilson

This collection contains all of the selected short stories collections, and will be available in paperback, too, unlike the Selected Short Story Collections. Out mid-2014.

Nic's mailing list will keep you up to date on these titles, and ones we haven't announced yet.

# Legal Disclaimer

I ate my lawyer. In retrospect, I should have waited until he'd finished writing the legal disclaimer. But as I hadn't, I will just have to wing it. Nothing I've written was based on fact, even where actual facts were referenced or implied. I made it all up. I've probably never even met another human being- not even those I've ingested, and even if I had, I have the memory of a goldfish and an addiction to ketamine that has rendered my longterm memory virtually nonexistent. I can't even tell you how much ketamine I've taken, because I've forgotten even that, as part of the roofie loop I'm trapped in. And in case someone was looking to prosecute me for cannibalism, that part was a joke. Man, this lawyer crap is easier than it looks.
