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Author’s note: The Piazzi is a Marsco Asteroid Shuttle plying its trade between the Asteroid Belt and the moon. Rumors are circulating that Marsco might be covering up a plague outbreak on that shuttle. In the Marsco world, it is common to have colonies on asteroids. Most of these are Marsco colonies, although some rare ones are independent of Marsco.

Chapter Nine

Plague Ship

(On the asteroid Adams-Leverrier, 2095)

“It’s solely an accident that brings this ship to your colony,” Carlton Caruthers, the visiting Marsco liaison, assured the Independent colony’s administration. Caruthers was an imposingly tall, muscular man. But that and his lefter status didn’t hold sway over the six unwavering administrators seated around the conference table.

“This shuttle,” Misha Paton, the colony superintendent, slipped on a finger mouse thimble to check his mobile screen, “this VBC Gagarin–we have denied, and we will continue to deny her permission to dock—especially if an accident’s involved.” Not versed in Marsco lore, Paton had no way of knowing how significant this port-of-call visit actually was.

The associate didn’t blink. “She has every right to dock here,” he fired at first. Then with a conciliatory gulp, he added, “But perhaps I spoke inaccurately. It’s merely coincidence that brings this ship in to your spaceport.”

Eleni Romanidu, the only woman in the conference room, broke in, “And coincidence that your ship’s coming from the wrong side of the belt?” She tapped her fingernail—she was without disks—on a nicked-up and scored polymer table to emphasize her point. As the colony’s legal expert, she kept Adams-Leverrier totally and truly independent from Marsco.

Caruthers glanced about at the half dozen faces with set jaws and determined looks. While his hair and moustache were trimmed and neat, the six Indies had that Indie-look. Paton sported a ponytail and a gold earring. Romanidu wore not just glasses but ones with dark lenses. The others looked peculiar as well.

Not one of them sported a single finger disk.

The viewpanel behind the colonists looked in toward the sun; its glare, even at this distance, still made the unnumbered stars and the close-at-hand asteroids impossible to see. But, somewhere out there, an expedition ship steadily approached. And the Gagarin was heading in at max, setting a Herriff-Miller speed record.

“Look,” the liaison now continued with the expected tone of confrontation, “we don’t have to ask permission to dock.”

“Yes, yes,” Superintendent Paton nodded, “Twelve Thrusters gives Marsco all the authority it needs.”

The associate simply smirked. “And I don’t need to give you a lecture on the movement of asteroids. Colonies line up differently relative to in- and out-going shuttles all the time. It’s the nature of planetary orbits. Besides, as you’ve acknowledged, under Thrusters, ordinary traffic—”

“But,” the legal counsel countered, her dark glasses giving away nothing, “the shuttle in question can’t in any way be conceived as ordinary traffic. What’s it doing out that way?” She motioned behind, through the plexiglas. During the asteroid’s rapid rotation, the view right then was outbound, toward endless space beyond the belt.

“Her mission’s black.” Caruthers dismissed her, hiding the fact that he thought her a shrill harpy standing in Marsco’s way.

“I’ll say,” the legal wonk came back at him, her cynicism toward Marsco not disguised.

The superintendent thought it best to reenter this exchange before too much was said by the head of legal that should be left unsaid. Thimble-twitching his palm screen nervously, he brought up his chief concern. “The Von Braun Center has furnished us with a manifest of the crew but little else about this shuttle.”

“As is standard for any docking craft, even Marsco-to-Marsco.”

“But, the manifest lists six hibering crewmembers; lists them as—and I quote: ‘Under quarantine.’”

“Matter of semantics, Mr. Paton, merely semantics,” the associate stated. “You’ve known me for five years, as long as I’ve been this colony’s liaison. I’ve helped in every matter possible during this time. We know each other; I hope we trust each other. You know that to Marsco, safety in space is its paramount goal.”

The superintendent gave an obligatory nod, but the five other Indies saw that the associate was stalling, looking for a way out. The liaison himself knew this as well. And yet he stammered on, reassuring his hosts that Marsco expected cooperation even though it always respected legal Independents. Finally, mid-paragraph, he remembered the second associate present and immediately shifted his ramble onto him. “And Mr. Steerforth here, he’s just in from the VBC on Mars which is home port of this craft. He’s come out specifically to meet the Gagarin. He’ll be most obliging with his answers—all of them forthcoming.” The liaison responded with an unconvincing smile.

The visiting hibernation specialist, David Steerforth, looked from inflexible non-associate face to face in no hurry to respond. Much shorter and thinner than the lanky liaison, his looks betrayed no age because he had hibered a great deal. As typical with ice-tech drudges, he looked uneasy with live specimens, preferring to work with those already sleeping deeply. In a crowd of other men, he would easily be overlooked. Nonetheless, he came on with an all-too-familiar associate demeanor. “It’s black as previously stated. Marsco doesn’t need your permission to dock, and it refuses your permission to inspect!”

“Is that a threat?” the regulatory specialist, Romanidu, retorted.

“Does it need to threaten?”

“It often does.”

Both the superintendent and liaison were a flurry of arms and gestures trying to keep their respective subordinates and this visiting associate from escalating the discussion into open hostilities.

“Please, please,” the chief colonist insisted, “you have to understand my point of view. I’m responsible for over 35K residents. And we know of plague ships—historical ones, perhaps mostly mythical, but others real nonetheless.” He drew a measured breath, “And we know of the Piazzi some six months back.”

“Eight to be exact,” the recently-arrived hiber specialist fired, growing impatient and feeling this was a sniper shot. “But that was the Asteroid Fleet—not Von Braun. In Marsco, two distinct entities.”

“I realize that, but—” the legal specialist tried to retort.

“There is a vast difference.”

“Realize that, too, but—”

“The Gagarin’s on a scientific mission, the nature of which I cannot disclose. Obviously, every sensor on this asteroid tells you that she’s coming in from outside the belt. Can’t deny it. But what else’s going on within her hull—that’s classified.”

“But it’s within regs that my health team meet every crewmember,” the legal expert insisted, “whether they leave the shuttle or not.”

“Letting you on board’s totally out of the question,” Steerforth insisted. “The Gagarin’s to dock, take on fuel, some supplies. It’s been beyond the belt for over three years—”

Sounding more like a VBC rep than the VBC rep, the Marsco liaison interjected, “You’ve gotta admire the scientific marvel of that feat!”

“—but not all its crew will de-shuttle or deice, so no, you may not meet them. Dot!”

·          ·          ·

As both an Indie and a colonist, Eleni Romanidu, the head of the Adams-Leverrier’s legal staff, was scrupulously cautious. The confrontation three days earlier hadn’t decreased her apprehension. Colonists needed ceaseless watchfulness lest space suck the life from their isolated pocket of frail existence amid this hostile, vacuous environment. On Earth or in space, Indies needed measured restraint rather than complacency when dealing with Marsco or else they would be crushed by its sheer size and might.

Her ancestors were Euros from the center of that continent, a location that always needed to balance the colliding extremes of East and West. Somewhat defeated, Eleni had felt like she was performing that same balancing act twenty-four hours ago when she watched the Gagarin glide up to a docking tether extended to greet her.

To read all the data the colony’s sensors had amassed on this suspicious ship—Marsco had provided none beyond the troubling and vague manifest—she needed to sit at her work table and twitch her way through screens of data.

To do so, she wore a set of finger mouse thimbles. The system was ancient, but the adamant administration wouldn’t let their tech specialists order anything Marsco. “We’re Indies, and must act it,” the superintendent argued convincingly. “As much as is feasible, we must support those few subsidiaries that have the moxie to stay out of Marsco’s sway.” A sign of his own stubbornness was the abject lack of finger disks throughout the colony and anything remotely approaching Marsco-standard finger mouse paraphernalia.

Eleni shrugged as she twitched her chip-embedded thimbles. Avoiding Marsco was an honorable but problematic sentiment to live by, especially considering that no one else made computers like it did. She looked at the trio of thimbles she had slipped onto her right hand. It was a wonder she was allowed to use even them.

The choice by these Independents to live free of Marsco rather than knuckle under had more repercussions than computer usage. The black hair framing her face was without luster or style. Bags hung under her eyes, but these were hard to notice because she wore dark glasses—another non-Marsco element—to protect her weakened sight and hide some of her strain. Our life here is ceaselessly precarious, she complained bitterly to no one in particular. Marsco on the threat horizon, arduous colony life, all this isolation to create their freedom—she was always just that close to jettisoning her independence for a modicum of an easier existence in some Earth-side Indie subsidiary.

·          ·          ·

For an hour, she reviewed all the Colony’s reports on the mysterious shuttle. Partway through her examination, she needed to level the table she used as a desk, one as scratched as the colony’s conference table where the Indies first met the two arrogant associates. She wadded up a piece of paper to slip it under a leg then tested her work station’s stability. “Better,” she whispered, “better than the bullshit cover story Marsco’s manufactured.”

Their first intel was spotty. The Adams-Leverrier’s deep-space sensors had picked up an unusual bogie more than four months ago. After that, as the phantom came closer, the colony’s tracking volume went up, out of self-interest if nothing else. It hit fever pitch three weeks earlier when the craft sent her initial and routine request to dock. Every colony took a plague threat seriously. And this shuttle’s fatuous cover story, that she was coming in from Jupiter, only added to their tensions or suspicions. It ameliorated no one’s qualms on the colony’s admin staff. Not after the hushed-up Piazzi.

“Hell, why not claim that she’s returning from Mercury!” she snickered.

Thimble-twitching through several reports, knowing she had already lost the first pawn in her opening chess match with Marsco, she mentally fumed, Something isn’t right! And that damn ship’s tied to us right now! Nonetheless, she swore she would gain a better grasp of the facts about the imposing shuttle.

Rising from her desk, Eleni stood at a viewport bubble where she watched the tethered brute.

Adams-Leverrier spun so quickly that dim sunlight hit the ship, passed it into shadow, and then once more into light four times an hour. The sunlight cycle created a creeping shadow along the entire ship’s massive superstructure.

The craft was all wrong; even someone whose eyes were weakened by screens of regulatory minutia recognized that. The VBC ship had four propulsion units, all standard Herriff-Millers, but four thrusters, not the typical pair. And to supply the quartet of engine bells, she boasted extra fuel tanks plus extended crew mods. An extraordinary mule! A shuttle on steroids, dreamed up in the murky depths of the Valles Marineris. And anything anomalous, anything out of the norm, anything unexpected—and anything coming from Marsco—that was too much for any Indie.

“She’s almost frightening,” the colonist mumbled, knowing full well it was the mystery within the shuttle that was most frightening.

“I didn’t know anything frightened you,” someone whispered behind her.

She knew the voice before catching a man’s reflection in the viewport. She didn’t turn but slipped off her dark glasses.

“Zale, what if plague is?” She shrugged at the menace presently shrouded in shadow for the next several minutes. “This colony’s been free of Neo-Con for its entirety, since before the Wars.”

“You’re getting panicky over the Piazzi cock-up.” The man looked mixed-African. An adoption during the AIDS-ravaging times had brought one of his ancestors north from near the equator to a Central Continental Power earlier in the century. His looks might betray a mixed ancestry, but his speech and comportment were exclusively Euro. He spoke without a discernable accent. He stood behind her, gently resting his hands on her shoulders, and felt her relax into him without looking him in the face. After a dozen years together, his gesture was still cherished.

“Marsco gives me plenty of reasons—cover-ups, shifting regs, wallahs showing up, throwing their weight around.”

“Twelve Thrusters?”

“That goes without saying!”

“And the Piazzi.”

“Yes, especially her, dammit!”

“But today, you got permission—”

“Finally!”

“—for the main thing we need. You’ll go aboard with Anora, you’ll see all’s A-OK. That’ll be the end of it.”

“I’m not so sure it will be,” Eleni replied, leaning back into the strength of her husband. “Will you come too?”

He laughed gently at one of her seemingly absurd suggestions he knew so well. “Bringing the colony’s health officer, I’m sure Marsco’ll buy. But why should an asteroid geologist come aboard?”

“Show of force, bringing our head of mining ops. Besides, I want your muscle.”

“Don’t go paranoid on me, Eleni. And more to the point, how do we justify a miner boarding them?”

“We want to verify they aren’t illegally harvesting in this quadrant. We have a license from Marsco, a monopoly around here.”

“Elli,” Zale laughed at her predictable logic, “Elli, Elli, your legalistic mind.”

“It’s hiding something.” She drew an irritated breath. “All their bullshit about Jupiter! Jupiter! Like it’s just fuckin’ next door.” She pointed into the never-never just outside the plexiglas for emphasis.

With the present colony orientation, Jupiter was bright enough to be the only object visible against the blackness, an orange ball not obliterated in the reflected station lights.

“The Gagarin ventured beyond and back into the belt—but for a reason. Hardly to go to damn Jupiter—no matter what the MAS or the VBC says. Why go there? Everything there is here. No, Marsco must be hiding something on that shuttle.”

“No shit!” He feigned amazement at her bald-faced assertion. “It’s always hiding something.”

“I know, but I don’t like it hiding that something while tethered to us.”

“But what it has hidden isn’t important so long as it isn’t contagious. And Anora will know that by 1430 hours today.” Turning her, he looked directly into her dark, bloodshot eyes. “We’ll know. And I’m sure we’re safe. But, yes, I’ll go with, if that’ll help.”

·          ·          ·

“So, we’ve worked out this sort of compromise,” David Steerforth explained to the hibernation specialist who had been on the expedition ship.

At this point in his career, Lieutenant Anthony “Zot” Grizotti of the Gagarin knew official bumf when confronted with it. Paton, the chief administrator from the Adams colony, Steerforth from the VBC. It made no difference. Both admins were generating self-importance, the iceman suspected. Although, he secretly admitted, he would believe Paton more than Steerforth any day.

Side by side the two made an odd pair. The VBC researcher stood shorter than the Gagarin iceman by more than a dozen centimeters. His frame was thin, lacking any muscle tone. Besides being taller, Zot seemed alert, engaged with his surroundings, attentive. His brown eyes were quick to focus and show immediate comprehension of any situation. His trimmed beard had a few gray strands as natural aging ran its course. He had grown it to full regulation size, which Steerforth, even at his age, couldn’t manage.

Standing there silently, the visitor secretly glanced at his fellow iceman. He had dark southern Euro features and a sense of confidence that the visitor lacked. Steerforth envied Zot for his easygoing manner, unless working. Then, he was intense. It wasn’t just his looks but his openness that the other man envied. People always liked Grizotti, even when he seemed to stand apart from the rest.

Although much older, Steerforth eagerly stretched his middle age out by hibering at every chance, his latest being the four-month crossing from Mars to the belt. Zot, on the other hand, had hibered reluctantly for short snatches during the years he had been onboard the Gagarin. Although the flight crew and all members of the science team had iced in relays across the void, Zot stayed awake as long as necessary to keep his experiment stable and safe. As a science team member, Zot nevertheless helped out all he could. When the two flight crew icemen went under for six months at a stretch (at Zot’s hands after the outward-bound ship left the belt nearly three and a half years ago) he made sure the hibering shuttle crew and his own cryo-frozen volunteers were all well tended.

“Do we know anything of their assessment team?” Zot asked at last.

As dangerous as trekking to Jupiter was, the hiberman was more concerned about this inspection. He wanted to know his foe—or friend—well before either approached. In the end, he never fully trusted Steerforth, but whatever info he shared on the colonists might prove helpful.

“Not much.” Steerforth had gleaned from the Marsco liaison that the whole colony was mostly Euro with a stubborn streak of autonomy although nothing approaching Ludd beliefs. “Unusual sort of place, however. Some religious connection or another, or so Caruthers says. They’re all thick-necked plus damned resilient.”

“Have to be out here.”

“Records acknowledge only a dozen or so residents have gone missing in the past five years—good retention, all things considered—living out next to nowhere.”

“Where do they go when they leave?”

“How do you mean?”

“Do these fleeing Indies end up in Security? Does it seem like they can’t wait to leave this place behind at any cost, thus they whore themselves in Security as legionnaires?”

“No, seems that most former colonists leave to join Earth-side sids.” The specialist from Von Braun paused then asked pointedly, “By the way—why are you here?”

“Ask our fearless commander; she’ll tell you.” The hiberman, like most in his guild, had little love for shuttle pilots. “Has something to do with the science team not having gathered all Marsco HQ wanted at the Trojans.” These asteroids, trailing the gigantic planet on an identical orbital plane, were the last locale explored by the Gagarin.

“Marsco HQ? Not Herriff and the VBC?” Like this colony, Herriff and his Von Braun Center on Mars enjoyed a large measure of autonomy from Marsco’s Seattle-based general headquarters.

“Affirmative. Seattle stuck its head into our program.”

“So, Seattle’s pulling the Center’s tail? Herriff’s not liking that. But that delayed your Jovan egression?”

“Some balls-up like that. Plus crew incompetence.”

“Incompetence? You are all hand-picked!”

“Well, all that and then Sparks sends the same sci-file twice. Put Seattle into a tizzy. We spent a week just asking ourselves what the hell was going on. By the time the flyboys and -girls sorted it all out enough to satisfy the Seattle wallahs, we egressed ten days later than we should. Thus, we didn’t align well with any belt colony—any Marsco colony.”

He paused to look down at the asteroid, scores of its domes lit against the ashen, pocked surface. It was a large settlement in a relatively colony-free sector of the belt. “Adams had been a friendly place for years, I understand,” the Gagarin iceman added at last.

“Yeah, the liaison reported that after each of his semiannual visits here.” Steerforth joined his subordinate at the viewport.

“What’s he like?”

“The usual ineffective drone: knows nothing but seems to know even less than that! Itinerant. He liaises with six or eight colonies but lives on Ceres—that’s the largest Marsco colony near here although it is really at quite a distance at present. His wife and kids are there, and he has three or four babes on other colonies. None here.”

Only Steerforth, Zot thought, would concern himself with counting another man’s women.

After watching a slice of dim sunlight reflect off the surface domes, Steerforth confided, “Yes, friendly here once, well, until the Piazzi. From what I can gather—rumors at the VBC and grumblings here—that incident changed everything on several colonies.”

Zot stated as dryly as possible, “What? Are sids and Indies beginning to doubt Big Red?”

“Cynicism doesn’t help the situation, Anthony.” Not knowing Zot well at all, Steerforth often used Grizotti’s first name; to those who knew him, he was always Zot, just Zot.

“What did happen? Any idea?”

“Nothing official. Accident of some sort. There’s to be an inquest. Or yet a second, or a third, or a continuing one, or God knows what else.”

“Some butt’s in it now. But, what did happen?” Zot asked insistently.

“Ask me about Von Braun and icing; no one will tell me squat even if they knew.”

“C’mon, explosions onboard shuttles just don’t happen.”

“Are you suggesting Ludds?”

“Or incredibly, poorly trained crews.” Zot paused then ventured, “I knew someone on board.”

“Know her well?”

“Him. No, just a friend. Classmate from my hiber-tech days. He was the iceman sucked into space—so far as we know.”

“Yeah, we really don’t know.” Had Steerforth been a closer coworker, he would have offered his sympathy but didn’t. “Look, it’s 1100. Give me your prelim report. They’ll be here at 1430.”

As much as he dreaded this exchange, the hands-on Gagarin researcher had everything ready. At a small conference table, he had two screens booted with identical material, a précis of his work. It was an unflattering account of the methodology that initially placed six volunteers in cryogenic stasis, a system wholly unlike routine hibernation. And the person who had so thoroughly botched that primary workup was waiting to hear Zot’s report.

When Grizotti initially came aboard the Gagarin, then in Mars orbit, the deep-iced guinea pigs had been in experimental cryo for half a year. Steerforth was quick to shift their responsibility over to Zot, to readily commit the subjects to his subordinate’s finger disks, and to hastily de-shuttle on the last lander back to the planet’s surface. At the start of the outward four-month crossing to the belt, the iceman needed to redo every aspect of the computer-assisted controls and monitors while still keeping everyone alive Steerforth had already frozen.

For his part, the VBC researcher had essentially copied Continental specs to freeze them but had dreamed up his own system for keeping them safe. Zot had to revise that system—in process—without endangering the frozen volunteers any more than they were and without ending the experiment prematurely by bringing them out of deep ice.

Grizotti was too kind to say outright, I saved your ass, David, so he spoke in generalities about the salvaged system, stressing more his alterations, his adjustments, his tweaks, as though he had added onto a working system, not redesigned an altogether failed one.

“All six were in yellow when I got them. I had them stable and safe within ten days.”

“Not an easy task,” Steerforth stated without emotion, even though his FD prints were all over those dysfunctional and bollixed fundamental protocols.

“They were all A-OK after eight weeks and are continuing so indefinitely.”

The concept originator readily saw that Zot had implemented a wholly new system under the most difficult of conditions, life and death conditions. But after the report’s conclusions, Steerforth played his part well and thanked the real designer for his forty-three months of ceaseless monitoring. “Excellent reconditioning of existing systems,” he stated more than once.

Zot modestly thanked him for the acknowledgement. “Everyone’s green-lining at present. They’ve been that way for the past forty-two months, one week.”

“Outstanding! Plus their six months before—so well beyond four years total. Y’know, all six have agreed to stay under even after returning to the Center.”

“We can then expect at least five years without problems—ten times hiber’s current max.”

“I’ve always maintained that twenty years is possible.”

“If twenty, then fifty, one hundred. They’re in stasis, after all, not hibernation. Just compare their body temps and vitals to green-lined hiber stats. And once safely in this stasis, eternity’s the limit.” Zot bit his tongue. If a hundred, why not two or three? Post-solar is possible. Certainly not in this end-of-her-limits research ship but in some other spaceship that can be automated to go beyond Pluto and then safely away.

But where?

·          ·          ·

After talking with the ten members of the flight crew complement and the twenty of the science research team, the Indie inspectors, accompanied by Caruthers, made their way aft to the hiber-station where they found both Steerforth and Grizotti in full uniform waiting for them.

The first thought that ran through Zot’s mind was that the physician had an air about her like Tessa’s. It was only in her deliberate and energetic manners, not her looks. Her blond hair was longer, fixed into a practical, non-ornamental braid that was curled up at the back of her head. Plus she looked strained from the rigors of life on an asteroid. Nonetheless, Tessa crossed Zot’s mind until he mentally shook his head to clear himself of her memory.

Next to this no-nonsense inspector was an older woman with black bags under her anxious eyes, eyes partially hidden by dark glasses.

With them were two men, the superintendent and one other man obviously attached to the legal side of the inspection pair. He stood silently by, observing and noting everything without responding. Their names betrayed little: Zale and Eleni Romanidu, Misha Paton, and Anora Hauser.

The Gagarin cryo-researcher made no attempt to garner meaning from names, races, and backgrounds. This was a postwar world, a Marsco world; all had been mixed, rearranged, sorted by techno-prowess. Or by choice to get as far away from Marsco as possible. This sifting began with Divestiture and continued to this day. Only associate, sid, and PRIM remained as viable and discrete categories.

Unless you count these few Indies and the likes of Walter Miller as a fourth column. Once more, Zot mentally shook his head; he wasn’t going anywhere near Tessa by thinking about her father.

Introductions over, the Indies gravitated to Zot’s workstation in the midsection of the third personnel mod.

Usually, when a pair like these women entered to check up on logs and reports, one played soft, the other hard. This time, however, both came in as polished and resolute as asteroid nickel. The doctor asked pointed questions about the six crewmembers in medical isolation, while the other scrutinized the fragmentary records given to her. Believing their home colony in peril, they wanted to make sure every conceivable risk was avoided.

Through a bulkhead behind consoles and banks of monitors, the cryo-bay was closed off, its hatch sealed. Steerforth was determined to keep anyone from even so much as seeing the tech layout of his experimental system. Even so, it took only a moment and the doctor’s sharp eye to raise concerns.

“You’ve given med charts for those six in hiber,” Hauser stated with an accusatory voice. She motioned toward the locked-down bulkhead, “but they go back only four months.” She addressed her question to Zot because he appeared to be the most honest of the three associates.

“And the problem is?” Steerforth interjected. He had been fussing around, keeping the inspectors from probing too deeply about his protocols.

“Your info doesn’t match your hiber-logs,” replied the legalistic Romanidu.

“And,” the doctor interjected still to Zot, “just look at these readings—heart rate, body temp, whatever you select—your ‘iced’ crew are all dead!”

Defensively, the Gagarin iceman pulled up another screen. “Here’s their respiration. They’re very much alive, as you can see.” He briskly pointed to a sine wave graphic that demonstrated their breathing rates as retarded but with verifiable patterns. A second screen showed the oxygen content of their slowly pulsing blood. “I’m not housing cadavers in there.”

The doctor had never seen such hiber signs before. “You call hibernation ‘icing,’ but this really seems to be freezing someone,” she commented in an unguarded outburst.

Neither Grizotti nor Steerforth felt obligated to respond.

“More to the point, Superintendent Paton,” the liaison moved this confrontation back to its original purpose, “after examining for signs of Neo-Con, your med investigator here finds no evidence of plague, am I not correct?”

The accompanying physician nodded, still with an eye on Zot, an eye clearly pleased with his frank demeanor and kindness.

The inspection team murmured assent and prepared to leave when Zale, who had been a brooding presence thus far, brought out his own data file with a self-important flourish. “I haven’t seen the records of your asteroid harvest. Where are those records?”

The two hibernation researchers were stunned by the question. “Why ask us that,” Steerforth stammered. “Do I look like a sid astro-miner?”

Ignoring the slam, Zale stayed revved up, gunning for them. “The ship must have records.” This charade covered his being on the inspection team, and it gave the two women more time to survey the hiber terminals.

Another aspect of this ship to distrust, Eleni noted, this mega-bay. It’s five, six times larger than it needs to be. Nothing makes sense here! She didn’t need to be a hiber-techie to observe that this workstation was beyond anything approaching normal. For starters its instrumentation was at least one hundred times larger than any standard system needed.

“Those records?” Zale asked the icemen again.

Even though flustered, Caruthers managed to evade the real issue. He was a minor official caught in a major situation well over his head. The VBC hadn’t expected this trouble, or Herriff would have sent someone besides this inept Steerforth. The liaison drew a forceful breath. “These two are mere icemen—one wasn’t even a member of the crew—why ask them?”

“Why not?”

“They know nothing of asteroid harvesting–alleged harvesting.” He held up a disk-full hand, but that gesture held little sway with such Indies. “Besides none has taken place, I can assure you!”

“I don’t buy that for a nano,” the colonist spit his answer. “Why else is a ship going outside the belt and then looping back in? What else but for secretly harvesting our allotment and covering your tracks while doing such an odd loop?”

“These allegations are baseless, without substance,” the liaison retorted.

The three associates glanced around at their Indie visitors. They then shared a mental epiphany: they don’t believe the Gagarin has been to Jupiter!

Distrustful bastards, Grizotti thought. “What have we to hide? We’ve been on a scientific expedition.” So as not to compound his statement with a direct lie, he added vaguely, “beyond the belt!”

Caruthers finally put his finger disks down. “Inspection’s over. You see there’s nothing for you to worry about or bother with, health-wise. As you’ve noted, you find no evidence of any disease present. And so now I really must insist: you’re interfering with Marsco shuttle traffic! You’ve had your look-about, so please go. Now!”

Something was going on here, Romanidu knew; its nature she could only just imagine. Reflecting further, the Indie felt stiffening Marsco resolve. Knowing there was more here than met her eye but also convinced that the shuttle was truly plague-free, she concluded it was time to back off.

·          ·          ·

A week later when clear of the asteroid belt, the Gagarin headed toward Mars. With the hypergolic fuel taken on at Adams-Leverrier flaming through the quad engine bells, the expedition ship gathered speed for her last homeward leg.

“That extra pair will kick us along nicely,” Steerforth commented to Zot as the latter prepared him for hibernation.

“You sure you want this? We’ll be in Mars orbit in a little over three months.”

“Three months of total blackness? What in solar for?”

Zot scoffed at the suggestion rather than reply. He had used his years beyond the belt to explore as best he could. He had augmented the ship’s dish antenna for an enhanced scope to look deeply into space—for the pure science of it, something Marsco wasn’t fond of lately. Even with that small-scale instrument, he had been able to gather files of substantial new data and gophered much more in cobweb sites long neglected by other associates. The whole universe beyond-solar waited for disks to explore it, yet it remained as unexamined as the far side of the moon in the middle of the last century.

“Let me ask you something else,” Steerforth began, breaking the silence.

The hiberman nodded without speaking.

“Any good ass on board?”

The busy iceman ignored his colleague.

“C’mon, either it was sensational or you got zilch.”

“How Marsco—so binary.”

“Look—why d’you take this mother-of-all-sorties anyway? To become a monk? Or for all those Marsco Units? Cha-ching!”

“Who said I was a monk?”

“Oh-ho!” Steerforth stressed by drawing out the comment, “mending a broken heart, then. Hey, best way for that—” he gestured rhythmically and crudely. “It’s like I’ve always said, ‘there’s always someone else to poke just down the hall.’”

Looking at the balding, short, unremarkable—and incompetent—middle-aged man, Zot tried not to laugh. “Chicks must cream in their thongs at just the mere thought of you.”

Missing the intent, Steerforth gave a knowing wink. “Bingo! Bingo-bingo!”

Zot worked on in silence then asked, “Tell me something. What’s this all for? I mean, this cryo? It’s well beyond anything needed at present. And from what I’ve seen of Jupiter—why return? More than ninety-five percent of the belt asteroids aren’t mined or inhabited. Marsco has no need—indeed, no desire—to go beyond the belt.”

“Yeah, this expedition was the closest it’s come to pure science in years.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“That’s loaded—what the hell do you mean?”

“Pure science? We orbited Jupiter. Examined several of its moons. We went to the trailing Trojan asteroids. But last century’s astronomers watching the Shoemaker-Levy comet collide with the surface learned more of Jupiter than we did. We looked for potential colony locales, for mining-worthy asteroids and moons. We looked for water-ice and frozen methane.”

“And that’s not science?”

“Not when you’re really only looking for future mining sites.”

Steerforth snidely countered, “Idealist.”

“And you’re the realist?”

“Damn straight.” The older man’s bloodshot eyes bore into Zot’s brown. “Listen,” he insisted, “learn this! You’re an associate. The world’s ours for the taking. We can have it all! Do whatever the hell we want. ‘Just do it!’ Quit all this sniveling about the past and about the future—live it up today! What did they say once, ‘Seize the day’?”

“They were Romans, and they said it carpe diem. And their empire fell with quite a large bang, as history reports it.”

“Well, better grab yours before—” He gave a gentle laugh, partly to signal his willingness to switch topics and partly out of his reluctant fondness for Grizotti. “Look, we didn’t create this world. All we did was inherit it.”

Zot wasn’t answerable to Steerforth. And he knew in an hour the irritating associate would be out of his hair for three months. Without comment, he picked up where he left off and continued prepping the VBC researcher.

“Hey,” Steerforth grinned, “no hard feelings.” He held out his hand, the gesture of shaking hands one not often shared in the Marsco world. The senior iceman knew enough never to tick off someone about to put you under. He would risk the FD-to-FD shock to avoid a horrid hiber. “Look, you asked sort of, so I’ll tell you sort of,” he finally confided. “Off the record, nothing official.” He paused, shrugged, and went on. “I don’t know what ol’ Herriff’s got planned. Martin and I aren’t exactly buds, if you catch? But I hear lots of rumors: a space ship—”

“Well, duh!”

“I mean one designed specifically for deep space.”

“So,” Zot concluded, “unlike the Gagarin.”

“Exactly.”

Zot gave a shrug and looked out a viewport. “She really is just standard pieces added on to make an old-fashioned shuttle into an enhanced platform. Nothing new or special at all. Extra fuel tanks, another pair of engines. But more to the point, all this cryo-crap isn’t just to make us obsolete?” They both laughed.

“No, far from it. We’ll still be needed. And Herriff’s aiming for a new engine concept.”

“New design? How?”

“Like I know the specs? I only heard things, y’see, only heard them. I never saw anything, not even a single peep at the schematics or concept models. Something propelled by ions, not chemicals. And then the boss, Doc Herriff, he just says one day out of the dusty red Martian sky, ‘David, push on with those cryo plans, stat!’ Like I can pull such designs out of the air.”

“Or out of a memory bank, a Continental memory bank.”

“Look, it’s all legit research, right? I checked their results and tests against mine, their data against my trials.”

“Got me there.”

“So, anyway, all I can confirm is that I heard that something’s going down. But Christ, it’ll be years, I tell you. I can see what’s under construction in the orbiting docks—and there’s nothing that seems remotely like it can do the impossible.”

“Like house a crew in deep hiber for fifty, one-hundred years.”

“One-fifty, two—I tell you, I’ve designed a system close to that.”

“Well, we have designed.”

Steerforth winked. “Got me there.”

Grizotti had the IV tubes ready to start bringing the necessary fluids to keep the man safely asleep for months, a system far simpler and far less complicated than the future-oriented cryogenic stasis in the farther bay.

Steerforth reached out and stopped him. “One last point, Anthony. Think about this one, for Christ’s sake. You’ll either go back to the MAS Fleet or you’ll stay with us at the VBC—I’d love to have you! Either way—not to Security, right? Y’know how many Academy grads end up as officers in the S & H mucking around patrolling hot zones?”

Zot shook his head.

“Lots, over forty percent this last grad year—well over. All that space-based bumf about shuttles and egress-my-ass those cadets had to learn and then, a few weeks past receiving their commissions, they’re in urban gray with an Enfield and squads of troopers in tow.”

“Something change while we were post-belt?”

“Not that on Mars I’d hear any more than you’d hear on board. But, rumors again, Anthony, rumors that something just ain’t right on Earth. Some zones, even some rundown subsidiaries, they’re all becoming IED-City. Christ, everyone carries an Enfield.”

“Everyone?”

“Every associate. But y’know what I mean. It’s hot down there on Old Blue these days, way hot, way too hot.”

“‘Needs no ghost.’”

“I know, I know, ‘rotten in Denmark.’ But seriously, watch your mouth, Anthony, Marsco-wise. It knows how to shut up those that open their yapper too much.” He chomped his three times for emphasis.

“Yeah,” Zot answered, “but don’t worry. I’ll be too busy saluting to complain.”

“Be careful it’s not you returning a salute from all your new troopers. When on patrol, you’re too busy to complain, so CYA, my friend, CYA.” Steerforth grinned one last time at his little witticism. “Y’know, you are as good as a monk, hearing my confession.”

“Shall I give you a penance?”

“Not on your life! But I’ll give you some free advice. Deice that blond in the fifth bay, the titty-luscious babe. If she’s not space-crazed, she’ll be willing. Types like her are always hornier than rabbits after hiber.”

“The words of a master.”

The senior specialist, winking before he drifted into hibernation, thought Grizotti’s last remark was serious.

·          ·          ·

Most of the flight and science crews on the Gagarin went under hiber soon after the solitary passenger, Steerforth. The ship’s own specialists took over after belt egression, leaving Zot to tend his six in cryo and work on his own scientific projects as time permitted. As promised, he supervised Steerforth personally, the VBC specialist not trusting anyone else.

At the cryogenic workstation, Zot was always alone. As the days passed into the first month, he thought about leaving Marsco. Dozens of Independent shuttles moved between the Earth and the belt. But the hiberman knew many of these were smaller ships that relied little on hibernation.

Or perhaps, he thought, I’ll really go near-Luddite, resign my commission, join Father Cavanaugh’s SoAm PRIM school. Zot had met the priest through the Millers, been down to his run-on-a-shoestring campus in the worst zone of Rio. Perhaps that would be his next move.

In the following weeks, he looked over his files of data about the post-solar universe. “Even if there were a confirmed Earth-like planet out there somewhere,” he finally concluded half aloud, “even with a new deep-space craft and my cryo, who’d ever go? Ever want to go? Besides, what’s really, really out there?”

After the hiberman dimmed all the lights in his cabin, the viewport filled with countless stars: dots merging into clusters, individual ones brighter than the rest, the backdrop of the Milky Way, a few larger lights obviously the post-belt planets. “All those stars and solar systems still years and years away,” he confided hopelessly to himself. “Only Dante or Milton could conceive of a more vacuous hell.”

Standing at the plexiglass as if to get a closer view, he pondered infinity. He was nearly overwhelmed by its immense nothingness and its entire totality.

The only other thought that crossed his mind was Tessa. The Tessa he loved so deeply once, the Tessa lost to him completely. Only Dante or Milton could conceive of a more vacuous hell than life without her, he thought before busying himself to drive her from his mind.

 

Chapter One: The Dissident’s Daughter

The Marsco Dissident

A Futuristic Novel

Book One of The Marsco Saga

by James A. Zarzana

Dedicated to Marianne and Elaine

 

“The times scientific, as evil as ever.”
“Toward Lillers” 1933

Ivor Gurney

“It had all the unknownness of
something of immense realness.”

In Parenthesis 1937
David Jones

“Everything off the Earth goes Marsco.”
Marsco Lunar Fleet Motto

2034

Chapter One

The Dissident’s Daughter

(The Sac City Subsidiary, formerly Sacramento, California, 2092)

It’s a Marsco world, thought Lieutenant Tessa Miller as she left the battered light rail, ravaged by age, gloomy with rust and neglect.

Her long day of travel almost over, she hustled along the dingy platform through a crowd of Sac City subsidiary residents. Stepping over a sleeping PRIM just beyond the broken escalator, she noticed he smelled of urine. The subcutaneous disk at the back of his left hand flashed amber, alerting the officer it was faulty.

Let an Auxxie deal, Tessa rationalized.

At street level, she surveyed the once-prosperous neighborhood still well within the rambling Sac City Sid. Twenty-two years after the Armistice, the area looked vastly different than from before the C-Wars. A seven-story building down the block was salvageable, yet no robotic cranes stood beside it. Instead, a scaffold surrounded the gutted structure on which sid-overseers supervised dozens of PRIMS brought in from the outlying unincorporated zone. These gangs scurried up and down the skeletal scaffolding, chipping off bricks and useable metal; a frenzy of PRIM-labor rather than cyber driven machines picking the bones of this sid for Marsco.

Once, seeing such gangs with her father, she heard him mutter about them being like coolies from a past era, but she didn’t know what he meant and later couldn’t find out on the Marsco wiki-p. Today near the light rail platform, she shook her head and looked the other way.

It was the lack of LR service that most occupied her mind. Without a continuing line, she had few choices left to reach her father’s isolated grange twenty-five clicks in the distance. Rather than returning to Seattle—Tessa was on the verge of that—or going back to the secure Marsco cantonment and grabbing a hover flight craft, she decided to proceed.

Before leaving her flat she had checked the Marsco Net, which indicated that the commuter line continued for several more stops to the edge of the subsidiary, terminating closer to where these outlaying districts gave way to the greenbelt. Why Marsco’s own Net was inaccurate, Tessa didn’t know. Unflustered by this inconvenience, she shouldered her small backpack, slipped on her wrap-around dark glasses and walked to the curb amid the dispersing crowd of PRIMS and sids just below the elevated platform.

To ensure her safe transit but mostly to avoid delays at any checkpoints (although her palm unit marked none along her route), Tessa wore her Marsco uniform, medium gray with red piping and prominent officer bars. Her shoulder patch designated her professor status at the Marsco Academy, the flagship campus within easy distance of the Seattle HQ itself.

Beyond those quads, her uniform carried little weight. Within greater Marsco, she wasn’t a member of its elite Asteroid Shuttle Fleet or even a member of its celebrated Lander Fleet making routine jaunts to and from the lunar colonies. And she wasn’t Security and Hygiene, even though her uniform prompted deference as she approached. To anyone non-Marsco, she was Marsco; that was enough to keep her from seeming fully integrated anywhere she traveled.

As a matter of course, she strapped an Enfield in a leather holster on her hip and wore cotton gloves to cover her eight finger disks embedded in the tips and on the phalanges of her right hand.

·          ·          ·

Earlier that morning, Tessa had been encased in secured chrome and stainless steel, speeding along on a MAG LEV train at 300 kilometers per hour. The 1200-click trip, with its one stop at the Portland Sector, took her just over five relaxing hours. She ate a lunch of fresh poached salmon, dozed in the plush comfort of the first-class compartment, associates only. Behind glass tinted with asteroid gold to filter the sun’s glare, she accelerated from the gleaming Seattle Sector to the Sac City Cantonment as if in a pneumatic tube detached from the remainder of the world. Since the Armitice, Seattle shone as Marsco rebuilt its HQ. Subsidiaries, like the former capital city of Sacramento, were also thriving via their connection to Marsco, or so Marsco reported to its associates like Tessa. The traveler looked for evidence of this flourishing, but found none.

As often happened on the magnetically levitated bullet, a few older associates had recognized her as Walter Miller’s daughter, a point that she never openly acknowledged even though curiosity about him was frequently on fellow associates’ minds, in their eyes.

Whether seeing her in transit or during the course of her weekly duties, some longstanding associates who knew both her parents periodically took note of her similarity to Bethany Palmer, her mother. Tessa’s auburn hair, shaped stylishly, a brush of freckles that made her seem younger than she was, her keen determination—these maternal traits gave her away, caused some associates to take a lingering look.

She had much of her father as well: his lively, ready smile and his eyes.

From both: a slender, athletic build and an unrelenting stubbornness.

From Marsco: a withering stare that never seemed to fit her even though an absolute necessity for survival in its world.

The inquisitive gazes above digital projection screens from several passengers on the bullet train, those raised eyebrows, prompted Tessa to initiate a “Question and Answer” game with herself somewhere below the Portland Sid.

Q: Your folks were such illustrious associates. But did you make it in Marsco based on your own skills?

A: Affirmative with a cap “A”. An aerospace engineering prof by my own dogged work.

Q: Impressive! So, a propulsion wonk like your father?

A: Not exactly. He’s more theoretical. I’m more applied.

Q: Has it hindered you being the only child of Marsco’s most famous dissident?

A: No comment.

Q: How do you explain this inherent contradiction in your life and his?

A: It’s a Marsco world.

Q: Is that your answer?

A: Affirmative.

Q: Can you elaborate?

A: Unnecessary. The nature of the world has become (or remains?) a contradiction.

Q: Is that your final answer?

A: Pass.

Q: Do you wish to add any other pertinent information to this conundrum?

A: Unnecessary.

Q: And what of Zot?

A: Do you mean Ensign Anthony Grizotti?

Q: Who else? Besides, logically, you can’t answer a question with another question. Do you still love him?

A: Why even ask?

Q: Why not?

A: Pass.

Q: A strange reply. Do you wish to add anything else?

A: As I said, it’s a Marsco world.

Q: And what is Marsco after all?

A: A hyper-country. A meta-nation. It exists beyond conventional post-statehood. For twenty-plus years, it has brought stability and prosperity to the world. Since the end of the Continental Wars, it has insured peace from here to the Asteroid Belt. But why can’t I answer my own question with my own question? After all, I am an associate, am I not?

Q: Is that your question or your answer?

·          ·          ·

Napping or watching the subsidiaries and cantonments rush by, Tessa had glided steadily south to the main Sac City terminal. Once there, it was only a few steps from the posh, spotless bullet to the run-down local service lines. After a delay, the associate left behind the cantonment at city center. It was from its guarded cantonments that Marsco assisted subsidiaries in keeping good order and tranquility. From them, Security often lent a hand in patrolling the contiguous PRIM unincorporated zones.

Like most pockets of Marsco power, the Sac City cantonment boasted almost all the comforts of Marsco with its gleaming metal and glass towers. Above and amid that part of Sac City’s skyline, a handful of HFCs skimmed, settled at street level or alighted on a rooftop. By mid-century, the hover flight craft had moved much mechanized traffic off ground. Taking a four-seater down to their final destination was generally the automatic choice for most associates (why go ground when you can skim?), but today Tessa wanted to make her way without avoiding indigenous contact, without avoiding the PRIMS and sids who populated Sac City.

Leaving the guarded cantonment at the center of the subsidiary, the solitary associate rattled along on a deteriorating local for more than an hour, still ever southward.

·          ·          ·

Once at the broken curb below the LR platform, Tessa quickly hailed an idle jitney with an old driver and his teenage son. They surely bought their banged-up prewar rover at auction, the woman concluded. Its faded navy blue paint showed the urban-gray color scheme of Security underneath.

“Sure, mizzy, sure?” the eager driver inquired. A thin, stooped PRIM, he counted it a blessing to have an associate grace his threadbare back seat. His tawny face was smooth except for a permanently wrinkled forehead common among PRIMS. “Sure y’wish, go there?” His brown eyes conveyed reluctance.

Such a noteworthy passenger, such a tenuous trajectory! The associate read his thoughts in the worry lines along his face, although she knew he could never have used such words. Father and son didn’t have language disks, Tessa noticed, so command of English was not expected. They were from off-continent, as so many PRIMS often were, an aspect of the prewar world that still existed.

“The way’s direct, even if far. And if it’s off your route, I’ll pay whatever’s fair.” Tessa was insistent; she had little choice. Only six vehicles, all in the same condition as this jitney, crept along the wide street they shared with scores of pedestrians and dozens of bikes. “I have the coordinates.”

The old PRIM knuckled under and offered Tessa a seat patched with duct tape. The boy lit two joss sticks poking out from the dash to mask any odor. In a trail of blue smoke, they were off, the driver and his son jabbering in a language Tessa didn’t recognize.

The glowing green of PRIM-disks at the back of their left hands reassured her.

·          ·          ·

Each click brought Tessa deeper into the surrounding subsidiary. Viewing her palm unit, she followed the progress of her journey down to the exact GPS coordinates.

Marsco precision.

Eventually, looking up from the unit’s screen, she watched the now-crowded street. A chaotic mesh of scooters and bicycles and a handful of other jitneys jammed the avenue. Several overloaded flat-beds moved through the jumble. They passed a pair of alcohol-fueled buses crawling along, both with riders precariously hanging on the outside. And always, ubiquitous rovers filled with Auxilliary personnel, Auxxies, patrolled.

The late afternoon was hot for mid-May, almost like full summer. The A/C wasn’t working, so the rover’s windows were open, one only partially, because it was cracked. When the jitney slowed amid a swell of humanity along the road, smells wafted into the interior: curry and sweet, pungent incense.

Old neighborhoods, inhabited once more, showed signs of revitalization, even if some dwellings needed fresh paint and window glass. Passing through this non-associate world, light years from the sparkling marble, glass, and chrome world she inhabited, Tessa felt a mix of power and exposure.

·          ·          ·

Estimating that her last leg would take about forty-five minutes, Tessa continuously checked her progress. As close to “on course, on time” as a Masco shuttle, she mused, given this antiquated equipment.

A twitch of her finger disk on her mobile palm unit opened her personal files. Three emails waited, all with disappointing news. Five more cadets, newly commissioned lieutenants, had been transferred to Security and Hygiene, their appointments to Flight School canceled. Marsco had a greater need, a pressing need, for patrol officers rather than shuttle pilots. She had access to no accurate numbers, but extrapolating from her own students, it seemed like 33% of this year’s graduating class had been sucked into the S and H. Last year’s total was a higher-than-normal 25%. Tessa had no firm verification of her numbers, only chilling rumors backed by her unofficial but conclusive stats.

Pulling her eyes up from the disappointing screen, she watched her driver’s head move as like an early century bobble-head on a dash. His son, an undersized teen, now sat silently. They were PRIMS, to be sure, ones working too hard to stay on the bottom, she noted, then grew ashamed of such standard-issue thoughts. She knew her father would offer an alternative theory—with sufficient evidence to appear totally logical—to counter her own Marsco-endorsed hypothesis.

It was easy, Tessa cautiously reassured herself, that as a Marsco associate she had put herself in the hands of PRIMS. Associates lived and worked in Marsco safe havens   (sectors and cantonments); their finger disks gave them total access to the Marsco Net thus unlimited access to every comfort and security imaginable. All of this, far from PRIMS. Sids, residents of subsidiaries, (those locales coupled with Marsco in the main), benefited from Marsco largess, but more than likely these sids were without finger disks and always without the elevated standards of a typical associate’s life.

And sids were a constant buffer for Marsco against PRIMS, both the residents themselves—who worked directly with PRIMS so an associate never had to—and the vast locations of their subsidiaries—these more than likely surrounded Marsco sectors. And these subsidiaries in turn shared tenuous borders with unincorporated zones, the lands of PRIMS. Unless an associate wanted to, actually went out of her way to, as Tessa had done today, an associate might live in a totally PRIM-free world.

The jitney traversed an area below the cantonment but one still well within regularly patrolled stoplines. Tessa’s palm screen gave her proof of that. Yet as she moved farther south, the sights changed radically. It did strike her though that this subsidiary had more than its share of PRIMS, and it showed signs of being more like an unincorporated zone than a true, thriving sid on a path to emulate Marsco success. A patina of dust covered everything, a layer of abandonment and despair. The air reeked of a teeming PRIM population, of feces, decay, and death.

Without warning, her palm lost all contact. Even com-link connections went dead. Tessa looked up in disbelief. “Stop, stop,” she shouted. “Pull over! You must’ve taken a wrong turn.”

The driver obeyed, but at the curb began to argue in that wheedling PRIM way when one of them is caught doing something underhanded. “Mizzy, sometin’ wrong? I know way, yes-yes.”

“You can’t be right!” She held up her palm unit to show him its display as though he would have no trouble following the downloaded map’s exact route. “We’re in a sid! Never to leave it! But look!”

The old PRIM knew to look around on an associate’s order.

This subsidiary sure seems mogged, the lieutenant thought. Dating from the late-twentieth century, mogged (coined by international troops patrolling Mogadishu) described scenes of the internal destruction of a society as legitimate governments and the rule of law failed. What had become an open wound and stark reality on the Horn of Africa a century back then became the wretched, dismal template for the prewar world, a world Marsco now ruled and vowed to restore.

Along the boulevards once known for their luxury, streetlights and traffic signals had long since been scavenged for metal. Here, late-twentieth century elegance and prosperity had been systematically dismantled by PRIM brick-gangs, the materials of the houses and shops used for makeshift dwellings that jammed the edge of the wide road. Barely functional habs. Tessa shuddered. Although she was moving through a location still designated by Marsco as a subsidiary area, it had all the unmistakable markings of an unincorporated zone.

“None of this makes sense,” she grumbled, half-blaming the driver.

She wasn’t positive, but she swore the son muttered to the back of his left hand, as though his PRIM-disk wasn’t a RFID transponder for tracking his movements but a mic, “It’s a Marsco world!”

No, he couldn’t have said that! She looked directly at the gaunt boy. Wouldn’t have dared to utter that.

“Bad-bad here,” the driver insisted nervously. “No understan’ y’that, mizzy,” he motioned to her palm unit. “But this—” he swung a roundhouse motion “—it’s been like ever-ever.”

“He is meaning, my father, beens this years and years,” the son added in feeble defense.

“Yes, year an’year,” echoed the old man.

Tessa shrugged, not defeated but confused. She knew that over the passing decades, with their series of asymmetrical urban wars, pandemic plagues, and dwindling populations, the late twenty-first century had given way to this aspect of the Marsco world. What associate didn’t know that?

“You wan’ go back, mizzy? Go back, Mar’co! All this no-no.” His brown eyes pleaded. His bronze brow wrinkled.

“No, carry on.” Sitting back in her seat, Tessa laid a reassuring hand on her Enfield.

·          ·          ·

The associate’s route grew increasingly crowded with small living spaces and scattered shops. Some were made of cannibalized building materials, tarps and plastic sheeting, corrugated metal, and planks. Here and there, high stone walls and steel gates stood at the entrance of larger, more permanent structures. Local warlords and thugs who ruled a few rundown city blocks, Tessa assumed. A bribe, a promise of compliance to Security, probably all it takes for an urban fiefdom. The streets throbbed with people and traffic, bicycles and mopeds, the crowd a mixed batch, an amalgam of sids and PRIMS.

The noise and snarled movement suddenly stopped as a Security Brad turned the wide corner. Tessa’s PRIM pulled to the side and waited. The associate, accustomed to taking matters into her own finger disks, got out and stood quietly beside the jitney as the armored personnel carrier approached.

Moving down the subdued street, the squat APC swung its non-lethal snout right and left, eyeing the crowd. Typical of Security, always watching. Although only meant to immobilize, its stunner and oozer nozzle looked sinister. The black Brad, four-times the size of the jitney, seemed to single out Tessa for scrutiny. A cam focused, lingered. After a pause, the patrol vehicle moved on, concluding that a uniformed associate must know her own business even down here.

“Do they come around often?” Tessa shouted above the returning street noise before her driver restarted his engine.

“Yes-yes, mizzy. Many patrols here. Keeps all saved here, it does.”

“All very goods here, safe yes-yes, and very, very goods,” added the boy, shouting to be heard. “Sid and PRIM here, goods all here.”

“Yes, no trouble Mar’co heres,” the father joined in, shaking his head eagerly, making up for his earlier complaints.

It’s all as incongruous as my crashed palm, Tessa thought. Yet, if this driver’s from around here, it’s no wonder he’s working so hard. He wants out, that’s for sure, and he has the initiative and self-determination to move up and away.

As their journey continued, the associate noted that a CCTV unit stood inconspicuously every few hundred meters, each a slender stanchion resembling a tall lamppost with a surveillance housing where the light dome should be. They were sacrosanct and never touched by sids or PRIMS. Throughout the Marsco world, CCTV devices, or I-ON-Us as they came to be called, were so omnipresent no one gave them any attention.

They, on the other hand, paid meticulous attention to everything.

·          ·          ·

Three clicks down the once-thriving boulevard, the broken macadam rose gradually up an incline, where a layer of dust seemed to thicken. In times past, at the crest of the rise the south road curved to join a larger transit system coming from the east. But today, Tessa was confronted by the sure signs that during the C-Wars this shallow valley had taken a direct V-hit.

The jitney slowed to a crawl, giving her a view of the stretching remains of this quarter of the city. Never a megalopolis like those lining the coast, at mid-century this was a sprawling metro area, influential in its own right, vital to the Continental Powers at their end. And always a significant military target.

But this suburb? What was here to merit a V-strike? She looked around a moment at the destruction. Explains the malfunct light rail, she noted without emotion.

The pavement ended where it had once joined the major thoroughfare. Up along the hillside, the cliffs had given way. Tessa was unable to judge if this was due to the initial Vanovara blast or the twenty-five years of disrepair since. Her jitney cautiously edged along where over the years tenuous traffic had made a compacted dirt road out of the remaining debris and hillside. Finally, after a forty-meter stretch, the unpaved route reached the remaining cement ribbon in a cleft through the west ridge.

Tessa turned in her seat to look back into the charred valley. Stanchions and supports for the old freeway stood stripped of suspended sections, lonely sentinels rising above the ruins they guarded. The Vanovara had exploded as an airburst above the crammed basin, flattening everything beneath its fireball. A comet nuclei composed of frozen methane blasted with dozens of kilotons of blinding force. Cracked pieces of the once-elevated pavement rested on the ground. The demolished buildings and rubble-strewn streets attested to the tremendous shockwave of that detonation.

The associate remembered her own early Academy lectures. V-1 type, comet head, methane, explosive. V-2 type, iron asteroid honed to a guidable shape, much smaller and used for precision hits.

“The ensuing fireball from a V-1 creates one of two situations,” her animated professor lectured a dozen years ago. “A firestorm or a conflagration—know the difference for Tuesday.”

In the Sac City Sid, Tessa clearly saw the evidence of a conflagration; the reaches of its all-consuming flames had scorched the hillside and continued in every direction.

“No matter which inferno, you want to avoid both,” whispered an older-looking cadet next to Tessa. His grin showed new braces, a post-sid luxury made possible by joining Marsco. “Grew up in the Chicago Sid,” he hastily explained under his breath.

“Took several hits, didn’t it?” another cadet asked, trying to occupy the dark-eyed young man all by herself.

“Closer to thirty-five, forty.”

The cadet with braces was Anthony Grizotti, born of sids, now a fledging associate.

“And so, Cadet Miller,” their prof stood over the three whispering plebes—hers was the only name he knew—“either way, you plebes are here at the Academy to make sure that this never, never happens again.”

·          ·          ·

In another twenty minutes, Tessa’s ride took her near an open-air market, close to a stopline and PRIM-accessible.

Inexplicably, she motioned for her driver to pull over. Even as he cautioned, “No-no, mizzy, no. Y’no stop here,” Tessa was out among the sids, PRIMS, and vendors. Scores of bartering booths covered a lot next to a deserted mall. If Tessa wanted lavish shopping, Seattle offered her everything. Here were rows of tables with last-century’s hand tools, clothes, farm produce, and MREs past code date but still edible.

Someone has an insider in Security, she realized, willing to fence.

Nothing appealed to her at first, and yet as she moved from kiosk to kiosk, the associate relished the freedom of a world so different from Marsco’s.

Leaving his son to guard the jitney, the driver hovered protectively behind Tessa at a respectful distance, his own quick PRIM eyes distrustful of so many other PRIMS around his missy.

They created an odd sight: a sole associate among a swarm of indigenous skinnies going about their frenetic bartering, and her PRIM trying to keep this unpredictable woman out of harm’s way. He knew if anything did happen to her, he would be blamed by Security. Thinking of that Brad, his mind raced, trying to avert any possible disaster.

Tessa stopped at a clothing stand; most of its pieces were PRIM-made and slightly flawed. The asking price jumped advantageously as the seller realized an associate had miraculously appeared with ready MMUs. Tessa’s eye fell on a gray cotton T-shirt with red block letters simply stating MARSCO, a standard-issue part of a plebe’s training uniform, unadorned with any patches or insignias. The one she chose had sleeves of slightly different lengths, unnoticeable without careful inspection.

Marsco had noticed.

Without haggling over the price, Tessa handed over a single Marsco Monetary Unit.

“Too-too, mizzy, too high,” her driver whispered hoarsely behind her. “PRIM hem douwn, mizzy! PRIM hem douwn!”

When she ignored him, he circled around her, acting as her mediator, waving his arms and grimacing.

Even as she moved to the next booth selling palm units three or four generations older than hers, and then the next with local jams and preserves, the driver’s appeals on her behalf continued. “Mizzy shouldda getta two deese,” he urged through broken teeth, grabbing up a shirt from a separate pile. The vendor, with judicious sidelong glances, cautioned against such a selection. She displayed the reverse side which verbally modified the front proclamation of “MARSCO,” stating simply, “SUCKS!”

Through her driver’s intercessions, Tessa received an additional single-worded, gray tee. Her protective old PRIM wouldn’t let her be cheated.

Her driver caught up to her amid other stalls selling individual items, barter items: bars of soap, bottles of shampoo, canned food, new and cleaned-up pots and pans, refurbished computers that couldn’t get anyone onto the Marsco Net but did minimumly function. Many products superior to these any associate in a sector or cantonment might order by the gross off the Marsco Net.

Tessa was sure, just beyond her vision, a black market offered more besides. Weapons and drugs and human flesh, undoubtedly: anything and everything to satisfy any vice.

As much as Marsco cracked down on such illicit sales, they flourished, festered. Although clearly designated as a sid, she thought back to her blank palm screen, it’s one not yet totally regulated. The noise of a mélange of languages hawked out in fits and starts, the shouts of merchants and buyers alike at grubby stalls, the knots and crowds of idle PRIMS both fascinated and depressed her. It could have been a scene from another century, not the end of the twenty-first.

Marsco has much housekeeping still to do, she thought.

With eager help from her driver, Tessa climbed back into the dented-up rover and was off.

·          ·          ·

The PRIM found his way instinctively. He kept to wider streets, slowing for the crowds that clogged them but running parallel to the main stopline on his left. He knew enough to cross only at a checkpoint and not to attempt any other way beyond.

Eventually, they slowed to approach a CP at an internal stopline. Another incongruity, the associate noted. Her download hadn’t designated either the in-sid line or its CP.

The fuel cell engine sputtered, not one of the finest the twenty-first century ever produced. Two S & H troopers suspiciously eyed the bent PRIM and his son. A barrier closed the stretching road to traffic, and beyond the gate Tessa saw few signs of habitation or postwar restoration.

Such a drastic change here within a subsidiary made no sense; by all Net accounts, she had never actually gone outside the sid. The look of this locale told her otherwise.

If anything, before her was a separation point between a subsidiary area and an unincorporated zone. If so, Marsco wasn’t web-reporting accurately. It made no sense to her that it was wrong. Making allowances, she rationalized that perhaps she simply misunderstood these sights before her.

To her left in the shade of a tall tree, a Brad sat with its menacing 20 mm weapon, not the usual McGrath stunner and Evans immobilizer ooze-nozzle like she had seen earlier. Leths had replaced non-leths. These Security troopers, clad in mottled cement-gray uniforms, all had shoulder-fired Enfields in addition to handhelds like hers. Besides being heavily armed, they were doing a job usually performed by Auxilliary units, Auxxies, who were recuited and trained by Marsco to keep the peace in subsidiaries. Someone’s expecting trouble, serious trouble.

Two rovers were parked near the armored vehicle, one having brought a meal out to the troopers. Half a dozen ate and relaxed to the side; another six eyed Tessa up and down. The contingent didn’t seem members of Marsco’s finest, the kind stationed in Seattle near Marsco HQ. These troopers had skinned their knuckles—and more—plying their trade here. Rotors in an I-ON-U housing whirred; a cam angle changed, focused.

Without hesitation, one hardened trooper was in the old driver’s face and retina-blinked him. He then had the gall to in-face Tessa as well, infuriating the officer.

Instantly, the trooper’s reader gave a green report on the driver. Tessa’s file acknowledged clearance notification and classified status, as expected for an associate and officer.

Her irritation changed slightly when she realized the retina system was up and running again. Only a few days before, Luddite hackers had phreaked the system, an all too common occurrence. Her own palm unit once more flickered to life, still reporting her inside Sac City and nowhere near a checkpoint.

The warrant officer in charge, realizing the jitney passenger intended to cross his stopline, barked at her, “Here on out, mizzy, s’nothing but RPA.”

The wide avenue beyond the checkpoint had become an unpaved road used mostly by PRIMS on scooters or bicycles. “Where y’up to anyway, wallah?” the haggard trooper drilled her without the expected Security courtesy. This wasn’t the heart of a Marsco sector; he needn’t bother with such niceties here.

“Is that how you address a superior officer, mister?” Tessa shot back. She leaned forward from the back seat so he could see her uniform better. The red piping and bars made it clear what he was dealing with. Had she been quicker to move forward, the retina scan would have been uncalled for.

The warrant officer remained unimpressed. He had his orders, and at his stopline, no one and nothing moved into this Random Patrol Area without his approval.

Tessa knew the routine, knew the way to circumvent this annoyance. She removed the cotton glove from her right hand. When that imposing array of finger disks failed to impress the warrant officer (a stubborn bastard to be sure, Tessa noted) she made a display of starting to remove the left-hand glove. She needn’t go that far. The warrant officer, a mere two-disk centurion with a three-centimeter PRIM-disk removal scar at the back of his left hand, relented. The former PRIM balked at crossing someone of Tessa’s status. With a resigned gesture, he signaled his troopers, who had finished eating, to raise the barrier. He knew when he was beaten.

But in one last act of defiance, the warrant officer stopped Tessa’s PRIMS, father and son, from moving on. “Him and him don’t have no clearance. Y’ll have to walk.” His smirk stated, Permission to enter granted, but upon more thoughtful-wise consideration, y’won’t go no further at all. Top that, wallah.

The Security warrant helped her out of the rover’s back seat, his Marsco courtesy suddenly oozing forth. It gave him an opportunity to admire her close up; his forced gallantry was worth the price to pay for that view. She was nothing like the PRIM skanks he poked, well out of his sphere. Fine T and A even in uniform, he futilely schemed, and as a bonus—no trace of the clap or crabs near her.

Tessa paid her driver and his son five MMUs, double what PRIMS might have expected from an associate, even a generous one. She gave the boy her second T-shirt. “Careful wi’that un, mizzy wallah,” the old man whispered earnestly but politely. “Y’know troopars,” he went on carefully through his broken-tooth grin. “If y’cross’em, they tak’t ou’ uv y’un way o’ another.”

As she turned to enter the RPA, the warrant cautioned her one last time. “Only thing out there,” he motioned emphatically, “is Indie sids, renegade PRIMS, and ol’ Doc Miller’s grange—you know, that gnarly crackpot.” He gave a smarmy grin. Don’t git your prime-osity of an ass in a bind, wallah; I haven’t the troopers nor inclination for any Air Cav nick-of-time rescues.

Tessa glared, replacing her right-hand glove and shouldering her pack.

Looking up at one of the troopers, she instantly saw her chance. Jumping to an aggressive, in-your-face stance, she eyed a young woman who stood slightly shorter but thicker set than her superior. Without taking her eyes off her victim, the officer shouted at the warrant, “Why’s this trooper out of uniform?”

The Security trooper—clearly of PRIM stock, her left-hand scar proved that—had a ring through one eyebrow.

Tessa didn’t let up. “She has a fishing lure over her damn right eye! Is that standard issue?” She pointed her glove hardly five centimeters away from the objectionable eyebrow. The grinning abruptly stopped as broken nails fumbled to remove the offensive facial ornament.

The commanding officer was speechless; the suddenness of this counterattack caught him flatfooted. “No, ma’am!” He eventually got out, “She’s new to my squad, ma’am!”

“No excuse, mister!”

The victim kept a vacant stare, knowing if she caught the officer’s eye, more hell would thunder down on her. Yet Tessa’s green eyes never left the woman’s, whose own were green as well. Like the officer’s, the trooper’s nose was bridged with freckles, more so since her duties brought her into the elements. The other woman could have been Tessa’s doppelganger. Had things been different, she might have been standing there, sweating under the glare of a fierce officer. It was that easy, Tessa knew, to be on the other side–the wrong side—of any stopline.

“Roger,” the warrant officer shouted into his com-link, “got yur back!” Ignoring Tessa’s glare-down, the detachment commander gathered his troopers, including the officer’s double. “There’s twenty-some PRIMS refusing to move back out! They’ve crossed the stopline six blocks to our east. Auxxies can’t get no co-op from ’em.”

The warrant glared at Tessa; it was his time to be in total control. “Take these four,” he ordered his second-in-command, “give Teri-Shay here,” he motioned at the eyebrow woman, “the SAW.” Tessa’s trooper ended up lugging the heavier squad automatic weapon, punishment of sorts for her unauthorized embellishment of the uniform. “Back up the Auxxies—but git them PRIMS out if they’re in here without authorization.”

Troopers hastily gathered gear, walking around Tessa as though she were no longer standing there.

“Auxxies visualled twenty,” the warrant explained to his second, “but disk-RFID has only a dozen.” A PRIM without a correctly working disk was in considerable trouble; PRIMS knew to report themselves to Security if their disk went from green to amber. Tampering with a PRIM disk was met with severe punishment, often expulsion from the PRIM’s home to some other dismal unincorporated zone half a world away.

“P-W/O-Ds!”

Tessa knew the seriousness of PRIMS without disks crossing a stopline and the capability of Security troopers backing up an Auxiliary patrol.

As troopers scrambled about, Tessa began walking away. When she stepped into the RPA beyond the gate, she heard a trooper yell at her jitney driver. “Git this kludgosity outta here!” The trooper’s voice was one of envy; he sensed that father and son would be leaving PRIM status by dint of their hard work together. The trooper’s father had lied about his son’s age and gave his own boy over to become an Auxxie at fourteen. Clearly this PRIMS’son was moving toward sid-level soon. Not by becoming a Security legionnaire after being forced into the Auxillary, either.

Tessa didn’t hear a trooper whisper to his warrant officer a caution, “Better watch how ya treat dem brass wallahs, dey get back a’ ya eve’time.”

Before she had gone far, a Security & Hygiene HFC skimmed slowly down the stopline. The hover flight craft glided thirty-five meters in the air, heavily armed, more so than usual. The HFC examined everything to its port and starboard, watching the barrier that kept things separate, categorically discrete. Only the two PRIMS bothered to watch it move down the stopline.

Thirty meters into the RPA, Tessa gave the bulge on her hip a reassuring tap. She was strapped and ready. As she walked farther beyond the checkpoint, she sensed the I-ON-U still focused on her.

·          ·          ·

As the associate paced herself for her final walk toward her father’s, her first visit in three years was steadily growing to be more trouble than it was worth.

In the past, she had come by lander from Seattle to the cantonment. Ordinarily, this last leg from city center to the grange was a quick HFC skim. Those had been uneventful jaunts she made regularly every few months over the past several years until her visits abruptly ended when she took a faculty position at the Academy. By skimming over subsidiary checkpoints, she kept herself from witnessing what she had seen this trip. Today’s more lengthy and tactile travels showed her that an abrupt change was going down, a change with Marsco’s veiled iron fist behind it. It was a realization that most associates, zipping sector to sector, kept at bay.

The troopers at the checkpoint carried Enfields. Any random Auxiliary patrols she had previously encountered in the sid green zone were armed only with non-leths, show-of-force deterrents more than anything else. Troopers stayed in the distance. Today was atypical, as the heavily armed contingent at the CP showed.

A palpable change, Tessa noted.

Preparing to meet her father, she let the troopers at the stopline fade from her mind.

As she continued on, she passed next to thick, guarding hedgerows and jagged walls of scavenged stone that surrounded several isolated granges. Out here, hardscrabble farmers needed each other, but they still relished the notion of independence from everything, especially Marsco.

Before the twenty-first century plagues had decimated the population, these remote residences stood on several-acre plots. From the first, their owners relished seclusion and grand architectural statements. These trophy estates had HFC landing pads and hangers, artificial lakes with faux waterfalls and gaudy fountains, and even small replicas of Greco-Roman or Oriental temples in their rambling gardens. European manors transplanted to a different continent and era, each far removed from the polluted, congested city to the north.

Eventually, Independents claimed the abandoned lands to make a stab at primitive farming.

Until the C-Wars disabled the interconnected tech-world, which Marsco was working to restore, earthmovers and heavy tractors had re-contoured the land. After the Wars, PRIM gangs worked the decorative landscape into something useful, salvaging what they could by hand. Each grange reclaimed an expansive house and possibly a garage or two for adaptive barns. In these hedge-surrounded farms, showcase lawns and gardens were slowly transformed into cultivated fields and pastures. Swimming pools were chipped into pieces then filled in or were used as cisterns, the great irrigation system of the last century having been destroyed in the C-Wars.

Another click on past the first grange, the solitary associate walked through a desolate area that still showed signs of the neglected mid-century community it once had been. She stepped over a stretch of a crumbling bike path and around an open storm drain sprouting tufts of thistle. This was not, she realized, the prime farmland of the Food Consortium.

“He’p a fella’, missy wallah,” a PRIM voice burst forth at her from under a thorn bush next to the path. The spiny hedge enclosed a grange close to her father’s.

Tessa’s first reaction was disbelief—that a PRIM might bother a uniformed associate. Her second thought, simultaneous with the first, was to shift her hand to the Enfield’s grip, taking no chances. The weapon hissed its distinctive recharge venting; its targeting laser blinking red on the PRIM’s chest. She was alone, without backup, out here many clicks from anyone or anything Marsco. A soft target. She also carried items easily disposed of on the black market—her palm unit, her backpack, the Enfield.

The lone associate assessed the situation. The old PRIM probably picked up day labor locally, but with most spring planting done on the larger granges, little extra help was needed. He held his palms up, showing he wasn’t armed, a submissive gesture. His PRIM-disk glowed green although the scars at the fingertips of his right hand indicated he once had implanted disks, just like Tessa and everyone else fully functional in the Marsco world.

Clearly, she realized, he’s had DRP. Disk Removal Procedure, the stripping of disks, was common practice after the Continental Wars, during the purges of the Troubled Times immediately after the Armistice. Quite painful if forced and especially painful because of its lifetime repercussions, even if voluntary.

While a PRIM without finger disks was axiomatic—only one type of implant awaited PRIMS—his assertiveness wasn’t.

This one was Tessa’s father’s age but beaten down by hardship and privation. According to Marsco, all subsidiary areas worldwide were thriving once more. But even so, she realized that PRIM life was relentlessly grinding.

It’s especially arduous for someone stripped of FDs, for someone deleted from the Marsco world or its subsidiaries—but that’s just the way things are, Tessa thought, forcing herself to be numb to that conclusion.

Then, her associate’s training gave way to her parents’ attitude toward PRIMS. She offered a five-unit token, not a credit strip, which he could hardly be expected to spend.

As quickly as the PRIM had appeared, he vanished into his bush, leaving the path ahead clear. That would never happen near a sector or in a cantonment, she knew, thinking once more as an associate.

The begging didn’t bother her; the five MMUs were hardly a widow’s mite. What bothered her was the interruption itself. Approaching her father’s home always took a certain degree of steeling herself, psyching herself to enter his world. Part of that preparation was why she chose the bullet instead of the expeditious lander. Returning had never been easy; her extended absence only made it worse.

She stopped 200 meters from the grange. First as an undergraduate at the Academy, and then as a graduate student at the Marsco Institute of Technology, she had regularly made this trip. Today, she was making her visit out of duty to her father and respect for her parents, although her mother had been dead nine years.

Nonetheless, as her uniform attested, she was crossing into his world not only as a daughter but also as a symbol of all that he had rejected.

Tessa knew the Marsco world was filled with incongruities. But the greatest symbol of that world wasn’t her uniform, it was her finger disks, and her father—a lefter still—sported all his. Yet another incongruity among innumerable others.

Uncharacteristically for anyone who constantly used disks without paying the slightest attention to them, Tessa stood a moment to think about hers. Removing her right cotton glove, she turned her palm upward to examine the blue-green disks implanted under her epidermis. That hand had eight disks at the fingertips and on the phalanges, an impressive array. Her index finger disk, always the prime, held her identity in Marsco and opened the world to her as nothing else on- or off-planet did. Her disks had a functionality completely opposite that of a PRIM-disk; hers expanded, not closed off, everything.

Months before, her father had sent her a portion of a history of Marsco that he was writing. One file “The Development of Finger Mouse and Finger Disk Technologies,” sat in a folder, essentially unread. She had dutifully clicked through it once, a cursory glance. But she excused herself from delving into the piece by noting how busy teaching and her unfinished dissertation kept her.

Miller dwelt on history, his daughter conceded, while she dwelt with the here and now—this was the Marsco world she had inherited, that was all.

But Tessa accepted one part of her father’s historical theory, his assertion that finger disks and Marsco were inexorably linked. Granted, some high-ranking sids might utilize mid-century finger mouse technology if they didn’t sport a few right-only disks, but for the most part, computer access came with an implant and, more likely than not, only with an implant. This was the central reality every associate accepted as part of the world.

A world her father, after a stunning thirty-year career, had rejected.

Doctor Walter C. Miller chose instead to live outside Sac City, well beyond its thriving cantonment at the subsidiary’s core, and to settle in an oddly defined gray area almost inside a conjoined unincorporated zone itself. He stayed amid autonomous neighbors who made a sort-of life for themselves, not as associates or sids or PRIMS.

Taking in a deep breath, Tessa slowly walked along a dirt road that once had been a winding, shady avenue. As she approached her father’s residence, an incongruous, fully functional I-ON-U rose above the height of the grange. Of early-century design, this stanchion initially had been placed on a bridge or in a city center for illumination. It had all the tech pieces to serve that function, including a solar panel generating enough power for continuous service, but here it lit up no passing traffic. Near its top, a surveillance cam in an onion-shaped housing focused down into Miller’s grange.

Why can’t it just leave him alone?

Tessa already knew the answer.