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  Kwame was shaken from his morbid thoughts by a Klaxon reverberating in the knit. He noticed the rest of the grunts in the hold start to awareness and begin to shake off the torpor of the long journey out. At least the Federal Army—so far, at least—didn’t have the need to archive its soldiers, like the Met forces did. He’d heard that half of most DIED ship’s infantry complement were given the pleasure of bodily compression. Their brains were switched off during this time, allegedly. Then their bodies were de…de-something or another. It wasn’t dehydration exactly. There was grist involved and manipulation on a molecular level. It was a kind of temporary decay, with gooey bodies compressed together like one of those prune bricks that the orphans were fed at the institution where Kwame had spent much of his childhood.

  He wouldn’t have liked that at all, but there was talk that the Federal Army might have to use such a transport procedure as the number of recruits grew. But there was talk about a lot of things, and knowing which were real and which bullshit was beyond Kwame’s power of discernment. He’d find out soon enough what was real. That was the nature of being on the sharp end of the Army’s poking stick.

  “Charon dead ahead,” said a female voice in his head. This was the latest in a long line of lieutenants the platoon had gone through. This one’s name was Twenty-klick. Janice or something. The surname might prove a problem when it came time to distance deployment and positioning. She’d have to last a good bit longer than the others before he started worrying about that, though.

  “Sergeant, have the platoon check in,” said Twenty-klick. It took Kwame a moment to realize that she was talking to him. Through a process of attrition and transfer, he’d become the highest-ranking noncom currently in the outfit. There was even talk about promoting him to master sergeant. He was supposed to be the Old Crow’s pet, after all.

  Pet guinea pig, thought Kwame. One thing Sherman didn’t do was reward success with an easy assignment. Instead, they’d gotten progressively harder since he’d been on the team that destroyed the rip tether on Triton. The truth was, though he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy being put in harm’s way, he remembered what a life of boredom was. Or he sort of did. The alcohol and enthalpy had wiped out some of his recollections of those good old days before the Army had saved him from himself. Or he’d saved himself from himself.

  Whatever the fuck, he thought. Get on with things.

  “Platoon report,” he said.

  The knit-transmitted voices of his soldiers came back to him—some quick and crisp, some sluggish and irritated. Two-thirds of the platoon were as green as could be—because the soldiers they were replacing were as dead as could be. Kwame ticked them all off. Everyone had survived the transit intact. Good enough for now.

  “Platoon Bravo all present and accounted for,” he told the lieutenant.

  “All right, Sergeant,” replied the lieutenant. “Gear up.” At least Twentyklick was not utterly new. She’d seen some action against the Montserrat. Kwame had, too, of course. He’d been up close and personal with the huge DIED destroyer just before Sherman had ordered it blown to Kingdom Come. He’d even run his hand against its hull. The ship’s isotropic coating had made it feel like a thick, black slime.

  “Stand by,” said Twentyklick. A couple of seconds passed. Kwame felt his body—and his mind—tightening to a quartzlike tension and precision.

  Drugs, he thought. Excellent drugs, too. We’re getting the full battle infusion. Shit. That can’t be good news.

  “Okay, incoming instructions,” Twentyklick continued. “It’s Charon; we’re dropping on Charon.”

  They were going into the Shit. The Real Shit. There wasn’t an inch of the little moon that wasn’t hardened against attack.

  Engagement always happened fast, and Kwame had decided there was no real way to prepare yourself. A great side door running along the main hull of the Boomerang slid upward on enormous hinges. Grist containment barriers deactivated themselves. Various e-m force fields were switched off.

  Then you were catapulted into space like a rock from a slingshot. It was that simple and mechanical. Elastic tethers spit you out at initial g forces that only the space-adapted could withstand.

  It took Kwame a moment to orient—and he knew he was much faster at doing so than some of the new recruits in the platoon. As well he should be, being the noncom now.

  Charon bristled below them, like a withered crabapple. The crenellations he saw were not canyons, but an overlay of grist-constructed armor. And as he looked, e-m fire rose from the surface below. The platoon was out of range, but closing fast.

  “Sarge, weren’t the ship and fighters supposed to soften up the place before they sent us in?” It was Private Daytrader communicating on platoon band over the knit.

  “They did,” Kwame replied. He almost added, “And can the chatter!” as he supposed a good sergeant would. But the stew of military drugs inside them all would keep everybody from falling over the emotional edge into panic.

  Almost in answer to Daytrader, the platoon crossed a sensor boundary and a triangulated group of stealth killer satellites—DIED satellites that had obviously escaped the invaders’ prep work—tracked and opened fire upon them. Daytrader was killed instantly as a large swath of his right side was disintegrated by laser fire. No rupture-healing grist could compensate for his rapid depressurization once his internal organs were exposed. He died from what looked to Kwame like a ruptured heart that ballooned enormously outward, then exploded.

  The rest of the platoon was through the killer satellites before the machines could get a fix on anybody else. Onward, downward. Very noticeably downward. Toward Charon.

  Charon was covered with water ice, but that was mostly obscured by the silicates-and-metal fortress that the Met forces had constructed as a shell.

  Too bad, Kwame thought. Even though he’d hated living on Pluto, he had liked to look up and find ghostly Charon there, glowing with the barest wisp of white reflected from the distant, distant sun. Now what would it look like? A black hole in the sky that blocked out the stars. That was all.

  And down they fell. Kwame’s internal gravimetrics told him that Charon’s feeble gravity was beginning to tug enough to accelerate him.

  “Retrothrust,” he told the platoon. “Calibrate with me through the knit.” There were small rockets on each soldier’s feet for this maneuver. Unfortunately, the burn would light them up for the moon’s defense sensors. Well, it couldn’t be helped. They had to slow down.

  “We’ve got an entry vector,” said Lieutenant Twenty-klick. As best Kwame could tell, she was somewhere behind him. He didn’t waste time trying to locate her exact position. “The captain says the jump area’s been softened up real good. All major weaponry’s out, and we delivered a shitload of the new grade-five grist-mil from Forward Labs on-site.”

  “Sounds good, ma’am,” Kwame replied. He checked another readout in his peripheral vision. “Touchdown in one minute fifteen seconds.”

  And so the Third Sky and Light Brigade, Company C, Platoon Bravo made its way down to the surface of Charon. Within seconds, Kwame could not see around the curve of the moon. Then the horizon straightened steadily from curve to ellipse to straight line. Thirty seconds.

  “Thrusters to full,” he said over the knit. “Maintain vector.” The ground was visible. It was a white target, surrounded by darker concentric rings. Were the rings actually waves? Liquid? Surely not. No, the waves were not moving. They were piled-up debris from an impact crater. “Platoon rendezvous at the bull’s-eye. Sound off!”

  Seven platoon members reported in—four men, three women. It had been five to three until they lost Daytrader.

  Ten seconds. Five.

  Kwame cut his boot thrusters. Three. Two. One.

  The world changed to madness.

  Ten

  NEPTUNE SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD EARLY APRIL, 3017

  TRITON HOME FRONT

  TB—the man sometimes known as Thaddeus Kaye—exa
mined himself in the fourth dimension. He was still there. Old man, new man. Painfully twisted through the past and future every day at waking. And Alethea blown to bits. Literally ones and zeros. Sweet nothings. Somewhere in the Met. He was sure of it.

  How did I get here, here to Triton? I can’t stay.

  And yet he had remained. And slowly found a place on Triton, tending to the wounded. He’d even begun writing poetry again, his old occupation.

  Ben Kaye’s occupation, he reminded himself. Thaddeus had never been a poet. Thaddeus had existed for the merest microsecond before Ben had plunged like a dagger through his heart, cleaving it in twain.

  TB was two people. It didn’t matter that they were the same person at base. What mattered was how you behaved. How you acted. That was the proof that he was damaged, that something was wrong. What you do reflects back and forth in time, making you. The action forms itself by forming you. How did that old poet Beat Myers put it?

  I stand like a shadow

  cast into the air.

  A shadow made by whatever

  that is down there.

  What’s real is what happens. Or fails to happen. Or happens in a half-assed way.

  They had tried to make him into a superman. They? Hell, he’d colluded. The ultimate Large Array of Personalities, writ on gravitons, bounced backwards and forwards in time. Himself in past, present, and future all at once. His glance would take in decades. His every action would coincide with the inevitable. It would put a human face on the inevitable and shape it to human ends, at least in the area of the solar system. Anywhere there was a grist substrate through which to flash the news, Thaddeus’s gestalt vision of past, present, and future.

  What a fucking crock. All he’d really wanted out of it was to be a better poet. To be up there with Shakespeare and Dante. Fame. It wasn’t such a misguided ambition. He never had given a damn about power. Power might be a side effect or it might not. Who cared? To write well and truly. To express his love for Alethea. To make her immortal, like Shakespeare’s dark lady, or Dante’s Beatrice.

  Misguided or not, he’d found a way to sabotage and destroy himself in the process. Because, in upgrading to this special kind of LAP, his old self would have to be left behind. Ben could not integrate with Thaddeus.

  But there was, and would always be, only one Alethea.

  She would love Thaddeus. That was a given. Alethea’s own desire was to become a LAP—something that she could not achieve because of a stray gene in her DNA. A slight propensity to schizophrenia that could not be removed from her or her ancestors without destroying their minds as well. People on Alethea’s mother’s side could never become LAPs.

  And so, in jealousy and disgust, Ben had copied himself before the upgrade, hired a hacker to insert this stealth duplicate into the upgrade algorithm. The security had been small potatoes to overcome. After all, who expected trickery in this experiment?

  He’d hidden his plans—even from himself. Until the moment came. The key words were spoken by the technician. Initiate manifold upgrade . Stupid, ugly words that presaged a stupid, ugly deed.

  Ben, the original, would die. That was part of the plan. Why should he hang around? She won’t love me anymore, he thought. She’ll just be nice to me because she pities me.

  He’d rather be dead.

  And so the moment came, and the words were spoken, and a virus was inserted into each of the multiple copies that would form Thaddeus’s being. Within that viral code resided Ben’s copy. Thaddeus was born with Ben running through him like a knife. But a knife that could never be extracted.

  Not even by suicide.

  He’d tried it. Upon first awaking to his new status as a LAP, his new being, he’d felt the knife. He’d not yet known what it was yet, but had instinctively reached within himself to yank it out, to cough it up, to get rid of what wasn’t right.

  There had been an explosion. An explosion that killed everyone who was in the physical location of the experiment on Mars. It was also an explosion within the grist—a virtual explosion that had scattered every convert present to the four corners of creation.

  Including Alethea. Including Alethea.

  It had killed Alethea’s body and scattered her mind to the winds of the grist.

  He destroyed his heart’s desire, the only woman he’d ever loved.

  Upon realizing who he was and what he’d made himself—this new creature, this king of the LAPs, didn’t call himself Thaddeus or Ben. He called himself TB. Tuberculosis Kaye. A sick joke.

  What followed was years of searching. Years of dysfunction. A new, degraded life in the garbage dump known as the Carbuncle, near the edges of the Met in the asteroid belt. The place where all the little pieces of free code came to die. Or to be mutated. Transformed.

  It was there, the shithole of the known universe, at his lowest point, that he’d felt the first flicker of care and love since the day of his “birth.” A friend made from a furry bit of escaped code, from weirdly transmuted grist, from his dark dreams of Alethea.

  Her name was Jill. She was, of all things, a ferret. At least she had been. Until she’d made herself, by sheer force of will, into a girl.

  Savage little Jill. The only one who could have convinced him to leave the Met—albeit she’d convinced him by knocking him out for a two-day sleep, then helping his other friends to trundle him into a pirate ship and out to Triton. Nobody else could have gotten close enough to betray him. Or save him. He still wasn’t sure which act Jill was guilty of. But one thing he was certain of—Jill’s heart was as pure as his was sullied. She was not to be blamed.

  “Breakfast!”

  Bob the fiddler walked in from the apartment’s tiny kitchen. For the past year, the old musician had been TB’s roommate. Not that TB had invited him. As always, Bob’s ways were mysterious and, for the most part, nonsensical. There were only two constants with Bob. First, he was a damned fine fiddle player. Second, he had a long-standing, mostly unrequited love for the smuggler and spaceship captain Makepeace Century. Maybe that was why TB didn’t mind having him around—they were two old goats hurting for far too long over lost love. Decades, in Bob’s case.

  Of course, if Bob was who he claimed to be, his love for Century had developed relatively recently. If he really were the vanished composer Despacio, that would make him…nearly three hundred years old.

  “Did you finish the poem you were working on?” Bob said. “And here are exactly four eggs.”

  He set the platter down on the coffee table in front of the battered sofa on which TB slept. Then Bob reached behind his back and pulled out a steaming cup of coffee as if by magic.

  “Here is ‘joe,’ as they used to say a thousand years ago,” Bob continued.

  “How the hell did you do that?” TB asked. “You got a shelf back there?”

  “Balancing stuff on your butt is easy in this gravity,” said Bob. “Just a little practice, and you can do it, too. I can teach you the wonders.”

  “I think I’ll pass,” TB replied. “But thanks for the grub.”

  “I want to read that poem.”

  TB took a sip of the coffee. Swallowed. “I haven’t finished it yet.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “That boy I tended last week at the hospital.” TB looked around. “There a fork around here?”

  “On Triton?” Bob asked.

  “I meant to eat these eggs with.”

  “Jesus Christ you’re picky.” Bob reached into one of his several shirt pockets. “Here. I forgot I had it.”

  TB accepted the implement and took a bite of the eggs.

  “That boy—the one who had the Broca grist infection?” said Bob. “The one who keeps talking in riddles.”

  “It isn’t riddles,” said TB between bites. “It’s nonsense.”

  “Not always easy to tell the difference,” said Bob. He sat down in the armchair across the table from the sofa.

  “Especially with you,” TB replied. “Aren’t you goin
g to eat?”

  “I ate last night,” Bob said. “I’ll eat tomorrow. Today’s for drinking.”

  He pulled a flask of whiskey from one shirt pocket and a small tumbler from another, and quickly poured himself a stiff shot.

  “What kind of rotgut is that?” TB said.

  “I’ll have you know this is prime sipping whiskey,” Bob replied. “Compliments of good old Captain Quench. The man knows his poison.” He knocked back the whiskey and let out a low whistle. “Whew. Want some?”

  “Not yet,” TB replied. “What are you going to do today?”

  “ Not take a bath. How about you?”

  “I’ve got a shift down at the hospital. Dahlia and I are still trying to work some kind of halfway cure on that boy.”

  “You always had a sweet hand with the grist.”

  “Yes, but I can’t work miracles. The boy’s entire personality was wiped out. We’re trying to rebuild him from the memory of a memory. Dr. Dahlia has this fancy name for it: personality interpolation. To me, it’s more like growing a tree from a stump. It may have the same DNA, but it’s still a different tree.”

  “Better than nothing,” Bob said. “You can do that to me if the bad grist ever gets into my brainpan. I wonder if I’d grow back as a chestnut or a hickory.”

  “Hickory,” TB replied. “And all knotty, too.”

  “Good for ax handles.”

  “I suppose.” TB finished his eggs, then downed the remainder of the coffee in a big gulp. “I’ve got to get going.” He started to rise.

  “Hey!” Bob yelled, startling TB back onto the sofa.

  “Jesus Christ. What?”

  Bob smiled his gap-toothed grin. “Have another cup of coffee, will you?”

  “Uh, okay.”

  TB sat for a moment, looking at Bob. Was the man a riddle or just full of shit? A little of both and neither.

  “I hope you don’t expect me to get it for you?” Bob finally said.

  “I guess not.”

  “You guess right,” Bob replied. “And get me a cup, would you. There’s something I want to tell you today.”