Four days later, the clear summer skies of the past week had been marred by the occasional orange cloud. It was still warm, but a light rain had sprinkled the city during the morning, clearing the air of dust. The smell of the summer rain had refreshed his senses, Mikhail thought, as he walked down the busy street towards the Terran Federation Post Office a few blocks from his apartment.

  He held a soft package tucked under his left arm, wrapped in brown paper and tied with strings of jute thread. The parcel contained a Jerrassian doll—to a Terran, it held a striking resemblance to a teddy bear. Mikhail intended to send it to Jenny for her birthday. Not to Jenny the High Admiral, of course, but to Jenny, his great granddaughter, far away on frigid Titan. She was really too old for the doll, Mikhail thought, but that didn’t matter.

  He was almost halfway to the post office, when something at the edge of his vision caught his attention. Mikhail didn’t visibly react, but instead continued walking past the man he had seen, as if nothing had happened. But in the corner of his eye, he had noticed a Terran in his late twenties sitting on a park bench, reading a newspaper. Or to be more precise, gazing just above the top of his newspaper, pretending to read it.

  Taking a turn to the right, Mikhail entered a street out of view of the man on the bench. He could no longer see the young Terran, but that also meant Mikhail was now free to move without being spotted himself. He took the chance and turned around, hoping to figure out what the man had been working so hard to observe without being spotted.

  But no matter where he looked, he failed to see anything in the neighborhood that seemed worth staking out. Cafés and restaurants lined the street, with a travel agency tucked into a corner between two larger buildings. On the sidewalk, street vendors peddled everything from hot dogs to local clay sculptures. Nothing of this struck Mikhail as significant. There were no federal buildings here that could be potential targets for a terrorist strike, and no jewelers or secure storage agencies ripe for the taking by robbers.

  He quickly walked further down the side street and entered Erik’s Development Thrift Store, picking up a bright yellow shirt as he rushed through it without paying. A quick nod directed at the clerk manning the sales desk made sure she recognized him. He would transfer them the payment for the shirt later.

  Now using the colorful clothing as in-plain-sight camouflage, Mikhail doubled back toward the park, hoping the man on the bench was still around and taking a chance he would pay more attention to the yellow shirt screaming look at me, and less to his face.

  When he came around the corner, Mikhail allowed himself to relax. The man was still there, sitting on the park bench, his gaze still focused a centimeter above the top of his newspaper. As Mikhail walked past him again and disappeared into the crowd on the other side of the park, he made a mental note of the geometry of the street in front of the man, and of the businesses located there. Still, nothing out of the ordinary stood out to him—the only establishments directly in the line of sight of the man were Café Metamorphosis, Travel with Tamor, and John’s Hot Dogs.

  What did stand out, though, was the tattoo on the wrist of the man: a stylized bald eagle, rendered in the iconography of the Mad Century.

  The Terran supremacists had arrived on Jerr.

  “So,” Special Agent Rehema Nyasi said as she sat down at the small table, “what did you see?”

  Once he had been out of sight of the man in the park, Mikhail had placed a call to Reagan Base and asked to speak with the current Special Agent in charge of Kerrma-non Sector. The intelligent computer he had spoken to had immediately authenticated him as a former Special Agent and instructed him to go to a nearby café, where Special Agent Nyasi, wearing plain clothes, had approached him just minutes later.

  “The man appeared to be in his late twenties,” Mikhail said. “Short, black hair. No beard. Light brown skin. He was sitting on a bench at the western edge of Tomaw Park.”

  Special Agent Nyasi seemed to focus inward for a second. “Got him,” she said with a smile. On her way to meet Mikhail Johnson, she had walked through the park, her biotic brain recording every sensory input with impeccable clarity. Now, she had reviewed what she had seen and had matched Johnson’s description of the man with the people she had encountered during her walk.

  It took her less than a millisecond to upload the footage from her visual cortex to the Sunguard computers through the permanent radio link she had embedded in her brain. The intelligent computers back at base were equally quick at identifying the man, matching him with their records of Terran Federation citizens. Together with the historical data from the Sunguard surveillance grid, they now knew not only who the man was, but also where he had been in the city during the days since his arrival on Jerr.

  It was one thing to know, in theory, how efficient a biotic Special Agent could be—seeing her in action was another matter entirely. Mikhail was impressed, and simultaneously saddened. How many more lives could he have saved throughout his career, if he had had the abilities of this young woman sitting in front of him now? But this was no time for regrets. In his time, he had done a lot of good for the people of Jerr, and now, that responsibility rested on the shoulders of this obviously very competent woman.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “What do we know of him?” he asked.

  “His name is Jonas Dao,” Special Agent Nyasi replied. “Twenty-seven years old, from Caldera, Mars. He arrived here four days ago. He’s been staying at a small hotel called Bob’s, located in the Illmun-ra district. There’s no surveillance available inside the hotel, but we’ve found him in the street footage as he exits the building. Other than going to a couple of different restaurants—all run by Terrans, by the way—he’s spent all his time in the park.”

  “So whatever he’s up to, it really is connected to this place,” Mikhail concluded.

  “So it would seem,” Special Agent Nyasi concurred. “Still, I don’t see the connection.”

  They sat at the table for another half hour, trying out different theories of what was going on. Unfortunately, none of them quite made sense. The best they could come up with was that he was planning some sort of robbery—perhaps him being a racist was just a coincidence. But if that was the case, why would he venture across light-years to this particular spot on Jerr, just to rob a café or a travel agency? Stealing cinnamon rolls or cruise ship tickets wasn’t exactly a lucrative endeavor.

  Solving the problem with the man in the park wasn’t really his job anymore, but Mikhail had trouble dropping the case. Whatever Dao was up to, he was sure it would mean nothing good for the Jerrassian people Mikhail had adopted as his own. Whenever his mind wasn’t occupied with other things, he found himself wondering about the intentions of the mysterious Terran.

  The light breeze had calmed down as the temperatures dropped in the evening. Now, River Taronga lay calm, the only ripples on its surface resulting from its leisurely flow through the city on its way to the ocean and from the occasional fish breaking the surface to catch an unfortunate insect that had accidentally landed in the water.

  Mikhail sat in his foldable chair on the muddy river bank, watching the float of his tackle slowly move with the water. The fish didn’t seem too interested in his bait today. That was all well and good—in return, he wasn’t that interested in the fish this day, either.

  The gulls, on the other hand, were quite interested in his success, hoping to find a treat among the leftovers from whatever he might manage to pull from the river. Well, they weren’t gulls, not really, but his Terran brain instinctively thought of them as such—they were parabirds. At first glance, they sure looked like Terran gulls, with their yellow beaks and white and gray feathered wings. But if you looked closely at them, the sharp teeth inside their beaks and the small claws on their wings quickly betrayed that these were, in fact, not birds at all.

  Still, if he closed his eyes, the haunting shrieks they made easily could convince him they were.

  What was Dao up to? What were he and Nyasi missing?

  He opened his eyes to look out across the river. The skyscrapers on the other side, rising like statues of gleaming blue and silver metal along the far bank, were partially obscured by the evening haze.

  He loved this city.

  He hadn’t always felt like that, he admitted freely to himself. There had been a time during the height of the uprising, when he had almost lost hope. For a while, it had seemed like nothing they did mattered—no matter what the Terran Federation did, things tended to go from bad to worse. But eventually, the Jerrassian people had proved all the nay-sayers wrong.

  They were a proud people, that was true, but they were also strong, kind, compassionate and loyal, and in the end, they had rejected the violence and bigotry of the Jerrassian Liberation Front, and embraced the Terran Federation. Over the years, they had come to see the Federation as their own, taking pride in their contributions to it, making it stronger and better than it had been without them. Together with the Terrans, the Etarians, and the Kelar, the Jerrassians were now the fourth pillar upon which it rested.

  What was Dao doing here?

  At the back of his mind, something was nagging at his thoughts, trying to break through.

  Suddenly, the float dipped below the surface of the tranquil river. It didn’t make a sound, but the parabirds—having over the years learned the implication of the disappearing float—immediately started to shriek in excitement, as they anticipated their first free meal of the day.

  Mikhail rose up from his chair and lifted his rod with a quick jerk, setting the hook firmly in the jaws of the creature that had swallowed his bait. With a shrill sound, the line was pulled out from the reel as the monster tried to get away from him.

  This was a fight he would not let it win.

  When the fish eventually started to slow down, tired from running, he pulled the rod to the side, dragging with it the line which he immediately reeled in, making sure to keep tension on it the entire time. Through the thin strand of weaved carbon fiber, he could feel the thrashing motions of the beast as it tried to get away from him, but he would not let it do so.

  Slowly, carefully, he brought the fish closer to the shore. Through the clear water, he could see its silvery side reflecting the evening sun as it turned and twisted in the water, its large scales polished like mirrors of liquid metal.

  Eventually, the animal—a horaub-mor weighing a little over four kilos—had tired enough that he could bring it within reach of his net. But just as he was about to close in on it, the fish took off again, dragging the line back out with it. He would have to do it all over again.

  This time, though, reeling in the fish—now already tired from its first run—went much faster. A few minutes later, it was swimming on its side in a shallow pool near the shore. With a quick sweep, he caught the creature and lifted it up out of the water, its hungry, yellow eyes staring at him across the light-years, one alien to another. The watery, almost swampy smell of its body filled Mikhail’s nostrils.

  Victory, at last!

  In his euphoric state, he had almost managed to forget Dao. Maybe that was what finally allowed his subconscious thoughts about the man to surface. Or maybe it had just been a matter of time before he eventually remembered what his brain had been trying to tell him all day long.

  Kal!