Vigilant

SNAKE-BELLY

Link-seeds are handy for giving evidence. The world-soul asked my permission, then downloaded everything I’d witnessed, straight from my brain. Soon, Protection Central had a VR repro of everything I’d been through — the smell of the acid, the howl of alarms. Might have been a big seller on the entertainment nets if the Vigil didn’t have rules against that sort of thing.

In Cabot Park, the cops dredged Coal Smear Creek for the remains of the male android, while another team bagged up the soggy mess in Pump Station 3. (When the female android self-destructed, flying bits of her had perforated five of the plant’s water vats. Much spillage. It was only luck the whole blessed petting zoo wasn’t washed away.)

Similar investigations revved up all over the world — everywhere proctors got killed — and by the end of the day, detectives had accumulated enough evidence to affect continental drift. By then there was an official task force coordinating the work, trying to avoid pissing contests between federals and locals. Meanwhile, all levels of government had bitten their nails to the quick, worrying the Vigil would throw a tantrum demanding Immediate Action Now.

Of course we didn’t. How would that be productive? But you can bet good money, there were suddenly a lot more proctors exercising their constitutional responsibility to scrutinize police activities.

The local detectives treated me like velvet. I might have had a few less-than-friendly run-ins with police in the past, but now I was a member of the Vigil, and respectable as mother’s milk. On the other hand, the appearance of the tube of light — that thing I’d started to call the Peacock’s Tail because of its colors — well, a mystery like that set conservative cop nerves on edge. What was it? Did I have any guesses? Could the investigators maybe I dismiss it as hallucination, a delusion brought on by terror, stress, and my newly implanted link-seed?

I could only shrug; I saw what I saw. If they wanted a dissertation on link-seed side effects, ask a neurologist.

(Of course I could have retrieved some clinical data myself. Reams of it. The Vigil’s databanks were full to bursting with case studies, every possible way link-seeds could bugger your brain. But I didn’t try access the information. You know why.)

The reports released to the media said nothing about the Peacock’s Tail. Not that the cops wanted to suggest this tube-of-light business was a figment of my imagination. Three different detectives made a point of telling me it was Standard Police Procedure to withhold a few details of any crime. Yeah. Sure.

My family wanted me to quit the Vigil. "At least ask for a leave of absence," Winston suggested, "till they catch this bastard who’s mucking about with robots."

If I begged off on a leave of absence, I knew I’d never go back. And I’d still have poison ivy in my brain.

"No," I said.

We were in Winston’s private dome — all seven of my spouses sitting worried around the dome’s circumference, with me in the middle. Our Faye in the hot seat. Concern pressing in on me… like the bad old days at sixteen, when my friends watched me trolling the streets for trouble. Later, age nineteen, as we kicked around the thought of getting married, all seven of them took me aside, each by each, to murmur, "You won’t be too crazy, will you, Faye? You’ve got the angries out of your system? You won’t make us all widows?"

"No," I told them all now in Winston’s dome. "You don’t have to fret about me."

Which is what I used to say in the bad old days.

Back then, I believed myself. After every scrape, I believed I’d finally scrounged up the wisdom and willpower to keep my head straight. Eventually, it even became true.

Now… someone was killing proctors. Maybe someone who’d be fuming I got away.

"I’ll be all right," I said. "Really."

They all looked back at me with old, haunted eyes.

I swore I’d push on with my scrutiny of Bon Cty Ccl 11-28; but the mayor withdrew the bill pending amendments by the Department of Works. When the female robot blew herself up, the explosion had caused structural damage to Pump Station 3. No holes, just cracks… but enough for the place to be declared unsafe. Now the engineers were chewing their pencils, deciding whether to shore up the walls or tear them down completely: maybe rebuild something bigger and better on the same site.

Whichever way things shook out, it meant shuffling budgets and priorities… not just for the public works, but in all city departments. The mayor’s office sent a polite note to the Vigil, saying it might be weeks before any new bills were presented to council. Ergo, we’d have no pressing scrutinies for a while. Nothing but bread-and-butter business happening at city hall: selling dog licenses, keeping the proto-nute flowing. Take a well-deserved vacation, folks.

You had to wonder if the mayor was afraid more proctors would get blown up on city property.

The Oolom cemetery sat a good ways outside Bonaventure city limits — in the tundra forest, where every footstep got muffled by frost-green carpet moss.

I liked the quiet. Serene. Somber. No hint of maudlin.

Homo sap cemeteries were another story. Most looked like tarted-up boneyards — young as their fresh paint and thinly populated. Our species hadn’t lived long enough on Demoth to lose our oldest generation. Just accident victims like my father.

Dads had been buried in an empty field outside Sallysweet River: no trees, no Other gravestones, just a hectare of uncut yellow-grass with a coffin-sized hole in the middle. The only field near town with deep enough soil to dig a decent grave.

But at Chappalar’s interment, we had moss and trees and silence.

The thaw was four days old now. You could still see snow streaks hiding in crannies, but the open areas were clear and dry. If you pressed down hard with one foot, you could hear mud squishing under the moss. I don’t know why I kept doing that.

All the Bonaventure proctors came to the funeral, of course. Plus an Oolom I didn’t recognize — an older man wearing shade-mist goggles. My jaw clenched like stone at the sight of those goggles; they were worn by plague victims who’d never regained use of their eyelids. The goggles kept out dust, and preserved corneal humidity by spritzing up a wisp of mist every so often. In bright light they darkened: an artificial squint.

Simple things, those goggles. Not sinister — just a practical solution to a low-grade problem. But. They brought back unwanted memories of the Circus. A hundred and twenty white-on-white Ooloms wearing the same kind of goggles under the Big Top.

"Who’s the stranger?" I whispered to the person beside me: Jupkur, an Oolom proctor who’d taken my arm as we walked to the burial site.

Jupkur followed my gaze, then let his eyes slip past to pretend he hadn’t been staring. "Master Tic," Jupkur replied, barely mouthing the words. "Just arrived to replace Chappalar."

"He’s a master proctor?"

"Yes."

"And they bungholed him to Bonaventure?"

"Yes."

Jupkur turned away quickly and made some lame remark about the weather to the person on his other side. I took the hint… but only for here and now. Next time I got Jupkur in private, I’d coax the full story out of him.

Here’s the thing: the Vigil only granted the title "master" to a handful of people every generation — the keenest, the brightest, the best. Master proctors never got short-sheeted down to city politics, especially not to drowsy towns like Bonaventure. They scrutinized the world government and interplanetary affairs… like the trade treaty currently being hammered out between Demoth and the Divian Free Republic.

So what was a master proctor doing here? Whose wife had he been caught diddling?

Then again, you didn’t blackball an exalted master just for being caught on the wrong side of a bedroom door. And your average master proctor wasn’t interested in bed-hopping anyway — they were supposedly so near sainthood, you could use their peckers as night-lights.

If this Master Tic had got sent to Bonaventure, it was because the Vigil dearly wanted him here. Because there was important work for him to do.

What work? Especially with our city council on hiatus for a few weeks.

It had to be something to do with Chappalar’s death. And with the only proctor who’d survived the robot attacks.

My skin got a case of the goosecreeps. I had a feeling I’d be seeing a lot more of Master Tic’s goggly eyes in the days to come.

At the gravesite, Chappalar’s family had already planted the roots of a snake-belly palm. It was a native Demoth tree and lightning fast-growing under the right conditions. In tropical jungles, a snake-belly would seed itself at the base of another tree, then climb that tree’s exterior in a solid sheath, like a snake swallowing the host tree trunk from the ground up. With enough water and sunlight, a snake-belly could sprout up a hand’s breadth every day — just a reed-thin shell around the host, letting the inner trunk sustain all the weight. Typical parasite behavior. Once in place, the snake-belly would digest the host trunk it had swallowed, little by little creating wood of its own from the outside in… till after a few decades, the host was fully consumed, leaving only a snake-belly with a solid wood core.

Down south, snake-bellies could grow around other snake-bellies, growing around their swallowed-up hosts. In the Pistolet Museum, they had a stump showing five separate snake-bellies in concentric rings round a toothpick core of original raspfeather.

In the Bonaventure Cemetery, we’d soon have a single snake-belly round a core of Chappalar.

They’d wrapped his body in a shroud of froth white silk. Half a dozen Oolom mourners had turned white themselves, though they stood on light green moss… the phenomenon of sympathetic transference, taking on someone else’s color in moments of heart-deep emotion. I wished I could go white with them, to show Chappalar/his family/myself that I truly felt the grief. But I stayed lumpishly Faye-colored as the pallbearers eased the body onto a wooden support stand atop the snake-belly roots.

A single Oolom child toddled forward and splashed soupy brown juice on the plant at Chappalar’s feet. Jupkur whispered that the liquid was fertilizer, laced with a mix of growth hormones. In a week, the tree would have swallowed Chappalar up to the ankles. By fall, the whole corpse would be wrapped in a snake-belly sheath. In thirty years give or take, my friend Chappalar, the man who died saving my life, would be entirely absorbed by the tree.

Even his bones. Ooloms have such precious lightweight bones.

Around us, no ornamental landscaping, no headstones, no crypts — just a forest of snake-belly palms, each one the height of a person.

By the end of the burial service, every Oolom was sympathetic white… all but Master Tic. That irked me: a peevish indignation on Chappalar’s behalf. I’d turn white if I could; why didn’t Tic?

To be fair, it wasn’t Tic’s fault: Oolom color changes aren’t consciously controlled. For Tic to turn white, he’d have to be overcome with grief — not likely, considering he’d never even met Chappalar. Tic had come to the funeral out of courtesy, showing polite respect… who could ask more?

I could. Seething-steaming-indignant.

Whenever I go to a funeral, there’s always something that makes me furious.

Ooloms don’t do tea and sympathy after a funeral. Instead, Chappalar’s family and the Oolom proctors glided off to the cemetery chapel, where (Jupkur said), "We’ll pray for just hours and hours. The priests’ major source of income is selling knee pads."

Jupkur hated to speak seriously about anything; but he wasn’t the only Oolom who turned jokily offhanded when the subject of religion came up. Ooloms didn’t talk to humans about what they believed — none of them did. Maybe that was an article of their faith, keeping mum in front of outsiders. An article of all their faiths, I should say… because whatever their religion was, it had three major denominations, plus various splinter groups. Each sect identified itself by a gobbledygook name that no one ever translated into English.

Secretive bunch, those Ooloms.

So the Ooloms went off by themselves, leaving me to walk home alone. A couple hours on foot through the countryside. Of course, the other human proctors offered me rides; but I hadn’t trekked through open tundra in years, and the quiet of it suddenly called to me. Being out among the trees, breathing the wet smell of spring, I’d been grabbed by a bubbly heartache for girlhood — for times long ago in Sallysweet River, where you could follow the Bullet tracks five minutes out of town and feel all alone on the planet.

Solitude. The rustle of trees. The pip-pip of crawler-birds slinking over the forest floor.

Just me.

Just me and my link-seed.

Okay. I can almost hear you groaning, Where’s your head, woman? Three days ago some slip-wit tried to kill you, and now you want to isolate yourself in an empty forest?

Good point.

I could make up excuses. I could put on the blather, how Demoth was a peaceful planet where assassinations didn’t happen… not often, anyway. Women didn’t need armed escorts to spend a therapeutic afternoon walking through the woods. What happened three days earlier was a fluke, the once-in-a-lifetime act of a crazed fanatic who’d soon be caught by the cops.

I could surely lie to you. But damn my link-seed, I couldn’t lie to myself.

Here’s the thing: deep down, I wanted to give the killer another shot. To see what would happen. It was another freckles-and-scalpel thing.

So I walked alone. Just to see.

I avoided the road — the woods were dry enough for walking, both the carpet-moss parts and the spots where yellow-grass could get a foothold. (Yellow-grass always grows close to water. Seen from a flying skimmer, every lake and river on Great St. Caspian has a lemon-colored fringe, like fatty buildup on the wall of an artery… but the yellow stretch fades to the frost green of carpet moss the farther you go into deep forest.)

I didn’t fret about getting lost — I could track myself by the sun. And come evening, there’d be the lights of the city to spot by the glow. This was a tundra forest… not thick stands of timber blocking the sky, but individual bluebarrel trees, well separated from each other. Any seed that rooted too close to an existing tree just wouldn’t grow. Wouldn’t get enough light, wouldn’t get enough nutrition from the gaunt soil.

In my mood, that seemed like a metaphor for something.

I dawdled away the afternoon. Nothing to see but stunted bluebarrel trees and lumpy-bumpy moss interrupted by the occasional upthrust of stone.

In one slab of rock, I found a house-sized rectangle cut straight into the stone. At one time it must have been two stories deep, though now it was three-quarters full of dirt and weeds. A leftover from pre-Oolom settlements some three thousand years old. Demoth never evolved intelligent species of its own, but aliens from the League had visited now and then in the past — setting up outposts for a while, then moving on when they lost interest in our poky little planet.

Great St. Caspian had hosted thousands of such visitors; their householes were everywhere, mostly filled in and earthed over now, with whatever had spilled into them during the past three millennia. The aliens dug mines and tunnels too. In Sallysweet River we used to play "Archaeologists Bold," excavating the nearby holes to find rusty metal junk of all shapes and sizes. We’d badger our parents to call the Heritage Board, convinced that we’d dug up priceless alien artifacts… but nothing ever came of it. The board had long ago surveyed a handful of sites and found nothing of interest. Nothing worthy of publication in a good academic journal. So now the Heritage Board ignored the ruins — dismissed anyone who wasted time snooping about in them.

Mistake. The Vigil would never have allowed such book-blinkered sloppiness. But the Heritage Board answered to the Technocracy, not local government, so it was beyond our scrutiny.

Mistake, mistake, mistake.

Sunset was coming on purple and peach when a skimmer flew over my head. It wasn’t the first I’d heard in the day, but the others were distant hums tracking the ocean coast or the Bullet tracks to the interior — probably families off on an outing, playing hooky now that the thaw had come. This new skimmer was sailing straight over the treetops of barren forest… and it had Outward Fleet insignia painted on its side.

Queer thing, that. The navy had only one base on Demoth, way down by the equator near Snug Harbor. And navy personnel seldom found cause to venture out to the rest of the planet; the base was mostly a dormitory for safety inspectors who met incoming starships at our orbitals.

A loudspeaker boomed from the skimmer’s belly: "Faye Smallwood?"

Damn. So much for a quiet walk in the woods.

Steeling myself, I did the obvious — stoked up my link-seed and contacted the world-soul. Has the Outward Fleet filed flight plans for craft in the Bonaventure area?

The world-soul didn’t answer with words; but my brain suddenly knew for a certainty, no plans had been filed. Some other time I’d worry how creepy that was, having knowledge planted straight into my head. For now, the skimmer was my immediate problem. Either the Admiralty was running a secret op with my name on it, or I was on the verge of being ambushed by a wolf in fleet clothing.

"Faye Smallwood!" the loudspeaker called again.

"Who’s asking?" I shouted back.

The skimmer was hovering now, its engine wash vibrating the bluebarrels around me. Their fat, hollow trunks began to resonate, producing deep growly notes as pure as a forest of bass viols.

The skimmer’s side hatch opened. A man wearing gold fatigues leaned out with something in his hand.

Yet another pistol. Not a jelly gun this time; a hypersonic stunner, like Explorers use in fic-chips.

In the chips, stunners make an edgy whirring sound. I didn’t stay conscious long enough to hear it.

Headache. Muddy. 6.1 on the Hangover Scale. What you get from mixing wine, tequila, and screech.

I’d had worse. And this time I woke up alone, with no beer-breath stranger lying comatose on my arm, cutting off the circulation.

A tastefully darkened room. A soft cot beneath me. No smell of vomit anywhere.

Compared to the bad old days, this was bubble-bath luxury. Not to mention, I still had clothes on… no need for a head-throbbing pantie search, terrified the other person might wake up before I got out the door.

I stood up. Not all that shakily. More than twenty years since my last debauch, but the rough-and-ready reflexes still kicked in: mining-town girl.

"Would you like something for the pain?" a male voice asked. It came from nowhere — a speaker hidden somewhere in the darkness.

"You call this pain?" I scoffed. "Ya big mainstream crybaby." I could tell this guy was mainstream from his accent: an oh-so-civilized Core-World featherweight who’d shrivel up dead if he ever caught a genuine hangover. "So what’s the point of kidnapping me?" I demanded… keeping my voice loud so my captors wouldn’t think I was some fragile flower on the point of collapse.

A door in the wall opened silently, letting in a dagger of bright light. Two men entered, and the door slid shut again, no noise. Both newcomers wore glittery gold-fabric uniforms; it made them easier to see in the returning darkness.

"You haven’t been kidnapped," one of the men said. "You’re voluntarily helping us with important research."

"What research?"

Neither man answered straightaway. I wished I could see their faces — whether they were looking at me like a person or a piece of raw meat. That might have helped me guess if they were real navymen or killers who had nabbed me for interrogation. Ready to torture me for information on the Vigil, to help them murder more proctors.

And speaking of information…

Protection Central! I called over my link-seed. Kidnappers…

It was like shouting into a pillow. Muffled emptiness. Mentally I yelled, Respond!

Nothing. Silence.

Something electronic beeped in the far corner of the room. Something that must have been listening for radio transmissions from my brain.

"Ah," said one of the gold-suited men. "You’ve finally tried to use your link. So you realize it’s not going to help."

"We’re jamming it," the other one added. "This entire house is insulated from the datasphere."

That shouldn’t have been a great surprise. Anyone who’d studied the Vigil would know to take precautions. "Well then," I said, "what do you want?"

A light sprang up in the middle of the darkened room. It began as a pinprick but fast expanded to a life-size hologram of two androids, a Peacock’s Tail, and a fear-eyed yours truly… a first-rate mock-up that had to be based on the download from my brain. The holo images were projected across my body, across the cot beside me, across the two men who’d come through the door; I happened to be standing half-in/half-out of the female robot. Stubbornly, I stayed where I was — flinching would have made me look like a nelly.

One of the men stepped forward…

Hold on a second. I need some breezy way of distinguishing my two captors — calling one Tall and one Short, something along those lines. But they were both of identical height, both wearing identical uniforms, both sporting identical haircuts: as close to twins as people can get when they don’t actually look the same. All I can think to call them is the Mouth and the Muscle… because one couldn’t stop yapping while the other mostly loomed quiet as a hoar falcon biding its time.

So the Mouth stepped forward. He made a point of walking straight through the hologram of me, briefly disrupting my laser-projected image into a random scramble of pixels. Then he aimed his finger straight at the peacock tube. "Do you know what that is, Ms. Smallwood?"

"No."

The Mouth sneered in disbelief. Not many men can actually manage a sneer — they might glower or grimace, but they don’t have the degree of self-involvement required for an out-and-out sneer. The Mouth looked as if he’d practiced sneering in a mirror till he got something he really liked. "This," he said, pointing to the peacock tube, "is a miniature Worm field. Colloquially called a Sperm-field, or Sperm-tail. Do you know what that is?"

"We use Sperm-tails as transport sleeves to our local orbitals," I answered. "They’re also used in starship drives."

I stared at the peacock again. "But the Bonaventure sleeve is white."

"Sperm-fields look white when they’re stabilized," the Mouth said, "like planetary transport tubes, or a starship envelope after it’s properly aligned. But with an unanchored Sperm, you get flutter around the edges. Makes a characteristic diffraction pattern." He pointed again to the peacock tube.

"Okay," I shrugged, "it’s a Sperm-field. So what?"

"So what?" the Mouth repeated, as if I’d only asked the question to antagonize him. "So where did it come from? There’s no Sperm-field generator in the picture!"

"None that we can see," the Muscle put in. "It could be miniaturized."

The Mouth glared at him. This was obviously a point of contention between the two men… and a precious petulant contention at that. Mouth took a slow and deliberate breath, the picture of a man exercising colossal restraint in the face of grievous tests to his patience. I bet he practiced that look in the mirror too. "The point is," Mouth told me, "current Technocracy science could not create a Sperm-field in the situation you see here. It came out of nowhere…"

"Nowhere big enough to see," the Muscle muttered.

"It came from no discernible field generator," the Mouth said testily, "it immediately shaped itself into a smooth arc without any apparent control magnets, and it ended in a well-defined aperture that held its position for 1.6 seconds without any equipment to anchor it in place!"

He stared at me triumphantly, as if he’d just scored some telling knockout in a political debate.

Ooo. Posturing. As a Vigil member, I’d never seen that before.

I spoke mildly. "I take it those things you listed are unusual for Sperm-fields."

"Unusual? They’re impossible!" the Mouth snapped.

"At least we don’t know how to do them," the Muscle said under his breath.

The Mouth gave Muscle another hissy glare, then slapped his hand through the hologram peacock. His skin fuzzed with green-and-purple streaks. "Ms. Smallwood," the Mouth said, "this is a matter of great concern to the Admiralty. When Outward Fleet personnel saw the news broadcasts of what happened to you…"

"This was never broadcast," I interrupted.

The Mouth looked at the Muscle. The Muscle shrugged.

"When the Outward Fleet obtained this hologram from the police," the Mouth said loftily, not looking me in the eye, "there was immediate concern. The base commander on Demoth contacted the High Council of Admirals, and the council dispatched us to investigate this matter strenuously."

"Strenuously?" I repeated. If I were an admiral, I wouldn’t trust these two with that kind of adverb.

"It’s a matter of security," the Muscle said with a straight face. "The security of the entire human species."

"Because someone pulled a trick you can’t imitate?"

"Ms. Smallwood," the Mouth said, pushing to regain his place as the center of attention, "if this hologram is accurate, someone is employing inhumanly advanced science on a Technocracy world. Your world, Ms. Smallwood. Doesn’t that worry you?"

"Why should it? The Sperm-field saved my life."

"She’s got a point," the Muscle murmured.

"Do you mind?" Mouth tried to give his partner a withering glare. He hadn’t spent enough time practicing the "wither" part — probably too busy working on his sneer. Mouth’s prissy little stare bounced off the Muscle like a wad of soggy tissue.

"Look," I said in my most reasonable voice, "we all know the League of Peoples includes races that are millions of years beyond human technology. Millions of years smarter, millions of years more evolved. I thought it was conventional wisdom that someone was always keeping an eye on humanity. ‘Invisibly walking among us’… even the Admiralty uses that phrase."

"League members may walk among us," the Mouth sniffed, "but they never do anything. If there are invisible aliens wandering through the Technocracy, Ms. Smallwood, they don’t stop children from drowning. They don’t call local police to tell who’s behind a string of serial murders, and they don’t show up in court to explain who’s innocent or guilty. So why should they work a miracle to help you?"

Good question, that. I’d asked it now and then myself in the past few days. "I don’t know," I said.

"We can’t accept that answer," Mouth told me. "The High Council gets extremely agitated at the thought of unknown aliens taking action on Technocracy planets. Especially when it involves political figures like you."

I snorted. "I’m not a political figure."

"You’re part of Demoth’s political system, Ms. Smallwood. And the Technocracy’s charter from the League of Peoples prohibits the League from trying to influence our internal governments."

Hogwash. I’d studied the charter during my Vigil training. The League could and would put the boot to human governments at every level if they thought our race was turning non-sentient. On the other hand, why waste breath giving these dickweeds a lecture on law? "What am I here for?" I asked as calmly as I could. "The way you’ve created this hologram, you must have hacked the full VR recording from the police databanks. That means you know everything I saw and heard. What else do you expect to get out of me?"

The Mouth smiled nastily. Close to a sneer but more smugness. "How about a confession this was all a hoax?"

"It wasn’t," I snapped. "If you want to see the acid burns on Chappalar’s body, let’s you and me take a trip to the cemetery."

"Ms. Smallwood," the Muscle said in a voice that had the decency to sound abashed, "there’s no question Proctor Chappalar died from third-degree burns. But we have to worry about…" He jabbed his thumb in the direction of the Peacock. "We need to know if that’s real or if someone is trying to trick us."

"How could I trick you? This is a direct download from my brain."

The Mouth sneered. Again. Falling back on the tried-and-true strengths of his facial repertoire. "Things can be loaded into your brain as well as out of it," he said. "Link-seeds are two-way technology."

"It could have been done without your knowledge," the Muscle added. "The Vigil has protected your brain with safety locks, but no security is perfect. Someone could have pumped that whole scenario into your mind; you wouldn’t know the difference between planted images and real life."

Blah, blah, blah. As if we hadn’t discussed this a thousand times at the College Vigilant. Yes, it could be done… with the right equipment and at least a day of finessing past the security blocks. And yes, the idea of someone jacking into my brain gave me the white willies if I thought about it too long. But Christ Almighty, you could brainwash anyone, given enough time. And if ever someone did try to monkey with our link-seeds, the world-soul would notice the next time we made contact. Digital signatures and all that.

"Look," I said, "I’ve only had my link-seed for a few weeks… and the Vigil’s been watching it very close for medical reasons. No one could have tampered with me."

"Except the Vigil itself," Mouth said. "When it had you in its hands for two weeks during mushor. They could have done anything to you."

"They didn’t."

"Of course, that’s what you’d believe." The Mouth gave me a nasty smile. As if petty innuendo was enough to stir up mistrust.

I sighed. "Mushor ended two weeks before the mess at the pump station. How could the Vigil plant false memories of something that hadn’t happened yet?"

"It could be done," the Mouth answered airily. Fair unconvincing too. Which told me these chumps had already decided on their course of action, and weren’t going to heed any argument against.

"Look," I said, "what’s this all about really? What do you think you’re going to do?"

"We’re going to shunt into your brain," the Mouth answered. Gloating. "We’re going to verify whether these Sperm-tail images were put in artificially. If someone has scribbled on your cerebellum, there should be obvious differences between the implanted memories and naturally acquired ones. Obvious to us if not to you. My partner and I will go in to check."

"You want to access me?" I growled.

"That’s it."

"Like hell you will."

The Mouth favored me with another nasty smile. "This is not an optional exercise, Ms. Smallwood. The Admiralty has authorized us to conduct this investigation however we deem necessary. If you won’t confess to this being a hoax…"

"Or if you can’t," the Muscle put in. "Then we’ll crack you open for a look-see." I stared at them. The only light in the room was the glow of the hologram, casting a yellowish gleam on their faces. The Mouth wore the leer of a man who’d enjoy violating me; the Muscle had a noncommittal look, neither eager nor uncomfortable. He’d do what he’d decided to do — he wouldn’t enjoy it, but he wouldn’t agonize about it either.

My throat had turned to gravel. "How about if I demand to see your superiors?"

"We have no superiors on Demoth," Mouth retorted. "Not even the local commander knows we’re here. Or knows you’re here. So if I were you, Ms. Smallwood, I’d lie back on the bed now. It may take hours for us to penetrate your link’s security locks, and you won’t injure yourself so much if you’re resting on a soft surface."

"We’ll be as careful as we can," the Muscle added, "but it’s not going to be easy."

The Mouth nodded. "Think of an epileptic seizure. One that lasts all day long."

I swallowed hard. "Look," I told the Mouth, taking a step toward him, "use your head for a second. How can this be a trick to fool the Admiralty? Who’d want to fool the Admiralty? Why go to the extreme of killing eight proctors just to…"

"To plant false evidence on us?" the Mouth suggested. "Killing eight proctors was the perfect way to catch the fleet’s attention. Mass murder is big; it’s flashy. It guaranteed the commander here would do some investigating, and send the results to the High Council." Mouth showed no sign of concern as I stepped forward again through the hologram. "Doesn’t that sound like a deliberate plot to bring us in?"

"But who’s plotting?" I insisted. "What would anyone gain from deceiving the Admiralty?"

"We don’t know," the Muscle answered. "That’s what bothers us."

"You don’t know how it concerns the navy," I said, taking another step, "but you’re sure it does? Every little mystery has to be about you?"

"Yes," the Mouth and the Muscle said together.

Which was when I broke Mouth’s knee.

It was a jerk-simple side-kick, hard and low — my instep hit the sweet spot of his patella and drove it backward till his whole leg bent the wrong way. Mouth hadn’t suspected a thing. Maybe these two spent so much time researching my link-seed, they’d overlooked the punch’n’crunch training the Vigil gave every proctor.

Always a mistake to concentrate on the mental and ignore the physical.

Mouth screamed… part pain, part the sight of seeing his knee angled back like a grasshopper’s. Damned sissy mainstreamer probably never took a good hit before. The Mouth didn’t even put up his guard when I stepped in to hand-strike range, so I gave him a good palm-heel in the solar plexus to shut him up.

He wheezed and fell. Still breathing, of course, but fierce unhappy about it.

When I turned to the Muscle, he’d backed up against the door and drawn a stun-pistol. "Stand where you are, please," he said.

"Why should I?"

"Because I’ll shoot if you don’t. We can pry into your brain, even if you’re stunned cold; it’s just harder when we can’t see your conscious response. More chance of us making a regrettable mistake. But if that’s the way you want to play it…"

"Shoot her!" Mouth gasped. At least I think that’s what he said — he didn’t have much air in his lungs for making words.

"I won’t shoot unless I have to," the Muscle said, still calm, keeping his gaze focused on me. "No sense in jeopardizing the mission, just because one of us got careless." He gestured toward the bed with the barrel of his pistol. "Are you going to lie down, Ms. Smallwood? Or do we do this the hard way?"

I stared at him, sizing up the situation. Unlike Mouth, the Muscle had been prepared for my attack; maybe he’d expected it as soon as I began inching forward. He wouldn’t hesitate to fire if I took the teeniest step toward him… and I knew from recent experience how fast stun-guns worked. The ultrasonic blast would drop me long before I got within kicking distance.

Throw something at him? No; there was nothing I could grab fast enough. Maybe if I yanked up the Mouth, I could use his body as a shield, let it absorb the sonics.

Useless. As soon as I bent over to grab the Mouth, the Muscle would slab me.

But I had no intention of letting these men into my brain. One lightning rush, zigzagging to make myself harder to hit?

"Don’t try it," the Muscle said, like he’d seen my thoughts on my face. "This pistol’s cone of effect covers your whole half of the room. I don’t have to aim to get you."

I didn’t know enough about stunners to tell if he was lying. Only one way to find out.

"Okay," I said in what I hoped was a defeated-sounding voice. "I’ll lie down on…"

Without warning, I dived forward — old trick, moving in the middle of the sentence, hoping your opponent needs a second to switch mental gears. Even as I struck the floor, I heard the whir of a stun-pistol, felt a wash of dizziness stagger my brain. Not quite out, I thought muddily, not unconscious. I rolled in the direction I thought was the door and blundered out with my leg, trying to sweep the Muscle’s feet out from under him. Nothing. If my leg moved at all, I couldn’t tell; it sure as blazes didn’t hit anything solid. I gave it another try, but my spasm of frantic motion only floundered me onto my back, staring up at Muscle through clumsy eyes.

Sitting duck. Too punchy to move.

The Muscle’s silhouette was framed against the light from the open door. I waited for him to shoot again, put me out for good. Instead, he just stood there, face lost in shadow… till his breath slipped out in a sigh and he slumped like a tired child, toppling across my legs.

Someone was standing in the doorway behind him — someone who also held a stun-pistol. It took a second for me to muddle out what I was seeing. Then I realized the whir I’d heard wasn’t Muscle’s gun, it was the newcomer’s. He or she had shot Muscle in the back… and I was still conscious because I’d only caught the slop of the blast, the sonic spill that hadn’t been soaked up by Muscle’s body.

The newcomer stepped cautiously into the room. It was a woman, a human woman, but with the backlighting I couldn’t make out her face. She moved forward, quickly now, the yellowish hologram light slipping over her body as she strode through the projected images. When she stopped, I could only see her back; she stood over the Mouth, her stunner trained on him.

"Ten-hut!" she said in a calm voice.

The Mouth stared up at her, eyes squinting, trying to see who she was. Suddenly, his face bugged wide with fear. "Admiral!" he yelped.

"I bet that leg hurts," the woman told him. Her pistol whirred, and the Mouth slouched back limply. "Now it doesn’t," she said.

For a moment more, she stayed with the Mouth’s unconscious body — bending and running her hand carefully over his broken knee. Her back was lit now by the spill-glow of the hologram. Enough light to show she did indeed wear the gray fatigues of an admiral in the Outward Fleet.

Under the circumstances, I didn’t take much joy seeing another navy mucky-muck.

Without jarring Mouth’s leg, the admiral readjusted his body slightly, shifting him into something close to the first-aid recovery position — the safest way for an unconscious body to lie, insurance the victim won’t choke if he vomits. Then she tucked her pistol into a hip holster and came to kneel by me. Her hand gently swept a sweat-strand of hair from my eyes.

She was young for an admiral. Clear green eyes, very alive. And she had a furious port-wine birthmark smeared across the right half of her face.

"Hello," she said. "I’m Festina Ramos. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner."