“Yeah…”

  Winslade sighed. “All right. Here’s the deal, I’ll get you out of here if you let me know what happened out at Clone World.”

  “You don’t care about Abigail? About what this whole commando attack was intended to do?”

  He fluttered his fingers at me. “How can I concern myself with such things when I know a great injustice has occurred?”

  “Huh… well, okay.”

  He looked surprised. “It’s that simple?”

  “Yeah. After what happened today, I don’t think your part of the story matters anymore.”

  Then, I told him the whole story—with a few edits. I told him that he’d turned traitor out at Clone World and gone rogue to help Claver. That he’d wanted a legion of Clavers of his own. Before I was halfway finished, he shushed me up.

  “You’re saying this to screw me, aren’t you? You know they record interrogations!”

  I couldn’t shake my head with my neck strapped down, but I tried. “Nope. That’s the honest truth. Just think about it. Think about how everyone has been acting. You had to have done something to earn it.”

  “Such abuse and mistreatment I’ve suffered…” he said, pacing around again. “I… I think I believe you. It’s a painful thing, but it fits the facts. Actually, I’m surprised I wasn’t permed out of hand.”

  “That thought did come up,” I admitted. “But they wanted to see how you contacted Claver, how you were turned by him. The experiment has lasted over a year, now, and it seems to have failed to turn up anything.”

  “Which should have been obvious from the start! Claver doesn’t have a planet any longer. He has no legions, no real power to speak of… In a way, that’s informative all by itself. These officers here at Central are diabolical. Turov must be behind this. Graves could never have thought of it. Am I right?”

  “Uh…”

  “That’s what I thought. Say no more—I have to get all the recorded files erased as it is.”

  He left then, and a few minutes later the goon squad came in and released me.

  “No hard feelings, guys,” I told them. I stretched my neck and arms experimentally. “You know… I think I might skip my weekly adjustment at the chiropractor this time around. You hogs can work miracles!”

  They looked disgusted as they signed me out and slammed the rattling cage door behind me.

  I didn’t make it far before my tapper buzzed with new orders: I was to report to Drusus by the end of the hour. That only gave me a few minutes for a quick shower, but I took it, and I arrived upstairs with seconds left to spare.

  Drusus was alone this time. He met me across his glowing desk. He looked thoughtful.

  “Your hair is wet. I was told you weren’t killed and revived today.”

  “That’s right, sir. This is good old-fashioned sweat.”

  He nodded. “You still look fresh as a daisy.”

  I shrugged. “Just a couple of bored hogs having a bit of fun.”

  “Listen,” Drusus said. “I’m concerned about this attack. I believe you have your share of secrets, but you don’t normally do things that might endanger Earth.”

  “You got the right of that.”

  “So, what did Abigail tell you before you killed her?” I blinked. That was a mistake. A tell. “Uh…”

  “Listen,” he said, leaning forward. “You seem to have some kind of weird connection with this woman. That’s par for the course for James McGill, but this is different. Our enemies managed to penetrate our defenses—killing guards in the detention center, no less—and they did it with armored suits on. That’s right, we’ve already tested the gear they were wearing. All three of the captured suits are tougher than anything we’ve got.”

  I nodded, unsurprised. “I get that, sir. I really do. So, I’m going to tell you what I know.”

  I repeated Abigail’s story about a planet laced with neutron dust, collapsed star matter, as being the source of the enemy technology.

  Drusus seemed disappointed. “That’s all you’ve got? No coordinates? Not even a stellar catalog reference?”

  “No sir… before she said more, she was dead.”

  He frowned. “Then we might have to revive her and continue with the persuasion.” That was the one thing Abigail didn’t want to face. I didn’t want her to face it, either.

  “There’s more, sir,” I said, coming up with a half-truth. It was really something I’d been thinking about over the last few days. “The weird world I visited during my last mission was a blown-out Skay, right?”

  Drusus nodded. “My techs have confirmed that after poring over your recordings and the scraps you brought home.”

  “Good nerd-work, sir. But if the Skay defenders had this special type of armor, where did they get it?”

  He shrugged. “We assumed that it came from some advanced tech in the Core Worlds.”

  I waved a finger at him. “Maybe. But the defensive creatures we faced before, back when we battled the Skay at Clone World, they didn’t have that kind of armor.”

  “Hmm… no they didn’t.”

  “We’ve only seen it from two sources,” I said. “One was Rigel itself, the second was out on that dead Skay. What if the two are somehow related?”

  “The two bodies in question are almost a thousand lightyears apart, McGill. Thousands of star systems exist in that region of—”

  “Wait a second,” I said, “what if we calculated the drifting course of the dead Skay, and plotted it backward? What if we checked out places where it intersects with a candidate world?”

  It was Drusus’ turn to blink. He stood up suddenly. “They should have thought of that. The tech people are too focused on chemical analysis. I’ll get them on it right now—stay here.”

  He stepped away to make a flurry of calls. I got up, found some of his prime whiskey, and poured us each a double. When he returned to the table, he looked stunned. He took the drink without urging and took a swig. I did the same. It was a fine single-malt scotch.

  “There’s only one multi-star system that the Skay might have drifted through—and it must have been decades ago. It’s called Tau Orionis.”

  “What province is that in?”

  “Province 928, the borderland between Rigel and Earth.”

  “Bingo!” I shouted, and I lifted my glass.

  He smiled, and we drank together.

  “No more torturing my lady-friend?” I asked him when he was done.

  “She has nothing to worry about,” he assured me.

  We had another glass, and I left the office.

  Before I got away from Central entirely, however, Turov caught up with me. I got the feeling she was watching my movements by tracing my tapper. Superior officers in the chain of command could do that.

  She’d moved to intercept me in the lobby. “Where do you think you’re going, Centurion?” she asked.

  I looked wistfully out the glass doors into Central City. It was night now, and the place looked lively. I still had plenty of new bars in town to visit.

  “I’m looking for some dinner and entertainment,” I said. “You want to join me?”

  Galina stared at me for a second, then she uncrossed her arms and loosened her face into a smile. “I certainly do.”

  Surprised, I walked out into the city with her. We ate, we drank, we danced, and around about midnight we screwed like rabbits back at her place.

  Up until that point, I hadn’t bothered to ask why she was in such a good mood. To my way of thinking, when a woman is in a loving way, you don’t ask why. You just go with the flow. That’s what I’d done, but even I harbored some level of curiosity about my good fortune.

  “Why, James,” she said when I asked her about it. “Don’t you know? I was having… well… certain dark feelings. Toward that Claver-freak.”

  “Oh… Abigail. Right.”

  “Don’t say her name.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, I heard that you killed her. That you stopped her from teleporting and shot her dead. That impressed me.”

  Suddenly, I got it. How could I be obsessed with Abigail if I’d shot her down? Smiling, I accepted her version of events without an argument or a qualm.

  Internally, however, I still felt a bit troubled about how that poor girl had committed suicide right in front of me.

  I hoped to meet her again someday. Why? I’m a moth that likes to circle flames, that’s the only good way to explain it.

  -15-

  The very next day, I got a surprise call from Floramel. She wanted me to go on a “special” assignment.

  Now, as a matter of religion, Legionnaires know you don’t volunteer for jack-squat unless you’ve got a very good reason. In the recent past, I’d volunteered for such duty, and I’d almost gotten myself permed. I’d done it because Etta had been sucking up all my money for her education, and I’d almost gone broke.

  After a few missions, however, I’d been cashed out to the tune of several million Hegemony credits. I surely know that’s no big sum to a rich guy, but for a swamp-dwelling soldier like myself, a million credits was nothing to sneeze at. I’d been able to pay for Etta’s tram and keep her living in her apartment in Central City where the rents were insane.

  Etta knew nothing about my money troubles, of course, and I liked it that way. She just thought I had a big stash from the old days. After all, I was a starman, and such people sometimes had discovered a way to cash-in at some point in their long lives.

  Not me, however. I’d never gotten a financial break. Every tin ten-credit piece I’d come by had been squeezed out of someone else’s iron-tight fist.

  So it wasn’t a surprise that Floramel, a lab director at Central, had thought to contact me for her clandestine off-world mission, whatever it was.

  “James,” she said, “I heard you were in Central City, and I thought I’d give you a call.”

  “Well, that’s a welcome change of heart!”

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said, using that sexy husky voice of hers on me, “but we could really use your expertise on our current project.”

  I considered. I had to admit her approach was working, to a degree. At least I found myself becoming interested in Floramel, if not her assignment.

  “Uh… how about you and I have dinner tonight?” I suggested. “We could talk about it.”

  She hesitated. We had a history, Floramel and I. She was a lovely lady, if a little too smart, too driven and too straight-arrow for my tastes. “I don’t want to lead you on,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about that. I know business is business. We could talk about old times—and new ones.”

  “Hmm... All right. Where shall we meet?”

  Surprised, I gave her the name of a romantic restaurant in midtown. She said she’d be there at six and closed the channel that connected her tapper to mine.

  After her sweet face faded from my arm, I whistled long and low. If Floramel had actually consented to a date, she must really want my services—as a commando, that was.

  The day went by quickly. Heading down to the floors in the mid-one hundreds, I found the training centers. I worked up a sweat in a gymnasium and practiced my marksmanship on a firing range. After a long hard day of fun, I walked to midtown and stepped into the restaurant where I was supposed to meet Floramel. Pre-ordering a bottle of Chardonnay, I waited for her to show up. Overall, I was in high spirits.

  That all changed after an hour had passed. I’d already finished dinner, the bottle of Chardonnay, and two baskets of bread. I was getting bored and a little annoyed.

  Using my tapper, I tried to connect to Floramel again. It gave me the disconnected icon, which wasn’t really a surprise. Floramel worked down in the guts of Central, in the underground labs, and regular commercial network traffic wasn’t allowed to reach those floors most of the time.

  I’d pretty much figured out she’d decided to stand me up. It wasn’t like Floramel to do that—she was a straight-arrow, as I said. She was, in fact, compulsively punctual most of the time.

  But… we had a past. She might have chickened because she knew I was going to flirt with her. Maybe she didn’t think she wasn’t ready to face the overwhelming charm of one James McGill again tonight.

  Just as I’d given up and called for the bill, a tall presence came up behind me. Floramel was a tall girl, whispery thin and model-like, with elongated bones and features like the ladies they put on magazine covers. Naturally, I suspected it was her arriving at last.

  Turning and forcing a smile, I put on my best welcoming face—and then I froze.

  “Etta?” I asked, surprised.

  My daughter Etta was a sidekick scientist assistant to Floramel. I’d known that, but I hadn’t expected to see her here tonight. In fact, I hadn’t expected her at all.

  “Daddy… I have to talk to you.”

  Her voice was hushed, and her eyes weren’t looking at me. She wasn’t hugging me, either, even when I stood up and put out a circle of arm for her to walk into.

  Right off, alarm bells began ringing inside my thick skull. I knew Floramel well, and I knew my daughter even better. Etta had a guilty look on her face.

  It wasn’t a normal kind of guilt, either. Most young people appear sorry when they’ve done something they know is wrong—but not my daughter. She looked wary, nervous, and worried she might be caught.

  “Girl…?” I said. “Where’s Floramel?”

  “That’s what we have to talk about.”

  “Well then, sit down. I can order dinner—”

  “Not here. Come on.”

  Sighing, I followed her out of the place after dropping a big tip. After all, I’d spent all night sitting at this table and keeping other diners out in the lobby.

  When we were walking down busy streets, Etta finally talked to me.

  “You were meeting with Floramel tonight, right?” she asked.

  “You know I was. Where is she?”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  I frowned. A feeling was beginning to come over me. A not-good kind of feeling.

  Way back when Etta was young, I’d brought her home from Dust World. At that point in her young life, she hadn’t been… civilized.

  She had, in fact, experienced a childhood akin to that of a barbarian from a thousand years ago. She was kind of kid who knew how to hunt and skin animals—or sew up a wound all by herself. But she hadn’t been too sharp when it came to the social graces.

  Etta had, in fact, attempted to murder some of my girlfriends. Usually they woke up afterwards, but even so, it was plain rude. My father had always said Etta had the devil in her—but only when my mamma wasn’t around to hear it.

  I stopped walking, and I put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t like that. She didn’t like any kind of restraining touch—that was part of what growing up wild did for you.

  She lifted her lip a little, but she didn’t snarl. Not exactly. A decade-plus of schooling had taught her to fake it. Only a trained eye like mine picked up the signs.

  “You went feral, didn’t you?” I asked her.

  She studied the sidewalk.

  “I can’t believe it, girl! Just because she’s your boss, and I asked her out on a date? I thought you gotten over that kind of thing back when you were twelve!”

  “It’s not like that, Daddy,” she said. “It’s not like that at all. I’m here to warn you. They want a candidate to go on a mission—a one-way mission using the casting teleporter.”

  The newest twist in teleportation technology involved what they called “casting” an individual—or victim, some might say—over a great distance. The advantage was they could watch what the person did when they got there for a good ten minutes or so. The disadvantage was they couldn’t bring the person back.

  Therefore, in order not to get permed, the individual in question had to make sure they died before the connection broke. That way, the people watching back at Central could safely revive them knowing they hadn’t made an illegal copy.

  “I’ve done that before,” I said. “It wasn’t all that bad.”

  “You died on every trip!”

  “I know, I know. But it worked, and I didn’t get permed.”

  She looked frustrated. “You don’t understand. This time, we might not be able to watch you—to confirm your death.”

  “Uh… why not?”

  “Because of the properties of the target planet. Supposedly, it’s laced with collapsed matter. I’ve done the math, and I don’t think our connection will stay open. Collapsed matter is like lead, but much more dense. It can’t be penetrated by any kind of known transmission.”

  “Oh…” I said, thinking that over. “So, they want to send someone out on a one-way ticket, but they don’t know if they can get them back or not?”

  “That’s right. We’ve offered this deal to several commandos. They’ve all turned us down. Floramel is desperate.”

  I mulled that over. She had accepted a date with me. That was odd on the face of it. Desperation… yes, that might be the reason.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “You convinced me. I won’t go on any such mission. I promise and hope to die.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “But it’s funny!”

  Legionnaires often put death references into everyday conversation. Laughter is the best medicine God ever created, my mamma always said.

  “Look, Dad… you just can’t do it. Please?”

  “Okay. I don’t have to anyways. I don’t need the money now.”

  She gazed at me, and a smarty-pants look came into her eyes. “You don’t need the money? But you did before…? That’s why you took that shitty mission last year, isn’t it? Oh God, I can’t believe you did that to pay for my tram. I could have done without!”

  I reached out my arm again, and she let me encircle her this time. She put her face against me, just like she was a kid again. Passersby gave us odd looks, but I didn’t care.

  “Okay now,” I said gently. “We got this all sorted out, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good… Now, it’s time to fess up. Where’s Floramel?”