“I think they're going about it the wrong way,” Dallas said. “But I have an idea. We do it your way.”

  The young man, still a little liquored up and somewhat agitated, paced back and forth in Mission Adventure's bow compartment. He wondered if he wasn't making a terrible mistake, but he felt committed now. There was seemingly nowhere else to turn and nobody whose guidance he could seek, they being under constant surveillance in the Old Palace. And Kay? What would she say? He knew very well. She would tell him he was just a boy and stupid, and that he should stay home: whatever it took to keep him out of harm's way.

  Deku Tahn stood with his massive arms crossed, and he stared at Dallas with an expression that alternated between stony, scornful and amused. Ri Onte sat comfortably, and studied them both with cat-like, dispassionate interest, whenever she deigned to take her eyes off her meditation stones.

  “They don't have the information they need,” Dallas continued. “Whoever killed Dana Sky deleted it, only, I'll bet they didn't just delete it from her computers. I bet they deleted it from wherever she found it too.”

  “You're not making any sense kid,” Deku said. “Who the hell is Dana Sky?”

  Dallas sucked in a breath, and launched into a long, erratic summary of what he knew. Deku's nose buzzed furiously throughout the young man's rambling speech, and he listened intently, resisting the urge to interrupt and demand clarification on various points: clarification that came of its own accord as Dallas stumbled through his exposition. Upon reaching his conclusion however, Deku still didn't understand why Dallas had actually come to him.

  “So how do we do it my way?”

  “Don't you see? We can find the tech, if we find the tech hunters. There are people somewhere on this planet who know where to look. I mean, this is what you do, right? The professor said...” Dallas trailed off, not wanting to actually accuse them of jumping claims, theft and murder. He didn't have to. They acknowledged the unspoken accusation with their complacent looks, and once again, Dallas wondered if he'd made the right decision in coming to them.

  “The first thing Evolution did when it got here was chase everyone off their claims. If anybody was on the money, the bots would have found it by now.”

  “Suppose they knew Evolution was coming though,” Dallas said. “What would you have done?”

  Deku's brows drew together in brooding contemplation. After just a few moments, they were jolted apart by inspiration. “Set up the map Ri,” he said, and he bounded from the compartment.

  Dallas heard him pounding up the ship's ladder and shortly after, heard him sliding back down. Ri set aside the table's clutter and replaced it with a thin, rolled up screen. Dallas had never seen its like before, and he was surprised when she made its blackness glow with an image of Ar Suft: a two dimensional projection of the planet. He sat down and leaned forward eagerly, seeing that Deku had returned with Sinsin's data slate: the one that listed the various groups of tech hunters Kay had located through their supply purchases.

  Deku drew an oblong circle on the map with his finger, which encompassed a large portion of the old desert, almost on the far side of the planet from Goodenough. His finger left a trail of white on the screen. “That's where Evolution is searching,” Deku said. He tapped a key off to the side of the screen, and started tapping out blue dots as he read place names from the list. “Where the hell is Isaac's Pond? It's not on the map.”

  “Here,” Dallas tapped. He was delighted to see his finger leave a blue smudge, the same as Deku's. “It's one of the new algae plantations.”

  “Yana Basin, Lynchton, Mont d'Ife, Ug-Uggerta...”

  “Ugarte,” Dallas corrected, and pointed.

  “Now,” Deku said, once everything was marked to his satisfaction. “If it was me, I would have covered up my claim and hid out in town until things quieted down, or mingled with the dummies out here,” he pointed to the old desert. It was so-called because it had been scorched and barren even in the garden days, when most of Ar Suft had been green or blue. Evolution, and the tech hunters it had displaced, had focused their efforts there. The former had been driven by rumor and tepid logic: that treasure could only be discovered in remote, inhospitable places; the latter had merely been attracted to the concentrated activities of the former. “Then I would have gone back to the money as soon as I could.”

  Ri's meditation stones sang on as they considered the map in thoughtful silence.

  “We'll just have to check these places out, one at a time,” Deku decided soon enough.

  “I'd double-check your clearance with Evolution and the militia before taking off. You don't want to take any chances after what happened today.”

  “Why, what happened today?”

  “Somebody rammed an Evolution dropship, around here,” Dallas said, pointing.

  Deku marked the spot with a red smudge: an adornment on the periphery of Evolution's search area. “They rammed it?”

  “We're still investigating, but yeah. It looks like somebody hijacked a militia transport flying out of New Town,” Dallas put another red smudge on the map and connected the two with a fairly straight line. “And they flew the bus all the way up here to make their suicide run.”

  “So they're fanatics: Codex maybe, or one of the militant chapters of the Truth of Light. Have there been any other attacks?”

  “Somebody shot an observer off my building. We all thought it was the Andorrans, but they denied it, and I haven't seen any lasers in their gear.”

  “Rich fanatics,” Deku marveled. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing, except maybe the massacre at the spaceport. Maybe they started that too. Evolution thinks it's being baited into a conflict with the militia.”

  Deku grunted thoughtfully and drummed his fingers on the table. “Why kick the geel's nest though? Why now? They're stuck here the same as everyone else. Even if they had a ship of their own, they couldn't outrun a cruiser, not unless they can gate too. And where would they go? It would take fifty years to get to the next closest system, at least.”

  Dallas's lips pursed of their own accord. Out of prudence and lingering mistrust, he hadn't told them what it was everyone was looking for. Ri and Deku read his face as easily as Li Luna however, and the latter loomed large with suspicion.

  “What? What is it?” Deku demanded.

  “I don't-”

  “Spill your guts kid! Come on!”

  “They're looking for a... well, nobody knows for sure, but the New Dawn was trying to make their own gate cores. Maybe they built one, or even a ship.”

  Deku leapt to his feet. “That's it! I told you Ri. I told you. I could smell the damned money. My nose is always right!”

  “You can smell the money?” Dallas asked.

  “You're damned right!” Deku laughed triumphantly.

  “Well, why don't we just fly a grid then? You can tell us wherever the smell gets strongest.”

  Deku's pleasure died abruptly. He stared at Dallas dangerously, even after the smirk wilted from his lips, and then Ri started gurgling with laughter of her own. He whirled on her.

  “Iddi,”he told her. Then, when she only laughed harder: “Duyish opoz.” Deku menaced her with a hand bigger than her belly, but the swipes he made towards her were few and halfhearted, as were the feeble kicks she made to fend him off.

  “What's so funny?” asked Ogden Bloom. The ship's engineer stood in the compartment airlock. How long he had been there, only he knew.

  “Never mind. Go spin up your reactor. We're taking off. And you,” Deku said, turning to Dallas. “Are you coming with us?”

  “Sure, if you're coming back tonight,” Dallas agreed. He had been won over by their merriment.

  “Yeah, we'll get you back by your bed time. We've got to come back for the rest of the crew sometime anyway. Go tell those cans outside we're leaving, then help me secure for flight.”

  Mission Adventure departed from Goodenough soon after this, though it took some labor getting the ship's contents safely stowed away. The crew compartment and galley were in a state of lived-in squalor. In the galley, Deku tossed trash, food and dishes into cupboards and locked them away, loudly damning his followers as worthless slobs. Dallas returned in time to help with the crew compartment. Seeing how Deku went about it, he scooped and tossed with the same uninhibited gusto, and each of them worked one side of the hull, heading aft. With the last of the crew's clothing and personal paraphernalia tossed into their lockers and recessed bunks, and locked behind doors and privacy screens, they turned to center line of the ship, and the various loose cargo nets and straps in need of securing. They made their back forward, working together to make everything taut and safe. At the airlock, they studied their handiwork in sweaty, breathless silence for a moment. Deku was immensely pleased, and he Dallas a jovial thump on the back, then pulled him towards the bow.

  On the bridge, Dallas was directed to the co-pilot's seat, and Deku took his usual place at the watch commander's station, in the center of all.

  “Light 'em up baby sister,” Deku commanded.

  It was Dallas's first time flying aboard a craft of such size: a proper ship. He was as excited as any child would be when Ri's hands at the flight controls brought the humming vibrations of the thrusters up to a thunderous rumble. He watched through a side view screen as the pane of the light cradle began to shimmer and dance in response to the lessening pressure of the ship. The pane turned entirely transparent for the merest fraction of time, when the ship was buoyed entirely by her own thrust, and then, it shimmered and danced in a contrary way as Mission Adventure began to fight to pull away.

  “Port master, port master,” Deku transmitted over comms. “Mission Adventure, is under thrust and in control. Let her go.”

  Dallas vaguely heard the port master's unintelligible reply through the copilot's headset, which he wasn't wearing, and the light cradle winked out of existence. His stomach gave a lurch, and they were free. Mission Adventure leapt upwards, with more speed and nimble grace than he had imagined possible.

  Deku, reading coordinates off their map, punched them into the watch commander's console. The ship's computer plotted a course, and a pip appeared on the bridge window screens. To the uninitiated, the pip was just one more piece of clutter on the already busy heads up display, but Dallas recognized it immediately, and so did their actual pilot. Rather than employ her lateral thrusters, Ri rolled to port in a gentle banking maneuver, bringing the pip from the edge of the left hand screen to the center. Then she juiced the ship's main drives: the two big plasma torches bulging at the ship's stern. It was only a tap of her finger, but without inertia dampeners enabled, it was enough to crush Dallas into the back of his seat under the weight of three additional Gs.

  “Hey,” protested the engineer, who had come to sit at the bosun's console, unnoticed. “Take it easy, I'm drinking here.”

  “You spill any more of that crap on my bridge and you can walk home,” Deku told him.

  To Dallas, it was just bluster from the gruff-talking tech hunter, but Ogden took it seriously: as it was meant to be.

  For the next several hours, Mission Adventure flew a circuit of the towns and settlements closest to Goodenough. There were no docking cradles outside the starport, and she had to make use of her own landing gear wherever they went. These rusted and disused appendages extended out from her bow and stern, and creaked alarmingly from the strain of bearing the ship's weight when she touched down. Deku would then throw his yellow cloak over his shoulders and depart his ship. There were no brows or gangways any more than there were docking cradles outside of Goodenough, and so he deployed a retractable ladder. He slid down it, just the same as he did when leaving the bridge, though the angle was perfectly vertical. Dallas hesitated to follow him in the same way, and he always had to jog to catch up.

  Deku seemed to have swollen into fresh enormity. At every place they landed, he strode into the town like a conqueror, come into his new domain. He wasn't in any obvious hurry, but his strides were as enormous as the rest of him, and Dallas felt childish in his struggles to keep up. He was also keenly aware of the attention the man drew. He was a somewhat singular specimen of their race, Dallas had to admit. He'd rarely seen anyone bigger, and never in such strong and healthy proportions. Heads turned to appraise Deku Tahn wherever they went. Dallas had never seen women turn and stare with such naked interest in a man, and he couldn't help but envy him for it. Deku didn't seem to notice, or maybe he just didn't care.

  At every place they visited, Deku did most of the talking. Sometimes a few words from Dallas were needed to help take the sting of intimidation out of an encounter, but for the most part, the young man kept mum while Deku lied. He usually claimed he was looking to make a bulk purchase of food and water for his crew, and he even went so far as to buy samples now and then. At other places they visited, he told people he was an assayer hired by the Prefect, with a mandate to gauge the impact the tech hunters were having on the planet's agricultural production and reserves. Between his inexplicable (in Dallas's view) powers of attraction, intimidating demeanor and the authority borrowed from Dallas's uniform, he never failed to receive the answers to his most pertinent questions: those about other tech hunters.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  After several hours however, they hadn't yet learned anything of interest. They loitered for dinner at a place called Sarah's Run. Deku cooked a meal from some of the day's groceries, and to Dallas's surprise, the result was delicious, greasy, spicy, nutritious, and filling.

  Deku encouraged Dallas to eat as much as he wanted. “It's not going to get any better sitting in a fridge kid. Eat up.”

  Ogden sat with them, but the plate Ri had set before him remained clean, and his chopsticks untouched. “You should maybe see about getting a few meters of conduit at the next place,” the engineer suggested hesitantly. “We could do with some.”

  “They won't have it,” Dallas said around a mouthful.

  Ri admonished him for his table manners. Dallas had no idea what she had said exactly, but her displeasure transcended the need for language.

  “Sorry,” Dallas told her, but only after swallowing and wiping his mouth with his napkin.

  Ogden sighed a little unhappy laugh, suckled heavily from his flask, and burped up more than just gas.

  “Du petkah ek,” Ri told the engineer softly.

  Dallas didn't understood the tension that followed. With her eyes alone, Ri caught Deku's gaze, and directed his attention to the pan of noodles, spinach and beans he had prepared. After a brief contest of their wills, he picked it up and set it down next to the little engineer. Having done so however, his eyes burned with fiery provocation; he silently dared Ogden to help himself.

  “Thanks,” Ogden said. “I'm not hungry. No conduit huh?” he turned back to Dallas, smiling wanly.

  “People murder for that kind of stuff out here,” Dallas said quickly, eager to break the tension. It was only after he said it that he realized murder wasn't the best topic for a lighthearted conversation with this crew. “Most places were stripped bare by people trying to buy their way off world, you know? There isn't much of anything useful left, and no way to make more. My Aunt Kay, and the Prefect -that's how they came to be together. He was rat-holing materials like that: just to keep it from going missing you understand. Even people in the militia were trying to get off world, so he had to hide it away from everyone except a few people he knew he could trust. Kay got wind of his hoarding though, and she talked him into letting her have what she needed to build green houses and coolers and the like.

  “Why don't you come with us the next time we stop?” Dallas suggested, when he saw that his family history didn't excite much interest.

  “Naw,” Ogden gurgled. “I don't like to leave the ship.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he's afraid I'll leave his nasty little ass behind,” Deku explained.

  This was taken as an invitation for Ogden to leave. He slipped out of his chair and staggered through the airlock. Ri muttered something vicious, and scooped up the pan and empty plates. She put the leftovers in sealed containers, setting aside a smaller one, which she would bring to Ogden later. Then she started to make coffee.

  “Would you leave him behind?” Dallas asked.

  “I'd like to punt him out the airlock in low orbit.”

  Ri slammed her fist down on the counter, and that was an end to the topic. Dallas lost his relish for his food, but he finished it anyway. It was better than just sitting there in the awful quiet that followed.

  ***

  As Dallas was finishing his awkward supper, Aunt Kay was getting arrested. Word had spread quickly of the attack on Chateau Roux, and though she had never once used the word “annexed” outside the Old Palace, rumors of the possibility had circulated. What began as a simple conversation in the marketplace between Kay and an old friend, grew into a passionate town hall meeting, and soon after, threatened to explode into an insurrectionist rally. Kay spoke to deescalate the high-running passions, but there were incendiary voices in their midst. Mostly they spoke against Evolution, but the militia was sometimes decried as an organization of cowards, and sometimes even co-conspirators of the occupation. There were calls to protest, to demand action from the Prefect, and others thought the reserve armories should be seized and the Old Palace stormed.

  Things were looking ugly when Major Phillup Odo arrived with a large contingent of his regiment, and they got even uglier. The militia shut down the marketplace, and in the ensuing riot, Kay was fairly well battered, and finally seized, along with dozens of others: more than a hundred in all. They were escorted outside, where transports were waiting in the streets. Kay was recognized and taken aside.

  “Don't do this,” Kay pleaded with the major, when he came to have a look at her. “You'll only make it worse!” She might as well have pleaded with an Evolution drone. Odo was a man who only understood tactics, military order and discipline. He had no friends: only subordinates, superiors and his scars. He didn't even bother speaking to her; he just growled orders to his troopers. Then Kay had been handcuffed and placed in Odo's staff car. The major himself took her to the Old Palace.

  Flea was waiting on the landing pad. He exchanged a salute with his major, spoke to him briefly, and then joined Kay in the back of the car.

  “Well Kay,” he greeted her jovially, his eyes twinkling. Then he saw that her hands were behind her back, and his merriment wavered. “Are you handcuffed?”

  “Everybody was handcuffed,” Kay said angrily. “Everyone. What the hell has gotten into you?”

  “Relax-” Flea began.

  “You just arrested a hundred people and you're telling me to relax!”

  “Yes,” Flea said calmly. “If you turn your back towards me and relax, I'll take those cuffs off. Just a moment now; I've never had to do this before. I have to find the key on this thing.” Flea sighed as he fidgeted with hand terminal: much the same as a personal networker, but more robust, being meant for military use. “Maybe we should leave them on. It's been a while since I had you in a backseat and you used to like being-”

  “Take them off!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Edward!”

  “You always want to kiss me or kill me and I can never tell which, not even after you start hitting.” Flea sucked his teeth mockingly, just as her manacles clicked open.

  Kay ripped her hands away from his gentle touch and backed against the far door. She stared at Flea as if she'd never seen him before: like he had always been a monster in disguise, and now the illusion was cracking and peeling.

  “Relax,” he said again.

  “Stop telling me to relax!”

  “I'm going to release you precious, and the others too, so just... relax,” Flea urged, waving a hand dismissively. He saw the loathing in her eyes, and it made him sigh again. “There were foreign agents antagonizing that crowd you know.”

  “Foreign agents! That's rich! Plenty of people have suffered loss. Plenty of people have reason to hate Evolution and you too.”

  “Some of them from far away planets,” Flea said airily. “Maybe you should take some of your own advice my dear. You were so much more temperate with the crowd than you are with me.”

  “How would you know that? You- you have the market under surveillance?”

  “Technically, Evolution does, but we placed the snoopers for it.”

  “Then you really have sold us out.”

  He shook his head. “Why do you think Evolution attacked Chateau Roux then?” Flea tapped a finger to his temple and rolled his eyes.

  “Then why let Evolution in the Old Palace?” Kay demanded. “Why take the hub down? Why-”

  “The hub! Sure! You see how bad it's gotten without it. If everyone was back on the messaging boards posting their irrational gobshit, our planet would have caught fire months ago. Besides, Evolution can control anything and everything we have networked. That would include your personal networker and its microphone and camera. Do you want it watching and listening to everything you say and do?”

  Kay shuddered.

  “At least this way, it can only spy through its own devices. As to letting it into the Old Palace, I didn't have much choice at the time. I'm not exactly happy about it you know. And I don't much care for my friend out there shadowing my every step.

  “Look at it.”

  Kay tracked Flea's gaze to the centurion lurking at the edge of the platform, where Flea had asked it to wait. There were times it was almost comical, dressed as it was in a militia uniform. That had been Flea's intention at least: a way to help cope with its constant presence, and certainly the white driver's gloves had been an inspired choice. Just then however, it was more sinister than ever. The two humans in the car imagined, rather than knew, that it was watching them in a high state of alert: listening to them perhaps. Could it hear them from so far away, and through the armored body of the staff car?

  “So...” Kay said, in a pretty state of confusion.

  “So,” Flea replied, as if the word was rooted in some well-informed opinion, and he deeply agreed with it.

  “What happens now then?” Kay asked, after much heavy silence.

  “We''ll sort through our catch,” Flea replied jovially. “We'll isolate the agents, release everyone else and then start the interrogations.”

  “You're sure they're not locals? Your own people?”

  “Very sure. Evolution back-tracked them to a squat near Dark Side. But I'll have their names checked against the old census records first, if that makes you feel better.”

  “It does. A little. Will you be doing the questioning?”

  “Not to start, but it'll be done here, in the Old Palace. It won't be like with that poor Andorran fellow.”

  “I want to be there,” Kay said forcefully. “I want to see and hear for myself.”

  “Alright,” Flea agreed easily. “But in exchange, I want you to go below and see off everyone else we arrested today. Do what you can to keep them calm. Explain what happened if you have to. Tell them we had to arrest everyone like that, because these agents are fanatics. They might have blown themselves up and everyone else too if they were singled out.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Maybe. Say whatever it takes to keep them safe. I don't want to start gunning people down in the streets.”

  “You would do that?” Kay asked sharply.

  “I would. I'll do everything in my power to preserve our planet, whether it's from Evolution, the Congress of Andorra, or a bunch of stupid savages who don't know any better. And I'm definitely not going to let a mob tear me apart as thanks for my efforts. Tell them that too, if you think it'll help. I can be the bad man if need be. You used to like it when I played the bad man.”

  In the bowels of the Old Palace was a small holding area. It was a remnant of former days, when the Monet family had been in residence, and whose house guard had sometimes been called upon to deal with thieves, spies, assassins and their accomplices. This dungeon was cold, dark and empty. The various cells and interrogation facilities were long since stripped bare; nothing remained but dust and cobwebs.

  Even as a work crew rushed to finish restoring lights, snoopers and even locks, the first batch of prisoners was brought in. The militia marched them through by the dozen or so. Cell doors opened and closed with rapidity as prisoners came and went; they lingered only long enough to have their identities confirmed by a handful of junior officers, and then they were discharged, usually in a high state of bewilderment. They had spent more time in the transports than they had in the holding cells: all except the troublemakers, presumed to be foreign agents. A junior officer took their names, thanked them for their patience and promised them they would soon be released, only to 'forget about them' in the apparent confusion.

  “They claim their names are David Hall and Mary Roads,” Flea told Kay, when she came to join him. “Do you recognize them?”

  They were in the old observation room. A pair of portable terminals had been connected to the old snooper leads and set up on an ornate table, which the lady 'guest' upstairs had rejected. A few of its dining chairs had been set around it. One chair bore a trooper, who had the management of the terminals, one was empty, and the last was improvising as a sideboard. Flea poured a cup of coffee from the carafe it bore and gave it to Kay. She took it, if only to bring warmth to her cold hands, and peered at the monitors.

  “No,” Kay admitted. The prisoners were strangers to her, but that didn't make them foreign. There were tens of thousands of people dwelling in Goodenough, for all its decline and present state of abandonment, and nobody could know them all.

  “They claim they're from Yana Basin,” Flea said significantly.

  “They're not,” Kay said firmly.

  Yana Basin had once been at the bottom of the ocean. It was a great big bowl on the equator, full of salt and heat and sunlight during the day, and not much else. There was a mining settlement built into a box canyon on its southern periphery, interested in the little pockets of natural platinum and palladium that had been too small to interest the big syndicates. There weren't quite forty people living and working there in total. While organized on the principals of business, its people were nevertheless a tightly knit family community, all more or less related to one another. Kay knew everyone in Yana Basin. She was their primary food supplier.

  “They must be lying,” she said unhappily. “I saw Jenna and Solomon not much more than a week ago. They didn't say anything about bringing on new people.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Jenna and Solomon Gadot. They're the quartermaster and foreman down there. They came in to buy supplies just ahead of the gate ship.”

  “I see,” Flea said complacently. He put a hand on the shoulder of the young woman running the terminals. “Are their scans complete?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Let's see them please.”

  The live feed from the snoopers in the cells was replaced with the prisoners' scan data. The invasive imaging was rather abstract, but revealed the prisoners' basic bone structure, with foreign objects highlighted as 'hotspots.'

  “There's not much to see sir. Ma'am,” the young officer added as an afterthought, jerking her head in Kay's direction. “They both have dental, vocal and cochlear implants: all very normal on most any other planet -polymers and metals; no explosives detected.”

  Flea opened the door. The centurion without turned to face him. “Let Sar know we're ready.”

  The centurion nodded. The door closed. “How went things with the mob?” Flea asked conversationally, as they waited.

  “Oh, great,” Kay said dryly. “They all apologized for inconveniencing you and promise never to get angry again.”

  Flea smiled, as if he was living in a state of bliss.

  Sar went straight to the woman's cell. In an instant, its own scanners confirmed what the militia's had seen, and Sar sneered complacently. The woman had been sitting, but she leapt to her feet when she saw what entered.

  “Good evening,” Sar greeted her.

  The prisoner backed away as Sar strode forward, but she was already in the corner after just two steps. The look of hatred and revulsion contorting her lean face changed to one of horror.

  “Where are you going?” Sar asked playfully. It stopped advancing when the woman dropped into a fighting stance. It registered the horny pads on her knuckles and over-developed muscles in her wrists: the lack of fat in her face and anywhere else it could see. She was a trained fighter, and well-conditioned.

  The woman looked around frantically, but seeing no weapon and no way to escape, a deadly calm overcame her. She stood up straighter, apparently relaxing. “I go to the Light,” she whispered. “And light take you too demon!”

  Sar saw her bite down in a strange way: so that two of her dental fillings were brought into contact. In an instant, it realized this was a trigger for a body bomb. But no, there were no explosives, and there was no detonation. No, of course there wouldn't be one instantly; there would be a time delay safety: two or three seconds. Sar sprang forward, intending to pry her jaws apart and abort the explosion, but at the same instant, the woman attacked. Sar's optics picked up the heat blooming inside her implants. She screamed in agony as she wrapped her arms around its head, and Sar, instead of trying to pry her jaws apart, was pushing her face away: her dead, glowing face.

  The woman's head disappeared in a burst of energy so powerful that it blinded Sar's optics and deafened his microphones. For several seconds, Sar was isolated in silence and darkness, certain of its continued existence only through its link to Evolution. It saw itself from the perspective of Flea's centurion, which had come running. It saw the damage that had been done to its platform: hands incinerated into unrecognizable slag, face melted and drooping like so much hot wax, and the front of its uniform burned away to the waist, with the torso charred beneath.

  A pair of drones arrived and took turns removing their parts. Sar's eyes were replaced, and it watched as the Centurion forced the distorted threads of its wrists. The useless hands were replaced by those of the drones, and then Sar took their microphones. In less than a minute, it was back to full functionality: wanting only a cleaning, a new uniform, and a new face. The drones ran off again with the damaged parts: to join the maintenance queue at the starport and have them replaced.

  Sar went straight from the woman's cell to the man's, barging past Flea without a word. The man leapt to his feet.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” the prisoner cried.

  Sar didn't wait. It made a fist with its new hand and struck. Blood and spittle splattered the wall, and several of the man's teeth clattered to the floor. Sar stepped over the prostrate, whimpering prisoner and picked up one of the teeth. Scrutinizing it under magnification revealed nothing however, and even after it had crushed the tooth between fingertips, the mystery of how it functioned still hadn't revealed itself.

  “How does it work?” Sar demanded. It stooped and lifted the man by his armpits. “The photon bomb! How does it work? How is it concealed?”

  “I don't know,” the man whined through the blood and pain; his speech was terribly slurred by the gaps in his teeth. “I'm just a lay cleric. I wasn't even implanted. I was only attached to the chapter a few months ago to give sermons, because my Cleric Superior didn't like me. Oh please,” the man turned to Flea, who came stand in the door. “Please sir, asylum, grant me asylum. I beg you!”

  “What was it?” Flea asked mercilessly. “How did it go undetected?”

  “They call it the Crucible,” the man said, speaking through sobs and tears. “It's disguised as normal implants. That's all I know. I swear, I swear by the light. Have mercy on me, please!”

  “Where are the others?”

  “The old resort,” the cleric said, eager to damn his compatriots. “Two streets south of Dark Side. It has a dome and a pool.”

  “Farragut's Folly,” Flea said, turning to Major Odo, who had come up with a file of troopers. “Go in hard with your best company. Remember they have at least one laser. Don't take any chances.”

  “We want them alive,” Sar said. “Observers have been dispatched.”

  “Fine. Let them know my unit is on its way. Hold a perimeter for them,” Flea told Odo, amending his orders. “And clean up after they're done.”

  “Sir.”

  “What about me?” the cleric asked.

  “Asylum,” Flea said simply.

  Even with its face melted, Sar's sneer was obvious. It dropped the prisoner with a snarl of disgust. “He's all yours Prefect. For now.”