Windows Of The Soul 
Paul Chafe 


This is a work of fiction. All the characters and 
events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any 
resemblance to real people or incidents is purely 
coincidental. 


Copyright (c) 2002 by Larry Niven 


All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce 
this book or portions thereof in any form. 


A Baen Books Original 


Baen Publishing Enterprises 


P.O. Box 1403 
Riverdale, NY 10471 
www.baen.com 
ISBN: 0-671-31838-1 


Cover art by Stephen Hickman 


First printing, January 2002 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 


Niven, Larry. 
Man-Kzin wars IX / created by Larry Niven. 


p. cm. 
ISBN 0-671-31838-1 
1. Life on other planets-Fiction. 2. Space 
warefare-Fiction. 3. Animals-
Fiction. I. Title: Man-Kzin wars 9. II. Man-Kzin wars 
Nine. 
PS3564.I9 M36 2002 
813'.54-dc21 2001043635 
Distributed by Simon & Schuster 
1230 Avenue of the Americas 
New York, NY 10020 
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH 



Printed in the United States of America 
Windows Of The Soul 
Paul Chafe 


For Christian, with love 


Transport tunnel nineteen is one of thirty-two that 
run the fifty-kilometer length of Tiamat's axis to 
link the docking hubs. Normally it's full of 
twenty-meter cargo containers, gliding in virtual 
weightlessness. Last night a roller jammed in section 
A near the down-axis hub. The Port Authority shut the 
tunnel down and sent in a tech. The problem was a 
body. That's when I got involved. Pathology said it 
had been there nine days and the Scene Team had all 
the evidence. There was no reason to go down there 
myself, but I did. You can't get a handle on a crime 
if you don't get on the scene. I wished I hadn't. 
The body was M18JSK98-Miranda Holtzman, nineteen 
standard years old, engineering student at the 
Centaurus Center for Advanced Studies. Her dossier 
holo showed sparkling blue eyes and brown-gold hair. 
She was a Wunderlander, just arrived in the Swarm on 
a work-study deal with a spun metal fabricator called 
Trist Materials. Good looking, smart and last seen 
alive at a bounce-bar called the Inferno. She'd 
arrived with friends and left with a stranger. The 
witnesses agreed on dark hair and a Wunderlander 
build but little else. A movement trace came up 
blank. After she left the Inferno, she hadn't thumbed 
a single scanner-and on Tiamat that takes some 
effort. That was nine days ago. Pathology had it 
right on the money. 
We identified her through her on-file gene scans so 
her next of kin didn't have to. That was a good 
thing. She'd been badly mauled in jamming the track 
rollers, but that wasn't the worst of it. She was 
slashed open from throat to groin and eviscerated, 
her skin was flayed off and her limbs were missing. 
Her empty eye sockets stared at nothing. The coroner 
listed cause of death as "unknown." There wasn't 
enough left to tell. 
Now you know why I wished I hadn't looked. 



* * * 
I tubed over to Trist Materials. They were closing 
down early, hampered by a swarm of Goldskin 
investigators. I grabbed the top cop. "Captain 
Allson, ARM." 
"How can I help you?" He looked harried. 
"I'm looking for the primary witnesses." 
He pointed out the couple to me. They were sitting on 
a couch in the reception area holding each other. 
Tanya's face was drawn and pale, she'd been crying 
recently. Jayce looked sombre. 
"You got somewhere I can hold an interview?" 
"We have their statements." 
"That's not what I asked." He looked sour. ARM 
outranks the Goldskins, but they don't like it. He 
beckoned over a uniform to set me up with some cubic. 
I called up their dossiers on my beltcomp. It helps 
to know who you're talking to. 
PCL9C3N4-Koffman, Tanya C., 24. Born Tiamat Station. 
Graduate Serpent Swarm Technical Institute. Physical 
engineer for Trist. Unmarried. Holder of a 
non-current belt navigation certificate rated for 
polarizers and fusion. No outstanding warrants, no 
criminal record. 
BG309003-Vorden, Jayce I. F., 23. Born Tiamat 
Station. Also an SSTI graduate and Trist's Compsys 
specialist. Unmarried. No warrants but he had a 
record, two hits, public mischief. I tabbed the entry 
for the details. University pranks. He'd hacked in to 
the scoreboard during a championship skyball game and 
displayed insults for the rival team. Acquitted with 
a warning. Another time he'd gained access to the 
transit system and given himself priority routing and 
children's fare. Charged double back payments on his 
fares and five hundred hours community service. That 
was three years ago-he'd been clean ever since. 
On a hunch, I punched up my desk from the beltcomp 
and did quick movement trace. Multiple hits-the 
pattern was clear. Jayce and Tanya traveled as a 
couple, starting three months ago. I scanned forward 
and found trouble in paradise-ten days with no 
visits. I called up the comm logs for the period. A 
few calls, all very short, then a long one. Right 



after that, the visits started again. They'd fought 
and made up. The fight started a week after Miranda 
arrived and she'd gone missing the day they got 
together again. I called up her comm logs and found 
long calls to both of them, starting her first day on 
station. 
The facts suggested a scenario. Jayce and Tanya have 
a good thing going, then pretty Miranda shows up and 
gets in the middle. A week later they sort out the 
triangle and go out for a no-hard-feelings party, 
which goes bad. Someone kills Miranda and the other 
gets involved. They make up the dark Wunderlander as 
cover. It wasn't a perfect theory, but it was a start. 
I stuck my head out the door and called Jayce over. 
He was tall and slender with dark hair and eyes and a 
Flatlander's blended facial features. I tapped record 
on my beltcomp and began. 
"What can you tell me about the night Miranda 
disappeared?" 
He shrugged. "There just isn't that much to tell. We 
went to the Inferno after work like we always did. 
She was dancing with this Wunderlander. After a while 
they left together." 
"By 'we' you mean Miranda and you?" 
"Miranda, Tay and I." He was perfectly comfortable 
with his answer. 
"You and Miss Koffman have been seeing each other for 
some time, is that correct?" 
"Yes." 
"I understand you and she had a serious argument a 
couple of weeks ago." I stated it as a fact. 
He was taken aback. "What do you mean? 
I kept pushing. "I mean that Miranda Holtzman 
precipitated a rift in your relationship. That gives 
you a motive for murder." 
The shock he displayed was genuine. I just didn't 
know if it was due to hidden guilt or injured 
innocence. 
"What was your relationship with her?" 
"She was our friend, that's all." 
"You didn't have an affair with Miranda which brought 
on a fight with Tay?" 
"No." 



"Why did you go to the Inferno that night?" 
"We just did. It wasn't unusual, we went fairly 
often." 
"The three of you." 
"Yes." 
"Did anyone else go with you?" 
"There's a bunch of us who sometimes go out, friends 
of ours, but they didn't come that night." 
"Why not?" 
"I don't know, just busy I guess." He looked stricken 
as he said it. He felt he was digging himself in 
deeper with every word. 
"So there's no one who can corroborate your story 
that she left before you." 
"Tanya can." 
I waved a hand dismissively. "Anyone else?" 
"Maybe the bartender." 
"But you don't know for sure." 
He put his head in his hands. "No." 
I changed tack. "What about this man she left with?" 
He seized the question like a drowning man grabbing a 
straw. If I was asking it, I must believe his story. 
"He was a Wunderlander, thick dark hair. He had a 
glowflow bodysuit, set to rainbow smears." 
"Had you seen him before?" 
"Not that I recall." 
"Do you think he knew Miranda or that she knew him?" 
He was anguished. "I don't know, I wish I did. We 
just didn't know what was happening." Then, almost to 
himself, he repeated, "We just didn't know." 
He was devastated by the sudden loss. Perhaps he 
hadn't known Miranda that well but he'd been with her 
the night she was killed. It wasn't his fault but he 
felt responsible anyway. Survivor's guilt-or simple 
guilt. Either way, I wasn't going to learn anything 
more. The Goldskins would go over his statement and 
cross-check for inconsistencies. I just wanted a read 
on the first-pass prime suspects. 
"You can go now, Mr. Vorden." 
"What?" He'd sunken into a reverie while I pondered. 
"You're done. Thank you for your help." 
"Oh." He seemed bemused for a couple of seconds, then 
gathered himself. "Good luck, Captain." 



"Thanks," I said, and I meant it. I hoped he did too. 
After he left, I punched my beltcomp's audio log 
through to my desk. I've got a program that analyzes 
voice microtremors-sometimes it even works. My system 
told me that Jayce was telling the truth-mostly. He 
was hiding something about his relationship with 
Miranda. That concurred with my theory. There had 
been infidelity, a fight, a murder. I just needed the 
link. 
I had Tanya sent in. She was petite for a Belter-my 
height. Her eyes were red and she dabbed at them with 
a handkerchief. In other circumstances she would be 
pretty. 
"Come in, Miss Koffman. Please sit down," I said in 
my best good-cop manner. 
She sat, giving me a forced, trembling smile. She was 
barely holding herself together. If I pushed her, 
she'd go over the edge. At times like this it's a 
judgement call. Sometimes a little nudge brings an 
easy confession, sometimes it catalyzes uncrackable 
resolve. 
And sometimes you're just adding pressure to a 
bystander already under emotional overload. Maintien 
le droit, the ARM motto cuts both ways. Tanya was a 
prime suspect. I would step softly, but I would find 
out what I needed to know. 
"Look, I know you're upset. I just have a couple of 
questions for you, and then you can go." I said it 
gently, coaxing. She nodded in response. 
"Were you jealous of Miranda and Jayce?" 
She didn't answer; she just shook her head, biting 
her lip. 
"But they did . . . did sleep together?" I couldn't 
think of a more delicate way to put it." 
She nodded. Paydirt. 
"That didn't make you jealous?" 
She shook her head. "We had a . . . you know . . . 
all three of us . . ." She collapsed into tears. 
I hadn't been expecting that. I sat back, 
implications running through my brain while Tanya 
wept. No use questioning her further now, my theory 
was shot. I needed to reassess. 
I sent her out and pulled up the transit logs again 



and cross-matched all three of them for Miranda's 
tube station. They'd both been spending nights in her 
apt. Far from causing a breakup, she'd been the 
hingepoint of a menage. Tanya and Jayce's transit 
pattern changed because they'd been spending their 
time at Miranda's. That didn't clear them but it 
reopened the question of motive. Miranda's file 
yielded another link. This was her second time on 
Tiamat. At sixteen she'd been on a six-month school 
exchange with FRCK1798-Koffman, Bris, Tanya's younger 
sister. That explained why Tanya was more upset than 
Jayce and where the spark for the expansion of their 
relationship had come from. And it told me what Jayce 
had been covering up about his relationship with 
Miranda. At least part of what he'd been covering up. 
The information also offered some good motive 
possibilities-jealousy now for Jayce instead of Tanya 
or an old grudge rekindled for her. Even so, my 
instincts were telling me that they weren't the 
culprits. I needed another angle. 
After a while I got up and grabbed the tube back to 
my office. On the way, I thought about dossiers. 
* * * 
C137PUDV-Allson, Joel K., ARM Captain. 33 standard 
years old. Born: Constantinople, Earth. Current 
assignment: Chief of Investigation-Tiamat Station, 
Alpha Centauri. Fingerprints, retina prints, gene 
scan. A holo of a man with a Flatlander face, Arab, 
African, Slav, Balt and Mongol-boringly nondescript 
on Earth, noticeably different on Wunderland. Date of 
birth, date of marriage, date of divorce. Medical 
history, educational records, details of promotion. 
Case reports from Bangkok, New Delhi and Berlin. 
Commendations for service and commendations for 
bravery. Date of transfer outsystem. 
A good record, I was proud of it. What's the measure 
of a man? Nowadays it's his data file. Dossiers are 
the tools of my trade. They give me a skeleton-my job 
is putting flesh on the bones. 
The best cops are just one step this side of the 
law-that's how you get into a criminal's mind. I was 
one of the best. In deep-cover work, the line gets 
blurry. You make so many sacrifices you start to feel 



entitled to fringe benefits your cover requires you 
to take anyway. The Brandywine case cost me my 
marriage. When it blew up, my position was-confused. 
The Conduct Review Board said, "Captain Allson's 
actions were directly related to his assignment and 
he did not act with criminal intent." They must have 
known more than I did. Prakit believed them because 
he believed in me but when the slot on Wunderland 
came up, he offered it, firmly. After Brandywine I'd 
never be safe undercover again, not on the 
Organization cases I'd made into my life. He never 
mentioned Holly, but it wasn't my cover that worried 
him. I took the assignment. What else was I going to 
do? 
Wunderland-the name says it all. The colonists found 
a virgin paradise of mountains and forests, clear air 
and low gravity. They turned it into the jewel of 
Known Space, but the world they'd built was gone now. 
First the kzinti had invaded taking the land and 
turning the citizens into slaves-or dinner. Some 
fought, some fled, some tried to save what they 
could. Most just survived and carried on in a grimmer 
world. 
Forty years later, Earth attacked with lightspeed 
missiles, twelve thousand gigatonne impacts that 
punched to the planet's core and blotted the suns 
from the sky. The UN wrecked the kzinti industrial 
base and much of Wunderland in the process. The 
survivors cheered anyway, and dreamed of liberation. 
And it came, faster than anyone could imagine, in an 
Earth armada with We Made It hyperdrives. The 
Provisional Government was formed and the 
Wunderlanders began to heal the scars of conquest. 
The rebels came out of the mountains and the pirates 
came in from the Swarm. The few kzinti left insystem 
adapted, disappeared into the forest, or died. 
But liberation didn't end the war. Alpha Centauri 
became the UN advance base. The Provo Government was 
controlled by UN advisors and the Serpent Swarm made 
a UN territory outright. The economy went to full war 
production. The liberators quartered thousands of 
troops in Munchen in case the kzinti came back-and in 
case the Wunderlanders objected to the UN plan. Maybe 



the breakdown was inevitable. The kzinti were no 
harsher than the Provos and a lot less corrupt. A 
political party called the Isolationists emerged with 
a simple solution-Wunderland for Wunderlanders. The 
kzinti were gone, the Flatlanders could go too. By 
the time I arrived in Munchen, they were no longer a 
political party, they were a terrorist group. The 
Provisional Government's anti-collaborator campaign 
had become a random witch hunt. The whole 
infrastructure was falling apart-transportation, 
medical support, civil services, even basic 
maintenance stripped to feed the UN war machine. The 
black market thrived on everything from pleasure 
drugs to biochips and a dozen crime webs warred over 
the spoils. Whole outland regions rejected the Provos 
and UN troops were used to impose control. 
I should have thrived in that environment-it was my 
kind of work, but the rot had spread to the ARM. 
Certain individuals, certain groups had immunity. 
Investigations that got too close were closed down. 
Critical evidence simply disappeared. I fought a 
losing battle to clean up the agency and made a lot 
of high-powered enemies. When they discovered they 
couldn't shut me up, they kicked me upstairs, big 
time. I wound up with the top job on Tiamat, half a 
billion kilometers skyward. 
It was better on station. There was smuggling, theft, 
even murder-but no bombings, no assassinations, no 
gang wars. More importantly, the taint of corruption 
was gone. I needed that change most of all. It didn't 
tempt me, but it disturbed too many sleeping ghosts 
for comfort. 
The tube stopped and I climbed out and hurried back 
to my office. I wanted to catch up to 
Hunter-of-Outlaws. One of the few wise decisions the 
UN made was to let the kzinti left in-system run 
their internal affairs as long as they toed the UN 
line when dealing with humans. Tiamat has a lot of 
kzinti, most in the Tigertown high-G section. They 
were surprisingly good citizens, considering, but 
keeping relations smooth was a balancing act. Hunter 
was my high-wire partner. 
He was on his way out when I got back. I grabbed him 



before he could leave and outlined my findings. 
"What do you think?" I asked when I was done. 
"Hrrr . . . If Koffman and Vorden are to be believed 
the prime suspect must be the human she left with, on 
evidence of contacts. Since she left no transit log, 
it is probable she traveled on her companion's ident 
to the transport tunnel where she was killed. However 
. . ." he trailed off. 
"Go on," I prompted. 
He continued reluctantly. "The body was found near 
the kzinti sector. The corpse looks like a butchered 
prey animal. On the basis of these facts I would 
suspect a kzin." 
I nearly laughed but he was dead serious. "You don't 
think a human would do that?" 
"I have seen humans kill each other but I have never 
seen them strip a carcass so. It is the act of a 
carnivore." 
"Never underestimate humanity, my friend." I grinned, 
but didn't let my teeth show. 
He ignored the barb. "If it is possible, then we must 
consider it. It is conceivable the culprit was 
cutting the body up into manageable pieces and was 
disturbed before the task could be completed. Perhaps 
Miranda Holtzman held dangerous information and was 
killed to preserve its secrecy." 
"I hadn't considered that, but you're right." I 
didn't go on. 
Hunter considered, pupils narrowing. "Your manner 
tells me you have another thought." He knew humans 
well. 
"Perhaps she was killed by a schitz." It was a wild 
idea, but it fit. 
The kzin looked baffled. Maybe he didn't know humans 
so well after all. "What is a schitz?" 
"It's a blanket term for someone who isn't wired 
properly. They respond to hallucinations, become 
paranoid or megalomaniacal. Specifics vary but they 
can be homicidal." 
He knew what hallucinations were but-"What is 
paranoid and megalomaniacal?" He pronounced the words 
awkwardly. 
"Paranoia is when you feel that the entire world is 



plotting against you. Megalomania is when you have 
delusions of grandeur." His expression continued 
quizzical. "As if a telepath was convinced he was 
destined to be Patriarch." 
"A kzin so defective would not survive. I have never 
heard of these conditions." 
"It's rare, the genes are being weeded out. There are 
drugs to control it too-but-med support is hard to 
get nowadays. On Wunderland people are dying for lack 
of it. It isn't so bad up here . . ." I trailed off, 
thinking. Getting treatment was easy in the Swarm, 
but what if someone didn't want treatment? 
"Why do you suspect a schitz if they are rare? 
Probability would suggest another scenario." 
"Yah, it would. But Miranda was a pretty young woman 
last seen with an unknown male. Schitz crimes 
sometimes involve violent sexual motives." 
He gave me another quizzical look. "Violent sex is a 
contradiction in terms. How can genes for this 
behavior propagate?" 
"Schitzies aren't rational, I don't know how they 
think. Dammit, I've only even heard of one schitz; 
this is just what I learned in training." I thought 
about the case I knew. An autodoc misread a med card 
and a quiet sculptor murdered his roommates in a 
blind rage. The error wasn't his fault but . . . 
Hunter interrupted my reverie. "We have a wealth of 
possibilities-a kzin with a lost temper, a human with 
a definite motive and a connection to the victim, a 
schitz engaged in random murder. We lack information. 
I suggest we gain some." 
I smiled. "Let's do that." Hunter could be relied on 
to cut to the heart of the matter. He gave me the 
kzin gesture that meant concurrence-between-equals 
and left. I watched him go and pondered. There was 
another possibility. 
Hunter's dossier told me he'd once been 
Kurz-Commander, in control of the kzin base on 
Tiamat. During the occupation he'd gained a 
reputation as a hard but fair governor and a 
ruthless, efficient rebel hunter. He'd earned respect 
and even affection from his human charges but he was 
their prime target on the day Tiamat revolted. He 



survived because he was off station, organizing a 
ragtag group of tugs and mining ships into a 
last-ditch defense against the Terran fleet. He 
survived the battle and the labour camps and 
eventually wound up back on Tiamat-this time to 
maintain order among the stranded kzin. He was the 
logical choice, he knew more about the asteroid's 
workings than anyone of either species. I relied 
heavily on his experience and judgment. 
That gave him a lot of power, and made me vulnerable. 
I called in Tamara Johansen, head of Criminal 
Investigation with Tiamat's Goldskin police. She'd 
served on Tiamat since before the liberation and 
would have had my job if the UN hadn't dumped me on 
top of her. It was a credit to her professionalism 
that she didn't let her resentment show-much. When 
she arrived I filled her in. 
"Where do I fit?" she asked. 
"There's a fourth scenario. Maybe Miranda was killed 
by a kzin with some connection to her. What if she 
knew something she wasn't supposed to?" 
"What are you getting at?" She was intrigued. 
"Look, we've got fifty thousand kzinti on-station. 
They're the ones smart enough to adapt to human rule. 
They know they have to work with us. That doesn't 
mean they've changed allegiance. Hunter-of-Outlaws 
doesn't mind suggesting that a kzin might have killed 
Miranda in a rage. What if a kzin killed Miranda 
because she knew too much about kzin underground 
activity?" 
She didn't look impressed by my suspicions. "We know 
they run an intelligence net, but it isn't much. I'd 
be surprised if they've got a secret worth the 
trouble a murder investigation will bring. They can't 
even get information back to Kzin." 
"What's your theory then?" 
She held up an imaginary magnifying glass. "It is a 
cardinal error to speculate in advance of the facts." 
She gave me an exaggerated scowl. 
I laughed and the ice broke a little. "Speculate 
anyway, Holmes, I won't hold you to it." 
She became serious again. "I'd suspect a Kdaptist." 
"What's a Kdaptist?" 



"They're a kzin cult. They've only surfaced once in 
the swarm, but the case was a lot like this one. 
Right after the liberation, a fighter jock named 
Detoine disappeared. He was a real war hero, very 
famous. Had every decoration you could get, most of 
them twice. There was a huge search." 
"So what happened?" 
"We got nothing. Then three years later a kzin got 
caught with a human skin-the DNA was Detoine's. Turns 
out the kzin was a high priest in this breakaway 
cult. They believed their god abandoned them and they 
used Detoine's skin in their rituals to try and get 
him back." 
"And the rest of Detoine?" 
"They ate him. To absorb his heroic warrior spirit." 
I shuddered involuntarily. "That's a close enough 
pattern to be worth investigating. That's your angle. 
Keep me posted." 
She gave me a thumbs-up and turned to go. I stopped 
her before she got to the door. 
"Why do you think Hunter is covering this up?" 
She shrugged. "We don't know that he is. He was still 
in a security camp down on Wunderland when all that 
happened, he probably doesn't even know about it. 
Remember, Hunter-of-Outlaws is a kzin. His personal 
honour is the core of his identity." 
"Meaning?" 
"Getting involved in a cover-up is risking his 
honour, so he probably isn't. But if he is, it'll be 
something big. Very big." 
She went off to start her inquiries and I sat at my 
desk and pulled up the files on the Kdapt cult. 
Service number K78131965-Squadron Leader Jean-Marc 
Detoine. Valour Cross, UN Cross, UN Medal and bar, 
Flight Medal and two bars and a dozen lesser awards. 
He had forty kills in atmosphere and eighteen in 
space. UNF Command put a lot of pressure on when he 
went missing and the Goldskins turned Tiamat upside 
down. They found nothing. Three years later, a kzin 
named Trras-Squadron-Battle-Planner forgot his 
shoulder pack in a tube car. The Transit 
lost-and-found opened it and discovered Detoine's 
skin, but Trras had scoured his quarters of evidence 



and committed suicide by the time the pack was 
traced. The search team got nothing but a paw-written 
Kdaptist creed. That dead-ended the case until a 
smart investigator connected the Kdapt view with the 
fact that Trras still carried his Fifth Fleet name. 
Seven kzin were found with similar names. All seven 
were involved with the cult. All seven were shot. I 
skipped the details and called up all unsolved murder 
files since the liberation. None came close to the 
Kdaptist's flay-eviscerate-devour pattern. 
I pondered. If any Kdaptists were left, they weren't 
very energetic. Anyway, Miranda hadn't been eaten-at 
least not all of her. Perhaps Hunter simply didn't 
consider the cult a possibility worth mentioning. So, 
what else was big enough for the kzin underground to 
risk a murder investigation, big enough for 
Hunter-of-Outlaws to put his personal honour on the 
line? 
Hyperdrive was the obvious answer. The UN's ongoing 
campaign against kzinti interstellar trade was 
strangling their empire. That strategy depended 
entirely on their lack of FTL travel. Hyperdrive 
ships aren't even allowed to dock at Tiamat because 
of the kzin population. The secret of hyperdrive was 
the only information they could get back to Kzin 
faster than a laser. 
Was that what was going on? Was Hunter involved? I 
forced the question out of my mind. If he was on the 
level, there was no problem. If he wasn't, then 
Johansen and I would catch him-sooner or later. In 
the meantime, the angle was worth following. Trist 
Materials had nothing to do with hyperdrives, so 
Miranda wasn't a primary-source spy. I did a movement 
trace for the last two weeks of her life, then 
cross-referenced to anyone connected to the 
hyperdrive project. I got about a hundred thousand 
possible contacts, including myself. Hunter was 
right, I needed more data. Without it, I'd drive 
myself paranoid. 
Thinking of paranoia brought me back to the schitz 
angle. I hoped it was wrong. I didn't want to think 
about a human depraved enough to do what had been 
done to Miranda. 



* * * 
Tiamat is a potato-shaped asteroid, 20 kilometers by 
50 kilometers. The Swarm Belters formed it into a 
rough tube, spun it for gravity and honeycombed it 
with tunnels. It rotates every ten hours, creating a 
1G pull around the circumference. Ships dock at the 
axis, low gravity industries take up the center of 
the tube, farms and parks take up the periphery. The 
Inferno was on a commercial arcade on the .4G level. 
After work, I tubed up to see how Miranda spent her 
last hours. 
It was packed when I got there. Sound dampers kept 
the pulsating music out of the pedmall but inside it 
was deafening. The dance floor was a mass of gyrating 
bodies in simulated free fall down a holographic 
bottomless chasm. Dante-esque demons circled above 
them before plunging past into the depths. The 
dancers took full advantage of the low G to leap and 
twirl in fantastic combinations. Artificial 
pheremones filled the air with sex and danger. 
I sat down at the bar. A local sound damper gave some 
relief from the thunderous beat. The usual selection 
of alcohol was on offer, as well as an array of 
pleasure drugs ranging from mild to mind bending. I 
ordered vodka and turned to survey the crowd. It was 
a mixed group, about half Swarm Belters and the rest 
an even mixture of Wunderlanders and Flatlanders. 
They were young and well off-the engineers and 
technicians who formed the backbone of Tiamat's 
industry, engaged in the species' oldest rituals. 
I didn't have a specific goal in mind, I just wanted 
to circulate and see what I learned. Putting together 
a dossier is easy nowadays. An ARM ident and a few 
keystrokes make a thousand databanks divulge your 
secrets-bank statements, travel logs, medical records 
and more. Your life is laid out for me to read like 
entrails before a soothsayer. I have a window into 
your soul and through it I can know more about you 
than your closest friends. And yet the bare facts 
never describe the real person behind them. That was 
my real purpose for being at the Inferno. I wanted to 
put flesh on Miranda Holtzman's bones. 
A huge dragon with burning eyes and golden scales 



swooped over the dancers and immolated them in 
holographic flames. They obligingly shrieked and 
writhed to the floor as the beast roared in triumph, 
drowning out the music as the controller changed 
tracks. It flew off in forced perspective, flapping 
heavily as the dancers picked up the new beat. A 
tall, elfin blonde caught my eye. I smiled back but 
made no move to go over. A short conversation in body 
language. "You look like fun, come join me." 
"Tempting ma'am, but no thanks." I beckoned to the 
bartender to refill my drink. As he did I showed him 
Miranda's holo. His manner stiffened ever so 
slightly. "I've already told the Goldskins everything 
I know." 
"I'm not a Goldskin, I'm just doing a little 
unofficial inquiry." 
He relaxed a bit. "Well, I've seen her of course. Her 
crowd were all regulars in here." 
"Are they here tonight?" I didn't look around. 
"They haven't shown up yet. I don't expect they will, 
since the news broke about her." Miranda was on all 
the 'casts. 
"Yah, I understand. Listen did anything unusual 
happen the night she disappeared?" 
"I really couldn't tell you; it was a week ago and I 
wasn't paying attention. I didn't know anything was 
wrong." He looked anguished, as if her death was his 
fault. 
"No, of course not." Reassuring. "Listen do me a 
favor and keep your ears open. If you hear anything, 
let me know." I handed him my callcard and he assured 
me he would call with almost comical solemnity. My 
work is high drama for the citizens. 
On the dance floor, another woman was looking at me, 
this one was a red-haired Wunderlander. She held my 
gaze for five intense seconds before whirling away, 
sensuous as a cat. Not an invitation but a challenge. 
"Bet you can't keep up." 
I looked for the blonde. She was on her way out, arm 
in arm with a UNF captain. Maybe she liked 
Flatlanders. She was a Belter and I watched her long 
legs with frank appreciation. She caught me looking 
and gave me a look. "See what you're missing." 



I shrugged and went to the edge of the dance floor. 
The holoshow had become a stormscape, thickened with 
real fog from a hidden nozzle. The clouds twisted in 
the virtual wind, forming wraiths for an instant 
before collapsing back into mist. At the height of 
the transformation, bolts of lightning formed eyes in 
the dark folds of their cowls. When the redhead came 
by, I caught her hand and she pulled me into the 
maelstrom. Her dancing was precise but uninhibited. I 
fell into rhythm with the bouncebeat, catching my 
partner and spinning her back into the crowd. 
Drowning myself in the deep blue pools of her eyes. I 
forgot about Miranda-and Holly. 
As the music climaxed, she pulled me to her, pressing 
herself hard against me in the crush. She gave me the 
merest whisper of a kiss when the drumbeat 
crescendoed. Then thunder drowned out the music and 
strobes split the clouds with artificial lightning. 
She spun away as the new rhythm came up. By the time 
the spots cleared from my eyes, she was gone. 
I was disappointed but intrigued. We hadn't spoken a 
word but her message was clear. "Catch me if you can." 
She'd chosen the right man for the job. 
* * * 
The next day I got down to business. Identification 
had put together a composite holo of our suspect. 
Interview reports were trickling in as well. I also 
did a little personal work on UN time. I called up 
the Inferno's sales files for the previous night, 
cross-referenced for sex and description and found 
three women who might be my mysterious redhead. I 
screened their holos and found a match. 
TLU5A169-Suze Vanreuter, 32, unmarried, no 
dependants, no record. She was a mining engineer, 
just arrived on Tiamat as a consultant to Corona 
Exploration. That's confidential information. A lot 
of speculators would pay high to learn that a 
prospecting operation has hired a mining engineer. 
I wasn't interested in the stock market. The file 
didn't mention her catlike grace. The holo didn't 
show the sparkle in her eyes. No matter, I knew where 
I could find the real thing. I closed my eyes and 
remembered her taut body pressed against me. And the 



kiss. She put more erotic energy into that 
barely-there kiss than most women put into an orgasm. 
That thought gave me pause and I thought back to my 
life with Holly. She'd been more than an enthusiastic 
bed partner, she'd been my lifemate, my friend. 
Losing her left an aching void in my soul. Was I now 
replacing her with Suze? Surely I was too 
experienced, too jaded to confuse love and lust. 
I decided not. Suze wasn't better, she was different. 
I didn't love her, I didn't even know her, but I 
desired her more than I'd ever desired a woman 
before. Even more than Holly. 
Hunter came in and looked over my shoulder. I should 
have closed my door. He gestured to Suze's holo on my 
screen. "What is this one's role in the crime?" 
I blanked the screen. "She isn't a suspect, she's 
just a woman I saw at the Inferno while I was 
gathering information. I called up her file for . . 
." I hesitated " . . . personal reasons." 
The kzin nodded knowingly, rippling his ears in 
amusement. He had dealt with humans, he understood 
the subtext of the conversation. "You have mated with 
her." 
I was taken aback. "No, I haven't, I am . . ." I 
groped for words " . . . interested in learning if I 
want to mate with her." 
The big cat sniffed the air, looking baffled. "How 
can you not know if you are attracted to a female? 
Certainly your pheremones speak of desire." 
Did he have any idea how personal he was being? "I do 
know I'm attracted to her." 
"Then you have already learned what you need to know." 
"Well . . . It's not so simple, she also has to . . . 
want to mate with me." 
"And this information is available in her dossier?" 
"No no no. She's made it clear she's interested in 
me. I'm looking at her file to get to know her 
better." 
"Would it not be easier to ask questions directly? 
And if you both desire sex with each other, why have 
you not already mated?" 
Curiosity might not be killing the cat but it was 
certainly embarrassing the human. I groped for words, 



then inspiration struck. "Among humans, sexual 
negotiations are often like a hunt. The goal is 
hopefully achieved, but the real attraction is the 
excitement and challenge of the chase. The harder the 
pursuit, the more satisfying the feast is." 
He nodded sagely. "I understand. This is the violent 
sex you spoke of earlier." 
"No!" He was making me look like a schitz. "There is 
no violence involved." 
"How then do you secure sexual relations with a 
resisting female?" 
"She isn't resisting, damnit! She wants to be caught. 
More than that, she's actively seeking me as well." 
"This sounds more like a duel than a hunt." 
"Yah, maybe that's a better word." I was relieved 
that some understanding had been conveyed. Now maybe 
we could move on to less personal topics. 
My relief had come too soon. Hunter had another 
question. "How do you determine the victor in this 
duel then?" 
I wondered if he knew how disconcerting his 
persistence was. I watched him for signs of amusement 
but his face showed only curiosity. 
I answered carefully. "There isn't a winner or a 
loser. If we manage to establish a . . . relationship 
. . . on mutually acceptable terms, we both win, 
insofar as we have gained something pleasant and 
desirable." 
The kzin just looked baffled. "A hunt with no 
hunting, where neither side knows if it is predator 
or prey. A chase that ends not with feasting but with 
procreation. A duel with no winner. Why go through 
these convolutions? If the scent is right, mate." 
It occurred to me that battle might be a better 
analogy. I started to sort out how to explain it in 
those terms but quickly gave it up. 
Hunter was shaking his head dolefully. "I will never 
understand humans." 
I was content to let him wonder. My concept of kzinti 
had been formed by holocubes on Earth. I'd learned 
they were remorseless alien killing machines intent 
on turning humanity into slaves and game animals. If 
anyone had told me then that one day I'd be trying to 



explain the dynamics of bounce bar dating to one, I 
would have died laughing. 
I didn't laugh now. I didn't want Hunter to feel I 
was making fun of his lack of understanding. Even so, 
it was hard to keep my teeth from showing through my 
smile. I cleared Suze's file from the screen and 
brought up my investigation records in its place. I 
spent some time filling him in on my suspicions and 
intentions. He listened carefully before speaking. 
"Have you further evidence that a schitz is involved?" 
"None yet, it's still just a hunch." 
"I would not dissuade you from your line of inquiry 
but I now have concrete reasons to suspect a kzin." 
"What evidence?" 
"My liver councils my head but my head councils my 
tongue." 
It took a couple of moments before I figured out that 
the saying meant he wasn't going to tell me. I tried 
another tack. "How long before you know?" 
"Soon enough, today or perhaps tomorrow. Even now 
First Tracker is stalking our quarry. I will inform 
you when I have more information." 
He left to help First Tracker set his snares. Tracker 
was Hunter-of-Outlaw's right-hand man-or rather right 
paw kzin. I find it incredible that a population of 
fifty thousand can be policed by just two 
individuals-particularly when the population is made 
up of fiercely individualistic carnivores with 
hair-trigger killer instincts. The contradiction 
underscored the curious nature of the kzinti social 
structure. At first glance, it's barely a step above 
anarchy. Kzinti are always fighting amongst 
themselves for wealth, status and honor. They fight 
individually and in groups, usually violently, often 
lethally. The only leaven of law is the Hero's code 
of honor, a rough-and-ready standard enforced with 
rough-and-ready justice. Yet despite this, they 
possess a cultural unity and stability that defies 
humanity. They had a single language and world 
government when human culture was nothing more than 
cave art. What's more, they have maintained their 
cohesiveness throughout the formation by colonization 
and conquest of an interstellar empire. Humanity's 



world government is already miserably failing in its 
attempt to make the transition to space. 
Humans are more civilized than kzinti-any human can 
tell you that. But Hunter-of-Outlaws and First 
Tracker had no difficulty maintaining order in their 
bailiwick. Mostly they investigated the facts in 
disputes brought before the Conservors. They had lots 
of time left over to lend me a hand with human crimes. 
Of course their caseload was helped by the fact that 
the kzin community required little "policing" in the 
human sense of the word. The Conservors offered 
guidance on the application of the honor code to new 
situations based on tradition and common sense. 
Individuals who violated the code were chastised, 
ostracized or killed depending on the severity of 
their transgression. Any other problem was a matter 
for the involved parties to settle by compromise, 
duel or Conservor arbitration according to their 
wishes. Most kzinti crimes were crimes against 
humans. It had taken a while after the liberation 
before kzin realized they couldn't simply kill a 
human for breaking a verbal contract or failing to 
show the proper respect. Finally, the Conservors had 
decreed that loyalty to the Patriarch required 
survival which required that humans be dealt with 
under human law. Eventually the majority had come 
around to that view. Those who didn't got weeded out 
sooner or later. Then the problem became humans who 
cheated kzinti knowing they hadn't the resources to 
secure redress. This issue was a much smaller problem 
for the UN, partly because it still took a brave 
human to cheat a kzin, but mostly because they just 
didn't care. 
They cared a lot about violence against humans 
though. I had been hoping that a kzin had killed 
Miranda because I didn't want to think about a human 
so depraved. Now I worried that I might get my wish 
along with the explosive can of political worms it 
would open. Even ten years after the war, there were 
those who called for the extermination of the kzinti 
survivors of the Liberation. This incident would only 
fan those flames. If my fears about a kzin ring 
intent on hijacking a hyperdrive proved correct, the 



whole damn asteroid would go to war. 
Alpha Centauri already had enough problems. I decided 
to keep working on the schitzies until Hunter gave me 
something solid. Before I'd hoped to find a kzin 
because I feared I'd find a schitz. Now I hoped to 
find a schitz because I feared finding a kzin. 
Niggling at the back of my mind was another fear-the 
fear that the killer might not be a schitz either. 
Faced with a crime like this, one's natural instinct 
is to push it as far away as possible, to an 
outsider, to a deviant, to an alien. Easy to do when 
the victim is innocent and the crime abhorrent. 
Harder when the crime is clean and abstract. Hardest 
when you see yourself reflected in the criminal. 
The more unhuman you can make the criminal, the 
easier it is to deny the common threads that bind our 
experience together. To feel empathy for a criminal 
is to admit that it is circumstance as much as virtue 
that separates the outlaw and the community. Most 
important, it is to deny ourselves the only socially 
sanctioned target for the anger and frustration 
obeisance to the communal laws brings. If we didn't 
vilify outlaws, we might envy them for their 
freedom-the freedom we have traded for property, 
social position and stability. 
I'd learned during Brandywine what true freedom is. 
Entering crime is like entering cold water. However 
daunting the prospect is at first, the exhilaration 
once you're immersed in it is indescribable. To make 
decisions with no pretense at morality grants immense 
personal power. Ironically, only when you have 
rendered society's laws irrelevant can you be truly 
honest with yourself. Your thoughts become incisive, 
unfettered by external entanglements. Your mind is 
free, you can do anything you like, be anything you 
want. Ultimately, freedom is about power. Ultimately, 
society has only the power we give it. Refuse the 
demand to submit to the social norm and, if you are 
smart enough and fast enough, you can walk like a god 
on earth. Such freedom is a heady drug indeed. 
That drug comes with a high price. It means 
sacrificing home, career, family, every anchor and 
reward society offers us. I wasn't ready to make that 



sacrifice when Holly was my home. I thought I'd found 
a compromise in ARM undercover work-a challenging 
career, exciting work, unbridled license and a happy 
family too. I even got paid to do it, it was like 
living a dream. What I didn't realize is that freedom 
really is a drug-a little is never enough and too 
much is always disastrous. How far I'd slipped didn't 
register until I'd lost Holly and then it was too 
late. I nearly lost my career in the bargain and at 
the time I wouldn't have cared. I felt burnt out and 
directionless. I was an addict forced to confront my 
addiction. I made a decision and my career became the 
anchor that held me back from the abyss. 
So far I'd managed to hold on. 
I forced my mind back to the job at hand. Detective 
work is a matter of sorting through hunches. I 
glanced over the interview reports from Trist 
Materials and other sources. They were pretty 
sparse-Miranda had no family here and she hadn't been 
on station long enough for people to get to know her 
too deeply. I wasn't really as interested in what the 
interviewees had said as in the impression they'd 
made on the interviewer. Even more, I wanted to see 
if any of them had anything to do with hyperdrive 
production. None did, nor had any of my investigators 
red-flagged any as a potential suspect. With no way 
to narrow down my search for a hyperdrive connection, 
I concentrated on the schitz angle. There were about 
five dozen people with severe schitz tendencies on 
their medical records in the Swarm. I cut that in 
half by looking only at males on the theory that the 
killing was a sex crime. By midafternoon I'd 
eliminated all but eight of them for having the wrong 
physical description, for not being on Tiamat when 
the crime was committed or some other 
disqualification. I ran a detailed movement analysis 
on the remainder, tying up my hardware for over an 
hour. Three were eliminated, none were implicated 
outright. What to do? 
I considered having the remaining five hauled in so I 
could ask a few questions. I didn't have to haul them 
in, my desk performs voice stress analysis perfectly 
well over the screen, but I prefer to talk to a 



suspect one on one. It makes the interview more 
personal, raising the stress level and giving the 
software something to work on. Besides, I like to see 
the reactions for myself and come to my own 
conclusions. The computer isn't infallible and 
neither am I. Using both techniques cuts the error 
rate. 
If it worked I could wrap the case up that afternoon, 
if it didn't at least I could eliminate those five 
and get to work finding a new line of investigation. 
The risk was tipping off the murderer. If one of the 
suspects bolted, we'd have our man. Then we'd just 
have to find him. My instincts warned me that we 
never would. He'd disappear into the Swarm or the 
mountains down on Wunderland. Maybe in a year or ten 
the Provopolizei would catch him sniping politicians 
in Munchen for the Isolationists. The Isolationists 
would suit a schitz just fine. 
My instincts were wrong, of course. I was used to 
Earth with its swarming crowds that could swallow a 
runner forever. Even on lightly settled Wunderland a 
fugitive who made it to the outskirts of Munchen 
could disappear into a thousand kilometres of virgin 
wilderness. In Tiamat's sealed environment there was 
nowhere to run and very few places to hide. Every 
time the suspect keyed a phone, the call would be 
monitored. Every time he thumbed a door or bought 
something, the computers would log it. Every time he 
walked a pedestrian mall, the vidscanners would be 
looking for him. If he were so foolish as to board a 
tube car, he'd be delivered right to the Goldskin 
headquarters' tube station and left locked in until I 
felt like coming to collect him. Tiamat was a law 
enforcement dream and a privacy nightmare. I punched 
the front desk and had my schitzies rounded up. 
All five came in voluntarily, concerned about the 
murder, eager to do what they could to help. Ian 
Vanhoff was the one I had the most hope for. He ran a 
power loader in the container bays of the down-axis 
hub, giving him direct access to tunnel nineteen. I 
was sure I had the case locked up when I read that in 
his file. He gave me an ironclad alibi. The night 
Miranda disappeared he'd been working an extra shift 



in a storage bay on the other side of the asteroid. 
It hadn't been run through his personnel card yet 
because of union rules but his foreman and the rest 
of the loader crew could verify the times down to the 
minute. His wife could vouch for his arrival at home. 
Thank you, citizen, you've been very helpful. 
Dieter Lorz was at his girlfriend's apt that evening. 
She could corroborate that, as could another couple 
who'd visited with them. 
Thank you, citizen. 
Myro Havchek was upgrading his single-ship license. 
He'd been at the library studying. Yes, there were 
people who could testify they'd seen him there. 
Get out of here, citizen. I've got a case to solve. 
Two lacked alibis. Keve McCallum claimed to be asleep 
in his apt. Why hadn't the computer logged his entry? 
He didn't like the computer watching his every move, 
he had a mechanical lock on his door. Darren Sioban 
had been relaxing alone in a park on the 1G level. 
Why didn't he show as having taken the tube there? 
He'd walked, he needed the exercise. 
Thank you, citizens. 
The stress analyzer hadn't twitched, neither had my 
internal lie detector. I mulled it over. Could a 
schitz lie well enough to fool the computer and me? 
In our different ways we both responded to changes in 
stress. Getting past that would require nerves of ice. 
So would taking Miranda apart. 
Did not wanting the computer to know when you were 
home constitute paranoia? Knowing what I knew about 
information retrieval, it even made sense. What did 
Keve know about it? What did I expect from a 
registered schitz anyway? The drugs weren't perfect. 
Were they? 
Could a schitz off drugs construct a fantasy so 
powerful it became an internal reality? If the 
subject believed he was telling the truth, no lie 
detector would say anything else. 
Was a schitz truly responsible for crimes committed 
while off drugs? I didn't even want to think about 
that one. 
I had too many questions and not enough answers. I 
called up Johansen but she'd already gone. I dumped 



my interrogation files to her desk and tasked her to 
verify the alibis. I didn't expect them to be 
anything but solid. She wouldn't be thrilled with the 
job but she'd do it right. 
I called up Dr. Morrow and found he'd gone home too. 
I hadn't realized how late it was getting. I asked 
the night intern a question. No, the drugs weren't 
perfect. Readjusting a schitz problem was a tightrope 
act. Too little and the patient destabilized. Too 
much and you had a walking zombie. Once upon a time 
any deviation from the social norm was drugged until 
it went away-totally. Now the doctors tried to 
intervene as little as possible. Around Alpha 
Centauri there wasn't even a law to enforce dosage. 
Minor personality quirks were not unusual. 
I asked some more questions. Yes, a schitz off drugs 
might suppress a memory, or move in and out of an 
alternate reality. Yes, a schitz off drugs might have 
the cold control required to beat a lie detector. 
What would happen when a criminal schitz had his 
drugs reinstated? Would his memory remain? How would 
he respond to the knowledge of his crimes? Anything 
was possible, it depended on the case. 
Back to square zero. 
Almost square zero. I left Johansen another message, 
asking her to collect blood samples from the group as 
well. Morrow could tell me if they were up to date on 
medication or not. If one of them wasn't, it would 
close the case up in a big hurry. 
I put an ARM tag on their idents. That would stop 
them from boarding the next ship to never-never land. 
If any tried it, he'd be back in the hot seat as 
suspect number one. 
Would a schitz off drugs choose to go back on them 
voluntarily? Another unanswerable question. 
I screened their psych reports. McCallum was manic 
depressive and paranoid. That explained his 
mechanical lock. Sioban was borderline schizophrenic 
and highly antisocial, hence his habit of walking 
alone in the park. They were both intelligent and 
well educated: McCallum was an electronics engineer 
and Sioban was a process control specialist. Neither 
had any history of sexual deviance or aggression, 



neither had a criminal record. Despite their minor 
quirks both were productive, stable members of the 
community. 
While they were on their drugs. 
Without treatment they were question marks. They'd 
been diagnosed early and treated all their lives. 
Nobody knew what they were capable of, them least of 
all. 
Even if one or the other was untreated, it wouldn't 
prove anything-none of the witnesses had chosen them. 
It would give me probable cause for a search warrant, 
which might turn up some physical evidence-the better 
part of Miranda had yet to surface. Until then I 
lacked a single link between the killing and-anything. 
I mulled my hyperdrive suspicions over again. I had 
even less to go on there than I did with the 
schitzies. I thought about Tanya and Jayce. They 
lacked motive for starters and they were just too 
upset by Miranda's death, genuinely upset. Maybe my 
instincts were wrong on that point. Maybe if I hauled 
them in and grilled them with the stress analyzer 
listening in, they'd crack. 
Maybe I was grasping at straws. I needed another 
angle, but first I needed a break. If nothing better 
suggested itself tomorrow, I'd run a detailed 
movement trace on every ident that went through the 
Inferno's accounting system the night Miranda 
disappeared and if that failed, I'd do it for every 
ident that even came within a kilometer of the place. 
If I split the compute task, I could get the results 
in a day or two, spend two weeks analyzing them and 
then maybe I'd have something to go on. Maybe. I was 
the last one to leave the office. Time flies when 
you're having fun. 
* * * 
I didn't go home after work, though I needed the 
rest. Instead I went down to the Inferno, eager for 
the second round of the developing game I was playing 
with Suze Vanreuter. On the way down I wondered what 
it was about her that appealed to me so strongly. She 
was attractive enough but there was more to it than 
that. Her energy and spontaneity had touched a 
long-buried chord-a part of me that I'd lost contact 



with. 
When I got to the Inferno, I waited just inside the 
entry for a few moments to let my eyes adjust to the 
lower light levels. The holoshow was a burning pool 
of lava and the dancers were individually encased in 
a dynamic, digital flame that clung and followed 
their movements. Periodically the lava would form 
into a diabolic face that laughed maniacally, 
swallowed the dancers whole and spit them out again. 
The music was darker and heavier than the night 
before but the insistent, pulsating beat was the same. 
I went in, expecting to find her in the middle of the 
show. Instead she was sitting at the bar. I sat down 
beside her. 
"Good evening, Ms. Vanreuter," I said formally. 
If my knowledge of her name surprised her she gave no 
sign. "Good evening, Captain Allson." 
It was my turn to be startled. Perhaps I shouldn't 
have been. She probably knew the bartender. It would 
have been easy enough for her to discover my name. I 
hoped the surprise didn't show. 
"Would you care to dance?" 
"Enchanted." She favoured me with a megavolt smile 
and took my offered arm. 
We danced as the holoshow engulfed us in living fire. 
The flames highlighted the blazing halo of her hair 
as she insinuated herself into the rhythm. Her 
concentration was complete, but she kept her eyes 
locked on mine. At first we connected only long 
enough to begin another energetic maneuver. As the 
night went on and the fatigue and endorphins built 
up, we stayed together longer and longer, building 
our own bubble of intimacy in the swirling throng. 
It became hard to think straight, I wanted her so 
much. 
After a while we left, half exhausted from the 
energetic dancing. We walked arm in arm along the 
pedestrian mall, recovering. The absence of the 
lights, music, pheremones and people was like a dash 
of cold water after a hot shower, shocking but 
invigorating. We talked about inconsequential things. 
Eventually we found a restaurant that boasted 
authentic Earth cuisine. The menu was a mishmash of 



Tandoor, Canton and Milan. The food was good in its 
own right but only a loose approximation of the 
originals it claimed to duplicate. It didn't matter. 
The atmosphere was cozy and the company delightful. I 
already knew her dossier, but I asked her about 
herself. 
She shrugged. "There's not much to tell. I'm 
thirty-two. I'm a geologist. I used to do engineering 
work for the UN mining consortium. Now I'm an 
independent. That means I charge lots of money and 
I'm usually unemployed. No children. What else is 
there?" 
"Parents?" 
"Killed in the kinetic missile raid." 
"I'm sorry." 
"Why?" She shrugged again but her eyes became icy and 
distant, belying her studied nonchalance. "Everyone 
dies sooner or later." 
Talking about the past was risky. Alpha Centauri was 
heavy with ghosts. I changed tack. "Plans for the 
future?" 
"I'm on a contract now. It's a good company. If 
things pan out I'll go permanent with them. If not, 
I'll find something else up here. I like it in the 
Swarm." 
"It's more relaxing than Wunderland. No gangs. No 
assassinations." 
"Is that why you came up here?" She seemed surprised. 
"No, I came because of the corruption in the Provo 
government . . ." I hesitated, doubtless out of some 
residual loyalty to my organization " . . . and in 
the UN." 
She nodded, far away for a moment. I didn't 
elaborate. She'd seen more of it than I had. "So 
you're an honest cop." 
"I am now." 
That sparked her interest. She raised an eyebrow and 
licked her lips. "You weren't always?" 
"I used to work undercover. I spent most of my time 
breaking the law in order to enforce it." 
"And?" 
"I crossed the line." 
"And you came back?" 



"I couldn't go back, it was too late. I came out 
here." 
She smiled. "And what are you doing here?" 
"You mean what's a nice guy like me doing in a place 
like this?" 
She just smiled and raised a querying eyebrow. I 
answered the unstated question. 
"Investigating the Holtzman murder." 
"I sort of suspected as much." Miranda was big news 
all over the asteroid. "How's it going?" 
I hesitated, a police reflex. Investigative 
work-in-progress isn't classified, but neither do you 
want it to be common knowledge. Most importantly you 
never want the criminals to know where you are in the 
investigation. If they know you're on to them, 
they'll flee. If they know you're not, they'll just 
sit tight. What you want is to leave them uncertain, 
unwilling to commit to flight, unable to hold their 
ground with confidence. That way they're more liable 
to make mistakes. Once in a while they just can't 
stand the strain and voluntarily surrender. 
On the other hand Suze wasn't with the press. She 
wasn't even a Swarm native plugged into the local 
gossip net. The odds of the information getting back 
through her were vanishingly low. She was a 
reasonable person who would hold anything I said in 
confidence. I was walking the road to paranoia again. 
"It's going, that's about it. We're still looking for 
connections." 
"Do you have a suspect?" Her eyes were burning blue 
electric arcs. The thrill of the chase. 
"I thought it might be a schitz, but it doesn't look 
like it now. My partner thinks it's a kzin." 
"What do you think?" 
"I think it's a different kzin." 
She laughed. "There's hope for you yet." 
"Why?" 
"Most Flatlanders can't tell kzinti apart." 
"I couldn't when I first arrived, I've learned 
since," I said, a trifle affronted. 
She held up a hand in apology. "I'm sorry. It just 
reminded of an old joke." 
"Which old joke?" 



"Promise you won't be offended?" She was smiling, 
impish dimples appeared, as if she were already 
laughing at the punchline. 
"Go ahead." 
She waited a second to get her expression under 
control. "How can you tell a Flatlander?" 
"How?" I played along. 
"You can't, they won't listen." 
We laughed together and went on to other topics. 
Later I told her about Brandywine-and about Holly. 
After that I told her about tracking criminals and 
what it was like to crack a major case. She told me 
about hunting minerals in the Jotuns and how she felt 
when she made the strike that became the Wind Pass 
Complex. Her eyes were full of the wild, unbounded 
sky when she talked about the absolute freedom of 
hiking the high Jotuns alone and the power of total 
self-reliance. I suddenly understood what drew me to 
her. I recognized the look. I'd seen it on Earth, in 
the mirror. 
We didn't talk about how we planned to spend the rest 
of the night but when we left we shared a tube car 
and she didn't punch in her address. By the time we 
got to the door of my apt the tension was thick 
enough to cut with a knife. 
We went in and I offered her a seat. I have a 
miniature wine rack that holds six bottles. I went to 
get the glasses and asked, "Would you like a drink?" 
"I didn't come here to drink." I turned around, 
surprised. She ran a finger down the front of her 
jumpsuit, unsealing the fabric. Her gaze was steady, 
half mocking, half inviting. It was the same 
challenge she'd offered the other night. "Bet you 
can't keep up." 
I put the glasses down and went over and kissed her 
gently. She returned it with enthusiasm. A while 
later she pulled me down to the carpet. I didn't 
resist. 
Afterwards we cuddled and talked in bed, making love 
languidly in sharp contrast to the almost desperate 
intensity of the first time. There was all the 
delight of exploring and discovering a new lover but 
little of the awkwardness. There had been other women 



since Holly. Asheya Ramal, sometime partner and 
longtime friend had pulled me into bed and away from 
the brink after Brandywine. Kerry Smythe, whom I'd 
known since childhood, had given me a last-minute 
going-away present before I'd left Earth. On 
Wunderland I'd lost a weekend with a blonde Valkyrie 
named Hanse who taught at the university. Asheya had 
been for solace and Keri for remembrance. Hanse was 
to forget. Suze was something more. 
Was I falling in love this fast? A week ago I would 
have said I wasn't capable of it at all. Did I want 
to get involved? The wounds of my divorce were still 
too fresh. On the other hand, the sooner I started 
getting over Holly the sooner they would heal. 
Don't think too much. Enjoy it for what it is and 
worry about tomorrow tomorrow. I traced patterns on 
her skin with my finger. 
She had a fine scar that ran from her nipple to her 
cleavage before it faded out. It was thinner than a 
hair, barely noticeable. I traced it with my 
forefinger. 
"What happened here?" I asked. 
She hesitated before answering. "You know I worked 
for the mining consortium. They sent me up to 
sub-survey a new site. We were doing test blasts and 
a booster went off in my face." She shuddered. "It 
should have been no problem but the UN had all the 
hospitals tied up with the attack on W'kkai. By the 
time I got med-aid it was too late to prevent 
scarring. They told me I was lucky to live." She 
sounded bitter. "That's why I quit." 
"They're barely there at all." I reassured her 
although I knew it wasn't the scars she was bitter 
about. I kissed the uphill end of the line. 
"Flattery will get you nowhere," she growled, then 
pulled me up and kissed me hard. I would have begged 
to differ, but I was otherwise occupied. 
Later I found other scars on her thighs, arms, chest 
and belly. One ran from her forehead to the side of 
her nose and across her cheek. They were all nearly 
invisible, just tiny misalignments in the texture of 
her skin. My detective's eye couldn't help 
reconstructing the accident. From the pattern of the 



tracery she'd been kneeling and bent forward 
slightly-likely setting the time dial on top of the 
charge. That saved her life. Boosters are shaped to 
explode downwards and the main detonation cone would 
have killed her on the spot. Instead she'd taken the 
backblast in the chest with spillover onto her belly 
and face. The scars came from agonized weeks spent 
bathed in Nutrol and breathing through a tube in an 
autodoc because real treatment wasn't 
available-proper clonal reconstructive surgery would 
have left no marks. I felt a cold wind brush against 
my back. Such a near thing. A little more pressure on 
the lever of fate and I would never have known what I 
missed. I didn't say anything more, I just held her 
tighter. 
* * * 
I arrived late the next morning. Hunter was on his 
way out. He rippled his ears knowingly but mercifully 
didn't ask any questions. Johansen was logged out 
checking alibis. First Tracker was doing something 
with the Conservors, probably playing poetry games. 
The usual backlog was waiting for me when I got to my 
desk. I scanned my messages first, 
prioritizing-coroner first. Johansen had delivered 
five blood samples. All five showed my schitzies had 
the right dosages. 
Well, it had been a good hunch anyway. 
I scanned down. There was the usual assortment from 
'casters, looking for information on the killing. I 
forwarded them to the PR desk for the official 
brush-off. The rest were routine, half an hour of 
dull but essential paperwork. I buckled down to it; I 
wanted my desk clear when I started setting up the 
movement trace. 
I was almost done when Hunter came in without 
knocking. "We have captured the kzin who killed the 
human Miranda Holtzman." His voice had more than the 
usual snarl to it. He turned on his heel and strode 
out again. 
I sighed, picturing riots in the tunnels when the 
news broke. Be careful what you wish for, it might 
come true. I followed him out. 
Work in the outer office was stopped dead with 



everyone staring at First Tracker. The big kzin was 
standing with his foot in the small of another kzin's 
back. The prisoner was lying spreadeagled and 
bleeding from numerous minor cuts. Hunter stooped 
over, grabbed the hapless captive by the scruff of 
the neck and turned his face to the gaping office 
staff. "This sthondat," he snarled "is known as 
Slave-of-Kdapt!" He screamed something into the 
prisoner's ear and dragged him into his office, 
nearly overbalancing First Tracker in the process. 
Tracker spoke little English. He gestured towards the 
door as Hunter slammed it and said "Dominance." He 
looked around the room, lips twitching over razor 
teeth. Everyone was suddenly diligently at work 
again. When he was satisfied that he'd quelled the 
gawkers, the kzin picked up a box, handed it to me 
and said, "Evidence." Then he curled up on a 
visitors' couch, cozy as a kitten. He fixed his 
golden eyes on the door to Hunter's office, ears up 
and swivelled forward. For the first time I saw that 
he too was suffering from various cuts and 
contusions. The first scream came through and his 
mouth relaxed into a fanged smile. 
I opened the box. Inside was a large, misshapen hunk 
of fine leather, crudely tanned. I didn't need DNA 
analysis to tell me it was Miranda Holtzman's skin. 
A crash and another scream came through the door. 
First Tracker licked his chops. I took refuge in my 
office. 
It wasn't much of a refuge. My office is right next 
door to Hunter's. Goldskin headquarters was once a 
factory process floor. It was converted to offices by 
installing inch thick sprayfoam walls. They were 
adequately soundproof for normal conversation, but 
that wasn't what was going on now. The modulated 
snarls came through almost unimpeded by the barrier, 
punctuated by crashes, thuds and shrieks of rage and 
pain. At least I was away from Tracker and his intent 
satisfaction at the mayhem. 
Sprayfoam is a mass-saving necessity on ships and a 
handy convenience on Tiamat. Its strength-to-mass 
ratio is very high but you can put your foot through 
it with a solid kick. I expected half a tonne of 



clawing, raging carnivores to land in my lap at any 
moment. Someday I'll have the budget to install 
privacy fields. I've seen a lot of violence, but 
brutalizing a prisoner like this ran against my 
grain. Slave-of-Kdapt, or whatever he'd been before 
Hunter renamed him, was a killer but he was still a 
human being. 
No, I corrected myself, he wasn't a human being, he 
was a kzin, an alien carnivore whose species was 
dedicated to the enslavement of mine. Did that make a 
difference? Perhaps it did. After all, it was his own 
species working him over. Why did it disturb me then? 
Because I'm a cop and so was Hunter-of-Outlaws and 
cops don't beat up prisoners to extract 
confessions-not where I come from. 
Not on Earth, but they did on Wunderland and kzinti 
still weren't human. It wasn't for me to tell them 
how to run their internal affairs. I didn't even know 
if a kzin would respond to a nonviolent 
interrogation; maybe this was the only way that 
worked. 
I still didn't like it. 
I pushed the unease away. We had the evidence, we had 
the murderer, soon we would have the confession. 
Except . . . The hyperdrive question kept buzzing 
around in the back of my head. If Miranda's death was 
connected with a spy ring that Hunter was covering 
for, how better than to hand me a culprit and dump 
the blame on a defunct cult? It wouldn't be hard for 
them to find a volunteer amid the despairing, 
honour-starved kzin of Tiamat. 
That thought decided me. I wasn't going to accept 
confessions at face value. After Hunter was through 
with his interrogation, I'd pass the suspect up to 
the frightening efficiencies of UN Intelligence. I'd 
have an answer I could trust by shift-end tomorrow. 
Case closed. 
I opened the next file, someone was reprogging stolen 
keycards and draining citizens' bank accounts. It 
would take a lot of specialized knowledge, 
electronics, crypto and bank procedures at least. I 
set up some search keys and began screening dossiers, 
trying to tune out the sounds coming through the wall. 



After an hour I'd made some good progress, narrowing 
down the field to about two hundred possibles. I 
picked the dozen who seemed most likely and set up a 
movement trace to link them with fraudulent 
withdrawals. While the trace ran in the background, I 
worked the opposite angle, starting with those who 
had access and linking that data back to the required 
skills. Hopefully I would get cross-matches and a 
start point for my investigation. I stopped noticing 
the violence next door until it ended. 
I was trying to put my finger on the absence when 
Hunter strode in. He had a nasty slash on his chest 
and his expression was even less pleased than before. 
He didn't waste time. "We have a confession." 
I wasn't surprised. "Good, put him in confinement and 
I'll get the proceedings drawn up." Hunter was in no 
mood for paperwork. That was a help. I'd have the 
suspect shipped up to UNF Intel quickly and quietly 
and he wouldn't even know I'd done it. 
"Slave-of-Kdapt has confessed to no crime against 
human law." 
"What?" I was dumbfounded. 
"He is not the criminal we seek." 
I gestured mutely at the box containing Miranda's 
remains. 
"He tried to imply that he had slain the human 
Miranda Holtzman himself. He has now admitted that he 
bought the skin from a human. Not only did he accept 
carrion from . . ." he paused, substituting words " . 
. . another species and claim it as hunt-prey, he 
lied to hide his shame. That even the lowest coward 
could sink to such!" He paced and spat curses in the 
Heros' Tongue. 
"Let me get this straight. He pretended that he did 
kill Miranda, but he didn't really? Why would he do 
that? He must know the penalties he's playing with." 
"He has the liver of a sthondat and less honor. We 
pitiful survivors of K'Shai are thrice cursed by the 
Fanged God." He snarled again, twitching his tail and 
raking the air with his claws. 
I decided to let the point go. The complexities of 
kzinti honour weren't my concern. The fact was, 
Slave-of-Kdapt wasn't a fall guy for kzin 



intelligence, or at least if he was, 
Hunter-of-Outlaws wasn't involved in the coverup. 
That was the good news. The bad news was the killer 
was still unknown, still at large, and human. 
Case reopened. 
I filed my account-fraud data and went over the 
interrogation with Hunter. Slave-of-Kdapt had been 
Machine Technician. He was known to be a Kdaptist. 
He'd been caught because he'd started bragging about 
"following the true Kdapt faith." Tracker was quick 
to pick up on this spoor and the pursuit had been 
easy. Kdapt rituals with human sacrifice had been 
forbidden by the Conservors as disruptive of the 
essential kzin/human relationship but the hapless 
Technician's real crime in kzin eyes was trying to 
gain status through lying. 
Hunter and Tracker were both too wound up with 
bloodlust for my taste. It was another hour till 
shift end but I sent them off to catch a ztigor in 
the Tigertown park. I wanted to talk to 
Slave-of-Kdapt myself and see what I could learn. 
They left, snarling amicably to each other. I called 
their battered prisoner in, had him make himself 
comfortable and began. I started by pulling up the 
schitzies I'd culled from the databank. 
Slave-of-Kdapt didn't finger any as the one who'd 
sold him the skin but admitted he couldn't always 
tell humans apart. His own description was almost 
uselessly vague and it fit a Belter, not a 
Wunderlander. He was pathetically eager to please, as 
though he could save himself through cooperation. 
Hunter thought he'd committed no human crime, but I 
could think of a dozen charges to bring against him 
ranging from concealing evidence to accessory to 
murder. For a kzin the penalties ranged from a short 
life in a labour camp to quick death in front of a 
firing squad. Even that was better than the fate his 
fellows had in store for him. Slave-of-Kdapt had 
violated his honour code. He would be an outcast. 
Eventually he would starve or die of misery or fall 
afoul of another kzin and be torn to shreds. 
I questioned him thoroughly and fruitlessly. I was 
used to dealing with kzin like Hunter, whose mind 



stalked problems like game and pounced on solutions 
with precision and clarity. Machine Technician wasn't 
dull exactly-just woefully naive and uncurious beyond 
his narrow specialty. 
He knew of other Kdaptists but didn't think any of 
them had anything to do with the murder or any other 
crime. They all followed the Conservor's dictum that 
human laws be respected. He didn't know Miranda 
Holtzman or anyone who might want to kill her. He 
didn't have any enemies who might be trying to frame 
him for her murder. He'd lied about killing her 
because he wanted the honour it would bring. 
Evidently that didn't violate the Conservor's dictum 
because it broke no human law-so he'd thought. Of 
course he realized he'd broken his honour code but he 
didn't think he'd get caught at that. Obviously he 
hadn't thought out the consequences of his claim 
becoming well known. His only motivation was 
status-he wanted more space and a kzinrett. It was 
the human who sold him the skin who'd suggested that 
Miranda's skin and the false prey-claim could be the 
way to achieve that. What humans would know he was a 
Kdaptist? He didn't know, he'd made no particular 
secret of it. He was sure he didn't recognize the 
human involved? Absolutely. 
There was one correlate. Machine Technician's job was 
servicing loading equipment in the down-axis hub. 
That put him just five hundred meters from the point 
Miranda's body was found. It might be coincidence, 
but it was the only link I had. 
I didn't charge him, I bought him a ticket to 
Wunderland. There were thousands of miles of 
wilderness down there, where Machine Technician could 
become Trail Stalker or Chaser-of-Gagrumphs with all 
the space he wanted and his own kzinrett if he could 
find one. Slave-of-Kdapt and dishonour would be 
forgotten. Pity for criminals is something a cop 
can't afford. Those feelings are reserved for the 
victims, but Machine Technician was as much a victim 
as Miranda. He'd been set up to take the fall, and he 
would have played his part to the hilt and to the 
death if Hunter-of-Outlaws' thorough . . . 
interrogation . . . hadn't allowed the truth to come 



out. 
Or, come to think of it, the interrogation I had 
planned for him with UN Intelligence. Their methods 
are much gentler, but they're a lot less pleasant on 
balance. Machine Technician was lucky he'd been 
caught by one of his own. 
He left, thanking me with embarrassing profusion. The 
one thing worse than an arrogant, dominant kzin is a 
pathetically humble one. 
When he was gone, I went over the data and summed up. 
Item: A male Wunderlander had left the Inferno with 
Miranda-if our only two witnesses were to be believed. 
Item: A male Belter had sold her skin to Machine 
Technician, someone who knew him well enough to know 
he was vulnerable to this particular frame-up, but 
not so well that the kzin had recognized him. 
Item: Machine Technician's admittedly inadequate 
description of the suspect was at considerable odds 
with the couple's. 
So if there were two people involved, that pointed to 
a conspiracy and away from a schitz. If not, it 
pointed back at Jayce and Tanya. I still lacked too 
many pieces of the puzzle. I didn't even have a 
motive. 
Tammy stuck her head in the door. "I hear you got a 
Kdaptist confession." 
"Sort of. What we didn't get was a culprit." 
"I heard that too. What's up?" 
"Hunter tracked down this kzin who claimed he'd 
killed Miranda. It turns out all he really did was 
buy her skin from a human and try to claim credit." 
"So he's an accessory after the fact. Why did you 
send him to Wunderland?" 
"You hear a lot." 
She grinned. "I keep my ears open." 
"He was set up and framed, pure and simple. Now that 
his honour is compromised he's an outcast up here. I 
thought I'd give him another chance." 
"What about using him as a witness?" 
"Wunderland is still the safest place for him. How 
long would he have on Tiamat?" 
She winced. "Good point. Well, I have to say I'm glad 
to hear it wasn't a Kdaptist after all." 



I cocked my head. "Why is that?" 
She held up her beltcomp. "Here's all the data I've 
tracked down on the Kdapt cult and current Kzin 
intelligence operations." She held her other hand up, 
thumb and forefinger forming an empty circle. "Zero." 
"Sorry for the goose chase." 
She smiled. "Don't be." She waved the beltcomp. "I've 
got a new contact and some leverage for a couple more 
out of it anyway. So where are we now?" 
"We know there are at least two people involved. They 
must have planned to frame Machine Technician in 
advance of the killing-that's not the sort of detail 
you work out while you're hiding in a transport 
tunnel with a corpse. So Miranda wasn't chosen at 
random. That puts us back to Vorden and Koffman the 
love-birds, unless someone-some group-wanted her dead 
for a specific reason." 
"It can't be the couple." She waved at the composite 
holo on the screen. "This is a male." 
"We only have their testimony to say there's a second 
male. Anyway, I think it would be pretty easy to fool 
Machine Technician on that aspect. Loose clothing 
would be all it would take." 
"Visually, yah, but he could smell the difference. 
But you're right about the testimony." 
"Suppose it's a group for the sake of argument. They 
must have had a specific reason they wanted her dead." 
"So what's the reason?" 
"That's what we need to know. Something she knew or 
something she'd done. She just wasn't up here long 
enough to have become involved in anything serious. 
Trist Materials doesn't handle anything worth killing 
for and if they did the target wouldn't be their 
brand-new exchange student." 
"So it must have been something she was already 
involved with down on Wunderland." 
"Right. Especially since a Wunderlander is a major 
suspect." 
"What groups operate both groundside and in the Belt?" 
I considered. "Anyone could send up an assassin. Any 
of the crime rings, the Isolationists, Kzin 
intelligence, collabo underground, collabo hunters. 
Even a few branches of the Provisional Government if 



she crossed the wrong people." 
She shook her head. "We know it's not the tabbies at 
least. The killers are human." 
"But they could be working for the kzinti." 
"Get serious. They tried to frame a kzin for the 
crime and ruined his honour in the process. If they 
were working for the kzinti, their bosses would eat 
them when they found out. Alive." 
"Good point." 
"We've got a lead, though. If she was killed by 
Wunderland assassins, they must have come up between 
her arrival and her death. That's a narrow window. 
Cross-check the Inferno's attendance list with the 
passenger manifests for every ship that arrived 
during that time period." 
I entered the search request and we watched the 
screen while it collected the data and compared it. 
It came up no matches. 
"Maybe they knew she was coming. Try the previous six 
weeks." 
I tapped in the query. It took a little longer this 
time because there was more data to retrieve and 
sort. The result was the same. no matches. 
"Damn!" I cleared the screen. 
"Not damn. Now we know the killer was already here. 
That means we've got to be dealing with an 
organization that's already in the Swarm. Smugglers 
for one of the crime rings probably." 
"We'll have to get the Provopolizei involved. Get 
them to dig out a contact list for us." 
"Attack it from both sides. Run a movement trace on 
every person who went through the Inferno that night 
too." 
"I already thought of that. It'll take hours to run 
and weeks to analyze." 
"So what have you got to lose? Run it overnight and 
we'll start the Goldskins on it in the morning. If we 
get a match, we'll refocus. At least you won't be 
totally reliant on the Provos." 
She was right, of course. I wrote a cable to the ARM 
on Wunderland instead of the Provopolizei. It was 
adding another bureaucratic step, since they'd have 
to go to the Provos anyway, but I knew people I could 



trust in the ARM-people who could smell an evolving 
coverup. Then I set up my board to run the trace and 
let it go. Somewhere in the mass of data that it 
would generate would be the critical clue. I'd just 
had to find it-if the murderer was in fact the man 
she left with and if he didn't have a false ident. It 
would be hours before the trace was done. I screened 
Suze and made a date for dinner. 
* * * 
We met at the same Earth cuisine restaurant as 
before. Why not? The atmosphere was intimate and the 
menu inviting. Suze was already waiting when I got 
there. She greeted me with a kiss and asked, "How's 
the case going?" 
"Well, we got a kzin who confessed to the crime." 
"So you're done?" 
"Well, not exactly. It seems he was confessing 
because he thought he'd gain status by it. He didn't 
actually do it." 
"I don't understand." 
"I don't think he understood himself." 
"So where do you go from here?" 
"Good question. Right now I'm running a movement 
trace on everyone who went through the Inferno that 
night. The murderer has got to be in there somewhere, 
unless he used a false ID." 
"How do you know the man she left with is the killer?" 
"Miranda wasn't just a random victim; someone wanted 
her dead for a reason. They watched her, figured out 
her movements and set her up." 
"She was just a kid! Why would anyone want to kill 
her?" Her eyes showed worry. 
"We don't know yet. Someone she was involved with on 
Wunderland, a criminal group." 
"Do you know which group?" 
"I haven't got a clue right now." 
"I think that's your problem alright." The concern 
went away and her smile developed those mischievous 
dimples. 
I missed the joke and riposted with a brilliant, 
"What?" 
"You haven't got a clue." 
I threw a miniature shrimp from my stir fry at her. I 



didn't throw it hard but I grossly misjudged the 
gravity field and the morsel went flying past her on 
a high, slow trajectory that eventually intersected 
the back of a balding patron's head. He looked around 
in irritated surprise while I tried to look oblivious 
and Suze suppressed giggles with difficulty. 
It became a game after that. We took turns picking 
targets and launching shrimp at them. The low light 
level helped conceal our nefarious intent but the 
fifth time the maitre d' caught us and we were asked 
firmly to leave. Suze asked him if he'd call the ARM 
if we refused at which we both collapsed into gales 
of laughter. He turned red and looked ready to burst 
but she got ahold of herself and apologized, then 
smoothed over his feelings by insisting on being 
allowed to buy two liters of their crumbleberry cream 
pudding before going because it was so incomparably 
good. On the way down to the tube station she poked 
me in the ribs. 
"Maybe you shouldn't have picked the maitre d' as a 
target." 
"You're the one who threw the shrimp while he was 
looking." 
"I had to. He was already watching us to see if we 
were the ones doing the throwing." 
"No need to confirm his suspicions." 
"He wasn't suspicious, he knew. He was just waiting 
to catch us." 
"All the more reason not to hit him with a shrimp." 
"He was a witness. I couldn't let him live," she said 
with mock ferocity. 
"The shrimp or the maitre d'?" I asked innocently. 
She laughed and poked me again. I caught her around 
the waist and held her and we walked arm in arm to 
the tube car, giggling and kissing. It wasn't in the 
best traditions of the ARM for Tiamat Station's Chief 
of Investigation to go around in public acting like a 
giddy teenager. Well, hopefully nobody knew who I 
was. Anyway, I felt better than I had since I'd 
arrived at Alpha Centauri and if anyone did notice me 
I didn't care. 
Back at her apt she called, "Dessert!", opened the 
pudding container and sampled some with her fingers, 



then gave me a crumbleberry-flavored kiss. In the 
process some of the pudding spilled on her jumpsuit. 
That was an invitation if I ever saw one so I 
unsealed it and spilled some more pudding, then 
kissed it off. We fell to the floor into a sticky 
tangle of clothes and pudding, and passion. That led 
to the shower and steam and more passion which in 
turn led to the bed, cuddling, contentment and . . . 
love? 
Maybe love. 
I fell asleep with her in my arms, serene for the 
first time since I'd left Earth. 
* * * 
I was late again the next morning. Tammy winked at 
Hunter, who rippled his ears and double twitched his 
tail in a manner I could only assume was meant to be 
suggestive. I glared at them both and got another 
tail twitch from Hunter and a look of "Who? Me?" 
innocence from Tammy. Tracker snarled something at 
Hunter, then rippled his own ears as he was let in on 
the joke. 
I was feeling too good to let it bother me. If my 
lovelife boosted morale I'd just chalk it up to my 
doubtless outstanding leadership skills. In the 
meantime, I gathered what was left of my dignity and 
went into my office. 
On my desk display the exhaustive movement trace was 
done and waiting for attention. I went over my mail 
first. There was a message from Wunderland and I 
screened it, expecting a response to my ARM query. It 
was from a Provo named Loreli Novostet. She was 
working to penetrate a smuggling operation that 
supplied UN weapons to the Isolationists. An 
informant had given her a tranship code that had 
turned out to belong to a twenty-meter cargo 
container arriving from Tiamat. The cargo carrier's 
crew knew nothing, of course, and both the shipping 
and receiving companies were fronts. Perhaps I had 
some information that might help? 
She'd attached the crew's idents and an inventory of 
what they'd seized. I called up the idents and dumped 
the dossiers for hardcopy, then scanned the inventory 
list. My eyebrows went up as I read-cases of pulse 



rifles with ammunition and battery packs, hiveloc 
launchers, sniper sights, infantry battle armor, 
combat drugs, hundreds of kilos of Tridex, boosters, 
a field hospital's worth of medical equipment, flash 
grenades, surveillance gear and more than enough 
comps and comms to run a regiment. 
And something bizarre. A nitrogen freezer jam packed 
with somebody's limbs and organs. She'd attached the 
DNA pattern. 
My hands flew over the keyboard. I knew the scans 
would match even before the computer screened Miranda 
Holtzman's gene record. 
Organlegger. The word felt strange. A long time ago 
failure of a vital organ meant death. Transplant 
technology changed that. With a little luck you could 
live as long as your central nervous system lasted-as 
long as you could find donors to keep you going. 
Everybody wants to live forever but the organ banks 
couldn't always supply what you needed when you 
needed it. Organleggers took up the slack through 
kidnap and murder. It wasn't a nice profession but it 
was very lucrative. 
Nowadays medical technology is more advanced. 
Autocloning has eliminated the need to scavenge for 
donors. Organlegging is yesterday's crime, like 
cattle rustling. 
But medtech is in short supply around Alpha Centauri 
and the UN forces have first call. People were dying 
because they couldn't get treatment. The 
Isolationists had bigger medical problems. A 
suspected terrorist can't just show up at a hospital 
with blast trauma or laser burns and get treatment. 
Organlegging was a natural for them. They already had 
an effective and ruthless organization in place. It 
would take only a few donors to meet their own needs 
and what they didn't use themselves they could sell 
on the black market to finance their operations. Once 
news of their new sideline broke, they'd probably 
start using it as a terror weapon. For some reason, 
people dread being broken down for parts much more 
than simple death. A few prominent kidnappings would 
apply a lot of fear in high places. 
Not a pleasant scenario but it gave me an edge. 



Miranda hadn't been chosen at random. Somewhere out 
there a terrorist was in need of spare parts. His 
tissue rejection profile would match hers. I called 
up Dr. Morrow. Rejection profiles weren't part of a 
person's file anymore, could he derive one from 
Miranda's gene scan? He could. While I waited I 
started a report to send down to the Provopolizei. 
He was back on the screen an hour later. Miranda 
Holtzman was a rare universal donor. There were only 
a few thousand in system who couldn't accept her 
tissues. 
I cursed myself. Of course she'd been chosen for 
exactly that reason. Another blind alley. I shelved 
the report and ran a trace on the container's 
tranship code. The shipping and receiving companies 
were fake but the container itself was real. Maybe 
its movements would give me a clue. 
Container 19C01FD4 had arrived aboard the freighter 
Achilles at the up-axis docking hub, customs' sealed 
and coded for transport from MUN42104K to TMU19J234C. 
The manifest said "Machine Tools." I called up the 
operations manual for the cargo system and figured 
out the codes. "TMU" is the up-axis hub's destination 
code. "19" indicates the nineteenth of the asteroid's 
thirty-two axial transport tunnels. "J2" is the 
second container bay in the tenth two-kilometer 
section of the twenty-five that make up the length of 
the transport tunnels. "34C" is the third level of 
the thirty-fourth container rack in that bay. Once 
unloaded from Achilles, the automated routing system 
would have sent the container down tunnel nineteen to 
its destination and the receiver would have been 
notified of its arrival and shown up in due course to 
sign off with the Port Authority and take charge of 
its contents. 
So far so good, but nobody had signed it off as 
received. The computer didn't even log it as arriving 
at 19J2. The next time there was a record was 
thirty-seven hours later as the container was being 
loaded aboard the freighter Canexco Wayfarer at the 
down-axis hub, still customs' sealed and manifested 
as "Machine Tools." Point of origin TMU19J234C, 
destination MUN42104K-Munchen Spaceport, Wunderland. 



A neat trick. The container had been shipped from 
Wunderland and arrived on Tiamat, traveled straight 
through the core of the asteroid, come neatly out the 
other end and gone back where it came from. Somewhere 
along the line whatever was inside it had been taken 
out and Miranda Holtzman and an arsenal of UN weapons 
had been put in. So far as the computer was concerned 
nobody had touched the container so there was no way 
to trace the smugglers through it. The chips 
containing the tranship codes are crypted and 
self-verifying to prevent containers from being 
electronically hijacked en route. You need a Port 
Authority ident to originate or receive a shipment 
and of course that gets logged in the shipping 
control net. Somehow the smugglers had managed to 
swap origin and destination without the ident. 
The trick got neater when I called up the information 
on container bay 19J2. It didn't exist. Somewhere in 
tunnel nineteen a 2000 cubic meter tranship box had 
disappeared for thirty-seven hours. I screened the 
history file for container 19C01FD4. It had traveled 
from MUN42104K to TMU19J234C and back twelve times. 
The tranship net had never logged it as delivered to 
anyone anywhere since it entered the system three 
years ago. 
A picture was coming together and it wasn't nice. The 
Isolationists needed medical support and had decided 
to get into organlegging. They'd made a list of 
universal donors and Miranda was on it. Her departure 
for Tiamat put only a minor crimp in their plans. 
They already had a sophisticated smuggling operation 
set up in the Swarm to ship stolen UN weapons to 
Wunderland. She'd been targeted, abducted and packed 
into a freezer to ship down to Wunderland in a 
weapons consignment already set to go. The freezer 
wasn't big enough for all of her so they'd left her 
torso in the tranship tunnel and sold her skin to the 
Kdaptist Machine Technician to blur the trail. 
I would rather have found a schitz. This was 
carefully calculated murder for profit. The people 
responsible for it couldn't be treated for some 
neurochemical imbalance. They were cold-blooded 
killers, plain and simple. 



The most frightening thing was the organization. The 
killers had some major resources behind them. They 
were probably already long gone. Even if I caught 
them it wouldn't stop more innocents from being 
snatched and killed to fill the Isolationist organ 
banks. I could only pray they confined themselves to 
organlegging. If they decided to escalate, things 
would get a lot worse-and I would be one of their 
first targets. 
It was time to take a better look at tunnel nineteen. 
Johansen wasn't around so I collared Hunter. As an 
afterthought I belted on my patrol pack as well and 
we went down to the Port Authority at the up-axis 
hub. Jocelyn Merral was Port Chief, a handsome woman 
in her fifties-iron-gray hair and a penetrating gaze. 
We asked her to shut down the tunnel so we could go 
over it with a fine-tooth comb. She didn't get upset, 
she just refused. It would be too disruptive to her 
operations. Tunnel nineteen had been shut down for 
maintenance and investigation already. The backlog 
had kept a ship overtime at the down-axis hub. Did I 
have any idea how much that cost? It wasn't going to 
happen again. 
I couldn't just order it done. The Port Authority is 
its own police within its jurisdiction. I tried to 
reason with her. "Ma'am, we are investigating a 
murder that involves the Isolationists and the 
smuggling of UN weapons to Wunderland. Surely the 
Port Authority is as interested in resolving this as 
we are." 
She spoke slowly and firmly. "The Port Authority is 
not at all interested in shutting down transport 
tunnels at the casual whim of the ARM." 
"Casual whim" was the key phrase. What she meant was 
that if we wanted her cooperation we were going to 
have to supply more information. I didn't want to do 
that. The odds were long someone in the Port 
Authority was involved with the smugglers, and as one 
of a handful with command access to the tranship net 
Merral was high on the suspect list. 
Instead, I tried bargaining. "Look, we just need to 
inspect tunnel nineteen. Can that be done without 
shutting it down?" 



"Certainly, I have just the thing." I was startled by 
her ready agreement. Information is currency to me, 
dealing for it is second nature. Merral had just been 
concerned about the efficiency of her operation. I 
wasn't used to taking people at face value. 
She ushered us out of her office. The gravity was 
about a twentieth of a G and the corridors had static 
fields in the floor to aid traction. Merral walked in 
effortless forty-foot strides. Hunter moved with easy 
feline grace. I kept unsticking myself and hitting my 
head on the ceiling before settling awkwardly back to 
the ground. They had the manners not to laugh too 
much. 
We left the corridor and entered the hub itself, a 
vast space full of container racks. I'd been in 
tunnel nineteen myself but there were no containers 
in it then. The files on the shipping system 
contained diagrams of the containers and the hubs but 
they gave no concept of the scale. 
Shipping containers are ten meters square and twenty 
long. The down-axis hub is a hollow cylinder, a klick 
across and half that deep. Eight rows of storage 
racks line the hub-twenty-four thousand containers in 
hundred-meter piles. From any given point inside the 
cylinder the floor slopes upwards at an impossible 
angle and the looming racks seem about to topple 
over. Eventually the floor becomes what common sense 
dictates is a wall with the rows of racks marching up 
it with no respect for the gentle but insistent 
one-twentieth G tug beneath your feet. Farther still 
the wall becomes a ceiling with the racks dangling 
from it like massive swords of Damocles. Containers 
are moved simply by launching them from the rack 
sorters on gentle trajectories either to the docking 
hub at the center of the cylinder or one of the 
tunnel entrances around its edge. The empty space in 
the middle of the cylinder was full of containers in 
free fall and I had to consciously keep myself from 
cringing as they flew overhead with quiet rushes of 
air. I felt like a mouse in a warehouse, scampering 
to avoid being crushed by the frenetic, 
incomprehensible activity going on overhead. 
Merral was watching me. "Impressive, ay?" she asked. 



"Impressive isn't the word. I can't believe you let 
those things go in free fall." 
She laughed. "It looks like disaster in motion, 
doesn't it? Actually it's very safe. There are eight 
hundred sixty-one trajectories. Whenever one is in 
use, all the intersecting flight paths are locked out 
until the container is down and clear of its 
destination." 
I looked up at the graceful, ponderous, 
hundred-thousand-tonne aerial ballet. It wasn't that 
I doubted her, but it was hard to shake the feeling 
all those containers were going to fall on me as soon 
as God cut the strings. 
Our destination was a cargo box, but this one had 
doors and large windows cut in the sides. Powerful 
lights were mounted flush with the walls. Jocelyn 
thumbed a door open and waved us in. "We use this for 
troubleshooting and inspections. It carries 
everything we need, and we don't have to shut down a 
tunnel to use it." 
Inside the container was mostly empty space. There 
were doors and windows in the floor and ceiling as 
well as the walls and all the surfaces were padded 
and well equipped with handholds. Strapdown chairs 
with mounts that locked into the handholds were set 
up beside the forward windows. A quarter of the 
bottom rear was given over to a series of cabinets 
that housed batteries, switches and various tool 
chests. Beneath the forward window there was a 
spartan control board with a compact data terminal as 
well as various buttons, gauges and comm gear. Beside 
it was a small keypad. I recognized it at once from 
the tranship operations manual. It was the 
container's shipping control panel, a duplicate of 
the one mounted on the outside. 
I walked over and examined the panel. When Jocelyn 
joined me, I asked, "This contains the tranship 
codes?" 
"Not just the codes, everything about the shipment. 
The freight manifest, maximum and minimum allowable 
temperatures, power requirements, loading parameters, 
whether the container is pressure sealed, center of 
mass, priority level, customs codes, COD status and 



charges. Everything." She tapped a few keys and 
cryptic data slid over the small screen inset on the 
panel. PRI, COD, KPA, BOT, and others along with 
numbers that didn't mean anything to me. I did 
recognize two codes. SRC and DST indicated the 
container's source and destination-both were rack 
addresses in the up-axis hub. 
I tapped a few keys and managed to bring up the DST 
code. "Can you set this up to go anywhere?" I asked 
Merral. 
"Anywhere on Tiamat. The lockouts don't allow us to 
be loaded for an offworld destination. This container 
isn't vacc sealed. I'll set it for the outbound 
receiving racks at the down-axis hub with a routing 
override so we get tunnel nineteen. That'll take us 
right through Tiamat." 
It was better than I'd hoped for. "Can you try 
TMU19J234C?" I asked. 
She looked at me with the half accusing "How do you 
know what that means?" look that's usually reserved 
for medical patients who show their doctor some basic 
piece of medical knowledge. Specialists hate it when 
you trespass on their specialty. It makes them less 
special. Nevertheless, she thumbed the pad to 
authorize the change and punched in the destination 
code. After a couple of seconds the screen displayed 
accepted, then reverted to DST: TMU19J234C. 
"This transaction is now logged in the transport net, 
correct?" I asked. 
Merral nodded, adjusting the restraining straps that 
held her in her seat. She motioned for me to do the 
same. 
"Is there any way to circumvent that?" I asked, 
fumbling with the belts. 
"How do you mean?" 
"Can you enter destinations into this panel without 
having the system become aware of it." 
"It could be done. You'd have to block the scan 
transceiver and trick the panel into thinking it had 
transmitted the change and received a valid 
authorization verification. It wouldn't be easy, we 
use dynamic encryption. Why would you want to?" She 
reached over and helped me get buckled in. 



"A smuggler might change an onworld destination for 
an offworld destination, or perhaps just make a 
shipment the system isn't aware of." 
"I see what you're getting at, but you misunderstand 
me. If you prevent the panel from talking to the net, 
the net will just ignore it. It won't get sent 
anywhere. There's a lot of ways to break the system, 
but once it's broken it won't work properly." 
"I don't follow." 
"Look, the system is vulnerable to tampering and 
there's no way to avoid that. Rather than try to make 
it tamper-proof we've made it fail-safe. Getting a 
container to move involves a series of steps, with 
our control procedures built into the chain. If any 
link is broken the system flashes us a trouble 
warning and won't move the container." 
"And the data in the panel itself is all 
self-encrypted so you need a Port Authority ident to 
change it, correct?" 
Merral warmed to her topic. She obviously enjoyed 
having someone show an interest in her work. It 
probably didn't happen too often. "Not quite. The 
source address is always locked so we can back-trace 
a shipment, nobody can change that. When the shipment 
arrives and is accepted, the destination address is 
copied to the source so the container can be sent out 
again. Manifest, COD charges and destination are set 
by the shipper and then locked when the PA verifies 
and seals the shipment. The user functions-like 
humidity, temperature and all that-can either be set 
and locked or left open at the shipper's discretion 
in case they need adjustment in transit." 
"So you can't change the source or the destination in 
transit unless you have a Port Authority ident." 
"Not even if you do have a PA ident. Once a setting 
is locked, it can't be changed until the receiver 
accepts the shipment and signs off with us. The 
system only lets that happen at the destination 
address." 
"What if you hacked it, opened the box and modified 
the software?" 
"All you'd do is cause a self-encryption verification 
failure. The system would halt the container at the 



next control point and drop a trouble flag." 
"What if I supplied my own panel that allowed 
in-transit re-routing?" 
"It still wouldn't work. Firstly, it would fail PA 
verification at the point of shipping. Second, the 
tranship net and the panel would disagree on the 
destination as soon as you modified it. The net would 
halt the container and you'd get another flag. It's 
fail-safe." 
Fail-safe. It's a one-word lie. Nothing built by 
humans is fail-safe. I knew someone was playing games 
with the tranship net. What Merral was really telling 
me was that I needed to look for hackers in the net's 
high-level control software or corruption at the Port 
Authority itself. I didn't tell her that: she might 
be the one I was looking for. 
Instead I offered a compliment. "Sounds like you're 
pretty secure. I've seen banks with looser systems." 
I meant it too. I didn't mention that I'd seen banks 
with looser systems because I'd gone in to 
investigate the frauds that had occurred at them. 
"You've got to understand, there are better than two 
million containers in the system. Every day we move 
thirty thousand of them through Tiamat. The cargo 
value in just one of those can get into the tens of 
millions of crowns. We can't just lose track of one." 
There was pride in her voice. She was a hands-on 
technocrat and the tranship system was her baby. 
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of 
the conveyor crane. The rollers on the container rack 
slid us into the jaws of the waiting cradle. I felt 
like Captain Nemo being attacked by a giant squid. 
There was a clang as the locking dogs engaged and 
then we were on our way, swaying gently in the 
minuscule gravity field. The crane loaded us onto the 
roller rails at the end of our row of container 
racks. The cradle disconnected and the crane swung 
away. The rollers began spinning and our container 
moved off. 
I watched out the windows like a kid on a train for 
the first time. There was a double jolt as we were 
loaded onto a sorter, then a gentle surge as we 
launched into free fall. I watched in fascination as 



we soared past the tops of the container racks. We 
spun slowly and I got a revolving view of the entire, 
bustling hub. To my surprise we didn't come within a 
hundred meters of another container. What looked like 
near misses from below were a trick of perspective. 
There was all sorts of room. 
We reached the top of our parabola and began to 
descend. There was another surge as tunnel nineteen's 
container receiver pulled us in. We landed perfectly 
flat and I realized what the spin had been 
for-Maintain This End Up at All Times. The whole 
experience was exciting but vertigo inducing. I got 
my stomach back under control and looked over at 
Hunter. He had eschewed the human-sized observation 
chairs, choosing instead to curl up on top of a large 
tool bin that afforded him a convenient view and 
loosely belting himself in with some cargo straps. He 
looked completely at home, curse him. 
I was clearly going to have to get more zero-gravity 
time if I was going to fit in on Tiamat. 
The conveyors hummed and with a gentle swaying we 
slid into the yawning entrance of tunnel nineteen. 
The swaying stopped as our container was grabbed by 
the roller tracks on all four sides of the tunnel. 
Darkness fell as we left the entrance behind. Merral 
hit a switch on her control panel and the floodlights 
came on, lighting the way ahead. 
Vertigo jerked at my stomach as my inner ears fought 
to reconcile themselves with my eyes. The containers 
move down the tunnels at about fifty kilometers an 
hour. That's not very much in the scheme of things 
but with the tunnel walls rushing past just inches 
away it seems very fast indeed. The tiny pull of 
Tiamat's rotation is overwhelmed by the acceleration 
and deceleration forces along the container's axis as 
it's braked or speeded up to allow for other traffic 
in the tunnel. 
My brain carefully weighed all this information and 
decided that I was falling headfirst down a 
bottomless elevator shaft. It was worse than the 
freefall in the hub. My knuckles were white on the 
arms of the chair and I found I couldn't make myself 
let go. 



"How long will it take to get there?" I asked, trying 
to keep my voice calm. It came out sounding tense 
anyway. 
"About forty minutes." It was clearly just routine to 
Merral. 
Hunter yawned, curled up and went to sleep. 
A track shunt appeared ahead of us. Luminous letters 
flashed by, too fast to actually read but I 
registered them as Y2. A black opening flashed by. 
I closed my eyes and took three deep breaths and 
found I could relax my grip. I was just sitting in a 
chair in very low gravity. The seatbelt pulled gently 
as the container responded to the tracks and I could 
hear the whine of the rollers. I sat on my hands and 
opened my eyes. 
Vertigo hit again, but I forced myself to keep 
sitting on my hands. Eventually I got used to the 
view. Another opening, another junction and W1 
flashed by. Merral had brought up a tiny hologram on 
her board. I recognized it as a map of the shipping 
tunnels. Tiny white dots moved slowly along its 
tributaries. She pointed to one highlighted in red. 
"That's us." 
I asked her some more questions about the tranship 
net and its security arrangements. She was happy to 
oblige me. I got detailed information on how data was 
stored, how transmissions were crypted and errors 
caught, how containers were sealed and how physical 
access was controlled. It really was an impressive 
system but she kept using the word "fail-safe." An 
engineer really ought to know better. 
After a while the conversation lagged and I fell to 
watching the hypnotically repeating panorama of 
tracks, rollers and supports. P3 streaked past. I 
thought about Holly and Suze. P2, P1, O1, N4, N3. I 
stopped counting them and thought about Suze. 
My reverie ended when the deceleration kicked in and 
pushed me against my safety belt. A scrabble of claws 
from behind told me that Hunter's nap had been 
interrupted and he'd nearly slid out of his 
improvised restraints. We slowed to a fraction of our 
former speed. A tunnel junction was coming up. 
I looked in amazement at the luminous figures on the 



tunnel wall. J2-the container bay that didn't exist. 
The floodlights illuminated a track shunt ahead, 
leading into a side tunnel identical to all the 
others we'd passed so far. I'd expected a complex 
trail of trapdoor computer programs and corrupt 
customs checkers. I'd imagined secret doors, illicit 
tunnels or a Slaver device that could move cargo 
containers into hyperspace pockets. I didn't know 
what I was looking for, but I certainly hadn't 
expected a perfectly normal tunnel junction, labelled 
with glowing letters four meters tall. 
The rollers braked our container some more and we 
were switched onto the side track. We rocked slightly 
from side to side as we entered the container bay and 
lost the stability of being guided on all four sides. 
Automatic handling gear clanged as it coupled to the 
container's lifting lugs and slid us up a container 
rack. It was only four tiers high but otherwise 
identical to the one we'd started in at the up-axis 
hub. The locking dogs engaged with a solid thump and 
we were stopped. 
Merral looked around from the side window. "Here we 
are," she said, as if there were nothing unusual 
about it. I looked out the window and I knew we'd hit 
paydirt. Jury-rigged spotlights lit the scene. Most 
of the immense bay was empty, with only a single row 
of empty racks, although the conveyer was built to 
service a dozen more. Another container was shunted 
onto the bay's only loading ramp. Its end doors were 
open and stacked around it were hundreds of white 
plastic crates stamped with UN code numbers. I had 
gambled on finding a lead. I'd found smuggler central. 
Hunter and I piled out and jumped the thirty meters 
to the ground. He landed in a combat-ready crouch. I 
came down less gracefully but my nerves were just as 
taut. I drew my stunner from its holster on the belt 
of my patrol pack. I don't usually carry the pack but 
I was glad I'd brought it this time. Now I wished 
that I'd worn my body armor too. For the first time I 
noticed Hunter's only weapon was his ceremonial 
dagger and I realized that it was all he ever carried. 
Merral came down after us, cautiously. J2 was just 
the disused container bay she'd expected, but she was 



more than smart enough to make the connections. 
Without words she took up a position behind us, 
watching the tracks leading to the container tunnel 
and letting us concentrate on the bay itself. 
Nothing moved. I was about to relax and tell Merral 
there was no danger when Hunter's sharp "Siisss!" 
warned me to silence. He was in a frozen crouch, his 
ears swivelled up and forward, twitching slightly 
back and forth. One paw was gesturing for quiet. 
Suddenly he leapt, sailing across the vast chamber in 
seconds. His target was the entry to an access 
corridor in the opposite wall. He flew through the 
opening with unerring precision, landed on a handhold 
and took off again, down the corridor and out of 
sight. I followed him awkwardly. I knew I could never 
have the big cat's reflexes, but I fervently wished I 
had at least Jocelyn Merral's easy grace in 
microgravity. I missed my jump by better than twenty 
meters and floundered down while she waited 
patiently. The access corridor was half a klick long. 
I swallowed my ego and let Merral hold on to me. She 
pushed off into a long parabola. A couple of kicks en 
route brought us to the end of the corridor. The 
pressure door to the next section was closed and 
Hunter was examining it intently. He turned to us as 
we arrived. 
"I heard a sound, which I now presume was this door 
being opened and then shut. There is fresh scent in 
this tunnel of a human male. He must have fled when 
our container's lights entered the trackway." The 
kzin showed his fangs and licked his chops with a 
deep-throated mrrrowl. "There is much fear in his 
sweat." 
I went to thumb the door open but the plate had been 
ripped open and bypassed. Not even an ARM ident would 
work now. Closer inspection revealed the locking 
mechanism. A hole had been cut in the door's plasteel 
surface and a simple lever and pivot engaged the 
securing bolts inside. A metal pin attached to a 
chain could be inserted to hold the lever in the 
locked position. With the pin in place the door was 
proof against anything short of heavy energy weapons. 
The holes rendered the door useless in a 



depressurization emergency, but the smugglers 
wouldn't be worried about that. 
I tried the handle reflexively. It didn't budge. 
"I have already attempted that," said Hunter mildly. 
"It's clear we're not going to get through. Let's 
seal this bay off and get the crime scene team down 
here." 
I grabbed the comm unit from my patrol pack and 
called Dispatch. I didn't get anything but static. No 
repeaters in this unfinished section. Our runner had 
made a clean getaway. 
Merral noticed the problem. "There's a Port Authority 
comm on the control board in the container." Hunter 
snarled in acknowledgement and launched himself back 
down the corridor, eager to be on with the chase. 
I let him go, turning to Merral. "You know about this 
place?" 
"Of course." She gestured at the door and the pirated 
wiring the smugglers had used to power their 
floodlights. "Although evidently I didn't know 
everything I thought I did." 
"Tell me about it." We turned back down the corridor. 
"This bay was supposed to serve a whole new 
industrial subsector they were going to put in right 
after the liberation. Turns out they overestimated 
the requirements and they never needed the space, so 
they just sealed it off and left it." 
Her explanation made sense but there were other 
problems. "The tranship net doesn't even know it 
exists." 
We turned the accessway corner into the main bay. 
Hunter jumped down from the container. "The crime 
scene team and a detachment of Goldskins are on their 
way. They will open the pressure door from the other 
side. I will meet them there." He leapt off again 
without waiting for an answer. 
"Of course it does," Merral continued. 
"It doesn't." I paused, decided to trust her. The 
smugglers already knew we were on to them anyway. 
"Miranda Holtzman's internal organs were found in a 
shipping container on Wunderland, along with a cache 
of stolen UN weapons. The container's point of origin 
was 19J2, but when I tried to punch up the data on it 



the system drew a blank." 
"You did a shipping trace to get that data, right?" 
"Yah." 
She nodded. "When you do a trace, the net uses the 
billing system data because normally you're 
interested in who owns the shipment and who's paying 
for it. This bay isn't in the billing system because 
no customers are registered to it so it would never 
show up. But the routing software knows about every 
node around Alpha Centauri and that's the data set 
that gets used when a shipment is set up and 
verified." 
The picture became clearer. "Is there any way someone 
could swap the source and destination addresses 
without a Port Authority ident, or at least without 
logging it in the computer?" 
"Too easy." She laughed and tapped a few keys on a 
board at the base of the container racks. Its display 
came up with a duplicate of the inspection 
container's shipping panel. Another press brought up 
SRC and DST. She hit a final key and the readout 
flashed REJECTED for a moment and then, magically, 
TMU19J234C and TMUCA147A switched places from origin 
to destination. "You just refuse delivery." 
"What?" 
"You refuse delivery. If you accept the shipment, you 
need a PA ident to accept the COD, clear customs 
control, verify the manifest and all that. If you 
refuse delivery, the tranship box just gets bounced 
back to point of origin still sealed so none of that 
matters, so you don't need the ident. The shipper's 
delivery bond is forfeited to pay for shipping the 
container back and the transaction is cleared out of 
the net. It's a user function." 
"A user function?" I couldn't believe my ears. "What 
happens if a refused shipment gets re-refused by the 
shipper?" 
"Why would anyone do that?" 
"What would happen?" I tried to keep my voice level. 
She shrugged. "I don't know . . ." She paused, 
thinking. "Grounded at the originating port, I 
suppose. At worst it would go back to the recipient 
again. It couldn't get lost or redirected, only a PA 



ident can change the source or destination. Nobody 
could claim it unless they signed off with us." She 
paused again. "Unless . . ." 
"Unless it got shipped here." 
She nodded, understanding the problem. The tranship 
system had a couple of assumptions built into it that 
the Port Authority was physically present at all 
the system endpoints, and that no shipper would 
refuse its own refused container. With dynamic 
encryption and multilayered security measures, the 
system was considered fail-safe. But a couple of 
reasonable assumptions made a security hole big 
enough to shove a twenty-meter container box through 
that wasn't defined as a failure. There were no 
hackers, no high-level corruption. The system just 
worked the way it was designed to. It was a brilliant 
setup, a sort of digital jujitsu. The smugglers were 
only caught because of human error. I wondered if 
they considered their system fail-safe too. 
It would be a while before the crime scene team 
arrived. Merral scrambled up the container rack to 
call in her findings to her team. I took the 
opportunity to look into the cargo box on the loading 
ramp. I got a shock. The white crates were all 
clearly labelled. They contained high-tech drugs, 
each molecule assembled atom by atom in zero gravity. 
I recognized some of the names-Polyhalazone, Quadrol 
and Ricaline. Every case here was worth fifty 
thousand crowns at a minimum, at least treble that on 
the black market, and there were hundreds of cases. 
There was more in the container, stacked parcels of 
brown quickwrap a half meter on a side. I ripped one 
open. Brand new fifty krona wafers spilled onto the 
floor. I couldn't begin to guess how much was in the 
package. The next package yielded twenties. I ripped 
open a third. Hundreds. I picked one up and looked it 
over carefully. It gave away nothing to the naked eye 
although I knew it had to be counterfeit. I would 
have heard of a theft this big-the whole system would 
have. I was willing to bet it was a very good 
counterfeit. The Isolationists never did anything 
with half measures. 
The scale wasn't half-measured either. I counted 



packages and did some quick mental arithmetic, then 
did it again because I didn't believe the results the 
first time. This container held a billion crowns at a 
conservative estimate. The krona isn't the rock solid 
currency it used to be. Its value has been steadily 
eroded since the start of the occupation and the 
slide has only accelerated since the liberation. Even 
so, a billion crowns was a staggering sum. A fraction 
of a percent of counterfeits in the cash supply will 
upset a currency's stability. With the Provo 
Government's grip already shaky, there was enough 
here to undermine the entire system's economy. If 
this container got through to Wunderland, Alpha 
Centauri would be in chaos within a month. 
It wouldn't, though, because we'd gotten here first. 
I felt suddenly shaky. This was a major haul. I was 
well aware of what the Provos knew and did not know 
about the Isolationists. The scale of their smuggling 
system, their expansion into medical facilities and 
organlegging and their counterfeiting operation were 
all new pieces of information. We were going to get 
positive DNA idents from this site, and the Goldskin 
interrogators would get the names we didn't have from 
the ones we caught. This investigation was going to 
break the back of the Isolationists in the Swarm 
before they even got going and shut down a huge 
smuggling ring as well. The information we gained 
would let the Provopolizei put a major crimp in their 
operations on Wunderland too. 
It was a good feeling-it was the way I used to feel 
when Prakit and I started to unravel one of our big 
cases back on Earth. And why not? This was just as 
big-maybe bigger. Tiamat might well wind up crowning 
my career and I'd only been here a month. 
My enthusiasm damped itself. The whole Wunderland 
half of the project depended on the Provopolizei. 
They might well be "convinced" to close the case down 
by some pro-Isolationist politician. 
I shook off the negative images. I was doing my job 
and doing it well. Wunderland was out of my control, 
but I'd already scored a major victory just by 
catching this shipment. No politician could take that 
away from me. 



Merral came in, gasping when she saw the cash. 
"Impressive, eh?" 
She just nodded. 
"Don't get too excited, it's not real." 
She looked at the stacked packages "There must be 
hundreds of millions of crowns here." 
"A billion at the very least." 
She whistled. "They could crash the market with this." 
"I think that's the plan." 
She tore her gaze away from the money and handed me a 
hardcopy. "Here, you're going to need this." 
It was from the data terminal in the inspection 
container. It listed thirty-six tranship boxes that 
had passed through 19J2 at some point, along with 
their points of origin, shipper, receiver and 
supposed manifest. This bay was a hub for smuggling 
activities ranging from UN outposts at the edge of 
the system to remote monorail stations deep in the 
Jotuns on Wunderland. One container was even 
shuttling back and forth from Earth itself. 
Hunter came in and reported. "The crime scene team 
has arrived and the access tunnel has been secured." 
He took in the container's contents and for the first 
time ever I saw him at a loss. "There is . . . 
considerable wealth here." 
"Almost certainly counterfeit." 
"Of course." He was back in control that quickly. 
"Shall I inform the UNF authorities that they can 
recover their pharmaceuticals as soon as the team has 
finished their sweep?" 
"I'll do it; you take over here." His practicality 
reminded me that there was plenty of work to be done. 
The bay was secure and the sweepers would give me a 
report. I had to start coordinating the authorities 
whose jurisdictions were on Merral's destination 
list. It was a big criminal organization. Not 
everyone would get warned in time. A lot of crooks 
were about to get caught. 
Johansen came in with First Tracker in tow. I took 
some time to fill them in on the findings and set 
them to tracing our runner. The sweepers were already 
at work in the bay by the time I left. I tubed back 
to the office and got the paperwork under way. I'd 



only been at my desk half an hour when the screen 
chimed. I punched the call through. It was Suze. 
"Hi, am I interrupting anything?" 
I smiled. "Big exciting things, but I'm glad you 
called anyway." 
"Why don't you knock off early and tell me about 
them?" Her smile was rich in promises. 
"I really shouldn't . . ." I looked at my long list 
of to-dos " . . . but what the hell." Any excuse to 
dodge paperwork. A twelve-hour delay wouldn't make 
much difference in the course of the investigation. I 
was just sending preliminary reports anyway. Most of 
the information I needed wouldn't be back from the 
field lab until tomorrow. 
"Great, your apt, thirty minutes. I'll order dinner." 
"Sold." She punched off and I stored my work in 
progress. 
* * * 
Suze was waiting at the door when I got to my apt. I 
thumbed the plate and kissed her. We went in and I 
unslung my patrol pack and hung it on a hook by the 
door. She looked at it with curiosity. 
"You carry a gun?" 
"It's just a stunner." 
"Does that have anything to do with your big exciting 
happenings?" 
"Not a whole lot as it turns out. We closed down an 
Isolationist smuggling operation in an abandoned 
container bay today. And we know who killed Miranda." 
"Who?" 
"The Isolationists." I paused, then shut up. I'd been 
about to tell her about their organlegging operation, 
but there was no need to upset her. 
She didn't notice my hesitation. "Catch anyone?" 
"Not yet, but we will. We got a big pile of stolen 
drugs and about a billion in counterfeit krona as 
well." 
She whistled. "That is big and exciting." 
I grinned, still very pleased with the success. "I 
have to convince the management that I'm earning my 
pay." 
"You won't get fired this week anyway." She reached 
past me and took my pack off the wall. "What else do 



you carry?" 
"Just what you'd expect. Comm unit, binders, medkit, 
beltcomp, shockrod, that sort of thing." 
She opened the pouch and examined the medkit. It was 
ARM issue on Earth, more advanced than what was given 
out here. "You're ready for anything, aren't you?" 
"As much as I can be." 
She took out the binders, simple double circlets of 
stainless steel-very low tech. She locked one cuff to 
her right wrist. 
"Anything at all?" 
She held out her arms towards me, wrists together. 
Her eyes were high voltage arcs. She wore a look of 
invitation and defiance-"I dare you." 
I walked over and gently took her hands. Her gaze 
didn't waver. Without breaking eye contact, I lifted 
the other cuff and closed it around her left wrist. 
The lock is usually inaudible. This time the click 
sounded like a gunshot. 
She parted her lips. I pulled her arms over her head 
and kissed her fervently, pulling her pliant body 
hard against mine. Eventually, I picked her up and 
carried her to the bedroom. My apt is on the .8G 
level and she was as light as a feather in my arms. 
* * * 
The screen chimed, though I had it set for privacy, 
dragging me out of a deep sleep. Priority call. I 
punched it through and got the Goldskin dispatcher. 
Emergency. Johansen had arrested a suspect and shots 
had been fired. She was hit-no word on her condition 
yet-and the suspect was fleeing. The Goldskins were 
in pursuit but weren't pressing their quarry. He had 
a strakakker and was moving along a pedestrian 
promenade. They didn't want to provoke a firefight. 
I didn't blame them. I punched the dispatcher into 
audio only and patched in security surveillance. 
They'd be following him on the monitors. The screen 
showed a crowded arcade from halfway up one wall. A 
surging disturbance in the throng marked the escaper. 
He was a dark-haired Wunderlander, running awkwardly 
in the low G, brandishing his weapon and screaming. 
People were desperately scrambling out of his way. As 
I watched, a startled kzin leapt straight up and 



grabbed a light fixture on the ceiling fifty feet 
overhead. The fugitive jerked his gun up to cover the 
sudden motion but didn't fire. Between his panic and 
lack of coordination, it was a miracle he hadn't 
already emptied the strakakker into the crowd. One 
hint of pursuit and he'd do just that. The Goldskins 
had made the right choice. Let him run, exhaust 
himself and then hole up somewhere. Even if he took 
hostages and wound up killing them all it would be no 
worse than a shootout down on that floor. Hopefully, 
it would turn out much better. 
Hopefully. 
Suze came up behind me, rubbing sleep from her eyes 
and looking very fetching with her hair tousled into 
a fiery halo and wearing an oversized jump-shirt from 
my wardrobe. 
"What's going on?" 
I spoke quickly. "We've got a runner. Tammy tagged a 
suspect from the container bay bust and got shot." 
The dispatcher was still waiting for instructions. I 
split the screen and punched up Control's map. I got 
a floating 3D planview of the arcade and the levels 
around it. The fugitive was a tiny red ball on the 
.3G level, heading down-axis. Gold spheres marked the 
cops positioned around his route, moving to get ahead 
of him but staying out of the way. As long as he 
didn't open fire they'd stay there. Clusters of 
blue-marked med teams held in readiness. Control had 
sealed the pressure doors behind him but not ahead. 
Any route he chose was fine with them as long as it 
was off that arcade. I zoomed the map out and punched 
up a history trace. A red line showed his path. He 
was panicked but he wasn't running blindly. He was 
going straight down-axis, moving in every time he had 
a chance. He was heading for the low-G industrial 
zone near Tigertown. 
Heading for the down-axis hub. 
I told the dispatcher as much and blanked the screen. 
Suze was looking over my shoulder and I nearly 
knocked her over as I got up to grab my clothes. I 
threw them on in record time and grabbed my patrol 
pack. At the door I paused long enough to kiss her 
good-bye. 



"Back soon." 
She grabbed me with surprising strength, kissed me 
hard and whispered fiercely in my ear. "Don't let him 
live." 
"What?" I said, taken aback, not understanding. 
"Don't let him live. If he's caught, there'll be a 
trial. He's an Isolationist, they can buy the court 
or blackmail it or break him out. He'll get away. 
It's not right, after what they did to that girl." 
Her gaze was intense, burning blue. "If he's shot 
while escaping . . ." She let her voice trail off. 
She didn't need to say more. I kissed her fiercely 
and left. 
Control had a tube car ready and held on standby. I 
jumped in, thumbed the plate and the door slid shut. 
The route panel was already set for the down-axis 
hub. The dispatcher obligingly shunted everyone else 
out of my way and I made the thirty-kilometer trip in 
record time. On the way, I thought about Suze's plea. 
An armed and dangerous fugitive killed while fleeing 
arrest. There would be no questions if I ordered 
shoot to kill. We'd lose the chance to interrogate 
him of course, but he wouldn't evade justice-and it 
would be justice. Even if he wasn't an Isolationist 
with blood on his hands, he'd proved murderous intent 
by shooting Johansen. 
Frontier justice. It wasn't the way the ARM did 
business on Earth, but this wasn't Earth. Maybe I 
should issue shoot to kill orders anyway. It was a 
reasonable response given the situation. I had to 
think of the danger to my troops as well. Stunners 
don't have a lot of range and if the runner got off a 
burst before going down it would be messy, even if we 
fired first. Pulse rifles would more than even the 
odds. 
I decided to wait and see. Any risk of a firefight, 
I'd give the order, but not until. I'd played by the 
rules since I'd arrived and I wasn't going to go back 
now. 
In the end it didn't matter. It was all over when I 
got there. The runner went straight for the down-axis 
hub. Control evacuated the accessways and when he got 
inside an empty corridor they sealed him in. His 



strakakker was loaded with armor-piercing explosive 
ammunition and he emptied it trying to blow open the 
plasteel pressure doors. When they failed to yield 
sufficiently, he reloaded and blew his head off 
instead. 
Armor-piercing explosive. I felt sick as I remembered 
Johansen. I called the medical section and asked how 
she was, dreading the answer I knew I would get. 
Tammy took five rounds point-blank from her left hip 
to her right shoulder. Her body armor was blasted to 
ribbons absorbing the detonations. She might as well 
have been naked, she was dead on the scene. First 
Tracker took rounds in the thigh, belly and chest but 
his heavier kzin armor and built-for-battle physique 
saved his life-hopefully. The doctors would rebuild 
his devastated abdominal cavity and autoclone 
replacements for damaged organs and limbs, if he made 
it through the night. 
He'd called in the shooting and the suspect, 
tourniqued his femoral artery and was giving CPR to 
Johansen when the crash team arrived. I'd pin his 
medal on myself. 
If he made it through the night. 
I screened Tam's journal for information. She'd done 
a search on the transit system logs for anyone who 
boarded a tube car in the access corridor to J2 up to 
five minutes after Hunter and I had chased our quarry 
from the container bay. One of the names on that list 
was a drive technician-HJ3U659A Wurzmann. Peter K. 
Wurzmann was suspected of smuggling but never charged 
through lack of evidence. Wurzmann took the tube to 
his apt, then another to the down-axis hub where he'd 
boarded the mining ship Voidtrekker. Johansen was on 
to him by then, but the police tag went on his ident 
seven seconds after he'd passed customs. Voidtrekker 
cleared docking control ten minutes after that and 
left on a prospecting trajectory that was bound to be 
a total fabrication. A comm check showed Wurzmann 
made four calls-Voidtrekker's captain, a co-worker, a 
Wunderland tourist, and a Wunderland doctor named 
Joachim Weiss. The last call was marked no answer. 
Comm checks on the recipients expanded the list to 
sixteen names. Fifteen people had taken off with 



Voidtrekker-everyone on the comm list except Weiss. 
Weiss was the one with the strakakker. 
So we'd flushed our quarry and they'd fled. I guessed 
the Wunderlanders were Isolationists and the Belters 
were contract smugglers. They were probably the 
entire control cell for 19J2-and they were all out of 
reach. 
I screened Hunter and got him to take a search unit 
down to Weiss's apt. His lips were twitching back to 
expose his fangs, his speech laden with snarls and 
heavy with threats. He was barely under control. He 
took Johansen's death and Tracker's wounding as 
personal insults. After that, I called up the navy 
and asked them about intercepting Voidtrekker. A 
competent-looking commander told me the odds of an 
intercept were a little less than one in ten. 
Voidtrekker was polarizer driven, which meant she 
could put a lot of distance between herself and 
Tiamat in a very short time. A smuggler ship would 
have shielded monopoles in her drive, making tracking 
impossible. Once she cleared Tiamat's control sphere 
she'd be very difficult to pick up. 
"Will the navy try anyway?" I asked. 
"There's no question involved." The officer checked 
something off-screen for a second. "We'll have three 
ships boosting in the next two hours." 
I gave my thanks and rang off. 
After that, I went over Dr. Weiss's file again. The 
Provos had him tagged as Isolationist leaning-that 
was nothing, most Wunderlanders were. Everything else 
told me he was Miranda's killer. When the Goldskins 
had printed him for ID they'd gotten two files back. 
His retinas said he was Joachim Weiss, his fingertips 
said he was a bio-engineer named Cas Wentsel. Wentsel 
was on the Inferno's customer list for the night 
Miranda was killed and his movements for that night 
took him past the accessway to container bay J2. 
Weiss arrived on Tiamat just one day after Miranda, 
on the next available flight from Wunderland. He fit 
the physical description from the Inferno, such as it 
was. He was qualified to perform Class 3 surgery. I 
pulled up his library list. It was hopelessly 
technical but I gleaned all I needed to know from the 



titles-fifty-year-obsolete manuals about tissue 
preservation and rejection control. They amounted to 
a primer for organleggers. 
Tamara was avenged. Miranda was avenged. I tagged her 
case file closed. 
I didn't feel the usual satisfaction I get when I 
close a case. Miranda and Tammy were still gone, 
Weiss's death wouldn't bring them back. His cohorts 
had escaped. The elation I'd felt when we'd shut down 
J2 was overshadowed by helpless frustration. On a 
hunch I pulled up his client files. Miranda Holtzman 
had been his patient since she was six. That was how 
he knew she was a universal donor, that was why she'd 
left the bounce-box with him. I felt ill. 
It was late. In the morning I'd open a new case file 
on the flight of the Voidtrekker. I switched off the 
system and went home. 
When I got back, Suze had gone out. I didn't blame 
her, but I did miss her. The events of the night and 
Johansen's death had left me totally drained. I fell 
into an exhausted slumber. Some time later I felt her 
slip into bed and snuggle against me, warm and soft. 
She gently kissed the back of my neck and I went back 
to sleep, feeling better. 
* * * 
The next morning Hunter was waiting for me. 
"You are late. We have had developments." 
"Why didn't you call me?" 
He twitched his ears genially. "Your recreation had 
already been disturbed once." 
I avoided the subject. "What happened?" 
"There was an explosion in the down-axis docking hub." 
"Serious?" 
"Yes. The initiating explosive appears to have been 
thermite but the main blast and fire were caused by a 
volatile aerosol inside a tranship container. Damage 
was extensive." 
I envisioned the havoc that a 
two-thousand-cubic-meter sealed vapor bomb would 
wreak and marvelled at the kzin's capacity for 
understatement. We were lucky the whole down-axis hub 
hadn't been blown into space. 
"What action have you taken?" 



"The area has been sealed and the crime scene team is 
going over it." 
"Findings?" 
"A human corpse has been found that appears to have 
been inside the transport container. The container 
itself was modified to support life." 
"Support life? What do you mean?" 
"We have found the remains of an oxygen recycler, 
food supplies and other items that indicate the 
container was designed to carry sentients in vacuum 
for extended periods." 
I swore. The Isolationists had been moving people 
back and forth to Wunderland with perfect impunity, 
right under our noses. Finagle only knew how many. 
We'd missed a trick. Reception parties would be 
waiting for the thirty-six containers on Jocelyn 
Merral's list when they arrived at their destinations 
but I hadn't thought about intercepting them in 
transit. It hadn't even occurred to me that some 
might still be within my grasp on Tiamat. 
"What about the guards and the security monitors. How 
come they didn't pick this up in progress?" 
"The Port was running its normal night shift. The 
monitors didn't pick up anything out of the ordinary." 
"So the perpetrator must have had access." 
"Hrrrrr . . . Either that or a tampered ident." 
"Granted. So once again we have someone operating in 
the down-axis hub. Someone who didn't flee on the 
Voidtrekker." 
He raised a massive paw. "It would be foolish to 
assume that only one Isolationist cell was operating 
on Tiamat. I would presume we have flushed only those 
with a direct connection to 19J2." 
"What other information do we have?" 
"Little enough. Damage was extensive. We can assume 
that they were willing to kill this individual rather 
than risk his capture." 
"Have they ID'd the body?" 
"The coroner's report has not yet been released." 
If I never spoke to Dr. Morrow again it would be too 
soon. I was tired of sifting through the details of 
dead lives. I screened his office and asked him what 
the delay was. He was having trouble determining if 



the body had been dead before the explosion or not. I 
told him to make the ID priority one. He asked me to 
wait and I watched his pleasant pastel hold patterns. 
Hunter grew impatient and left to pursue his own 
work. Fifteen minutes later Morrow was back on with 
the results. 
I thanked him and screened the file. K8DH3N37-Klein, 
Maximillian H. Graphic designer, unmarried, 
thirty-four standard years old, fifth generation 
Swarm Belter. No previous arrests. He'd lived his 
whole life on Tiamat and worked for Canexco, a large 
shipping company. A bell rang in the back of my head. 
Miranda Holtzman's fatal cargo container had been 
shipped down to Wunderland aboard the Canexco 
Wayfarer. Perhaps there was a connection? I called up 
Max's employee file. He worked in corporate 
communications-nothing to do with the handling of 
tranship boxes but his company ident did include 
access to both hubs. 
But what was a graphic designer doing in the 
container bays of the down-axis hub, with or without 
access? Was he involved or just caught in the wrong 
place at the wrong time? On a hunch I screened the 
composite holo created from Machine Technician's 
description. It was a rough match, not good but not 
bad considering the sketchiness of the source. Was he 
the one who'd sold Miranda's skin? Insufficient data. 
What was a graphic designer anyway? Presumably some 
sort of visual artist. 
It occurred to me that I'd never seen a file listing 
"Artist" or "Musician" or "Gardener" as a profession 
on Tiamat. This airless rock was made fit for life 
with advanced technology and maintained by 
technologists. It exists solely to provide Alpha 
Centauri system with products of the very highest 
sophistication-products whose manufacture demands 
zero gravity or unlimited high vacuum or gigawatts of 
solar power. There's little room for someone not 
directly involved in survival-physical, economic or, 
since the kzinti came, military. 
Of course the best engineers saw their work as art, 
even as the best artists refined their skills to a 
science. Maybe in this totally technical atmosphere, 



it wasn't surprising that people saw things through a 
technological lens. Idly, I punched up the work 
roster for the parks on the 1G level. Maybe I'd find 
at least a gardener. 
The roster was full of eco-engineers and 
environmental control technicians. 
I blanked the screen. It was a meaningless exercise. 
A rose was a rose, whether it was tended by gardeners 
or botanical techs. I had a feeling the difference 
was important, but it was too subtle to put my finger 
on. What's in a name? Maybe nothing. What does it 
mean when a society insists on calling an artist a 
graphic designer? 
My mind was wandering. It was early morning and 
already I needed a break. I gave up trying to work 
and let my thoughts drift to Suze. She was beautiful, 
intelligent, sensuous, exciting, graceful, 
uninhibited, warm. Adjectives did her poor service. 
If I'd been able to find the words, I might have 
written a poem. Instead I called up her file again. 
When the computer screened it, I blew up the ID holo 
and dumped it to the printer. 
Dossier holos never do anyone justice but her 
radiance came through the bad image. She was wearing 
her characteristic high-energy smile. Her hair was 
longer when the holo was taken, a burnished auburn 
river flowing down over her shoulders. Her eyes were 
a dancing, sunny brown-lending just a hint of 
devilishness to her look. 
I froze, cold horror seeping along my spine. 
Unnoticed facts clicked into place and my thoughts 
locked into a paralyzed frenzy of revelation and 
denial. I sat and stared for a long time. Then I 
commed her apt. 
"Hi, what's up?" 
I could hardly meet her gaze. I strove to keep my 
voice animated. "Care for brunch?" 
"Sure, whenwhere?" 
"Meet me at the office and we'll figure it out. 
Fifteen minutes?" 
"Give me thirty and you've got a deal." 
"See you then." She smiled her dazzling smile. 
I rang off and waited as the minutes dragged by. I 



had the shakes under control by the time she arrived; 
even so I still couldn't bring myself to meet her 
gaze. Instead I tossed her the holoprint. She took it 
and stared at it uncomprehending for a moment. Then 
her face hardened. She dropped the holo and looked 
up. This time I forced myself to look her in the 
eyes. They were ice blue. Miranda Holtzman's eyes 
were ice blue. 
Her voice was as cold as her gaze. "Now what?" 
"You tell me." 
"Name a price, you'll get it. I'll just walk away." 
"In counterfeit?" 
"In cash. Or credits if you like. You name it, you'll 
get it." 
I didn't answer her directly. Instead I asked a 
question. "Why?" 
She turned my words around. "You tell me." 
"You're an Isolationist." 
She nodded. 
"You're a mining engineer. I'd guess that makes you 
their explosives expert. Something went off in your 
face. They can't put you in hospital so you wind up 
with scars, and of course they have to get you a new 
set of eyes somewhere or you're out of action." 
"Wrong." The bitterness in her voice ran deep. "I got 
my scars from the UN mining consortium just like I 
told you. They hand out defective equipment and when 
there's an accident, it's just too bad. All they care 
about is the damn production goals for the damn war. 
I was one of the lucky ones. Luckier than my 
parents." I could see the rage cross her face at the 
memory. "That's why I'm an Isolationist." 
"And your eyes?" 
"I caught a laser bounce in a Provo raid." 
"So you become the first beneficiary of the 
Isolationist transplant program." 
"Not the first." 
Of course not. "How did you expect to get past a 
retina scan?" 
She laughed. "I think you'll find my file matches my 
prints. Someone forgot to update the holo-they'll pay 
for that." 
"And that night in the Inferno?" 



"I started going there as soon as I could see again. 
I knew you'd come after Weiss's stupidity. You or 
someone like you." 
A vague unease tugged at the edges of my awareness. 
She was volunteering information too easily, too 
calmly. I forced it down. "Weiss messed up?" 
"He couldn't get all of Miranda in the freezer. The 
dolt dumped her body in the transport tunnel instead 
of getting rid of it properly." 
"And the hub last night, that's where you went from 
my apt." 
She tipped an imaginary hat in reply, as if accepting 
a compliment. She was a professional. She took pride 
in her work. 
"There was some evidence. It's not important now." 
"And Klein?" 
"Just a go-between. He got in the way." 
I had one more question. "Why Miranda?" 
"We needed a universal donor, and I've always wanted 
blue eyes." She smiled, briefly. 
"Now what?" 
Her voice was as hard and cold as steel. "How much do 
you want?" 
My heart sank and I shook my head. "I can't let you 
go." 
Suddenly there was a gun in her hand, a jetpistol. 
Designed for zero-G combat, it had virtually no 
recoil. It fired miniature rockets designed to 
mushroom on impact. They would turn a living body 
into hamburger. It was almost totally silent, small 
enough to conceal easily and had no power source or 
metal to trigger security alarms. She had chosen her 
weapon well. 
"I don't think you have a choice." She smiled. She 
was right. The choice was hers and she'd already made 
it. Even so, I had to ask. "What about us?" 
She laughed, a short, explosive sound. "I liked you, 
Joel. It was fun, but now it's time for me to leave." 
She raised the jetpistol. Her expression held regret 
and finality. I wouldn't beg, but my expression must 
have spoken for me. Perhaps she thought I was afraid 
of dying. 
I glanced at the stunner hanging on my patrol 



pack-two impossible meters away. 
She caught me looking and a smile played around the 
edges of her lips. I knew the expression. She was 
daring me to try. 
I held her gaze but I didn't take the bait. "You 
can't kill everyone who knows you're here." 
Her smile was as wide and predatory as any kzin's. 
"Watch me." The weapon's bore looked as big as a 
cannon's. Her finger tightened around the trigger. 
There was a piercing scream and the wall behind her 
exploded around two hundred and fifty kilos of kzin. 
She fired reflexively but I was already on my way to 
the floor. Even so, she would have got me if Hunter's 
attack hadn't ruined her aim. The rocket slug went 
past my ear with a nasty zzzwip, leaving an acrid 
trail of burned propellant. Another slug slammed into 
my computer, spraying shards of plastic and glass 
over my head. A second later it was followed by Suze 
and the kzin in a tangle of limbs. They hit the wall 
and bounced to the floor. The jetpistol sailed into a 
corner. She lay on the floor beneath him, returning 
his fanged snarl in kind. I had to admire her courage. 
I picked myself off the floor and shook off the ruins 
of my computer. The room was filling with startled 
clerks and cops from the outer office. As they 
disentangled Hunter and Suze, I retrieved the 
jetpistol and examined the thumbnail-sized hole it 
had left in the wall. On the other side was a crater 
the size of a serving platter. The outer office was 
showered in fragments of pulverized sprayfoam. 
Shattered remnants of my desk covered my office. I 
shuddered. It could have been the shattered remnants 
of me. 
Hunter dusted himself off, scream-snarled and bounded 
out to work out the fight juices. Someone hauled Suze 
off to the tender mercies of the UN Intel 
interrogation section. When they were through raping 
her mind, she'd have nothing left to tell. I'd have 
rather seen her face Hunter claw to claw. 
When everyone was gone, I sat down at my desk. By 
reflex I pounded the switch, not registering its 
destruction. After that, I just sat; eventually I 
went home. 



* * * 
Suze was in interrogation three days. Her trial 
should have been in the Swarm but the UN moved it to 
Wunderland so she could be made an example of. By the 
time the Goldskins were done with her the extradition 
paperwork was finished. I didn't see her off. 
Instead, I asked a favor of Jocelyn Merral and 
watched from the hangar bay control deck as the 
guards escorted her to the ship that would take her 
to Wunderland and the ProvGov's version of justice. 
She caught sight of me as they led her onto the ramp 
and stopped, looking up. The guards yanked her along, 
and she was gone. 
I kept watching out the window. I knew I wouldn't see 
her again. I just didn't want anyone to see my face. 
* * * 
That evening I sat at the bar in the Ratskellar, 
drinking beer and brooding. Earlier I'd sat in my 
room, drinking vodka and playing with the safety on a 
jetpistol that should have been sealed in an evidence 
bag on its way to Wunderland. I didn't decide life 
was worth living, I just couldn't live with myself if 
I took the coward's way out. 
Of course, if I did I wouldn't have to. Alcohol 
doesn't make for logical decision-making. It was 
enough that I'd left the weapon behind. 
The rockjack beside me suddenly left. His stool was 
taken by a huge orange hulk. Hunter-of-Outlaws 
ordered a liter of vodka and milk before speaking. 
"Humans have odd ways of celebrating victory." 
I grunted. "Is it a victory I'm celebrating?" 
"Hrrr. We have found the outlaw we sought and more 
besides. Several major criminal enterprises have been 
brought down and gutted. We have performed our duties 
well and with honor and our belts are heavy with 
trophies. It is a triumph worthy of our names." 
I didn't answer directly; I asked a question. "How 
did you know to come through the wall like that?" 
"How could I not know? My office echoes to your voice 
all day. I cannot close my ears tight enough to keep 
it out. For years I've been trying to get a privacy 
field." He growled deeply. 
So much for soundproof sprayfoam. 



"I owe you my life, you know." 
He waved a paw dismissively. "You will repay that 
blood-debt when the situation arises. Now tell me why 
you choke on the meat of victory?" 
"She offered me as much money as I cared to ask for. 
Of course, I couldn't take it." 
"You are true to your honour." 
"You don't understand. I loved her." 
"I sympathize with your situation. Your species' 
reproductive arrangements are overcomplex. Such 
strong attachment to females can only lead to 
continuing tragedy." 
"No, love is a continuing glory. She loved me too, 
she just loved . . . freedom . . . more. I would have 
gone with her in a second if she'd let me." 
Hunter was staring at me, openly amazed. "You would 
have sacrificed your honour for the affections of 
this outlaw female?" 
"It would have been a small price." 
His ears flicked and his tail twitched as he tried to 
make sense of that. He gave it up and quaffed his 
drink resignedly. "Truly, I will never understand 
humans." 
I had to laugh. I clapped him on the back and 
gestured for another round. "Neither will I, my 
friend, neither will I." 



