Eric Flint's Blog, page 220

Death’s Bright Day – Snippet 33

Death’s Bright Day – Snippet 33

“Master Menandros,” Adele said. She poured the rest of her wine on the floor and set the glass on the table. “You forget yourself. Nothing that happens in a place as benighted as the Tarbell Stars could affect the Republic’s honor.”

Adele walked out without looking behind her. She thought that Menandros might lift himself from the chair to follow, but he only mumbled protests. The three women chattered in low, piping voices like birds after sunset.

Tovera pulled the gate open, her face turned backward to watch the president and his servants. What would I have done if the door had been locked? Adele thought as she set a dignified pace down the hallway.

She smiled. Tovera could cut the ring off Dumouret’s finger, I’m sure. And if that wasn’t the key, it would at least encourage him to tell us where the key is.

“Do you think they’ll try to stop us?” Tovera asked in a low voice after they turned the corner.

“Dumouret has more sense than that,” Adele said. “I suspect Menandros does also, though you can’t be sure whether rulers in a backwater like this really understand how insignificant they are to the Republic. Still, Dumouret won’t let the president tell the guards to detain me.”

Tovera giggled. “A pity,” she said.

The doorman had changed while they were with Menandros. This one merely nodded with a vacant expression as they walked out. His mouth was slightly open.

“Dumouret is an Upholder agent,” Adele said. “I wanted to get a feel for him in his own element.”

“A job for me?” Tovera said. She opened the back of the Mignouris’ ground car for her mistress, then went around to the driver’s side.

“No,” said Adele. “Mignouri or his predecessors have planted a very thorough information-gathering suite on Dumouret. He’s harmless in himself, and I’m sure the Upholders — or General Krychek — would easily replace him if they had to. This way we know what the Upholders know.”

Tovera drove off, over-correcting as they turned into the street but managing to avoid the gatepost.

Adele was thinking of the new Headman of Karst, a boy and a fool. He had insulted Cinnabar’s representatives, Senator Forbes and Captain Daniel Leary, and he had insulted the Republic itself. He hadn’t realized how insignificant he was, but because of the war with the Alliance the Republic hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

The war is over now, Adele thought as Tovera got out to open the gate of the Residency.

* * *

As Daniel raised his hand to knock, Tovera opened the door. “The external security is pretty good,” she said with a grin — her version of a grin, that was. “The 5th Bureau brings in its own construction crews whenever it can. The plumbing may not work, but you’ll be able to watch visitors a block away in any direction.”

“I hope it’s all right for us to drop by here,” Daniel said. That aspect of visiting his friend at her new house hadn’t occurred to him before. “At a safe house, I mean.”

“Come in, please,” said Adele who had come up behind her servant. “It’s not a safe house, it’s the 5th Bureau Residency on Peltry and we’re not 5th Bureau.”

“Well,” said Tovera as she closed the massive outer door behind Daniel and Hogg, “I haven’t been for years, at least.”

Adele led them through the entrance hall into a drawing room with upholstered chairs and a table on which sat a vase of dead flowers. She glanced at the vase and said, “Perhaps I should’ve directed the wife to stay here. I’m not a skilled housekeeper.”

“There’s some fresh ones out front,” Hogg said, taking the vase by the neck in his left hand. “Come on, Tovera. Let’s see what we can find in the garden.”

They weren’t in the way, Daniel thought as the servants went out. But he was just as glad to be alone with Adele. He was feeling wrung out and — almost — overwhelmed, and he didn’t like to hint at weakness in front of his old servant.

“I’ve been put in charge of training the crew of an ex-Sverdlovsk destroyer,” he said as he let himself down onto a chair covered in deep red plush. “I can do it, of course, but it’s scarcely going to change the course of the rebellion unless the Upholders are a great deal less formidable that they’ve been made out to be.”

“I’ve downloaded full particulars on Nabis to the command console,” Adele said. “I don’t think there’s anything you need, but I wanted you to have the background. Would you like a drink?”

I didn’t say anything about Nabis. But she’s Adele.

Daniel closed his eyes. It was relaxing to chat with Adele. “I wouldn’t turn down a whiskey,” he said. “But a small one or I’ll fall asleep and Hogg will have to push me to the Sissie in a wheelbarrow. If you have a wheelbarrow here.”

“The house inventory doesn’t mention one,” Adele said. “I believe there’s a shed in back which you could check. Or Hogg could.”

Glass clinked on the table beside Daniel. He opened his eyes and saw the bottle and tumbler which Adele had set there.

“I don’t think the Mignouris had very elevated tastes,” she said, “but I don’t suppose it will poison you.”

As Daniel poured — more than the small one he had asked for, he realized — Adele continued, “Minister Robin is afraid of you. He’s an adventurer himself, and he can’t imagine that you don’t plan to displace him in running the government here.”

“Bloody hell,” Daniel said. “What would I want with the Tarbell Stars?”

Adele shrugged and took a sip from her own tumbler. “Minister Forbes was concerned that you’d want to do that.” she said. “Why shouldn’t a Kostroman quartermaster imagine that it’s the height of your ambition also?”

“I’d sooner go into banking,” Daniel said, setting down his tumbler. He’d finished the whiskey in it, more fool him.

“I’m going to go ahead with the training,” Daniel said deliberately, staring at the empty glass. “Split both crews between the two ships and pack in as many of the Nabis Regiment as I can. I’ve brought landsmen up to speed before now. I’m going to take them off to an uninhabited world where we won’t have distractions and get me a feel for the people.”

He looked at Adele and said, “Do you have a better idea?”

“No,” she said. She sat in the chair across the table from him. “I’ll look for a way around Robin’s concerns.”

Adele coughed. “I wonder, Daniel…” she said. “If you’d mind if I stayed in Newtown while you’re training?”

“What?” Daniel said, sitting upright again. “No, of course not. I was already doubtful about asking you to give the Nabies some pistol training, because I thought you’d frighten them.”

“If you don’t mind, then,” Adele said. “I’d like to look over the local files, which will take some time. There’s extensive video coverage of the palace and all the ministries. And though of course I don’t have any responsibility to General Storn in his official capacity, it would be courteous to have someone competent watching over the Residency until Mignouri’s official replacement arrives. The wife wasn’t even keeping up with the correspondence in the areas within her capacity.”

Daniel eyed the bottle, then turned his tumbler upside down on the table. He rose. “I’ll sleep aboard the Sissie tonight,” he decided aloud. “Tomorrow we start training for real and I probably won’t be getting much sleep from there on out. Have fun with your files.”

“I will,” said Adele, the simple truth as Daniel well knew. She walked with him to the door.

Tovera opened it from the other side. Hogg stood with her, holding a vase refilled with flowers of a sort that Daniel’s mother had grown. He didn’t remember what they were called.

Daniel grinned. “And you know what?” he said. “I’ll have a good time with the training. Langland gathered up some decent material on Nabis before he made the mistake of trusting Karst.”

 

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 24

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 24

“So acidum salis is feminine?”

“Yes. Think of it as being Eve,” Phillip said. “Now . . .”

“So aqua fortis is supposed to be Adam?” Michael asked. “Why do you say that?”

“Because aqua fortis enables the violent masculine explosions in gunpowder. Therefore it is male.”

“But you don’t use aqua fortis to make gunpowder,” Michael said. “You use saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal. Everyone knows that.”

“And aqua fortis is the acidic essence of saltpetre,” Phillip said a little more forcefully than was possibly necessary. “You do know how to make aqua fortis, don’t you?” he asked.

Michael bit his lower lip and shook his head.

“And you consider yourself an educated man.” Phillip gave rein to a set-upon sigh before continuing. “You make aqua fortis the same way you make acidum salis, only instead of using the feminine salt of the sea, you use the masculine saltpetre.”

“So aqua fortis is Adam, acidum salis is Eve, and aqua regia is Cain?” Michael asked.

“For the purposes of this explanation, yes.” He stared hard at Michael. Was it possible he was laughing at him?

“I don’t remember. Was Cain more powerful than Adam or Eve?”

That tilted Phillip’s suspicions heavily towards being laughed at. Still, he was going to finish this explanation even if he ended up killing Michael. “The Adam and Eve analogy is purely to show that two parts, which can’t achieve something on their own, can achieve that same something when they are combined.

“So, aqua fortis and acidum salis come together to form aqua regia, which unlike its parent acids, can dissolve gold, thus proving that the power of a mixture can be greater than the power of the individual ingredients. Of course, like Cain, aqua regia, changes as it ages, transforming into other states and natures, which is why only fresh aqua regia can dissolve gold.” At last Michael was nodding, raising Phillip’s hopes. They were dashed only moments later.

“So how does the quinta essentia of anything increase the power of a drug?”

Phillip admitted his lack of knowledge with a well-practiced Italian shrug. “Perhaps the extracted quinta essentia pulls out more of the masculine essence of the medicine than a lesser solution. Who knows? And that is why I need time to talk to Isaac, so I can find out.”

“How long do you want?”

“I’d like as long as you can give me.”

“I can give you five days. I expect it’ll take me that long to clear my backlog of specimens.”

That was much better than Phillip had hoped for. “I can do that.” He grabbed Michael and hugged him. “Thank you,” he said before running off.

A week later

Phillip was trying to pack, but Michael was walking along the bench checking everything he’d been doing over the last few days. “Do you mind,” Phillip demanded as he edged Michael away so he could plant a basket of horse manure on the bench.

Michael took one look at the contents of the basket and jumped clear, pinching his nose. “What is that?” he asked, pointing at the basket.

“It’s exactly what it looks like,” Phillip said as he carved a hole in the manure.

“What do you want that for?”

Phillip held up a flask of a clear liquid. “This is fivefold distilled waters of wine. According to Isaac, if I bury it in horse manure for four months, then decant it into a clean flask, and bury it for another four months, and then decant it into another clean flask and bury it for another four months, I will be left with a flask of the Quinta Essentia of the Waters of Wine.” He thrust the flask into the hole and covered it with manure, firmly patting down the top layer.

“A year!” Michael repeated. “That’s a long time. I hope it’s worth it.”

Phillip walked over to a bucket of water and started washing his hands. “According to Isaac, if you mix the distillate of any item with the Quinta Essentia of the Waters of Wine you’ll have a medicine that can cure any malady.”

Michael’s eyes screwed up and he stared at Phillip. “If I drank a medicine mixed with fivefold distilled waters of wine I’m pretty sure I’d feel cured, for a while.”

Phillip grinned. “Maybe I misunderstood Isaac. We did have a bit of a communication problem, with him thinking in Hebrew but trying to explain in Latin.”

Michael nodded. “That’s possible. So, what are you going to do now?” his gaze settled on a number of glass jars on the bench awaiting packing. “What are these?”

“Those are the quinta essentia of such things as of Plantago major, willow bark, Tanacetum cinerariifolium, and Cantharis beetle.”

“And they were all collected by the destructive distillation of the parent?”

“Of course. How else can one extract the quinta essentia?” Phillip demanded.

“Phillip, I have this vague recollection that the whole idea of this quinta essentia of whatever is so you can do something with the Quinta Essentia of the Human Humors.”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” Michael said with some emphasis. “I can’t help but think you’re going to run into a bit of resistance when you use destructive distillation to extract the Quinta Essentia of the Human Humors.”

“You don’t extract it,” Phillip said. “The idea is to invigorate it while it’s still in the body.” Phillip sighed. “At least that’s what I’ll be trying to do in a year’s time when my Quinta Essentia of the Waters of Wine are ready.

Michael looked dubiously at Phillip. “Do you really think burying a flask of fivefold distilled waters of wine in horse manure for a year is going to somehow give it special powers?”

“But Michael, according to Isaac, his people have been preparing the Quinta Essentia of the Waters of Wine in this way for hundreds of years. Why would they continue doing it if there was no benefit?”

May 1617, Zadar, Dalmatia

Phillip was in his natural habitat, an alchemical laboratory. He was hard at work producing pure acids, which were to be his payment to Davitt Tapiero for the use of his laboratory. At the door Davitt was watching on in awe when Michael turned up.

“He is absolutely magnificent,” Davitt said with a very Italian flourish of his arms.

“How do you mean?” Michael asked.

“Look at him,” Davit instructed with a wave of his arm. “Look at the way he has a dozen retorts working at once.”

“Running a dozen retorts on a distilling furnace isn’t anything special. I’ve seen plenty of people do the same,” Michael said.

“Yes, but no doubt they are all distilling the same thing. Signore Gribbleflotz is distilling three different acids, aqua vitae, and water, all at the same time.”

Michael whistled. “That’s Impressive. But I still need to talk to him.” He walked over to the bench where Phillip as working on something. “Phillip. I’ve got some bad news for you.”

Phillip carefully laid down the pen he was holding and turned to Michael. “What’s happened?”

“Professor Alpini died on the 6th February.” Michael held up a letter. “This was waiting for me when I checked with our shipping agent.”

Phillip was shaken by the news. “How did it happen?”

Michael checked the letter. “They think an imbalance of the humors caused his kidney’s to fail.”

Phillip slumped into a chair. He’d lost the second of his great mentors. He’d learned a lot about the various medical qualities of plants from the man who had been the director of Padua’s botanical garden. And now he was dead. “There’s nothing left for me in Padua now.”

“So what will you do now that our plant gathering expedition is over?”

Phillip shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Are you still interested in being a military surgeon?”

Phillip nodded. It was something he’d mentioned during one of the many discussions they’d had around a campfire over the last few months.

“Well, the Republic is fighting the Archduke of Styria. I’m sure they’d welcome someone of your talents.”

“I’ll think about it,” Phillip said. He turned his back on Michael to hide the tears that were starting to fall. His tear filled eyes settled on the jars of quinta essentia. One day he’d learn how to invigorate the quinta essentia of the human humors. It would be too late to save Giulio and Prospero, but he would do it. It was personal now.

 

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 09

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 09

Close-by, Fleet Commander Dannet looked up over her shoulder at Caitlin. The black eyes danced with green fire. Dannet’s ears canted to an angle that communicated disapproval. “You should take a seat, Director Kralik. It would not do to have you injured on the jump.” She turned back to the console she was monitoring. “That would create a lot of fuss over your well-being at a moment when we could least afford to have our attention diverted from what really matters.”

Wrot took her arm. “Just what I was going to say,” he murmured in Caitlin’s ear, “sort of.” He settled her into a seat before a vacant station next to Lieutenant Vaughan. She fastened her harness.

The screen crawled with figures that she supposed no one needed to know at the moment.

“First framepoint generator set,” a voice said.

The ship trembled beneath her feet like an eager hound about to be released on the hunt.

Uldra checked one screen, then another, his ears pitched at a mostly approving angle, though occasionally lowering in dissatisfaction as he pointed out an error that needed to be corrected. He was a calmer captain than Dannet had been, Caitlin thought, remembering how the big Jao had stalked about the command deck, cuffing those who were slow to handle their responsibilities, even throwing one to the deck and taking over the station herself. Of course, to be fair, Dannet had been working with an unfamiliar and mixed crew of Jao and humans, not those from Narvo, her former kochan.

That, of course, was the norm for this fleet two-plus years later. Only the Krant ship Pool Buntyam was crewed solely by a Jao crew. Even Dannet seemed to be resigned to the integrated crews these days, although one could still see flashes of irritation in her posture from time to time.

“Second framepoint generator set,” a different voice said with no more excitement that someone reading the choices for dinner off a menu board.

The vibration increased, so that the ship herself seemed eager to get on with the jump, which all the Jao present mostly found a thoroughly ridiculous notion, she thought.

“We’re getting close,” Wrot said.

She took a deep breath. They had jumped the Lexington many times now. The crew knew what it was doing. They would come out into a new system and hope that this time they would find what–and who–they were looking for.

The shaking increased. Wrot seemed to settle somehow into a waiting-for-necessity position that gave the air of being as solid as a mountain.

“Third framepoint generator set,” another crewman said, and this time there was just the slightest hint of excitement in his tone.

Uldra’s posture said calm-acceptance. Caitlin looked over at Dannet, whose body was angled to communicate disdain. One did not surrender to crude excitement when merely doing one’s job, at least one did not if one was Narvo, which Dannet would always be, no matter that she had been gifted to Terra Taif like a prize heifer to make up for Oppuk’s crimes.

“Fourth framepoint generator set,” a female voice said.

The ship was lurching beneath their feet now. Caitlin hastily checked the harness that would keep her from being ejected from the seat. “I hate this part,” she said, just loudly enough for her guards to hear.

“Amen,” Captain Miller muttered back from where she grasped the station console for balance. She looked pale, but resigned. “I don’t hate it as much as the thought of what could be waiting for us on the other end, though,” she finished.

It could be something wonderful or something terrible, Caitlin thought. The only way to know was to jump and take a look.

“Fifth set!” a male voice said.

The ship rocked beneath their feet as though buffeted by five monstrous opposing tidal waves, all trying to wash it out to sea in a different direction.

“You may jump, Navigator Annen,” Uldra said.

The great ship leaped.

As always, Caitlin’s stomach was left behind. She gritted her teeth, feeling distinctly unwell, as though being torn apart and compressed into exotic matter at the same time. She tasted blue on the back of her tongue, saw the strange gleam of bittersweet behind her eyes, felt the rasp of fear along her spine.

It will be over in a heartbeat, Caitlin told herself. Jao endured this all the time and had for centuries now. She could not let herself be seen to be weak.

Captain Miller was swearing under her breath. Her face was very pale. Her grip on the console showed white knuckles at every joint.

On and on they went, traveling and not-traveling, propelling themselves through something that simply was not-there, striding across the galaxy with seven-league boots like some preposterous fairy tale character.

Then, with a jerk, they arrived, existing at least somewhere again, when only a second ago they had been both nowhere and everywhere. Caitlin’s breath blew out. She hadn’t even been aware she was trying to hold it.

“I will never get used to that!” Caewithe muttered with a gulp.

“Amen.” This time it was Caitlin who replied.

The view screen blazed with light, the local view of the photosphere of this system’s star that surrounded them. “I guess we made it,” Caitlin murmured.

Terra-Captain Uldra strode from screen to screen, checking readouts, his body showing cautious-approval with every step. Caitlin looked over to the lift. Tamt flicked an ear of inquiry at her. She shook her head and Tamt settled back into place by the door. The Jao guard showed no effects at all, just like the Jao members of the command deck crew.

Caitlin looked back to Miller, who had released the console and straightened, but still looked a bit green around the gills and showed a few sweat beads on her forehead. She nodded at Caitlin who had to smile. Miller was always trying to prove herself to the Jao. If they took no notice of the discomfort of a jump, neither would she, as far as she was able.

Over the course of the next minute, the other three battleships reported in, all having jumped safely.

The screen brightened, then just for a second, Caitlin could see the darkness of space punctuated by distant stars. The fiery plasma closed in again. They were enveloped by starfire. That was the part to which she would never become accustomed.

Her heartbeat accelerated again, which she hadn’t thought possible. What was out there on the other side of that brightness? Friend? Foe? Or, most likely, more dead worlds?

“Shedding plasma,” one of the bridge crew said, a slight Krant male Caitlin had seen on duty before but never picked up his name.

Ten more minutes passed. The sensors detected the other ships of the fleet arriving. Caitlin checked her watch when she thought no Jao were looking. The plasma thinned. The times when their instruments could see lengthened. Nothing was close to the star. At least no Ekhat seemed to be waiting on them. This was most likely going to be another disappointment.

Then the plasma cleared for the last time. They were out of the photosphere.

“Scanning,” one of the Jao said.

Caitlin released the harness and stood to get a better view of the main screen. Techs were checking the system’s orbits for habitable planets. Most star systems had one, occasionally even two or three, if you counted marginal worlds where the gravity would be too high or too low, no liquid water existed, or the atmosphere was unsuitable for breathing without assistance.

“Coming about,” said the navigator.

Lieutenant Vaughan suddenly spat out a single hard-edged word. “Damn!”

Had he spotted something? Caitlin squinted at the screen, then saw what he had already spotted.

“Oh . . . my,” she said.

Miller said something even stronger.

 

Death’s Bright Day – Snippet 32

Death’s Bright Day – Snippet 32

CHAPTER 12

Newtown on Peltry

“Mundy of Chatsworth to see the President,” Adele said to the uniformed doorman. “He’s been informed of my visit.”

She had come to the presidential palace in civilian clothing as Lady Mundy. The outfits Adele had brought from Cinnabar reflected her own taste, very dull by Peltry standards, but fortunately Yvette Mignouri was both young and from the more flamboyant Pleasaunce. The garments the Resident’s wife had left behind included some which suggested a basic tawdriness as well.

Adele had sent two of the most likely suits to the ship to be converted into Peltry-style court dresses: most spacers were expert tailors. In this case Woetjans had insisted on doing the sewing herself for the honor of it.

Adele could imagine her mother’s reaction: “Go and change at once! You look like a common prostitute!”

Adele smiled faintly. She didn’t, of course. Even wearing an outfit of saturated red and blue, she was no more sexually enticing than a similarly painted tramcar.

“Ah, a moment, please,” the doorman said, looking worried. He pressed a button. The fellow wore a pistol as part of his uniform, but it may never have been out of its holster.

Tovera was in gray today. She was as unobtrusive as one of the Sissie’s bunks.

A big man, blond where he still had a fringe of hair, bustled up from the interior: Dumouret, the butler, as Adele knew from Mignouri’s files. “Lady Mundy!” he said. “Come through, please. President Menandros will be so pleased to see you!”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Adele, walking past the relieved-looking doorman. Visits from foreign dignitaries were obviously not part of his routine.

Adele’s statement was true. Besides, her parents had been prominent politicians. She had grown up hearing much greater lies than the one Dumouret had just told.

Dumouret took them — took Adele; he seemed oblivious of Tovera beyond the fact that Lady Mundy had brought her maid — through a door to the left and then down a long corridor. The windows on the left opened onto a courtyard whose bushes had been trimmed into balls and pyramids. Fresh growth blurred the topiary with bright green tendrils.

The room at the end of the hallway had a front wall of ornate grillwork instead of being solid. There were upholstered chairs and couches along both sidewalls, but at the opposite end of the room three young women were playing cards with a man wearing loose garments of pink and orange in vertical stripes.

The gate had a latch mechanism, but Dumouret swung it open without hesitation; either it had not been locked, or the butler had an electronic key in his ornate signet ring. “Your highness,” he said. “Lady Mundy of Cinnabar is here to pay her respects.”

President Menandros looked up with a frown. Ignoring his master’s obvious displeasure, Dumouret ushered Adele through the gate. “You’ll recall, your highness,” the butler said, “that Lady Mundy is passing through the Tarbell Stars and wished to make your acquaintance.”

Menandros grimaced, but he got to his feet. Like the furniture — and despite the generous cut of his clothing — the president was overstuffed.

His face suddenly brightened. “Lady Mundy, I wonder if you’d like to try some of my wine,” Menandros said, gesturing to a sideboard with bottles and glasses. “Dumouret, pour her ladyship some of the Saturnia!”

“At once, your highness,” the butler said.

Tovera was standing beside a chair near the grill. The wall panels were of gray wood with very fine grain. Adele wondered if Tovera had chosen her outfit with the present background in mind.

Tovera was direct — brutally direct — but she was also intelligent. She noticed minute details which might affect her own duties.

Dumouret handed the glass to Adele. There wasn’t a chair for her at the table, so the butler stepped away to get one of those against the wall.

The three women — girls, rather — stared at Adele with vaguely petulant expressions. That didn’t necessarily mean they had anything against the newcomer: in Adele’s experience, women of a certain sort always looked petulant. Each wore a filmy pastel shift — blue, pink and yellow.

The wine was as pale as sunlight. Adele sipped it, feeling a tingle on her tongue and at the back of her nostrils. Menandros was watching her intently.

Adele lowered the glass and said, “I believe that my mother would have approved. I myself don’t have the palate to really judge.”

“Oh, do sit down,” said Menandros, suddenly solicitous. He gestured to the chair Dumouret had brought up. “Your mother is a connoisseur, then?”

Adele sat down. The chair’s wooden frame matched the room’s paneling.

“She was a connoisseur,” she said. “Mother has been dead for many years now.”

Executed as a traitor and her head displayed in the center of Xenos, to be precise, but Adele didn’t go to that level of detail. She had learned that it shocked people; particularly those who thought she was making a joke in bad taste.

Adele sipped more wine. The information she had received about President for Life Menandros was completely accurate — as she had expected. She wasn’t here to observe the president.

Menandros settled happily back onto his chair. “We’ve been playing cards,” he said, tapping the deck. “The girl who wins gets to spend the night with me.”

He caressed the ear of the girl in yellow with the backs of his fingers. “Yevgenia is ahead,” he said.

“How lucky for her,” Adele said. She frowned slightly and said, “What if you win, President Menandros? You’re playing also, aren’t you?”

“Ah!” Menandros said. “If I win, I get to choose. But Yevgenia is far ahead now. Do you play rummy, Lady, ah…?”

“Lady Mundy, your highness,” said Dumouret. “Lady Mundy is here to discuss your views on the rebellion.”

“I thought you said she was just paying her respects?” Menandros said sharply, glowering at his butler. This was the first evidence Adele had seen that the president wasn’t quite as fuzzy as he acted.

“I am a private citizen paying my respects,” Adele said. “But as a member of one of the leading families of Cinnabar, my impressions will be solicited when I return home. I would be remiss to neglect this opportunity to discuss matters of such import with the president of the Tarbell Stars.”

“Well, I don’t see that there’s very much to say,” Menandros said. “There isn’t really a rebellion. My subjects are happy, why shouldn’t they be happy? The Upholders are just stooges for the Alliance of Free Stars. It’s that simple!”

“I’ll certainly pass on your opinion, President,” Adele said. “But how is the war –”

“It’s not an opinion, it’s the simple truth!” Menandros said. “Look, you’re important on Cinnabar, you say? You’ve got to help us, then. The Alliance is attacking us and you’re their enemy!”

“President Menandros,” Adele said, “I am a private citizen. I know that we and the Alliance have been at peace since the signing of the Treaty of Amiens, however. I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed.”

The girls didn’t speak, but they picked up and put down their cards in a bored fashion. They kept glancing sidelong at Menandros, in case he should suddenly take an interest in them again.

“Are you a fool?” Menandros said, slapping the table with the flat of his hand. His cards jumped and several of them fell to the floor. “This treaty says that the Alliance won’t increase its territory by conquest! And that’s they’re trying to do, conquer my Tarbell Stars!’

Definitely not as fuzzy as he seems, Adele thought. Although Menandros hadn’t been the subject of her visit to the palace, she had learned something that neither Mistress Sand nor the 5th Bureau seemed to be aware of.

“I am not a lawyer or a diplomat –” she began.

“This isn’t law!” said Menandros. “This is honor! If Cinnabar doesn’t defend its honor, it is cowardly and all the world will know that Cinnabar is a coward!”

Adele stood up. She was here playing a part, but there was a point beyond which she could not go and remain believable. The president might not recognize that, but Dumouret probably did — and those to whom Dumouret reported certainly would.

 

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 08

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 08

They came to a stop by the lift to his shuttle.

“So what do you want?” he asked.

“To not be afraid,” Lim answered simply.

“Learning to fight will not kill your fear,” Tully said. She looked at him in silence. “But it might teach you to work beyond your fear.”

Lim nodded. “Teach me.”

Tully looked at her. With her recent growth, she was now taller than Tully and had longer arms. She had mass. With some training, she just might be able to hold her own in a battle. It was worth exploring, anyway.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Tully said. “If you like, you can drill with my troops. I think everyone should know how to protect herself.”

The Lleix’s black eyes gleamed. “When shall I be starting?” Lim said.

“Now is fine with me–well, let’s make it after the next framepoint transfer,” he said. “Unless you have something better to do. Come to the Ban Chao and we’ll see what we can do.”

“Until we find a new species with whom we need to communicate, I have nothing to do,” Lim said. “I am much wanting it to be otherwise.”

****

Caitlin entered the bridge of the Lexington, or the command deck, as the Jao preferred to call it. Caewithe Miller came with her and Tamt followed them, a silent shadow who took up a stance beside the lift.

Fleet Commander Dannet herself, in the days when she was Terra-Captain Dannet, had not approved of superfluous personnel in her command space on the Lexington. She had allowed it during the mission to Valeron, because Wrot krinnu ava Terra had possessed oudh over that mission and he had wanted others there.

The new captain of the Lexington seemed to be a little more tolerant than Dannet had been. Terra-Captain Uldra krinnu ava Terra had been born Uldra krinnu Ptok vau Binnat, scion of a lesser associated kochan of a mid-tier kochan, according to the briefing Caitlin had received. The Jao, of course, would never have described the relationships that way. They would have instead said that Binnat was a kochan of lesser associations to the great kochans of Pluthrak, Narvo, or perhaps the scarcely lesser Dano, Hij, and Jak. Not as lesser as Krant had been before their Krant-Captain Mallu and his crew had become entwined with the affairs of Terra taif and its guardian, the Bond of Ebezon, the one Jao organization that was apolitical, standing aside from the constant association maneuvering and shifting that was normal existence among the kochans. But lesser, undisputedly.

Binnat and Ptok had sent troops for the conquest of Terra, perhaps more than they could rightly afford to risk; and more still for the long struggle to maintain Jao control of the restive planet. Uldra had been among the first of them. He had survived the conquest. He had survived the long grinding aftermath to the conquest, and finally had taken the bauta and retired from service on Terra, much as Wrot had done. But perhaps most importantly, he had come out of retirement to pilot one of the hastily modified Terran submarines that battled the Ekhat ships in the interior of the Sun; one of the two surviving pilots who had done so with some skill. As Wrot had put it recently to Caitlin with one of the human phrases he loved to collect, Uldra “had seen the elephant, up close and personal.”

At the founding of Terra taif, Uldra had joined the overwhelming majority of the veterans of the Terran wars in shifting allegiance to the new taif. Now, in the Jao manner, Uldra was of use as the captain of one of the greatest warships Jao warriors had ever manned, greater even than the Harrier class warships of the Bond of Ebezon, as well as serving as what the humans would have called the ‘flag captain’ of the fleet under Fleet Commander Dannet.

So far Caitlin had found him to be even-tempered. Given her experiences under Oppuk, the crazed-and-now-mercifully-dead Narvo governor, she chalked that up as a big mark in the plus column.

At the moment, the mood on the bridge was industrious, voices murmuring, heads bent low over displays, crewmen consulting one another in low voices. Dannet krinnu ava Terra was up there too, standing and gazing down at a readout, her body communicating uncomplicated steady-interest. Her golden-brown nap was still damp. Evidently she had come straight from one of the Lexington’s many pools. Lieutenant Vaughan was seated at a station to the rear of the deck, focused on multiple screens all streaming data, oblivious to everything going on around him.

Caitlin drifted around the bridge. She still didn’t understand a lot of the details of what was going on, but she had been on the bridge often enough in the last two years to know whether things were in their normal flow. No problems yet today, it seemed.

The mood subtly shifted. Crew, both Jao and human, settled deeper into their seats and bent over their screens. Voices did not grow so much louder as more intense.

It was getting close to the time for the jump, she thought, and her stomach gave a lurch. Personally, she found frame travel extremely uncomfortable. It wasn’t that it hurt. The experience was more that she felt like she was being forced to exist for the duration of the jump in dimensions that did not support human life. Or life of any sort. Like she was being folded and stretched at the same time, existing both here and there, turned inside out and upside down. She shuddered. She’d tried to explain it to her father, after they’d returned from the Valeron mission, but words had simply failed her.

Dannet looked up at her with green fire blazing in her black eyes. “You feel it,” the Fleet Commander said.

Caitlin nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I don’t know how, but I do.”

“Not entirely unexpected,” Dannet said with a satisfied flick of one ear. “After all, you were associated with one of Narvo’s best.”

I guess you could call it that, Caitlin thought. She’d always thought the word “tormented”–or perhaps “terrorized”–closer to the reality of the situation. But she knew now that Jao were also tough on their own progeny, demanding a lot and not babying them. She’d seen that much for herself after visiting one of the Terra kochan-houses, so perhaps her upbringing at the rough hands of Banle krinnu ava Narvo had not been as vicious in the eyes of a Jao as it had seemed to her. But Caitlin wasn’t Jao.

A low hum built as the great jump engines charged. The ship seemed suddenly more alive. Uldra was now all business, up out of his captain’s chair and striding from station to station, making corrections here and there, approving readouts and moving on. His ears were flattened in unabashed focus.

Caewithe Miller came over to her. “Are we close to jump?”

“I think so,” she said, as her heartbeat accelerated. “Not that anyone tells me anything.” Of course, they didn’t need to. To be fair, that was not her function, all the details that went into the running of the great ship. They would turn to her when it was appropriate for her input.

“Maybe this time will be the charm,” Caewithe said with a smile. “We’re due for some luck.”

“Maybe.” She made herself return the smile, though her heart was racing. It was just as likely they would find ten Ekhat ships on the other end of this jump as an inhabited world filled with agreeable aliens and highly developed tech that they would be absolutely delighted to put at the Human/Jao/Lleix’s disposal.

An alarm sounded, not a strident bell, but a clear ringing chime that was being relayed throughout the great ship. “Stations,” Uldra’s deep voice said over the ship com in his capacity as Terra-Captain of the Lexington. “Jump preparation has been initiated. All personnel take appropriate action.”

That meant hold onto your proverbial hat, Caitlin thought. No matter how many times they jumped, she never got used to it.

The bridge doors opened again and Wrot krinnu ava Terra walked through. She motioned for him to join her. The old Jao was both wily and wise, but what she often liked most about him was his sense of humor.

 

Shadow’s Blade – Snippet 41

This book should be available now so this is the last snippet.

Shadow’s Blade – Snippet 41

“Because I think it’s possible these dark sorcerers are after you because of him.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I know he’s into dark magic.”

She scowled, but wouldn’t meet my gaze. “And how do you ‘know’ that?”

“The night I talked to your parents at Jacinto Amaya’s, he followed me and we . . . well, I guess you’d say we had a little confrontation.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. But I noticed that he was quick to go for a knife. There’s no doubt in my mind that he was going to use it to draw blood for a casting. Which is exactly what a dark sorcerer would do.”

“Is it?” she said, sarcasm saturating the words. “I couldn’t help but notice that you used blood against Fitzwater a little while ago. Does that make you a dark sorcerer, too?”

“That was different!” I heard the defensiveness in my voice and cringed inwardly. She’d come too close to hitting the mark.

“Because it was you and not him?”

“Because it was a last resort against a weremancer I couldn’t defeat in any other way. Neil pulled his knife out of habit, not desperation.” I offered the distinction with more surety than I felt, but I didn’t pause to let her see that. “Maybe he was drawn into the dark stuff,” I said, making an effort to soften my tone. “Maybe he had friends who used dark magic, and he started out just experimenting with it.”

She said nothing.

My grip on the wheel tightened. “Why are you still so eager to protect him? After all he’s . . .” I broke off, shaking my head.

“After all what?” She bit off each word, though I saw that she glanced at Emmy as she spoke.

Emmy gave no indication that she was listening.

“Never mind.”

She glared at me. “Stop the truck.”

“What?”

“I said stop. Pull over.”

I opened my mouth to argue.

“Now!”

Emmy did look up at that, her eyes wide.

We were on an open stretch of road. Another pickup pulling a small trailer followed us at some distance and a pair of motorcycles rode ahead of us. I pulled over and came to a stop, dust billowing over my dad’s truck. As soon as we stopped moving, Gracie pushed open her door, slipped out of the truck, while at the same time easing Zach’s head down to the seat, and then stalked off into the desert.

Emmy eyed me expectantly.

At last I got out and joined Gracie in the brush and dirt. She stared off toward a distant line of mountains, her fists on her hips.

“Nice spot,” I said.

She rounded on me. “I don’t know what my parents told you — No, that’s not true. I know exactly what they told you. And apparently you believed every word. Well now you’re going to listen to me. Whatever you think you know about us, it’s not true. More to the point, it’s none of your goddamned business.”

I wanted to tell her that she owed the kids two more quarters, but this didn’t seem like the time.

“It’s not only your parents,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “You’ve been to the ER quite a few times, and the police have noticed a pattern to your injuries.”

Her cheeks colored, but her eyes held mine. “I hope you were better at this when you were a cop.”

Kona had said something similar when she and I argued about Neil and his role in Gracie’s disappearance.

“Your parents are worried about you, and I’ve seen enough cases of abuse to be worried, too. About you and the kids.”

She ran both hands through her hair. “My parents don’t know what they’re talking about,” she said. Much of the anger had leached out of her voice. “They don’t understand my life, and they never particularly liked Neil. Not because of anything he did, but because of what he represents, and because of who I’ve become since we married.” A faint, sad smile curved her lips. “They want me to be Engracia Trejo.” Her accent materialized like magic when she spoke her name. “They don’t like me being Gracie Davett.

“But despite what they think they know, and despite what you’ve decided is fact, Neil has never hurt me. He’s never hurt either of the kids. Whatever his faults, he’s not abusive.”

“Then why did you leave him?”

“What?” she said, her voice rising once more. “I’m not allowed to leave unless he hits me?”

“That’s not –”

She threw her hands wide. “I left because it wasn’t working. And like I said, anything more than that is none of your damn business.”

She started to walk away.

“It’s not that easy, Gracie.”

She halted, her back to me, her dark hair dancing in the wind.

“For whatever reason, you and your family have drawn the attention of dark sorcerers. Now I’m guessing that’s because either you or Neil has been working with them or for them. I’d also guess the break-in is tied up in all of this. They were after the knife, because somehow one of you has come into possession of it. You don’t want me accusing Neil of anything, and you don’t like it when I question the things you tell me. But there is way, way more to this that you’re admitting. To be honest, I don’t care if it’s Neil’s fault or yours. I came out here to help you, and that’s what I’ll do. But it works both ways. I need you to trust me, just a little bit, enough to help me understand what the hell is happening here. Someone like Fitzwater doesn’t simply show up at your door. There’s a reason he found you. And I’m still convinced it has something to do with Neil, but if you tell me it was you, I’ll believe it.”

Gracie turned, squinting against the sun.

“I didn’t bring blood magic into our lives,” she said, surrender in the words.

“So he was casting dark spells.”

“Yes. But it wasn’t like he had joined with men like that.” She waved a hand, and I knew she meant Fitzwater and the guys he’d had with him today. “He was playing around, trying new magic. He never . . .” She gazed back down the road the way we had come, her expression more fragile than I had yet seen. “He didn’t like it that I had more power than he did. Some husbands don’t like it when their wives out-earn them. Neil made plenty of money, but he was no match for me when it came to spells.”

I frowned. “Did you two . . . did you have magical battles or something?”

“No. We used to play around a bit, that’s all. I thought it was fun. But after a while he grew frustrated, because I was always better than he was. That’s when he started playing with blood spells. One night he insisted on playing one of our old games. We hadn’t in a long while. I’d gotten tired of the way his mood soured when he couldn’t keep up with something I did. But this night he insisted.”

“We did fire spells. That was our usual. We’d set up candles in our room and see who could light them fastest. Sometimes after, with the room all lit up like that . . .” Her mouth twisted and she crossed her arms over her chest. “Anyway, on this night, he pulled out a knife and before I knew what he was doing he had cut himself and lit all the candles with a single spell. There was this whoosh of power, and it was like a wave of fire had swept through our bedroom. I swear he almost burned the place down. He was all pleased with himself, but I got angry with him, told him not to use spells like that in the house ever again.

“We got into a big fight. He said that I didn’t like being beaten at my own game. The truth was, though, I was scared. I’d heard about blood spells but I’d never seen one. And I didn’t want that kind of magic around the kids.”

“So that was why you left.”

She hiked a shoulder, dropped it again. “I didn’t leave right away. He said he wouldn’t use blood spells anymore, at least not around the house, and for a while I don’t think he did. But we didn’t play that game again. Or any others, for that matter. Even that would’ve been all right. But he stopped talking to me, at least beyond the day-to-day stuff. We didn’t laugh anymore. It was like there was this constant tension, you know? After a while, I couldn’t take it any more, so I took the kids and went back to my mom and dad’s place.” A smile ghosted across her lips, reminding me of one I had seen on her mother’s face. “That’s how desperate I was to get away at the end. I went back to them.”

I had no idea what to say.

“The kids don’t know any of this . . .” she said.

“Of course. I won’t say a thing.”

“I’m not in love with him anymore. It got too sad for that. But I still love him, and I want the kids to keep loving him. That’s why I reacted the way I did.”

“I understand. What about the knife?”

She shook her head. “I’m not ready to tell that story yet.”

I suppose I could have pushed her, but she had opened up to me more than I expected, and I thought maybe if I didn’t push now, my patience would pay off later.

“Fair enough,” I said.

She regarded me for another moment before nodding and turning to walk back to the pickup. I should have followed right away, but for a few seconds all I could do was watch her, feeling a blend of pity and something else I couldn’t quite name. Or perhaps didn’t want to name.

I had only met her a couple of days ago. This morning I hadn’t been sure I wanted anything to do with her. And now . . . Now I had to remind myself that I was here to protect her and her kids, and that the woman I loved was back in Phoenix, probably worrying about me.

I took a step toward the pickup, but then froze as magic brushed my mind.

Justis Fearsson.

I spun, expecting to see Saorla behind me. But I only saw clusters of brittlebush and stunted prickly pear cacti.

I know that you can hear me.

“What do you want, Saorla?”

Where are you? I can speak in your mind, but I cannot see you or find you. What glamour is this? What have you done?

I didn’t answer. I was impressed, though, that my father’s warding had worked against her so well.

I can always find the woman, you know. I can use her to make you tell me anything, to make you do whatever I wish.

“Not without Namid knowing about it. Now what is it you want?”

I want the woman. Not yours. She is nothing more than a cudgel I can use against you. But this other — you know which one I mean — her I want, and her children as well.

She didn’t mention the knife, and I thought better of admitting to her that I knew of it. “Well, that’s too damn bad.” I said it with enough force, but my heart was laboring, because I knew what her response would be. I should have expected this.

Do not be so quick to refuse me, she said in my mind, as if reading from a script I’d already memorized. You owe me a boon, and I choose now to demand its payment.

“I won’t give them to you. You can demand all you want, but I won’t do this. You want to use them, to make them soldiers in your army, and I won’t allow it.”

It is not for you to decide! Her words raged in my head like a storm. She might not have known where I was, but she could still lash at my mind with her power.

I winced, raised a hand to my temple.

You will bring her to me, and the children, or I will kill everyone who you hold dear. Your love, the dark-skinned woman you used to work with, your father.

I started to object, but she talked over me, her voice like thunder in my ears. Namid protects them, I know. He protects you, as well. But he does not know of our agreement, does he?

I could picture the cruel smile that met my silence.

I thought not. Defy me, and he shall learn of it. And once he does, he will be helpless to protect you or those you love. A promised boon is no small thing, Justis Fearsson. We have a bargain, truly sworn. Uphold your end of it, or face the consequences of breaking your promise to one such as I.

In the next instant she was gone from my head. I sensed her absence as forcefully as I had her presence. Nothing looked different; her voice was gone, of course, but even that wasn’t what told me she had withdrawn. It simply seemed that a weight had lifted, that my thoughts were once again my own.

I rubbed at my temple a second time; the shadow of a headache lingered, but most of the pain had vanished with her. I turned eastward. The moon hung low in the sky, white on blue and nearly full. Its pull on my thoughts was more gentle than Saorla’s had been, more kind. I’m not sure I’d ever thought of the approach of the full in such benign terms. I had a lot to figure out before the phasing began.

I stumbled back to the truck, trying to clear my thoughts.

“You all right?” Gracie asked as I drew near.

“Sure, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You look sick.” She stepped in front of me, forcing me to stop. And then she laid the back of her hand against my forehead, the way my mom used to when she checked me for fever. “You feel cold.”

“Aren’t I supposed to? Cold and wet, like a puppy’s nose?”

That earned me a giggle from Emmy.

“Seriously, Fearsson, what’s up with you?”

“Don’t call me that.” I said it more sharply than I’d intended, but right now I really didn’t need anything that would make me equate her with Billie, even in the most superficial way.

“I’m sorry. Jay. Now tell me what’s going on.”

“There’s nothing –”

“I saw that you were talking. I couldn’t make out what you said, but your lips were moving and you seemed good and pissed. So I’d like to know who you were talking to and what it was you were saying.”

I managed not to flinch away from what I saw in her eyes. With the sun shining in them they were a deep, earthy brown. “It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

“Generally speaking, I like to be the judge of that myself, especially when it concerns my children.”

She had a point, I suppose. And being embarrassed at my own fear and powerlessness didn’t seem like the best excuse for keeping her in the dark. I regarded the moon again.

“I was talking to Saorla.”

“Saorla,” she repeated, her eyes narrowing. “You’ve mentioned her. She’s the one . . . like a runemyste, only dark.”

“That’s her. She wants to know where we are, and she thought she’d try to scare me into telling her.”

“Scare you how?”

I met her gaze once more. “By threatening to kill all the people I care about.”

She stared back at me, clearly at a loss for words.

“I essentially told her to go to hell. I don’t know what the consequences of that will be. I’m hoping she understands that once those people are dead, she has nothing on me, so she’s better off letting them live and using the threat again and again. But she’s more than a little unhinged and I never know what she might do. So the next time you’re feeling sorry for yourself and want to tell me to mind my own business or remind me again of how little I know about you and your life, try to remember that I have a stake in this, too.”

Her cheeks colored and her lips thinned to a hard, flat line. But after a second, she nodded once and backed out of my way.

I walked around to the other side of the truck, and climbed in. She had already taken her seat and shut her door.

Saying nothing, I pulled out into the road once more and continued on to wherever the hell we were going next.

 

Through Fire – Snippet 08

Through Fire – Snippet 08

Limiting Factor

“Not particularly experienced,” he said, as I came out of the fresher and asked about his experience with undercover work.

He too had got dressed in the same sort of cheap-but-gaudy attire, in his case an aping of the tight pants with broad-shouldered jackets that Simon’s circle wore — also made of plastic-like fabric in an unlikely sky blue color. I noted that his gaze barely flicked over me, more as if verifying I’d done the job properly than with any prospective interest, no matter how remote. I wasn’t used to indifference. Not that I minded it.

“It’s just that I have some idea how to survive underground,” he said. He shrugged again. “The Good Man Simon St. Cyr picked me out of death row. Insurrection. Activities against the state.” He must have seen the expression on my face, as I was thinking these were strange qualifications to become the main chief of security to the Good Man. He grinned, a surprisingly attractive expression that made him look ten years younger, almost boyish. “Well, you see, his father had just become incapacitated and Simon — St. Cyr was replacing his father’s security force with his own, so that, well… so we’d be loyal to him.”

“And he was, of course, involved in rebellion himself, one of the sans culottes.”

Alexis nodded. I got the impression that there was something more he wanted to say, but when he spoke again, what he said was, “I got us broomer suits,” he said. “Used. Cheap. Pray we don’t have to use them.”

“Why?” Broomer suits were the padded leather clothes one had to wear when riding the antigrav wands that were forbidden in most places on Earth, but which people still rode anyway — either as a safety measure to escape from a crashing vehicle, or when they were up to something they didn’t want the all-pervasive authorities of Earth to know about. Being illegal, brooms didn’t have built in trackers that were on every other vehicle.

“Because if we have to use brooms it means that we already botched all sane escape plans.” He looked at me, as though he were upset that I hadn’t picked up on the subtleties of the situation. “They’re monitoring traffic. Patrols and … every other way, even possibly infrared. I don’t want to travel long distance on a broom, but we might not be able to use a flyer. Flyers are much easier to trace.”

“Are you sure we have to leave the seacity to look for help? Can’t we contrive a plan to rescue Simon on our own, if it’s so difficult to leave?”

It seemed to me the longer we took to fight back the more people would die. It was well and good for Brisbois to say Simon was too valuable to be killed, but, as far as people knew, his family had ruled the seacity for years. Fearing him had been a matter of survival. They might not feel free until they killed him. I vaguely remembered it had been like that in old France. The king had had to die.

For the first time he showed a normal human emotion: there was raw fear in his eyes. He put his ear to the door again, as though to confirm there was no one outside. He turned around to face me, and his broad, homely face looked pale and haggard. “I … you’re going to think I’m insane, but it looks to me like we’re in the middle of new Turmoils.”

“New–?”

“Turmoils,” he said. “With a capital T. Historical disturbances, when all the bioed people were killed!” he said. “In Liberte, at least.”

I stared. He had to be exaggerating. You see, unlike most people on Earth, I had seen images of the Turmoils. Most people on Earth had heard of them, but not in the detail we’d heard of them in Eden, partly, I thought, to hide the fact that after the Turmoils the Mules — now calling themselves Good Men and pretending to be completely non-bio-enhanced — had climbed back into power. On Earth, the pictures, videos and holos of that time period were restricted or censored. On Eden they were mandatory viewing, because that was our genesis story, the reason our ancestors had left, the reason we kept our home secret from Earth and guarded it.

For a while, at the end of the twenty first, the fate of everyone on Earth had been determined at birth. Either you were one of the enhanced ones or you were a serf, at best a working drone, at worst one of the myriad dependent on the state for charity.

And then it had broken.

In Eden we were taught it had gone wrong because the bio-rulers, the Mules weren’t quite human. They were genetically human, mind. Made of human DNA. Yet they hadn’t been raised as people, but as instruments of the state. They had no loyalty to humans or the ways of humans. They had wreaked havoc on the Earth while purporting to improve it. They’d destroyed vast portions of the fauna and flora of the continents and ruthlessly moved populations around, reduced populations, enhanced others. We’d been taught it had gone wrong because governments were too powerful. Because one person, whether bio-ed or not could not decide best for multitudes.

But in any case, the results had been disastrous. The rebellion against the Mules was known as The Turmoils, capitalized, as though there had never been and there never would be worse disasters on Earth.

It had started as a hunt for the Mules left behind, but, as those proved elusive, it had expanded to a hunt for all the Mule servants left behind, and, finally, for anyone who was smarter, prettier, faster — anyone who could be bioed. In some places, they’d used gen readers to identify modified genes, but in most places beauty or competence were considered evidence enough.

Interestingly, but not unexpectedly, given the abilities they’d been endowed with, most of the Mules left behind had not only survived, they had gotten new identities and they’d thrived. They’d taken over. In the fullness of time they’d become the Good Men, Earth’s rulers under a regime that forbid bio enhancing and research, and concentrated on keeping the Earth as stable as possible. Having defeated the cloning stops in their genes, they’d also stayed in power. To keep up appearances, they had their brains transplanted into the bodies of their supposed sons, generation after generation and inheriting from themselves, to hold the Earth in an immutable grip.

Simon had escaped the fate of the other sons of Good Men, of becoming a body donor for his “father”, because his father had suffered a disabling accident before he could have the operation performed. Simon had figured out the system and what his fate would have been. I didn’t know if he’d become a rebel then, or if he’d been a rebel before. A few other sons of Good Men had escaped the brain-transfer, and were part of the Earth-wide revolution raging against the old regime. I’d met two of them: Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva and Jan Aldert Hans Reiner.

It was impossible there could be Turmoils in a world where most of the territory was still in the control of the Mules-by-another-name, still part of the regime that had given Earth a vaunted three-hundred-year-long stability. Wasn’t it? I backed up to sit on the bed. “What do you mean Turmoils? What would precipitate Turmoils?”

I couldn’t read him. I couldn’t tell if he was confused or upset, or if he felt sorry for me. It was all there, but what he said aloud was, “I think,” he said. He swallowed. “I think it’s just as it was, and that they’re hunting down and killing anyone they believe is bioed. That was … the raid on the palace, the people surrounding the seacity. Not the Good Men, but the people, in the territories and in the other seacities. Most of the people here are administrators, so they think…”

“That they’re bioed?”

He nodded. “It was always a danger. The Sans Culottes, you know, want equality, so they swear allegiance to natural people, not to any state. And now they know the Good Man is not precisely of the people, not like the rest of us. And they whipped up a frenzy of maybe there are more. If the Mules lied and took over again, they might be all over.”

 

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 23

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 23

“No,” Phillip whispered as he made a vertical incision about an inch long. “But I’ve watched Professor Casseri demonstrate how to do it on cadavers and animals many times.” He sliced at the tissue under the skin until he reached the cartilage of the tracheal rings. He pushed the tissue aside with the fingers of his left hand as he tried to locate the cricothyroid membrane. Once he found it he made a horizontal incision in the membrane between the tracheal rings. Air tried to whistle through the hole he’d made, telling him he’d made an opening into the trachea. He enlarged the hole enough to slip in the curved cannula into the hole and pushed it in a good inch, until the wings on the cannula, which were there to stop it being pushed in too far, came into contact with the boy’s throat. Almost immediately the boy’s struggles eased. But Phillip couldn’t rest yet. He needed to tie the cannula in place so it wouldn’t slip out. He threaded a ribbon through the hole on one wing of the cannula and passed it under his neck. He then threaded the other end through the hole on the other wing and pulled the ribbon tight before tying a knot to hold it securely in place. He’d done it. Now he could rest.

Phillip was feeling almost faint. He collapsed onto his buttocks in relief. It was one thing to watch someone of Professor Casseri’s caliber demonstrate the operation, it was something else do it oneself. Phillip wiped the sweat from his brow and looked up. He was surrounded by interested faces, not least of which was the woman who’d been hitting him. She was being held by Gasparo and Leon, whom he assumed had come to his aid. “Thanks for holding her, but you can let her go now,” he told them as he laid his shaking hands on his knees.

The moment she was released the woman collapsed beside her child, kissing him and cooing over him.

“He’s still in a bad way,” Phillip warned the woman. She laid a hand on her son’s forehead and spoke. Phillip couldn’t follow what she was saying, but guessed that because she was looking at him that she was thanking him for saving her son. He waved that away as being of little importance, the achievement being sufficient reward in itself. Still, he had a problem. The Cannula in the boy’s trachea was only a short term solution to an unknown problem. He needed more information, but he couldn’t communicate with the mother. He looked around the crowd that had gathered. “Can anyone tell me what happened?” He asked. It didn’t draw a reply in Venetian, so he tried again in his native German. That also failed to elicit a satisfactory response. In desperation he tried his last remaining language, classical Latin.

A man approached and laid a gentle hand on the shoulder of the woman. “My name is Isaac, and I would like to know the name of the man who saved my son’s life.”

“Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz.” They were speaking in classical Latin, the language of instruction, so Phillip knew he was dealing with an educated man. “Do you have any idea what might have caused the swelling,” he asked.

Isaac nodded. “I believe the swelling is caused by the stings of bees. Jusufio and the other children were playing near the trees when they disturbed a bees’ nest.”

Phillip turned back to the boy and studied his face and neck. Now he knew to look for them he could make out little dots that were the sites where he’d been stung. He did a quick count, finding thirty-four possible bee sting sites. He had little doubt that there were more, and even less doubt that they were the cause of the swelling. He turned back Jusufio’s father. “Your son won’t be able to breathe without the cannula until the swelling goes down.”

“I understand, Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz. I too am a physician, and I know it will be many days before the swelling reduces enough so that Jusufio can breathe normally. I lack a tube such as you used, can I buy it from you?”

“It’s one of a set, and I’d rather not sell it, as I might need it again. Where are you headed? If it’s the same way we are going we can leave it in place a while longer. We’re bound for Biograd na Moru.”

“We too are bound for Biograd na Moru. Mayhap we can travel together, and you can tell me about what you did? Galen and Aretaeus both wrote about such an operation, but that’s the first time I have ever seen it performed.”

Phillip wasn’t sure this was the right time to say he’d never seen it performed on a live human before, but he was happy to talk to the man.

Biograd na Moru

Phillip spent the morning talking to Isaac on the trip to Biograd na Moru, and once the expedition was settled he hurried over to the table where Michael was sitting to beg permission to follow him to his lodgings where they could continue their conversation.

“You have to let me spend some more time with him, Michael,” he pleaded. “His theories about the Quinta Essentia of the Human Humors could be important.”

“The what?” Michael asked.

Phillip ran his hands lightly over the table top as he tried to assemble his thoughts. “Are you familiar with De secretis naturae sive quinta essentia?”

“The book by Ramon Llull? I’ve heard of it.”

Phillip nodded. “Yes, that one. Well, whereas Signor Lull talks mostly of using the fifth essence, the quinta essentia of things as a cure, Isaac sees it more of a solvent for the medicines, making them a hundred times more powerful.”

Michael responded by slowly shaking his head. “I can imagine using the fifth essence of Plantago major as a basis for an infusion made out of the leaves rather than using water, but I can’t see any logical reason why the resulting medicine should be any stronger. And certainly not a hundred times stronger.”

“A hundred times stronger might be a slight exaggeration on Isaac’s part,” Phillip admitted. “But imagine if mixing a drug with the right quinta essentia could even just double its strength . . .”

“I’m trying to imagine it, Phillip.” Michael shook his head. “Nope. I can’t see it happening. It sounds too much like witchcraft.”

“But you must have seen it happen. Think of how neither acidum salis nor aqua fortis can dissolve gold on their own, but if you mix them together in the right proportions you create aqua regia, which can dissolve gold.”

“Okay, you’ve got me there,” Michael said. “I’ve seen aqua regia at work. Why do you suppose it works?” he asked.

“Ah, well, that’s a good question.”

Michael’s lips twitched. “Do I get a good answer though?”

“Of course.” Phillip planted his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers so he could rest his chin on his fingertips. “Consider Adam. God created man, but on his own Adam cannot produce children. So god took of Adam a rib and created Eve. On her own Eve can’t conceive a child, but together Adam and Eve produced Cain. So as with Adam and Eve, who alone can’t produce a child, neither acid on its own can dissolve the noble gold. But together they make aqua regia, which can dissolve gold.” He looked expectantly at Michael. “Do you understand now?”

“What happened to Abel and Seth?”

“It’s just an analogy for illustrative purposes, Michael. For now imagine that Adam and Eve only had one child.”

“But . . .”

Phillip exhaled noisily through his nose. It was more of a sigh than a snort. He was sure Michael was just trying to be difficult. “Michael. Surprisingly enough you still seem to still have most of your teeth. Would you like me to remedy the situation?”

Michael smiled in the face of Phillip’s threat, displaying his teeth in all their glory. “I still don’t see the connection between Adam and Eve and the quinta essentia of something being able to double or more the power of a medicine.”

Phillip paused to think about his explanation. “Okay, how about this. Acidum salis is the acid of salt. Salt is ultimately derived from the sea, which is the all-mother. It’s dried and heated and put through extensive complex processes to make the acid, so acidum salis is the acidic essence of the all-mother.”

 

Death’s Bright Day – Snippet 31

Death’s Bright Day – Snippet 31

“Where’s the station?” Adele said aloud.

“In the basement, but the files are all locked,” Yvette said. “I have the key to the communications console, though.”

“Thank you,” Adele said. The electronic files wouldn’t have been a problem even if Grozhinski hadn’t given her the keys, but there was no reason to tell the wife that. “Hale, I’ll take a look at the equipment. Then I’ll probably have you stay here while I return to the Sissie and discuss the matter with Daniel. Oh, and I’ll have an ambulance sent here to pick up Mignouri. Mistress Mignouri, you’d better pack a case. Whether you go with your husband or not, you can’t stay here any longer.”

“Right, mistress,” Hale said. She braced to attention unconsciously.

“You can’t walk in here and do that!” said Yvette.

“Mistress,” said Lady Mundy, speaking with the icy certainty that her mother would have displayed in similar circumstances. “I am here at the behest of your husband’s superior’s highest superior. You have nothing to say to me but ‘Yes sir!’ And if you’re wise, you might add, ‘And thank you for not shooting me for treason, sir.'”

Yvette’s mouth fell open.

Tovera had opened the door under the stairs. Adele strode to it.

Behind her Evans said plaintively, “Bledsoe, are we supposed to shoot this lady?”

* * *

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Daniel said, speaking clearly and without the need of amplification to be heard by his audience of the forty-odd officers and non-coms. “I am Captain Leary. The Minister of War has put me in command of the Nabis Contingent of the Forces of the Tarbell Stars.”

Daniel had changed into clean utilities with RCN rank tabs and his saucer hat for this introduction. It was the garb he would have worn on the bridge of the Princess Cecile when she was in RCN service, though on larger ships officers were expected to be in 2nd Class uniforms.

All the officers before him were men, which was the usual case in the military on planets at such a distance from the centers of civilization. Gender discrimination wasn’t unheard of even on lesser worlds in the Cinnabar and Alliance spheres. It was one more excuse for residents of Cinnabar and the core worlds of the Alliance to consider their subjects from the fringes to be higher animals rather than real human beings.

“Minister Robin put me in charge because he wants the Nabis Contingent raised to the level of the RCN,” Daniel said, keeping his tone informal. His audience had been nervous at the start, but there was nothing in his delivery to worry them further. “That’s going to be a change, as some of you have already learned.”

He smiled gently as he looked across his ranked audience. A dozen of those facing him were not in full uniform, and one was wearing pajamas. Further, some were the worse for drink. They hadn’t all been on duty at the time Daniel called the meeting; but most had, or should have been.

“Now, a spacer is a spacer,” Daniel said. “There’s good ones and bad ones, but the RCN isn’t great because our crews come from Cinnabar — which mostly they don’t. What makes a military force great is the quality of its officers, commissioned and warrant both. That means you.”

He smiled again. This time his expression wasn’t so friendly.

“You’re going to come up to RCN standards,” Daniel said. “Then you and I together are going to turn the Nabis Contingent into the finest fighting force in the Tarbell Stars.”

Only two of the commissioned officers and half a dozen of the non-coms — warrant officers and sergeants depending on the service — had been at their duty stations or in their official residences. The spacers’ ground billets and the Regiment’s barracks were filthy.

The reason the personnel were here facing Daniel was that Cory had located them using a console on the Princess Cecile. Adele had apparently connected the databases and communications networks in Newtown — and probably throughout Peltry — to the Sissie. Knowing that wouldn’t have helped Daniel himself very much, but to Adele’s protégés it was as good as a street map to the missing officers. Teams of military police backed by two or three Sissies each had brought the officers to the parade square between the Nabis barracks and the Katchaturian’s berth.

Angry bluster probably wouldn’t have gotten Nabis citizens very far with military police, none of whom were from that until-recently independent planet. It got nowhere at all with the Sissies, nor did any claimed rank that wasn’t in the RCN.

“You’re going to train…” said Daniel, raising his voice slightly to override the sudden buzz of voices. “By performing as common spacers under officers of the RCN. On Cinnabar, RCN spacer is a respected position. That’s because every citizen knows that the RCN is a collection of the best.”

Vesey and Major Berners, the Minister’s representative, stood to Daniel’s left. Woetjans was on his right, but a pace back out of the bosun’s own sense of decorum.

Hogg stood at the side of the square along with common spacers from the Sissie and the Katchaturian; both ships were moored in the same slip. Hogg had wanted to be closer to Daniel, but the whole point of this address was to create a dichotomy between the military and civilians.

The best way to weld the two crews into a single fighting force was to give them third parties on whom they both could look down: mere civilians. Daniel wasn’t a philosopher. He didn’t try to reform human nature, he just used whatever aspects he could when they helped him toward a goal.

“Now, you’re going to train as hard as you need to come up to RCN standards,” Daniel said. “It’s not going to be a picnic. You’ll take orders from whoever your officers — my officers — put in charge of you, and you’ll learn to jump when you do it. That means –”

“How dare you?” said a man as he pushed his way forward from the third row. “How dare you, you Cinnabar ponce!”

“You’re Lieutenant Feilson, I believe,” Daniel said pleasantly. He adjusted his stance slightly.

“I bloody well am!” Feilson said. He was properly dressed — but in a civilian suit of good quality rather than the uniform he should have worn as the duty officer of the Katchaturian. “I’m an officer of the Fleet and a gentleman of Pleasaunce. If you think some yob from Cinnabar is going to give me orders, you’re bloody wrong!”

“Get back in line, Master Feilson,” Daniel said, his voice still friendly. “You’re on duty and I’m your commanding –”

Feilson was a little taller than Daniel and in good condition; he swung for Daniel’s jaw. Daniel blocked the fist with his open left hand. Instead of counter-punching as he normally would have done, Daniel shoved the Pleasaunce officer backward.

“An officer of the RCN doesn’t brawl with his crew,” Daniel said, trying to sound a little bored. He wanted to shake the sting out of his left hand, but he controlled the urge; Feilson had been stronger than Daniel expected. “Master Feilson, you have –”

Feilson cocked his arm to swing again. Woetjans caught him by the neck and jerked him aside. Feilson got out a one squawk before the bosun slapped him with her right hand. She could drive nails with her callused palms.

Feilson’s eyes glazed; Woetjans tossed him to Barnes and Dasi. They dragged the unconscious man away.

“As I was about to say,” Daniel continued to the remainder of his audience, “Master Feilson has chosen to resign rather than become a real officer. At this moment you all have the option of resigning. I don’t know or care what your obligations to the Tarbell Stars may be. If you’re not willing to become an officer who I can respect, I want no part of you.”

“Does she beat the crap outa us if we quit now?” said a scarred, wiry man of fifty in the front row. He wore utilities but the rank tabs were on the underside of his collar.

Daniel didn’t recognize the fellow by name from the briefing materials, but he didn’t need to. “No, she doesn’t,” Daniel said, “but I hope you don’t quit anyway. Senior warrant officers with the balls to speak up aren’t thick on the ground around here. What’s your specialty, spacer?”

The little man braced to attention. “Gunner Gabriel Wright, sir!” he said. “Late of the Fleet, late of a lot of other places that needed somebody who knew how to make a plasma cannon sing!”

“At ease, Wright,” Daniel said. “Do you know how to take orders too?”

“Yes sir,” Wright said. “Even if I think the guy giving ’em is about two brain cells short of being a moron. As I did Lieutenant Feilson, sir.”

“I’ll hope I measure up to your standards when the time comes, Wright,” Daniel said.

His expression sobered as he looked at his audience again.

“Gentlemen,” Daniel said, “I’ve told you that you’ll learn to be officers under me, and that’s important. But this is your chance to learn something even better. I’m giving you a chance to be part of an elite combat unit. Until you’ve felt that, you can’t imagine what it’s like. You trust your fellows and they trust you, because you know every one of you will do his job.”

Daniel felt his throat getting husky as it always did when he thought about this. He continued, “You’ll have trained with the Sissies and you’ll be as good as the Sissies, and there’s no better in the human universe than my Sissies.”

Daniel swallowed. “Gentlemen, I’m going to dismiss you for an hour,” he said. “After that, you’ll assemble again and we’ll enroll you in the new Nabis Contingent, all of you who’ve got the balls.”

He grinned and said, “Which I hope a lot of you do, because we’ve got a real fight ahead with the Upholders. Dismissed!”

 

Shadow’s Blade – Snippet 40

Shadow’s Blade – Snippet 40

CHAPTER 14

Finding another campground, as opposed to a hotel room, would have been the safer course. Paying cash for a campsite never raised eyebrows; paying cash for a hotel room, particularly so close to the Mexican border, along a route used by drug traffickers, was bound to set off alarm bells. And credit card payments were too easy to trace.

But when I mentioned all of this, once Gracie had woken up, she insisted we find an out-of-the-way hotel.

“I need a shower and a comfortable bed,” she said. “And we’d need to buy a new tent and new sleeping bags, which means using a credit card anyway. We might as well be comfortable.”

She had a point.

Another idea came to me. As I put us on state road 86, which cut across what was known on maps as the Papago Indian Reservation, home of the Tohono O’odham nation, I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled through the list of contacts.

“Mommy says people who drive and use cell phones are morons,” Zach said, talking around his saliva-soaked thumb.

“Your Mom’s right, but this is important, and it can’t wait.”

Gracie’s frown returned. “Take your thumb out of your mouth, kiddo.”

She reached for his hand, but he jerked out of her grasp with a loud, “No!”

I found the number I was after and pressed dial.

“Amaya,” said the voice on the other end.

“It’s Jay Fearsson.”

“I can see that,” he said, sounding impatient. “What news do you have for me?”

“They’re safe. They’re with me.”

“Where are you?” he asked. The impatience had fled his voice, leaving him sounding almost too eager.

I hesitated. “We’re outside the city.”

“I understand. Where?”

“I’d rather not say. I’m afraid Saorla might be keeping track of my conversations.” And I’m not entirely sure I trust you enough to answer that question. I wondered if it’d been a mistake to call Jacinto. I wanted to ask him if he would pay for a couple of hotel rooms for us, on his credit card. But now that I had him on the line, I wasn’t so certain this was a good idea. I wondered how much he knew about the Sgian-Bán?

“Yes, of course,” he said. “You’re right to be careful. Why don’t you go ahead and bring them to me. They’ll be safe here.”

Yeah, I didn’t really believe that either. I had no trouble imagining why Saorla and her cabal were after the knife and wanted to enlist Gracie and Emmy in their army of dark sorcerers. And I had already promised myself that I wouldn’t allow that to happen.

But wasn’t it possible, even probable, that the other side — the “good side” — was as desperate as Saorla to find the weapon and add the girl and her mom to their ranks? They were all prizes to be won. If Gracie was as powerful as she seemed, and Emmy fulfilled the promise she had already shown, they might not need the knife to tip the balance in this magical war. Add in the Sgian-Bán and it might be enough to turn a stalemate into a rout. I wouldn’t have been surprised if all these thoughts had crossed Jacinto’s mind; I had heard the hunger in his tone. And, I had to admit, on some level I appreciated the importance of doing everything possible to bolster the strength of whatever force was arrayed against the dark ones. Our kind weren’t supposed to use blood magic — though once again, I had just now, while battling Fitzwater — and so we needed every advantage we could find.

The problem was, while Amaya might have seen himself as fighting on the side of the angels, I knew better. There were no angels here, and I didn’t want to see this family dragged into any war, regardless of which side drafted them.

“Jay?”

“I’m here,” I said. How did I say as much without pissing him off? It took me all of two seconds to conclude there was no way.

“You’re going to bring them to me,” he said, a command in the words. “That’s what we agreed to when I hired you.”

“That’s what you wanted me to agree to,” I said. “I told you then, it might not be possible, at least not right away.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I’ll be in touch when I know more, and when I’m sure it’s safe to bring them back to Phoenix.”

“Fearsson! Fearsson!”

I snapped the phone shut, ending the call. But that second call of my name had been so loud, it almost sounded as though Amaya was with us in the truck. Gracie and the kids were watching me.

Zach grinned and pulled his thumb from his mouth. “Fearsson! Fearsson!” he said in a sing-song.

I mussed his hair. “Goofball.”

“Am not!” But his grin widened.

“He didn’t sound very happy,” Gracie said, appearing far less amused.

“He’ll have to get used to disappointment,” I said, quoting an old movie. She didn’t seem to catch the reference.

“Who was that?”

I had a feeling she already knew, but I didn’t flinch from her gaze as I said, “Jacinto Amaya.”

She quirked an eyebrow, reminding me of Billie. “Not a man you want to make angry.”

“No. But I’m not just going to hand you over to him.”

Her gaze drifted away, settled on the highway in front of us. “Thank you. But then why did you call him in the first place?”

“We need for someone to put a couple of hotel rooms on a credit card. He seemed like the logical choice, at least until I realized how eager he was to have you under his roof. It was my mistake. I’ll be more careful next time.”

“That’s not . . .” She shook her head, looked out the windshield again. “You’re doing fine. We appreciate it.”

Another idea came to me. I dug into my pocket for my wallet and handed it to Gracie. “There should be a credit card in this in the name of Leander Fearsson.”

She took the wallet but for several seconds did nothing more than stare at it. “Do you really expect me to find anything in this?”

I frowned, eyeing the wallet and seeing it as she would. It was a mess. An overstuffed, ragged, disorganized mess.

“It should be in one of the sleeves behind my driver’s license.”

She searched the wallet, a frown wrinkling the bridge of her nose. “There are receipts in here from, like, the 1950s.”

“I wasn’t alive in the ’50s.”

“Well, clearly the wino you rolled to get this wallet was.”

I laughed. Emmy eyed her mom and me, her expression cross.

“Oh, here it is. ‘Leander Fearsson,’ you said. Right?”

“That’s it.”

“This an alias?”

I laughed again. “Hardly. Leander is my father’s name. I take care of him, and sometimes I need to make purchases in his name. It’s tied to a separate account. Someone watching for charges on one of our cards might not notice a charge on his.”

“He might notice.”

I shook my head, staring straight ahead. “Not likely.”

“He a weremyste too?”

“An old one,” I said, which told her all that she needed to know. Generally speaking, an old weremyste was a crazy weremyste.

“I’m sorry. My mother took blockers, so I never had to worry about that. But Neil’s mother . . . I know what it’s like.”

I didn’t have much to say in response. I drove, and allowed the conversation to die. The reservation included some gorgeous high country, and I was content to enjoy the scenery and figure out where we might stay tonight. At Quijotoa, I cut north on a narrow two-lane that tracked toward Casa Grande. There were quicker ways to do this, more direct routes. But all of them involved spending at least some time on one of the interstates, and now that I had Gracie and the kids with me, the thought of getting on the main freeways set off warning bells in my head. I’d learned long ago to trust my instincts on such things.

“You heading someplace in particular?” Gracie asked, her voice sounding loud after such a long silence.

“Not really. But I was thinking that I want to avoid getting on the freeways if I can help it.”

She nodded. “I agree.”

“Any idea why?”

“No idea at all,” she said. “Just a feeling.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

Zach took his thumb out of his mouth. “Mommy, I’m hungry.”

“We’ll be in Casa Grande in a little while,” I said. “We can find some food there.”

“Pizza?”

I had to grin. My childhood hadn’t been the happiest, and with my mom dying and my dad drinking himself out of a job and going nuts before my eyes, my adolescence was a complete disaster. But in that moment I thought it must have been nice to be five years old and oblivious to the perils dogging us all.

“Sure. Pizza sounds good.” I glanced at the fuel gauge. “We could use gas, too.”

I wasn’t crazy about the idea of putting charges on my dad’s card. The money wasn’t the issue. I paid his bills for him, and this one I would pay out of my account rather than his. But this was just the sort of “unusual activity” that was bound to draw the attention of the credit card bank. Of course, there were ways around that. I handed my phone to Gracie, had her dial the number on the back of the card, and took the phone from her. After being on hold for a few minutes, I spoke with an agent and told her my father and I were taking a short trip and would be using the card. I answered a few questions, told her the bank could call me at this number if they needed to, and hung up.

One problem taken care of.

I only hoped I was right in thinking that neither Saorla’s friends nor Amaya would think to watch my father’s account.

Traffic built as we neared Casa Grande, and by the time we found a pizza place, the kids were starved and grumpy. We wolfed down a meal, gassed up the car, and set out again, crawling through the city and its outskirts, past strip malls and car dealerships, chain motels and bars, pawn shops and liquor stores.

Eventually we emerged from the sprawl, passed over Interstate 10, and drove back into more open country. At first, much of it was agricultural, vast tracts of dusty farmland. But at Florence, we turned north toward the dry peaks and high desert of the Superstition Wilderness. I had no intention of taking them too far off the beaten path, but I knew the area and was certain we could find some small motel along the road that would offer a bed and a shower and a hot meal.

Neither Gracie nor Emmy had said much since lunch. Emmy had her nose buried in a book. Gracie was leaning against her door, staring out the window, the desert wind blowing through her hair. Zach had fallen asleep, his head lolling in his mother’s lap, her fingers running gently, absently through his light brown hair. I was reluctant to break the silence, and the relative peace we all seemed to be enjoying. But I had a question for her — about a dozen, really — and once they started to worm their way into my thoughts, I couldn’t ignore them.

“The day we met,” I said, drawing her gaze, “I asked you about Fitzwater. I didn’t know his name yet, but I think you did. You told me you weren’t sure if you’d ever seen him before the restaurant, and you said it didn’t matter if you had. Then you started to say something else, but you never finished the thought. I’ve been wondering what you intended to say.”

“I’m not sure I remember. A lot’s happened since then.”

“You were telling me for the second or third time that you didn’t know who he was. But then you said, ‘The rest — ‘ . . . And that was all.”

“The rest is unimportant.” She said it without hesitation, as if the words had been waiting all this time for her to give them voice. “That’s what I was going to say.”

“And by the rest you meant . . .”

“Leave it alone, all right? It doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does matter, more than you want to admit.”

“It’s not your problem!”

“Seriously?” I said. “That’s the best you can do? It’s not my problem?” I shook my head. “In case you didn’t notice, Gracie, I’m in this now. Up to my eyeballs. You might not have wanted me involved, but your parents did, and so here I am. They’re after all of us now, and if I haven’t convinced you yet that I’m on your side, I don’t know what else I can do, short of getting myself killed.”

Nothing.

“I know what they’re after. A friend of mine is in the medical examiner’s office because of it.”

At that she looked my way, her face blanching. I’d tried to be obscure enough not to scare Emmy, but direct enough to get Gracie’s attention. For once, it seemed, I’d gotten it right.

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t your girlfriend was it?”

“Thank God, no. But still, you have to start trusting me, just a little bit.”

She glanced down at Zach, who still slept. “What do you want to know?”

“Fitzwater thinks you have . . . it. He asked about it today.”

“Yes.”

“Did he also ask about it at the Burger Royale?”

“I can’t remember. Everything happened so fast that day –”

“He did.”

We both looked down at Emmy.

She remained intent on her book and for a moment I wondered if I was wrong in thinking she had spoken. But then she tipped her face up to her mom and nodded. “He said ‘What have you done with it?’ I remember.”

“Thanks, sweetie,” Gracie said.

“He also called you Engracia, which is weird.”

“Read your book”

Emmy went back to reading.

“Is that weird?” I asked.

“A little bit.”

“Who else calls you Engracia?”

“No one,” she said, her voice low. “Aside from my parents, no one has called me Engracia since high school. I hate that name; always have. I’ve been telling people to call me Gracie for as long as I can remember.”

“Apparently he didn’t get the message.”

“That’s so odd. I –” She gazed down at her daughter and shook her head. “She wouldn’t get something like that wrong.”

“I didn’t,” Emmy said, still reading.

Gracie’s smile was fleeting.

“Is Engracia still your legal name?”

She nodded. “It is. I suppose he could have gotten it through a legal search or something of the sort.”

I had more questions, but none that I wanted to ask in front of the girl. Apparently Gracie sensed this.

“Emmy, you want to listen to your music on my iPhone?”

Emmy glanced first at her mother and then at me. “Yeah, okay,” she said in a way that made it clear we weren’t fooling her for a minute.

Gracie produced the iPhone from her backpack, attached a pair of earbuds and handed them to Emmy. Emmy dutifully put them in and took the phone from her mom.

Once we could hear the thread of her music, Gracie faced me again. “What more do you want to know?” she asked, her tone about as welcoming as a briar patch.

“Do you have the knife?”

Color flooded her cheeks.

“You do, don’t you?”

“I know where it is.”

“Did Neil steal it from them? Is that what happened? Maybe he thought he could get some money out of them.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re guessing now, and you’re way off the mark.”

“Fine, then how did you get it, and where exactly is now?”

She bit back whatever she first wanted to say and stared out at the road.

“My friend isn’t the only person who died because of the knife, Gracie. There was an old man who lived up in the desert on the Gila River reservation.”

Her head whipped around. “He’s dead?” she said, appearing stricken.

“You knew him?”

She turned away again.

“Fine, then tell me more about Neil.”

“Why?”