THE MAN WHO NEVER MISSED


                                Steve Perry


  Chapter One


   DEATH CAME FOR him through the trees.
   It came in the form of a tactical quad, four people walking the three-and-
one, the point followed by the tight concave arc; the optimum number in the
safest configuration. It was often said the Confed's military was always
training to fight the last war and it was true enough, only there had been
enough last wars to give them sand or cold or jungle troops as needed. These
four were jungle-trained, they wore class-one shiftsuits with viral/molecular
computers able to match backgrounds within a quarter second;"they carried .
177 Parkers, short and brutal carbines which held five hundred rounds of
explosive ammo—one man could cut down a half-meter-thick tree with two
waves of his weapon on automatic. The quad carried heat-sensors, corn-
implants, Doppler gear and personal sidearms; they were the deadliest and
best-equipped soldiers the Confed could field and they were good. They
moved through the cool rain forest quietly and efficiently, alert for any signs
of the Shamba Scum. If something moved, they were going to spike it, hard.
   Khadaji felt the fear in himself, the familiar coldness in the pit of his belly,
an old and unwelcome tenant. He had learned to live with it, it was
necessary, but he was never comfortable when it came to this. He took a
deeper breath and pressed his back harder against the rough bark of the sum
win tree. He practiced invisibility. The tree was three meters thick, they
couldn't see him, and even without his confounder gear their directional
doppler and heat sensors wouldn't read through that much solid wood. He
listened as they moved past him. The soft ferns brushed against the shiftsuits
of the quad; the humus of a thousand years made yet softer sounds under
their slippers as they walked, but Khadaji knew exactly where they were
when he stepped away from his tree.
   He was behind them, a tall figure in plain tan orthoskins with spetsdods
molded to the backs of both hands. He held his breath for steadiness and
brought his arms up, as might a man lifting a small child. He hyperextended
the index fingers of both hands and each of the spetsdods fired once, a polite
cough. Two hits, sounding like knuckles on wood as they pierced the too-
light armor.
   They were fast, the last two. The bacterially-augmented reflexes had been
well-trained, but in this case, the instruction was wrong. Instead of dropping
flat, the point and left rear spun, carbines cleared for killing.
   Khadaji fired both spetsdods again. The flechettes hit the soldiers halfway
through their turns, on the sides instead of the backs. The point managed to
trigger off a few rounds before he crumpled. The sound of the .177 was very
loud in the thick forest. The smell of the electro-chemical explosive tainted
the air with an acrid tang.
   The four soldiers were knotted into odd angles amid the ferns and spider
plants, voluntary muscles clenched in the frozen lock which gave the
ion/molecular/chemical flechette of the spetsdod its name: Spasm. They
wouldn't die, but it would take six months of treatment to bring them back to
normal. Six months of extensive physical and psychotherapy for each victim
of the spetsdod's sting, expensive, time-consuming, draining. Spetsdods were
good weapons for guerrillas—a dead man cost the enemy little, but a
Spasmed soldier was a lot of work; with proper treatment, they never died
and they did cost.
   Khadaji turned to leave. One of the quad might have triggered his com
and, if so, a flier would already be on its way. As he started to move, he
glanced back at the soldiers. One of them had a stain on his leg. It was hard
to see because of the shiftsuit, which matched the color of the ground on
which the downed man lay, but it looked like blood.
   He moved closer. Yes. Apparently the point's desperation blast had
wounded one of his own. Damn!
   Khadaji hurried to the man. No, correction, it was a woman, not that it
mattered. She was hit, there was a crater the size of his fist in her thigh and
she would bleed to death in a few minutes.
   For a moment, Khadaji thought about it. He hadn't killed any of them, so
far, and this one wouldn't be on his karma, he hadn't shot her. A flier might
be coming.
   He shook his head. No. He had to take the long view.
   He found her medical kit and jerked it from her belt. He opened the plastic
case and found the pressure patch. Triggering the unit, he slapped it over the
pumping hole in her leg. The patch whined and sealed around the edges.
Inside, the pressure went up as the rudimentary brain of the medical sealer
clamped arteries and veins and shuttled the flow of blood. If a flier was
coming, she'd be all right. Once he got away from the woods, he would call
and report the downed quad anyway, so there was no real danger. There
were no predators on Greaves and the most dangerous thing which could
happen to the quad was that they might get rained on.
   Khadaji rose from his crouch and looked at the quad a final time before he
loped off into the woods. He managed a grin against the drop of adrenaline
which left him feeling drained and tired. The Shamba Scum had struck
again— according to the official dispatches, their number was now estimated
at between six and eight hundred. His smile increased. If the quad he'd just
downed had been faster, the Shamba Scum would have been eliminated—all
of them. For Emile Antoon Khadaji was the resistance on Greaves, all by
himself.
   It was six klicks to his next station. He jogged the whole way, alert for any
sounds of more troops or fliers. It was quiet. The earthy smell of the
mushrooms and molds was heavy—brought out by the rain last night—and
the ground was squishy underfoot.
   This part of it was hard, too. Aside from the means, the logistics were
becoming more difficult all the time. In the early days, it had been easy. The
Confed's machine came to rest on Greaves as it had a dozen other peaceful
worlds almost without incident. There were no armies on the world, no
underground brewing among the agios and craftspeople who made up most
of the planet's population. Oh, there had been a few students handing out
agitprop, but nothing of any consequence—until ten or twenty troops a day
began dropping with Spasm poisoning. A single message, coded
mysteriously into the Garrison Commander's computer, claimed
responsibility in the name of the Shamba Freedom Forces—quickly
shortened to Shamba Scum by the troops-of-the-line.
   Khadaji grinned as he ran along the thin path through the forest. That had
been a nice touch, he'd thought, naming the "Freedom Forces" after Lord
Thomas Reserve Shamba, the twenty-second century war hero. It was a joke
only Khadaji could appreciate, though. It came from Sham-ba's answer to a
surrender call by Confed forces who outnumbered him fifty-to-one at the
Battle of Mwanamamke in the Bibi Arusi System:
   To the Commander, Confederation Jumptroopers:
   Sir:
   Fuck you.
   We stand until the last man falls.
   When the first man fell in the current insurgency, it would be the last man.
   Khadaji slowed to a walk when he was a kilometer from the patrol line. He
checked his confounder, to make sure it was operating, bent and stretched
his legs and back, and took several deep breaths. There were three men on
the line in this sector, virgins as near as he could tell. He could have taken
them on the way out, but that might have made it tough to get back into the
city. The Confed military mind was rigid and not particularly bright, but
neither was it completely stupid. The replacements for these three wouldn't
be fresh meat, they'd be vets, more interested in staying ambulatory than
proving how well they'd' absorbed their training.
   The first soldier was so easy it made Khadaji sad. He walked to within five
meters without being noticed. The boy—he could have been no older than
twenty-two or three—stood in the shade of a small fir tree. It was not
particularly warm, but he wore class two body gear, and it didn't take much
to heat up the inside of that to sweatpoint. The boy had shifted his goggles
up and his tight hood back, exposing his face and head to the cooler air. If
Khadaji had been an uprank, the boy would have been in trouble.
   "Excuse me, which way is Hartman Street?"
   The boy turned, surprised. He started to swing the Parker up, but stopped.
What he saw was a tall man in orthoskins, palms supinated, looking
harmless.
   "Jeet, dork, don't slip up on a man like that!" He seemed to relax a little,
seeing that Khadaji was unarmed and smiling.
   The Shamba Scum shrugged, raised his left hand slightly, and stiffened his
index finger. "Sorry," he said.
   The little dart hit the boy high on the forehead and snapped his face
upward; the Spasm hit him on the way down and he was in the lock before
he touched the ground. The strongest muscles determined the shape of the
knot; this one had strong quads and triceps—his arms and legs stuck out.
   Khadaji shook his head. There was no joy in this. The boy would be able to
tell all about the man who shot him— in six months, if he were lucky.
Meanwhile, he would spend an uncomfortable time thinking about his
actions on this day. Spasm froze the muscles but neither the memory nor the
mind which drove it. He wouldn't be able to call out, but he would
remember how stupid he had been. A harsh punishment for a boy, but it was
necessary. All of it was necessary, for reasons this soldier couldn't begin to
understand, even if Khadaji had hours to explain it to him.
   Unlike the first, the second man wore his armor—and class two would
stop a spetsdod's dart—but the armor wasn't perfect. Gloves and hoods were
designed to overlap but the material had to be thin in places for a man to
move; knees and elbows and shoulders had to bend or rotate. When the
soldier stretched, after two minutes, Khadaji fired. The fle-chette entered the
thin fold behind the man's left knee, a line only a few millimeters wide. It
was a difficult shot, but an expert with a spetsdod could cut a dragonfly in
half in mid-air—and hit both pieces as they fell. Point-shooting had been
brought to a peak higher than craft, if not art, with the invention of the
spetsdod: the word itself meant "point death." The brush came alive with the
canvas-rip sound of a Parker carbine on full automatic; bushes and trees blew
apart, explosive shells chopped them down from waist-level. Khadaji was on
the ground and crawling before the first leaves fluttered to the forest floor.
The third man had been spooked. Maybe he'd heard or sensed something,
maybe one of the others managed to trigger a com. It didn't matter. He was
shooting at shades, but he would have called for backup. Khadaji crawled at
right angles to the line of fire until he was clear, then stood and ran. Thorns
tried to dig into the tough orthoskins, but failed. He dodged trees and larger
shrubs, but ran over the small stuff. There was no time for finesse, he had to
be a long way from here when help arrived.
   He cleared the forest and was among a line of warehouses in the storage
district. He stopped. Behind him, half a klick back, the scared soldier was still
cutting shrubbery with his weapon.
   There were few ways to disguise a spetsdod on the back of the hand.
Khadaji loosened the plastic flesh which connected the two weapons to his
body and pulled the flechette guns free. He found a trash bin full of scrap
metal and buried the weapons deeply in it. It wouldn't matter if they were
found since he had others—the better part of a case of them from the
shipment he'd stolen. Twenty spetsdods and ten thousand rounds of Spasm
darts—and that number, ten thousand, was very important.
   Although he felt naked without the weapons, Khadaji stepped out onto the
street as if he owned it and started toward the Jade Flower. He would have
plenty of time to get there and collect another pair of spetsdods before his
last station was due. So far, he'd only taken out five of the Confed's finest,
and he needed at least eight more to maintain his schedule. He wanted to
average a hundred a week, but it was getting harder all the time. He'd been
at it for almost six months and the first troops would be coming out of lock
pretty soon. When that began to happen, it would be over. Even if the confed
military tried to lid it, word would eventually get out that only one man's
description kept coming up. They wouldn't believe it, of course, not at first,
but it would plant a seed. They would never admit that one man could
mimic hundreds—military PR would smash the idea flat, that thousands of
trained troops could be downed by a single assassin. But if they knew, it
would be over fast. They were looking for guerrillas in packs, not the owner
and operator of the Jade Rower, the biggest recreational chemical pub in the
city, a man whose business depended on the military, as customers and
patrons. Soldiers needed rec-chem almost as much as they needed sex and
the Jade Flower supplied both in abundance. More than a few of the Sub-
Befals spent time there. Khadaji made certain that upranks got the best
whores, male and female, and the first drink or toke or pop was always on
the house to anybody over line-grade. He was a popular man, Khadaji was.
   So, two more stations, six more hits. He sighed. Nearly six months, and he
was getting tired. He didn't waver from his purpose—that was as clear as
ever—but he was tired. Not much longer. Not many more.
   He sighed again, and hurried along the street. A quad passed him, going
the other way. The men all smiled and nodded at him. He smiled back. He
would probably see them later.
   One way or another.


  Chapter Two

  THE JADE FLOWER was always open. Before the Confed had honored
Greaves with its massive squat tactics, the rec-chem pub had been only a
small-time operation, serving the locals a narrow spectrum of alcohol and
soporifics, minor hallucinogens and mood elevators. Two or three part-time
prostitutes took care of anybody interested in buying sex, and the operation
was, at best, a break-even proposition. With the coming of the military and
its civilian support population, the character of the Jade Flower was bound to
change. A greedy and well-prepared man would have made a fortune, but
the previous owner was old and tired and not ready to deal with the influx of
soldiers, bored spouses and children the Confed bent to the sleepy planet.
When Khadaji arrived and waved enough standards under his nose, the old
man was glad to sell.
   Khadaji looked around the main room of the pub. It was early, not yet
1600, but already the place was crowded. Even with local zoning regs
relaxed, there was usually a line of customers outside, waiting for someone
to leave in order to enter. Khadaji always kept a dozen or so places open, for
any highly-ranked officers who might be interested in a toke, poke or drink.
Anjue, the doorman, had studied the holoproj of every uprank over the level
of Lojt and if one showed up, he or she was escorted to the head of the line
and inside. Rank, as always, had its privileges. The troops-of-the-line might
gripe, but the powers-that-be all smiled at Khadaji when they saw him.
   The main room, which was octagonal and dimly-lighted, boasted sixty
circular tables with four stools each. The first thing Khadaji had done on
buying the pub was to have the stools and tables bolted securely to the floor.
He'd had thirty people applying for the job of bouncer and their first test was
to see if they could move the furniture. Two men managed to uproot a stool
each; one woman set herself and screamed, then tore the top of a table off its
mount. And then—well, she was clever. The rest failed. Khadaji had longer
bolts installed and hired the two men and woman who'd proved strongest. If
a fight broke out, nobody was going to be bashing anybody with his
furniture; and before it got too far, Bork, Sleel or Dirisha would be there to
stop it. It was difficult to argue with a man holding you a half-meter off the
floor, or a woman who could break three ribs with a flat punch. There was
very little trouble in the Jade Flower.
   "Ho, Emile, how's it hanging?"
   Khadaji looked to his right, to see Lojtnant Subru, smoking a flickstick. The
man's dark face was almost hidden behind the cloud of purple-black smoke.
   'To the left, Subbie, just like always." He grinned. "How's the ratface job?"
   Lojtnant Subru shook his head and exhaled a fragrant blast of flickstick
smoke. The smell of hot cashews surrounded Khadaji. "Busy today, Emile.
Word is there were several skirmishes within fifty klicks of town."
   Khadaji raised an eyebrow and tried to look surprised. "Really? Get any of
the Scum?"
   The dark soldier nodded. "Body count of fourteen, I heard. They nicked
one of ours in a blastfight, but she's okay."
   Khadaji didn't have to work very hard to suppress his smile. He'd heard
this kind of statistic too many times. "Good for the troops."
   "Yeah, we should have the Scum cleaned out pretty soon. Only problem is,
I hear 1C has upped their estimates of the numbers. Even with the ones
we've been cutting down, 1C says there are close to a thousand guerrillas in
the field now."
   Khadaji shook his head. "Where are they coming from?"
   "IC would love to know. I hear the Old Man would give his left nut and a
kilogram of bauxite to be able to spike the leaders." He took another blast
from the flickstick. "You ever do any ratface-time, Emile?"
   Khadaji smiled. "Sure. I did my tour sitting planet and pushing disks for a
supply unit. Strictly button-thumbing stats, Subbie. Never saw action."
   "Yeah? What unit?"
   "14-788 Quartermasters, on Tomodachi. Been a few years." The unit was
real enough, Khadaji had known men who served in it while he was training,
but in fact his own unit had been the 14-433 Jumptroop Plex and he'd seen
more action than most of the soldiers on this world. Too much.
   The Lojtnant nodded, not really interested. He looked around for a table
with an empty stool. "Emile, who's working the sheets tonight? Anybody
worth a week's pay?"
   "Marj is on, Brin, Roj, Davisito, and... let's see, I think Sister Clamp is on at
1800."
   "Sister Clamp, huh? I heard she's something else. Expensive, too."
   "You can't take it with you, Subbie. Never know but you might get pulled
out of that air-conditioned T-plex and put on the line."
   "Shee-it, they'll have to be scraping the walls for that. Still, I might get
flattened by a ground-effect tank crossing the street. Eighteen, you said?"
   "I can put in a word, if you like, maybe get her to give you an uprank
discount."
   Lojtnant Subru nodded again. "Yeah. Do that, would you? I'd appreciate
it."
   The soldier wandered off, trailing the smell of cashews.
   "Afternoo', Chief."
   Khadaji's head pubtender stood there, looking grave.
   "Butch. A problem?"
   "We runnin' low on mid-range sops. Las' week's delivery was short two
gross and we only got half what we need 'til next shipment."
   "What do you think, Butch?"
   "I think we put a limit on and ration them suckers out."
   Khadaji shook his head. "No. Business as usual and when we run out, offer
high-range at the same price."
   "Jeet, Chief, we lose half a stad every tab!"
   "We can afford it, can't we? We want to keep the customers happy."
   Butch shook his head. "I don' see how you make an' profit, you keep tryin'
to give it away."
   "We get by, Butch, we get by."
   The pubtender left, looking even more grave than before, and Khadaji
began to work his way around the octagon, smiling at the customers,
listening and watching as he moved.
   "—holes Uplevels wouldn't know a Scum if it peed on—"
   "—said she's more fucking sensitive than I am—"
   "—Jammy's still knotted in the stretch ward—"
   "—kid's nine T.S. but sharp, lemme tell you—"
   "—couldn't pull it out of her if you wanted to—"
   "—the Old Man himself said it, so I hear—"
   The flow of conversation was full of the things which have always been
important to soldiers: love, hate, sex, money, family, Uplevels' stupidity, the
campaign. Khadaji knew the talk. He'd only been nineteen when conscripted
for his seven and he'd done six years with men and women like these. Most
of them were young, but the military had a way of making you grow up
quickly. He was thirty-nine T.S. now, he could have fathered most of the
soldiers in the octagon. He felt a lot older than that sometimes, an old man
among children.
   "—your ass! Get up, elbow-sucker!" Khadaji froze for an instant, then
turned. Two troopers were standing next to a table six meters away, squared
off in military oppugnate stances, each waiting for the other to make the first
stupid move—which both had already done by standing to fight in the Jade
Flower. Khadaji wondered who was on this shift—ah. As he watched,
Dirisha moved smoothly through the crowded pub toward the two soldiers.
Dirisha was a big woman, close to Khadaji's own 183 cm and eighty-two
kilos, but she didn't look it because she was so well balanced. She had short,
dark hair, a winning smile when she was happy—like now—and expert
rankings in three class one martial arts. She was about twenty-eight T.S. and
in a one-on-one, could probably take either Bork or Sleel, the other two
bouncers.
   Dirisha reached the two men and slid between them, her back to the larger
one. Khadaji strolled closer.
   "Fighting's not too bright," she said. "I mean, make a list: fucking, soak-
toke, good wine or cold simshi and where does getting your face smashed fit
in?"
   The soldier she was talking to was about eye-level with Dirisha and he was
obviously angry. He wasn't going to let go of his rage that easily. "Yeah?
Well, I don't think dick-nose over there can smash anything!"
   Dirisha's voice got very quiet, and she smiled, her teeth bright against her
dark chocolate skin. People strained to hear her. "I wasn't talking about him
hurting you, Deuce, I'm talking about me. You can sit and smoke your smoke
or you can walk, but you can't fight in here." Her voice was even and there
wasn't a gram of bluff in it.
   The soldier seemed to wilt a little.
   Khadaji smiled. Dirisha could take the soldier without having to suck a
deep breath and the man was perceptive enough to pick up on it, even if he'd
never seen her in action. If he had, he would have sat as soon as she
approached. He had to get one last shot in, though.
   "What about him?" He pointed at the man behind Dirisha.
   She didn't bother to turn and look at the second soldier. "He's got the same
options you do, Deuce. So what say you just have a seat and work this out
like preachlegals." It was not a request.
   The tension seemed to drain away suddenly. The larger man behind
Dirisha sat on his stool and reached for his mug of splash. The soldier facing
Dirisha wiped at the back of his uniform collar with one hand and nodded.
"Okay. We don't want any trouble with the Flower, we can work it out later,
maybe."
   Dirisha's smile broadened. "Good thinking, Deuce. Tell you what, the
house buys the next round for this table, tell the server Dirisha okays it."
   She turned and walked away quickly, in Khadaji's direction. He smiled at
her and she stopped. The pub noises picked back up around them.
   "Nice work."
   She nodded. "For a second, it could have gone over and I would have had
to thump him. You lose points when you have to thump them."
   Khadaji nodded. He understood. He had spent much of the fourteen years
after Maro studying various fighting disciplines and that had been a point in
most of them: to have to use physical technique was a failure of sorts. An
expert should be able to project enough ki so that a potential opponent
would stop hostility. A real expert could defuse almost any fight situation
simply by being there.
   "Ever give any thought to your future, Dirisha?"
   She shrugged. "I take it as it comes."
   He thought about it for a few seconds. It was no riskier than a lot of other
things he'd done. He said, "You ever hear of Renault?"
   "Backwater world in the Shin System," she said. "I don't know much about
it."
   "It would be a good place to be in three or four years," Khadaji said,
looking past her around the octagon. "Somebody there might make you an
offer you'd find interesting."
   The big woman looked at him carefully. "What kind of an offer?"
   He shrugged. "It might not happen. A lot of things could get in the way.
Let's just say if situations go as designed, Renault could be a place for you to
stretch yourself a little."
   "Um. Any particular place on Renault?"
   "There's a small coastal town, Simplex-by-the-Sea."
   She didn't say anything for a moment. Then, "But how could I leave you,
Emile? You need me here."
   He smiled, recognizing the fugue in her statement. "I expect to be out of
the rec-chem business pretty soon."
   "And on Renault?"
   He sighed. "No. You won't see Emile Khadaji on Renault."
   She considered that, and apparently decided not to ask anything more. "I'd
better get back to work," she said.
   "Good idea. I need to check with Anjue and see how the crowd is building.
Later."
   He watched her move away. She walked with a smooth, rolling motion
that bespoke her years of training and excellent physical conditioning. He
didn't really know Dirisha; she kept to herself, spent a lot of time working
out in one of the local dojos, and had no lovers, male or female, that he knew
of. But there was a strength in her beyond the physical, an essence of
something deeper. She could be a piece of it, he felt.
   He walked to the main entrance of the pub, where Anjue and his three
assistants were working the line.
   "Anjue. How is it going?"
   "Ah, Emile, slow. I have only forty on my flat-screen, and three upranks
have called on the com to say they are coming at seventeen." He waved his
hands in that typical gesture used by natives of Spandle—a kind of outward
loop with each wrist. "The early darkness means a change in guard duty, so
fewer troops are free and the eagle doesn't fly for three days, so some are
unlined, what can I say?"
   "Not to worry, Anjue. We get by."
   Khadaji left and headed toward his private rooms in the basement. He
stopped by the dispensing window for a moment to tell Butch. The man sat
behind a three-centimeter-thick sheet of densecrystal set into a solid
plastcrete wall. The drug room might be a tempting target for thieves and it
was well protected. The doors were thick stainless steel with reaper locks,
and nothing short of a vacuum bomb would dent the densecris window.
Chem was purchased and delivered through the double drawers under the
window.
   "I'm going to catch a little sleep, Butch. No calls for an hour or so."
   "Copy, Chief." His voice had a metallic ring through the speaker set into
the wall over the window. "We'll try to keep the Scum from takin' over while
you're nappin'."
   "Thanks, Butch, I appreciate that."


  Chapter Three

  KHADAJI'S PRIVATE SPACE was a combination of office and living
quarters. It was furnished simply—a desk and comp terminal, a few chairs, a
foam-pad bed in one room; a shower, sink and bidet in the second room; a
small kitchen in the third and final room. Simple living quarters—on the
surface. What didn't show was the hidden store box set under the floor of his
desk, nor the tunnel under the refrigerator in the kitchen. He had dug the
tunnel himself, using a "borrowed" cutalong he returned before anyone knew
it was missing. It was a short, tight passage, leading from his kitchen into the
housing of his receiving transformer in the alley behind the Jade Flower.
There was just enough room for a careful man to stand inside the housing,
between the ceramic insulators and high voltage grid of the transformer. A
careful man could come up through the expanded metal grate over the floor
inside the housing and wait until the alley was clear to leave. A careless man
could not, for he would be dead, fried by the power circuits.
   Khadaji checked his chronometer. Almost seventeen.
   From the hidden store box, he took a set of black or-thoskins, a pair of
spetsdods and ammunition magazines for them, and a skinmask. This was
going to be a city operation and even though it was dark, he didn't want to
be recognized. He dressed quickly, tabbing the orthoskins on, smoothing the
skinmask over his face and ears and allowing the spetsdods to set on the
backs of his hands. It took a few seconds for the artificial flesh backing the
weapons to warm and mold to his own skin; once set, the spetsdods would
be almost as much a part of him as his fingers. The weapons would not shift
or move until he triggered the release.
   There were a lot more efficient weapons, he knew. Hand wands sent a fan-
shaped pulse which could take half a dozen people out at a single strobe;
explosive rocket or bullet throwers could blow through armor which would
stop a spetsdod's flechette; implosion bombs wiped away steel as if it were
butter. But it had to be spetsdods. The choice had not been a hard one.
Spetsdods were used by the military sometimes, but they were essentially
civilian weapons, so that was a necessity. And a Spasm-loaded dart slinger
did not kill, that was another point. Finally, a spetsdod required skill to use
properly, more than wands or explosive guns or bombs. A man who went
after targets in class two armor with a spetsdod was either very good or a
fool. A miss and he would likely be dead. That part was as important as any
of it, the skill needed. If it was going to be built to work, it had to be built
right. He'd had years to think about it and the spetsdod was the right
answer. It had taken him more years to become truly expert in the use of the
flechette weapon. There were some better, perhaps, but that didn't matter.
He was good enough. He had been so far, at least.
   The spetsdods were ready. He found a set of spookeyes and slipped them
on, pushed back on his forehead. He took a sublingual tablet and allowed it
to dissolve under his tongue. The chemical had a long and complex name,
but it was called Reflex by those who used it. It affected nerves, from
peripheral to central nervous system, and its effect was simple enough: the
drug speeded up reaction time. The effect varied from person to person, but
in Khadaji's case, he was able to move faster than a bacteria-augmented
soldier-of-the-line, for short periods. There were some nasty drawbacks to
Reflex—it required top physical conditioning to handle because it increased
catabolism and metabolism and left the user exhausted afterward; it caused
nightmares; it was addictive. Khadaji only used it when he was doing a
particularly risky gambit. He would pay for it later.
   He checked the skinmask in the mirror, took his con-founder from the box
and snapped it into place on his belt. He took a deep breath and nodded at
his image. There was one last item: a photon flare. He hooked it onto his belt.
He was ready.
   His shoulders brushed the flexmac lining the walls of the tunnel as he
crawled through it. Carefully, he lifted the matched pad covering the tunnel
mouth and moved the expanded metal grate inside the transformer station. It
was black inside the cover, with only a thin pattern of streetlight showing
through the cooling slots next to the radiant fins over his head. He slid the
spookeyes down and clicked them on. The place lit up, in that eerie green of
multiply-augmented light. He replaced the pad and grate and stood quietly,
listening.
   The first rush of Reflex vibrated through him, making him feel warm and
slightly itchy. He wanted to move, to run and dance and jump—that was the
drug singing to him, urging him to use his body, to do something—
anything— fast and hard. But he held still, listening. After a moment, he
moved to a slot in the door of the unit and peeped through it into the alley.
Empty. No one home. He clicked the spook-eyes off.
   In a second, he was through the door and out, locking it with his
thumbprint. He scuttled to the shadows next to the wall of the Jade Flower
and flattened himself against the cool plastcrete. He would stay in the
shadows for this one. He took a deep breath and moved off, feeling the
Reflex dance in his muscles.
   The T-plex was brightly lit, a half-dozen big HT lamps overlapping their
pools of daytime around the building. It was standard Confed architecture,
squat and ugly, a prefab block of expanded hardfoam with carved door and
windows. Right now, whoever was on electronic watch would be getting
signals from Khadaji's confounder and—if they were awake—wondering
what the Doppler ghosts were fuzzing the screen. The confounder was the
best the Confed could produce—it wasn't even issued to these troops it was
so new—and Khadaji had paid a small fortune for it less than a year ago. It
was unlikely the simadam running the scopes would know what the
problem was.
   The lights were something else, of course. The quad did have image
intensification equipment equal to his own. With spookeyes lit, the quad
could see an area framed only in starlight as if it were a bright afternodn.
Shorting the lights out, therefore, should not be to his advantage.
   Khadaji grinned. The problem with the military mind was that it tended to
be logical only to a point that satisfied it, but no further. The way to out-think
the military was to carry its logic one step past.
   He hooked a simple timer-and-popper against the unshielded transformer
and set the delay for twenty seconds. He scurried back, keeping to the
shadows, until he was in front of the T-plex. The quad was alert and
prowling; no virgins, these—they were crack troopers, all Sub-Lojts chosen
for skill to form this special unit. The woman on the other side of the door
they guarded—visible through the hard plastic window—was a Sub-
Befalhavare, one of ten on planet. She commanded a thousand troopers and
was, therefore, a valuable person. The Confed had done one intelligent thing
with its military and that had been to clean up the old-style ranks found on
most worlds. The organization had been streamlined for ground troops: four
troopers made a quad, commanded by a Sub-Lojt; twenty-five quads formed
a centplex, with a Lojtnant running the show; ten centplexes overseen by a
Sub-Befalhavare made a ten-kay unit; and the commander of ten thousand
troopers was a full Befalhavare. That was the size of the unit on Greaves, a
ten kay. The next rank was a Systems Marshal, an Over-Befalhavare, then the
Supreme Commander of Confederation Ground Forces Himself. Only five
ranks between a line trooper and the S.C.
   There was a loud pop and the HT lamps began to fade. Khadaji slid his
spookeyes down and flicked them on at minimum, but kept his eyes closed.
The intensified light of the dying lamps flashed brilliantly at his closed eyes.
   He heard one of the quad yell, "Amplifiers on!"
   Good. He was counting on their training. These four would be ready for
the darkness by the time the last glimmer faded from the lamps.
   Khadaji opened his eyes as the light against them dimmed; he adjusted the
spookeyes to compensate for the darkness. Green-on-green images came into
ghostly focus. An eye-smiting glare poured from the window of the Sub-
Befalhavare's office and he looked away from it, concentrating on the
soldiers. With full-intensification, spookeyes would amplify available light
millions of times; the glow of a flickstick butt would seem a bonfire at close
range.
   He had been in the shadows with only a little cover. That would effectively
be gone, now that the light was only from the stars and the ambient city
glow. He had to move quickly. And the timing had to be right. They all had
to see him at the same time.
   "Hey!" Khadaji yelled.
   They were superb, the members of this quad. They spun as one, bringing
their weapons up.
   Khadaji marked their positions in that instant; he also triggered the photon
flare and tossed it toward them. He turned his head and squeezed his eyes
shut tightly; even so, the light from the flare reflected from the walls beat
upon his eyes through the lids. There was no time to think about what it did
to the eyes of the quad. Khadaji ran at a right angle to his left, as fast as he
could sprint.
   The quad was blind, but they were firing. A man's voice began yelling
orders over the sound of the . 177s and their explosive bullets: "Toomie, take
the left, Janie, center front! Jason, to the right!"
   Khadaji circled before Jason managed to get his carbine out to cover his
assigned field of fire and raised both spets-dods. He fired twice, caught Jason
and the quad leader with the first two rounds, then fired both his handguns
again. He got Janie, but missed Toomie, who was still covering his quadrant
with short bursts of the Parker, his back to Khadaji. Before the man could
realize his team wasn't shooting, Khadaji snapped off a final round into
Toomie's neck. He went down, the Parker silenced.
   No time. Khadaji sprinted for the door, tugging the spookeyes from his
face as he ran. He didn't slow, only twisted so that he hit the pressed plastic
with his left shoulder. The cheap material tore away from its sliding frame in
a shower of gray shards and Khadaji dived for the floor as he went through.
   The double boom of a smoothbore pistol filled the air and the charge of
brass shot sleeted against the wall and through the open doorway. Khadaji
rolled up and fired toward the woman standing behind her desk. The dart hit
her square on the chest, but she managed to trigger another twin shot of the
smoothbore as she went backwards. The gun was pointed at the ceiling and
blew a binocular-shaped pattern in the white hardfoam.
   The Sub-Befalhavare went into poison contractions; the strength
distribution of her muscles causing her to sit back in her chair, her fists
drawn up to her shoulders and her face clenched into a snarl. She held onto
the smoothbore pistol at an almost classic port-arms position, pointed by her
right ear.
   It should not have been funny, but it struck Khadaji that way. He laughed,
thought about it for a few seconds, and decided to add a touch more. There
was a flower arrangement on the woman's desk and he pulled a long-
stemmed green rose from the vase and stuck it into the barrel of the
smoothbore. One had to keep one's sense of humor, after all. And it could be
a clue for a wise man. A green rose— a jade flower.... He doubted the Sub-
Befalhavare would think it funny, but humor always depended upon one's
viewpoint, whether you were the one who stepped on the banana peel or an
observer.
   Time to leave. Khadaji sprinted from the office and into the street. Other
troops would be coming and he wanted to be back at the Jade Flower by the
time somebody started a net working in the city.
   He jumped the downed figure of a quad member near the door and started
down the street. Another easy station, he thought, as he ran. He shook his
head a little. He had to watch that, the feeling of invincibility, the sense of
right-ness which made him feel as if he could not fail. That was dangerous,
that kind of thinking. Just because he knew who he was and what he was
doing, there was no guarantee he'd succeed. Over-confidence had ruined
more than one man, especially men with grand plans who let the big vision
cloud the details of the smaller workings. The tendency was to feel as if there
was some kind of benevolent spirit backing him, the hand of Fate guiding
and protecting him because he was its instrument, and that was dangerous.
He was fourteen years past his Realization and he still had to fight the sense
of superiority it had given him.
   He heard voices approaching from a side street and slid to a halt in the
shadow of a trash-recycle hopper. A pair of quads ran by, heading back
toward the T-plex. Close.
   Yes. It could happen at any time. A stray bullet triggered by a falling
trooper could do it, a slip while running from pursuers, any one of a
hundred things. For nearly six months he'd been careful and lucky.
   He ran back toward the Jade Flower. He recognized that his worry meant
the time for the end was getting nearer. It gave him a fluttery stomach to
think about it, a tingle in the muscles of his buttocks even as he ran.
   "Have a nice nap, Chief?"
   "I feel much better, Butch. How's business?"
   "Goin' pretty good, now. I heard Anjue on the com a few minutes ago, he
said when Sister Clamp came in, fifteen troopers joined the line."
   Khadaji nodded and strolled into the octagon. The place was at capacity,
save for the spaces saved for upranks. He smiled a little to himself. At least
one Sub-Befal wouldn't be dropping by tonight.
   There was a man drinking splash alone at one of the spare tables. Khadaji
walked to the table and nodded down at the man. He was a quad leader, a
Sub-Lojt, and he looked familiar, though Khadaji couldn't place him.
"Evening," Khadaji said.
   The man looked up and nodded, but didn't speak.
   "Drinking alone can be depressing. Mind if I join you?"
   The Sub-Lojt shrugged. "Sure. Why not? I was just turning over a few bad
memories."
   A server brought Khadaji a flare full of Moet & Chandon, from his private
stock of vintage champagne. He sipped at the pale amber liquid slowly.
"Another splash for the Sub-Lojt," Khadaji said.
   "Thanks," the man said. He finished his current mug and leaned back.
"You know, I was going to flake out when my impress was up, but I went for
another tour. Probably the biggest mistake I ever made."
   Khadaji nodded slightly, but said nothing.
   "I just left the knot ward—one of my quad is in his second month."
   "Hit by the Scum," Khadaji said. That's where he'd seen the man's face,
obviously. Only, he couldn't remember the particular attack. There had been
so many.
   "Yeah. It was dark, we didn't see 'em until it was all over. We were lucky,
they only got Rudy. I check on him every once in a while."
   "You must really hate them," Khadaji said.
   The Sub-Lojt shook his head. "You know what the funny thing is? I don't,
really. But seeing Rudy reminds me of what it is I do for a living." The man
paused to stare at his splash for a moment. "I was remembering a time on
Wu," the trooper said. "That's in the Haradali System."
   Khadaji nodded again. "I've heard of it."
   "Yeah, well, we had to go in and flatten a local insur-rect—bunch of
malcons somehow managed to get control of a city and were making a lot of
noise. A simple operation, by-the-tape, more gunship diplo than anything
else. We waved the flag from a battlecruiser and a couple of support ships
and sent a few centplexes down to show Confed muscle, you probably know
the drill."
   "Yes. I know it."
   "Well, I went down with my quad and got stuck doing guard duty on a
secured perimeter, no perspiration. Then, some fuzzbrain in the malcons got
the idea to try a raid. They sent maybe a hundred against us, armed with
sticks and thero-knives and a few chemical-only slug guns."
   The Sub-Lojt paused and took a drink of the new mug of splash. "Stupid,"
he said. "Practically unarmed against a quad, none of us virgins. We cut them
down like it was target practice. It was stupid of them, stupid?"
   Khadaji sipped his champagne.
   "It was not our fault, 'they'd have wiped us, they could have, we were only
doing our jobs. But after it, I went with the medics to check for survivors. We
were using .177s with the harrad load, so there weren't many. But there was
this... girl." He paused and took another swallow of his drink, closing his
eyes as he did. "This girl was maybe thirteen and she was lying there with
her legs shot off from from the middle of the thighs down. And she looked
up at me while the medics were clamping vessels and pumping dorph into
her to kill the pain and I swear I never saw such clear green eyes before or
since. And she smiled and said, 'It's all right. My father is a soldier.' And then
she died. Massive hemo-shock, the medics said."
   The Sub-Lojt finished his splash and set the mug down gently. "That was
the bad part. As if it was okay for me to shoot her, because I was a soldier
like her father." He shook his head. "A system that makes people kill
children, it's just not right. If something like that ever comes up again, I don't
know if I could shoot. I haven't seen any of the Shamba Scum, but if I saw a
bunch of kids coming at me waving sticks, I just don't know what I'd do this
time. Can you understand how I might feel like that?"
  Khadaji nodded, and stared unseeing at the far wall of the octagon. "Yes,"
he said, finally. "I can understand."


  Chapter Four

   AT ONE-THIRTY, Khadaji went to his rooms. The Reflex was mostly gone,
but there was enough of the drug in his system to keep him awake for a
couple of hours, if he'd let it. Instead, he took three hundred milligrams of
parame-thaqualone—Paco, it was called in the pub—and stretched out on the
bed. There were more potent sleeping medications, but a Paco would
sometimes stop the nightmares that usually went with Reflex. Sometimes.
   —twenty-five years old and Sub-Lojt, with a good shot at promotion to full
Lojtnant, if he would sign for another tour this far in advance. A man could
do worse than the military, and six years in the Jumptroops with two
Distinguished Service lines on Nazo and a third for the Kontrau'lega Break
would set him up for a fast track to his own centplex. That's what they told
him and he had no reason to believe any different. As soon as the little scrap
on Maro was done, he could come and see the Old Man's sub and talk fine
points and was he interested?
   Emile Khadaji nodded and grinned. He was young and understood life in
the ranks. It wasn't dull, there were plenty of people who shared the places
with him, he had good times with women and even a few men, he had stads
to buy what he wanted. Was he interested? Yeah, he was interested—
   "—see the way the fish swim through that funnel, Emile? It's plenty big
enough to pass through, but once they're on the other side, they never can
seem to find the narrow exit to get back out."
   The boy nodded at his father and watched the fifty kilo grouper swim
around inside the trap. There were five or six of the big blue-gray fish
flippering back and forth. "They're stupid," he said. "The hole in the middle is
the same size on both sides."
   Hamay Khadaji looked down at his ten-year-old son, then back through
the glass walls of the observation tank. "No, son, they aren't stupid, no more
than any other fish. It's the way they look at things. It has to do with the
space around them, with the way their eyes and minds work. Just because
somebody or something doesn't look at the world the way you do doesn't
mean it's stupid. It's just different—"
   "—oh, yes, Emile, put it in, I'm ready!"
   He looked down the length of Jeda's naked body, slick with sweat, at her
widespread legs and damp pubic hair. He was ready too, but he wasn't sure
of just what to do. Should he just plunge in all at once? Or should he move
slowly? She said she liked it all at once, but the instruction tapes said it was
better to be easy, gentle and—-she decided for him, as he poised himself over
her, by grabbing his ass with both hands and pulling him into her, hard. Oh,
yes! This was wonderful, he couldn't believe how good it felt, only it wasn't
going to last long, he felt himself about to explode—
   —exploded into a shower of blood and torn flesh as the slugs from his
carbine smacked into her flesh. The look of surprise on her face, of
puzzlement, touched him. She had not known she could be hurt, that she
could die. It was there on her face as she fell, the amazement. Among the
hundreds of them charging across the harvested wheat field, he saw her face
clearly. But the look was on other faces in the background. Wrong, the look
said. This isn't right, this isn't the way it's supposed to be, those dying
expressions said—
   "Khadaji, get your quad to the left, three hundred degrees! There's another
wave coming!"
   "Jasper, Wilks, Reno, the Lojt says cover three hundred, stat!"
   "Why are they still coming, Emile?" Reno was almost sobbing. "We're
blowing them to fuck and they ain't even armed! They're fucking crazy!"
   "Goddamn fanatics," Jasper cut in. "They don't think they can die, their
leader's told them they're invincible. Well, we'll show the stupid ratholes—"
He triggered another blast of his carbine, waving it back and forth at hip
level like a water hose. Three hundred meters out, four or five of the
attackers went down, human wheat in the field used to grow a different crop.
   "Stupid fuckers, stupid fuckers, stupid, stupid—!" Jasper screamed as he
fanned his weapon back and forth. All around them, other quads burned the
air with blasts from their carbines, firing a locust-cloud of explosive bullets at
the oncoming enemy. Thousands of the attackers dropped, so many they
were stacked two or three meters high in places, with others climbing the
hills of human debris to keep coming. Those were cut down as well, until the
mounds of dead grew higher still.
   "Why don't they stop?" Reno was crying, pointing his empty carbine at the
sea of people, clicking the firing stud over and over. "Why don't they stop?
Why?"
   Khadaji felt gray, he felt as if a barrel of sand had been poured over him,
ground into his eyes and nose and mouth and muscles. His arms ached from
the weight of the carbine, the stink of electrochem propellant filled his
nostrils, the roar of the explosions seemed continuous, even through the
mute-plugs in his ears. But he kept firing. And firing. And firing....
   He opened his eyes suddenly, but otherwise didn't move. The sheets were
damp from his sweat and he felt chilled. Only a dream, he told himself. Just a
bad dream. He couldn't even remember it, only that it was bad. He took a
couple of deep breaths and went through a relaxation drill, but he was still
tense. And awake.
   After a few minutes, he sat up, then stepped out of the bed. He padded
across the floor, the air cool on his naked skin. He bent and touched his toes,
straightened and leaned back, stretching his belly muscles. He was in good
shape, but using Reflex drained him. He always resolved to avoid the stuff
after he went through one of these nights, but sometimes it was necessary.
Only a little while more and he could stop.
   He went to his desk, slid it aside, and opened the secret store box under
the flooring. In one corner was a small case, a flash-rigged packet coded to
open by the print of his left ring finger. He sat cross-legged and naked on the
floor by the desk and printed the lock open. Anybody who tried to violate
the packet without the proper print would be rewarded by a face full of
phosphoreme at 800 degrees C.
   Inside the case was a writing nib and a small pad of paper. A single
number was written on the top sheet: 2376. He stared at the number for a
minute, then tore the sheet from the pad. Add four in the woods. Plus two on
the picket line, that's six. Four more in front of the T-plex made ten and the
Sub-Befal made it eleven. Twenty-three-eighty-seven. He wrote the number
on the blank top sheet. He put the pad back into its case and tucked it back
into the locked case. There was no need to count the flechettes, but he pulled
the magazines from the two spetsdods he'd used and double-checked them.
He'd canned two of the weapons after the station in the woods, but he'd kept
the ammunition. He counted the remainder of those plus the ones he'd used
later. Each magazine held twelve darts, so he should have, let's see, minus
two each from the first station, then two more, one from the left, one from the
right....
   He finished the count. One short. Had he miscounted?
   He closed his eyes and replayed the stations slowly. The first one was
okay, the second was right, it must be the third....
   He fired twice, caught Jason and the quad leader with the first two rounds,
then fired both his handguns again. He got Janie, but missed Toomie....
   Ah. Yes. He'd missed the last quadman with his first shot, it had taken a
second dart for him. Khadaji grinned wryly. He was getting careless. He
reached up and pulled open one of the drawers in his desk. There was a
second flash-rigged packet nestled in the corner, under a banded packet of
standards. A thief who opened the drawer would see the money and likely
not worry about the plastic packet under it. If he or she did try to open the
case, there would be a hot surprise waiting; the thief would be lucky to
escape with hands and face intact.
   He removed the second case from the drawer and printed it open. Inside
were loose spetsdod darts; there had been a hundred of them. Ninety-three
now, Khadaji knew. He had removed seven of them in five-odd months, once
for each wasted dart he'd fired. There was a pair of tweezers inside the lid of
the box and he used them to pick up a single dart, which he carefully loaded
into the magazine of his right-hand spetsdod. There.
   He closed the flash-rigged packet and put it back into the drawer. His
carelessness hadn't been in missing Toomie, though that was bad enough; no,
the problem was in forgetting that he'd missed. True, it had been in the
middle of a heated exchange, but it was inexcusable.
   He put the weapons away and closed the store box. There was no rigged
lock on the store box itself, even though a determined search of the cubicle
would likely turn it up. That was all right, it was unlikely anybody would be
in here while Khadaji was alive and if he were dead, well....
   He suddenly felt very tired. The Reflex had finally worn off and the Paco
was still pulling at him. He stood and walked back to his bed. So very tired.
   He slept again, and if he dreamed, those dreams didn't disturb him. "Good
morning, Boss."
   Khadaji nodded at Bork, the largest of his bouncers, one of the largest men
on Greaves. Bork was of Homomue stock, from a world where the gravity
was higher than normal and increased muscle mass was an asset. Here on
Greaves, where the gravity was close to standard, Bork resorted to weight-
lifting to keep in tone. He could have simply used elec-trostim but Bork
preferred the barbells. More organic, he said.
   "Bork. Things peaceful last night after I turned in?" "Yessir. I had to warn a
trooper to quiet down, but he didn't cause any trouble after that."
   Khadaji smiled. Bork was soft-spoken most of the time, but when he
"warned" somebody, it could involve lifting them by the shirtfront with one
hand until they were eye-level. He had seen Bork load a flexsteel bar with
275 kilos and then proceed to bench press it ten times; Bork himself weighed
a good hundred and twenty-five kilos and stood close to two meters high.
Most troopers smiled nervously when Bork passed.
   "You're off at eight?"
   "Supposed to be," Bork said, "but Sleel had to see the medic so I said I'd
cover for him."
   "Sleel sick?"
   The larger man looked uncomfortable. "Sir. Sort of."
   Khadaji didn't say anything, but he continued to stare at Bork. Finally,
Bork shook his head and said, "You know how Sleel is, he thinks God created
him personally to show the galaxy how to use a cock."
   "He caught another exotic kind of veedee?"
   "Not this time. He—uh—bet one of the girls he could outlast her."
   Khadaji shook his head. "Even full of Android to the eyes he couldn't
manage that. Who'd he bet?"
   "Uh... I'm not supposed to... ah, hell, it was Sister Clamp."
   Khadaji laughed and shook his head again. "Not really?"
   "Yessir. Really."
   "I would have liked to see that—after an hour or two. What's he being
treated for, blisters? Or exhaustion?"
   "Sister says it's something called flea-bite-us."
   "Phlebitis?"
   "Yessir. She says it's irritated blood vessels, an inflammation of the veins.
In his—ah—dick."
   "Is Sister a medic?"
   "She says she used to be a doctor, but even if she wasn't, she'd seen enough
cases of this to know what it was." Khadaji laughed again. "I'll bet she has.
Poor Sleel.
   Maybe he learned something."
   "I don't think so, Boss. He's talking about a rematch." "Let me know if it
happens, Bork. I'll bet my money on Sister."
   The big man grinned. "Yessir, me too."
   The octagon was about three-quarters full, early morning being the
slackest period, but there were still almost two hundred men and women
perched on the stools, smoking or drinking or wrapped in the grip of some
other rec-chem. It could be noon or midnight, from the artificial lighting; it
always looked the same in the octagon.
   Khadaji looked at the scene with some fondness. As pubs went, this was
one of the better ones he'd worked in—and he'd been in no small number. It
would not be too hard to see himself growing old here, serving the troopers,
being well thought of by the military and locals, playing this simple game.
He shook his head. No. It was a nice fantasy, but that's all it was and he knew
it. It was temporary, and he was better off keeping short-timer's attitude
about it. There were some good people here, a lot of them, and he would
miss them, but this wasn't his karmic destiny.
   Lojtnant Subru entered the octagon from the front and strode across the
room toward the dispensing window. He was a man in a hurry.
   Khadaji walked toward the window, so that by the time Subru had bought
and collected his flickstick, the owner of the Jade Flower was standing next to
him.
   "Something, Lojt?"
   Subru scratched the end of the flickstick along the seam of his creased
uniform pants. The tip flared, then faded to a glowing dot. He stuck the
flickstick to his lips and drew in a deep breath of the fragrant smoke. He held
the blast for a second, then began to speak. Dark purple smoke emerged from
his mouth with the words. "A major attack, Emile. The Scum hit a T-plex last
night. My T-plex. They got the guards and then hit the C.O. herself." He took
another hit from the stick. "I could have been there. If they'd come a day
earlier, I would have been sitting on the O.O.D. desk my-fucking-self."
   "They get any of the rebels?"
   "Not alive. I hear there were twenty-five or thirty of the Scum involved in
the attack. Armed with stolen .177s and spetsdods."
   "The troops ought to be wearing class two or three armor, Subbie."
   The Lojt glanced at Khadaji's face through the smoke. He seemed more
relaxed, now. "There's not enough to go around. You were in the
Quartermasters, you know how Supply works. In a ten-kay, you only get so
many suits and additional reqs take months. Besides, class two won't stop a .
177 and you can't move in class three except to waddle."
   "Way I heard it, most of the casualties are from dart poison, so class two
should—"
   "Where did you hear that?" Even through the drug, he sounded suspicious.
Careful, Khadaji told himself.
   "I run a pub, Subbie. I hear a lot of things. Men get drunk or stoned, they
say things they don't think about."
   Subru shook his head. "Damn! Listen, Emile, I know this won't get past
you, but upranks is shitting bricks over this thing. A lot of the troops the
Scum have hit are stiffies from Spasm poisoning and some of them were
wearing class two. I even heard of a couple wearing class three who took
darts."
   "I don't believe it." He knew that was not true, he wasn't so stupid he'd try
a class three with a spetsdod.
   "My information comes from high places, Emile. But if you hear any of the
troops babbling in their smoke or splash, see if you can't shut them up before
they get their asses into a sharp crack. The Old Man would love to have a
target to shoot at, any target, including our own."
   "Okay, Subbie, I'll try and keep your boys out of trouble in my place. It
would be bad for business if somebody thought they talked too much in here
and made me off-limits."
   "Thanks, Emile. I appreciate it."
   Khadaji left the shaken Lojtnantinhaling flickstick smoke and walked for
the closest exit. He needed some unpolluted air. Sometimes, this game
seemed to get too twisty, even for him. But Lojtnant Subru was in
Administration, he had access to all the facts about the campaign against the
Shamba Scum and he believed that the rebels were able to knock off men in
class three body armor with spetsdods, something Khadaji himself knew was
impossible.
   It was twisty, but it was going better than he'd hoped.
   And the end was nearly here.


  Chapter Five
    SLEEL'S PHLEBITIS MUST have responded to treatment, Khadaji thought,
because the bouncer was working the floor, watching for signs of trouble
from the crowd in the Jade Flower. It was quiet, though. Butch had run out of
mid-range sops and had, reluctantly, begun offering the high-range chemical
at the same price. Soldiers loved a bargain, and a lot of them were barely
awake at their tables, stoked with the glow of the depressant drug. Nobody
fought on high-sops, it took more energy than a user had available.
    Anjue gave him the news when Khadaji went to check on the line.
    "Have you heard about quadman Pendragon?" "I don't believe I know a
trooper by that name." The doormaster waved his hands. "He was one of the
first—if not the first—hit by the Shamba Freedom Forces. Six months ago, it
was." Khadaji nodded. "So?" "He's awake. The first to recover from the
poisoning."
    "Ah."
    "Good news, eh?'
    "Indeed."
    He wandered back into the octagon, thinking. So. The first one was out of
it. He tried to remember the earliest troopers he'd stationed. They all seemed
to run together, it was hard to pick out a single man or woman. There were
some who stuck in his memory, of course: the couple drinking contraband
voremhdlts in the swirltub; the trooper who covered his face with his hands
and would spend the months that way; the two nude women who came at
him with knives. There were so many of them, though, he couldn't summon
up, they were just bodies falling, locked in tetany. But they were coming back
to their interrupted lives, now. Quadman Pendragon may or may not have
seen him. Probably not— he'd been particularly careful in the beginning,
sometimes wearing skinmasks, sometimes shooting from hiding. But not
always. They would start awakening by the dozens pretty soon, and some of
them had seen him. Some of them had known who he was. Very shortly, the
game was going to be over. Now it would get tricky, it could all fall apart if
he allowed it to go too far.
    Khadaji found he was breathing faster, that his heart was rumbling along
quicker than normal. Funny. He had known this was coming and yet now
that it was here, he felt a thrill of fear running through him like some electric
current. The years of mind and body training, of mental and physical control
kicked in, and he calmed himself. He slowed his pulse and breathing, but the
hormone balance was not so easy. The chemicals were stirred and it took
more than a quick effort of will to smooth those waters. Later, he would go to
his cube and spend a few minutes meditating, that would do it. He needed a
clear mind for what was to come.
   One more station. It would be dangerous, maybe foolishly so. The big
holoproj was hardly over—it was only just started—but this portion of it was
coming to a close. Kha-daji had mixed emotions about it. On the one hand,
there was the fear—he could end it all now if he screwed it up. On the other
hand, if he pulled it off, it would be the final touch, a major coup. And it was
the last. If it worked, it would serve and if it failed, well, there were risks in
everything. As Subru had put it, one could be flattened by a ground-effect
tank while crossing the street. Life was always shadowed by death.
   Preparations were simple. Khadaji took the container of extra spetsdod
darts from his desk, along with the writing pad with the number of casualties
from the hidden box under his desk and dropped them into a public
disposal. There was a flash as the unit's lasers ignited the rigged packets. The
disposal was built to take worse and now that evidence was gone. If nothing
else, the legend was safe.
   He walked back to the Jade Flower and used the public com just outside
the fresher. As he waited for the connection to be made, he looked around,
taking in the sights and sounds and smells of the pub. It was all very sharp,
diamond-clear, made so he realized by the fact this might be the last time he
would see it. Interesting how a man's mind worked—
   "Befalhavare Creg's office."
   Khadaji turned his attention to the com. "This is Emile Khadaji, owner of
the Jade Flower. I'd like to speak to the Befalhavare."
   "Hold, sir, I'll get the Sub—"
   "Negative, mister. I need the Old Man himself."
   "Sir, Befalhavare Creg is in conference at the moment and cannot be
disturbed. If you would like to leave a message, you will be contacted
when—"
   "Listen, mister, I am holding 'Ears Only' material for your C.O. You don't
want to be the one who kept him from hearing it ASAP."
   There was a pause. Khadaji could imagine the soldier's thoughts. There
were procedures, standing orders which were supposed to be followed.
Deviation from such could mean his ass; on the other hand, if Khadaji—a
man of some local standing—was holding 'Ears Only' material and wasn't
put through, the Old Man might use somebody's balls for marbles. Either
way was a risk. It would depend upon how bright the clerk was.
   He was bright. "Hold a moment, sir, I'll put you through."
   Khadaji grinned into the comset.
   The Old Man was not one to waste words. "What?"
   "Befalhavare Creg, Emile Khadaji, I'm the owner—"
   "I know who you are, sir. What is your business rattling my clerk?"
   Khadaji smiled again. "I know who the leaders of the Shamba Forces are."
   "I'll send a quad for you, stay where you are."
   Naturally, Khadaji thought, the call would be traced, but it wasn't going to
be played that way. "I would rather not be a target," Khadaji said. "I'll get to
yqur office on my own. But if word gets out, I'm a dead man. This is between
the two of us, no one else."
   "My word," Befal Creg said.
   "I am on my way."
   Khadaji's grin broadened as he broke the connection. The Old Man would
be scrambling already, getting stress analyzers set up, recorders checked,
drugs and electropophy gear brought to his office. A commander of ten
thousand men would hardly be careless when it involved something this
major. Khadaji expected no less. By the time he left the Jade Flower, probably
a dozen quads would have been corn-dispatched to collect him.
   The first quad found him within two minutes. Another joined for backup.
Five men and three women formed a circle around Khadaji and escorted him
to the Befalhavare's office, alert for any attacks by the Shamba Scum. Khadaji
allowed himself a short laugh.
   The security at the C.O.'s office was impressive. Fifty troopers, half in class
three armor, and a ground-effect spin-gun guarded the building. The Scum
weren't going to storm this building. Khadaji kept his face impassive as he
was marched into the hard foam structure. Of course, the Scum didn't have
to storm the building....
   Khadaji was checked for weapons; he emptied his pockets—he only had a
pack of flicksticks and some change, which he handed to the Lojt in charge—
was hand-searched, then walked past a fluroproj to double check that he had
no material secreted in his clothes or body cavities.
   "Clean," the tech said, looking at the proj.
   The Lojt handed the flicksticks and money back to Khadaji. Khadaji
extended the pack toward the officer. "Like a smoke?"
   "No, sir. Not on duty."
   "For later, maybe?"
   The officer hesitated a moment, then shook his head. "Better not. Go ahead
in, sir."
   Inside, there was at least a pretense of privacy; Creg sat behind his desk,
and the two men were alone in the room.
   "Sit," Creg ordered.
   Khadaji shook his head. "First we make sure I get back to the Jade Flower
alive," he said. "I want you to arrange for a quad to escort me back, now that
you've marked me by having me brought in under heavy guard."
   "It'll be taken care of."
   "No, sir. I want you to get on the com and tell that friendly Lojt outside the
door that when I come out, he's to take me back to the Flower without any
stops—that anybody who tries to approach is probably Scum, no matter
what they claim to be or look like and they are to be spiked." The
commanding officer of the forces on Greaves looked irritated. "Mister
Khadaji, you have vital information for me and we are under Military
Interdiction. I can pry what I want from you in five minutes."
   "I know that," Khadaji said. Careful. "But I'm here voluntarily. I want to tell
you what I know, and you can verify it easily. I just want to make sure I
survive. Is it so unreasonable a request?"
   Befalhavare Creg weighed his options. Khadaji could see him decide. "All
right, Mister Khadaji." He reached for the com unit on his desk, touched a
pressure-sensitive pad, and spoke quietly. 'Temms, when this man leaves
here, you are to escort him back to where he came from. No one is to
approach without being considered an assassin—not anyone, including your
mother, you copy?"
   "Sir."
   The Old Man looked up. He was only about fifty, Khadaji estimated,
hardly old, with ajnilitary shag cut and hard features. Probably a by-the-tape
commander.
   "You have somebody monitoring this conversation, commander?"
   "I gave you my word otherwise, didn't I?"
   "Recording?"
   "That I do, mister. Now, you had something to tell me?"
   Khadaji nodded. He took the pack of flicksticks from his pocket. "Do you
mind if I smoke?"
   Creg shook his head. "Not if you get to the point."
   Khadaji smiled and scratched the tip of the flickstick along the leg of his
pants. The tip flared and he put the doped cigarette to his lips, but didn't
draw on it.
   "Me," Khadaji said.
   "Excuse me?"
   "Me. I'm the leader of the Shamba Freedom Forces. In fact, I'm the whole
army."
   Creg's eyes widened, then narrowed. "I don't much care for jokes, mister—
!"
   Khadaji took a deep breath, centered the flickstick in his mouth, and blew,
hard. There was a paper tube inside the thinly packed flickstick and inside
the tube, a single dart of fluroproj-transparent plastic, just in case. The dart
tore through the tip of the smoldering flickstick and across the desk, hitting
Befalhavare Creg's throat. The poison took him, one knee snapping up into
his desk, throwing him forward. Number twenty-three-eighty-eight, Khadaji
thought. He wouldn't be able to top this one.
   He stood and walked to the door, slid it aside and was out. He locked the
door behind him. The Lojtnant looked startled.
   "Time to go," Khadaji said.
   "That didn't take long."
   Khadaji shrugged. "Who are we to question the C.O.?"
   "I should check with him—"
   "I wouldn't. He told me he wanted a few minutes to think about what I
told him. No calls short of planetary emergency, I think he said."
   The Lojt nodded. "All right. This way."
   It would take five minutes to get back to the Jade Flower; it would
probably be another twenty or thirty minutes after that before anybody
seriously tried to disturb Befalhavare Creg; there would be another few
minutes of confusion after he was found before the chain-of-command
collected itself enough to check the recording and figure out what happened;
finally, a few more minutes would elapse before troopers stormed the Jade
Flower, looking for the Shamba Scum. He could figure on an hour, at least.
Plenty of time.
   Inside the Flower, Khadaji found Sleel. "Clear everybody out," he said.
"We're closing." "Huh?"
   "The Jade Flower is going to close. Tell Anjue to start herding the troops
out; I want the place cleared in fifteen minutes."
   "But—but—"
   "Just do it." Khadaji was aware of Sleel's stare at his back as he walked
toward the drug room. He rapped on the densecris window and got Butch's
attention. "What's happenin', Boss?" "Open up, Butch."
   The reaper locks snicked open and the thick stainless steel door swung
wide. The chief pubtender stood in the doorway. "Somethin' up?"
   "Go help Sleel. We're closing for a little while. I want everybody outside."
"What's the deal?"
   "Not to worry, Butch. Somebody will be asking for me soon—tell them
where I am." He walked into the drug room and started to cycle the door
shut.
   "What is it, Boss? You in some kinda trouble? Listen, me 'n' Sleel can hold
'em off if you—"
   Khadaji smiled. "Thanks, Butch, I appreciate it. But you do what I told you,
that'll help the most." The door swung closed. Khadaji walked over in front
of the dispensing window and stood framed in it. He saw Butch and Sleel
both look at him, and at least a dozen troopers saw him before he opaqued
the window. The crystal faded slowly to black. Alone in the room, he took a
deep breath and slowly sat on his heels in the kneeling position called seiza.
He had at least three-quarters of an hour, plenty of time for a short
meditation.
   His mind would not be still. It had been over ten years since he'd learned
the first of the calming procedures he'd used from that point. They had
become almost automatic in that time, his control was nearly perfect. Zazen,
kuji-kiri, throndu, point-contraction, mantra, mandala—he knew them all,
cages for the monkey brain. But the monkey was elusive this time. And it had
a larger, fiercer cousin, a beast which slept in a deep and black cave in the
back of Khadaji's mind. The monkey's nervous chattering of doom awoke the
shaggy creature. Death? It said, red eyes narrowing. No. I will fight Death
and kill him! I am not ready to die. Never.
   Khadaji sighed. Too many years, too much preparation had gone into this;
too much was stirred for him to calm himself now. Instead of being lulled,
his mind was preter-naturally alert, filled with thoughts and desires and
memories. He saw quietly, but his head was full of storm; epinepherine
surged through his blood and washed over his shores in pounding waves.
Khadaji remembered.
  He remembered it all.


  Chapter Six

   THE WOMAN EXPLODED into a shower of blood and torn flesh as the
slugs from his carbine smacked into her. The look of surprise on her face, of
puzzlement, touched him. She had not known she could be hurt, that she
could die. It was there on her face as she fell, the amazement. Among the
thousands of them charging across the harvested wheat field, Khadaji saw
her face clearly. But the look was on other faces in the background. Wrong,
the look said. This 'isn't right, this isn't the way it's supposed to be, those
dying expressions said—
   "Khadaji, get your quad to the left, three hundred degrees! There's another
wave coming!"
   "Jasper, Wilks, Reno, the Lojt says cover three hundred, stat!"
   "Why are they still coming, Emile?" Reno was almost sobbing. "We're
blowing them to fuck and they ain't even armed! They're fucking crazy!"
   "Goddamn fanatics," Jasper cut in. "They don't think they can die, their
leader's told them they're invincible. Well, we'll show the stupid ratholes—-"
He triggered another blast of his carbine, waving it back and forth at hip
level like a water hose. Three hundred meters out, four or five of the
attackers went down, human wheat in the field used to grow a different crop.
   "Stupid fuckers, stupid fuckers, stupid, stupid—!" Jasper screamed as he
fanned his weapon back and forth. All around them, other quads burned the
air with blasts from their carbines, firing a locust-cloud of explosive bullets at
the oncoming enemy. Thousands of the attackers dropped, so many they
were stacked two or three meters high in places, with others climbing the
hills of human debris to keep coming. Those were cut down as well, until the
mounds of dead grew higher still—
   "Why don't they stop?" Reno was crying, pointing his empty carbine at the
sea of people, clicking the firing stud over and over. "Why don't they stop?
Why?"
   Khadaji felt gray, he felt as if a barrel of sand had been poured over him,
ground into his eyes and nose and mouth and muscles. His arms ached from
the weight of the carbine, the stink of electrochem propellant filled his
nostrils, the roar of the explosions seemed continuous, even through the
mute-plugs in his ears. But he kept firing. And firing. And firing....
   —exploded into a shower of blood and torn flesh—
   "—your quad to the left, three hundred degrees—!"
   "—Goddamn fanatics—.'"
   "—stupid fuckers, stupid, stupid—!"
   Khadaji turned away from the slaughter and dropped into a squat over the
dry ground; he ejected the magazine from his weapon, drew a full one from
his belt and clicked it into place. The sensors in the carbine noted the load.
There was a quiet whine as the first round cycled into the firing chamber. He
felt as if he had been dipped in lead; the smallest movement was hard,
straightening and turning took the energy of a ten klick run. He moved in
slow motion, a man standing in thick lube gel to his neck. He pointed his
weapon in the general direction of the attackers—there was no need to aim—
and triggered it. The Parker carbine vibrated in his hands, sending explosive
bullets to join the killing. It seemed to him as if he'd been born to this foreign
world, as if he'd lived his whole life here, firing and loading and firing and
loading and firing, as if he would surely grow old and die here. His
chronometer must have stopped, it showed that only an hour had passed
since the first wave of fanatics—yes, Jasper was right—fanatics had swept
toward the foam-blocked positons of the Confed's Jump-troops. Only an
hour? He had never fired for a solid hour before. Sometime during that
period, a supply robot had issued him a new weapon; dozens of the
anodized aluminum dins ran back and forth behind the line, dropping new
belts of loaded magazines and replacing burned-out weapons, so the
firepower would not slacken.
   And still they came. There must be millions of them, he had never seen so
many people in one place, all moving with such singleness of purpose. They
weren't even armed! The dead were piled into mounds of warm flesh, there
had to be two or three hundred thousand of them covering the field,
withering lower under the explosive spray of a ten kay at full throttle.
   Why? Why did they walk into certain death, never pausing?
   His weapon clicked dry. Mechanically, he turned, squatted, and reloaded.
The machinery of his carbine whined again, telling him it was ready.
   Why are we killing these people?
   Khadaji stared at his weapon. The barrel was hot, smoke rose from it in
thin tendrils into the cooler air. The weapon seemed alien, suddenly, a
strange instrument whose function he couldn't understand. The gravity was
a standard gee, the air carried enough oxy, but this was not his world. The
bright yellow sun was hotter than his own; the smells of planet Maro were
different from those of San Yubi. Ten thousand of the Confederation's finest
had been bent here, to spend ammunition and time target shooting.
   No. Those weren't targets out there. He was shooting people, people who
laughed and cried and ate and fucked and he was killing them. In the name
of any god which might have ever existed, why? What could justify that?
What had they done to deserve to die? Because they opposed the confed?
Because the confed wanted order on this world? It was insane!
   "Khadaji, what's up? Your weapon jammed?"
   The voice of the centplex's commander, Lojtnant Hogan, blared from the
transceiver over Khadaji's left ear.
   "Jammed?" The word was as meaningless as the chunk of deadly plastic,
spun crystal and metal that he held.
   But the Lojt misunderstood. "Supply is on the way. Hold on for a minute."
   Khadaji became aware of his breathing. The damped noise of the constant
firing faded from his consciousness; the yelling of the- troopers dwindled,
the screams of the dying trailed off, and all he could hear was his own
breathing. In, out, a little hoarse, but it was steady. His heartbeat was slow, a
gently throb under his skin. He felt as if he'd been wrapped in a thick
blanket, he was warm, comfortable and alone. He stood slowly and turned
yet slower, to look at the sea of dead and about-to-be-dead.
   Why?
   Because.
   The invisible blanket was removed. All the sounds and sights and smells
and tastes came back in a rush. The stink of death, of explosives, the cries, the
blood. Everything burst upon him in that moment. He knew! He understood
why! He could not have said it, there were no words, but the Realization
burst from his innermost being. It was all right. ALL RIGHT! Not good, not
moral, but he understood it, all in a single cosmic flash which lasted only a
second. It was more potent than any psychedelic he'd ever taken, stronger
than anything he'd ever felt. Emile Antoon Khadaji suddenly and without
any logical or apparent reason knew just who he was, exactly what his place
in the universe was. He knew who he was, and so he knew too what he must
do.
   He grinned and put his left hand on the top block of foam, then vaulted
over it and began to run toward the approaching mob. The sunshine warmed
him; the smells were fine, now.
   "Buddha! Emile, what the fuck are you doing—?"
   "—Khadaji, get back here—!"
   "—pull your fire or you'll hit him—!"
   "—slipped his drive—!"
   As he ran, Khadaji tore the transceiver from his ear and tossed it away. The
voices from the radio went with it. The explosive bullets screamed and
whined past him, but they didn't matter. He would be hit or he wouldn't, it
was all the same, it didn't matter in the overall scheme of things, whatever
was right would happen....
   A tumbling bullet nicked his left boot, ripping the heel away, and he
stumbled, tripped and fell. He managed to turn the fall into a shoulder roll,
came up and kept running. Without the heel, it was a lopsided run, he nearly
fell again, but he kept going. He was fifty meters out and nearing the first of
the dead. Another fifty meters and he would be there—
   A body near him jumped under the impact of a slug and an arm blew
away from the corpse and bounced from Khadaji's chest as he ran. He didn't
slow. He could see the faces of the attackers now, dull, almost like plastic
dolls, showing no fear or emotion as they moved toward their goal. They
didn't have a chance of reaching it, of course, he knew that. They would learn
it as they died; only then would the vapid expressions change in sudden
surprise.
   He passed the first of them. They ignored him. His uniform seemed to
make no difference, they could not focus on a single man. He began to strip
the lightweight gear away, still running.
   When he was down to a thin coverall, he finally slowed to a walk. There
were still thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them, all
moving opposite the way he now walked. Those in front of him moved to let
him pass, as if they knew he was a man with a mission, as if they could
somehow see he was a man on fire.
   He walked on, not knowing where he would go, what exactly he would
do, only that he was going to do something. He had no money, no way to get
off the world, no way to live. He had known only the military and he was
done with that now. But he didn't worry. He had no cares and no problem
was too big for him to solve, he knew he had the answers somewhere within
him, he had only to look.
  Somewhere within him, he would find a plan.


  Chapter Seven

   THE MEMORY OF it was still strong as he wandered about the streets of
Notzeerath. A few kilometers away, three-quarters of a million people had
died violently only days earlier, but there was no sign of it here. There was
no fear of the Void in these people, he understood that now. They were
believers in soul regeneration, of being born anew after each cycle. Their
High Priest was considered a god and they would march into the teeth and
claws of death for him. Many had. More would. Khadaji was wrapped in his
personal Realization still, and so he understood. He knew whatever answers
he needed would come to him—he was operating totally on an intuitive level
for the first time in his life. He didn't worry about the Military looking for
him. They would surely think he was dead—walking into the fanatics as he
had, he should have been torn to pieces. They wouldn't even look for his
body, among all the others. He stood on a corner, awash in the sensual input
of the city: six-wheeled vehicles with alcohol-powered engines rumbled by
on hard plastic tires; people shopped at an open-air fruit and vegetable
market; the steady thrum of a broadcast generator vibrated from the
plastcrete through his bare feet. He had thrown his boots away.
   "Lost, pilgrim?" came a deep voice from behind him.
   Khadaji turned, to see a figure wrapped from head to foot in folds of gray
cloth. Only the eyes and hands were visible in the gray cloud. The eyes were
green and clear, the hands short-fingered and powerful looking, ridged with
tendons and thick veins. A man's hands. He must be hot under all that
material, Khadaji thought.
   Khadaji smiled. "Lost? No. I don't know where I am, but I'm not lost."
   The man in gray laughed. "A zen answer, pilgrim, and perfect for a holy
man. Have you been such long?"
   "I'm not a holy man," he said. "Until a few days ago, I was a soldier.
Something... happened. I... saw something, felt something, somehow. A
vision."
  The tall figure in gray nodded. "Ah. Relampago. You are blessed, pilgrim."
  Khadaji didn't know the word; however, he was certain that the man was
going to tell him what it meant.
  He did. "The Cosmic Flash, the Existential Lightning, the Finger of God—
Relampago. There are people who labor a lifetime hoping for that touch,
sweating through postures and prayers and complex rituals."
  "I'm not sure that's what happened to me—"
  "Oh, it is, pilgrim. It shows. You are producing psychic energy like a
kirlian flare. Anyone with any sensitivity could see it. Even a blind man
could feel it through the pores of his skin." The man in gray shook his head
and Khadaji knew he was smiling, even though he could not see his face. "I'm
the current Pen," he said, "and this tent I wear marks me as a member of the
Holy Order of the Siblings of the Shroud."
  "You're a priest?"
  "Close enough. It's a bit more complicated than that, but the designation is
sufficient."
  Khadaji thought for a few seconds. "You said you were the current Pen. Is
that a name or a title?"
  "My name. Pens come and Pens go, and it is my lot to be the Pen of the
moment. When I am gone, another will take the name and carry on. There is
never more than one of us at a time."
  Khadaji understood. A week ago, it would have sounded weird, but now it
made perfect sense. Though he couldn't have said why, exactly, he knew it
did.
  "What can I do for you, then, Pen?"
  Pen moved his hands so that the palms faced the sky. "It is I who is to do
for you, pilgrim."
  "My name is Khadaji. Emile Khadaji."
  "Ah. Well, Emile Khadaji, I am, among other things, a teacher. Can you tell
me of your vision?"
  Khadaji smiled. He shook his head. "There are no words for the feeling," he
said. "The best I have come up with is that I felt and heard and saw and
smelled and tasted a sense of... tightness. Of order, of unfolding as it should
be."
  "Ah. And how did this vision come to be?"
  Khadaji told Pen of the slaughter. He left none of it out. When he finished,
the gray-robed figure nodded.
   "Yes. It happens that way. Would you care to hear the psychology and
physiology of the experience? The science of it?"
   Before Khadaji could speak, Pen continued. "Oh. Excuse me, I forget my
manners. You need new clothes, and food. When did you eat last?"
   Khadaji considered it. "Three days," he said- "Before the attack. I've been
drinking water from public fountains, but food hasn't seemed very
important."
   The fabric covering Pen's face shifted slightly. He had to be smiling.
"Come, then, we'll see to clothing and food and then we'll talk."
   While it somehow seemed natural that Pen would do these things for him,
Khadaji felt a sense of wonder about it. Before he could ask, Pen answered
his question. "When one is ready for a teacher, a teacher appears; the same is
true of students—when the right one appears, a teacher knows. The Disk
spins and we are spiraled along to our proper places. It was no chance which
brought us together this day, Emile Khadaji, but the twirlings of the Disk—
for now, we are for each other."
   Khadaji nodded. He had never paid court to mysticism, he had been raised
by atheist parents and shaped by a pragmatic military, but he was no longer
the person he had been. He followed the bulky figure in gray because he
understood, in some strange fashion, what Pen meant.
   They sat in the shade, under a broad-leafed pulse tree in the court of an
outdoor restaurant. Khadaji now wore a set of loose-weave orthoskins in a
gray which nearly matched Pen's shroud, and dotic boots custom-spun for
his feet. He ate slowly from a plate of highly-spiced vegetables and sipped
from a mug of splash. Arteries throbbed under the woody skin of the pulse
tree a meter away. He watched them and listened while he ate.
   Pen was talking. Lecturing. "The psychology of the religious experience
has been well-researched and taped. There are many paths up the
mountain—sensory deprivation or sensory overload—emotional response to
stimuli or the lack thereof is common. Drugs, of course, from psychoactives
to the more mundane depressants. Electropophy can bring it about, as can
organic brain damage, lack or excess of oxygen, even sex can trigger it. And
what it is, according to the science of man and mue, is a subjective mental
state, somewhere to the left of hypnosis. A trick the mind plays on itself. A
delusion, void of reality."
   Khadaji took another bite of the vegetables, then grinned.
   Pen inclined his head slightly to one side. "And none of what I've just said
matters at all, does it?"
   Khadaji shrugged. "I know what I felt. I hear what you are saying. I
understand it here—" he tapped his head with one finger, "—but that doesn't
compare to the way I feel it here." He pointed at his belly.
   "You are convinced of its truth?"
   Khadaji nodded.
   "Good. So am I. Science, alas, for all it has done for us, is sometimes short-
sighted. A product of the monkey-brain, science is, and too concerned with
numbers and equations and limits, at times. Today's mysticism will be
tomorrow's science."
   Khadaji sipped at his splash. The midly alcoholic drink did little to wash
the hot spices away.
   "You have told me of your vision," Pen said. "You have glimpsed the Disk
as it spun, the largeness of it, the lightness of it. But you saw flaws."
   Khadaji sighed. "Yes. It was not so much a sight as a feeling. Everything
was right, but there was a kind of... wrongness, as well. About man."
   "A large painting is made up of many figures," Pen said. "You can see it at
a distance and get an impression of it, but you cannot know it until you look
closer, at the small parts which form it. The study will take some time; it may
lead you to many places. I can only guide you part of the way. Will you
allow me to show you what I can?"
   This was part of it, Khadaji knew. He had a sense of mission, of purpose so
strong he had no choice but to go with it. He nodded again. "Yes," he said.
   There was a flat yard of thick grass trimmed short behind the building in
which Pen had his rooms. Khadaji felt the mat sink under his dotics as he
walked on it, like a plush carpet. He turned and faced Pen, who stood two
meters away.
   "Before you can properly influence others, you must control yourself," Pen
said. "Body control is the easiest but it must be mastered. You are trained as a
soldier, with weapons. And, I assume, some unarmed skills?"
   "Oppugnate," Khadaji said. "Military boxing, with hands and feet."
   "Good. Attack me, using your training."
   Khadaji hesitated. It was hard to determine Pen's age from his hands and
eyes alone, but he was easily old enough to be Khadaji's father—maybe his
grandfather. "I am still circulating bacteria-aug," he said. "For another six
months, until the colonies die, I will be considerably faster than an
unaugmented human."
   "It doesn't matter," Pen said. "Launch your attack."
   Khadaji shifted into a fighting stance, left foot forward, his left hand held
high, his right low, fingers extended and stiffened, thumbs curled tightly. He
edged forward slightly, keeping his legs wide for balance. He had been
training in the unarmed combat for nearly six years; he was young, strong,
and practiced. He didn't want to hurt Pen, so he figured to snake in and tap
the man lightly a couple of times and then back off. He kept his eyes
impassive, focused on the entire figure, and held his breathing even, so as not
to reveal his intent.
   Pen stood quietly, looking relaxed, his hands by his sides.
   Khadaji jumped suddenly, half again as fast as a normal man, and jabbed
his stiffened hand at the other man's solar plexus; it was fast, but not hard.
   Pen pivoted, caught Khadaji's wrist lightly with his thumb and forefinger
and did a kind of two-step dance, ending in a twirl. Khadaji felt himself lose
balance and start to fall. He twisted and managed to roll out of the fall, but
he hit the ground harder than expected; it jarred his teeth together. He came
up, spun, and crouched, to face Pen again.
   Pen stood as he had before, looking unconcerned.
   Khadaji considered the throw. Some sort of wrestling technique, rather
than boxing. All right. One of the judo or jujitsu or aikido variants. Well. That
could be handled. If he kept his weight centered and only used muscle-
strikes, he could avoid being thrown.
   He moved in, snapping his right foot up toward Pen's groin, still fast but
without real power, then stepped down and swung his hand around in a
sweeping chop. His stance was solid, it was unlikely he'd be pulled off-
balance at this angle.
   Pen shifted, spun again and seemed to wave his hand past Khadaji's
shoulder with only a light touch. Khadaji went over backwards. He reached
out to slap at the soft grass with both hands, but he still hit hard, on his back.
It knocked the wind from him. He twisted to one side, rolling, and scrambled
up, trying to inhale tiny sips of air. Maro's sun beat upon him and he felt his
face go hot. The air was heavy with moisture and sweat rolled down his neck
and spine. This was all wrong. He was faster than Pen, he could feel that.
Okay. The problem was in his attack. An initiated strike left one more open
than defense, an attacker had to commit himself while a defender only had to
wait. He would stand his ground and wait for Pen's move, then.
   The two men stood facing each other for what seemed like a long time to
Khadaji. He kept his stance wide and powerful, his hands raised to cover
himself high and low, and waited. Pen, meanwhile, simply stood in his
neutral stance.
   Finally, Pen moved. He raised his hands and clasped them together. He
began to knit his fingers together in an intricate weave, crossing and
uncrossing, locking and unlocking the digits in strange and complex
patterns. Khadaji stared at Pen's hands. What was he—?
   Pen stepped forward, almost slowly, Khadaji thought. He reached out with
one foot and kicked, a kick aimed at Khadaji's leading leg, behind the knee.
The younger man couldn't seem to move in time to parry or block. Pen's
instep smacked solidly into Khadaji's leg, lifting it high. For the third time,
Khadaji fell, arms flailing. This time, he stayed on the grass. He sat up and
stared at the other man.
   Pen laughed, a deep belly rumble.
   Khadaji shook his head. "I suppose I'm missing something funny."
   "Only a cliche," Pen said.
   "I don't understand."
   "This whole scene." Pen waved one arm to encompass Khadaji and the
surrounding landscape. "The old martial arts master defeating the young
student. It's classic. Problem with cliches is, they get to be that way because
they tend to be more or less valid. I couldn't devise a better means to show
you I have something you need to learn than the old routine. Sometimes
older is better, it seems."
   Pen bent and extended a hand to Khadaji, then helped lift him back onto
his feet. "The art is called sumito," he said, "and the idea is to learn to control
your own body, not defeat somebody else. When you can make your hands
and feet go where you want them to, it doesn't matter if you have an
opponent or not."
   Khadaji shook his head. He had always been taught that muscle memory
required specificity—if you wanted to learn to play nullball, you practiced in
zee-gee; if you wanted to improve boxing skill, you boxed with a partner.
Anything less was good only for general conditioning, not specific skills. On
the other hand, Pen had been tossing him around as if he were feeble and
brainless, instead of a trained and augmented professional soldier. Had to be
something to what the man said. Had to be something.


  Chapter Eight

   KHADAJI STARED AT the floor. There was a strange pattern of footsteps
drawn there, laid out like some madman's dance. He looked up at Pen.
"What am I supposed to do here?"
   Pen smiled. "It's simple enough. Walk the pattern."
   Khadaji shrugged. He began to step on the drawn figures. They seemed to
be exactly the size and shape of his own feet. The first five steps were simple.
He looked at the sixth with disbelief. "I can't reach that one from here."
   "Certainly you can."
   "Not without twisting like a contortionist, I can't."
   "Try."
   Khadaji tried. He kept his weight on his left foot while he stretched his
right leg and attempted to twist his ankle to make his right foot conform to
the diagram. He lost his balance and almost fell. "Can't do it," he said.
   "No?" Pen motioned for Khadaji to stand aside. He stood at the beginning
of the pattern and began to walk it. When he reached the sixth step, he
simply did it. Khadaji wasn't sure how. One second he was facing this way,
the next second, that way. The man was shorter, had shorter legs, and if he
could stretch that far, Khadaji should be able to also.
   It took nine tries before he succeeded, but Khadaji finally made the sixth
step. He looked at Pen and smiled.
   Pen's face was invisible within the shroud, but he did nod. "Very good.
The seventh step?"
   Khadaji looked down. Buddha! It was impossible, nobody could get there
without falling! He glared at Pen, mentally daring him to do it.
   Pen did. This time, he walked the entire pattern, almost a hundred steps.
Ninety-seven, to be exact. It was a number Khadaji would grow to detest. In
six weeks, he could manage to make it to step fifty. Sometimes. It was
radically different than the oppugnate training he had learned in the military.
It didn't seem to make any sense.
   During that time, Pen began to teach Khadaji other things. They hopped
around on one leg. Sat motionless for long periods. Did stretching exercises
which hurt him in places Khadaji didn't even know he had. He was learning
something, Khadji knew. What, he didn't know. But something.
   Somewhere along the way, Khadaji began to lose the sense of
foreknowledge he'd had. He still had the memory, but the sense of oneness
he'd felt with the universe during the slaughter faded and became less sharp.
There were some moments when he could touch it, but they became fewer
and shorter. It was as if he'd passed through a magical door on a conveyer;
he continued to move and the door grew smaller behind him. He wanted to
stay at the portal, but he could not. And he didn't know where he was going.
   So, when Pen began one particular teaching, Khadaji found himself
puzzled.
   They were sitting in the largest of Pen's rooms, a low-ceilinged square six
meters on a side. The room was cool, despite the heat of Maro's summer
outside, kept that way by a strip of lindex filter set under the opaqued
window. There were three foam chairs, a desk with a comp terminal on it,
and a large chest against one wall; no other furniture.
   "Pubtending? Are you serious?"
   Pen laughed from within the folds of his gray shroud. 'To be sure," he said.
"One must make a living."
   Khadaji had a little trouble picturing Pen behind a bar, or window, mixing
drinks and dispensing tablets. He said as much.
   "Ah, but it is a perfect job for a priest, even one so un-priestly as I.
Consider: who has a better opportunity to see people with their masks
lowered than a pubtender? Men will confide things to you drunk they
wouldn't tell a brother when sober; stoned women will reveal secrets they'd
never speak as pillow talk while straight. More than one pubtender has come
from the ranks of practicing psychologists-or gone there from some bar."
   Khadaji shook his head. "I don't know...."
   Pen waved one hand. "What's to know? You'll have to do something to
feed yourself-I won't be around forever. A top-ranked pubtender can always
get a job and as I said, there are few places better to study the human
condition. More, it's a skill I can teach you."
   Khadaji stood and walked to the plastic window. He touched a control on
the sill and the window shifted from near black to clear. The light was too
bright, bringing a blast of reflectled heat with it. He darkened the window
again. "Somehow, it doesn't seem exactly what I had in mind."
   "And what did you have in mind?"
  Khadaji turned to look at Pen. "I-I don't know. Something. ..."
  "Ah. I see. Well, until you figure out what, precisely, perhaps it would be
wise to learn what is available."
  Khadaji considered it. Pen was right. He only had vagueness where he felt
he should have some plan. Pubtending? It was as good as anything, he
supposed. And easy enough, he figured.
  He was wrong about how easy it would be. He found that out quickly.
  Pen stood and walked to the comp terminal. He removed a small steel
marble from his robe and held it out so Khadaji could see it. Khadaji
recognized the ball as a recording sphere, a storage device for information.
Though the sphere was small, it would hold several hundred volumes of
hard copy.
  "This contains seventeen years of experience as a pub-tender," Pen said.
"Every drink I know how to mix, every chem, planetary and local laws
regarding dispensing, favorites on different worlds, everything. Cross-
referenced, indexed, annotated and illustrated. Come and see."
  Pen dropped the vacuum-formed steel ball into a circular slot on the
computer's terminal and stroked the unit to life. The operating system
acknowledged the format of the sphere with a wash of colors and words
across the holoprqj image above the keyboard, then went into mode-select.
  "Verbal," Pen said, "standard Interstitchi, float it."
  "Acknowledged," the computer said. It had a deep, feminine voice.
  "Index-categories, primo screen-give me this one visual."
  "Running."
  Two seconds after the computer spoke, four words splashed into the air
over the unit. Khadaji blinked and stared at the projection. The words were:
  LIQUIDS, SOLIDS, GASES, RADIANTS
  Pen turned to Khadaji. "Pick a category," he said.
  Might as well keep it simple, Khadaji thought. "Liquids," he said.
  Pen turned back to the computer. "Liquids-give me the total number,
please, verbal will do."
  "Nineteen thousand three hundred sixty-nine," the computer said.
  Khadaji raised his eyebrows. "Buddha! You've made that many different
kinds of drinks?"
  "So it seems."
  "You can't remember them all."
   "I probably could, but there wouldn't be much point to it. That's why I
have the sphere. Usually, it's enough to learn the ten or twenty most popular
ones in any given pub to get by-you can call up anything else if you need it."
   Khadaji shook his head again, something he seemed to be doing a lot
lately. "I wouldn't have believed there could be that many different kinds of
drinks."
   Pen chuckled. "People or mues will drink almost anything. Some very
strange stuff." He said to the computer, "Liquids-Shin's Kiss, give the
ingredient list, visual."
   "Running."
   Two seconds later, the holoproj lit up with:
   SHIN'S KISS
   30CC BLENDED LIQUOR - WHISKY STOCK (QUADRANT COMFORT)
   30CC FRUIT EXTRACT - COCONUT MILK (ISLE OF WENT)
   30CC VEGETABLE EXTRACT - CUCUMBER SOAK (SHIN)
   40-45 GRAMS SUCROSE POWDER
   DIHYDROGEN OXIDE/CARBON DIOXIDE BLEND, QS TO TOP.
   Pen said, "It should be pretty obvious how I have them organized-I go
from general to specific, ending with a brand name, if there is one."
   "Interesting," Khadaji said. "But it looks pretty tame. I would think there'd
be a lot stranger stuff."
   "Don't let the names fool you," Pen said. "Computer, give me an ingredient
list of Shin-skip the cucumber."
   "Running."
   Another list lit the air, this time mostly chemical compounds. Water,
ammonia, sodium chloride, potassium chloride, uric acid, creatinine,
creatine, urea, phosphorus, magnesium-the list ran on. It didn't mean
anything to Khadaji.
   "Don't recognize it?" Pen chuckled again. "You should. It's common
enough. Urine."
   Khadaji blinked. "Piss?"
   "Human urine, to be precise. Shin is made by soaking a cucumber in urine
for a week, then blending it into a nice frothy texture."
   "You're joking."
   "Not at all. The drink is quite popular on some worlds- Thompson's
Gazelle, for one. They even drank a version of it on Earth at one time, as a
remedy for snakebite. And there was one culture which drank the urine of
those intoxicated on certain mushrooms-to get the effect without some of the
nasty side effects of the mushrooms themselves."
  "Shit."
  "As I said, there are some strange beings who will drink even stranger
drinks." Pen's voice was dry. Khadaji didn't know if he was being had or not.
He suspected not.
  "There are fewer chemicals used for recreation in the solid and powder
categories, fewer still in gases and radiants. And, of course, which ones are
legal on which worlds determines their use. Is it a bit more complex than you
thought?"
  Khadaji stared at the formula for Shin's Kiss, still glowing in the air half a
meter away. "Yeah. A bit."
  "You don't need a degree on most worlds to challenge the pubtender's
exam, but you do need to learn a few things. We might as well get started."
  Khadaji nodded. Well. It wouldn't be dull, not if there were other
chemicals like Shin's Kiss. My.
  Khadaji had learned a good deal about falling, rolling and tumbling, he
realized, as he found himself flying through the air for the tenth time that
day. He nicked, hit the grass at a good angle, and came up, without injury or
even mild pain.
  "You were sleeping," Pen said. He stood three meters away, enveloped in
his ever-present shroud. The wind was chilly, it was late fall shading into
winter and snow was expected in the mountains within a few days. Khadaji
nodded. He hadn't been concentrating and the result showed it. Sumito
required total attention for it to work; anything less was cause for instant loss
of control. After five local months, he was getting better, but he still had a
long way to go. Muscle memory had to be trained, Pen told him, and
concentration had to be sharpened to a needle's point. He could walk to the
seventy-second step.
  As for the planet, he was getting used to it, as well. The smells of the air no
longer seemed alien, nor the slight differences in gravity, nor the actinic
quality of the local sun's light. The people still waged their war against the
Confed, with no success. More troops had been sent to the world and the
numbers of the ready-to-die attackers could not overcome the firepower of
the Confederation machine. Khadaji wondered sometimes if he and Pen
would eventually be the only people alive except troopers....
   The snow was piled half a meter thick upon the frozen ground. Khadaji
and Pen walked over it on flat, thin sheets of enforced plastic radiating from
their slushboots like artificial spider's webs. There was a flaw in the heating
system of Khadaji's suit-a spot over his left buttock the size of his hand so
cold it was going numb.
   "Primary routes of administration?" Pen didn't wear a conditioned suit,
only the shroud of his order.
   Khadaji's breath made frosty clouds as he spoke. "Oral, anal, vaginal,
nasal, ophthalmically, otically, cutaneously." He hit a patch of soft snow with
his left web and sank in that direction, almost toppling.
   "You forgot poenile-the meatus urinarius," Pen said. "Use the mnemonic
and you won't."
   Khadaji blinked. Damn. The memory device- flashed across his mental
screen. On Aqua, crafty people never open virginal orifices. The first letter of
each word stood for one of the primary routes of drug administration.
   "Secondary," Pen said.
   "Sub-Q, IM, IV, IC."
   "Good. We'll do nine kilometers today, so we should have time to cover
nasal adequately. Let's start with powders."
   Khadaji nodded. It was going to be a long walk.
   Khadaji sat nude in the hot swirling waters of the local immersion tub,
next to Pen, who was fully clothed in his robes. Nobody seemed to think
anything of that, a man dressed to the eyeballs, and Khadaji was quite used
to it by now. The thickened water stroked Khadaji's sore muscles and the
aroma of mint floated up from the surface with the steam. A plastic roof kept
the snow and most of the cold out; it was late, and only a few people enjoyed
the water with them.
   "What would you get if you served a patron voremholts on Primesat?"
   Khadaji shifted, to allow the stream of hot water under his left buttock to
flow up between his legs. His penis bounced in the stream. "Probably a nice
tip," he said. "Voremholts is expensive in the Centauri System."
   "And the same drink served on Tatsu would get you..."
   "Two-to-five in the local prison." Khadaji's voice was dry.
   "And on Gebay?"
   Khadaji shifted back. The water was causing some blood flow down there
he couldn't do anything about now. He looked across the tub at a girl with
long white hair. She was young and had a nice smile-not to mention a slim
and attractive body he'd noticed when she'd entered the tub. Maybe he could
do something about that anatomical swelling....
   Pen slapped the water and a glob of it arced up and splashed against
Khadaji's face. "Hey!"
   "What happens if you serve voremholts on Gebay?"
   Khadaji wiped the water from his face. It left a greasy feeling on his skin.
"Gebay. Not much. Except in the Konta Compound, where any but church-
approved chemicals are illegal. They cut your hair off for selling proscribed
drugs. Which doesn't sound all that bad, by the way."
   Pen shook his head. "No. They don't cut your body hair. They pull it out,
one strand at a time. The pain is supposed to be incredible, after a time, not
to mention the anticipation. It takes three days for someone not particularly
hirsute- they work straight through, day and night."
   Khadaji felt a chill, despite the heat of the water surrounding him. Gebay.
The religious compound-serve no voremholts there.
   "And the makeup of voremholts?"
   "Jahambu bark, majani wormwood and tecal mushrooms, dissolved in a
fifty-fifty solution of water and Koji rum."
   "And where is the best voremholts made?"
   "The Bibi Arusi System-the green moon, Rangi ya majani Mwezi."
   Pen nodded; the shroud swirled around him in the water. "Very good," he
said. "No more questions for today."
   Khadaji inhaled through his nose, enjoying the tickle of the mint. "I have a
question," he said. "Will you ever tell me about your order? The Siblings of
the Shroud?"
   "It is a complex subject," Pen said. "We are called many things: existential
humanist/pacifists; elitist intellectual pantheist/positivists; meddling sons-
of-bezelworts. A few minutes in a tub would hardly suffice to scratch the
surface. Besides, it isn't important for you to know about me, only about
yourself. The Shroud isn't your way."
   "All right. I have one question you can answer, then. Do you ever take that
shroud off?"
   Pen laughed. "Certainly. Normally, not in view of another person, that's
frowned upon, but when alone, it is allowed. I sleep without it, normally
bathe without it, and surely make love without it-in the dark, at least."
   Khadaji was surprised about the last. He had somehow thought the order
was celibate, though Pen had never said so.
   Pen caught Khadaji's look, apparently. He laughed again."Oh, yes, we
have the same stirrings as others. And we indulge them. In fact, I will not be
sleeping in our rooms this night."
   Khadaji grinned. "Got something lined up?"
   Pen said, "I have plans for the evening, yes."
   Khadaji's grin widened. Good. He'd have the rooms to himself, and the
young woman with hair like snow might also be free. He was thinking of the
best way to approach her when Pen stood and waded across the hip-deep
tub toward the girl. He extended his arm, dragging the wet folds of the cloth
across the scented and thickened water. As Khadaji watched, the girl smiled
sweetly and took Pen's hand in her own. Khadaji watched the muscular roll
of her buttocks as she and Pen climbed from the tub and walked to the
drying rooms. Khadaji found his mouth was agape. He shut it and blinked at
the suddenly irritating mint fumes. Well, I'll be damned, he thought. Maybe
some of the critics of the Siblings were right. Certainly Pen seemed a son-of-
a-bezelwort, at the moment, anyway.


  Chapter Nine

  THEY WENT TO the Beta System, to the fifth planet, called Rim. As the
boxcar dropped from orbit, Khadaji stared out through the densecris portal.
There were patches of smudgy light against the blackness of the planet's
surface, patches which grew sharper as the boxcar swung its passengers and
cargo closer to the ground.
  "Nice view," Khadaji said. "You couldn't get us a daylight arrival so we
could see the place, I suppose."
  Pen's eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping, but Khadaji knew
better. The man never seemed to sleep. He spoke without opening his eyes.
"You didn't bother to read the history, did you? Didn't even wonder why
they call it 'Darkworld.'"
  "I was busy. Studying the tender's exam. Besides, I figured it was probably
rock formations or black sands or something like that."
  Pen opened his eyes and glanced out through the densecris plate.
"Actually, it's axial tilt and habitable land masses. Most of the people on this
world live on a subcontinent which gets daylight only a small portion of each
year. J{ stays somewhere between deep twilight and true night all day in the
High Bzer's Glorious State of Khadzharia, for at least twelve of the planet's
thirteen months."

   Khadaji watched the lights of one city begin to turn into bright, hard
diamonds and rubies and sapphires as the boxcar continued its dead-bird
descent. "Wonderful place if you're a vampire."
   "Or an albino," Pen added.
   The old man's name was Kamus and he was the owner of the pub, a long
and narrow warren called D. W. Dick's. Khadaji looked around the place
carefully, taking it all in. The floor was wood and well-worn, but clean; the
tables were small squares with rounded comers, bolted to the floor; the bar
itself was antique stressed red plastic, probably almost as shiny as the day it
was cast. Behind the bar was a speedex retrieval cabinet for the chem stock, a
credit tag reader and comp terminal; on the wall hung a long sword, under a
full-size acrylic picture of a nude couple intertwined in apparent passion.
Aside from the old man, Pen and Khadaji, the place was empty. It smelled
clean.
   "We close on Si'days," Kamus said. "Bzer's Decree." He looked carefully at
Khadaji. "Your tags say you're qualified, but the patrons in this pub have
eclectic tastes. How do you mix a Sinclo Suicide?"
   Khadaji wanted to smile, but he kept his face impassive. "Twenty-five cc's
each gin, scotch, amberglow and Spandle yeast, in a tall glass of Bern's
champagne."
   The old man nodded. A lock of white hair fell across his forehead. "A
Scarlet Dream?"
   "Grind five grams of red coke into a fine powder and mix with one half
gram of verisol-any inhaler will do, but it's best in a number six Marietta."
   Kamus nodded again. "One more. Bloody Mary?"
   Khadaji allowed himself the grin, this time. That was an old one, Pen had
made him learn it early on. It was perfect for curing the aftereffects of alcohol
intoxicaton. "Forty-five cc's vodka, ninety cc's tomato juice, one cc
Worcestershire sauce, two cc's Tabasco, trace pepper, lemon slice, one
dissolved tab AA-complex. Mix cold with cracked ice and strain into a
frosted glass."
   The owner of the pub returned Khadaji's smile, then looked at Pen. "Seems
to know his stuff. Your rec?"
   Pen nodded. "Vouch and backup."
   Kamus sucked at his teeth. "All right. You're hired. Corpse-stealer's shift,
basic-and-half-diwy with the floor. When can you start?"
   Khadaji was startled. He understood about half of what the old man had
just said. Before he could speak, Pen said, "Fine. He can start tonight. Where
can we get rooms?"
   "Wait, hold it a-" Khadaji began.
   "Quiet," Pen ordered. "The rooms?"
   The old man grinned and wheezed a little and told Pen where they could
find rooms.
   As they walked out into the warm darkness, Khadaji started asking his
questions. "Corpse-stealer's shift?"
   "Midnight until dawn, twelve hundred to oh-six hundred. In the early
days on this world, people used to bury the dead."
   Khadaji shook his head. "Like on old Earth. I never understood why-such a
waste of raw material. And basic-and-half, divvy with the floor? What are we
talking about?"
   "Minimum stads to start, but you get a percentage of gratuities left by
patrons, usually divided equally among the workers on any shift."
   "Vouch and backup?"
   "A long time ago, I worked for the previous owner of the place. I-ah-
developed a good reputation. If I'm willing to vouch for you, it's a point in
your favor. Backup means I'll cover for you if you have to miss a shift for
some reason."
   "That might be rough on you," Khadaji said. "Having to work my shift and
yours."
   Pen stopped and smiled; the movement was invisible through the folds of
his costume, but Khadaji knew. "Did you hear me say anything about me
working? You support us for awhile, Emile; I've got meditation to catch up
on."
   Khadaji thought about that for a moment. Well. It was only fair; after all,
Penn had been carrying the cargo since they'd met.
   Pen came with him the first night and stood in the background as Kamus
introduced Khadaji to the others on the shift. Even with the dampers on, it
was noisy, there were a couple of hundred people packed into the place. He
yelled at Banrose, the headserver, managed a smile across the bar at Shandu
and Gretyl, two more servers, and got a frosty nod from Mang, the "crowd
control officer."
   Kamus said, "That's pretty much the crew, except for Juete-she's late, as
usual. Hop on back there and work with Lu Shan for a few minutes, get the
hang of the layout."
   Khadaji glanced at Pen, who stood nearby, watching the crowd, then
nodded at Kamus. "Sir," he said.
   "None of that," Kamus said, smiling. "Last time somebody called me 'sir' I
had to duck to keep him from shooting me. Call me Kamus."
   Khadaji nodded and headed for the bar. He took a deep-breath and let it
out slowly. The battle on Maro, with its sense of cosmic consciousness, was
still firmly embedded in his mind, but he had to believe Pen's advice-he had
to start somewhere. Pubtender Khadaji. Well. It had an interesting ring, at
least.
   Khadaji was busy. He supposed it would get easier as he learned the
systems, the locations of various chems, the ways to mix common ones faster,
but for the moment, he was running at full throttle, jets flaming, trying to
keep up with the demand. The standard single-ingredient chems were easy,
just a quick tab touch and the computer would dispense those automatically.
But some of the patrons were as odd as Pen had first told him. He was bent
over a concoction called Hen's Teeth when a soft and deep female voice said,
"I need four splashes, a Wizard's Ring and a double fire brandy."
   Khadaji looked up, mildly irritated with the server.
   Later, he would swear his heart had stopped and his vocal cords had been
suddenly paralyzed. The most beautiful creature he had ever seen stood
there. She had encountered his reaction before, it seemed, for she smiled
slightly and said, "I'm Juete. You must be the new tender."
   Khadaji managed a blink, but no words. Shoe-et-tay, she called herself.
Wonderful. Amazing. She stood a hair over a hundred and sixty centimeters
high, weighed maybe fifty-five kilos, and had smooth white skin, white hair
to her buttocks, and pink eyes. He wasn't sure about the last, the lights were
dim, but she was as clear an albino as he'd ever seen. She wore a jet body
stocking which was nearly as revealing as full nudity, though it covered her
from neck to toes. Against the black of the sheer cloth, her face and hands
seemed to shine with pure whiteness.
   "My drinks?"
   Khadaji fumbled the drink he was building, managed to set the glass down
without spilling more than half of it, and hurried to fill her order. Somehow,
he managed it. Then she was gone. He stared after her, feeling stupid, feeling
as he had just before the first time he had ever made love to a girl.
   Kamus cackled behind him. Khadaji turned. "Never saw an exotic before,
that's plain enough." Khadaji snapped himself out of his daze and hurried to
rework the Hen's Teeth. The old man hovered next to him. "Genetic
restructuring," he said. "Somebody figured since it was dark all the time,
albinos would feel right at home. It was before the Chromosome Charter and
the genetic laws, but they tend to breed true."
   Khadaji tried to say something. "She's-I-it-uh...." The old man cackled
again, trailing off into a wheeze and cough. When he could breathe again, he
said, "Yeah, I understand, son. That's why I don't term her for coming in late,
she is good for business." He laughed again, then wandered off. As he passed
the sword hanging under the acrylic picture, he paused to stroke the handle.
   By the time Juete had returned for her twentieth order, Khadaji was able to
relax enough to speak and pretend to a kind of normalcy. He hoped.
   But the conversations were limited to drinks and powders; both the server
and tender were too busy to stop and chat. Khadaji found it was hard for him
to judge her age. At first, he had thought she was very young, she seemed
barely past puberty for a standard human female, on looks alone. But she
moved too well, her timing and pacing were obviously well-practiced, a
thing which only came with age. Such a joy to watch move, she was, ahHe
shook his head. He was a young man, but hardly a virginal wheatseed fresh
off an agropod; he had spent six years in the military, had been many sexual
places with more than a few people. Why was this woman so-so- so...
whatever it was she was? He felt smitten-and foolish for feeling that way.
   The morning worked its way by without any major disasters on his part.
Oh, he did flub a few orders, managed to put bitter tair in a drink supposed
to be sweet, but all in all, it went well. He was tired, but pleased. And
smitten, of course. At six hundred, the relief crew began to filter into the pub.
When the dayshift tender arrived, Khadaji tried to find the girl, but Juete was
gone.
   Pen seemed to materialize from the smoke-filled room, to stand next to
Khadaji. Before he could speak, his teacher said one word: "Pheromones."
   "Excuse me?"
   "The female exotic. She produces concentrated and enhanced sexual-
chemical signals, specific for human males. Part of the original genetic
programming built into her ancestors' systems. They were designed as sexual
toys, you know."
   Khadaji swallowed and shook his head. "No. I didn't know."
   "You found her attractive. Unusually so."
   "Yeah." He recalled the feeling. Knowing why the woman drew him
seemed to make no difference. It was that gut-level versus intellectual-level
thing again. The brain might know, but the gut felt. And, in this case, it was a
portion of his anatomy somewhat lower than his gut which seemed to
control his interest in the exotic girl he'd just met.
   Pen said nothing, only stood there amid the flick-smoke and stale odors of
human bodies and chem, waiting.
   Finally, Khadaji said, "Let's go to the rooms. I'm a little tired."
   The routine was established. Days, Pen schooled Khadaji in martial
techniques. Nights, they slept-at least Khadaji did. Early mornings, there was
the pub. After a few weeks, Khadaji had the hang of it. He got to know
Banrose and Shandu and Gretyl, the servers; managed a passing relationship
with Mang, the bouncer, and listened to the old man Kamus spin adventure
stories in the early hours at the pub. But Juete, the exotic, seemed to be
avoiding him, save for orders at the bar. Aside from that, Khadaji was
comfortable with the new routine. Too comfortable, he thought. Something
was bound to happen to screw things up. At four hundred on a slow
W'nday, something did.
   Kamus was near the starboard end of the bar, leaning on the thick plastic,
telling one of his fantasies to a group of old men like himself. The Dick-as it
was called by almost everybody-was nearly empty, only a dozen or so of the
night people quietly smoking or drinking. The vampire crowd, Khadaji
thought of them, they came out after midnight.
   "-giant spider," Kamus said, "damned near the size of a big dog. Well, I
have to admit I was a touch worried-"
   Khadaji stirred a cocktail and blasted the finished drink with a spray of
liquid nitrogen, freezing the fluid into a slush. He dropped a cherry onto it
and turned toward his next drink. At a table near the port side of the bar,
three men seemed to be raising their voices a bit louder than the usual
background din, but not enough to blank Kamus.
   "-skewered that fucker on my blade, but he kept wiggling and reaching for
me-"
   Add carbon dioxide for the bubbles, now-what was the last? Ah, yes, the
still wineThe voices of the three men increased in volume. They were
arguing about something. Juete was their server and she seemed somehow
involved in the discussion. Khadaji saw Mang begin to edge in the direction
of the table.
   "-green blood, it had! Copper-based, I think, but it was damned well
bleeding all over me and my sword-"
   Khadaji was reaching for a mixer when he heard the whump! of a
compressed gas gun. It was a sound he'd heard enough during the
Kontrau'lega Break. He ducked reflex-ively and swept his gaze around the
room.
   One of the three arguing men stood by the table, pointing a long-barreled
air pistol at the downed form of a second man. As Khadaji watched, the man
with the pistol took deliberate aim at the fallen man's head and fired again.
Khadaji heard both the whump! of the gun and the wet thump of the steel
projectile as it smacked into the man's skull.
   Mang jumped toward the killer, his hand digging for his own weapon.
Before he could clear his stunner, the third man kicked his chair away and
pointed a hand wand at the charging bouncer. He fired, and the pulse flared
out, flashing Mang and the two customers who had jumped up at the first
shot. Two more patrons reeled away with peripheral shock.
   The whole sequence had taken maybe five seconds.
   Khadaji took it all in. There was no point in becoming a dead hero, he
decided. If they pointed their weapons in his direction, he would duck
behind the bar, otherwise, he wasn't planning on moving and drawing their
attention.
   Then the man with the air pistol grinned widely and pointed the weapon
at Juete. "Your time is come, twat."
   Khadaji went cold. Without pausing, he vaulted the bar, hit the floor, and
took two running steps. He reached out, clamped his hands onto the air
pistol and twisted, swinging his arms in a hard half-circle in front of his face.
The torque snapped the gunman from his feet; Khadaji heard the man's wrist
break as the pistol clattered onto the wooden floor. All of Pen's training
seemed to focus as Khadaji kicked the pistol away and watched the killer fall.
Khadaji was in control, he knew just what he had to do. He turned to face the
second man, who was also trying to turn and bring the hand wand to bear.
He didn't need to be accurate, the pulse was much like a shot sprayer, and he
was almost thereKhadaji saw the flash of bright steel, a blur in the dim
lightThe hand holding the wand jerked away from the rest of the man's arm
and fell with a clump and clatter. The man screamed and clutched his bloody
wrist with his other hand.
   He went pale and collapsed, the red pumping from the stump with each
pulse. Khadaji looked away from the bleeding man to see Kamus holding a
sword with both wrinkled and knobby hands. For a second, the younger man
could see what the older must have been like many years past, the fire was
dimmer now, but still there.
   "Get the medics," Kamus said.
   Somebody ran for the com.
   Gretyl found a pressure patch and managed to fit it to the severed wrist, to
stop the bleeding.
   "Save the hand," Kamus ordered. "Stick it in a foam bag and put in the
cooler for the medics."
   Khadaji was feeling ill. The adrenalin in him was ebbing and he felt tired,
afraid, and shaky. It was a reaction he'd felt after battles, he knew it would
pass, but the desire to run and hide was strong.
   Someone touched his shoulder. Juete. "Thank you," she said. "He was
going to kill me."
   Despite a feeling of nausea and his jittery hands, Khadaji felt a strong
desire for the exotic, he wanted to grab her, to kiss her, to tear the thin body
stocking away and feel her naked against him. Was it the violence? Or were
her pher-omones raging from her own fear, singing to him? He managed a
short nod. "No problem," he said. "You know them?"
   "I used to work for him." She glanced at the man with the broken wrist.
"He was my... agent."
   Khadaji nodded again. He didn't ask what kind of work she had done for a
man who had just killed another. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.
   Juete reached up to touch Khadaji's arm, just above the elbow. Her fingers
were warm even through the shirt he wore. "You took a great risk for me."
Her voice was soft, deep and it seemed to draw at something in his core.
   "Well. I can't have people shooting my servers, can I?" It sounded inept
and foolish even as he said it, but it broke the tension. Juete laughed, and
Khadaji with her. She smiled at him, her hand still touching his arm. "Yes.
There is more to you than you would reveal, I can sense that. Perhaps we can
talk later?"
    Khadaji's mouth was full of glue, his tongue was made of lead, his throat
constricted with plastcrete; he couldn't even nod this time. But she could see
it in his face, and she smiled again.
    "Fun's over, people," Kamus said. "Suppose we clean up and get back to
work." He prodded the man with the broken wrist with the tip of the sword
and the man stood and walked toward the bar. In a few moments, the medics
and nabs arrived to haul away the dead and injured. Mang would survive,
but he would be out of action for a month, the other customers would live, as
well. Only the man Juete's "agent" had killed was beyond help, and that
because of the brain injury. Kamus's sword hadn't damaged the wrist or
hand of the wandslinger too badly, the limb would be reconnected easily
enough. But despite the deaths and injuries, Khadaji counted the affair as a
plus. Juete had smiled at him, had touched him.
    The rest of the shift passed in a kind of limbo. Khadaji mixed the drinks
automatically, while Kamus polished the blood from his sword, occasionally
laughing to himself softly as he wiped the mirror steel.


  Chapter Ten

   PEN SHOWED HIM the knife before they went outside. Khadaji hefted the
weapon, made a few slashes in the air, then stared at the blade. "It looks like
a banana," he said.
   Pen nodded. "It's based on the shape of a tooth, actually. In the southern
part of the subcontinent there used to be a saber-toothed carnivore, a large
cat-like beast. It had a set of slashing tusks on the sides of its mouth, four of
them, pointing down."
   Khadaji had learned to pay attention to the next question any such
statement by Pen invariably brought up. So he asked it. "Why would a
creature evolve such natural weaponry, I wonder?"
   "Roots," Pen said. Khadaji thought he detected a pleased note in his voice.
"The southern region is rocky and full of caves. A lot of wildlife used to
inhabit the caves, and that's where the predator did its hunting. There is a
kind of plant which traps its victims in a sticky root system and then drains
the fluids from the body. The tusks seemed to have evolved for slashing the
roots."
   "Interesting. And efficient."
   "Not in the long run," Pen said. "The plants are still there, they are very
tenacious. Men have put the predators down."
   Khadaji glanced at the knife. The handle was of some dark and close-
grained wood; there was a brass cap where it met the curved steel, which
was sharp on the inner edge of the curve; the back of the blade had a
notched, serrated pattern near the handle. Holding the knife with the point
toward the floor, it was easy to imagine it being the tooth of some meat-
eating creature.
   "There is a lot of mining done in that region," Pen continued. "The saber-
tooth knives were popular among the miners in the early days of men on this
world. Hand-burners sometimes flamed out or had power packs go dead. A
knife was more dependable."
   Khadaji got the distinct impression Pen was trying to make some point,
but he wasn't certain just what it was. "Seems to me it would be easier to
avoid the roots," he said.
   "Ah, but that's the trick. The things grew incredibly fast, were resistant to
most herbicides, and had a trick of hugging the roof or walls of a cave or
tunnel, of blending into the surface so they were difficult to see. Then, when
an animal-or man-moved past, they were triggered."
   When did he learn all this? "I see."
   "Yes. Sometimes trouble cannot be avoided. And in some cases, the most
simple preparations are the wisest."
   Pen extended his hand and Khadaji passed the knife to him. "Shall we?"
Pen turned toward the door of their cubicle. Khadaji followed him outside.
   It was dark, of course. One of the planet's two moons was visible, and
there were thousands of stars in the galaxy's edge to the clump of the
Whore's Pubes. It was warm and humid and insects buzzed drowsily in air
which smelled faintly of wood smoke. The two men walked to a clear patch
under a circle of low-sode light cast by the yard lamp.
   Pen turned and faced Khadaji. The man in the gray shroud seemed
relaxed, there was no special stance to mark his intent. The curved knife was
held low, by his right leg, invisible. Khadaji knew it was there, just as he
knew what his teacher was about to do withPen... shifted. He didn't lunge or
leap or fly; he simply moved, somehow scooting across the two meters which
separated them; it was incredibly fast. He snapped the knife up, edge leading
sickle-like, the point aimed at Khadaji's scrotum. If it connected it would gut
him from groin to sternum, Khadaji knew.
   Khadaji stepped aside. There was no jerkiness in his movement, it was an
unhurried shift much like Pen's own motion.
   Pen converted the upward slash into a loop across his body and out to his
side, a backhand for Khadaji's throat.
   Khadaji ducked and the knife cut only air over his head. He slid back
another step, anticipating Pen's next strike.
   Pen continued his circular motion, whipping the knife over and down, so
it would have buried its point in the top of Khadaji's skull-had he not moved.
   Pen stepped back a meter and faced Khadaji. He brought the knife behind
his back, out of sight. "Ah. So your encounter last night in the pub has
changed you."
   Khadaji smiled. "Those men would have killed me."
   "And if you fail to move, I won't?" Pen edged closer. "You think I would
pull my strike?"
   "No. But you don't want me to die. If you hit me, I think you would drop
the knife and do your best to keep me alive."
   "You think so? If my sumito teaching is a failure, why would you be worth
keeping alive?" He moved, and the knife became a blur as he slashed, a
figure-eight criss-cross.
   Khadaji backed up easily, staying just out of range. He said, "There's a
difference. It's hard to explain. I feel the energy-you're a teacher-they were
killers."
   Pen laughed. "Were you afraid of them?"
   "Yes. More after it was over."
   "Good. But you didn't let your fear paralyze you."
   Khadaji shifted a hair to his left, ready for Pen's next attack. "There's
something else," he said. "I was afraid, but I was also a lot more alive. And I
was.., worried."
   Pen made another pass, slicing the warm darkness with the knife based on
the tooth of a long-dead predator. Khadaji moved from his path; this time, he
snapped his own hand up, the edge leading, and chopped at Pen's wrist. Pen
managed to pull his hand back, twisting the knife to cut, but both attacks
missed. "Good," Pen said. "You were worried, you said. About the exotic?"
   "Yes."
   Pen spun in toward Khadaji, the knife whirling like a rotor blade. Khadaji
dropped to the ground and rolled to the side, then back up, out of range. He
tried a sweep with his right leg, but Pen jumped over his foot and stabbed at
his face. This time, Khadaji's block connected solidly and knocked the hand
with the weapon away. Pen switched the knife to his opposite hand.
   "I'm not one to give advice on such things," Pen said. "We of the Shroud
tend to believe in teaching those things we know we can teach, and in affairs
of the heart-or gonads-there are no real experts. Love, like zen, cannot be
learned, only felt."
   Khadaji thought about that for a moment as Pen circled to his left, holding
the knife loosely. "But you have an opinion about her."
   Pen shrugged. "What I think isn't important. What you think is, in this
case. I have been on the Disk for what seems a long time; one passes the same
point more than once, even though it is usually at an upward or downward
spiral."
   Again, Pen moved, the knife leading.
   Again, Khadaji shifted away from the killing blade. He tried to trip his
teacher as he passed, but missed.
   "Is that why you don't tell me about the Shroud?" Khadaji asked. "Do you
feel as if it's something which can't be taught?"
   "Hardly. It's just that your circuit lies in another plane. You'll never be a
priest, Emile. You will be a great man, in your own way. Eventually."
   There came another attack. Even as he moved, Khadaji saw the end of this
series. He knew he was in perfect balance, in total control of himself. Since
Pen was attacking, he had that small disadvantage of the attacker, despite his
own years of sumito practice. An attacker must reach beyond himself; a
defender did not need to; this gave the edge to a defender, assuming equal
skill otherwise.
   Pen cut downward with the root knife; Khadaji pivoted and flipped the
heel of his right hand into Pen's shoulder, at the same time he caught Pen's
left wrist with his own left hand. Khadaji twisted, and the knife spun from
Pen's grip, falling in a lazy twirl to stick in the bare ground. Khadaji
continued the movement, levering Pen past him as he dropped to one knee.
Pen stumbled as Khadaji released his grip, then dived into a perfect roll, an
egg rather than a ball. He came up and stepped around casually to face
Khadaji. "Very good," he said. "Excellent."
   Khadaji grinned. It was the first time since they'd begun training, almost a
year now, that he'd ever thrown Pen. He was both pleased and proud.
Although mere was a small voice in the back of his mind which wondered if
maybe the old man hadn't allowed it, for reasons of his own.
   The dim lights reflected in the bright red plastic of the bar's surface gave
her face a rosy glow as she smiled at him. "Would you like to have breakfast
with me after the shift ends?"
   "Yes," he said, feeling his heart pound faster. "I'd like that very much."
   "Good. I have some stuffed Mikkel leaves a friend brought back from the
bright belt, I'll cook them for us."
   Khadaji swallowed dryness as he watched her walk away carrying her tray
of chem. Breakfast. In her cube. Alone. He felt the beginnings of an erection
stir, and he quickly turned back to his next order. She only asked you to have
breakfast with her, fool, nothing more. That's all. But he spilled half a bottle
of wine as he visualized her stripping the body stocking away. It would
never happen, he thought.
   She had black silk sheets on her bed and die contrast between them and
her naked skin was incredible. His own brown arm looked somehow alien as
he reached across her breasts to squeeze her shoulder. He pulled her against
him, kissing her softly. Her lips flowered and parted and her tongue slowly
slid along the sides of his own tongue. "Ummm." Her voice was a small
moan. He leaned back, breaking the kiss, and looked at her. Definitely pink
eyes. And pink nipples, budded up like tiny hard roses now. Perfectly white
pubic hair, as fine and downy as that on a baby's head. Her body was slender
and taut, the muscles firm as she moved back against him. He slid his hand
down her back and over one buttock, marvelling at the smoothness of her
perfect too-pale skin. He moved his hand around over her hip, feeling the
padded sharpness of the bone pointing at him. She lifted her leg and pointed
her toes at the ceiling, opening up for him. Her vaginal lips were delicate, hot
and slick, and she moaned again as he traced them, first the outer, then the
inner. She shuddered as he touched her clitoris, and dug her fingers into the
hard muscles of his back. He slid down, then, to taste her there, to smell the
musk of her as he softly waggled his tongue back and forth, following the
path his fingers had taken a moment before, tasting and probing gently, then
deeper, nibbling at her lips with his own.
   "Oh, gods," she said. "Yes!"
   He lifted her legs with his hands, pushing her knees back, raising her
higher and wider. He stabbed deeper with his tongue. She began to move
against his mouth, in that oldest of rhythms. She came hard, he could feel the
pulse around his tongue, against his lips, and he grinned. He flicked his
tongue back and forth a few more times.
   She tangled her hands in his hair and pulled his face away. "Easy. Let me
catch my breath before you do any more of mat."
   "No problem," he said.
   She moved suddenly, sliding across the jet silk, turning and taking his
penis into her mouth in a single, smooth motion. He felt her lips touch the
base as she took the length of him into her throat. Damn! She moved, and he
felt like a boy again, so hard he was afraid his organ would burst. All the
learned techniques with all the partners over all the years meant nothing, his
control was completely gone. When she found the base of his prosate with
her finger and pressed, he felt as if a dam had burst within his groin. Oh,
God!
   When he stopped throbbing, she pulled away slowly, flicking the tip of his
still-hard penis with her tongue.
   She turned around to snuggle next to him.
   "Now I know what an avalanche must feel like," he said.
   "It was pretty good, wasn't it?" She smiled at him.
   Khadaji propped himself up on one elbow. She was the most beautiful
woman he had ever seen, he was sure of that. And she seemed to exude
sexual attraction, more now man before the shattering climax she'd just given
him. He reached for her and hugged her to him, sliding into her as she rolled
onto her back and clasped his buttocks with both hands. She was tight, but
lubricated, and they fit together as if they had been custom-designed for each
other. The dance became frantic, as they pounded each other faster and
faster. "I-love-you," he said, his voice keeping time with his thrusts. But the
words were lost in the storm.
   Pen was sitting quietly in the center of his bed, his eyes closed, when
Khadaji came into the room. It was late, only a couple of hours before
Khadaji's shift was to begin and he was tired. Though hardly unhappy.
   Pen said, "And...?"
   There was no need to say more. They had developed a feel for each other's
mood, at times. "She is wonderful," Khadaji said. "I love her."
   Pen nodded, but said nothing. There was a long pause.
   "I can't explain it," Khadaji began. "She-"
   "There is no need to explain. I understand. The time was approaching and
now it is here."
   Somehow, that sounded ominous. "The time?"
   "For me to continue upon my circuit. And you on yours."
   Khadaji was stunned. "What?"
   Pen smiled. "You will want to be with your beloved. You have things to
learn from her."
   "But-but-that doesn't mean-"
   "Ah, but it does," Pen said, his voice soft. He unfolded his legs from the
meditation knot and shifted to the edge of the bed, then stood. He faced
Khadaji, still smiling. "You've learned what I can teach you. What you need
now is new teachers, and time. Experience will fill in many of the gaps."
   Khadaji stared at the robed figure, still feeling shocked. Sure, he'd said in
the beginning it was only temporary, but, this wasn't right. It was Juete, she
was the crux, that was why he was leaving. He thought about her, and about
Pen, who had been father-brother-teacher since they'd met. In that moment,
Khadaji knew, he knew that if he offered to forget her, Pen would stay. This
was some kind of test. He thought again about Juete, about the day they had
spent together, only leaving the bed long enough to pee or get a drink, about
the passion he'd felt, he still felt for her. Was it any more than lust? Did he
love her, as he'd said? Yes, he was sure he did. Could he give her up, to keep
Pen? But if he was planning to leave anyway, it would be a wasted gesture to
even offer, wouldn't it? He remembered her hands and mouth, touching him.
Pen was going anyhow, Juete was only making it happen a few days or
weeks sooner. Khadaji told himself it wasn't a rationalization on his part; but
far back in his mind, a little voice laughed malevolently.
   Juete smiled at him across the red bar and Khadaji reflex-ively smiled back.
He watched her walk away and felt desire for her even as he felt disgusted
with himself. Was he doing as so many others in the military had done? Was
he thinking with his dick?
   He shook his head and wiped at a spill on the bar. No. He loved the exotic
woman, there was more to her than sex. She was intriguing, there was a
depth to her, she was ... exotic, in the truest sense of that word. But PenPen
was gone. Khadaji had seen him off at the sling. Pen hadn't seemed disturbed
or sad at going. He had laughed, he had hugged Khadaji, he had told him not
to worry. Things would be fine, in the end, he was destined for what he was
destined for-who could say where the Disk would spin him?
   As Pen waited for the boxcar to helix, he reached within the folds of his
robe and came out with a small steel marble in his hand. He extended it to
Khadaji.
   "What's this?" Khadaji said, as he took the marble.
  "My compendia. The works of my career in tending pub."
  "I can't take-"
  "I have copies, Emile."
  "You've given me so much already."
  "Only what I could, little enough. Someday, when you are where you will
be, I will smile and wish it were more."
  Khadaji felt a lance of guilt. "You don't have'to go, Pen."
  "I do, Emile, but there is one more thing I would like to do before I leave."
With that, Pen reached up within his hood and pulled the cross-scarf
covering his face away. For the first time, Khadaji saw the features of the man
who had lived with him for over a year. Slowly, Pen leaned forward; slowly,
he pressed his lips against Khadaji's lips, and kissed him. Then, the scarf was
back. None of the few passengers waiting for the boxcar had seen Pen's
naked face, no one save Khadaji. His tears ran freely as Pen entered the
boxcar and was slung out of Khadaji's life.


  Chapter Eleven

   THE ROUTINE IN the pub settled into a comfortable rhythm. Once in a
while, somebody would ask for some unusual drink or powder, even a
radiant. Kamus would walk by and smile and pause to stroke the old sword
hanging on the wall. He seemed pleased with Khadaji's work. Pen was gone,
but Khadaji still practiced the self-control forms, the dances of sumito, alone.
It was as Pen had said, an opponent wasn't needed if you could control your
own actions precisely enough. And there was Juete. He had little time for
anything else.
   Juete was incredible. She could drain him as no other woman had ever
drained him. Sometimes they made love until he could barely remember who
he was, sunk into a satisfied stupor with a stupid grin locked into place.
   He also learned about her in other ways. One morning, after a quiet
lovemaking session, she lay on the bed, cradling his head in the crook of her
arm, petting his face with her fingertips. "Such a sweet boy," she said.
   "Boy?"
   She smiled down at him. "It's all relative, lover. I might not be old enough
to be your mother, but I certainly could be your big sister."
   "Only if I were incestuous," he said.
   "There are worse things. But I do have a few standard years on you."
   He'd suspected as much, but merely said, "So?"
   She seemed to stare through the bedroom walls. The smell of sex hung in
the air, fighting a losing battle with the stick of incense she'd thumbed into
life earlier. Sandal wood, he thought. Or maybe some kind of musk. Finally,
she said, "Older doesn't necessarily mean wiser, Emile, but it does mean
older. More... experienced. More adept at dealing with the galaxy, at... taking
care of oneself."
   Her tone was disturbing, and he wanted to lighten the mood. "Well, I'm
not exactly freshly minted, you know. I understand a few things." He tried to
laugh, but it fell flat.
   She bent to kiss him, first on the forehead, then on his closed eyelids. She
didn't have to say it aloud; what he heard silently was, No, you don't
Understand, Emile.
   During a lull late in his shift, Khadaji listened to old man Kamus finish one
of his tales for a few of the regulars. Juete had left early, since things were
slow and she said she was tired. When Kamus finished his story, and the
small gathering began to break up, the old man turned to talk to his
pubtender. "You seem to be working out okay," he said. "You've been good
for business."
   Khadaji was pleased, but said, "I'm just doing what you pay me for,
Kamus."
   "Yeah, but you get along well with the customers, they like you, and now
that you and Juete are living together, things have been a lot quieter during
corpse-stealer's shift."
   Khadaji didn't understand. "Quieter?"
   The old man drew himself a mug of splash and took a big swallow of the
liquid. He leaned back against the bar. "Sure. You don't understand about
exotics, son, even though you're pretty tight with one- They cause trouble
among regular people."
   Khadaji felt himself stiffen; he tried to relax, using one of Pen's mantras.
The old man caught it, though.
   "Don't take it personal, son. Juete is a fine woman, but she can't help being
an exotic. It's the same for all of them, men or women, old or young. They
attract basic stock humans like shit does flies, something chemical, I think."
   Khadaji remembered Pen's comment about pheromones. But that didn't
matter"Anyway, there are people who get real possessive. You know a lot of
exotics work as prostitutes?"
   Khadaji nodded. Juete had told him.
   "A lot of them don't want to, but it's kind of what they were bred for,
originally. Usually, you see an exotic, you see a collection of people clustered
around 'em, trying to figure a way to get some kind of piece of them."
   Khadaji said nothing, but he wondered what the old man was getting at.
   "Yo, Emile, slide me another stinger down here, would you?" Khadaji
looked up and smiled at the short man sitting at the end of the bar. He built
the drink, while Kamus kept talking.
   "Normally, people around here know not to start trouble in the Dick." He
glanced at the sword on the wall. "I don't much care for it and people know
it. Even so, some nights I've had to have Mang toss guys-and women-with
their tongues hanging out over Juete through the door. After you jumped the
cuntmaster and his cur, word got out you were fast and dangerous. So
people are even more careful than usual trying to get to Juete. In here, at
least."
   Something about the way he said it made Khadaji's gut freeze, as though
someone had stuck him with a shard of dry ice. In here? What did he mean
by that? And cunt-master?
   Kamus wandered off, to talk to a pair of old women who had just come
into the pub, and Khadaji didn't have a chance to ask about his comments.
He wasn't sure he would have asked even if the old boy had stuck around.
   When he got to her cube, Juete was waiting for him. She stood naked in the
doorway, and any doubts or fears he might have felt were erased by the sight
of her dropping to her knees to untab the fastener of his pants, and by the
feathery touch of her lips on his hard flesh.
   People talked to him at the bar, as Pen said they would. He listened with
half his attention as he worked, and the conversations tended to run together.
A lot of what was said was supposed to be unique, and each person seemed
to think it was, but it wasn't long before he'd heard a lot of stories with
common threads running through them.
   "-me, said I couldn't do the fucking work-can you believe that? So I told
him, 'Listen, tarpsucker, I been here twenty-two standard years, before you
were finished fresher-training, and I know my fucking job better than you
do! If you don't like it, you take it to the steward,' I said, 'and fuck you'-"
    "-younger and tighter, that's all he wants! Buddha, I had the goddamn
surgery like he wanted, I took the rejuve to the limit, I don't look sixty, I look
thirty-five, see how they still stand up? And I know the tricks, buddy, believe
it, I can make a man howl like a dog, if I want, and shit, he's off sticking it to
some teenpuss young enough to be our granddaughter! She can't know
anything! Why? I don't understand men, they're such assholes-"
    "-failed the exam, flat, I sucked it, I'm cold meat in the eyes of parents and
sibs and classics, I am raised, you bury? Sure, they give you a second blast,
but you have to wait six months, and that'll be during the Light-nobody will
want to play stroke-the-grad in the sunshine-!"
    Khadaji gave advice. He nodded a lot, made sympathetic murmurs, and so
a lot of the customers thought he knew more than he did. But he was
learning. The lot of man was made up of lots of individuals, and the stories
rang true, if similar. Love, hate, lust, fear, the emotions were the same. And
there was another emotion he found, too....
    The man was a freight handler, off a freighter dropping heavy machinery
on planet from out-system. He was big, well built and attractive. He sat at the
bar, wearing a coverall spotted with dirt and machine lube, sniffing spirals of
kick-dust and laughing. He was talking to a local next to him.
    "-best I ever had. I've had 'em on twelve worlds in four systems, but this
pussy was talented! I never had an exotic before and they are everything
they're cracked up to be!" He laughed at his own pun, and shook his head.
"She couldn't get enough, she turned me every which way but loose. I
wished I had a gallon of android, I would have wore myself down to a nub.
And she didn't charge me a demi-stad, either. The best I ever had and it was
free! Shit, I might just jump ship and stay here-" he stopped talking and
stared at someone in the pub. Then the freight handler nudged the local with
one beefy hand and said, "Shit, there she is now!"
    Khadaji turned, to see who had made the man so happy.
    And found himself looking at Juete.
    It had to be a mistake. Even as he thought it, he knew it wasn't-Juete wasn't
somebody you could forget. Then he thought, it must have happened before
they'd met; Juete's past was her own, he couldn't fault her for thatThe big
man slid from the barstool, grinning. "It's been two days, I'm ready for
another round," he said.
    Two days. Khadaji felt that lance of dry ice again, only mis time it ran from
his bowels to his brain, turning-him numb. He watched, detached, as the
freight handler approached Juete. Two days ago, she had left early, had been
gone for hours before he'd gone to meet her. But it couldn't be.
   The look Juete gave the man was not that of someone meeting a stranger.
She smiled and said something-Khadaji was too far away to hear what-and
the man smiled back at her. Khadaji turned away and stared at the wall, not
seeing it.
   It was an irrational feeling, he knew. Monofidelity was an archaic concept,
one he'd never believed in before. People did not own each other in a
civilized society; no one had the right to expect another to become any sort of
chattel. Certainly he had enjoyed a liberal intercourse all his life, and there
was no reason to expect Juete had done differently. Cuntmaster came to his
mind, a word he had refused to speculate upon after Kamus had dropped it
into their conversation a couple of days earlier. No, her past was her own,
just as her present and future should also be. Khadaji knew that.
Intellectually, he knew.
   Why, then, did he feel like screaming? Was he like all the others who hung
around the exotics? Possessive? Jealous?
   "Not now!" That was Juete's voice, pitched to carry.
   Khadaji turned, to see the big freight handler holding onto the exotic's arm,
urging her in the direction of the front exit. She looked at Khadaji, her eyes
pleading.
   He didn't remember the move, but he was suddenly on the outside of the
bar, heading for them. His mind was filled with murder. He would chop the
freight handler into bloody slabsKamus moved to block his path. "Easy, son.
Mang's got it."
   Khadaji faltered for a step. He was about to tell the old man to get the hell
out of his way, but he saw the bouncer holding the freight handler's arm as
he had held Juete's, walking him toward the exit.
   Khadaji's rage bubbled, heading toward a full boil. No. He didn't want
Mang to walk the man out! He wanted to handle it himself. She was his
woman! He wanted to- toTo what, Khadaji? said the little voice that lived
deep in his mind. To kill him? Like you did the fanatics on Maro? Is that the
mark of a civilized society? When you grow angry, solve the problem with
death?
   He stopped breathing for a moment with the shock of what he had been
about to do. The old man stood his ground, watching, and Khadaji's hatred
and anger left him in a rush as he exhaled. There was something very wrong
with what he'd been about to do, something which was linked to the way the
Confed squatted upon the worlds and systems of the galaxy. It was
important, but he couldn't quite grasp it, it eluded him.
   "You okay, son?"
   He wasn't, but Khadaji nodded.
   Juete walked to where the two men stood. Kamus looked at the two of
them for a moment, then left.
   "He was your lover," Khadaji said. The anger was gone, but the gut-twist
of jealousy was still there.
   "Yes. Briefly."
   'Two days ago. When you left work early."
   "Yes."
   "There have been others since we-"
   "Yes.'
   Khadaji turned his head and looked away from her. Behind the bar, Kamus
was mixing some chem, doing Khadaji's job. What customers there were paid
no attention to the couple standing and talking.
   "It bothers you," she said. "That's why I didn't tell you."
   "But-why? Aren't I enough for you?"
   He did not expect the answer she gave. "No. You aren't."
   It hurt, to hear that. He wanted to hit her, but instead, he clenched his
hands into fists. He felt the nails cut into his palms. There was a wrongness
here"It isn't your fault," she said, her voice soft. "It's the way we are. What
attracts you to me works both ways, Emile. My drives are more intense than
yours-or any normal human's. I must have that energy, it's built into me the
same way as the color of my hair and eyes are built in."
   Khadaji did not speak, he only stared at her.
   "I like it, Emile. Sex. The entire process, meeting someone new, the
discovery, the consummation, the afterglow."
   "But I love you," he said. It sounded like a whine, even as he said it.
   "I know. And I love you. But my needs have nothing to do with mat."
   Again, he was unable to say anything.
   "You don't understand. It's always that way with normals." She touched
his arm. "Do you know what the leading cause of death is among normal
people? Most diseases are curable now, so old age and accidents are the ways
ordinary people mostly die. But among exotics, the chief cause of death is
murder."
   "Murder?"
   She nodded. "Yes. Mostly by non-exotics. We are slain by jealous lovers, by
cunt- or dickmasters who sell us, by the envious who wish they could be like
us. Three of five exotics who die are killed-sometimes we kill each other."
   "I-I-didn't realize-"
   "Of course not. Because of what we are, of what we do, we become targets
of those around us."
   "But-couldn't you... tone it down? There must be drugs or therapy which
could-"
   "-stop our sexual drives? Yes, there are. But would you choose such an
option? And even if you did, you might find it was no real cure. We are still
desired. As you desire me now, despite all I have said."
   Khadaji felt guilty. He did want her, he had an erection, he was ready.
   She continued. "I could take combinations of hormones and pheromone
suppressants and other chems, and become a kind of normal. I could dye my
skin and hair, wear colored lenses and look and act normal. If I wanted to.
   "If I wanted to. But I don't want to. I like being attractive, I enjoy bedding
lovers, men and women, it's what I am. If you love me, you will have to learn
to accept it."
   A thought loomed, then, something Khadaji didn't want to consider. But
once alive, the thing would not die. "Did you have me become your lover
because I could protect you from people like the freight handler? Or the
cwnfmaster?" "You saved my life," she said. "I wanted to be grateful in the
best way I knew how. And, later, I wanted to continue, because you are a
good lover. But-certainly I considered your physical abilities an asset."
   He felt dull. Blind, deaf and stupid, that's you, isn't it, Khadaji?
   "I am sorry if I have hurt you, Emile. I do think you are a lovely boy."
   "I'm a man, not a boy!"
   "Then act as a man. Consider what we exchange and decide if it is enough.
I told you before I have learned to look out for myself. You must understand
this." She allowed her hand to drop and touch the front of his pants lightly.
   He felt his already stiff penis jump as she moved her hand away. He
wanted to turn and walk away from her, he felt betrayed, he wanted to tell
her he would not play her game. But he did not.
   When Juete left work, Khadaji followed her.
   Their lovemaking had never been so intense, so good.
   Afterward, when she was asleep, he cried softly. What was he going to do?
He had thought she was to be his, eternally, that she loved him as he did her.
Could he learn to live with her lovers, with the things which drove her so
differently than he was driven? He thought that he could. It would still be
better than any relationship he had ever had, but it would not be what he
first thought it would be.
   He had been naive, he understood now. Something Pen had said came
back to him. He needed other teachers. Well. He had learned something.
About himself. From her.
   He looked at Juete, her perfect whiteness nestled under the black silk of
her sheets. She was beautiful and he did love her. But it was not the same as
before.
   Not the same.


  Chapter Twelve

   THE COMFORTABLE RHYTHM of work, exercise and Juete remained the
same, on the surface. The work was becoming easier, almost dull. Now and
again, there would be something he had to look up, but mostly, he was able
to do in two minutes what would have taken ten a few months earlier. The
sumito exercises felt solid, he practiced them daily and his control increased
slowly and steadily. And Juete was as good as ever. She was discreet;
Khadaji never knew for certain when she had lovers. He was sure she did
meet other men and maybe women, when they were not together. She spent
most of her off-time with him, but not all of it. He wanted to ask, but he
never did. He could stand it, if he didn't have to know. When he thought
about it, he was honest enough to know his imagination had to be painting a
much worse picture than the truth. But he could stand it.
   The days and weeks slipped by in a monochromatic routine which became
his security. The highs were few, but then, so were the lows. Work. Exercise.
Juete. There was no major factor against which he could complain, nothing
was really wrong, there were no sharp points of discontent jabbing at him.
He lived day to day, in a kind of fuzzy disquiet.
   Eventually, it was a customer who brought things to a focal point for
Khadaji, an old woman lost in the depths 'of expensive wine. She spoke to
Khadaji because he was there; he thought she would have said as much to
the wall, had he not been.
   "-nine'y-seven, boy, that's how old. I might have- wha?-another twenny-
five years lef ? Tha' be all righ', I had the body I did when I was for-forty! But
like this? Why should I bother? I could'uh been so much more, y'know? I had
chances, I could-could-have gone to Earth, been the mis'ress of a rich bi'ch. I
could'uh been powerful, rich, somebodyl Bu' I pissed it away, I din wanna
take the chance. I thought I'd have time, plen'y of time, I was young, I was
forty! An' now I'm old and it's all gone pas' an' it's too late."
   She looked up from the glass of clear wine and stared at Khadaji, who
stood silently behind the bar. The pub was nearly empty and he had no chem
to mix.
   "But you don' unnerstan'. You're a kid, you think you've got all the time
there is, don'cha? Blow off a year here, piss away a year there, it don' matter,
you got plen'y to spare."
   She lifted the wine glass, drained it, and set it carefully back onto the
bright surface of the bar, as if it were still full and she was afraid of spilling it.
"But you're wrong. Wrong."
   Khadaji nodded, but it was more for himself than the old woman. There
was no flash of sudden knowledge, no cosmic rush of feeling, but there was a
moment of... focus. Why was he here? Working in a backworld pub, listening
to a drunk, nailed into a routine which was comfortable and pleasant, but
going nowhere? He tried to think about the feeling he'd had during the battle
on Maro, when he'd deserted the military, but that certainty, that sense of
purpose, was only a faint memory. When had it faded? Why? He did
remember the horror he'd felt at all the killing. A Confederation which could
condone such had to be evil. It had to be opposed.
   Well. You're certainly in a position to do a lot about it here, aren't you?
   "One more," the old lady said.
   Khadaji mechanically punched in the order and waited while the dispenser
filled the glass with the fermented products of three kinds of grapes. Funny,
how deep his knowledge of such things ran. The cuvee of this particular
liquid was a blend of Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay, a single-
fermentation process. Given time and another round of fermentation and
tirage, still wines could become champagnes. He knew this, but he did not
know many other things, important things.
   "Hurry up, honey, I only got maybe twenny-five years lef', remember?"
   He set the glass in front of the woman and added the cost to her credit tab.
She clutched the wine with both hands.
   Khadaji shook his head. Tending pub wasn't going to teach him how to
resist the Confed. He had to educate himself, he had to learn how the beast
was built, how to find its Achilles' heel-or if it even had such a weak point.
He stared at the old lady and understood what it was she had said. There
was so much he needed to know and so little time in which to learn it. He
had to start now.
   Yes. Now.
   Most of the patrons had gone home, including the old woman who liked
still wine, and only the hardiest of the vampire crowd remained, talking
quietly among themselves. Juete was also gone-and not alone, Khadaji had
seen.
   When he told Kamus, the old man was philosophical.
   "I figured," he said. "You were beginning to get the look. Most tenders are
afflicted with itchy feet, I never can keep the good ones very long. I was
hoping you'd settle in with Juete and stick for a while longer, but if you're
set, I won't kick. I'll give you a good vouch. You'll stay long enough to let me
break in a new tender?"
   Khadaji nodded. "Sure."
   "If it's none of my business, say so, but-where you going?"
   "I don't really know, Kamus. I've got some things I need to work out, some
studying to do. I thought I might try Bocca, in the Faust System."
   "Yeah, well, that's the place to go if you want education. If it's taught
anywhere, they teach it on Bocca."
   "So I've heard."
   The old man looked thoughtful for a moment. "What about Juete? You
seem tied to her pretty tight. You plan to try and get her to go with you?"
   Khadaji thought about that for a long time before he answered.
   He had planned to tell her before they made love, but he didn't want to
spoil what might be the last time. Afterward, when they lay quietly in her
soft bed, it was easier.
   "Leave? Why?"
   He had not told anyone before, save Pen, but he tried to explain it to her.
He started with his life in the military, told her about his feelings before and
during and after the slaughter on Maro. About the feeling of... wrongness
that he had seen, and the knowledge that he must do something about it.
   "You are only one man," she said. Her voice was soft.
   "A single man cannot hope to change the ways of an entire galaxy."
   "You're probably right," he said. "I don't think one man can change it all.
But maybe I can affect it some, in some small way."
   "You would be a ripple in an ocean, at best."
   He sighed. "Maybe. Better a ripple than nothing."
   "Bocca is a tropical world," she said. "-Hot, rainy, a burning sun. My skin
would not survive without constant screening. You would ask me to accept
that?"
   For a long moment, he said nothing. "Would you go, if I asked?"
   She was quiet for a time, as well. Then, "We have been good together. I can
see your love for me, and I feel such for you, in my own way. But you're
asking me to leave my home, the world of my birth, a place where I am
hardly accepted, to go to a place where I would be more of a freak."
   He took a deep breath. "No, I'm not asking you to do that."
   She sat up suddenly. The servomotors in the bed whined as they tried to
adjust to her quick movement. "You aren't asking me to go with you?" Her
voice was laced with puzzlement-and anger.
   "I wanted to know if you would-if I were to ask. You didn't seem
particularly enthused about the idea, so I won't ask."
   Juete slid away from him and out of the bed. She turned and stared down
at him, her hands clenched into fists. She was no less beautiful for her anger.
Khadaji felt a hard lump gather in his chest, and a dryness wrapped his
throat. "You don't want me to go!"
   He sat up on the bed and clasped his arms around his bare knees. "I love
you. I want to stay with you. But I also have something I must do. I have a...
vision. I might well fail in trying to attain that vision. Probably I will. I can't
ask you to share the kind of life I might have."
   "You can't ask?-" Her voice became cold, as it did when he'd seen her really
angry. "I would not have gone. If you had begged, I would not have gone!"
   In that moment, looking at her wonderful nakedness, he thought he
understood something more about her. She needed him to ask her to go, so
she could be the one to refuse. He had known she wouldn't leave Darkworld
and so had thought to spare his own ego by playing 'what if games with her.
In doing so, he had cheated her of refusing. It was an important point, one he
should remember. He was tempted to say something, to tell her she would
do just fine without him, that she could find another like him with little
effort. But he didn't say it; it was a thing they both knew. And there were
already others.
   He slid off the bed and began to gather his clothes.
   They did not speak as he dressed. He realized now that he had not really
known Juete as he had thought.
   Already, he was learning.
   There was no one to see him off at the sling. As Khadaji stood there,
waiting to board the boxcar, he .wondered if Pen had known this moment
would come. He wondered about Pen, about how he was doing, where he
was. There might be a way to trace him, through the Siblings of the Shroud.
One day, he would have to do that. But not now. Now, he had places to go
and things to learn, it was time to start thinking of what he was going to do,
and how it might be achieved, once he decided. Leaving Juete was painful,
but he would survive. It was as Pen had said: the Disk was still in spin and
who could say where it would .take him?
   His inner voice spoke to him then, nasty in its interrogative. O how
philosophical we are! Would you have been so quick to leave if you'd
thought Juete 'faithful' to you? Was it your vision which truly made you go?
Or lanced pride?
   Khadaji shook his head, but the voice had already done its mischief and
was gone. He didn't want to think about the question it had raised. Damn!
   As he entered the boxcar, he half-hoped to see Juete running up to the
entrance, to ask him to stay-or to go with him. It didn't happen. Self-control,
Pen had taught him, was primary. You had to be able to control your own
actions before you could hope to influence the actions of others.
   He had, Khadaji knew, kilometers and years to go.
   Ah, damn!


  Chapter Thirteen

  KHADAJI STROKED A control bar and the form-chair in which he sat
extruded itself into a bed, complete with privacy sonics and polarizers. He
was tired, more so than he should be after only six hours on the system
hopper. He wanted to be alone.
  The voyage from Rim to Bocca-would take six days. That time would be on
both ends of the trip, moving at subluminal speeds before and after the
Bender did its magic. Bender was what it was called by almost everybody,
but the true name of the drive which gave men the galaxy was the Scales-
Waller Augmented Reality Analog Instigation Construct. What it did was
simple enough to say-the Bender put a ship into that state of being in which
the vessel was all places at once. Once there (or here or everywhere), the
Bender wrapped metaphysical fingers around a particular point of allness
and pulled it to the ship. The physics and mathematics of it were enough to
drive an average genius insane--Scales and Waller had both been as far above
the average genius as the average genius was above a moron.
   So what, Khadaji? Why do you care? Aren't you just trying to avoid what
you really should be thinking about? Hmmm?
   Yes, dammit! Leave me be!
   Maybe the bed was a bad idea, he.thought. Maybe he should go to the
lounge and strike up a conversation with another passenger.
   No. He didn't want to do that.
   He looked at the menu on the bed's control holoproj and saw that the
device had a built-in sleep generator. Good. He would set the thing for six
hours and escape his thoughts that way.
   It was only as he was drifting off that Khadaji wondered what he might
dream about....
   -was deep enough so the warmer colors had begun to fade, save under the
artificial day of the lamps he wore. There were left the blues and violets,
rippling gently in the cold silk of the Nemui Sea. Emile wondered about that
name. The oceans of San Yubi were all connected and at times, this named
portion of the water world seemed anything but a Sleepy Sea.
   "Emile, let's have a position report."
   The voice from his comset startled the boy. He glanced at the
chronographic read built into the rim of his mask. The numbers winked at
him grayly. Sharkshit, he was overdue again. He cleared his throat. "I'm at
hex seven, Dad. One-nine-two meters."
   The suit's heater kicked on, fighting the chill of the water. Emile still felt
cold; probably because his father would be pissed at him for missing report-
in time as much as from the water.
   "Recorded," his father said. "Do let me know when you reach the inversion,
if you are still awake."
   "Yes, sir." He felt guilty enough without the sarcasm. The old man could
really be nasty when he wanted to be. Good thing his mother wasn't oncom.
She was already pissed at them both. She didn't want Emile doing visuals
any deeper than a hundred meters anyway; if she knew he was past-tensing
his reports, she'd raise bottom muck to get the old man to cancel it.
   Emile blew a larger than normal exhaust. The bitter tasting gas mix
chorused away from him in a burst of hemispherical bubbles heading for the
surface. His mother was relatively dense, considering she was a medic and a
lib. Half of Emile's friends were doing deep visuals, easy, and he'd been
dolphed by them until his old man had finally let him go below a hundred.
Sharkshit, he was twelve, not a towhead!
   Emile looked down, but it was too dark to see the inversion layer yet. He
checked his descent rate, adjusted the suit's trim a hair to speed it up.
   'Course, there was good and bad in being able to do deep. He wanted to,
but he also didn't want the old man to think he'd changed his mind about
herding. No way. There were five other worlds in the Shin System and he'd
never even been off planet. He didn't want to spend his life sucking mix and
herding tuna. Directing sharks and harvesting was fun, but it got old fast. He
didn't know how the old man kept it up after all the years. It was flatshoal
boring and Emile wasn't going to spend his life doing it- not studying and
cataloging ick and bug poisons like his mother, either. He pitied his little
sister. Evin already had it laid out for her, she'd be a fishfarmer, contracted to
a fishfarmer, and when she got old enough to get pregnant, she'd raise more
fishfarmers! Sharkshit, it was enough to make him want to spit. He was
getting out and off, soon as he was able.
   Meanwhile, he'd better not miss another report. Emile kept a steady watch
on his chronometric read as he sank toward the inversion layer.
   -slid the hatch of the bottle shut and tapped the sealer control. He grinned
like a dolph through the densecris dome at the approaching storm. It looked
like a good one, and Weather had reported the pod was thick and full of
juice.
   "Yo, Emile, you tucked and ready?"
   Emile laughed. That was Little Hamay in his bottle. He was half a klick
south and behind Emile's bottle, so he couldn't see the other boy, but Emile
said, "Yeah, I'm ready."
   Already the bottle began to bob in the small waves being pushed ahead of
the storm. It looked like it was gonna be a good fucking ride. Lightning
flared two klicks away.
   A third voice filled the short circ of the com. "Are you sure we won't get
into deepmuck over this?" That was Jeda, in her own bottle, just to Emile's
left.
   "No way," Emile said. "I told 'em we'd be discom while we ran the desal
tests, so we got three hours, at least. Nobody will •bother us and we can dive
and be back on station in plenty of time to finish."
   "You hope."
   "Trust me, Jeda. I wouldn't lie to you." Talking to Jeda made him feel
tingly, as if something was fluttering in his belly. Last year, she'd been just
another girl. But now, there was something different about her. He hadn't
figured out just what had changed, but something sure had. He kept wanting
to be around her, to talk, to be... alone with her. Only most of the time, he
couldn't think of a sharkshitting thing to say. So he'd invited her to storm-
bounce with him and Little Hamay. "What'd you have to ask her along for?"
Little Hamay had said. All Emile could do was shrug. Why not?
   The rain came across the water in blowing patterns, spattering the waves
and whitecapping them. Emile's bottle- a two-meter-long sub shaped like a
kayak with a densecris bubble in the middle-began to pitch a little more.
Storm-bouncing was a kick, but definitely a negative as far as the adults were
concerned. If they knew about this, Emile would be stuck in his cube and
disconnected from anything except edcom for two weeks. But they wouldn't
find out.
   Little Hamay came oncom. "Hey, Emile, you heard the story about the
Deep Ranger?"
   Deep Ranger was the hero of the entcom series cast. Guy was able to
change into a gill suit and kick ass like nobody when the mals started
trouble. He wore a disguise, so nobody would know his secret identity. "Tell
me," Emile said.
   "Okay. It's a Fuggin Roy joke. Fuggin Roy is tapped into edcom, see, and
it's primary sex ed. The teacher says, 'Okay, I need some input examples of
sex stuff. So Fuggin Roy's input circ lights, but the teacher don't want to call
on him, 'cause he's such a jerk-off. So she calls on Mary. And Mary says,
'Mitosis, that's cell division.' And the teacher says, 'Good, Mary. Who else?'
And Fuggin Roy's circ blares again, but she calls on Bill, and he lays out
something about menstrual periods. 'Good,' she says. 'One more.' This time,
nobody's circ lights except Fuggin Roy, so she has to call on him. So Fuggin
Roy says, 'Well, the Deep Ranger is out diving, see, and all of a sudden, eight
thousand mals come out of the coral and start shooting at him with
harpguns. So the Deep Ranger pulls his own harp-gun and starts filling the
water with long darts, zap, zap, zap! And pretty soon, the Deep Ranger has
killed all the mals, speared 'em deader than chum.' The teacher waits a few
seconds and Fuggin Roy don't say nothing else, so she says, 'Well, that's a
very nice story, Roy, but-what's it got to do with sex?' And Fuggin Roy says,
'Well, it'll teach them mals not to fuck with the Deep Ranger!'"
   Emile wanted to laugh, but he held it, waiting to hear how Jeda was going
to react. After a second, she came oncom. "That's stupid, Hamay, really
stupid."
   Emile didn't say anything-his bottle was sliding down the trough of a big
wave and he was trying to hold the nose into the wind. It wasn't that stupid a
joke, really. Actually, it was kind of funny, but he didn't laugh. Suddenly,
what Jeda thought of him seemed more important than what Little Hamay,
his friend for years, thought. And his gut churned in a funny way that was
only partially due to the sudden roll of the bottle as the storm clawed at it.
   "-your duty to the Confederation requires your participation in galactic
service. You should all know the alternatives by now, but I will list them
again." The Confed rep stood in the center of the assembly hall in front of an
active holoproj unit. The two hundred seats were filled with young men and
women, all watching the rep. Emile Khadaji watched maybe a little more
carefully than most.
   "First, there's the military. Confed standard is six years. Then there's
medical, you've got eight years' tour there. Those of you with weak stomachs
can try for Civilian Corps, but the input is limited and we are talking about
ten years minimum. That's it, people. You will have to do your duty, one
way or another. It's up to you. Personally, I would hope you'd do military.
The pay is better, the chances for advancement better, and the tour is shorter.
Who knows? You might even get posted to your homeworld."
   Several people laughed at this. The military contingent on San Yubi
consisted of a hundred troopers; chances of anybody here making it into that
post were slim and snowball. Besides, Emile didn't want to be stuck on his
home-world. He wanted to see the galaxy, he wanted to see action.
   Jeda leaned toward Emile from her seat next to him. "Medical is the best
deal."
   Emile smiled, but said nothing. They talked about joining Medical together
and asking for link-posting. But Jeda wasn't as... exciting as she'd once been.
She was, Emile reflected, kind of... dull. He'd had other girls, even a few
guys, to play nik-nik games with since that first time with her, and, well, she
wasrpt-so hot. He was going for Military, for a new start. One thing he had
learned: there were a lot of fish in the sea. He meant to sample a few....
   "-won't hurt, but you may notice a transient itching sensation," the Medic
said.
   The goddamned fishfucker! 'Transient itching sensation,' was it? Khadaji
felt as if someone had pumped him full of rock venom. It was all he could do
to keep from clawing gouges in his skin. Each of the fucking bacteria must
have teeth and talons!
   But the augmentation process was working. He tried the test he'd heard
about, the stack of coins on the back of his hand. When he dropped his hand
from under the metal circles, it seemed as if he had all the time in the galaxy
to pluck them from the air. Oh, he was fast! Of course, it didn't make much
difference in the barracks, since everybody else was auged the same way, but
against a civilian? He couldn't wait to get to a pub to start a fight.
   The military minds weren't completely stupid, though. Until the newness
wore off, speed-augmented troopers were kept away from civilians. Too
fucking bad....
   "A guard? I don't want to be a fucking guard, Sub!" "Seal it, Khadaji. None
of us want to be guards. But the Confed in its wisdom has seen fit to bend us
to Kontrau'lega for a time. You will make the best of it."
   Khadaji turned to his bunkmate, Theris. "Shit. After Nazo I thought they'd
send us where we could see more action. We're battle-tested, experienced!"
   The small dark woman looked up at him. "So are half the ground forces in
the system, Emilio, old dork. Way I hear it, Kontrau'lega is a reward for a job
well done."
   "Shit."
   -airgun barked and Khadaji saw Theris's left eye disappear. She fell, and he
swept his carbine in a semicircle at hip level, firing on full auto. A dozen of
the breakers were stopped by the lead wall, and the closer prisoners were
blown apart by the explosive rounds.
   "Theris!" Khadaji dropped, oblivious to the roar around him. He stabbed
his thumb and forefinger at her carotids, but there was no pulse. The steel
pellet must have gone right into her brain, she was dead before she touched
the neatly clipped lawn.
  When he stood, his rage was in full charge. The fuckers were going to pay
for Theris, every goddamned one of them"-don't want me to go!
  "-want me-!
  "-don't-!"
  Khadaji came up from the sonically-induced sleep, fighting the dream. The
pure white skin and flowing white hair of Juete filled his mind, along with
her rage at being deserted. You should have let me refuse, she seemed to say.
You owed me that much.
  Khadaji lay quietly in the bed for a moment, allowing his heart to slow to
normal. Sleeping was not the answer, not if it brought dreams. His past was
not going to help him now. He had to start anew, to begin on the path he'd
seen tantilizing him on Maro. He had to do something.
  It was going to be a long trip to Bocca, he realized. Far longer than he'd
expected.


  Chapter Fourteen

   A TROPICAL THUNDERSTORM was in full rage as the shuttle landed at
the port of Nagas on Bocca. The attendants on the boxcar were moving
among the passengers with hoops of reverse-os thinfilm. Khadaji stood as the
young woman approached and raised the hoop over his head.
   "Hold your breath for a second," she said.
   Khadaji took a deep breath and the woman brought the hoop down slowly
around his body until it touched the deck. Khadaji stepped over the edge of
the hoop and the woman raised it and moved to the next passenger.
   The microthin plastic felt like cobwebs on his skin, and Khadaji quickly
cleared his mouth and nostrils so it wouldn't be sucked in when he breathed.
The thinfilm sheet had already conformed to his body to form a water-
repellent layer. It had a half-life of ten minutes before it would begin to die,
but it would keep him dry long enough to reach the terminal. In twenty
minutes, the material would be completely gone, evaportated harmlessly into
the air.
   The rain pounded at him as Khadaji walked quickly to the terminal. It was
hot, the rain was nearly as warm as me air, and hard flashes of lightning
were followed quickly by sheet-metal rolls of thunder. It was hard to see
much, and Khadaji followed the passenger in front of him. A gust of wind
shook him as he reached the terminal.
  Inside, the customs officer checked him through.
  "Purpose of your visit?"
  "Student," Khadaji said.
  The man looked bored. Bocca's single major industry was knowledge, in
one form or another. "Subject?"
  Khadaji didn't speak for a few seconds. He hadn't really decided, yet. He
had some vague ideas, but nothing for certain. What was he going to study?
  The customs man began to look irritated.
  "Politics," Khadaji said suddenly.
  The man nodded, bored again. He returned Khadaji's tag and waved him
through.
  It seemed as if the whole damned planet was a university. There were
thousands of colleges, covering tens of thousands of subjects. Khadaji stared
at the catalogue scrolling across the holoproj image. Politics? What kind?
There were dozens of choices: Human or Mutant? Current or Past? System?
Planet? State? Theoretical? And, assuming he could choose a particular
branch, there were several ways to go about learning the material, too. Viral
Inject. Hypnotic Induct. Real Time.
  Viral Inject was the fastest. A few minutes and you could absorb an entire
course, coded into educational virus which would become a part of your own
nervous system. Hypnosis took longer, several sessions of an hour or so, but
the information was the same and locked in fairly well. Real Time was the
chanciest, there were no guarantees because the work had to be done by the
student. Well, Viral seemed like the way to go--until Khadaji saw the prices.
Buddha and Jackson! He'd saved most of the money he'd earned in the pub,
but a single course would take all of that and more. Hypnotic courses were
cheaper, but still more than he had to spend. He could afford Real Time, that
was all, and not too much of that. Holy Allah, education was expensive. He'd
never thought much about it before: on his homeworld, he'd been schooled
for free as a child, and part of his father's benefit package had given Khadaji
secondary training in BasicLib-a total of fifteen years, all for free. He wished
he had some of that free time coming to him now.
  The instructor was a pinched-faced woman of eighty, with frizzy short hair
dyed brilliant green in a fashion which was fifteen years out-of-date. She
faced four hundred students in the auditorium and gave her first and final
lecture on politics.
   "There are three files," she said, waving at the air. A giant holoproj lit to
her right, with the names. Khadaji pointed his comp at the image and pushed
the inducer. At the same time, he heard several hundred other inducers click
into operation. It sounded like a swarm of angry insects. The files were
dutifully copied by his portable unit.
   "Read them carefully," the professor said. "Introduction to Basic Terran
Politics will hold its final examination in six weeks. The schedules will be
filed under class times in the library's mainframe matrix." With that, the
professor waved her hand again, wiping the holoproj image away. She
turned, and walked from the auditorium.
   Next to him, a jet-skinned boy of sixteen or so muttered, "Shit. I'm gonna
line my parents for Viral stads. I hate this Real Time suck."
   Khadaji stared at the names projected above his comp.
   THE PRINCE - NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI - 6934561-POL-1
   A BOOK OF FIVE RINGS - MIYAMOTO MUSASHI - 7105436-POL-l THE
ART OF COMPROMISE - CARLOS PERITO - 3451509-POL-1
   Khadaji looked at the boy and raised an eyebrow.
   "That's it," the boy said. "She gives us the reading, we do it, they test us at
the end. They're trying to weed us out, there's too many of us, so seal it, you
can bet your orbs the test will be a humming peter!"
   Khadaji only nodded. It didn't matter to him if he passed the test or not.
He wasn't here to get a degree; he was here to learn. Three files. It didn't
seem as if he would be able to learn much about politics from them.
   He was wrong. Machiavelli had been something called an Italian, and he
wrote his theories in pre-Galactic times, but his insight was fascinating. Much
of the text first seemed incomprehensible, due to archaic references to Terran
sub-states like France and Rome and Tuscany, but Khadaji was able to
decipher those using a basic history file in the library. The more he read, the
more he understood.
   Musashi's book was'concerned with sword fighting, of all things. But a
deeper look showed strategy beyond that of waving a sharp metal blade.
Khadaji couldn't help remembering Pen's lessons with the curved knife, back
on the Darkworld.
   Perito was an early post-Galactic, writing on Alpha Point in the Centauri
System. His psychological insights delved deeper than the others, and he
talked much of ethics.
   Amazing, that such men could know so much. It made Khadaji realize
how little he knew.
   Military Science was structured differently. There were regular class
sessions with a live instructor, and Khadaji felt almost at home in the classes.
He had, after all, been a soldier. He was done with that, but since the Military
was the enforcement arm of the Confed, it seemed like a good idea to learn as
much as he could about it.
   "-is your basic antipersonnel, fully automatic, blowback-operated shoulder
weapon," the instructor droned in a bored voice. "It holds five hunnert
rounds of point one-seven-seven explosive ammunition with a rate of fire of
eight rounds per second. This here shoulder weapon weighs three point six
three kilograms empty and five point one kilograms fully loaded. People, this
is your weapon, not your gun." He waved the Parker in the air. "This is for
work." He dropped one hand to touch himself on the crotch. "This is for fun.
Don't mistake one for the other. Those of you not male or electively equipped
as such might remember that easier."
   Khadaji found a small bar in the town serving the university branch and
managed to get hired as a backup tender. The pay wasn't that good, but the
job included a communal sleeping room and at least one meal a day. The
money he had saved from Kamus wouldn't last forever, and, it seemed, there
was a lot he didn't know. The vastness of human knowledge seemed like
some monstrous void looming in front of him. He was ignorant, he realized,
and ill-equipped to challenge a galactic Confederation in any area.
   From politics, Khadaji naturally slid into the study of history; then came
psychology, sociology, biology and socio-biology. He delivered drinks and
powders in the pub by day and attended classes and worked the library
comp in the evenings. He took classes in physics and chemistry, in
electronics and atomic theory; he learned about warps and drives; he
immersed himself in astronomy and astrophysics. The more he learned, the
more he wanted to learn. Knowledge became a joy for him, an end in itself.
Time went by in a kind of intellectual blur, filled with something new each
day. A line of study would often take a turn, dragging Khadaji into a new
discipline which would blossom for him, making him grin as he tapped the
controls of the comp and chased the information like a predator chasing
prey. Astronomy, astrophysics, medicine, religion; they all called to him....
   Confederation History: now there was a subject. Khadaji had paid little
attention to such things before; after all, the Confed was so vast and ever-
present, it was like worrying about breathing. On screen, the dates and facts
were dry and lifeless: the first extee colony off Earth, 2000 A.D.; the first ship
to reach another stellar system, the ill-fated Heaven Star, constructed in space
and launched in 2072; in 2193, the Bender Drive was perfected, giving FTL
travel. Then came the leap: from 2195 to 2255, there was the Expansion, a
period of intense colonization; from 2255 to 2295, the Consolidation held
sway, in which the galactic association became more rigid, less a loose
association and more a bureaucracy. And, although the Confed frowned
deeply upon it, the period since 2295 was becoming known as the
Declination. The fifty-six planets and eighty-seven wheel worlds were
growing ever more restless. In the spiral Sb which is the Milky Way, such a
Confederation was less than a scratch upon the hundred billion stars which
formed the galaxy; still, the Confed was spread over a thousand light years,
and even at its fastest, the Bender took time. And what the official histories
usually left out was the sense of oppression ordinary people felt from the
vastness of the indifferent Confed. The beast had long since stopped serving
to become the master. The Confed did what governments were famed for: it
made more government. To oppose it was treason, and worth death. Even a
monster has fear.
   "-etiology of the pathogen was at first unknown, but experiments revealed
that the viral matrix was consistent with that of an opportunistic symbiote of
the class-"
   "-type of geological formation is only found in areas pf volcanic activity-"
   "-of which tantric is the most popular form-" "-subatomic realm we must
deal in theory-"
   "-me a Bloody Mary, would you Emile? My fucking head feels like it's
going to fucking explode!"
   Khadaji grinned and began to construct the drink. It was fairly busy, but
not too bad. The pub was quiet as it almost always was-the college crowd
would sometimes get loud, but usually only during the period around
exams. Maurice, the owner, didn't even have a full-time bouncer. He hired an
off-duty pol when he thought things might get rowdy.
   Three people came in while Khadaji was making the Bloody Mary, all
dressed in Confed military uniforms. He felt the short rush of coldness in his
gut he usually did when he saw legit Military-after all, he was a deserter. It
might be half a galaxy away from Maro, but Bocca was a kind of crossroads.
He was aware of the small chance of encountering somebody he knew
whenever he saw a uniformed trooper.
   The coldness faded. The three-two women and a man- were young, maybe
twenty or so, and so wouldn't know him. It had been six years since Maro.
   That stopped him. Six years? That meant he had been studying here on
Bocca for-what?-four years? At least that. He blinked at the realization.
Where had the time gone? He hadn't begun to make a dent in what there was
to be learned. He was still a young man, only thirty-two, but- six years?
   Khadaji felt a break in the normal rhythms of the pub. Something was
going on, something unusual. He glanced around. A soldier was standing,
one of the women, glaring down at a single man at a table near where the
other two soldiers still sat. The woman was angry.
   Khadaji tried to tune out the background noises of the pub so he could
hear her.
   "-much care for the way you stared at us when we came in, chickie. What
the hell do you think you're looking at?"
   The man, a slightly built redhead, shook his head. Khadaji didn't recognize
him, he wasn't one of the regulars.
   "Sorry," he said. He had some kind of accent Khadaji couldn't place right
away. Baszelian, maybe? "No offense meant."
   "Yeah, well I don't think much of your manners, chickie. And I think you
were eyeing my partner too much." The soldier waved at the second woman
sitting behind her.
   Khadaji began to work his way to the end of the bar. He could see trouble.
The woman had already been into chem somewhere. From her sleeve
insignia, he could see she was a combat vet; Khadaji was willing to bet the
other two were, as well. All three wore air pistols clamped into plastic spring
holsters.
   "Like I said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offer insult," the redhead said. He
had his hands palm up on the table. Khadaji noticed his right index finger
was curled almost to his palm.
   "I think I just might kick your ass," the trooper said. "Right here and right
now."
   The redhead said nothing, but shook his head.
   "No? You don't think I can?" The woman was psyching herself up to jump
the man. Khadaji rounded the corner of the bar and started toward her. The
confrontation had developed an audience by this time.
   The trooper bent and grabbed the redhead's tunic and dragged him up
from the chair. As she did, he brought his hands around in short arcs and
smacked her on both ears with his palms. She screamed and released him.
Khadaji grinned. That was a nice moveSuddenly, the other two troopers
kicked away from the table and reached for their air pistols. The woman with
the sore ears dug for her own weapon. Buddha, they were going to start
shooting! Khadaji sprinted, hoping to reach them before they killed the
redhead.
   The redhead waved his hand back and forth, pointing his finger at the
troopers. There were three coughs, a sound like a giant might make spitting.
The three troopers fell, knocking over a table and two chairs, their air pistols
in their hands but not yet clear of the clamps on their hips. What-?
   The man with red hair came out of a shooter's crouch, but Khadaji didn't
see a weapon. The man's hands were empty, no way could he have drawn a
weapon, fired three times, and put it away without Khadaji seeing it.
   Red saw Khadaji approaching and shifted his stance slightly toward him.
   "Easy," Khadaji said, holding his hands in sight, fingers spread wide.
"You're clear, they went for firepower first."
   Red seemed to relax slightly. He nodded, but didn't smile.
   When Khadaji was two meters away, he stopped. "The sector pol works for
us as a bouncer sometimes. We'll call it self-protection-he'll go along with
that."
   Red nodded. "I'd just as soon not get involved with the local cools. Or the
Confed Military pols. Maybe I'll bend before they show up."
   Khadaji shrugged. "I'm not going to try and stop you." He grinned.
   The smaller man smiled back at him, and turned toward the exit.
   "One thing before you go," Khadaji said. "What did you hit them with?"
   Red turned his right hand, so the back of it faced Khadaji. There was an
angular parallelogram riding there, a diamond shape maybe six or seven
centimeters on a side, with what looked like a slunglas tube extending from
the end in a line with the index finger. The tube was a centimeter longer than
Red's finger, and was obviously a barrel for projectiles. The body of the unit
was covered in flesh-colored orthoplastic, save for what must be a magazine
and its snap-out button.
   "Spetsdod," Red said. "I'm running shocktox darts. They'll be out for fifteen
minutes."
   They heard the whine of a military ground-effect car, and Red dropped his
hand and looked at Khadaji. "Back way out?"
   "Through there."
   When the military pols blew in, Red was a minute gone. Khadaji stalled in
telling of the shoot long enough for him to get further away. After the pols
and medics were through, Khadaji thought about what he had seen. There
was something important in it, something he couldn't quite grasp.


  Chapter Fifteen

   IT WAS RAINING again. The pounding tropical downpour was
punctuated with heavy electrical discharges and the resulting clap of air
rushing in to fill the void left by the lightning. Thick-leaved trees danced and
swayed under the windy sheets and puddles expanded into miniature seas,
drowning gray plastcrete streets and walks.
   Khadaji liked the rain. It reminded him of his homeworld. As a boy, he
would watch the storms, sometimes with waterspouts, sweep across the
ocean as if they were living things. Rain cleaned the air, refreshed the ions,
and stirred the fish. It was always more fun to work the schools after a heavy
rain, the mock-tuna seemed more frantic, the poda's oxy streamers were fully
extended, even the guard sharks roused from their normal lethargy. And it
wasn't just within a few meters of the surface, either. The deep fish knew
about the rain, somehow, and they showed it.
   Khadaji sat under the wide overhang of a pagoda roof, watching the rain.
The wind blew spray at him now and again, but he was mostly dry. People
walked or ran by wrapped in micro-plastic sheets or carrying umbrel-fields;
life couldn't stop because of the rain. In another few years, so they said,
weather control would be installed on Bocca, and the storms would be
scheduled and milder. So they said.
   Khadaji sighed. If he considered his life since his Realization on Maro as a
mountain climb, then he was certainly taking a lot of time to look at the rocks
and caves along the way. First it had been Pen, then Juete, and now it was the
seductive lure of education. There was inside him the drive to do something,
even though he did not know what. What he did know was that he wasn't
moving. Sure, he was learning a lot-had learned a lot from all his
experiences- but running through it all was a feeling of frustration.
   Lightning scored the air maybe two hundred meters away, striking up at
the clouds from a bleeder tower designed for that purpose. The thunder fired
like a giant's carbine and the sound seemed to shake more rain from the dark
clouds. A short mue dressed in phosphor gear ran by, cursing the weather, as
she splashed through the sea-over-plastcrete.
   He remembered the fight in the pub vividly. The three troopers going for
weapons and being blown down by a single man with what amounted to an
air-powered dart gun. Sure, they were chem-lit, but they were also combat
vets, highly trained and deadly. And Red had taken them, quickly and
efficiently, without raising perspiration. The Confed wasn't invincible: He'd
been a trooper, he knew that. There were too many soldiers for any person or
group to resist openly, that would be suicide.
   He thought about the killing he'd seen, about his final participation in the
slaughter on Maro. It still made him want to vomit, the thought of all those
people ceasing to exist. Many religions had it that there was another life,
another existence following the one known, but Khadaji held no faith in that
idea. Maybe so, maybe not. It would be nice, but until it was proven, a
person should make the best of his or her time on the physical plane. And if
all those dead on Maro were wrong?.... Then they were wasted, like a
shipment of bad foodstuffs or contaminated chem. That felt so wrong to him
there were no words for it. Any type of violence initiated by one intelligent
being against another was wrong. Killing violence was worse than any other
kind. How could it be condoned? In his brief moment of cosmic bliss,
Khadaji had seen the value of intelligent life. Man and his self-created mues
were alone in the galaxy as evolved intelligence. Certainly, there were
artificials- computers and genetically altered animals-but no aliens had been
discovered above the level of an unaltered dog. It was a big galaxy, plenty of
room for every human or neo-human, it wasn't necessary to kill any of them!
   The rain continued to pound the trees and buildings and ground; Khadaji's
shoulders were tense and drawn up. He took a deep breath and relaxed as he
exhaled both air and anger. Somebody had to do something. Somebody had
to stop the Confed, had to make it release its steel grip, had to end its casual
death-dealing.
   Khadaji laughed into the rain. Who? Him? By himself? Sure. It wasn't just
funny, it was a screamer. But he kept seeing Red-who was he? What kind of
man was he?- sweeping the three soldiers away. In the end, even the largest
army was made up of single units, men and women like those in the pub.
Like he himself had been. While no man could stand against the might of the
entire Confed, a single man might be able to move against them in smaller
numbers, if he were careful, if he were clever and skilled.
   The rain began to slacken. The drops were smaller, the wind less; the
clouds were nearly empty.
   Yes. The time had come to do something. But-no matter how he twisted his
thinking, Khadaji could only see one path to effect the kind of changes he
wanted and it was not evolution but its faster brother-revolution. And
violence was all too integral to that manner of change. The irony of it was not
lost on him. I am for peace-do it my way or I'll kill you....
   The rain gave a short-lived surge and tried to recapture its glory as a
storm, but the effort failed. The last drops fell and the hot sun was revealed
by the retreating clouds. Vapor rose from slate roofs and plastcrete, returning
to the air to begin the cycle again.
   Khadaji stepped from the pagoda and walked in the warmth of the early
afternoon. Could he use the same excuse as the Confed-the end justified the
means? Sometimes it did, of course, but could one ethically justify using the
same methods as a deplored enemy, in order to get it to stop?
   Khadaji waded through a puddle which covered his dotics and rose to his
ankles. What other paths were there? His studies had shown him that
revolution and evolution were the only ways that societies ever truly
changed. Revolution and evolution, built of a mix of education and violence
and politics and compromise and self-interest and self-preservation.
Certainly, history showed that rigid societies, like ancient dinosaurs, always
died. The Confed was the biggest dinosaur ever, and while it was already
dying and had been doing so for a long time, it would take many years
before it finally fell. Any empire which had to hold its citizens in check with
military force was far down the road to destruction. Which brought up
another thought: what would replace the dead beast when it began to rot?
What parasite would emerge from the corpse to try and breed itself into
superiority?
   Khadaji shook his head. He didn't know enough, he knew that much, but
every moment he allowed to pass without action meant it was that much less
likely he would accomplish anything. It was time to do something.
   What, and how?-those were puzzles still to be solved.
   He grinned to himself. Funny, how much he had changed in the last few
years. Who would have ever guessed at what he was now planning and
doing, compared to what he thought and did as a callow young soldier?
Certainly not one Errrile Antoon Khadaji. It had all sprung from one cosmic
moment on a battlefield, something no one would have ever foreseen. Based
on that one flash of knowledge and the subsequent faith attached, he had
altered his life dramatically. He'd become a deserter; he'd educated himself
in processes he'd never known about; he now contemplated unthinkable acts.
Such things were utterly amazing, even now. That spiritual moment drove
him, forcing him to become more than he'd ever dreamed he would be. In a
way, he had become a kind of intellectual; it was time now for him to become
much more active.
   It took him two weeks to find Red. And even then, it was more a matter of
luck than Khadaji's skill as an investigator. He had read the texts on detection
and investigation, but there were some things which didn't translate well
from a text file. "Contact local sources of information" was a lot easier in
theory than it was in practice.
   Red wasn't particularly thrilled to see him.
   They met in a somatic club, amid rows of people sitting in electrostim
units, having their muscles exercized. Red was utilizing an old-fashioned set
of free weights, and sweating with the effort. Khadaji noticed he wore the
spets-dod even here.
   "Yes?" Red looked wary.
   Khadaji explained what he wanted.
   "You jest."
   "No. I'll pay you to teach me."
   "Why?"
   "Self-protection."
   Red stared at Khadaji's body. Like most of the others in the club, Khadaji
wore only a groin strap. His body was better than most; all the hours of
sumito practice kept him lean and tight. "You look as if you could take care
of yourself, if the need arose."
   "Against three armed troopers?"
   In answer to that, Red tossed the weight bar he was curling at Khadaji, and
brought the spetsdod up to aim at the bigger man's bellyKhadaji wasn't
there. The weight bar clunked onto the rockfoam floor cover and Red found
his outstretched arm clamped at the wrist by a powerful hand; Khadaji was
standing next to him, out of the line-of fire of the dart shooter. Red grinned
widely, and Khadaji released his arm suddenly.
   "That's what I thought," Red said. "I saw you move in the pub. You don't
need a spetsdod, friend. You could have taken those three with your hands,
no matter if they had air guns, am I right?"
   "Probably. But I still want to learn."
   Red bent and recovered the weight bar. After curling it several times, he
finally spoke. "All right. I'll show you."
   As it turned out, Red had a name-Lyle Gatridge-but most people did call
him Red. The College of Military Science had an underground weapons
range, and they practiced there. The place smelled of lubricant and explosive
chem, and it brought back memories of Khadaji's own military training. He
could still recall the Sub-Lojt telling the troops to load-and-lock-one-clip-ball-
non-explo-and-ready-onna-firing-line.
   Killing weapons were generally illegal for civilians in the civilized galaxy,
but these weapons which would stun or shock an attacker were allowed,
with proper licenses, for self-protection. Tasers, light-cannons and spetsdods
loaded with charged ion-chem were fairly common, Red told Khadaji. He
should know, because he earned his money as a bodyguard at times.
   "Now you take a laser. It's a fine weapon, it delivers a hard charge which
will knock a big man stupid. Problem is, the range is short. A laser's
transmitter is only good for maybe fifteen meters, tops. Outside of that, you
might as well throw it. There are short-circ vests which will absorb a laser's
signal, too.
   "Light cannons are fine, they'll blind you, especially at night, just like a
photon flare. Problem there is, Ihey're not so good in bright sunshine, and
you can wear polarizing contacts which will pretty much kill the effecl."
   Red handed Khadaji a spetsdod. "Put it on the back of your hand-this is a
right-side model-you peel the backing on the flesh and mold it, like this."
   Khadaji wiggled his fingers experimentally. The weapon was very
comfortable, light enough so he hardly noticed it was there. The barrel
protruded just past the tip of his index finger.
   "It's not loaded," Red said, "but you always check that for yourself, don't
take anybody's word for it. Right there is where the magazine goes."
   Khadaji checked the slot. It was empty. Red handed him a plastic rectangle
about the length of Khadaji's little finger, but only half as thick. "It holds up
to fifteen rounds, depending on what kind of dart you load. The power-
compressed gas-is built into the magazine. This is stinger ammo-dull-nosed
darts without chem. You know you're hit if you get shot by one, but all it
does is sting a little; no damage unless il hits an eye or something. Load il
wilh ihe white end up."
   Khadaji obediently snapped the magazine into place. "That's Ihe ejecl
button next to the magazine. Try it." Khadaji touched the button and the
magazine snapped out and fell onto the floor of the shooting range. Red bent
to retrieve it. "You can reload in about three seconds." He returned the
magazine and Khadaji reloaded the weapon.
   Khadaji dropped his hand next to his thigh and wiggled the fingers again.
He had read about how to fire the weapon, there was a chem-sensitive
trigger on the end of the barrel which would only react to certain kinds of
epidermal tissue, specifically that of a fingernail. There was no safety, unless
you wore a fingertip cover.
   Red punched in a command on the range computer and a holoproj image
lit up three or four meters out. A big man with a knife raised over his head
running in place toward them. Khadaji laughed.
   "Go ahead, shoot him," Red ordered.
   Khadaji nodded and snapped his hand up-and shot himself in the foot.
   "Ah, shit! shit, shit, SHIT!"
   Red leaned back against the stall support and laughed until tears flowed.
"Felt that, did you?"
   "Goddammit, that hurt!" Khadaji refrained from hopping around and
holding his foot-barely.
   "I forgot to mention that the firing mechanism is very sensitive."
   "You fishfucker," Khadaji said, glaring at him.
   "Ah, ah. You'll remember it better now than if I'd just told you. You see
why I always keep my index finger curled in now, don't you?"
   "I see."
   "How's your foot?"
   "I'll live."
   "Good. Let's try it again, only take it a little slower, what say?"
   It was unlike any weapon Khadaji had ever used in the military. First, the
shooting was "instinctive"-it was point-firing, there were no sights, no way to
aim. You pointed your finger at the target and that's where your missile
went. Which was what made it so fast, your target was never any further
away in time than jabbing a finger at it.
   A crazed woman waving a hand wand ran on a treadmill at him. Khadaji
pointed his finger at her. A chime rang and. a diode lit on the control panel.
A hit.
   "Where were you aiming?" Red looked at the board. "At the woman,"
Khadaji said dryly. "Where at the woman? Her face? Chest? Left nipple?"
"Her chest."
   "You missed, then. You hit her too low, almost at the navel."
   "So? I hit her, didn't I?"
   "Not good enough," Red said. "You ever hear the story of the archers?"
   "What's an archer?"
   "Bow shooter. Slings an aluminum shaft about a meter long using the
power of a primitive spring-" "I know what a bow is," Khadaji interrupted.
"Yeah, well there was a contest and the best three archers in the state were
shooting for a prize. The state's ruler had a big holoproj of a fish hung for a
target and the archers were set back a good distance, fifty or a hundred
meters. So they shot, and one guy won. After the contest, the ruler called the
three archers in one at a time and asked each archer what he'd been aiming
at. The first guy said, 'I was aiming at the fish.' Second guy said, 'I was
aiming at the middle of the fish.' The third shooter said, 'I was aiming at the
fish's eye.' You want to guess which archer won?" "Obviously the third
archer," Khadaji said. "Right. Because you only get as accurate as you try for."
He waved his right hand, showing Khadaji his own spets-dod. "These things
have a range of about fifty meters, but are only effective for maybe half that.
Combat range for a spetsdod is five to seven meters, that's where you'll do
most of your shooting. You got somebody wearing a vest or padded 'skins,
your only target might be a hand or neck." Red stopped talking and bent to
pick up an empty magazine from the floor. He held it in the same hand as his
spetsdod, then casually flipped it into the air downrange.
   As Khadaji watched, Red jabbed his finger toward the tumbling magazine
and fired. It jumped away suddenly at a right angle to its former flight.
   "Always aim for the fish's eye, kid. You might not hit it, but you'll be more
likely to hit the fish somewhere."
   Getting a license for his own spetsdod was easy enough. Khadaji used his
own name-in all the billions of people in the galaxy, there had to be
thousands with his name- and only lied about background. He'd been a
citizen and student on Bocca for four standard years and he had stayed
mostly within local laws. The permit was appended to his tag and the
spetsdod became a pan of his hand. Red had a left-side model he made
Khadaji practice with, sometimes requiring him to use both at the same time.
Khadaji put in an hour in the range daily, firing off several hundred darts
each session. At first, the improvement in his speed and accuracy was
radical; after a few months, the improvements came in tiny bits-a half-
centimeter closer here, nine hits instead of eight there. In three months,
Khadaji could hit a tossed magazine six times out of ten.
   In six months, he could hit the magazine nine times out of every ten tosses.
He could hit a man-sized target at combat ranges a hundred times in a row
with no misses, and he could do it standing, sitting or rolling.
   In nine months, Khadaji regularly outshot Red, using either or both hands.
He practiced in varied lighting, wearing heavy and awkward clothing,
sometimes blindfolded, shooting at generated sounds from the targets. He
still missed his targets occasionally, but he took each miss as a personal
affront, striving for perfection. The motions of the spetsdod became almost
instinctive, a learned reflex which seemed as natural to him as walking.
   "Ready?"
   Khadaji nodded, feeling relaxed. He wore spetsdods on both hands and he
held his arms crossed over his chest.
   Red stood to Khadaji's left, unmoving. With a sudden jerk, he tossed a
handful of empty magazines into the air. Four of the small plastic rectangles
glittered in the hard light of the firing range as they tumbled through the air.
   Khadaji moved, both arms swinging out, his index fingers stabbing at the
small targets, the spetsdods coughing. He fired four times; there were four
hits.
   Khadaji grinned. It was easy. He still wasn't sure what he was going to do,
but he knew one thing for certain: He was good enough at this, now.
   Khadaji was off-duty, so he sat at a table with Red, sipping on his latest
experimental drink, champagne. It was really quite good, provided he didn't
drink enough to get a headache. Three glasses seemed to be the limit.
   "So, what happens now?" Red asked. "You're better than anybody I've ever
seen, either with your hands or that." He pointed at the spetsdod. "Nothing
else I can teach you."
   "I've got something to do," Khadaji said. "This is only a part of it."
   "I thought so."
   He didn't ask the obvious question, and Khadaji didn't volunteer. He liked
that about Red; the man never pried. Still, Khadaji felt a curiosity about his
teacher. "What about you? What did I interrupt?"
   Red sipped at his drink. "Not much. I've done a lot of things, mostly
dancing around the edges of legality. Body-guarding, some... courier work,
freelance odd jobs. Never could find a place interesting enough to settle for
more than a few months. You've been interesting, so I've stayed around here,
but now that I'm done, I think maybe I'll take off. Lot of galaxy I haven't seen
yet."
   "No family?"
   "Not to speak of. I was married a couple of times, they didn't work out. I
have a daughter I've never seen, she'd be her late-teens. Geneva, her name is.
I'd like her to have more than the stads I send, but I don't have a lot to offer.
Only thing I was ever really good at is what I do."
   Khadaji nodded. This was the most he'd learned about Red in all the
months he'd known the man. Impulsively, he decided to say something he
hadn't planned to say. If anybody could be trusted, it was Red. "Listen, if
things go the way I want them to, I might be in a good place in a few years;
maybe a place you might want share with your daughter. I'll have a
permanent mail code established here, under the name 'Spit Enterprises'."
Khadaji smiled "Drop a pulse my way every year or two and let me know
where I can find you."
   Red grinned. "I was never much for corresponding, kid, but, sure, why the
hell not? I can see some kind of fire in you. I dunno what it is, exactly, but
something potent. I'll keep in touch."


  Chapter Sixteen

  KHADAJI SAT IN one of the two thousand booths which made up the
main university library, staring at the holoproj image generated by the
computer. He knew that if he intended to offer any kind of opposition to the
Confederation, it would have to be done from a position of strength. He had
a strong body, and certain skill with that body, and now, with a spetsdod.
But more was needed, he had to have some kind of power base.
   Power, he'd learned from his study of politics, could come from several
sources. It could be military, it could be political, or religious, or it could be
money. Often the different kinds were intertwined.
   Khadaji touched a control and the heat-sensitive device caused the
holoproj to blur as the computer searched for the chosen subject.
   Military was out. He'd have to be a Sector Marshal to command any forces
strong enough to rise against the Confed and his chances of that were less
than those of a snowball in a supernova. Politics would offer no easy access
to power, either. It would take too long-assuming he could manage to work
his way into an effective political organization. Religion was simply not in
the question; he had no bent in that direction at all.
   Which left money. It was easier to get rich than it was to get famous, there
were a lot of ways to earn standards.
   Of course, the trick was to make the money quickly. Within, say, five to ten
years. That eliminated most honest work. Starting at the bottom of some
corporate lift and rising slowly through the ranks would take some
considerable amount of time, even if he had some particular skill in a given
field. Which he didn't, really. He was fairly well educated in some areas, but
it was mostly academically oriented. And pubtenders didn't die rich.
   There were, of course, faster ways to make money honestly. 'Find a need
and fill it' was the creed of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs
throughout history. If one had the proper kind of drive and luck, one could
join the ranks of the self-made millionaires.
   But the fastest way to make big stads was much simpler. Do it illegally. As
always, it seemed that finding illegal needs and filling them paid the best.
There were drugs which were frowned upon here which could be bought
legally there; it was then merely a matter of figuring a safe way to transport
the chemicals from here to there. Likewise, there were proscribed weapons,
banned holos, illicit sexual devices and a myriad number of things and ideas
which were worth a lot to someone able to provide them.
   Of course, there were risks involved with such endeavors. Lock-time and
brain-diddle weren't pleasant thoughts; neither was being killed by a
criminal element which disliked competition. And there were moral issues.
Could Khadaji live with himself were he involved in slavery or life-
destroying chemicals?
   Of course, laws weren't always just. Some rules outlawed a thing because
it was intrinsically bad: child molestation, say. Other rules made harmless
activities crimes only because someone wished them to be so. Take
cohabitation on a religious holiday. On some worlds, it was legal on one day,
illegal the next, and on the third, okay once again. Khadaji could see no
moral dilemma there.
   The holoproj cleared. The title of the text was: "A Statistical Analysis and
Comparison of Activities Violating Major Planetary Laws Involving Crimes
Against Property, Indexed by Stellar System."
   Khadaji shook his head. The work was, apparently, an ongoing project for
graduate-level students, constantly being revised. According to the
computer, the file, if printed out, would fill 25,973 pages. As he watched, the
number was raised by a hundred. Then another seventy. Even at full
augenblick speedscan, it would take some time to read it all. He would skim,
Khadaji decided, and hit only the highest of the high points. He had no
intention of spending the rest of his life trying to read a file which was
growing so fast he couldn't keep pace with new additions....
   He bought two travel cases that were identical, from a retail outlet which
sold thousands of such cases each year. He wore thinskin gloves when
handling the cases, so he left no prints or secretions. One case he filled with
ordinary items of travel; clothes, toiletries, novel and travel tapes. The second
case was filled much the same, but also had several hundred doses of
mescabyn hidden in a tape reader. Mescabyn was a mild and harmless
hallucinogen, and legal. At least it was legal on Bocca. On the planet's nearest
neighbor (and the only other occupied body in the Faust System), Ago's
Moon, the chem was illegal, as were most drugs. If he could get it to the right
people, the mescabyn would be worth five hundred times what he had paid
for it.
   Travel between Bocca and Ago's Moon was easily accomplished and
hardly regulated. Naturally, there were smugglers, but inspection of luggage
was usually done only on a spot basis. Khadaji bought a fake tag which
identified the bearer as Reachardo Hollee and used it to buy a oneway
passage to Ago's Moon. He checked the travel case containing the mescabyn
through under the new name and had the claim number imprinted on the
tag. Immediately, he booked passage on the same commuter ship under his
own name, checking the second case. He was quick enough, and the second
claim number was sequential to the first. Step one.
   Emile Khadaji was more than a little nervous as he sat in the womb-foam
of the morning shuttle to Ago's Moon. The attendant offered him a soporific,
but he declined. He would have to relax, he thought. If his mental state was
apparent, he would be caught for certain.
   The ship landed uneventfully and Khadaji proceeded to the luggage claim
area. He watched as the bags were ejected through a slot, sometimes fired
completely over the conveyer by the robot dins assigned to transport them.
Finally, he saw the bag containing the contraband. He was sweating as he
reached for the case, expecting at any moment to feel someone clamping
hands upon him.
   Nothing happened, no one seemed to be watching him, so Khadaji moved
to the line waiting to have tags checked against bags. The old woman
matching numbers looked bored. The reader she used was not equipped
with automatic memory Khadaji knew. That was an important part of his
plan. If the device had been so fitted, he would never have tried the caper.
   The woman glanced at the readout on the fake tag, saw the numbers
matched, and waved Khadaji through, pointing with her nose. She didn't
look at him, but immediately began to check the next man through.
   Khadaji released a deep breath. So far, so good. Step two.
   The corridor led to customs and there were no exits between the luggage
area and the inspection tables. There were, however, small disposal tubes
lining the corridor. As inconspicuously as he could, Khadaji approached one
of these disposals. He attached a thumbnail-sized sticker of phosphoreme to
the fake tag, squeezed it, and dropped it into the wall tube. There was a small
whoosh! as the tube sucked the plastic tag away, and Khadaji imagined he
heard the phosphoreme as it ignited and flashed the ID. Reachardo Hollee no
long existed. Step three.
   The customs inspectors looked as bored as the woman who checked the
claim tags, but Khadaji knew they weren't. This was the most dangerous
part. If they opened his bag, if they found the chem hidden inside the reader,
then the caper was aborted. He was, he figured, protected as much as he
could be, considering he was guilty of smuggling. He had played the
scenario inside his head dozens of times.
   "Well, what have we here? Look, Johann, a drug smuggler!"
   Khadaji would look astounded. "What? I never saw that before." He would
look at the contents of the bag for a moment and the realization would dawn
on him. "Hey, wait a minute! That's not my bag!"
   "Sure it isn't, chickie. Come over here into my office. Let me see your tag.
And move very slowly and carefully when you reach for it, Johann zaps
things when he gets nervous."
   He would produce his tag, very carefully, trying to look innocent. They
would check it.
   "Yeah, it's the wrong number, all right. How did you get it past Marlerra?
Giver her a call, Johann. And check to see if there's another bag matching this
number, too."
   After what would seem like a thousand years, the second bag would show
up, probably in the company of the old woman. It would be very thoroughly
checked, but would be clear of anything illegal. And the number would
match. And Khadaji's tag would show he'd only checked one bag through.
And they would let him go, though they might be suspicious, and begin
looking for Hollee the drug smuggler. ...
   "Your tag," the customs man said, interrupting Khadaji's mental scenario.
   "Oh, sorry." He handed the tag over and the man shoved it into a reader.
   "Purpose of your visit?"
   "Vacation. I'm going to Giant Falls, to do some swimming. Maybe some
diving."
   "Um. Anything to declare?"
   "No sir."
   The man pulled Khadaji's tag from the reader and handed it back. He
looked at the case Khadaji carried. "That all you're bringing in?"
   "Yes sir." Khadaji made as if to put the case onto the inspection table.
   The customs man glanced at Khadaji, then at the bag. "Never mind. Have a
pleasant time on Ago's Moon." He waved at the next man.
   Khadaji forced himself to walk slowly as he moved away from the customs
inspector. He was through! Step four.
   He had a contact lined up, someone he'd met in the pub on Bocca. Before
he went to meet him, Khadaji took his legal permit, went to a weapons
supplier and bought a spetsdod and four magazines of shocktox darts. Just in
case.
   There was no trouble. Ten minutes after he arrived in a respectable
clothing producer's office, Khadaji traded fifty standards worth of mescabyn
for twenty-five thousand stads. He saw the money credited to his account,
and he and his customer parted on the best of terms. The man would take all
Khadaji could supply, he said.
   Khadaji grinned as he walked toward his rented cube. He had just made
more money in a few hours than in the last two years. He laughed aloud. He
was tempted to spend a few days and a chunk of the money on Ago's Moon,
enjoying some of the pleasures which could be had by someone well-off. But
he shook the thought. No, this was only a beginning. He would have to
devise other ways to make this seed grow. The switched bag caper had
worked, but he wouldn't try that again. According to his research, most law
benders were caught when they tried to milk too much from a gooa thing. He
didn't plan to repeat himself and run that risk.
   The term "victimless crimes" might be a misnomer, but it was one Khadaji
used as his basis of operation. Smuggling seemed to him to be the best way
to go. He didn't deal in killing weapons; if he smuggled drugs, they were
non-addictive; he tended to buy something where it was legal and sell it
where it was not. The risks he took justified his profits, in his mind, at least.
   "-thing to declare, brother?"
   "I bought this camera on Muta Kato," Khadaji said. "It's a gift for an old
friend here."
   "Looks expensive. Value, brother?"
   "Four hundred standards, I'm afraid." Not counting the flame opals hidden
inside the drive motor. "Will I have to pay an import duty?"
   "That's so, sorry, brother. Fifty percent."
   Khadaji pretended to wince. "Well. There goes my mother's souvenir
statue of His Eminence." He reached for his credit tab.
   "I'd hate to deprive somone's mother of such a gift. What say we value this
at... three hundred stads?"
   Khadaji smiled. "You are a true saint, brother."
   Khadaji kept smiling as he walked through customs. He was glad he'd had
a chance to study history; he owed an easy twelve thousand stads to the
writer of an old file called The Purloined Letter.
   When the Directorate of Simba Numa declared rec chem An Abomination
and shut down all public pubs, Khadaji was not one of the chemrunners who
sold a shipload of common sops and liquids to eager buyers waving credit
tags at passing traffic. The Directorate was expecting that kind of business
and was prepared for it. Dozens of ships were impounded and their owners
and pilots arrested. Khadaji, drawing upon his knowledge gained as a
pubtender, approached a legal market selling products which could be easily
converted into various popular rec-chems and sold them instructions on how
to make those conversions. Bathtub psychedelics and gin became best-sellers
and Khadaji left the planet long before the authorities began looking for him.
   To cover his travel and illicit activities, Khadaji bought a business, a firm
which specialized in sending consultants to help small businesses streamline
their operations. He did so through a series of dummy corporations and
fronts, then hired himself as a kind of free-cycle investigator, who answered
only to the CEO of the company. The same CEO, hired by Khadaji, was
allowed to run the legal end of the business as long as he vouched for
Khadaji and didn't ask him any questions.
   As he made more money, Khadaji invested it in other legal operations, in
stocks and banks and high-profit ventures. He wanted wealth, but it had to
be useable wealth. He paid taxes on his legal earnings, hired a team of
accountants to shift and juggle and obscure the input made from illegal
activities, and poured the money through. The filter of respectability changed
dirty stads to clean; Khadaji became solidly middle-class, then well-off, then
moderately wealthy.
   He put all of his energy into making money. It became a game, exciting at
first because of the risks. Later, Khadaji became cautious and began paying
others to take his risks for him. He worked through circular dummies, dead-
end computer orders and back-check fail-safes; tracing him would be almost
impossible, should his people be caught. And, on the rare occasions when
one of his employees was detained, a legal fund swung into effect, along
with a considerable chunk of tax-paid cash for the arrestee. Few ever
willingly talked and those who did could give little away.
   After almost five years, Khadaji had accomplished two things: he became
known in the smuggling trade as No-Face, because no one knew who he was;
and he became rich. In a galaxy where a man who was worth five million
stads was someone of importance, Khadaji was as important as a dozen men.
Only, nobody knew it-or him. When he met anybody not connected to his
legal work, he went skin-masked; the computer worm he constructed was of
such complexity that it was highly unlikely anybody could ever follow its
tortuous convolutions to him from any part of his enterprises. His profile
was so low as to be nearly flat, he was obsessive about keeping his identity
secret. Nobody even suspected he existed, save as a well-paid flunky for a
nondescript corporation; a faceless member of the business community. He
had contacts of a certain kind, however, enough money to be powerful, and
he had the beginnings of a plan.


  Chapter Seventeen

   THERE WERE six human-occupied worlds in the Shin System and Renault
was the least developed of the six. It was the fifth planet out from the
primary G called Shin, one of the many worlds which fit the narrow slot that
allowed humans to walk about and free-breathe. The gravity was a hair
greater than standard single-gee, and the air a bit richer in oxygen. There
were three continents, a decent axial-tilt, and something under nine million
people and assorted mues living there. The main local industries were
forestry and farming; primary exports to the galactic markets consisted of
refined metals, although in no great amount.
   Renault was another of the sidestream worlds, of little importance to the
Confederation and its machinations. There was a small military outpost of a
hundred troops; assignment to it was considered a form of punishment for
any soldier with ambition.
   Simplex-by-the-Sea was a village on the southwestern coast of the smallest
continent. The summers were hot, the winters mild and the primary
industries were fishing and tourism. Civilization had brushed its technology-
carrying hand past the village, but only a few seeds had fallen upon the small
town. The fishing fleet had full bio-gear for locating the schools, but they still
used nets; the library was nailed into the off world cast, but the scanners
were antiques and subject to local weather and breakdowns. It was a place as
far from Confed interest as any, and therefore perfect for Khadaji's plan.
   He spent a month in the summer sunshine of Simplex-by-the-Sea and
when he left, Khadaji owned a building which had once been a school for the
children of the town. The last students to use the building were old enough
to be grandparents; there were few children left in the village and those who
were were linked to edcom at home.
   Of course, the residents of Simplex-by-the-Sea, if asked, would have
denied knowledge of anyone named Emile Antoon Khadaji; nor would they
be able to identify the face of the man who bought the old school; for they
had not seen it, in truth. But his money was good and there seemed to be
plenty of it. In this town, everybody knew what everybody else did and talk
was as common as the smell of fish and gulls, but one did not offend an
outsider willing to spend money and maybe create jobs. The Man Who
Bought the School was a hot topic after he left, but only in town. Best not to
spread things too far and maybe wipe the transact, eh?
   Four teams of Khadaji's agents were sent to Renault. Supplies were
brought, licenses obtained-sometimes with bribes, sometimes not-and
workers hired. When possible, local people were given jobs and paid much
higher rates than were the union standard. The Man Who Bought the School
was very popular in Simplex-by-the-sea.
   Khadaji sat in his office on Bocca. He was surrounded by hand waxed
persimmon wood paneling, and the most sophisticated holoproj/comp
terminal available sat on a desk of carved giant briar. A free agent didn't
deserve such an office, so Khadaji had arranged to be "promoted" to a vice
presidential job. He had circulated the rumor in the company that he was
being kicked uplevels for inefficiency in the field, which made him someone
to avoid in company political circles. Once he had the image of a loser, the
other workers let him alone, just as he intended. He was getting better at
manipulating people, he realized. Sometimes that bothered him, his ability to
do that.
   Khadaji said, "Juete," and the holoproj screen flashed the file before he
could lean back in the form-chair. He smiled. She had claimed her last
month's funding on Vishnu, the pleasure moon orbiting Shiva, in the Tau
System. Five thousand stads were made available for her to draw each
month, and the trust would last until she died. Juete would never have to
work or worry about taking care of herself again. He had never actually said
it was from him, but he had given Juete what-in his mind-was a strong clue
as to who sent her five kay stads each month. On the original deposit, he had
appended a closing salutation which read: "I understand better, now. Love,
Older."
   It was from a conversation they'd had early in their relationship, when
she'd tried to warn him, in her own way, that she did what was necessary to
take care of herself. He hadn't really understood then when she told him that
with age came experience, more important than wisdom. Now he did.
   Juete was never stupid; she realized immediately where the stads came
from. Early on, a taped message arrived at the office of the bank
administering the trust and was eventually forwarded to Khadaji's attention.
It was simple enough: "Thank you, Emile. It is you, isn't it? I see that you
really did love me. If you should feel the need, I would enjoy seeing you
again, to show my gratitude."
   He had smiled when he'd heard the message. It contributed a small
warmth to his day, even if he were less naive now than he had been when
he'd met Juete. Maybe she really meant it, a pleasant thought. Or, said the
cynical voice he'd developed in dealing with crooked officials and the
smuggler's underground, maybe she just wanted to possess the entire goose
and not just the monthly golden egg.
   Well. It didn't matter. His gesture had been for him as well as for her. If
she had been less truthful about telling him her needs, she could have held
him forever. Truth deserved rewarding, even if it were sometimes
unpleasant. Besides, if he hadn't left, he wouldn't be in a position to be
generous.
   "Sir?" It was the appointment voice of his comp.
   "Yes?"
   "Your workout is scheduled in fifteen minutes."
   "Ah. So it is. Thank you."
   "You are quite welcome, sir."
   Khadaji stood and stretched, listening to his joints pop, feeling the play of
muscle in his back and shoulders. Things were coming along nicely, but it
wouldn't do for him to get out of shape. His life would depend on his
conditioning.
   Until the games comp was switched on, the warehouse was simply a large,
empty rectangle: a stress-plastic frame and rockfoam covered building
surrounding empty air. But when the computer was activated, the
holographic projections made the inside of the warehouse anything it was
programmed to be. A desert or a forest or a city street would spring into
existence at the sound of a coded word, and the projections would look and
feel almost real, courtesy of captive energies whose workings Khadaji could
only partially understand. The projections could be peopled with holoproj
simula-crums, also programmed to behave as required. The machinery for
generating the illusions cost over two million 'standards; to his knowledge,
Khadaji had the only such device outside of military or police operations.
Such toys were considered illegal for normal game parlors.
   He opened the case he carried and removed the pair of spetsdods.
Methodically, he molded each of the weapons onto its proper hand, then
snapped loaded magazines into place. He waved each arm experimentally,
adjusting for the slight change in weight. It was an automatic ritual now: The
dartguns made his hands feel normal; without them, he felt bare. He walked
to the center of the warehouse, to a neutral spot which would not become
part of a wall or a tree when the comp was activated. The terrain patterns
were randomized-he never knew which the computer would assemble for
him. Nor did he know how many spectral-but-solid opponents the
magnetic/viral bubbles would deploy.
   He felt a tenseness in his back and shoulders, and he took a deep breath
and exhaled, allowing the muscles to relax. Early on, he had warmed up
before each session, stretching and doing kata. He'd stopped that; in a real-
life situation, he might not have a chance to limber up and get ready.
   He took another deep breath. "Go," he said.
   Reality altered. The empty warehouse became a tropical rainforest with a
snap, with no blur into apparent solidity. Thick-leaved trees and squat
bushes surrounded him, phantom insects shot by emitting Doppler hums.
Birds called from the tops of the trees.
   Khadaji dropped flat to the soft humus of the small clearing and began to
crawl rapidly toward the nearest bush. That was a lesson he'd learned early
playing these games. He'd been "shot" several times for standing around
while trying to get his bearings in the new "world."
   The jungle was noisy, but none of the sounds were those of men. No shots
tore the air, no voices called for Khadaji to solidify, no detectors began
screaming stridently. He grinned. Good.
   He began to work his way through the bush, moving cautiously in a half-
crouch, alert for any sign of trouble. Fifteen minutes later, he smelled the
faint tang of gunlube. He wet a finger and held it up in the air. The wind was
from that direction. He moved.
   There were three troopers in a cleared area. One man leaned against a tree,
smoking a flickstick. A woman sat on the ground, cleaning her carbine. The
third man stood watch. The last man was the dangerous one, Khadaji knew
that. He was a constant face, one the computer used in almost every
simulation, and he was fast. To approximate real soldiers, the comp
produced human figures with a full range of reflexes. Constant Face there
sweeping the brush with his shifty gaze was the fastest of them all,
superhuman in his speed, even quicker than a bacteria-augmented man. That
made it unfair, but Khadaji was glad of it. If he could take Face, he should be
able to take any real soldier in a one-on-one.
   This was three-on-one, however, and a different matter. The theory said it
was simple enough: Shoot Face with one weapon, hit the leaning man with
the second and the woman would be simple; after all, her weapon was down.
Face was the one to worry about.
   Khadaji held very still, using the ninja-freeze techniques he'd learned. With
his body control training in sumito, he could lock himself into non-motion
for hours, but the ninja-freeze was even better. One practiced invisibility
instead of simply being still. There was a subtle but definite difference which
was not fully explained. The most common theory was that the psychological
stance of being invisible helped avoid detection by anyone who might be
emphatically receptive-another unproven idea.
   Khadaji was waiting for Face to turn away, so he could shoot him in the
back. There was no room for heroics or fair play in Khadaji's plan, the odds
were already stacked in favor of the other side. Face was fast enough so he
might be able to get off a shot before the simulated Spasm hit him; Khadaji
didn't want to give him a target.
   Finally, Face took a couple of steps and turned to look away from Khadaji's
position. Leaner still leaned; the woman had her carbine only partially
reassembled. Khadaji extended his arms, balancing carefully on his elbows,
and fired each spetsdod once.
   Leaner doubled up fast, but Face did manage a half-spin before he knotted.
He triggered a short blast of his weapon at Khadaji's position, but it was too
high. If he'd been standing, the holographic shots would have tagged him.
Khadaji grinned and scrambled up to finish the woman as Face dropped onto
the damp ground in a fetal curl.
   The woman was gone. Where-? How-?
   She came from behind a tree in a dive. Khadaji swung his left spetsdod to
cover her. She hit the ground in a shoulder roll and came up facing him, five
meters away. An easy shot. He fired at her solar plexus-and at the same
instant, saw she held something in her hand. She threw whatever it was at
him, hard.
   Damn! He jumped to his right and started to sprint. It could be a proximity
shrap-!
   A bell chimed, a clear and insistent tone Khadaji had grown to hate. He
looked down and saw a throwing steel buried in his chest. The stainless steel
bar looked very real, even though he knew it was only a computer-generated
image like all the rest.
   Ah, damn! She got him! "Cancel it," he said, disgusted.
   The throwing steel vanished abruptly, along with all of the other unreal
paraphernalia produced by his two-million-stad toy. Khadaji stood alone in a
bare and empty warehouse. He sighed, and shook his head. Over-confidence,
that was what had done it. He'd underestimated the woman, in his concern
over Face. It was a bad error; had this been real, he would be dead.
   "Let's have a percentage, to date," he said. "And for the last ten sessions."
   The computer's voice was bland. "Total run, seventy-eight-point-eight-six
percent survival. Sessions two hundred six to two hundred sixteen, inclusive,
ninety percent."
   "Thanks." He was getting better, certainly. Only one "death" in the last ten
runs, he'd gotten through nine out of ten, which wasn't bad in most things. It
wasn't good enough, he knew. In real life, the game would be lost if he won
all but one. There was no second place winner in a combat shoot, it was a
pass/fail situation.
   Well. He could practice his forms now and work on his unarmed combat
before another run. He peeled the spets-dods away and set them aside, and
began to stretch. And think.
   Revolution versus evolution. The gun versus the instruction tape. Force
versus peaceful means. It was no simple choice, not merely a black-or-white
decision. Few things were clear-cut and this was not one of them, in his
mind. To offer himself as an example of determined resistance for others to
follow was one way to undermine the grasp of the Confed. To deliberately
create an heroic figure to inspire and agitate by attacking with the means he
despised was something he thought much about. Oh, he could rationalize it
to himself by saying he was actually defending, that the Confed by its very
nature forfeited its rights, in essence attacking all free people first. One was
allowed to defend against attackers in Khadaji's objectivistic philosophy. The
nonviolence of the strong allowed one to protect oneself as long as one did
not initiate anything. That was reasonable.
   Khadaji slid slowly down into a split, working the muscles of his legs.
Despite his practice, he still could not completely stretch it out; his groin
stayed clear of the floor by a good three centimeters.
   Rationalization was not enough, though. He didn't feel sufficiently
righteous to accept the ends-justifies-the-means easily, and the simulated
troopers he was blasting had no families, friends, hopes or dreams. Real
soldiers had those things. He knew. He had been a trooper. Therefore the end
to justify those kinds of means had to be worthwhile, really important.
Simple revolution was not enough, it left too much to chance, too many holes
which would have too many people all too willing to plug them with
systems worse than the Confed. So, there had to be more. And that's where it
got tricky.
   He bent over and tried to put his chest on the floor, still holding the split.
Close.
   He thought about the school he'd bought on Renault. Yes. Very tricky,
indeed. So much could go wrong.
   He finished the stretches and stood, then went through the six katas of
sumito. It took almost an hour, but he felt much better when he was done. He
retrieved the spetsods and molded them into place.
   "Go," he said.
   The sand was green and black, and a wind stirred the desert around him.
He spun quickly, looking for enemies. He didn't see any immediately, but he
knew they were out there.
   Waiting.
   In time, his percentages of winning against the simulacrums peaked. He
would, Khadaji knew, grow better still, but only by small degrees, measured
in bits perhaps discernable only in theoretical, rather than practical terms. As
good as the simulator was, it did lack certain things, not the least of which
was real risk. To fight against the machine was one thing, to fight against
living, breathing opponents was another. He considered where he could get
such experience. There was the Musashi Flex, a loosely-organized band of
modern ronins who travelled around challenging each other; he could try
that. Or, there was The Maze. Such a thing was risky, but it offered a real test.
Injury was likely, death a possibility in the game known as The Maze; if he
could survive that, maybe he would be ready.
   Maybe.


  Chapter Eighteen

  KHADAJI WATCHED THE three men as they moved to circle him. Two of
them were larger than he, one considerably smaller. The larger men were
similar only in size: One had a jagged slice on his face, probably done by a
sharpened fingernail; the second had a single, thick bar of black hair where
normal eyebrows would be. The last man, the shrimp, didn't seem to have
much going for him. Khadaji didn't let the third man's size fool him, though;
since he was still in the game, he had to have something.
   Slice edged closer, looking for an opening. Brow glanced at Slice's back,
but apparently decided to honor the pact, at least until Khadaji was out of the
way. Shrimp was trying to get behind Khadaji, but failing, since Khadaji kept
stepping slowly backward. Fortunately, this portion of The Maze was mostly
empty streets, with nothing to trip a man not looking where he stepped.
   Slice hurried his steps, trying to come within his own range without
entering Khadaji's defensive sphere. He was taller and so should have the
reach advantage.
   Khadaji considered running. After all, he didn't know how many
participants were left and three-to-one odds weren't the best. There was no
rule again alliances, even though the intent of the game was all-against-all. If
Slice, Brow and Shrimp managed to eliminate the competition, they would
have to turn against one another-there was only one winner allowed.
   Brow moved closer. Khadaji kept his gaze unfocused and allowed his
peripheral vision to warn him. He shifted back a hair faster, not allowing
Brow to move close enough to attack without losing his center. These three
were all expert in one or more martial arts, they wouldn't make any rash
moves, no attack unless they were certain of success. Too much was at stake.
A hundred entrants at ten thousand stads each, winner take all-the winner
being the last man or woman standing-or breathing.
   Shrimp darted by Khadaji quickly, at a run. If Khadaji was going to take
off, it would have to be now. He grinned, and stopped moving suddenly. No.
He didn't need the money, but he had to know that he could win against real
opponents rather than computer simulations, no matter how sophisticated
the machine. A loss here was worth serious and real injury, maybe even
death. Despite the latest in medical gear standing by, Maze gamers had been
known to die.
   Slice made the first move. He squared his stance into a riding horse variant
and looked at Khadaji over his left shoulder and raised fist. Since he was a
big man and powerful, Khadaji figured him for a strength attack, maybe a
kickIt came. Slice cross-stepped and threw a sidekick, his heel aiming for
Khadaji's groin. Well. At least he had sense enough not to kick high, like
some holoproj artist. Khadaji sidestepped and used both hands to increase
the speed of Slice's thrust. It overbalanced the man's weight on his ground
foot and Slice fell heavily onto his sideBrow leaped in, trying to catch Khadaji
off guard. Brow shot a stiffened hand at Khadaji's throat, his fingers bunched
into a spearKhadaji spun away from the strike. He grinned as he found
himself following the pattern of steps Pen had made him learn so many years
ago. He had time to remember the numbers, seventy-one and two, then he
extended his own hands and caught Brow's wrist. Continuing his turn,
Khadaji levered Brow into a fall and the man became an eighty-five kilo
missile with a bone-tipped warhead-landing right onto Slice as the first man
tired to scramble up. There was a clunk! of Brow's skull hitting Slice's face.
Slice was down again and unconscious; Brow was stunned. Khadaji spun on
the balls of his feet to face Shrimp, who aborted his own attack and came to a
stop. Shrimp regarded Slice and Brow, then looked back at Khadaji, whose
stance was neutral and relaxed.
   "Truce?" Shrimp said. "You and I, we can finish them and work together.
There are maybe six or eight others left. After that...."
   "No," Khadaji said. "I play alone."
   Shrimp appeared to be weighing his chances of fighting or running.
Behind him, Khadaji heard Brow groan, then collapse. A telemetric scanner
whined from above The Maze, and Khadaji knew both men were out of the
game. A medical din would be coming for them soon.
   Abruptly, Shrimp decided. He turned and ran.
   Six or eight left, he'd said. Khadaji had figured more, so he must have
missed a couple of the telemetric signals, that was bad. Unless Shrimp had
been wrong. But he'd looked shrewd, that one, and Khadaji wondered again
what skill had kept him in the game this far. They were three days into The
Maze, a holoprojic construct built especially for such things. If only eight or
ten players remained, it would likely be over soon. Some were no doubt
hiding, hoping the others would take each other out, but they would have to
emerge sooner or later. There was a time limit of a week; if more than one
person remained on the field by then, the game was voided. It was not
enough merely to survive; one had to survive alone....
   Khadaji found himself walking down a wide street flanked by holoprojic
buildings programmed to look like a heavy industrial district. Plenty of
places to hide, doorways, alleys, refuse containers.
   Suddenly there was a blur of motion half a block ahead. Khadaji slid
behind the cover of a metal container and cautiously stuck his head around
the edge to see what was happening.
   It was a skirmish. A tall woman with dusky skin faced a shorter man built
like a powerlifter. They circled, hands held in defensive postures.
   Khadaji cautiously moved closer, keeping to the shadowy doorways, being
careful not to allow his attention on the fighters distract his check for hidden
players. He stopped twenty meters away from the pair and watched.
   Unless the woman was very skilled, Khadaji would put his money on the
powerlifter. The man moved well and was obviously very strong. If he
managed to close with the woman, she would be in trouble.
   The two feinted a few times, the woman giving ground. The powerlifter
might be certain he could take her, but he was not stupid; that the woman
had managed to survive where so many others had not was obviously in his
mind.
   Eventually, the powerlifter backed the woman into a corner, between a
grimy wall and a rack of heavy machinery. He gathered himself, and lunged
at her, hands open wide to grab herThe woman was skilled. She threw half a
dozen punches and kicks, sharp and powerful attacks. She scored; the
powerlifter was hurt, but he kept coming. He locked his arms around her
and lifted her free of the ground in a bear hugShe continued to lance at him,
but he ducked his head into her and kept squeezing. She was a wasp,
stinging a gorilla. Khadaji heard ribs snapThe woman put the tip of her little
finger into her mouth and bit down, hard. Khadaji frowned. What-?
   She pulled her finger from her mouth and spat the tip of it into her palm,
then turned her hand over and slapped it onto the top of the powerlifter's
head. There was cracking sound and the powerlifter suddenly collapsed,
releasing the woman.
   A telemetric siren began to scream and the voice of a medical din blared at
the combatants in a metallic clang: "Ordnance foul! Ordnance foul! Ordnance
foul!"
   The woman turned to run, but was quickly surrounded by four dins
waving prods. While the medical din continued to repeat the foul charge,
Khadaji turned and hurried away. All the commotion was as apt to drive
players away as draw them. The woman had cheated, she had somehow
gotten a weapon past the scanners. Must have been some organic explosive
charge, Khadaji figured, shaped to blast hard enough to fry a human or
mutant brain. The powerlifter was likely dead; the woman would be
disqualified and penalized. Two more players gone.
   Feeding stations were prime places for attacks. Khadaji had avoided them
as much as possible for that reason. He waited until "night," watched a
station for at least an hour before moving on it, and was in and out quickly.
Many of the players were taken at meal times as they sauntered into some
carefully-set trap placed by expert hunters. Like water holes in some
primitive jungle, the feeding stations in The Maze were dangerous, no less so
because all the users were predators and prey.
   Khadaji was on the roof of a structure overlooking one of the ten stations.
It was near midnight and he had been lying there for nearly two hours,
watching and listening. Normally, he would have moved in long before, but
something had made a noise thirty minutes into his watch, and he had not
yet been able to pinpoint the source. He was hungry and thirsty, but this only
made his hypnotically trained senses sharper. He hoped.
   Just as he was preparing to give up the watch as an overcautious worry, a
man appeared from a pile of refuse cans and cat-footed toward the food
dispensers. Ah, there had been something. Funny, it had seemed to come
from a closer source, but sounds did strange things in such surroundings. He
watched the man.
   As the figure reached a spot two meters from the dispensers, there was a
flurry of additional motion. A second man appeared-Khadaji couldn't tell
where from, exactly-and a short fight ensued. The second man was vicious;
he clubbed the first from behind with his hands locked together, hitting him
repeatedly at the base of the skull. After the man was down, the attacker
continued to hit him, until the drone of the robot dins bringing medical gear
grew close.
   On the roof, Khadaji suddenly felt sick. This game wasn't only a game.
Sure, the man would likely survive his assault; sure, he had known the risks,
had wanted the money enough to take them. But it was like watching two
animalsA voice took over the night. "According to the rules of The Maze
Game, we are required to inform you that two contestants remain at an
elapsed time of five days, nine hours, forty minutes, twelve seconds."
   Khadaji took a deep breath. His sumito, his art of personal control, allowed
him much leeway, and he didn't do what the attacker below had done. He
turned the force of an attack upon itself, he defended, using the energy of
another against himself. Or herself. But in the now-quiet darkness, he shook
his head.
   Am I any better than that man down there? Isn't violence violence, no
matter how it is wrapped with clever rationalization? The others have
destroyed each other for money and I have a higher goal: freedom from the
yoke of the Confederation. But at what price? These players were all people,
with families, and friends and lives they wished to live, weren't they?
   Gods, is what I'm doing right? Can I really justify it?
   Khadaji watched as the dins removed the downed man. The winner of the
fight moved into a patch of pale blue light cast by the food dispensers.
Khadaji recognized him: Shrimp.
   Is what I'm doing right? Even at such cost? Once I was certain, I had that
knowledge, now I am not so sure, not so sure at all. But I spent a big portion
of my life so far working toward it. Can I quit now?
   No. No, he decided, you can't. It might cost you personally, but if you
reach your goal, it will be worth it. It has to be worth it.
   "You might as well come out," Khadaji said. "I know where you are and
there are only two of us left, now." He stood facing the dispensers, five
meters back.
   After a moment, Shrimp appeared. This time, Khadaji saw his hiding
place, a cleverly built arrangement which folded against the wall. At night, in
the dark, it would be hard to see until one was nearly upon it.
   "I thought you might make it," Shrimp said. "I've seen that stuff you did
before. Some kind of religious fighting style, isn't it? I didn't think anybody
as good as you are at it would be interested in playing in The Maze, though."
   "I'm not, really," Khadaji said. "I've got other reasons. I don't need the
money."
   "Oh? Why not default then, and let me have it?" Shrimp edged a hair closer
to Khadaji.
   "I would. Except I don't think you deserve it."
   "Ah, but I do deserve it, you see. I've won this game before. Came in
second twice. It isn't the money."
   Khadaji nodded. "You like it. The hurting. The fighting."
   Shrimp moved to his right, so the light fell more upon him. "Oh, yeah. You
have to, to win."
   Khadaji shook his head. "No, you don't. If you've got enough reason, you
can hate it and win."
   Shrimp held his hands up in front of his chest and brought them slowly
together. "You jest, friend. You might fool somebody else with the
philosophical rat shit, but it's just you and me and we know what we are,
don't we?" He brought his hands together suddenly and began a finger
weave. Shrimp's fingers danced in the pale light, knotting and unknotting in
intricate and complex patterns designed to draw a watcher into them. It was
a variation on classical kuji-kiri called Neshomezoygn, and he was very
good. But Khadaji had first seen the organomechanical hypnosis years ago,
when Pen had used it to beat him in their first encounter; he had learned how
to use it-and avoid being taken by it since. Now he knew too how Shrimp
had survived The Maze. But it wasn't going to be enough, this time.
   Khadaji stepped in toward the other man.
   A moment later, there was a new winner of The Maze Game. And a new
loser. As Khadaji stared at the unconscious form of the man he'd thought of
as Shrimp, he knew the winner and loser were, in fact, the same. But at least
he knew also that he was as ready as he was likely to be to begin the next
step in his plan.
   The thrum of the dins surrounded him as he stood there nodding slowly to
himself. Yes. He was ready.


  Chapter Nineteen

  HE ARRANGED FOR competent people to take care of his business and
money. That was easy enough, since he already had most of them in place.
Then Khadaji took passage on a ship and was bent through half a galaxy to a
world with enough strategic importance to rate recent occupation by ten
thousand members of the Confederation ground forces.
  Fourteen years after and billions of kilometers away from the Slaughter on
Maro, Emile Antoon Khadaji arrived on Greaves.
  The old man's name was Hinton, and aside from his age and the fact that
he owned the pub, he had a kind of cackle which reminded Khadaji of
Kamus. Hinton was tired. He had run the rec-chem operation for thirty local
years and whatever joy it might have once held for him had long since fled.
Khadaji's agents had supplied him with information about Hinton and the
Jade Flower, as well as three similar operations, so it was no surprise to
Khadaji.
   Of the places carefully investigated, the Jade Flower was first choice. The
only problem he saw in buying it was the price. Not that he couldn't afford
it-ninety million standards would buy most of the town-but he had to be
careful to offer enough and not too much. The old boy might wonder about
that, and what Khadaji didn't want at this stage was any suspicion from
anybody. But, since Khadaji knew precisely what the pub was worth, he had
an advantage.
   They sat in Hinton's office, the old man behind a plastic desk and Khadaji
in a worn form-chair which kept slipping a gear and poking him in the left
buttock.
   "My partners and I are willing to offer a hundred and fifty kay," Khadaji
said. That was low, by fifteen percent. The place was worth st172,500,
according to Khadaji's peo-pie.
   "Not a chance," Hinton said. "I might accept two hundred, but I'd be
cheating myself."
   Khadaji kept a straight face. "Well. I might be able to get my partners to go
to a hundred and sixty."
   "And let an old man starve? Shee-it."
   Khadaji would have paid ten times what the place was worth, but it was
important the old man not think so. After a few minutes of bargaining, and a
fake call to his "partners," Khadaji allowed himself to be talked up to a final
price of 190,000 stads. He was pleased, the old man was pleased, and the Jade
Flower was Khadaji's.
   The detail man from the chem distribution outfit was surprised, but didn't
let that temper his greed.
   "Full spectrum? How deep are we talking here?" Khadaji allowed himself a
small grin. "I'm planning on a good business. We already have military on-
limits status and I-my partners and I-plan to go full day and night cycle."
   The man nodded, and Khadaji could almost see his mind adding up his
percentage of the new order. According to Hinton's records, the Jade Flower
was a break-even proposition most of the time. With a full-spectrum order
for rec-chem, the detail man's commission would jump considerably. He
smiled broadly, and waved his portable transducer at the holoproj. "Well, I
suggest a basic order along these lines...."
   Khadaji smiled and nodded. The man was adding twenty percent to what
was really needed. Khadaji let him finish, then cut the order by ten percent.
That showed he wasn't a fool, but still allowed the detail man enough skim to
make him happy.
   "Lemme see I got this right," the constructor said. "You wanna buy the
round tables with a quad set of stools, but you wanna have 'em bolted to the
floor?"
   "That's right," Khadaji said. They stood in the center of the Jade Flower's
octagon room, amidst the bulky long tables Hinton was currently using.
   The constructor nodded. "No problem. What-ah-you gonna do with the-
old furnishings?"
   "I thought I'd sell them."
   "I-ah-can make you an offer."
   Khadaji raised an eyebrow.
   The constructor looked at him for a moment, then named a figure which
was half the value of the old tables and benches. Khadaji nodded in return,
then made a counteroffer. In the end, he allowed the constructor to take the
old furniture for enough so the man would make a nice profit when he resold
them.
   He didn't fire any of the people Hinton had working for him; he didn't
want any ex-employees causing problems. With the expanded scope of
operations, more help would be needed. Khadaji contacted an employment
service with his needs.
   Anjue Yesmar Levart was a thin, dark, intense native of Spandle. He used
his hands when he spoke, weaving, a picture around his words. Khadaji
detected in Anjue the qualities he wanted in a doorman. He seemed quick,
had a good memory and ten years of experience. Khadaji ran six of the
constructor's helpers past each applicant for the job, and Anjue recalled all
their names after one introduction. More, Anjue remember what they were
wearing before he saw them again. And he was polite but not obsequious.
Khadaji hired him and gave him leave to hire his own assistant.
   Hiring a head pubtender was relatively easy. With his own background,
Khadaji knew which questions to ask. Of the first half dozen applicants the
agency sent over, only one knew the ingredients to Shin's Kiss. Samar
"Butch" Beavens knew not only a Shin's Kiss, but also every drink Khadaji
asked about, and obviously a lot more he didn't know. Khadaji gave him the
job and told him to hire assistants as needed. Butch would take care of
selecting prostitutes, as well.
   The man was burly, but not too bright. He stared at Khadaji. They were
alone in the octagon, in the middle of the newly-installed round tables and
stools. Khadaji repeated it. "I want you to pick up a stool. Be careful, they are
bolted to the floor."
   The man digested that, shrugged, and stepped to the stool nearest him. He
leaned over and gripped the stool, bending at the waist. He took a deep
breath and gathered himself"Hold it," Khadaji said. "That's enough."
   "Huh?"
   "I'll contact the agency and they'll let you know."
   It took a while for that to filter through, but finally the man nodded and
turned to leave. Khadaji tapped a key and crossed the man's name from the
computer's file. Anybody who used his lower back in lifting, as he'd been
about to do, didn't know the right way to utilize his muscles. Besides, he
hadn't walked like a man who knew how to move well. Khadaji had Anjue
bring in the next one.
   The next applicant came across the floor as if he owned it. He moved in
balance, a point in his favor. Khadaji looked at the file and saw that the man
called himself Sleel. According to the application, he had several years
training in tahrae, a form of jujitsu.
   "Sleel. That a last name?"
   "It's what I go by."
   Khadaji nodded. Sleel didn't look particularly muscular under his two-
piece, though he did have fairly wide shoulders. "The stools are bolted to the
floor," he said. "I want to see how strong the bolts are. See if you can move
one."
   "Sure." Sleel untabbed his tunic and slipped it off, and Khadaji revised his
opinion upward. Sleel had muscle. He wasn't all that broad, but he looked
thick and dense and he carried no fat.
   Sleel touched a stool, tried to wiggle it, then bent and looked at the base.
He walked around the stool, then planted his feet to the sides, squatted, and
kept his back straight as he gripped the cross bars under the seat. He took a
deep breath and tried to straighten. Ten seconds passed. Tortuous veins
stood out on Sleel's muscles like tiny hoses under great pressure. The
muscles of his neck and back and shoulders showed cross-striations; his
whole upper body turned red. Suddenly, Sleel relaxed, took another grip,
and repeated the lift. He did it three more times, long after most men would
have quit, Khadaji thought. Khadaji started to stop him, but Sleel put a final
effort into his war against the stool, and the bolts gave up the fight. The stool
came out of the floor with a grinch! of metal tearing. Sleel stood there for a
second, holding the stool, before he set it carefully atop one of the tables. He
turned back toward Khadaji. "Anything else?"
    Khadaji could feel Sleel's arrogance, his total confidence in himself. He
grinned. "We open in a week," he said. "Can you start then? Butch will
discuss your schedule and pay."
    Sleel grinned back at Khadaji. "You got it."
    The next twelve men and two women failed to budge one of the bolted
stools. Then Bork came in. Saval Bork, according to the file, and he was a
large man. Khadaji figured his height at near two meters and his weight at a
hundred and twenty or twenty-five kilos. The man reminded him of a bear
he had seen in a zoo, once. Only Bork didn't lumber, he walked with such a
deliberate step he looked absolutely unstoppable.
    Khadaji said. "I want you to move a stool for me. That one." Khadaji
pointed at the one nearest Bork.
    "Yes sir," Bork said. He reached with his right hand and grabbed the stool
by the cross bar.
    Khadaji started to warn Bork that the stool was bolted to the floor, but he
saw the big man pause as he realized something was holding the stool down.
The pause was no more than a second. Then Bork straightened. Khadaji saw
the muscles of Bork's upper back work under his coverall, heard the big man
grunt, and the stool came free. He'd done with one hand what more than a
dozen others had failed to do with two.
    "Where would you like it?" Bork asked.
    "Anywhere. Can you start work in a week?"
    Twenty-nine people had applied for jobs as bouncers and so far, Khadaji
only had two. He needed three.
    Dirisha Zuri was a tall black woman with green eyes. As Khadaji watched
her walk across the floor toward him, he was more impressed with her than
any of the other applicants. She wore a blue body stocking under ruffles, and
she moved with perfect control. Her file said she had trained in at least four
different close combat styles, and of all those he'd interviewed, Khadaji knew
immediately she was the most adept in that arena. She had the job before she
got to where he stood. But he wanted to see how she would handle the test.
    Dirisha touched the stool lightly with her fingers, then stepped away from
it. She pushed at the base with one foot. She bent and looked under the table
nearest the stool. She stood, and stepped up to the table. She locked both
hands onto one edge of the table's top, took several deep breaths, then set
herself. She screamed, a low guttural yell, and yanked the top of the heavy
plastic table free of its base. She turned and smiled at Khadaji, then used the
table top like a hammer against the nearest stool. It took five shots before the
stool tore free, sheared from the bolts. She set the table top back onto its base.
"You said move it," she said. "It is moved."
   Khadaji laughed. "And you're hired."
   The constructor was puzzled and a little upset. "What happened?"
   "A little test for my bouncers," Khadaji said. "I want you to use longer and
stronger bolts when you fix them. And replace all the other bolts, too. I don't
want my customers bashing each other with my furniture, should they
become agitated." No, that wouldn't do, to be declared offlimits by the
military. He needed to have their business, it was essential to his plan. The
Jade Flower was going to be popular and quiet, the kind of place a trooper
could go and relax and not worry about fighting. Fighting was not going to
be allowed. Sleel, Bork and Dirisha would see to that.
   "It's gonna take a couple of days."
   "Put a rush on it. I want to open in a week. How is the drugstore room
coming?"
   "Nearly done. I got techs setting the densecris tomorrow and a smith
installing the reaper locks this afternoon. It'll be done inna few days."
   "Good."
   Khadaji went to his office. So far, everything had gone well, at least
physically. There was still the other, the mental part of it. The plan was
working, but he still had his doubts as to whether it should ever have been
started. He had his sense of mission, that was strong. And he had the
haunting memory of Maro, that would never go away. And, too, there was
his Realization, his lightning moment. It was time-faded, but he could
remember the sense of tightness he'd felt after it. He had those things. Still,
there was a schism between the thought and the deed. Theory and practice
were separated by a gulf not easily crossed. Killing sentient beings was
wrong; massive killing on a scale done by the Confed to maintain its warped
existence was more wrong. The Confed was evil and dying, but its death had
to be hastened, to avoid more senseless murder. What he would do here on
Greaves, if he were successful, would speed up the fall. One man could make
a difference and that would give millions of men hope. The Confed could be
resisted. But that was only a part of it. There was more, greater in
importance. Revolution and evolution, brothers of a different speed, but
brothers nonetheless. The galaxy would see one thing happening here, but
there would be something else unseen happening, as well. If he could pull it
off. Only thing was, he would have to hurt people to do it. Not kill them, not
if he could help it, but certainly he would cause them pain, stealing a part of
their lives. That was not an easy thing to think about. Not at all.


  Chapter Twenty

   THERE WAS THE matter of obtaining weapons. The choice was, of course,
spetsdods. Khadaji could have easily bought enough of the hand weapons to
outfit his own army, but the form was important. It was necessary that
spetsdods come from the Confed forces; further, they would have to be
stolen, not bought from someone looking for a fast stad. Spetsdods were of
limited use in the military, utilized mostly by prison guards, and by security
personnel where deadlier weapons might be dangerous, such as in a fragile
in vitro lab. Finding out low-level information such as nonlethal weapons
shipments was relatively easy with the sophisticated computer gear Khadaji
had. Stealing the weapons themselves was somewhat more difficult.
   The warehouse was standard Confed construction; expanded hardfoam
with plastic doors. Guards had been mounted near the loading bay and main
entrance, with additional patrols covering the emergency exits. Eight
troopers altogether. They tended to stick close to the pools of light cast by the
HT lamps on each comer of the building. It was sloppy of them, but then,
there had been no trouble on Greaves in the months they'd been on planet.
Besides there was nothing really valuable or dangerous in the warehouse. It
was mostly full of uniforms, paper supplies and miscellaneous material.
And, Khadaji knew, several cases of small arms, including spetsdods.
   Getting inside would be the hard part. He didn't want trouble until he had
what he wanted; therefore, he had to bypass the guards and the alarm
system designed to prevent pilferage. Going through a door or a wall was
out, digging under would take too long; therefore, he would go in through
the roof.
   He chose a rainy night, when clouds blocked all natural skylight. The rain
was cold and steady, and it kept the guards huddled under any shelter they
could find near the building. Patrols were done, but reluctantly and quickly.
   Khadaji lay in the wet darkness, and watched two troopers hurry past his
position. Their voices were almost lost in the sound of water flowing from
buildings through gutters and onto the drenched ground.
   "-fucking detail ain't worth shit-!"
   "-a leak in my suit, my leg is getting wet-"
   As soon as they passed, Khadaji moved. He scrambled up and ran to stand
next to the building. He took a synlon ladder from his backpack and unrolled
it carefully. He removed the cover from two blocks of sticktite and squeezed
each clump of the soft plastic substance to activate the chemicals within, then
carefully allowed the end of the ladder attached to the sticktite to hang by his
side. In a few seconds, the blocks of sticktite would adhere to anything with a
specific gravity greater than water, they would not let go unless a special
solvent was used and then only reluctantly. Still moving carefully, Khadaji
swung the synlon chord back and forth like a pendulum. With a final swing,
he tossed the weighted end up. The ladder arced over the edge of the roof.
The sticktite nailed itself down and became a part of the hardfoam roof, as
solid as a rock.
   Khadaji clambered up the ladder and cleared the edge of the roof. He
pulled the ladder up behind him and pressed himself flat. The angle was
slight, just enough so water would run off easily, but even so, the wet surface
was slippery. It would not do to fall five meters to the ground, he thought.
   He pulled a small tremor knife from his belt and cut a circle the size of his
hand through the hardfoam. He slipped the spookeyes he wore on his
forehead down and clicked them on. The inside of the warehouse lit up in
ghostly green. He saw a collection of trash boxes a few meters away. Good.
He slapped a patch over the hole he'd cut and moved along the roof. He
slipped once, but caught himself before sliding far. About where he saw the
trash, Khadaji cut another hand-sized hole. Ah, yes, he was right over it. He
took an electronic confounder from his pack. There was a thin line attached
to the device. Khadaji used the line to lower the confounder until it was
hidden among the trash boxes below. He cut the line. Then he patched the
second hole and pulled a remote transmitter from his pack. "Sorry to disturb
your sleep, troops." He thumbed a control on the unit. Intruder alarms began
screaming.
   The building vibrated under him as the doors were opened and the guards
ran in. Light would be flaring inside, he knew, and the watch officer would
be getting a com call from the guards. Something had set off the proximity
alarms in warehouse seven, something bigger than a rat and on the floor.
   The search took about thirty minutes. Since the troopers were looking for
an intruder and not an electronic box hidden in the trash, they didn't find
either. He could hear them through the thin patch as they searched.
   "-bad circuit is all, you think, Hal-?"
   "-could get in here, the doors are all sealed-"
   "-least get out of the fucking rain for a while-"
   "-empty as my credit tab-"
   Khadaji switched the transmitter off-it was a line-of-sight maser and so
would be almost impossible for a sweeper to pick up, unless he was directly
over it-and the alarms died.
   He waited another fifteen minutes and then switched on the confounder.
The alarms blared into noisy life again.
   The search was repeated. Khadaji killed his transmitter and the
confounder.
   Ten minutes later, he turned them back on once more.
   This time, he heard the trooper in charge of the guards yelling into his
com. "Shut it down! There isn't anybody here, we have fucking looked three
fucking times! Maybe the fucking rain has shorted some fucking circuit out
somefuckingwhere. I don't care. Get a tech over here. What? That's not my
fault, you spread them out that way. How long? An hour? Fine. Nobody is
gonna walk off with the fucking place. We'll be outside like good little
soldiers, protecting the fuck out of all this valuable stow. Yeah, yeah, right.
Discom." Then, a moment later, "Fucking asshole!"
   When Khadaji tried the confounder the fourth time, no alarm answered.
He grinned. Good thing, he was getting cold, despite the orthoskins. He
pulled the tremor knife from his belt.
   It took ten minutes to find the spetsdods, another three to load twenty of
them and ten thousand rounds of ammunition into his pack. Less the two he
strapped on, with magazines of Spasm for each. He climbed the boxes he'd
stacked to the roof and left through the hole he'd cut. The rain was going to
make a mess of whatever was under the hole, but that was one more blow for
the Shamba Freedom Forces against the Confed.
   He left the synlin ladder hanging from the roof and scuttled away into the
rainy night. Maybe he should have picked off a couple of the troopers, but he
figured they would have enough trouble as soon as the theft was discovered.
Besides, he was still reluctant to start. He had the spetsdods and ammo, that
ought to be enough for one night.
   It was almost a week before he shot his first troopers, a quad he'd seen at
his pub hours earlier. They were all stoned and it was no challenge. He hit
them in the back; it wasn't sporting, but then again, it wasn't supposed to be.
It was war.
   And so the months on Greaves passed, with the Shamba Scum laying
waste to the Confederation's finest. They grew in number, the Scum,
according to the dispatches Khadaji tapped into. There was more than a little
concern in official circles.
   Gradually, Khadaji came to accept what he was doing, to a degree. It still
bothered him when he thought about it; only, he didn't think about it much
any more. It became his job and he tried to stay dispassionate. But he had
nightmares at times, not always triggered by drug use. It had to be done,
what he did, but he took no joy in it.
   Eventually, as all things do, Khadaji's plan wound its way toward a
climax.
   Finally, they knew who he was.
   Finally, they came for him.


  Chapter Twenty-One

   AND SO HERE he was. Sitting on the floor of a drug vault, waiting for the
Confed to come and extract its revenge. They wanted him alive, of course,
but that wasn't going to happen. It would spoil all the months of work, make
it all worth so much less. Oh, sure, what he'd done would still be remarkable,
but it would be less than perfect. And once they had him, they could make
him say or do anything, eventually. He had no illusions about that. They
could peel his brain like an onion.
   Well. So much for quiet meditation. He touched upon his past in the last
few moments, had brought forth the good and the bad, some of the people he
had known and loved. He was, he supposed, as ready as he would ever be.
   There were a couple of things left to do, before the troopers arrived. He
looked at a package gathering dust in the corner and smiled. It had been
there since the beginning, over six months. Khadaji took a few steps and
picked up the package, a plastic box sealed with security strips. It was
heavier than he remembered. Or, maybe he was just tired"-looking for the
owner, Khadaji!"
   The transceiver over the window picked up the voice of the trooper
clearly. Khadaji smiled. So. At last. They were here. He stepped in front of
the densecris window and touched a control, depolarizing the crystal to
clarity once again. There were a dozen troopers crowding into the room, all
wearing class three armor and waving carbines. One soldier carried a
grenade launcher. Khadaji smiled more broadly and felt himself become
calm. It was the waiting that was hard, not the doing. He waved at the
troopers. "Here I am," he said. Then he touched the control for the densecris
and the window faded to black.
   "Open it!" the Lojtnant said, waving his sidearm at Butch.
   "I can't. It can only be opened from the inside."
   Sleel stepped forward. "What's the scat, Lojt?"
   "I want that man."
   "Why?"
   The Lojt turned on Sleel. "Who the hell are you?"
   "I'm the man who is going to flatten you if you don't come up with some
reasons for being here."
   The Lojt laughed. He was pointing a rocket pistol at Sleels belly; more, he
was dressed in class three armor, which was proof against any weapon in the
room, save the grenade launcher. Even so, he shouldn't have laughed.
   Sleel stepped forward and hooked his right heel behind the Lojt's ankle,
then shoved against the man's chest, hard. The Lojt went down, flat onto his
back. He looked like a giant beetle as he waved his arms and legs, trying to
right himself. There was a procedure, but he wasn't using it.
   Sleel smiled, but the smile vanished when a trooper thunked his carbine's
butt into the back of Sleel's head. He fell. Butch dropped to his knees and
cradled the fallen man's head.
   Three troopers helped the Lojtnant to his feet. Behind the faceplate of his
armor, the man's face was livid. "Get that door open!"
   Two men waddled toward the door in their armor. One began kicking it
while the other slammed his carbine's stock against the handle.
   From the floor, Butch said, "I wouldn't do that. There are reaper locks
installed there."
   The door's alarm system began squalling, a singsong whoop-whoop. A
recorded voice began blasting the two troopers: "WARNING, REAPER
SEQUENCE ENACTED. STAND CLEAR. WARNING, REAPER SEQUENCE
ENACTED-"
   The two troopers looked at the Lojt, who waved the rocket pistol at the
door. "Go on!"
   The recorded voice warned them a final time. Then the reapers went off.
Four finger-thick steel bars shot out of the door, two each near the upper left
and lower right sides, angled across the door. The two troopers weren't hit,
but before they could move, the steel rods whipped out from the bars. The
top set took the men at shoulder height; the bottom set just below the knees.
An unarmored man would have been broken in half; as it was, the troopers
were flipped sideways as if they were toys. The reapers re-cocked
themselves.
   "Damn!"
   "I told you," Butch said.
   "Back off!" The Lojt yelled. He pointed his rocket pistol at the door and
triggered it. The rocket reached the sound barrier just before it hit the door;
there was a double boom. A bum scar flashed the steel, but the door held
firm.
   "All civilians out!"
   When the room was clear of everybody but his men, the Lojt said, 'Take
out the window."
   A tall woman raised her Parker and let loose a blast. The densecris shook
under the impact of the explosive slugs, but didn't crack. It didn't even star.
There was a line of black scotches, no more.
   "Goddamn!" The Lojt was so angry he shook. "Listen up in there, mister!
You come out, now, or we're going to implode the damned room, you copy
that?"
   There was no answer.
   "Outside, everybody but the L-45!"
   One of the Sub-Lojts said, "Sir, aren't we supposed to capture-?"
   "I said out!"
   The troopers cleared the room, fast. In a minute, only the Lojt and the
trooper carrying the L-45 were left standing in the doorway. "Blow it," the
Lojt said. He was grinning like a man on the wrong side of sanity.
   "Not from in here," the soldier said. "It's liable to suck us in when it goes."
   "Blow it!"
   The trooper looked at the Lojt's face and decided disobeying him was a
bigger risk. He raised the L-45 and pointed it at the sheet of densecris. He
took a deep breath, held it, then fired.
   The grenade hit the window and there came that muffled whuff! of an
impolsion device. Objects not tied down leaped at the sudden vacuum. The
trooper with the L-45 was already scrambling backwards and he cleared the
door. The Lojt stood like a rock, leaning against the wind. There was a bright
flash of red light, going to blue, and a sonic blast which shattered glass for a
kilometer around. Things got very quiet.
   In the wreckage of what had been the Jade Flower, the drug vault and all
its contents compacted into a sphere three meters around. Much of the space
around the atomic particles which made up the seemingly solid material was
eliminated. The ball sank through the pub like lead through feathers, until it
buried itself deeply in the earth below.
   Behind the faceplate of his armor, the Lojtnant was still smiling tightly. He
didn't know it, but the war on Greaves had just ended.
   For now.


  Chapter Twenty-Two

  IT WAS, THE OB thought, a good thing Creg was laid away with Spasm
poisoning; otherwise he'd wish he were. As it stood, the Senior Sub, a
whipcord woman named Pease, was hearing most of what Creg would have
heard.
  "-inept management I've ever seen!" Over-Befalhavare Venture said. He
paused for a breath.
  Pease jumped in before the OB could take off again. "Sir, this man Khadaji,
the leader of the resistance, was very resourceful. He was a Jumptrooper-"
  "-a decade and a half ago," the OB said. "Where was he between the time
he deserted on-" he looked at the HX on the holoproj's imager, "-Maro and
his arrival on this backrocket dinge of a world?"
   Pease took a breath, but the question was rhetorical. The OB continued.
"Creg never would have caught him if he hadn't sauntered into this very
office and told him who he was."
   "The attacks on our troops have stopped," Pease tried. "The death of their
leader-"
   "Sub-Befalhavare Pease, I know you heard the recording this man Khadaji
left. Did it occur to you the reason the attacks have stopped might just be
because what he said was true? That maybe he was the resistance-alone?"
   The woman stood at parade rest, as formal a position as full attention,
despite the term. She looked pale, but determined when she spoke.
"Impossible, sir. The logistics of the attacks, the sheer numbers preclude that.
He was lying."
   The OB nodded, as if to himself. Yes. He had seen the numbers. It didn't
seem likely, even if possible, that one man could have done so much damage.
Word of the resistance to Confederation forces on Greaves had spread to
other worlds, of course, and was damaging enough when it was thought that
hundreds or thousands were responsible. If it were even suspected that a
single man could do such... well, that was not a pleasant thought, not at all.
   Venture looked at the holoproj again. "So, in the two weeks since Khadaji
was imploded, there have been no attacks on our troops whatsoever?"
   Pease allowed herself a small smile. "None, sir."
   "And we are certain this pub owner is dead?"
   Pease nodded at the computer. "The chemist's report is in the files, sir.
With an implosion device, the only way to be sure a human was included in
the condensation is a deep-spec analysis of the material. The breakdown
indicates the constituents of a human body were present, within normal
parameters, and allowing for error due to compressed mass."
   Over-Befalhavare Venture nodded. That much was good, anyway.
   The intercom came to life.
   "Yes?"
   "Sir, we have a report on the rebel leader."
   "Well, stick it into the computer."
   There was a slight pause, then the Lojt said, "I-ah- don't think that would
be-ah-wise, sir. We in MI think it should be classed A1A-ah-pending your
approval, of course. Sir."
   Venture sighed. A1A. Top Secret, Eyes Only for Full-Clearance Personnel.
Damn. Now what? "All right. Bring it in."
   The door slid aside and a starch-spined Lojt marched in, carrying a small
reader. He handed it to the OB and stood back at attention. Venture stared at
the reader. "All right, Lojtnant, what am I about to look at?"
   "Sir, this is a report on the inventory taken of the rebel Khadaji's personal
effects."
   Over-Befalhavare Venture stared at the young officer sourly. "Son, I have a
lot on my mind. Why don't you tell me precisely why MI thinks how many
pairs of socks and tunics this man had is important enough to make Al A
noises over."
   The Lojtnant swallowed and took a deep breath. "Sir, if the Systems
Marshal will punch up code A-slash-S-slash-D, I think the answer will
present itself."
   Venture glared at the man. "It had better, Lojtnant." He tapped in the code.
The inducer in the desk's computer picked up the signal from the reader and
put the file onscreen. The military jargon was there, but it had been fifty
years since it had caused Venture any problems. At eighty, he might be a bit
past his prime, but he was still sharp.
   FLECHETTES / ANTI-PERSONNEL / SPASM / SPETSDOD
   BOXES / 25        TOTAL ROUNDS / 7500
   UNBOXED MAGAZINES, COMPLETE / 9 TOTAL ROUNDS / 108
   UNBOXED MAGAZINES, PARTIAL / 1 TOTAL ROUNDS / 04
   INVENTORY TOTAL / 7612
   The OB looked up from the read at the Lojt. "I am impressed. MI knows
how to count-obviously the canard about 'Military' and 'Intelligence' is not an
example of oxymora, after all. Is there a point to this, Lojtnant?"
   The younger man seemed to sag a little from his stiff posture, without any
movement the OB could detect. He said, "Sir, the Spasm darts in Khadaji's
possession, along with fourteen gas-operated fully automatic dorsal hand
weapons-spetsddds-were stolen from an arms shipment to this base seven-
and-a-half months ago. Twenty spetsddds and ten thousand rounds of
ammunition, to be precise."
   "So he was shooting our men with our weapons. Not uncommon during
guerrilla warfare, son. The point?"
   The man sighed and swallowed again. "Sir, if I might beg the Systems
Marshal's indulgence a moment longer, please add file T-slash-W-slash-S to
the screen."
   Venture shook his head. "Why is it I get the impression you're trying to get
me to say the horse is dead, Lojtnant?"
   The Lojt was silent, and the OB shook his head again and punched in the
second code. Another jumble of military acronymity lit the air, and Venture
scrolled to the basic data enshrouded in the tangle.
       CONFEDERATION TROOPERS HOSPITALIZED FOR
       CONTRACTURE POISONING, TOTAL / 2388.
   Venture looked up. The Lojt didn't wait for permission to speak. "As the
Systems Marshal is no doubt aware, most of our casualties in the conflict on
Greaves have been due to Spasm darts."
   The OB smiled. "The Marshal is also aware that those injuries not due to
poison are, at best, suspect. There have been rumors of troopers shooting
themselves in the feet, then claiming they were attacked by fifty of the Scum.
   "Sir. If the Systems Marshal would examine the screen again-"
   "Dammit, boy, I'm tired of playing games! What are you trying to avoid
saying?"
   The Lojt swallowed again. "Sir, the numbers."
   Systems Marshal Venture, Over-Befalhavare for all of the Orm System,
looked at the holoproj before him. What was the boy so scared shitless about?
Khadaji's ammo consisted of 7612 rounds, from 10,000. Which meant he'd
fired off, let's see, ten minus two is eight, nine minus oneVenture stared at
the screen as if it had suddenly told him to go fuck himself. It couldn't be. He
checked his subtraction, but the numbers were right. Ten thousand darts.
Take away those which had been recovered, seven thousand six hundred
and twelve, and that meant the man had used twenty three hundred and
eighty-eight. Venture's gaze travelled across the holoproj's split-screen to the
number of poisoned Confederation troopers.
   Two-three-eight-eight. The number was identical.
   Venture looked up. "Are we certain of these figures, Lojt?"
   "Yes sir. They've been checked and rechecked a dozen times."
   "Holy Buddha's left nut," Venture said softly. "I can't believe it. The
ratsucker was telling the truth! I will be goddamned." The awe vanished,
replaced by concern. "This can't get out, Lojtnant. I want to see some altered
figures, stat. Some of those troopers were shot with other small arms, some
wounded by explosions and what-not, do you understand? I want the
changes in the computer within the hour."
   "Sir."
   "I also want arrests made, a few of the ringleaders of the Scum, let the
records show, say, fifty were caught and executed, understand?"
   "Understood, sir."
   "One final thing. I want this damped. Anybody who came within a
hundred meters of this information is to be cleaned thoroughly, this has got
to be kept quiet! I don't want any of the troops to talk about it to anybody, I
don't want rumors, I don't want the slightest hint of these numbers to get out.
The Confed Military will be made to look like morons, including me
personally, and anyone in my command who does that will regret it in ways
you could not begin to believe, you copy?"
   "Yes sir." The Lojt swallowed dryly.
   But even as the young man executed a snappy about-face and marched
from the office, Over-Befalhavare Venture knew it was probably too late. The
soldiers' comline was faster than White radio; what one man or woman knew
would be passed to another, despite attempts to prevent it. The story would
out, eventually. They could deny it, of course, and PR would begin working
on it ASAP, but it would be even worse if it smelled like a cover-up. Ah,
damn! Why? What could have been on the man's mind, to take on an army,
alone? And why give it up the way he did? The fucker must have been
something else, too! One dart per trooper. Never missed. Buddha, wouldn't
that stir the fucking underground! One goddamned man! He had to know it
would get around, maybe even arranged it, maybe he had allies in the
Military. Damn!
   Pease cleared her throat politely, but Venture ignored her. After a moment,
she spoke anyway. "It doesn't matter, sir, does it? I mean, the war on Greaves
is over."
   Blind and stupid, he thought. Aloud, he said, "Yes, the war on Greaves is
over."
   "And we won, sir."
   It seemed to take him a long time to look away from the holoproj and up at
the woman before the desk. Won? He laughed, and then spoke as if to a slow
child. "No, SubBefal Pease, we didn't win. All we did was kill him-that
goddamned miserable elbow-sucker Khadaji won!"
   And, of course, Over-Befalhavare Venture didn't know the half of it.