“Count Jack Fitzgerald of Kildare-upon-Ireland. Welcome. I am Nehenner Repooltu Sevenniggog Dethprip; by right, battle, and acclaim the uncontested Queen of Noctis. And I am your number-one fan.”

  * * *

  One finger of rum in Count Jack’s particular tea. And then, for luck, for war, for insanity, I slipped in another one. I knocked, waited for his call, and entered his dressing room. We might be somewhere in the warren of chambers beneath the Hall of the Martian Queen, miles beneath the sands of Mars, but the forms must be observed. The forms were all we had.

  “Dear boy!” Uliri architecture did not accommodate human proportions. Proles had been at work—the prickly tang of scorched stone was strong—but I still had to duck to get through the door. Count Jack sat before a mirror of heat ray–polished obsidian. He adjusted the sit of his white bow tie. He filled the tiny cubbyhole but he still took the tea with an operatic flourish and took a long, County Kildare slurp.

  “Ah! Grand! Grand. My resolve is stiffened to the sticking point. By God, I shall have need of it today. Did you slip a little extra in, you sly boy?”

  “I did, Maestro.”

  “Surprisingly good rum. And the tea is acceptable. I wonder where they got it from?”

  “Ignorance is bliss, Maestro.”

  “You’re right there.” He drained the cup. “And how is the piano?”

  “Like the rum. Only I think they made it themselves.”

  “They’re good at delicate work, the worker-drone thingies. Those tentacle-tips are fine and dexterous. Natural master craftsmen. I wonder if they would make good pianists? Faisal? Dear God, listen to me listen to me! Here we are, like a windup musical box, set up to amuse and titivate. A song, a tune, dance or two. Us, the last vestige of beauty on this benighted planet, dead and buried in some vile subterranean cephalopod vice-pit. Does anyone even know we’re alive? Help us for God’s sake help us! Ferid Bey, he’ll do something. He must. At the very least, he’ll start looking for us when the money doesn’t materialise.”

  “I expect Ferid Bey has already collected the insurance.” I took the cup and saucer. Our predicament was so desperate, so monstrous that we dared not look it full in the face. The Queen of Noctis had left us in no doubt that we were to entertain her indefinitely; singing birds in a cage. Never meet the fans. That was one of Count Jack’s first homilies to me. Fans think they own you.

  “Bastard!” Count Jack thundered. “Bastarding bastard! He shall die, he shall die. When I get back…” Then he realised that we would never get back, that we might never feel the wan warmth of the small, distant sun; that these low tunnels might be our home for the rest of our lives—and each other the only human face we would ever see. He wept, bellowing like a bullock. “Can this be the swan song of Count Jack Fitzgerald? Prostituting myself for some super-ovulating Martian squid queen? Oh the horror, the horror! Leave me, Faisal. Leave me. I must prepare.”

  The vinegar smell of the Uliri almost made me gag as I stepped on to the stage. I have always had a peculiar horror of vinegar. Lights dazzled me, but my nose told me that there must be thousands of Uliri on the concert hall’s many tiers. Uliri language is as much touch and mantle-colour as it is spoken sounds, and the auditorium fistled with the dry-leaf rustling of tentacle on tentacle. I flipped out my tails, seated myself at the piano, ran a few practice scales. It was a very fine piano indeed. The tuning was perfect, the weight and responsiveness of the keys extraordinary. I saw a huge golden glow suffuse the rear of the vast hall. The Queen had arrived on her floating grav-throne. My hands shook with futile rage. Who had given her the right to be Count Jack’s number-one fan? She had explained, in her private chamber, a pit filled with sweet and fragrant oil in which she basked, her monstrous weight supported, how she had first heard the music of Count Jack Fitzgerald. Rather, the head of poor Osman explained. When she had been a tiny fry in the Royal Hatchery—before the terrible internecine wars of the queens, in which only one could survive—she had become intrigued with Earth after the defeat of the Third Uliri Host at the Battle of Orbital Fort Tokugawa. She had listened to Terrene radio, and become entranced by light opera—the thrill of the colouraturas, the sensuous power of the tenor, the stirring gravitas of the basso profundo. In particular, she fell in love—or the Ulirui equivalent of love—with the charm and blarney of one Count Jack Fitzgerald. She became fascinated with Ireland—an Emerald Isle, made of a single vast gemstone, a green land of green people—how extraordinary, how marvelous, how magical! She had even had her proles build a life-size model Athy in one of the unused undercrofts of the Royal Nest. Opera and the stirring voice of the operatic tenor became her passion, and she vowed, if she survived the Sororicide, that she would build an incomparable opera house on Mars, in the heart of the Labyrinth of Night, and attract the greatest singers and musicians of Earth to show the Uliri what she considered was the highest human art. She survived, and had consumed all her sisters and taken their experiences and memories, and built her opera house, the grandest in the solar system, but war had intervened. Earth had attacked, and the ancient and beautiful Uliri Hives of Enetria and Issidy were shattered like infertile eggs. She had fled underground, to her empty, virginal concert hall, but in the midst of the delvings and the buildings and forgings, she had heard that Count Jack Fitzgerald had come to Mars to entertain the troops at the same time that the United Queens were mounting a sustained offensive, and she seized her opportunity.

  The thought of that little replica Athy, far from the sun, greener than green, waiting, gave me screaming nightmares.

  Warm-up complete. I straightened myself at the piano. A flex of the fingers, and into the opening of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” And on strode Count Jack Fitzgerald, arms wide, handkerchief in one hand, beaming, the words pealing from his lips. Professional, consummate, marvellous. I never loved him more dearly than striding into the spotlights. The auditorium lit up with soft flashes of color: Uliri lighting up their bioluminescent mantles, their equivalent of applause.

  Count Jack stopped in mid-line. I lifted my hands from the keys as if the ivory were poisoned. The silence was sudden and immense. Every light froze on, then softly faded to black.

  “No,” he said softly. “This will not do.”

  He held up his hands, showed each of them in turn to the audience. Then he brought them together in a single clap that rang out into the black vastness. Clap one, two, three. He waited. Then I heard the sound of a single pair of tentacles slapping together. It was not a clap, never a clap, but it was applause. Another joined it, another and another, until waves of slow tentacle-claps washed around the auditorium. Count Jack raised his hands: enough. The silence was instant. Then he gave himself a round of applause, and me a round of applause, and I him. The Uliri caught the idea at once. Applause rang from every tier and level and joist of the Martian Queen’s concert hall.

  “Now, let’s try that again,” Count Jack said, and without warning, strode off the stage. I saw him in the wings, indicating for me to milk it. I counted a good minute before I struck up the introduction to “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” On he strode, arms wide, handkerchief in hand, beaming. And the concert hall erupted. Applause: wholehearted loud-ringing mighty applause; breaking like an ocean from one side of the concert hall to the other, wave upon wave upon wave, on and on and on.

  Count Jack winked to me as he swept past into the brilliance of the lights to take the greatest applause of his life.

  “What a house, Faisal! What a house!”

  Hard Stars

  BRENDAN DUBOIS

  Here’s a disquieting look at a bleak but disturbingly plausible future in which the tables have been turned and the United States is being hit daily by hundreds of deadly drone strikes launched by foreign enemies, targeting any sort of electronic signal—which makes our technological civilization almost impossible to maintain.

  Brendan DuBois has twice received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, been nominated three times for the Edgar Allan Poe Award given by the Mystery Writers of America, and has had stories reprinted in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century and The Best American Noir of the Century. He’s the author of sixteen novels and over 130 short stories, and has made sales to Playboy, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Space Stations, Civil War Fantastic, Pharaoh Fantastic, Knight Fantastic, The Mutant Files, and Alternate Gettysburgs, among other markets. His SF novels include Resurrection Day and Six Days. His most recent novel is Deadly Cove, part of the Lewis Cole mystery series, which also includes Dead Sand, Black Tide, Shattered Shell, Killer Waves, and Buried Dreams. He is also a Jeopardy! game show champion. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with his family and maintains a Web site at www.BrendanDuBois.com.

  The first-floor windows in the lakeside cottage were broken, meaning the sharp wind whipping across the snow-covered lake came right through one side of the building and out the other. Trenton was in the kitchen, which had a cracked linoleum floor, metal table, and an old-style fridge and gas stove. Two of his team members were in the kitchen as well. Lights were off and no powered equipment was being used, so they made do by the light from a nearly full moon reflecting off the snow and from candles found in a nearly empty cupboard.

  Carlson came up to him, wearing his black wool coat. His breath eddied in the air in a little cloud of steam. “Jenkins is gone. Ran out a side door.”

  “Damn,” Trenton said.

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Where’s Harrier?” Trenton asked.

  “Upstairs.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s cold. We’ve got as many blankets on him as possible. Tyler’s offered to crawl in with him.”

  “Harrier just might like it.”

  Carlson said, “Hell, I might like it, too, but he’s not in the mood.”

  “Who the hell is?”

  “Yeah, but Tyler thinks he might be coming down with a bug. He was coughing some as he went up the stairs.”

  “Shit,” Trenton said.

  Diaz came over, a lit candle in her hand, small black kit in the other. In her prior life she had been a medic in the 10th Mountain Division. “You’re up next, boss. Sorry.”

  “Not a problem,” Trenton said. “Like to think you’re just saving the best for last.”

  Trenton followed her and took off his overcoat and suit coat, and sat down at the round metal kitchen table. Trenton unsnapped the cufflink from his right shirtsleeve, rolled up his white starched shirt to his elbow. The table was so very cold against his bare skin. Another candle was lit, and Diaz, concern on her face, sat down next to him. She unzipped the black case, got to work. She took out a piece of rubber tubing, tied it off below his elbow. It was very, very tight.

  Trenton heard the sounds of aircraft overhead, some jet-powered, others propeller-driven. Most, no doubt, unmanned.

  Carlson looked up at the plaster ceiling. Even Diaz paused.

  “Do it,” Trenton said. “Now.”

  Her strong hands manipulated the top of his wrist, her fingers sliding up and down, and then she nodded. “Got it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sorry, boss, don’t even have a local.”

  “Christ, will you stop talking? Do it.”

  From the open case, out came a surgical scalpel with a gray handle. The candlelight made the metal look yellowish. Trenton turned his head.

  The bite was sharper and hurt more than Trenton anticipated. He gritted his teeth. Diaz swore and said, “Shit,” when something fell on the table. “Sorry, tweezers slipped.” Trenton took a deep breath through his nose and tried to think of anything, something, whatever, while his bleeding wrist was dug at, poked, and probed.

  “Got it,” Diaz announced, triumph in her voice.

  Something cold was splashed against his wrist, and Trenton gritted his teeth again as he felt a needle poke through his skin four times, a heavy thread tugging behind each poke. “Now we’re done. Hold on.”

  Trenton glanced over as she put a small bandage over the wound, taping it carefully at each end. “You’ll need to have the stitches taken out in a week or so.”

  “You’re up to doing it?”

  Diaz said, “If we’re still … together, yeah, I’m up to doing it.”

  Near his wrist was a square white gauze and bloody tweezers, along with a chunk of gray metal the size of a large piece of cooked rice. His chip, inserted during his first week on the job. Diaz deftly took a tiny propane torch from the bag, switched it on, and in seconds, toasted his chip. The smell was sharp and acrid. The chip was dead.

  His chest and back suddenly felt lighter. The last one out from his detail. There you go. No more powered equipment, no communications gear, no cell phone, iPhone, iPad, nothing they possessed could now be tracked by the hordes of eager snoopers out there.

  “Gee,” Carlson said. “We made it after all.”

  Diaz made to say something but a sharp whistling noise came from overhead. They all looked up as the noise grew louder and ended sharply in a large boom! The candles flickered and dust sprinkled down from the plaster ceiling.

  Trenton said, “I take it you didn’t get Jenkins’s chip before he ran out.”

  “Yes,” Diaz said.

  “Guess he shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Yes, again,” Diaz said, zippering up her bag.

  Carlson said, “Poor guy died tired, that’s all.”

  * * *

  Trenton took a lit candle and climbed up a set of narrow wooden stairs to the second floor. Candlelight flickered from a room to the right. Trenton went down a short hallway, past framed family photographs from years ago that had peeled away in their frames, their faces and shapes yellowed out. In the room was a large four-poster bed, with a form underneath its covers. A woman named Tyler sat on a wooden chair next to the bed. There were bureaus and other chairs in the room. Trenton was pleased to see a shotgun across her lap. They had been unarmed for what felt like a very long time.

  “Where did you find that?” Trenton asked.

  “Rear closet. Figured most of these country folks are armed, no matter what the laws or the media might say. Rummaged around and found this. Twelve-gauge.”

  “Good job. Got any shells?”

  “Six.”

  “Better than nothing. How’s Harrier?”

  “Sleeping. Poor guy is exhausted. I think he might be getting a fever.”

  “Diaz told me that.”

  Trenton walked over to the bed, peered down. Made out the back of an older man’s head, his thick gray hair mussed up a bit. His breathing was raspy but steady and strong. That made him feel better, even with the man’s supposed rise in temperature.

  Another explosion sounded in the distance. Tyler glanced out the near window. “Did Jenkins get whacked with that earlier one?”

  “I think so.”

  She moved her shotgun around and her coat sleeve slid up, revealing a small bandage on her wrist.

  “Why did Jenkins run?” she asked.

  “He’s got family in the area.”

  “Still, it’s running away. Cowardice. Betrayal.”

  “Don’t think he’ll be called up for a disciplinary hearing anytime soon.”

  “Government’s too secretive, moves too damn slow.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  * * *

  Trenton went back outside the cottage through the same side door Jenkins had used, stepped to the edge of the frozen lake, his feet crunching in the snow. His long coat was back on and his wrist throbbed with pain. Trenton could be atomized in a second or two and not even know it—maybe just hearing the whine of a fourth-generation Hellfire missile coming down at him, or one of its Iranian or Chinese or Korean variants—but with his chip dug out, Trenton was feeling just a bit more confident that he and the others might survive the night and tomorrow.

  Trenton tipped his head back, looked up at the hard light of the stars overhead. A long time ago when Trenton was in the Boy Scouts back in Arizona, he could name every constellation up there, but not now. The fixed bright stars didn’t concern him. Trenton watched the few lights up there, dipping down and moving around, and he saw unlit shapes as well, the ones that briefly covered the stars as they circled about, always hunting, always seeking, always ready, every day and night, every week and month, to kill you.

  Trenton counted maybe a half dozen, but there could have been twelve up there. Or twenty. But he and his crew, they didn’t have the tech to track what was up there, and that was all right.

  Information exchange was now very much a two-way street.

  * * *

  Back into the cottage. Carlson and Diaz were around the table, looked up at Trenton as he came in, stamped the snow off his boots. “How’s Harrier?” Carlson asked.

  “Sleeping.”

  “Tyler?”

  “Armed.”

  Diaz said, “The hell you say.”

  “Whole truth,” Trenton said. “She found a shotgun up in a closet, with a half-dozen shells.”

  Carlson laughed. “Hell, at least we’re packing now.”

  Trenton nodded. About three hundred miles and what felt like a century ago, they had dumped their weapons. They were all keyed into their thumbprints and palm prints, and their status was continuously updated to a central government server in Herndon, Virginia. When the crisis had erupted and Trenton had learned the first reports of what was going on, he had made the instant decision to get rid of the weapons.

  But two of their teammates, Hong and O’Brian, had raised hell about doing that, citing the usual chapter and verse of regulations, rules, and their duty, and they had been in a chase Chevrolet Suburban when they were obliterated outside a small town in Pennsylvania. Soon after that, they dumped their official vehicles and comm gear as well, and moved on toward appropriating—or stealing—civilian vehicles. Up on the other side of the cottage was a stolen Toyota Sienna that had been pretty crowded with all of them inside, but which had gotten the job done.