The weapons officer looked around. His hiding place had been formed where a section of armored duct curved up and over the edge of a solar panel. It was as good a place as any. He opened the case and started the arming procedure.

  There were two marines standing outside Shimmura’s position when the “repel boarders” buzzer went off. He couldn’t reach the weapon hidden just beyond the marines, so the engineering officer did the next best thing and triggered the armored hatch that sealed him inside his control cocoon during combat.

  Fast though the hatch was, it wasn’t fast enough. A marine fired. Her armor-piercing bullet went through Shimmura’s space suit, through his shoulder, through a rack of electronics, and flattened itself against the hull metal beyond.

  The impact of the bullet threw the engineer back into his seat. It felt wet inside his suit. Shim saw the picture of Susie that he’d taped above his controls and wondered if he’d ever see her again.

  Perko and the Confederation marine squeezed their triggers at the same moment. The private’s bullets hit the steel deck and ricocheted around the compartment like lead banshees. One creased the side of Perko’s face as he squeezed the trigger and kept squeezing. The marine’s face turned to red mush.

  Willie straightened from laying the officer’s body on the deck. There were two more dead marines as well, one killed by Christoferson and the other by Sparks. Willie turned to Christoferson, who had returned to her controls. “Status?”

  “Perko had a close call but survived. He and some others are guarding the lock to prevent them from sending more marines through. Shimmura is wounded but managed to seal himself inside his control-escape module. There are two marines trapped in the drive room but the rest ate dead.”

  Willie nodded as he strapped himself into the command chair. “Good. It could be worse. Send those marines a message by pumping the air out of the drive room. They can surrender now or later when their tanks run dry, whichever they prefer. After that let the shuttle roll up between us and the Argentina, blow the lock, and get us the hell out of here.”

  Christoferson’s fingers were a blur of motion as they flew over the keys. Then she watched the screens, waited until the shuttle was in perfect position, and blew up the main lock.

  The charges had been placed there as a last-ditch defense against boarders, but did a bang-up job of separating Alice from the shuttle as well. The smaller ship was literally hurled at the Argentina, sheltering Alice for a few precious seconds and giving them a better chance.

  Willie scanned the screens as he activated the intercom. “Guns, give me full ECM, hot chaff, and anything else that might throw them off. Find something soft, everybody! Number Two, give me full military power. Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  Willie was pushed down into his seat as Alice took off and Naisbit’s voice came over the radio. “Sorry I can’t be there to follow those orders, Lawson, but you’re good at running, so I’m sure you’ll find a way. You’d better hurry up, though, cause the marines are hunting me down and they’re getting damned close. I’ve got a backpack nuke here, and when this baby goes off, blammo! Everybody gets reamed. See you in hell, Lawson.” And with that Naisbit pushed a button.

  For a moment, seconds only, a brand-new sun graced the heavens, and the Argentina disappeared.

  All the talking, all the reports were over, and there was nothing left to say. Willie looked at Forbush and hoisted a glass of the historian’s whiskey.

  Out there, beyond the rock and steel of Big Red, the Alice still lived. Not the woman who had died so many years ago, but the ship, and most of those who crewed her. Thanks to Christoferson she’d cleared the nuclear explosion and lived to fight another day.

  Willie still felt sentimental about the Alice B. and hoped that she’d make it through the war, but if she didn’t, well those were the breaks.

  Perko was gone now, commanding another beat-up freighter called the Q-24, and on his way to the Admiralty only knew where. Meanwhile Christoferson had moved up to XO and seemed to be enjoying it. And Shimmura . . . well, his shoulder would recover but not his heart, for Susie had disappeared. At the moment the engineer was taking refuge in his work, dealing with things more predictable than emotions, and ignoring everything else.

  So, Willie thought to himself, that leaves Forbush, myself, and the other twenty-seven billion people of earth, all making the same stupid mistakes our ancestors did, and surviving in spite of it.

  Willie smiled across the table. “To us!” And both men downed their drinks.

  Dead Men Talk a Lot

  I’m waiting to die. Well, not die exactly, since there’s no such thing but I won’t be alive either. Not like I used to be, up walking around, checking things out. Not hardly. Not after the padre comes, not after the doctor does his shit, not after the lethal injection.

  It’s confusing. That’s why I’m writing this down, to keep my thoughts straight, and to tell my side of the story.

  I mean Larry’s been dead for more than a year now, and he’s been on everything from Sixty Minutes to the Oprah Winfrey show. The miserable bastard. It’s all part of what some regard as the end of the world—and others see as the beginning.

  It all started when this little-known researcher at Lucent Technologies married some sort of artificial intelligence thingamajig to a voice synthesizer, and hooked the whole thing to the telephone network.

  All of a sudden the poor bastard’s talking to dead people! He didn’t believe it himself until his mother got on the line and chewed him out for skipping breakfast.

  Well, everyone said he was crazy, or a fraud, or both, but it wasn’t long before the geeks at MIT, UCLA, and any number of telephone companies duplicated his results.

  Wow! You wanna talk about chaos!

  Religions took it the hardest, which is kinda funny, since they’re the ones who used to work overtime trying to convince everybody that life continues after death.

  Well, they were right. There is life after death, but not the kind they envisioned. No streets of gold, no angelic choirs, no celestial virgins, just a place where things are what you make them and people are all jumbled together. And that’s where the problem comes in . . .

  I mean with no paradise to look forward to, why load your car with explosives, and ram an embassy? Why eradicate people who call god by some other name? Or build their temples in funny shapes? Or dress differently?

  The conservative Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups were hardest hit, but others suffered too, especially when it turned out that relics, holy books, prayer wheels and crystals don’t mean much. They’re symbols—ritual elements—and aids to concentration. It’s what you actually do that counts.

  The New Agers fared a little better, since their theories about karma and reincarnation turned out to be true, but hundreds of disappointed women sued their channelers when it turned out that the real Cleopatra had incarnated into a male body and was driving a bus in the Bronx.

  In any case talking to dead people is no big deal anymore. No medium, no trumpets, no ectoplasm. So everyone yacked it up, burning ether between this world and the next. And the implications were enormous . . .

  Sorrow caused by the death of a loved one became a thing of the past, old people smiled a lot, funeral homes went out of business, send-off parties became all the rage, historical figures phoned historians in an attempt to tell their side of the story, new religions popped up all over the place, politicians both living and dead discussed the possibility of “two-dimensional democracies,” and the IRS began to file tax cases against “disincamate citizens.”

  And it was right in the middle of all this that Larry and I decided to rob a bank. Not just any bank, but Seattle Trust, a nice little establishment conveniently located across from our apartment on Capitol Hill. Stupid, huh? But that’s what bank robbers tend to be. Stupid.

  You could see the bank through the window of our cheap studio apartment. A low-slung building on the other side of funky, funky Broadway. A dry cleaners once, and specialty store after that, all dressed up in brick with no place to go. Like most of our really stupid ideas this one originated with Larry. He was dressed in his usual uniform of Grateful Dead T-shirt, ripped blue jeans, and filthy Reeboks. He had long blonde hair, beady little eyes, and the biggest honker you ever saw. He strode back and forth across our twelve-foot-wide living room and gestured towards the bank.

  “Hey dude, it’s just sittin’ there, waiting for us to come on down. You’ve been in there, you know there’s nothin’ but a couple of ugly lookin’ chicks, and a geez with glasses. Shit, the old fart ain’t even got a gun!”

  At this point Larry pulled out the chrome-plated .38 he’d stolen from his father—and waved it under my nose. I’m no coke head, but I do drop a little LSD once in a while, and the barrel of Larry’s gun looked like the inside of a railway tunnel.

  “Woooo woooo!” I said in my best imitation of a steam locomotive. Larry ignored me. He resumed pacing back and forth. “I don’t know about you, dude, but I’m tired of flippin’ burgers, and takin’ shit from management trainees. So we walk in the bank, introduce the clerks to Mr. Smith and Wesson here, grab the money and haul ass. Ain’t nothin’ to it.”

  “Yeah,” I said brightly, “ain’t nothin’ to it.”

  Right,” Larry agreed, lighting a Camel. “So let’s go.” He stuck the pistol in the back of his pants, threw me a black baseball hat with RIDE TO LIVE, L.IVE TO RIDE inscribed across the front, and headed for the door. Like a fool I followed.

  The trip down the rickety back stairs, up the side of the building to Broadway, and across the street passed in slow motion. I remember getting lost in the traffic and feeling a tug on my sleeve. “Come on, dude, its green.”

  The bank sensed our presence and opened its door. The old man in the blue uniform looked up from his Field and Stream, nodded, and went back to reading.

  The counters were straight ahead but the chandelier caught my eye. It had tulip-shaped fixtures that seemed to pulsate in and out. It meant something but I wasn’t sure what.

  I heard someone yell, felt Larry grab my arm, and found myself running out the door.

  Outside there was the usual mix of street people, old ladies, and business types on their way to lunch.

  I bumped into someone, Larry’s hand disappeared, a bus pulled up and I stumbled on. It jerked into motion and I fell forward. Hands helped me up. There was the babble of voices as someone asked me for money and someone else said I was “wasted.” Doors hissed open, and I half walked, half fell onto the street.

  I don’t remember much after that, except the afternoon passed slowly, and I spent a lot of it in a park. Along about dusk I made my way back to our building, climbed the stairs, and entered our apartment. I called for Larry but there was no reply.

  Collapsing on a beat-up futon I turned on the tube. Oprah interrupted one last guest, made way for a block of commercials, and they segued into the news. The bank robbery was numero uno. The anchorman smiled as if bank robberies were a lot of fun. “The Capitol Hill branch of Seattle Trust was robbed today . . . and two people were killed. Deborah Wallings is standing by live. Deborah?”

  Something heavy fell into my stomach. Killed? Deborah Wallings live?

  I struggled to my feet and ran to the window. Sure enough, a TV crew had set up in front of the bank, and Deborah Wallings was gesturing towards the front door. I rushed back to the TV set and cranked the volume up.

  Deborah was blonde-haired blue-eyed perfection as always. “. . . Frank. The robbery was carefully planned to coincide with the noon rush hour.”

  My mind boggled. “Carefully planned?” Where’d she get that? Regardless of where she got it Deborah continued. “Shortly after twelve, two unidentified white male suspects came through the door. One pointed a gun a teller Cindy Hall, and ordered her to empty the till.”

  At this point they put a shot of Larry on the screen. The blurry black and white security photo made him look even worse than usual. He clutched the .38 in his right hand while a joint drooped from the corner of his mouth. Jeez! The idiot even smoked while robbing banks!

  I felt disconnected, separate somehow, until my picture flooded the screen. The shot was crystal clear and better than the one in my high school yearbook. I was staring upwards, almost directly into the lens, looking stupid as hell.

  Deborah droned on. “The second man functioned as a lookout and may or may not have been armed.”

  Now the picture dissolved from the shot of me to Deborah. She looked smarter than I had.

  “After collecting more than a hundred thousand dollars in cash the two men fled south on Broadway. They split up after a block or so. One jumped onto a metro bus—and the other disappeared down a side street. Seattle police spotted him ten minutes later and gave chase. They caught him in the alley behind the Payless drugstore.”

  Now the shot dissolved to an alley and a blanket-covered corpse. All you could see were Larry’s dirty Reeboks sticking out from one end of the blanket. Suddenly it came crashing home. Larry was dead. Really dead. Pushing-up-daisies dead.

  I felt a lump form in the back of my throat. Larry was an idiot, but he was my idiot, and we’d been friends since the third grade.

  The camera zoomed back to show Deborah. A pair of medics were loading a second body into the back of an ambulance. How did they do that? Oh, this part was taped. The taped Deborah looked sad.

  “Police say they ordered the suspect to halt. He turned, pulled a .38-caliber revolver, and fired a single shot. Then, in what police describe as a ‘one in a million’ occurrence, the suspect’s bullet ricocheted off a building, and hit Officer Philip McCutcheon in the head. He was pronounced dead at Harborview Hospital.

  “McCutcheon’s partner, Officer Kline, returned fire and the suspect fell. She will remain on administrative leave until a shooting review board is convened and their investigations are complete. Seattle police and FBI agents are searching for the second suspect. Frank?”

  A dead police officer? The FBI? Oh shit, shit, shit. What the hell had I done?

  Frank appeared on the screen, one eyebrow carefully raised. “Thank you, Deborah. One question before you go . . . what about the money? Did police recover it?”

  Deborah shook her head. “No, the police found no sign of the money, and assume that suspect number two has it. Interestingly enough, sources close to the investigation say that the suspects got away with an exceptionally large haul. It seems there was an unusually large amount of money on hand . . . much of which was close to Cindy Hall’s window when the robbery occurred.”

  Frank shook his head at this sad turn of events. “Thanks, Deborah. We’ll be back for an update at 6:30. There was a fire today . . .”

  I turned the TV off and sat there trying to absorb what had transpired. Larry and I had robbed a bank. Larry was dead. A police officer was dead. The FBI was looking for me. The FBI! What the hell was I sitting around for? Come to think of it, why weren’t they knocking on the door?

  The phone began to ring. I started to pick it up and stopped. Who was it? The FBI? Mom and Dad? They love Deborah Wallings. Mom thinks she’s “cute.” Oh god, what would I tell them?

  The phone continued to ring as I stood up and looked around. There was Larry’s wallet, laying on the card table where he’d forgotten it for the last time. That would explain why they weren’t beating the door down. I grabbed it and looked inside. It contained little more than some scraps of paper, a ticket stub, and a driver’s license. I threw it on the futon. Poor stupid Larry. The phone quit ringing.

  My brain kicked in. I needed clothes. Clothes and money. There wasn’t much time. The cops would arrive any minute now. They’d arrest me, find me guilty, and send me to prison. All in about fifteen minutes. Not if I could help it they wouldn’t!

  I grabbed some dirty laundry and stuffed it into a blue gym bag with ALASKA AIRLINES stencilled across the front.

  Walking over to the makeshift bookcase, a surefire place to hide things from Larry, I grabbed Hidden Hawaii, An Adventurers Guide and opened it up. The twenty was right where I’d left it. Some pit spray, my shaving kit, and Larry’s portable CD player. I was ready to go.

  I slipped out the door, took the back steps two at a time, and walked away. There wasn’t a cop in sight.

  Parking on Capitol Hill is next to impossible so my car was six blocks away. It’s a red 1994 Honda Civic, not fancy, but as Dad would say, “dependable.”

  It was my graduation present from high school, a reward for my 3.5 grade average, and supposed to cany me through four years at UCLA. Unfortunately I dropped out after two and moved in with Larry. A mistake if there ever was one.

  The Honda started like always and I battled my way out from between a couple of old beaters and oozed my way towards 15th.

  I felt safe now, rolling along the city streets, wrapped within the wonderful cocoon of privacy that surrounds a car in traffic. The feeling is largely illusionary of course, since people can see you in there, picking your nose, and scratching your pits. But it feels private and I needed that.

  Time passed and I went nowhere, driving aimlessly around the city, trying to make a plan. I wound around Queen Anne, over the Ballard Bridge, and out past Golden Gardens.

  I knew I should be doing things, like changing my appearance, finding new plates for the car, and putting some miles between Seattle and me. The last was especially difficult since it would take some money, and outside of the twenty, and six more in my wallet, I was flat broke.

  It was kinda funny in a way. I mean here I was a bank robber—without any of the stuff you rob banks for!

  And that got me to thinking . . . Where was the money anyway? The “more than a hundred thousand dollars” that Larry had toted out of Seattle Trust and stashed somewhere? Maybe I should look for it.