Eric Flint's Blog, page 288

Into The Maelstrom – Snippet 06

Into The Maelstrom – Snippet 06

“I hope you will speak out for the ‘Stream back in Brasilia,” Allenson said, changing the subject.

“Of course but I doubt anyone will take any notice of my opinion,” Destry said. “Trance is convinced there will be war. That is why he has put up the money for Sarai and me to go home.”

Trance was the Paterfamilias of Gens Destry which made him one of the hundred or so most influential people on Brasilia. When Destry spoke of “putting up the money”, he was not just referring to the cost of the liner tickets, expensive though they were, but of the purchase of an estate on Brasilia suitable for the dignity of Destrys albeit minor colonial offshoots of the gens like Royman and Sarai.

“No one who has experienced war wants to go through it a second time,” Allenson said. “Let’s hope Trance is mistaken.”

“Yes, but he rarely is,” Destry said. “Probably because he is one of the people whose decisions mold the course of events so his opinions tend to be self-fulfilling”

“Is that why you have decided to go home?” Allenson asked. “Because of the rumors of war?”

“Partly,” Destry replied. “And partly because I think Sarai and I need a new start. Maybe she will agree to children if it goes well.”

A low wheeled car slid out of the terminal and drove towards them.

“That’s my transport,” Destry said. “Goodbye, Allenson.”

They solemnly shook hands.

“Sod it,” Destry said giving Allenson a hug, to his astonishment and no little embarrassment.

The chauffeur opened the door of the car for Destry to climb in. He held up his hand, preventing the door closing.

“Promise you will look me up, Allenson, when you visit Brasilia.”

“Of course,” Allenson replied.

Destry removed his hand letting the door shut. The car pulled smoothly away and Allenson watched it drive out onto the quay. In his heart he knew he would never see Royman Destry again.

He was going to miss him.

#

Allenson’s chauffeur attempted to open the door of the carriage but Allenson waved him back to his post at the front of the vehicle. The carriage looked a bit like an open sleigh, roofless and resting on two skids. The chauffeur sat in a small open cockpit with a control screen by his left elbow and a small stick on the right. Black rods projected out at forty five degrees at the sides of the coachwork.

Trina was already sat on the leather-upholstered bench seat at the rear. His wife was petite, a little plumper than current fashion dictated but attractive in a motherly sort of way. She watched him climb in beside her but she said nothing. She correctly gauged his mood as not conducive to chit chat. She was good at that, judging his mood. She knew when he wanted to talk and when it was best to leave him be.

“Home, sar?” asked the chauffer, turning around.

“Yes, Pentire,” Allenson replied, brusquely.

The chauffeur said nothing but turned back and busied himself turning on the power and keying the carriage’s automatics to Port Newquay Control.  Even the damn chauffeur knew when Allenson was out of sorts. The fact that everyone could anticipate his humor so easily did nothing to improve Allenson’s mood. Neither did the fact that they sat stationary for second after second.

“If we don’t get clear soon we will be trapped for hours by the liner’s lift sequence,” Allenson said, irritably. “The new Control’s automatics were supposed to stop these pointless bloody traffic jams. Heaven knows Brasilia charged us enough to install them. I suppose we’ve been ripped off again.”

Trina unfurled a bright yellow parasol and adjusted the angle so she disappeared under it. The chauffeur switched on an eye shade colored a hideous bilious green through which swam the dark orange silhouettes of naked girls.

“Ping control, Farant, and tell them that Delegate Allenson demands priority.”

“I’ve just done that, sar.”

“Then bloody do it again.”

“Yes, sar.”

The chauffeur touched the control screen and leaned forward to mutter something into a microphone. There was no point, Allenson reflected, in having authority if you didn’t abuse it occasionally.

A hum from the centrally-located motor was the first sign that Control had acquiesced to Allenson’s queue jumping. Balls of green and blue light rolled down the rods and out onto carbon filaments that extended from the rods like spreading ice crystals. A faint shimmer in the air like a heat haze was just detectable around the carriage. Frame fields were theoretically invisible if exactly adjusted but when was any machine perfectly tuned? Not in the Cutter Stream, that was for sure.

The carriage lifted from the ground and turned away from Port Newquay, climbing slowly until it levelled out at a thousand feet. Trina fastened her lap belt and gazed at Allenson stonily until he did the same. Allenson was pleased to see that Farant kept his right hand on the control stick and his left on the screen even though they were on full automatic.

Farant was a competent and careful man. That was why Allenson bought his contract when he decided Trina needed a new chauffeur. That, and because the man was a proficient shot with an ion pistol. Allenson paid the indentured servant a generous salary that gave him every expectation of buying out his contract in a few years. Farant had every reason to be solicitous of Lady Allenson’s future good health.

Control routed them around the edge of Lake Clearwater to avoid flying over Manzanita City. That flight path was forbidden ever since an overloaded lighter frame with burnt out batteries came down onto the island despite the one sober crew member peddling like mad to generate power. It hit one of the villas along the shore killing the young mistress of a Member of the Upper House.

The surviving crew member, the sober one, was carefully questioned before being exiled to one of the more unpleasant Hinterland colonies. The interrogation revealed nothing that was not already known. The local frame technology was unreliable and half the stuff imported from Brasilia was crap. Brasilia did not permit its colonies across the Bight to trade freely with other Homeworlds. ‘Streamers had to put up with whatever Brasilia’s merchants chose to dump on them. Reflecting on this didn’t calm Allenson so he concentrated on watching the world go past.

New settlements were springing up all around the shores of the lake. Land on the original island shot up in value as Manzanita City grew in prosperity and population. Middle class citizens decamped out to the new suburbs on the mainland. With no Rider attacks on Manzanita in living memory, the need for a defensible island site became irrelevant. The island was now home just to the Cutter Stream local government, the wealthy owners of the villas on the shore and barrack-like buildings for the poor who provided the necessary cheap labor.

They passed over the site of a new settlement still under construction. Allenson was intrigued to see that it was not just utilitarian blocks of cheap flats but also more upmarket houses in terraces with individual gardens. The jetty was already up and being used to bring in materials and labor by boat.

There was still only one causeway running from the island to the mainland where it ended in Port Clearwater. Unused by anyone, that is anyone who mattered, it slowly fell into disrepair. Nothing ever came of the talk of putting in a new causeway to Port Newquay. Myriads of small private boats, ferries and lighters weaved backwards and forwards across the lake linking Manzanita City to its suburbs.  Far too much money and hence political influence was tied up in waterway transport for a new causeway to get backing in either the Upper or Lower House.

The power supply in Trina’s carriage had been retrofitted from a Brasilian military lighter that Allenson had used his influence as Colonel of Militia to acquire. Terran Home World technology was state of the art so Allenson had every confidence in its reliability. Nevertheless, he was pleased to see from the movement of Farent’s shoulders that he was peddling every so often to keep the batteries charged. The chauffeur was indeed a careful man.

Allenson checked Farent’s background carefully before employing him. The driver wound up in the Cutter Stream after having been caught defrauding his employer to pay off gambling debts. He was addicted to betting on which dog could run the fastest. He became an indentured servant when his labor was sold to provide compensation for the theft. Farent was spared temptation in his new home as the Stream colonies had never felt the need to import racing dogs across the Bight.

 

Into The Maelstrom – Snippet 05

Into The Maelstrom – Snippet 05

Chapter 2 – Rumors of War

“All rather different from when we were young men,” Destry observed, glancing around the dock.

Port Newquay’s syncrete aprons glittered white in the bright Manzanita sunshine. The amber field in front of Destry’s eyes lightened and darkened as he turned his head. It responded to the changing strength of the polarized waves of light and ultraviolet bouncing into his face from the perfectly flat surface.

This year the fashion among the upper classes was a field shaped like a great curved visor hanging in the air ten centimeters from the face. Hints of smoky fractal patterns in darker brown formed and disintegrated seemingly at random.

“Yes, there was just Port Clearwater then. It impressed me when I first saw it fifteen years ago,” Allenson replied.

Port Clearwater was still there, a kilometer or so along the shore of Lake Clearwater.  Wealthy tourists and business men alighting at the trans-Bight terminal would not have their vision polluted by its appearance but it was close enough to move goods to and from. Port Clearwater catered for the tramp ships and barges short-hauling freight around the Cutter Stream worlds along the edge of the Bight.

The conversation between the two old friends was surreal, not least because it was likely to be the last. There were many things Allenson could have said even should have said but the words wouldn’t come. There was a pause in the conversation while both men studied the massive rectangular grey box of the Interworld liner. It floated, moored to a long solid quay projecting into the lake.

It was difficult to grasp the ship’s true size as the entry ports were mostly closed so the vehicle was featureless.  Even the field support rods projecting from every surface gave little clue to scale.

“I envy you, brother-in-law”, Destry said quietly.

“What?” Allenson asked, startled. “Why?”

“You started with every disadvantage…”

“Hardly,” Allenson interrupted. “You make it sound like I was born in a stable.”

“Of course not,” Destry waved a hand in denial. “I didn’t mean to suggest that you were one of the great unwashed but you didn’t have my advantages.”

“Very few people did have your advantages,” Allenson replied, with a smile to show he meant no offence. “Mind you we Allensons did enjoy a link to Gens Destry when my brother Todd married Linsye.”

“Alliance with the Allensons was definitely one of our better decisions. It was down to my sister you know,” he said, turning to face Allenson. “Father was initially reluctant to sanction the match as he had plans for her to marry on Brasilia. Linsye can be most forceful when she chooses.”

“I know,” Allenson said, making a rueful face. “She gave me one hell of a wigging when Todd died on Paragon. I wallowed in self-pity but she knocked me out of it.”

“I watched the conversation from a window,” Destry said.

“You never said.”

“No, well, I’ve been on the end of Lynsye’s tongue far too often myself to bait a fellow sufferer. I never wanted to discuss her advice to me with a third party so I saw no reason why you would.”

He gave Allenson a sly grin which he switched off after a tenth of a second.

“I envy you because you have achieved so much while I have stood still my whole life.”

“That’s nonsense,” Allenson said forcefully. “You played a critical role in the Rider and Terran Wars and have well-deserved combat and campaign medals to prove it.”

“We did do rather well, didn’t we?” Destry asked.

“Indeed, we did!”

“But you know what I take most satisfaction from?” Destry asked.

“No?”

“That first trip into the Hinterlands with you and Jeb Hawthorn. The Harbinger Project set up the exploitation of the new worlds and we achieved that – just the three of us. And dammit, Allenson, we were young and everything was new and such fun.”

For a moment they were both lost in the past.

“What I most remember about that expedition is fear,” Allenson finally said, as much to break the silence as anything.

“You, afraid?” Destry snorted derisively. “I recall you charging a pack of renegades single handed. You remember. Your gun crashed so you whirled it ’round your head like a club.”

“You mistake stupidity for bravery,” Allenson said, dryly. “But it wasn’t death I was afraid of.”

Being afraid of death always seemed pointless to Allenson. After all, it was the one inevitable in life and at least then all your problems were over.

“I was afraid of failure, of disgracing myself in the eyes of my peers since I had no idea what was going on half the time let alone what I should do about it.”

“You always know what to do,” Destry said simply. “That is why you are so successful.”

“Rubbish, I’m just a gentleman-farmer who got lucky and inherited my brother’s estate.”

“A shrewd businessman who is now one of the largest landowners in the Cutter Stream,” Destry corrected sharply.

Destry’s eyes focused on infinity and he cocked his head, listening to a private holographic message that only he could see or hear.

“Sarai is going aboard,” Destry said.

The Interworld liner was fuelled, loaded and ready to sail. Destry and his wife would join at the last moment. Even in first class, room on an Interworld ship capable of crossing the Bight was extremely limited with much space given over to fusion motors and iron heat sinks. Metallic elements like iron created enormous drag in the continuum. Drag must be overcome by power, power that created heat, heat that needed heat sinks to dispose of, and so on and so on. When it came to ship design, everything was a compromise.

The transBight colonies only existed because of a major chasm, the Cutter Stream. Chasms were permanent rivers of energy flowing through the Continuum. This one linked the Home Worlds to the colonies. Without that free push across the Bight colonization of the Cutter Stream Worlds would have been uneconomic as there were no intermediate inhabitable worlds to use as stopovers.

The liner was scheduled to sail down the edge of the Bight to the Brasilian Colony of Trent. There it would shed heat before joining another chasm that would boost it back across the Bight to the Home Worlds. Its first class staterooms looked luxurious enough. Clever camera angles appeared to show spacious lounges and restaurants but that was all an illusion. By the end of the journey Destry and his sensual wife would barely be on speaking terms. So passengers boarded in reverse order of rank, stateroom guests last.

“I fear Sarai is disappointed in her marriage,” Destry said. “Disappointed in me.”

“That’s nonsense,” Allenson said, somewhat curter then he had intended. “Sarai lucked out when your families agreed the marriage contract. As Lady Destry she has enjoyed far more status and luster than she could ever have hoped to attain as the daughter of a Manzanita merchant. If she is disappointed in that then the fault is with her not you.”

Destry shrugged. “Her family had money but little status. Mine, as you know, lacked the financial wherewithal commensurate with membership of one of the ruling gens of Brasilia. That was why my great grandfather came out to the colonies in the first place – to make his fortune. My marriage alliance with Sarai was a good match for both families. We have both fulfilled our contractual commitments but sometimes I wish she could show me the affection she has found for others.”

Allenson struggled for an answer. He had grown acquiescent if not entirely comfortable in Sarai’s presence but it hadn’t always been like that. Old memories, old feelings long suppressed rose unbidden from the swampy depths of his memory – feelings of guilt and shame but most of all passion – terrible all-encompassing passion.

“Cocktease am I?” she had asked throatingly. “What makes you think I am teasing.”

Her thin orange gown tore easily under his hand and how she had opened her legs in blatant invitation.

“You and Trina enjoy a good marriage,” Destry said.

“That is true,” Allenson agreed, mentally shoving the past back in its box.

“She clearly adores you.”

Allenson stared at his friend. Trina was a loyal, attentive and affectionate wife, he supposed, but that was not what he meant by a good marriage. She brought money and useful connections to the contract. Over the years he learned to rely on her good sense and political instincts but he had never hungered after Trina as he had after Sarai. Perhaps that was one reason it was a good marriage.

 

Spell Blind – Snippet 05

Spell Blind – Snippet 05

Chapter 8

Robo’s was one of the hottest music and booze joints in Tempe. It was upscale enough to serve all the best beers and trendy drinks, and to provide its bands with a professional stage and quality sound equipment. But it was also seedy enough around the edges to seem cool to the University kids. On nights when there was live music — Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays of most weeks — the line to get in could stretch all the way around the block.

When I got there, the doors to the place were closed, including the second set of glass ones past the window where patrons paid the cover charge. As Kona had told Gann, the Marquee read “Electric Daiquiri: Featuring Randy Deegan and Tilo Ruiz.” Inside one of the windows was a black and white picture of the band standing in front of some vague photo studio backdrop. Randy stood at the center, wearing jeans and an untucked dress shirt. The guys around him came across as cool and a little unsavory, which I’m sure is what they were going for. But Randy couldn’t help but look like an all-American kid, even with that serious, “I-really-am-a-badass” expression on his face.

It didn’t surprise me at all that a place like this would be interested in having Randy Deegan’s band headlining for it. What did surprise me was that a buttoned down guy like Randy would stoop to play there. Then again, from all I’d seen in the papers and on television over the past year or so, I had the sense that Randy wanted to follow in Dad’s footsteps, and maybe he figured anything that made him out to be a regular guy would help.

Despite the locked doors, I could hear music coming from inside, so I knew the place wasn’t empty. I knocked several times until at last a large man in a Robo’s t-shirt came to the door and tried to shoo me away. I pulled out my private investigator’s ID, which has a terrible picture of me and looks official enough to impress.

“My name’s Jay Fearsson. I’m doing a little work on behalf of the Deegans.”

He frowned, glanced back over his shoulder, clearly unsure of what to do. But then he shrugged, perhaps figuring that I was Randy’s problem and not his. He let me inside.

The music was cranked to an ear-splitting volume, but I could tell right away that Electric Daiquiri was a decent band. They were in the middle of an up-tempo instrumental piece with a Latin beat and a lot of tonal modulation. Randy played bass but was obviously the group’s front man — not that I would have expected anything different. The band also included a guitarist, a drummer, a keyboardist, and a saxophonist, who was in the middle of a blistering solo. The stage lights were on, but the rest of the place was dark and I doubted that any of them could see me. The sound guy acknowledged me with a quick nod, but then went right back to fiddling with the mixing board. I took a seat in the back of the bar and listened to the rest of the piece, which went through a keyboard solo, a drum break, and a final go-round of what must have been the original melody. All of it was very tight, and when they finished I clapped.

Randy shielded his eyes from the spotlights. “Who’s that?” he asked, squinting against the glare.

“My name’s Jay Fearsson,” I said. “I was at your house the other day.”

“The guy Howard talked to?”

“That’s me.”

He glanced at the guitar player, and then at the other musicians. “Let’s take a quick break, guys.”

Randy and the guitarist took off their instruments, hopped down from the stage, and joined me at my table. The rest of the band wandered backstage.

I shook hands with Randy, and he introduced the guitar player as Tilo Ruiz. He was a tall, good-looking Latino kid, with black curly hair and large dark eyes. He was rail thin and was dressed like a model in his black jeans and white t-shirt.

“You were Claudia’s boyfriend, right?”

“That’s right,” he said with a puzzled frown. “How’d you know that?”

I didn’t think it would be too smart to bring up Robby Sommer, so I shrugged. “Must have read it somewhere. You both have my deepest sympathies.”

“Thank you,” Randy said, sounding anything but grateful. “I have to tell you Mister . . . uh . . .”

“Fearsson.”

“Right. Mister Fearsson. I think it was a mistake for Howard to even talk to you the other day. He shouldn’t have asked you to do any work for us. I’m not comfortable with that at all, and neither is my father.”

“I can understand that. But first of all, he never gave me any money, so he didn’t hire me in any true sense. And second, even if he had, I’m bound by both ethics and the law to keep any work I do for you completely confidential.”

“That didn’t stop you from talking to Billie Castle.”

My smile was reflexive; I would have preferred to smack the kid in the mouth. “If you read her piece the other day, you would have seen that I told her nothing, and that she was feeling pretty snippy about it.”

“And now you’re here,” Randy went on, as if he hadn’t heard me.

“Yes, I am. You probably know that the police have a man in custody.”

“Mike Gann,” Tilo said.

“That’s right. I came here to learn what I can about him. The fact that I happened to find you here is a coincidence. You have my word on that.”

Randy had narrowed his eyes. “You’re doing work for the PPD?”

“You read Billie’s article. I used to be a homicide detective. I worked the Blind Angel case for a year and a half before I left the force.”

The Deegan kid still wasn’t ready to declare me his closest pal, but my explanations seemed to have satisfied him, at least for the moment.

“You think this guy Gann is the Blind Angel killer?”

An honest answer would have raised questions that could get Kona in trouble. “I don’t know. He certainly had it in for your family.”

“Yeah,” Randy said. “I’m sorry if I came on too strong just now. It’s been . . .” He averted his gaze. “It’s been a rough week.”

“I understand. I won’t trouble you anymore. But can you tell me who I should talk to about Gann? I have a few questions about his work here and how he got along with his co-workers. That sort of thing.”

Randy nodded. “Kenny Moore is the person you really want to talk to. He’s the manager. But he’s not in today, and he won’t be again until Thursday night.” His expression brightened. “You should come then. We’re playing, and I can reserve a table for you up front.”

“I’m not sure I want to be that close to your speakers.”

Tilo laughed.

“In back then,” Randy said, grinning. “But that’s your best bet for finding Kenny.” He furrowed his brow. “The other person who might help you is Doug Bass. He’s the janitor, and he’s been here forever. He’d have known Gann.”

“Is he here now?”

Randy nodded. “In back.”

“All right, thanks.” I shook hands with both of them, and started toward the back of the club.

“I meant what I said,” Randy called to me. “Come Thursday night. There’ll be a table reserved for you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll try to make it.”

 

Castaway Planet – Chapter 10

Castaway Planet – Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Laura stared in uncomprehending shock. Bobbing ever so slightly, the vast wall of dark, wet stone still loomed up less than a kilometer distant. The piece that had fallen from it — a solid mass the size of a skyscraper — should have been towering over them even nearer. There was no possible way that the lagoon before them could have been two hundred meters deep, no, not even a tenth of that!

Yet that monstrous fragment had plunged down effortlessly, irresistibly, neither slowing nor pausing, and taken their hopes with it into the impossible deep.

Even as she thought that, the seething water bubbled more, darkened, and that same fragment surged from the depths, shedding water and stripping itself of soil, a massive bulwark of varicolored stony outcroppings and dripping mud. It bobbed slowly, rising and falling in diminishing cycles. She hoped against hope that she might see something else, smaller but oh so very much more valuable, also bob to the surface… but there was nothing more coming from the mysterious depths.

Sakura was clinging to her with a deathgrip, and Whips’ tendrilled arms were only just beginning to relax. Slowly Laura forced herself to stand. “Are you all right, Sakura? Whips?”

Sakura managed a tiny nod of her head, eyes so wide that white showed all the way around them. She was otherwise silent, and did not release her grip.

Whips buzz-clicked something in his native language before catching himself. “I… I am all right, Dr. Kimei… Laura,” he said slowly, uncertainly.

Her omni buzzed. “Laura!” came Akira’s shaking voice. “Are you all okay?”

“We’re… fine, Akira. But…”

“We saw,” he said. “LS-5 is gone?”

“It… looks like it. I don’t know if there’s anything to salvage. Whips is the only one who might be able to even try.”

The big Bemmie — only an adolescent, but still outmassing her by at least two to three times — shuddered, a rippling motion accompanied by jangling, discordant patterns of light and color in his skin. “I’m … not sure I can.”

Laura knelt next to Whips. “Harratrer, honey, I know that must have scared the wits out of you. But I really need to know exactly what you saw, what it means, and that might mean you have to go down and really look.”

His back quivered under her touch, and she wondered for a moment… but the clenched tendrils relaxed slightly. Then he heaved a long, wet — sounding breath and shook himself something like a long, flat dog. “You’re right. No one else can do it, you don’t have the senses or the equipment to do it right. And I …” a quick flash of bright patterns that were like a chuckle, though a very nervous one, “… I really didn’t understand what I saw, and I have to see it again to really know.”

“If you’re afraid of that… thing we saw –”

“A little, but really, something that big isn’t going to bother coming after something like me unless I make myself an obvious nuisance. I think.”

Laura bit her lip. Maybe this was a stupid idea. “On second thought…”

“No, I’m doing this.” Whips turned and moved back towards the former lagoon. “You’d do it, if you were me.”

Laura couldn’t argue. “But you’re…”

“… Bemmius novus sapiens,” he said bitterly, and she understood now what drove him.

“No,” she said, and put her hand on the base of one of his arms; Whips twitched, but didn’t move away. “I was going to say, you’re not an adult yet, you’re like one of my own children, and I wouldn’t force them to go.”

His discordant colors quieted, went to a calm blue-green. “Sorry… Sorry. I just… this is what we have to do, isn’t it? Do what we can? If I don’t… if I can’t… then maybe they’re right about me, about us.” He contracted, then raised himself up. “I can’t be afraid to go in the water. I’m still fast, I’m still smart, I can’t let this keep me out. And if I don’t go in now, it’s because I am afraid. And I am. I really, really am.” He shuddered again. “But I’m not going to let that stop me.”

With a swift, decisive movement, Whips sent himself sliding over the edge and into the water.

Sakura finally let go. “M… mom? What happened? That didn’t make any sense, the whole end of the … the land, it tipped up, and it’s over there,” her voice was rising higher and shaking, speaking faster, “like, floating, and the LS-5, it was hit and then it’s gone and we’re — “

“Sakura.” She spoke her daughter’s name firmly but quietly, taking her by the shoulders, looking her in the eye. “Sakura. Stop.”

The girl’s brilliant blue eyes locked on hers. With an obvious effort Sakura forced her mouth closed and stood there, shaking, then closed her eyes. Slowly they opened again, but they were less wide, more focused, more there, and Laura let herself relax a tiny bit. “Sorry, mom.”

“It’s okay, honey. We’re all near that panic. We just can’t let it catch us. And I have no idea what happened.”

There was a splash, and they saw Whips emerging from the water. “I’m back, Laura.”

The dull colors on his back echoed his tone of voice. “I still can’t believe what I’ve seen.”

There were sounds of running behind them, and she turned to see Akira, with Caroline, Melody and Hitomi close behind. They came here as fast as Hitomi could run, she guessed.

She took a moment to hug her other daughters and take a rib-straining one from her husband. Then she turned back to Whips, whose colors were now brighter but slowly rippling. “All right, Harratrer, what did you see?”

“A lot. But … I don’t know exactly what it all means.” He took an audible breath. “Once I get out past where you can see the shallow water, it just… drops away. Farther than I can ping. Even when I shout as loud as I can, there isn’t a return from the bottom.”

“But…” Melody started, then stopped.

“Go on, Melody,” Laura said.

“But… I thought your people could ping to the bottom of the Europan ocean.”

“Some of us can. I couldn’t manage that, but… there are other noises. I think the bottom’s a long, long way down below even that level.”

“We’re sitting on a cliff tens of kilometers high?” Caroline said in disbelief. “That’s impossible. Even underwater that should –“

“Not a cliff,” Whips said, cutting her off. “I don’t know what we’re standing on, but… once I get down maybe thirty meters or so, there’s nothing but water in all directions. Well, that’s not true, I detect some stuff in the direction that’s, well, inland, but there’s always water in that direction eventually.”

Laura and Caroline exchanged disbelieving glances. “Whips, are you saying that, well, there’s nothing supporting the land we’re standing on?”

“Nothing as far as I can tell.”

For a moment they all stared at each other, trying to come to terms with that ridiculous, impossible statement. Laura turned and looked back at the immense stretch of land behind them, vanishing into hills on the horizon, then over to the black wet towers of what had been the land across from them. “You looked at that piece that … well, is floating there?”

“Yes. It is floating. Nothing under it anywhere.”

“Coral,” Caroline said slowly. “The rock… I noticed it looked rather like coral. But I never thought…”

“Coral?” repeated Melody incredulously. “But shouldn’t that sink?”

Caroline bent over, searching, and found a chunk of rock that had been broken off by LS-5 in the crash. Laura watched as her oldest daughter flung the rock far out into the water.

The white-pink rock plunged into the sea. And a moment later, bobbed to the surface .

“There were cases of floating coral on Earth,” Caroline said, her voice starting to become more animated, excited, “and some pieces could drift for hundreds of kilometers, last for many months. Mom, Dad, this is amazing. If Whips is right, we’re floating on an ocean so deep that no landmass could rise out of it, not for more than an eyeblink on a geologic scale, because you can’t get that many kilometers of rock to stick up above the rest. There are plenty of water worlds out there, some of them with oceans over fifteen hundred kilometers deep, so deep that even geological forces probably can’t make themselves even felt on the surface. Since this one has life like ours, though, trace elements, some kind of active geology just has to be working here to get all of that into solution. But with the gravity here, by the time you get a hundred kilometers down it’ll be all solid, ice-six, maybe ice seven, but then there’s heat from below…”

She broke off. “Sorry, got carried away. Anyway, something must have evolved here to keep itself up on the surface, where it got the advantage of all the light energy from above, or maybe harvesting things like diatoms or whatever that did use the light energy… maybe also keeping it away from a lower-down ecosystem like the one on Europa, where everything revolves around the vents. And that turned into colonies, and then other things started taking advantage of the colonies to support them…” She looked back inland, eyes shining. “We’ll have to get samples, get a look at the actual geological history… only it’s not really geological, it’s … coral-ological? Alcyoneological?”

“That‘s why the guide app got confused,” Sakura said suddenly. “It was right. The geometry shifted. We assume that land doesn’t shift detectably over any reasonable timescale — a few centimeters per year, right, Caroline?” Caroline nodded. Sakura went on, sounding finally like her regular self. “But these things aren’t land, they’re floating. Floating islands — floating continents — and they’re moving with wind and currents, so they must’ve been drifting at centimeters per second, maybe even more, and so the guide app lost certainty on the targets because it was like trying to get a fix on … I dunno, a set of waves or something. The app and the sensors could see small changes that I couldn’t with my eyes.”

Laura was still trying to grasp it. Floating islands… floating things hundreds, thousands of kilometers in extent? Her mind balked momentarily at the idea. The material in question would have to remain buoyant for a timescale of… how long? To build something that huge, get forests growing on it? How strong would it have to be, how flexible, to keep from shattering into pieces at the first storm and waves flexing it?

“That is fascinating, Caroline, Sakura,” Akira said after a moment. “And we will of course be studying this as time goes on. But I think the first order of business is survival, and I don’t think it matters, for that, whether we’re on regular land, an island of floating coral, or the back of a giant turtle.”

Laura couldn’t keep from smiling at the last, and the others burst out laughing; even Melody ended up grinning. “No, love, you’re right. We’ve lost LS-5, but we haven’t lost any of us, and that’s the important thing. This isn’t going to be easy,” she said, looking at her family steadily, reassuringly, “but we will survive.”

Akira took her hand, and the others — even Whips — gathered around for another hug. “Now, everyone — let’s go back to our camp and figure out what we need to do next.”

Inside, Laura was still shaking, still worried. But she could see her family — including, now, one juvenile Bemmie — straightening up, wiping away tears, taking that new breath and focusing on the moment, ready to face whatever Lincoln held for them, and that was all that mattered. If Akira and I stay strong, they’ll be strong. And that’s what we need right now.

 

 

Eric Flint Newsletter – 7 NOVEMBER 2014

I’m a little behind on this newsletter. To being everyone up to date, I’ve turned in three manuscripts over the past two months or so. I just turned in the manuscript for the next 1632 series novel, 1636: The Cardinal Virtues. Baen Book has it scheduled for publication in July, 2015. My co-author on the novel is Walter Hunt and it recounts the events leading up to the outbreak of the French civil war. (What? You didn’t see that coming? It’s not as if I haven’t dropped more than, oh, five hundred hints or so across the past half dozen novels.)



Earlier, I turned in the manuscript for The Span of Empire, which is the sequel to The Crucible of Empire. David Carrico is my co-author on this novel. I began the series working with K.D. Wentworth, but as many of you already know Kathy passed away a couple of years ago. She’d only written four chapters before she broke off working on the novel due to her illness. I asked David to step in and he did an excellent job of completing the first draft. We don’t have a publication date yet for the book.

I also turned in the manuscript for 1637: The Volga Rule, which I co-authored with Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett. This novel is the sequel to 1636: The Kremlin Games. No publication date has been set yet.

Over the summer I also wrote a short novel titled “Sanctuary,” which will be appearing in the second anthology in the Clan of the Claw setting created by Bill Fawcett. The anthology is titled By Tooth and Claw and it’s coming out in April of next year.

Right now I’m working on a novel with Mike Resnick titled The Gods of Sagittarius. We’re about halfway done and we should be turning in the manuscript in a few weeks. Once that’s done I’ll start working on my next solo novel in the 1632 series. Baen Books has it scheduled for publication in January 2016.

And to think I used to have Real Jobs! Bosses, time clocks, getting chewed out by foremen, the whole nine yards. Oh, chortle. Nowadays all I have to do is work. Piece of cake.

–Eric

Castaway Planet – Chapter 09

Castaway Planet – Chapter 09

Chapter 9

“Okay, Sakura, now cycle the lock again, exhausting to the outside.”

Whips wasn’t taking any chances. Before letting anyone step out of the shuttle, he wanted Dr. Kimei and her husband to check the air readings. So they’d put Laura Kimei’s omni, which had a lot of built-in sensors for medical purposes, into the starboard airlock, let it open to the outer air, and left it there for an hour to gather data. The omni hadn’t been able to communicate well through the lock, so they had to bring it back in to check the results. Everyone was accordingly in environment suits.

It had better be okay, Whips thought. Because they couldn’t stay in environment suits the whole time.

Laura reached into the lock as it opened and brought out her omni — a Scanwise Gold Five that looked like an Egyptian bracelet. “Well, it looks all right.” She tapped into the local net and checked the data.

A few minutes later he saw her pull off her helmet and knew the answer. “All clear, everyone. Oh, there’s some pollen and other such things in the air, but nothing immediately toxic.”

“Did it see anything through the open lock?”

“Not terribly much. Mostly a lovely blue sky and a few distant flying somethings.”

Dr. Kimei tied back her hair tightly. “All right, I’m going to take a look.”

No one argued. Whips knew that Laura Kimei was not only the tallest and strongest of the humans, but much more agile than he was out of the water. If he remembered right, she was also the daughter of a policeman and trained in some hand-to-hand weapons, overall making her the best choice for first person outside. In her hand she held the only ranged weapon that had been available outside the cargo storage: a SurvivalShot 12mm, designed for use on worlds with no ammunition manufacturing in place.

Not that she was going far. They saw her go to the lock, look out cautiously, then lean out farther, looking down, around, and up, then back down and out for several minutes.

She turned back to them, smiling broadly and holstering the pistol. “Well, Sakura, we can see exactly where we came down; there’s a big trench cut through the landscape pointing right back to the heart of this continent.

“Better news is that I can see a shallow ridge below us. I think the water there is no more than a meter deep, so we can wade to shore, though someone has to carry Hitomi.”

“Very good!” Akira said. “What’s our plan, then?”

“First we need to scout out some temporary headquarters. It has to be near to the water, for Whips’ comfort, but high enough that we’re not going to get caught by waves and tides. It also needs to be sheltered, so that wind and such won’t get in too much. Everyone take some of the rations with you. We’ll probably be camping outside the LS-5 until we get her out of this lagoon and lying flat instead of mostly on her tail.”

Akira nodded. “Whips, since you’re the strongest, if you don’t mind I’d like you to carry the winch?”

“And the carbon-composite cable and block-and-tackle, yes, sir.” The compact high-powered winch was a standard piece of equipment in the shuttles, available to install on the nose or the rear loading ramp or into the standardized sockets on the colony work vehicles. And, with enough mechanical advantage — like the block and tackle — it might just be strong enough to pull LS-5 out of its current inconvenient position and up onto the land. The carbon-composite cable, of course, was more than strong enough for the job. From his engineering work he knew that he could probably suspend three or four shuttles from that single cable.

“Good.” He smiled down at Whips. “I’m very glad you’re with us, Harratrer.”

“So am I,” he said quietly. Inside, he wondered if any of the rest of his family, his pod, had escaped. The thought that all of his family — little brother Pageturner with his eyes always in a book, so much like Melody that at times he’d wondered if they could somehow be related despite all the obvious biological impossibilities; his father Kryndomerr, called Numbers by everyone for his mathematical genius; Windharvest, his mother, whose real name was Rillitrill but who was proud of the nickname that told of her success in making more efficient and easily manufactured wind turbines; and his big brother Dragline, hunter and athlete — the thought that they all might be gone was enough to dim his light even inside, make an ache spread from within to the very tips of his hands.

Am I unstable? Is that my stress limit?

He forced himself not to think of it. That would just make it worse. And perhaps they weren’t gone. The rest of Outward Initiative might have survived. And here he also had a pod, with the twin sister of his heart Sakura (who he liked to think of as “Jumpsfirst” in the way of his people), and her family who had welcomed him without hesitation. He forced the light back into his skin, mind, and heart. Yes, it would get worse later. He could feel it. But he knew they would be very, very happy to know he was alive and with the Kimei family.

He waited for the others to go out; make sure everyone else was clear before trying to get down himself. Crawling to the lock, he stuck his forearms out and grabbed the climbing rungs, pulling himself forward enough to get a good look out.

For a moment he just stopped there, admiring the view.

Below, shadowed slightly by the sharply-inclined LS-5, the waters of the lagoon sparkled and shimmered in blue-green, a lighter line of pale green showing the shallower ridge that began right at the hull of the shuttle and ran to the shore. From this height he could see that the seafloor dropped sharply to either side of the ridge, down to at least five meters depth; there were hints of movement in those depths which told him there would be prey aplenty — if he could eat it.

The shore, which the Kimeis had just reached, was a three meter high cliff which had a big bite taken out of it, right where LS-5 had finished its crash. Along that line he could see the trench the armored shuttle had dug from its impact almost a kilometer distant. The brilliant blue sky contrasted with the fluffy white of clouds, and with the deep, pure green of the forested hills or even low mountains in the distance; he guessed that some of those rolling ridges reached several hundred meters in height. Trees — or something very like them — grew at no great distance from the shore, broad and feathery-looking crowns casting deep shadows beneath.

He looked down again. This might be a little tricky. The climbing rungs were of course there for climbing down the shuttle when it was set down properly, which was to say sitting on its belly, rather than standing almost vertically on its tail. The rungs now provided only a stabilizing handhold, with the winged shuttle’s side dropping away below. The humans had gone down a rope, but that was something he really didn’t want to try.

On the positive side, though, the tremendous damage on the outside of LS-5 had taken great scrapes, dings, and divots out of the hardened exterior. He was pretty sure he could use those — especially since, unlike the humans, he had three arms with a very wide reach. If he stretched them out, he could reach almost four meters from tip to tip, and that meant he could hook fingers into a couple dozen places at once.

Stretching that far stung, as well as ached. Despite everything Dr. Kimei had been able to do, his skin was drier by far than it should be, little sore cracks opening as he pulled on normally flexible hide. But they were down, and near an ocean. He could take this, and the aches from the de-orbit and crash. They were down and they were safe.

Feeling more confident with that thought, Whips carefully slid his lower first arm out as far as he could, locking fingers and extending his graspclaws to catch anything they could. His lower second arm followed. His top arm anchored itself to the doorframe and twined around the rope. Not without some trepidation, he slowly spun his body and let it slide over the edge.

“Whips,” Laura called to him, “Make sure you close the inner hatch, okay? I don’t expect any problems, but no reason to let the local wildlife have easy access.”

“Right, Dr. Kimei.” He stretched out part of one arm and touched the control, closing and sealing the inner door. Since he was using the doorframe as an armhold, he couldn’t close the outer door, but that shouldn’t be an issue anyway.

As he let the whole weight of his body finish the slide to the vertical, a couple of fingers lost their grip, but more than enough stayed firm. With exquisite caution he carefully released the grip of his top arm and moved it lower, gripping at other scars on the shuttle and the rope. Then, one by one, the fingers of his first arm let go, dropped, and found others.

He could, of course, have just dropped into the deeper water… but a quick splashdown like that would surround him with bubbles and be momentarily disorienting. That was a perfectly good entrance to use — if you were confident nothing was waiting to eat you. It wasn’t likely there was something waiting in those depths to ambush him, but it wasn’t at all impossible, and why take chances?

A few minutes later and he was down on the shallow ridge. He inhaled the water. So fresh! He’d forgotten what real, honest seawater of any world tasted and smelled like. Lincoln’s seas smelled exciting, a tingle of salts just slightly more concentrated than Europa’s, not quite as concentrated as Earth’s seas, but different, with other smells and vibrations and tastes that promised something dangerous yet thrilling. Sharp pain sparked momentarily at the places where his hide had started to crack, but the overall sensation on his skin was wonderful. He paused for a moment, just letting his skin soak in the water of a natural ocean.

There was definitely movement in the water not far away. He wanted to see what it was, but restrained his curiosity; he did, however, take advantage of the fact that a meter of water was more than enough for him to jet his way to the shore in one quick spurt of motion, running right up onto white-green sparkling sands next to Sakura.

The whole family clapped. “That was great, Whips!” Laura said appreciatively. “You’re quite an acrobat for someone who’s normally slow on land.”

“I’d be a lot slower climbing up, Dr. Kimei,” he said modestly, though he was very proud of how well he’d managed the descent.

“Most people are.”

They gazed up into the interior, shouldering their packs — even little Hitomi making sure the backpack her mother had given her was settled properly. “You know, Laura,” Akira said after a moment, “I think our best bet might be to just go up this trail to near its beginning. Everything’s been cleared out of this region, so there isn’t much chance for surprises, and even larger things were probably scared off by that crash, and it makes a perfect path to the ocean. We’ll haul LS-5 up the trench as soon as we get a few things settled, or at least see if we can get started.”

“Makes sense to me. Let’s take a look.”

So, my crash gives us a good shelter! Clever of me to arrange that! Sakura sent.

But if you hadn’t crashed, we could still be using LS-5 as our main shelter, he pointed out.

She sent an image of her sticking her tongue out at him. He smiled (though the smile was mostly a matter of particular light and color patterns rather than the human equivalent, which wasn’t something he could actually do) and was pleased by the fact that Sakura was cheering up and able to take a joke or two.

Glassy-winged somethings zipped quickly by the newcomers, but dodged aside before approaching too closely. They probably smelled very strange to anything native. That’d keep most things away, at least for a while.

He crawled along higher on the edge of the trench than the humans, to give himself the same vantage point. Once he thought he heard something larger approaching from the high side, and extended his top hand. Let’s try my favorite trick.

Bemmie articulation was very different than human. The linkages of the arms, in particular, could both stiffen selectively in various ways, or be relaxed to the point that the appendage was as flexible as a hose… or, in this case, as a whip. There was, of course, always some risk in this trick; even though the arms and fingers were quite tough, it was possible to dislocate, break, or — in rare instances — rip off the tips of fingers with the particular trick he was going to try.

But it was what he was famous for. With practiced, focused ease, he bobbed and pulled the arm, causing a ripple to travel all along the extended arm and finger tendrils. At the far end, this hastened as he yanked the arm back, and the fingers at the very tip suddenly snapped around, multiple whipcracks of sound echoing loudly across the trench. His fingertips tingled, but didn’t hurt. Ha! Got away with it again!

Whatever it was, the thing didn’t like that sound at all; he heard a sudden and speedy movement away.

“What was that?” The Kimeis had all spun to face him, and Laura had the pistol out.

“I don’t know, Dr. Kimei, but it sounded bigger than most of us, so I scared it off.”

“Darn near scared me off,” she said, with a half-smile. “I still can’t imagine how you do that without breaking your fingers.”

“I know other Bemmies who can do it. Not as good as me, though,” he admitted, proudly. “After all, that’s where I got my name.”

“Seems to already be coming in useful. The more we can chase things off and the less we have to confront them, the better we’ll be.” Laura looked up. “Oh, that’s promising.”

LS-5 had struck hard on first impact, gouging out a considerable trench with one of the tailfins in the underlying coral-like rock, a trench that actually had considerable overhang on one side. Caroline, not only the closest they had to a geologist but one who had previously gone caving, mountaineering, and freeclimbing, moved cautiously under the overhang and started checking it. After a few minutes, she nodded. “At least this section along here looks stable — no deep cracks or flaws I can see. We could use this as a windbreak and partial weather shield and let the shelter set itself up right here.”

“Looks good,” Laura said, and Whips, after examining it himself, agreed. “All right, everyone, dump the first load here. Whips, that means the winch and such too, even though I’m pretty sure we’ll be bringing it down near the water’s edge again.”

He complied gratefully; the little winch was still pretty heavy, and all the cable — neatly tied or not — was clumsy. He noticed small shapes scuttling away from their feet and gear, lashed out and caught one.

The thing had a shell shaped like the shields of knights that Sakura had showed him in one of her books, and pulled its limbs and head under the shell when he grabbed it. What he could see indicated eight limbs and the head showed glints of sharp-edged mandibles or something like it. Some of the ventswimmers were similar. “I think we need to make sure our stuff is protected soon. These things might be able to dig through the packaging.”

“Spread out the shelter,” Melody suggested, plopping down with exaggerated exhaustion on the ground. “We have to do that anyway to let it set itself up properly. We can put all our other stuff on top of it until we trigger the setup.”

“An excellent idea, Melody,” said Akira. “Hitomi, can you and Melody start doing that?”

“Why me?” asked Melody plaintively.

“Because the rest of us have other work to do, like running all the way back to the shuttle for more supplies, and figuring out how we’re going to move it,” her father said.

Whips felt a grin ripple across his back as he watched Melody glance down the long stretch of somewhat broken terrain back to the shuttle and then up the several meter high climb to the airlock. “Okay,” she sighed. “Come on, Hitomi.”

“Akira, hon, I want you and Caroline to stay with them. Sakura, Whips, and I will go get the rest of the stuff. I don’t want Hitomi left with just Mel, and with Caroline the two of you will be able to get some of the preparation work done.”

“All right.”

The three of them started back. “Sakura, have you any idea what happened to your guidance app?”

His friend shook her head. “Not really, mom. What I got after we landed and I queried the data made no sense. It claimed that the points I designated weren’t the same points, that they had different geometry than the original points, and the same thing happened when I told it to reacquire. It tried to follow them but couldn’t hold a lock. Something had to be wrong in its calibration or something.”

“Whips? Any thoughts?”

He dug through his knowledge of the assisting app they’d devised for the landing. “I don’t know, Dr. Kimei. We designed that app to be close to foolproof, but I suppose it’s possible we missed something about how perspective affected the apparent distances. I thought we had that all nailed down, but…”

Laura nodded. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters right now.” She stopped by the water’s edge and looked up, studying the shuttle as it stood, tipped to one side, in the water; it looked somehow slightly more tipped than it had been, but he couldn’t be sure . “Whips, I think we need to know what’s holding her up — and especially if there’s anything under her that might catch on her when we try to pull her off.”

That did make a lot of sense. He could see her looking at him uncertainly, and understood. “No problem, Dr. Kimei.”

“Oh, please, Whips, I know I’m your best friend’s mother, but please stop calling me ‘Doctor Kimei’. Call me Laura. We’re going to be stuck here for a long time no matter what, we don’t need that much formality.”

“Okay, Laura.” It sounded a little strange, but he could understand getting tired of formality. “It’s okay, Laura. None of you could do that a tenth as well as I can, and if there is anything dangerous down there, well, I’m still the one you want.” He flickered a smile. “Besides, I really want to go in and swim. I haven’t done that for like a year.”

“All right, then. Get in, do a quick check around the base of the shuttle, then come back and report.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

He slid easily into the water, retracting his arms for minimum friction. The exciting, tingling smell refreshed him and the cool water buoyed him up. All his senses were now on full alert, especially the skinsight that was by far the most powerful sense his people had in the water. Oh, you could get a lot from acoustics — soundsight — and from eyesight, from smell, and so on, but the electromagnetic skinsight — related to the lateral — line and ampullae of Lorenzini found on Earthly sea life — was the most useful of all underwater. In the air it was barely active, with a range usually of only a meter for minor things, but in water…

Now he could sense movement, living things moving throughout the lagoon. There seemed to be nothing very large, at least not moving, and no strong signals of something bigger than he was. But there was a dead zone — near the ship, not surprisingly.

Whips jetted slowly off the ridge and down to the deeper areas. As he got lower, he could see what appeared to be a very steep dropoff below the mangled jets; it seemed to be a trench, broadest just under the shuttle and narrowing to either side. He hesitated, eyeing the shuttle. There was the faintest grinding resonance, as though the shuttle were shifting against the rock, but it seemed stable enough.

In and out quick, then. If it started to fall, he was plenty fast enough to get out from under it as long as he paid attention. Just duck into that gap and get a look, then get out.

He pulled in plenty of water, then jetted forward and down, flipping his body so he streaked vertically into the crevice beneath the shuttle.

For a moment, he was simply too stunned, too disoriented, to make sense of everything. There were no returns from his quick soundpings, no safe aligning of walls and surface with depth once he passed a scant few meters, barely more than a few body lengths. Sounds and skinsense and sight scanned down and down and sideways and sideways and on and on and on, and found nothing except above…

And then there was something below, something rising, rising fast, and the soundpings returned slowly, yet faster, and he could not grasp, not even with all arms, what it was he was feeling because it made no sense…

Then it did make sense and horror struck him, overwhelmed him with utter, unreasoning panic. He spun about, jetting frantically, streaking upward, past the tail of LS-5, up, up, so fast that he flew across the dry sands, almost bowling over Laura and Sakura.

As he left the water, he shouted, trying to tell them, and scrambling with tail-anchors and arms to push himself farther up, farther. “No bottom, a void, so huge, nothing, something coming!“

Sakura stared, confused, but Laura seemed to understand his panic, if nothing else, and snatched up her daughter, ran, up the slope, passing him even as he grasped in desperation and pulled himself another meter forward.

The ground quivered.

At the same time, three somethings erupted from the water, gray-blue-green, stretching up, pointing to the heavens like curved daggers as they rose, trailing foaming water into the air with them, towering up, far, far above LS-5. Even as they reached their apex, casting sharp-edged terrifying shadows across the three refugees, LS-5 tilted sideways, falling…

And the far side of the lagoon, too, slid sideways.

Whips froze alongside his friends, unable for a moment to grasp what he was seeing. The towering… claws? Tentacles? Fingers?… were subsiding into the water, but LS-5 was bobbing in the disturbed water, its airlock now flooding (but the inner door’s closed, that should be fine…), but what held their gaze in disbelief was the far side of the lagoon, the shore that had been just a hundred meters or so distant, rising now into the air, higher, revealing a craggy, dark, weed and growth-encrusted underside, rising higher as the farther end, the very tip of the land on which they stood sank, and as it dropped the portion near them continued to rise, fifty, sixty, a hundred, three hundred, almost five hundred meters towering into the sky, pouring a cascade of dirty water and squirming, chittering, shocked creatures down into the sea below. Then a part of it broke, and began to fall with exaggerated apparent slowness.

“RUN!” Laura screamed, and Whips was galvanized back into desperate motion, climbing up, up, have to get higher —

A two hundred meter mass of stone, shedding greenery as it plummeted, landed squarely on LS-5, piledriving it into the impossible depths below, sending a huge wave thundering outward and up, inundating the shore. Whips gripped a rock with his tail anchors and reached out, catching hold of Laura and Sakura with one arm even as the other two realized there was nowhere to run, then latched onto everything around him with the other two arms and held on.

The water rumbled up and over him, clawing at him madly, but somehow he kept his grip against that titanic force — barely — and then it began to recede, slowly running back. Blinking his eyes clear, he saw to his relief that the wave had not managed to reach the rest of the family, nearly a kilometer distant.

But the LS-5 was gone, gone as though she had never existed at all… and everything she had held was gone with her.

 

 

Into The Maelstrom – Snippet 04

Into The Maelstrom – Snippet 04

“Aye, aye, captain,” Helena said, remorselessly rubbing the girl’s nose in her new pecking order.

“Aye, aye, captain.”

“So explain that explosion to me.”

“I’m not entirely sure.”

“Indulge me, speculate wildly.”

“Do you know anything about the professor’s work?”

“No, carry on.”

“Well he was working on sub-atomic physics.”

“What?” Helena was astonished. “I don’t claim to be up on the latest thinking but that surely went out with bows and arrows. The ancients explored that cull de sac pretty thoroughly and a fat lot of good it did them. They ended up with more fairy stories than a children’s nursery book. I mean, we’re talking bloody quantum bloody mechanicals or some such.”

“Quantum mechanics,” Flipper said, didactically.

Helena raised an eyebrow which was all it took for Flipper to take the hint and hurriedly proceed with her explanation.

“It’s true that the ancients had the weirdest superstitions about the natural world but they also carried out a number of empirical experiments with interesting results. They had these high speed accelerators that they used to smash atoms apart.”

“Is this going somewhere?”

“Well, you know that the heavier an element is the more likely it is to decay?”

“Yes, so what? The heavier elements are radioactive so completely useless and bloody dangerous.”

Flipper became more animated and confident now she was on home territory. She waved her hands to illustrate her description.

“The ancients found they could make small quantities of artificial heavy elements by smashing lighter ones together. The products were ridiculously unstable decaying in microseconds. However, the ancient’s mathematics predicted an island of stability where stable ultra-heavy elements could exist around element 126, unbihexium. They never had the technology, though, to reach this island.”

“Go on,” Helena said, becoming intrigued despite herself.

“Their theoretical understanding of what was going on involved superstition about magic sub-atomic particles called neutrons and protons that behaved as waves. In their system unbihexium was the 126th element because it had one hundred and twenty-six protons arranged in what they called a closed proton shell and around one hundred and ninety neutrons in a closed neutron shell. Nonsense of course.”

Flipper paused and gazed unseeing at the ground, not doubt pondering how stupid were ancient people or indeed was anyone over the age of twenty-five. Helena tapped her foot. The action startled the student back into the real world.

“But their mathematics was sound if used simply as a descriptive empirical construct. The professor tried to interest academia in building a modern more powerful version of the ancients’ accelerators to see if we could manufacture these stable heavy elements. The grant committees baulked at the cost.”

Flipper’s expression of contempt no doubt reflected her late professor’s opinion of nitpicking milksops who whined about money when knowledge was at stake. Actually, Helena sympathized with that view to some degree. The naval budget was always being squeezed to the detriment of The Service.

“How much would it have cost?” Helena asked.

“About half a million crowns not counting the cost of hollowing out a mountain.”

Helena’s sympathy evaporated.

“I can see why the proposal generated resistance,” she said dryly. “This is all very interesting but get to the point.”

“Neutron stars,” Flipper said, as if that was supposed to explain something.

“What?”

“It’s all about neutron stars. You know they’re formed by exploding white dwarfs or collapsing massive stars?”

Helena nodded.

“The professor predicted that if a binary supernova…”

“A death star like the one that caused the Ordovician extinction on Old Earth?”

“Yes, if a death star’s gamma beam struck a collapsing massive star – something normally big enough to form a black hole – then the massive energies involved would create a powerful magnetar combining lighter elements into the super-heavies. Most would decay almost immediately except for those in the island of stability.”

“So you were looking for Element 126?”

“Yes, a stable superactinide with unusual properties.”

“Properties like what?”

“Well for one thing continuum fields would cause it to become unstable and decay. That was why samples could only be collected in realspace. No frame fields until we got it in a magnetic bottle.”

Helena wondered if she or just the rest of the world was mad.

“You had us out in a frame ship hunting for nuclear bomb fuel triggered to explode by a frame field? Was Finkletop rug-munching crazy?”

“No, no,” Flipper shook her head emphatically. “My calculations showed no release of energy. It was simply that the field would catalyze the breakdown of unbihexium into lighter elements.”

“So what happened?” Helena snapped, becoming thoroughly fed up with going around the academic houses. “What went wrong?”

“I have been going over the maths again and again.”

So that was what she had been doing, Helena thought.

“I think I got the calculations wrong,” Flipper whispered. “Unbihexium is weirder than I anticipated. Its decay isn’t energy neutral but it doesn’t lose mass and release energy like every other radioactive material. When unbihexium decays the products weigh more than the starting material.”

Helena looked blank.

“Don’t you see? It gains mass. That’s why it’s normally stable. It can’t access the necessary energy input.”

Helena still must have looked as baffled as she felt. Flipper spelt it out, step by step.

“The coxswain must have switched the boat’s field back on before the professor finished sealing the sample into the magnetic bottle.”

Helena interrupted.

“Wait a minute. I agreed that the frame field would be switched off just for the time necessary to get samples, not to leave it off while Finkletop buggered about with his equipment. He lied to me?”

Flipper looked evasive.

“Not lied exactly, just economical with the truth.”

Helena snarled wordlessly.

Flipper rushed out more words. “He thought you wouldn’t agree. The field had to stay off until the unbihexium sample was completely isolated.”

Helena took a deep calming breath before speaking.

“No doubt the coxswain would be more concerned with being splattered by a meteorite than by the professor’s activities.”

“Yes, the coxswain must have disobeyed the professor and turned on the field prematurely,” Flipper said, repeating herself.

“Damn right!” Helena said. “He did the right thing.”

“No doubt he thought so but the boat’s field initiated unbihexium breakdown when it activated. Radioactive decay got the initial energy input from the frame field. I suspect the reaction ran wild after it started. It sucked in the necessary power from the surroundings, causing the implosion.”

“Impossible, something can’t suck in heat,” Helena said.

“That’s not entirely true. If you blow bubbles into a highly volatile liquid through a straw…”

Helena wondered where fizzy drinks came into it. “What?”

“…you freeze the surroundings. That’s how a ‘fridge works. Energy absorption is the only explanation I can come up with. The ship’s field was interacting with the jolly boat’s so …”

“So this negative energy wave,” Helena said, for want of a better description, “went through the jolly boat’s field into the ship’s field where it froze the ship, stalled the motors and drained the heat sinks?”

“It’s not really negative energy…” Flipper stopped upon seeing the look on Helena’s face and merely bit her lip and nodded.

The girl’s face brightened.

“It takes a lot of energy to make a little bit of mass. The reaction must have been short lived or we would have been taken down to absolute zero. This is going to make quite an impressive publication,” Flipper said, eyes shining with academic fervor. “I might get it in Brasilian Science or even the Terran Universe Journal. I think Tee Yu would be best as it has a higher impact rating.”

“Publication, in a Terran journal, are you mad? You aren’t going to publish this anywhere,” Helena said, looking at the girl in astonishment.

Helena touched her datapad.

“Mister Grieg?”

“Captain?” replied the mate.

“Ms. Wallace is to be placed under immediate close solitary arrest. She is not to be harmed in any way. I make you personally responsible for her welfare but she is not to talk to anybody or have any access to communication devices until we hand her over to the NID.”

Grieg responded as if the order was standard routine. “The Naval Intelligence Department, ma’am?”

“Correct, give her a fatigue suit and place all her possessions in a case locked with my authorization code.”

Helena turned her datapad off but flicked it on again when a thought struck her.

“And all of Finkletop’s stuff, as well.”

“Aye, aye, captain,” said the mate, unperturbed by orders from officers no matter how peculiar.

Flipper gazed at Helena blankly as if she couldn’t understand what was happening. The girl really didn’t have a clue.

 

Spell Blind – Snippet 04

Spell Blind – Snippet 04

“Still–”

“I hear you. Really, I do. And it’s not like I’m booking this guy’s room on death row. But you have to admit that we’ve got an awful lot of coincidences at work here.”

I took a breath. “Yeah, you do.”

She frowned. “Isn’t it possible that when the Deegans fired him — when Claudia got him fired — something snapped and he began this string of killings that culminated in her murder?”

Put that way, it did make some sense.

“So you want me to use my magic eyes,” I said. “Tell you if I think he’s our guy.”

“Would you know if he was?”

I thought about Sophe at the New Moon, and how subtle the blurring effect had been with her.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d know.”

She smiled and stood. “Then come on.”

We walked to the interview rooms, where suspects were interrogated and stopped first at the observation room. Each interview room had video cameras in the ceiling corners. The signals from the cameras came here. The room was brightly lit and it seemed to vibrate with the hum of fluorescent bulbs. Four television screens lined one of the walls. Three of them were off. The fourth showed a large, muscular man with a military style buzz cut and a square face. He sat on a metal chair in front of an empty table. The TV was black and white, and the signal wasn’t the best, so I couldn’t tell from here whether he was a weremyste, much less one who was powerful enough to have left that vivid crimson wash of magic on Claudia Deegan’s face and body.

Gann was antsy. He was slouched in his chair, one of his legs bouncing, his eyes flicking up toward the camera every few seconds.

Kona watched me, expectant.

I shook my head. “I can’t tell anything from here. I’m going to have to see him in the flesh.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that.”

“Hibbard?”

“Damn right, Hibbard. I’d rather the Federal boys didn’t see you here either, but I’m more worried about old Cole. Calling you to the Deegan place was one thing. But if he finds out that you were here, meeting with his suspect . . . ?” She shook her head. “One day you’re going to have to explain to me again why it is he hates you so much.”

“I’ll keep my mouth shut and you can tell Gann I’m visiting from one of the precincts, or something.”

We made our way back to the interview room and went in. Gann sat up as soon as the door opened, his gaze darting back and forth between us. I leaned against the wall near the door, and stared at him. Kona began to pace the perimeter of the room, her lips pursed, her eyes on the floor. This was how we’d always started our interviews. Kona and I hadn’t been in one of these rooms together in a year and half, and yet it felt like no time had passed.

After a few moments of silence, Gann started to get real nervous. He stared at me and narrowed his eyes. I guessed that he could tell I was a weremyste. But it also seemed he didn’t want to admit that if he didn’t have to. After a moment or two, he turned his attention back to Kona.

“Who the hell are you guys?”

“We’re priests, Mike,” Kona said, still pacing, still not looking at him. “We’ve come to hear your confession.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“The guys at Robo’s say different.”

I watched him as his eyes followed Kona. He was definitely a weremyste. I could see a faint shimmering around his face and shoulders. It might have been somewhat stronger than the blurring I’d seen on Sophe and on Robby Sommer, but it wasn’t as obvious as what I’d seen on Luis. It wasn’t even close. And Luis’s power was no match for that of the Blind Angel. There was no way this guy had left that magical residue on Claudia. Asking him to cast a spell that powerful would have been like asking a ten year-old little leaguer to hit a home run off a major league pitcher. He didn’t have the strength or the skill to pull it off.

“I just went in there for a minute,” Gann said. “I heard music and I wanted to see who was playing.”

“It said out front who was playing, Mike. Randy Deegan’s name was on the marquee, in the windows, on the door. Unless you can’t read, you couldn’t have missed it.”

Gann glared at her, but didn’t answer.

“What were you doing there?”

He crossed his arms and stared at the table.

Kona flicked a glance my way, a question in her eyes. I shook my head, drawing a frown.

“All right, Mike,” she said, sounding like a parent who’s disappointed in her kid. “You give that question some thought, and I’ll be back.”

Kona and I stepped out into the hallway and she closed and locked the door. I knew better than to say anything right away. We started back down the corridor toward the detective’s room and once we’d put some distance between ourselves and Gann, she glanced my way.

“Well?”

Before I could answer, two guys came around the corner in front of us. One of them I didn’t know. The other I recognized, but couldn’t name. He must have remembered me, because he stared at me the way he would a guy he knew from a wanted poster. He muttered a hello to Kona, but his gaze kept swinging back in my direction. I’m not one to feel self-conscious, but in that instant I wanted to make myself invisible. Had I known the spell, I would have spoken it.

A moment later, we turned that same corner and were alone again. I exhaled.

“Justis?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s not our guy.”

She did nothing to mask her disappointment. “You’re sure?”

“Pretty sure. Unless he’s found some way to dampen his magic and make himself appear to be less of a weremyste than he really is, it couldn’t be him. I didn’t see that much power in him.”

“Is what you just said possible? That part about dampening?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure, Kona. I wouldn’t know how to do it, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

She started to say something, then stopped, shaking her head.

“You really think he’s our killer?” I asked.

Kona rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. “Maybe,” she said with a sigh. “He’s the best prospect we’ve had since that groundskeeper at Red Mountain you and I brought in two years ago.” She smiled faintly. “But that’s not saying much.”

“If this was a normal case I’d agree with you,” I said. “But whoever this guy is, he’d not a typical serial killer. He’s smart and he’s ruthless and he has a specific goal in mind. A magical goal. He’s building up to something. I don’t know what it is yet, but there’s more to this than trying to get back at the Deegans. And there’s more to our killer than I saw in Mike Gann.”

“I’m not the only one who likes him for this,” Kona said. “Hibbard is giddy as a little girl who just got her first pony.” I snorted and she grinned. “Yeah, and I can tell you, that’s not a pretty sight.”

I laughed.

“The Deegans are convinced he’s guilty,” she went on, her smile disappearing, and her voice falling to a whisper. “And the Feds are about this close” — she held her thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart — “to taking him themselves. They’re leaning pretty hard on Latrelle and Hibbard to release the guy into their custody and be done with it. And with the assistant chief and the commander of Violent Crimes pushing us, that’s probably what’s going to happen. I’ve never seen pressure like this. Randolph Deegan is one powerful man.”

“Do you want me to keep poking around?” I asked, whispering as well. “Hibbard doesn’t have to know. Whatever I do, I can claim that I’m working for Wriker and the Deegans.”

She eyed me. I could tell she didn’t like the idea, but she was considering it just the same. “Where would you go?”

“I’d start with Robo’s, maybe learn a bit more about Gann. And then I’d go see Brother Q.” I hesitated, but only for a second. “Truth is, I was planning to see Q anyway. I talked to Luis Paredes last night, and he seems to think that Q might know something about our guy.”

“And when were you planning to tell me all of this?”

I smiled. “I hadn’t decided yet.”

Kona shook her head. “I don’t like putting the future of this case in the hands of Orestes Quinley, Justis. The man’s certifiable.”

“He’s eccentric.”

“My Grandma’s eccentric. Q is nuts.”

I didn’t say anything; I didn’t have to. All I needed to do was watch her make up her mind.

“Yeah, all right,” she said. “Let me know what you find out at Robo’s.”

“And Q?”

She rolled her eyes. “Sure, tell me what he says, too. Just keep him the hell away from me.”

“You’re starting to sound like Hibbard,” I said with a grin.

“Great,” she said. “That’s what I want to hear.”

 

Into The Maelstrom – Snippet 03

Into The Maelstrom – Snippet 03

Helena located the source of said voice. Seckon, the engineering officer, stood against a console stabbing down at a screen with both forefingers. The rating who should have operated it was on the floor. Blood matted his hair. He stared at Helena with open sightless eyes. An icicle of frozen saliva hung from his lips. The poor bastard had frozen to death making her wonder how long she’d been out?

What was the engineering officer doing on her bridge? What was she doing on the deck? Unanswered questions orbited around her mind. Nothing made any sense.

She pulled herself upright using her chair as a crutch. She realized she had missed some important piece of information. What had Seckon said? The motors were out, that was it. The emergency power must be on or she would be floating under zero gravity.

A loud crack sounded and the deck twanged like the skin on a kettle drum. Helena gripped her command chair tightly. Oh God the motors were out. That meant the field was down and they were still in the debris stream.

The lights snapped on. The ship suddenly hummed with that faint background vibration that was so normal a part of her life that she never usually noticed it at all.

“Getting there, ma’am, field on,” Seckon said triumphantly.

“Good man.”

Helena sat down and activated her chair. The navigation hologram sprang to life. She switched to damage status causing it to light up with red and orange icons like New Year decorations in a shopping arcade. Her ship was a bloody mess but what struck her as odd was the temperature. Parts of the ship were well below freezing. She boosted power to environmental control to start hot air circulating.

“That’s not right,” said Seckon, frowning.

“Which of our many failed systems do you mean?” Helena asked.

“The heat sinks, ma’am. They’re…well, have a look yourself.”

Helena triggered the necessary controls and did a double take.

“My screen says they’re empty, stone cold empty,” she said.

“Mine too,” replies the engineering officer. “But they can’t be. The monitoring system must be faulty.”

“Great. Any sign of the jolly boat?”

“Haven’t looked, I was too busy starting the motors.”

Helena activated a scan. Scanning while semi-phased was inefficient but the boat should be close enough to detect. There was no sign of it at all, not even wreckage from the hull registering. She couldn’t tarry as for all she knew the heat sinks could fail at any moment. She consulted her navigation charts then pressed the icon for wideband communication.

“All crew, this is the captain. We have sustained considerable damage but essential systems are functioning.”

Helena crossed her fingers at that point, for real not metaphorically. She had no idea what state the ship was really in or how long anything would function. She couldn’t trust her instruments so she was blind but it didn’t hurt to boost the crew’s morale. If something vital failed then they were all dead anyway and her people’s morale would cease to be a concern.

“We passed a habitable world some two hours normal sailing time away and I propose to head for it. We’ll be travelling slowly so as not to test anything to destruction but we should make landfall in just over three hours. Captain out.”

She looked around the bridge for the pilot. He sat up and was noisily sick on the deck. Helena sighed.

“Please stay on the bridge Mister Seckon,” she said to the engineering officer. “It looks as if I will be conning the ship personally and I would like you to nurse the motors for me.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.”

#

Helena found a small river on her landing approach. It was bordered by trees restricted to within a few meters of the water so she set the ship down on nearby scrubland nearby not wishing to push her luck with the strained hull by trying for the tree-lined bank. That meant extra work for the crew in rigging a hose to the river but she was in no great hurry. She wanted every system thoroughly tested before they began the long voyage home.

The Reggie Kray supported its bulk on proactive self-levelling landing struts that balanced the stresses affecting the hull. Most ships dispensed with such expensive technology but most ships landed only on perfectly flat reinforced starport pads or on the water. A research ship needed to be able to land on any vaguely flat surface so it devoted valuable carrying capacity to rough terrain landing gear.

Helena observed the semi-desert terrain with a disinterested eye despite its forlorn beauty. She had stood on so many alien worlds that the novelty had long passed off – seen one wilderness, seen them all. She barely even noticed the change in smell from the tang of the sterile filtered ship’s air to the mix of organic aromas associated with a living ecosystem. She disregarded the subtly different spectrum of the sun overhead from the Brasilian standard light used on the ship.

She walked around the vessel to check the hull. It was extremely unlikely that she would spot anything not already revealed by whatever instruments were functioning. Nevertheless, a flight check was traditional and would reassure the crew.

What was left of the crew, she corrected herself bitterly. Out of fourteen naval personal she had lost two in the jolly boat and had four more casualties on the ship. Three of those lay in induced comas in sick bay until they reached civilization or what passed for it this side of the Bight. She doubted if more than two would ever be revived even with proper hospitalization. Not even modern medicine could do much with the burst cells of a frozen brain. The fourth was already dead.

The research team was harder hit as the B Hull had been closer to the jolly boat. Only Flipper Wallace and a young male technician survived.  Flipper wisely kept out of Helena’s path but the technician was a practical sort who made himself useful to the short-handed crew.

Her datapad chimed where it was hung off her belt.

“Yes,” she said.

“We’ve rigged hoses into the river and are ready to start pumping, captain” said the mate.

“Very good, carry on.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.”

Helena backed up so she had a better view of her ship’s dorsal vents. The blue-white sun shone brightly causing her to shade her eyes when she looked up. She should have brought a sun shield. She should have done many things including not letting Finkletop goad her into crazy plans.

The heat vents opened. She waited for the white rush of condensing steam from the water flushing out the heat sinks. She waited but nothing happened.

After a few seconds she touched her datapad.

“What the hell’s going on Seckon? Why aren’t the pumps working?”

Seckon was at his station in Engineering.

“They’re working fine. The water’s running straight through.”

“Hold on.”

Helena ran back to the ship and peered underneath. River water gushed from vents under the A hull and trickled across the dry yellow soil.

“It seems the instruments were quite accurate when they indicated that the heat sinks are cool. We can leave any time you order,” Seckon said.

“But that’s not possible,” Helena replied. “Heat doesn’t just disappear.”

“Nevertheless.”

Helena could almost hear the shrug from her engineering officer.

“Find that bloody girl and send her to me – now.”

“Aye, aye, captain.”

Seckon did not need to ask which girl. Whatever he did to insert a squib up Flipper’s arse clearly worked. She shot out of the ship and scuttled over to Helena, moving at a faster speed than she had hitherto employed since she came aboard.

“You asked to see me, Ms. Frisco?” asked Flipper

“No, I didn’t ask to see you I summoned you,” Helena snarled in reply. “What the hell has Finkletop done to my ship?”

“The professor doesn’t like me talking about our work,” she said, evasively. “He has enemies and rivals.”

“Finkletop is dead so all his problems are over. Yours are just beginning if I don’t get some answers. You address me as captain or ma’am. As I have co-opted you into my crew you are subject to naval discipline up to and including summary execution for mutiny. Am I making myself clear?”

Helena glared at the girl so hard that she backed up a step. Actually, Helena was not up enough on military law to know if that interpretation was correct but she rightly assumed that Flipper knew even less about military law than did she.

“Um, yes,” Flipper said, flashing frightened eyes.

 

Spell Blind – Snippet 03

Spell Blind – Snippet 03

#

I drove back to my office to check for mail — it was all bills and junk — take in the paper, and get my phone messages. The Republic led off with another story about Claudia’s death, but there was nothing new in it except a more detailed statement from the M.E. and the announcement that her family was putting up a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for the capture of her killer. For the most part, the article repeated details from yesterday’s story and gave a lengthy recap of the facts from previous Blind Angel murders. Still, I read through all of it, scanning the piece for any mention of me, but it seemed that Billie Castle was the only reporter in Phoenix who found me interesting. I wondered if I should be flattered.

I was on my way out the door to go see Orestes Quinley, when the phone rang. I thought about letting the machine get it, then reconsidered. I reached it on the third ring.

“Fearsson.”

“Justis.” Kona’s voice.

“Hey, partner. What’s up?”

“You can tell just from seeing a guy if he’s a . . . you know, like you, right?”

“You mean, if someone’s a weremyste?”

“Right. You can see it, can’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“I need you to come down to Six-Twenty and take a look at someone for me. Right away.” She sounded excited and abruptly my heart was pounding, too.

“You think you’ve got him?” I asked.

“Maybe. We’re working blind here, partner. No pun intended. We need your eyes on this one.”

“Yeah, all right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I hung up and hurried down to the Z-ster.

As Phoenix moves through May into June, two things in the city become constant: traffic and heat. Driving downtown in the middle of the day I had to struggle with both.

It took me the better part of an hour to get from Chandler to Six-Twenty, even though it was no more than a twenty mile drive. As I walked from the lot to HQ, a hot wind swirled around the street lifting scraps of paper and plastic wrappers into the air. There were cops everywhere, of course. Men and women arriving for work, others leaving, guys on duty bringing in perps. Six-Twenty was always a busy place, and even now, a year and half after leaving the force, I hungered to be part of it.

I recognized some of the faces, though not all. It’s not easy being a cop; the hours suck, it eats up your personal life, and no one with integrity is going to get rich on the job. Not surprisingly in a city as big as this one, there’s a good deal of turnover at any one department. So as I entered the building, a fair number of the cops inside ignored me. A few others eyed me with cool indifference, but said nothing.

To be honest, I was shaking all over; I would have preferred that no one see me. I wanted to feel like I still belonged, but I didn’t, couldn’t. And so what I really wanted was to be somewhere else — anywhere else.

“Hey, Jay! What brings you back here?”

Carla Jaroso, had been the front desk officer at Six-Twenty for as long as I could remember, as if in defiance of all that turnover. She was short and round, with the friendliest face you ever saw. Her hair was almost pure white now, but her skin was the color of dark rum, and still as smooth as the day I met her.

I took a deep breath. “Hi, Carla. You look great.”

She stepped away from the window and emerged from a side door to give me a hug and kiss. “Liar. You behaving yourself?” she asked.

“When I can.”

“You here to see Kona?”

I nodded.

“Should I phone up?”

“No,” I said. “It’s all right. She’s expecting me.” I gave her another hug. “It’s good to see you, Carla.”

She returned to her desk and I started to walk away. Then I stopped, remembering. When I faced Carla again, she already had the visitor’s badge in her hand.

“Sorry, Hon,” she said. “Rules. I’ll need your driver’s license, too.”

Such a little thing, trivial when it came right down to it. But it felt like a fist to the gut.

“Yeah, sorry, Carla. I forgot.”

She smiled, sympathy in her dark eyes. “I know you did, Hon.”

I clipped the badge to my shirt and took the stairs up to the third floor, where the homicide unit was located. The last thing I wanted was to get stuck in the elevator with one of the detectives I knew from my time on the job.

The smell of a police station is something a cop never forgets. It’s like the perfume of that old girlfriend I mentioned before: stale coffee and sweat, nitrocellulose and old paint. It doesn’t sound like much, or like anything a normal person would want to smell. But to me it was like the smell of home.

When I walked into the detectives’ room, Kona was sitting at her desk, talking on the phone. A number of years ago, when I first joined the force, detectives had their own offices. Now they had cubicles, like horse stalls in a big barn. It made no sense; Kona needed to be able to lock up files at night, and in fact, since the changes, many detectives had gone out and bought those fire-safe lock boxes they sell for important documents. It was ridiculous that cops should have to pay for these themselves, but the politicians cutting police budgets didn’t see it that way.

Kona was playing idly with a long, elaborate earring, which she had taken out so that she could talk on the phone. Kona and her earrings. None of the ones she wore conformed to regulations for proper attire. Our sergeant, Iban Arroyo, had been on her about her jewelry for years now. But Kona did things her own way, and she was too good a cop to get busted for the little stuff.

Seeing me, she smiled and waved me over. I sat in the chair beside her desk, waiting until she hung up.

At last she ended her call and beamed at me. “This just gets better and better,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“His name’s Mike Gann. We picked him up at Robo’s last night. He’s not supposed to be there because Randy Deegan plays there with his band, and our friend Mike isn’t supposed to go anywhere near the Deegans. Not any of them.”

A vague sense of discomfort crept over me, but I said nothing.

“Well?” she asked. “Don’t you want to know why?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“He used to work for the Deegans. Odd jobs: yard work, small projects around the house. Handyman stuff, you know? But then he was fired because — wait for it — he started hitting on Senator Deegan’s daughter. She told him to get lost about a dozen times, and he kept at her. Over time he started to get angry about all the rejections. He even threatened her. So they fired him, got a restraining order to keep him away from Claudia and from the house. Eventually he got a job as a bouncer at Robo’s. But then he got fired from that job, too, because Randy and his band started booking gigs there. So then he had another reason to hate the Deegans.”

“When was all this?” I asked her.

“He was fired by the Deegans three years ago. It’s been about ten months since he lost the job at Robo’s.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t convinced. “Kona–”

“Hold on, Justis. There’s more.” She nodded toward the phone. “That was Kevin.” Kevin Glass, Kona’s new partner. “He’s at Gann’s place now. Says it’s filled with all sorts of oils and herbs and those little talisman-things that your friend Q used to steal.” She smiled. “We think the guy’s a damn sorcerer.”

“Even if he is, you’re making the Blind Angel murders all about the Deegans, and you and I know better than that. Everyone is so caught up in the fact that Claudia Deegan was killed, that they’re forgetting about the other thirty victims.”

I regretted that last bit as soon as I said it.

“You think I’m forgetting the other victims?” she demanded, the words clipped, her voice like ice.

“No. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“I’ve been working this case for three years now, Justis. Even you can’t say that. I never — never — forget any of the kids this guy’s killed.”

“I know you don’t.”

For some time neither of us said a word. She stared at her phone; I studied at my hands.

“He lives in West Chandler,” she said, breaking a brittle silence. “Did I mention that? He’s, like, ten minutes from South Mountain Park.”