Undercover Truths - Undercover Lies

Undercover Truths / Undercover Lies

  A Novella by Stephen H. King (TOSK)

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  Published by the author,

  Copyright 2012 Stephen H. King (TOSK)

  Discover other titles at https://www.TheOtherStephenKing.com

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  Undercover Truths

  Undercover Lies

  A Message from the Author

  Excerpt from CATACLYSM: Return of the Gods (Volume 1)

  Excerpt from PROPHECY: Elf Queen of Kiirajanna (Volume 1)

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  This novella is written to be enjoyed as a standalone work, but it also tells the back story for some of the major characters in my Return of the Gods series. The novels in the Return of the Gods series are available in both ebook and print book format. Additionally, an excerpt from Cataclysm is included at the end of this novella.

  All three novels in the trilogy are also available under the title Married to Mars, an electronic boxed set available at online retailers everywhere. For links to all options, visit the author’s web site at https://www.TheOtherStephenKing.com.

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  I wish to again thank my daughter, Jessalyn Perry, for granting me use of her artwork to make the cover of this book. See more of her work on my site: https://www.TheOtherStephenKing.com

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  Undercover Truths

  I almost didn’t get on the elevator. Sometimes, even now, I wonder why I decided to go ahead and step in. Granted, I had to step onto one of them, since I wasn’t going to walk the five flights of stairs down from the command center to the meeting room level, but there were other lifts I could’ve taken. The advantage of taking one of the others was that it likely wouldn’t have contained him.

  The disadvantage? I was already late for the damn meeting, and waiting for another lift at that time of the morning would have made me even later. Besides, you didn’t walk into a meeting after the Governor.

  I’m really not sure why the thought of riding the elevator with the Governor turned my stomach. I sat in his council meetings every week, after all. As the technician who ran the primary reactor center in the colony, in fact, I ranked a seat at the main table. Matter of fact, I was a direct report. There was never anything particularly negative said at the meetings, but of course there was never anything particularly positive said either. He wasn’t offensive so much as just a single-dimensional man, the one dimension of his personality being arrogance.

  As the elevator doors closed to begin the descent, I couldn’t help but check for my blaster at my hip. Of course, I snuck a glance to check whether the Governor was following protocol also. He was; his energy gun rested in a sleek black holster. Mark, the director of security, had decreed that no one could so much as leave his or her office without their sidearm, what with all the threats and terrorism going on in the world. I’d thought he was nuts; the station seemed pretty much invulnerable. Still, he’d decreed it, and the Governor himself had signed off on it.

  “Mornin’, Governor,” I said, my smile wrapping its way from one cheek to the other without bothering to infect my eyes. Luckily I wasn’t expecting more than a nod and a grunt in reply. If I had, I would have been disappointed. Geez, what arrogance. His office was housed in my building, for crying out loud. The entire sprawling reactor complex that also served as the Colony of America headquarters was mine to command. He could at least have acknowledged one of his direct subordinates.

  Hell, I didn’t even know my own boss’s name. Nobody did. In the old days—a funny thing for a twenty-seven year old technology prodigy to say, but still—this colony was a sovereign country with elected leadership. Nobody would’ve been elected without people knowing their name. Hell, nobody as arrogant as the Governor would’ve been elected at all, or at least I hope that was the case. I remember watching as a teenager, though, as an international council disbanded all sovereign governments for the sake of peace. Peace, hell; it was to prevent nuclear holocausts, a concern that became crucial once every nation on the planet had mastered the trick of splitting atoms. The treaty centralized all power generation in one area, stripped all nuclear equipment out of every other nation-turned-colony, and set up a system of rule by oligarchy. The Governor played a significant part in the negotiations and the later constructions and deconstructions, and in reward for his efforts the leadership of the large, wealthy power generation colony, America, was bestowed upon him. We met not much later when I took over the main station.

  Wait. You’re probably wondering what a twenty-seven-year-old anything was doing running the biggest nuclear station on the whole damn planet. Aren’t you?

  I was good. Still am. Anyway, I finished high school math back in tenth grade. All of it. Took a year off from math my junior year to learn the three primary languages of robotics. Senior year, my physics teacher signed off on an independent study class on integral calculus with some partial differentiation. I finished the book and then went for more, and along the way learned the theories behind nuclear fission.

  College was pretty damn boring after that. At least, it was academically boring. Technically, I majored in nuclear physics and minored in mathematics, graduating summa cum laude. Unofficially, I majored in love—no, not falling in it like many of my poor sappy girlfriends did. I mastered the art of manipulating it. It’s easy enough; boys have three distinct disadvantages in this arena. First, very few of them spend more than a laughably small percentage of their childhoods looking away from sports on the vid screen long enough to seriously consider what makes us girls tick. Second, the male psyche is set up to always assume that it’s in charge, that we simpering, fragile little songbirds are too stupid or frail, or both, to lead them on. Third—boobs. Mine may not be the largest, but I have them, and they don’t, and that simple difference turns even the smartest man into a hormonal dumpling.

  I chose the thesis option for grad school, thinking I could just get the damn thing out of the way quickly. I was right. I continued my other, more important, studies, of course. The male grad students were all too busy trying to solve the technical problems in life to think about me as anything more than one of them, so I turned my efforts to the faculty. Most of them were bored of their lives in academia, anyway, so it turned out to be pretty easy. It got me a little more time in the labs than the other grad students, which in turn helped me finish even faster.

  I’ll bet you can figure out the rest of the story on your own, yes? It’s amazing how much a girl can accomplish in a short time with a fair amount of technical brilliance as well as a pair of breasts. Amazing.

  Not with him, though. You were thinking that, right? That the only way for a girl to be second in charge to the Governor is to sleep with him? I might think that too if I didn’t know the secret about how station directors are chosen. But no, the guild chooses. The Governor has to accept whoever the guild puts up to the task. At least, I think he does. He never gave me any indication of whether he thought I was right or wrong for the task, honestly. Doesn’t matter, the guild leaders picked me as the best candidate to direct the newly-connected main power station. Something about my brilliance, and my energetic youth. And no, I didn’t even sleep with all that many of them.

  Let’s move on, though. My studies aren’t what this story is about.

  The elevator had just started down when the cell at my hip sprang violently to life. I’d programmed every system in the reactor to send exception reports, either primary or copied, to my cell, which in turn was programmed to buzz once per report. Right then, the cell felt like it was trying to buzz its way through its holster. I snatched the small rectangle of high-tech gadgetry out of the nylon pouch that held it, m
oving quickly because I’d never felt that many reports coming through before. Well, okay—really, it was because the constant buzzing was driving me crazy.

  I scrolled through as quickly as I could, but the reports were being added quicker than I could scroll back through the previous ones. After a couple of seconds my breath caught as I saw the pattern; they were nearly all security notifications: “breach in A-2e, breach in B-5c, breach in A-1p, breach in D-9b,….” I was vaguely aware that the alarm klaxons were sounding, but the readout of the cell demanded my full attention just to keep up.

  Suddenly it all went silent. The cell stopped buzzing, stopped scrolling notices. The klaxons also stopped, which would have been a relief had I not been picking myself up off of the floor. The elevator, too, had stopped, and its normally well-lit interior had gone dark. A hand gripped my upper arm in the darkness and helped me to my feet.

  Thank God I’m not alone, I thought, even if it is him. Aloud, I asked, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “We seem to be under attack,” the Governor’s voice rumbled out of the darkness. The voice was calm, almost relaxed. He’d stated the obvious, but I guess my question had been just as useless as his answer.

  “Are you all right, Stacy?” he asked. So he did know my name!

  “Fine. Bruised my palm a little catching myself, but it’ll be okay.” I groped along the wall till I found the intercom button. “Command, this is Allen. Give me a sit rep. Now. Are you there? Dammit, are you there? Come on!” I shouted the last, beating on the wall where the speaker must be.

  “All comms have apparently been severed,” the Governor said, his voice still amazingly relaxed. “Your cell is as dead as mine is, yes? We’d be hearing announcements if the intercom were up. Something has struck our comm infrastructure entirely down.”

  “How—how can you be so calm?” I asked, pretty shaken myself.

  “As opposed to what?”

  “Something—anything. My station, which is the core of your colony, is being attacked by somebody we don’t know who has hit us harder than we thought possible. And yet here we stand, doing nothing. We don’t know what they’re here for. We don’t even know if they’re coming after you as our governor. We should be doing something!” I felt the pitch of my voice rising as the rant developed, but at that point I really didn’t care if I sounded as hysterical as I was feeling. This wasn’t—shouldn’t—couldn’t be happening. Not on my watch, dammit!

  “Stacy, we’re stuck in an elevator.”

  “Yes, but….” I looked frantically around in the dark, hoping to see something, anything, that would give me a clue on how to get out.

  “But once we get out, we can worry about the next step. Till then, we can’t get out. Meanwhile, the bad guys, whoever or wherever they are, can’t get in either. Relax, dear.”

  For the first time in my life I felt myself going out of control.

  The Governor said, “Ah, there it is.” A loud screeching noise of metal on metal sounded somewhere above us, and I picked up the vague sense of motion as the Governor’s arms pressed the doors away from each other. As they separated, the emergency lights from the hall filled the top half of the elevator with a dim red glow. A pair of legs stood on the floor onto which the top half of the elevator now opened, but I didn’t have time to examine them as the Governor’s hands grasped my waist and heaved me up and out. He followed, lightly springing up onto his feet beside where I now sprawled in the heap I’d been tossed into.

  I started picking myself up off the floor for the second instance in a frustratingly short period of time when a hand thrust under my arm and hauled me up.

  “Thank y—“ I said, voice trailing off as I saw my helper. She was—amazing. Not only did she present a flawless example of a muscular woman’s physique, her corded arms and legs bursting from a strangely plain tunic and short trousers, but she also had perfectly rounded breasts and hips as well as beautiful high cheekbones and a soft chin. I hated her immediately.

  “Stacy, meet Sorscha. Sorscha, Stacy. I’d spend more time on introductions, but we just don’t have it,” the Governor said.

  Apparently he knew this Sorscha. Well, that made sense. I had made a hobby of knowing every pretty girl on my station, and somehow I’d never met this one, had never even seen her name flicker across the payroll reports. She could only be some sort of super-secret personal assistant, then, to the Governor, or to the planetary council.

  But we were being attacked, and so I looked around, trying to regain my equilibrium. I could worry about Sorscha and where she had come from later; I had an attack to deal with. “We need to get up to the central comm room,” I said. “Sorscha, what floor did you rescue us onto?”

  The Governor replied. “We’re on the ninth floor. I don’t agree on our next destination, though.”

  “Why not?” I knew I was breaching protocol with the question, but I was still too freaked out to care.

  The Governor didn’t seem to mind; his response sounded more like a lecture. “If you were to attack a nuclear power plant, would your objective be the comm room? If you’re planning to do something nasty to the reactors, you can only do that using the controls at the reactors themselves.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said, the Governor’s words bringing a jolt of panic. “We need to get down there, don’t we?”

  “Yes, I think that’s smartest,” the Governor said, his voice still calm. “But are you ready for what we may run into?”

  “I qualified expert on all three rounds of the blaster course just last month.”

  “Yes, you did,” the Governor said, looked like he had more to say, and then appeared to hold his tongue. “Let’s go, then.”

  We took off down the nearby stairs. I somehow fell behind, despite my constant efforts in working out, which was when I noticed that Sorscha lacked anything resembling a holster swinging from those damn apple-shaped hips. “Are you carrying a weapon, Sorscha?” I called after them.

  “Sorscha doesn’t need a weapon,” the Governor stated.

  Who was this Sorscha? Even personal attendants had to abide by the rules. The Governor’s job was to approve the rules and then ensure they were enforced, not give out personal exceptions. I filed the argument neatly away to be held later, once the station was safe.

  For that matter, who didn’t need a weapon?

  Granted, I had thought the requirement stupid, myself. But that was before the station was attacked. Now that we were running into a hostile situation, I was quite glad, thank you very much, that I had a blaster strapped to my side, and….

  “Hey, slow down, you two!”

  Despite my attempt at keeping my voice quiet, I was horrified to hear my words echo down the halls. I winced. The Governor and Sorscha stopped their run, turned, and glared, hands on their hips.

  Ah, well. I ignored their smoldering expressions and caught up.

  “Why Reactor B?” I asked in a barely-audible whisper, curious why the boss had picked the connector hall we were in.

  “Closest. If there are attacks at all reactors we’ll stop the one there soonest. If not, we’ll find out there first. Now, mind if we get back on our way?”

  The question had clearly been rhetorical; the two apparent marathon runners were already moving again. This time it was a straight hall and they were being a little cautious, so I kept fairly close. I glanced to the side as we passed the connector hallway to the living quarters for the men and women who worked at Reactor B. Bodies lay in clumps spaced several yards apart. The blue uniforms of the B techs and the red of station security identified the members of the piles. The air smelled funny, but there wasn’t time to investigate.

  We covered the rest of the distance to the main reactor door in seconds, the strange smell dissipating. The Governor pulled his blaster and I copied the motion. He pushed me heavily back against the wall behind him and pointed Sorscha to the opposite side.

  He was just going to open the door! As his hand wavered
I had a brief moment to consider the lunacy of the situation. He was the top government official on the entire continent. I, in turn, was the top official of the station under attack, second only to the top government official on the entire continent. Sorscha was—well, hell, she was an unarmed pretty blonde girl. Or was it silver hair? I couldn’t tell in the light. Didn’t matter; whoever was inside those doors had taken out over a dozen trained techs and security police back down the hall. We—the three of us—were a little outnumbered. What the hell was the Governor thinking?

  He wasn’t, apparently. He turned his head toward me as I started to raise the objection, stopping me short. His face was hiked up in an expression of—glee? Battle lust? Whatever it was, he was obviously ready to run in with gun blazing.

  “Ready, Stacy?”

  I swear to you now on my grandmother’s grave that I didn’t say yes, but that was pretty much irrelevant. One hand holding his blaster, the Governor’s other hand rapidly keyed in the override combination. The doors slid open, their quiet hiss the only sound I could hear for the moment.

  It was as dark inside the control center as it was everywhere else, but I saw lanterns at several of the consoles. Three or four men’s faces, all heavily bearded—enviros!—turned to face the door. I could hear quiet whispers and shuffling inside, and then a barrage of blaster fire erupted from inside the room.

  The Governor tapped the wall behind him, a move I gladly interpreted as “stay here.” He and Sorscha both bent at the waist and at their knees and ran in as a pair, the Governor to the right and Sorscha to the left.

  On one hand, staying outside sounded pretty good if all the bad guys were in the control room. On the other hand that occurred to me as soon as I watched the boss run in, I didn’t know if they were all in there or not. I decided I wasn’t going to be left out on the other hand by myself, so I followed to the inner security door. It didn’t seem to matter, anyway; I could still hear blaster shots but now there weren’t any coming through the entrance. Clearly the Governor and his sidekick were the greater perceived threats to the attacking environmentalists.

  Inside the double sets of doors was Control B, the direct controls for the B reactor, one of the four alpha-class, which meant huge, reactors managed by the station. Control B was configured in large concentric circles; around the outer wall were all of the charts and diagrams and electronic indicator screens that were needed in order for the room’s occupants to know anything at all about the reactor at a glance. A hand rail separated the six-foot-wide walkway around the perimeter from the center, and inside the hand rail were a dozen consoles, each of which was responsible for a different system. It was extremely efficient; in a pinch a single tech could move from console to console managing inputs while still being able to observe readouts on every other console and around the walls.

  One of the bearded men in the middle of all that planned efficiency saw me and rose from his crouch over the main console. He wasn’t fast enough, though; I’d trained for this. I brought my blaster up and fired, scoring a perfect hit dead center of his chest. As he went down, the other enviros still up at the consoles started moving, but the center of the round control area was open and an easy shot from the door. It was like the second round of the blaster qualifying course. Only—in the qualifying course, nobody shot back. I ducked as a blaster was leveled and fired. It missed, but my hand was trembling so much as I got back up that my own blaster’s response missed wildly also.

  Off to the left the blaster fire ended abruptly. My peripheral vision registered jerky movements in the dark. Sorscha’s clothes had been dark-colored but her hair had been dyed in the new metallic fashion going around; as the woman kicked, spun, and dispatched the last enviro, the gleam of her hair was almost hypnotic. Of course, I thought, a martial artist. Who else would the Governor retain in his personal retinue?

  My thoughts and eyes were both pulled back to task as the final enviro in the middle of the room stood and took aim at me. I—well, I remember thinking that I should move, should shoot, should do something—but I couldn’t. An overwhelming fear held me in place as effectively as if someone has poured cement around my ankles. I was close enough to see the enviro’s lips curl up into a leering grin, his blaster perched to shoot.

  Sorscha’s silvery hair flashed in the glow of several lanterns as she came to my rescue. One hand on the railing, she vaulted over the console, stuck the landing like a gymnast, and a moment later nailed a roundhouse kick on the back of the enviro’s head. He crumpled, and my fear released just as quickly. I jerked my own blaster up, firing shot after shot at the prone body.

  “Enough, Stacy. He’s dead,” the Governor’s voice sounded in my ear. The familiar voice brought me back to my senses, and my finger stopped closing on the contact. Everything went quiet again.

  The Governor’s hand caressed my shoulder. “Nice shooting, Stacy,” his calm voice sounded again in my ears. Suddenly I couldn’t help it. The adrenaline was gone, leaving in its place a huge hole that all of the terror I had pushed away rushed back into. Without a conscious thought, I spun and wrapped myself around him.

  As conscious reasoning power slowly returned, I found myself crushed into the much-reviled Governor, sobs wracking my body as my face buried itself in his chest, pressing hard against it as if to somehow go deeper, hide, get away from the panic. His arms were around me, and I was vaguely aware of his voice speaking in soothing syllables.

  “Master.” The urgency in Sorscha’s voice cut through. Who the hell calls anybody Master these days? “The readings on this console indicate that the rods are being lifted out of the reactor core. It’s heating up.”

  A new mode of panic seized me. Oh my god, that’s what they were after? The enviros always said they were out to save the planet, not destroy it. Melting this reactor core down would have made this area uninhabitable by anyone for centuries, quite the opposite of saving the planet. Bastards!

  I pulled out of the entanglement of the Governor’s arms. Was he really hugging me? Was I really enjoying it? Ah, well, I’ll sort that out later. I sprinted to the main console and, fingers moving rapidly, punched in the commands to reverse the movement of the rods, bring extra coolants on line temporarily, and prevent a meltdown. The Governor was speaking, but I really didn’t have the time to listen.

  Last command entered, I checked to make sure the sequences were being carried out, exhaled in relief, and looked around. The Governor was over at the communications console, talking into the microphone. I ran to him and tugged his arm toward the door, oblivious to what he was saying into the set.

  “Come on, we have to save the other reactors,” I urged, struggling against his strength.

  He turned and smiled, hands outstretched. “Relax. Security teams are on their way to the other reactors. They know what’s going on, and what to do in response.”

  “What—who were you talking to?” I asked, looking at the communication set that tied the four reactors together.

  “Security. Whoever planned the attack knew how to shut down our station-wide comms but they left the reactor-to-reactor comms open, probably to make doing their own job easier. What they didn’t know is that since the two systems run over the same cabling, there’s a back door from one to the other. While you were saving our lives here, I linked the comms back up.”

  It immediately proved true as I realized that my little friendly cell had sprung back to life, buzzing my hip off once again. Dammit.

  “So it’s done?”

  “No, we should still go around and make sure everything’s safe. I think the panic stage is done now, though.”

  We did as he said, jogging around from one reactor down a set of halls to the next. At each reactor’s control room I was relieved to find red-uniformed security teams in charge over a set of shaggy enviros’ bodies while technical personnel in the color specific to that reactor’s team worked the consoles feverishly to reverse the near-meltdown at each.

  The station�
�s reactors finally secure, I followed the pair as they walked more slowly back to the central elevators. As the door closed us all in, I turned to begin asking the questions that were bugging me. “Governor?”

  “Matthew.”

  I stood in silence for a moment, baffled.

  “What?” I asked.

  The Governor reached over and pressed the button to halt the elevator, then turned to meet my eyes.

  “My name,” he said, “it’s Matthew. Somebody here at the station ought to use it every so often. Not in public, of course.” His eyes were blue, I saw, now that the lights were back on. They were a vibrant, intense blue that I’d somehow never noticed before.

  “Matthew, then. It’s a nice name. Why don’t you use it more often?”

  “I’m not here to make friends, Stacy. The use of a personal name implies a personal connection, a friendship at a certain level, and I’m more effective in my job if I ignore that and just be the hard, cold, arrogant Governor.”

  “So why use it now?”

  The Governor—Matthew—answered by gently lifting my chin and kissing my lips. Of course I let him; I was in shock, and hey, what else was I supposed to do? It was a gentle, chaste kiss, but it still sent bolts of electricity coursing through my body. In spite of myself, I moaned.

  “Because.” That didn’t qualify as an answer, but—damn. Here I was, the girl who had controlled all my previous romantic encounters, being controlled by one. Just a single enigmatic kiss, too! My heart trilled a damn love song in my chest. My eyelashes fluttered. My tongue refused to cooperate, but that was probably best because my brain was at the moment incapable of determining what best to say. I was turning into a damned joke. Worse, I’d never felt this way before. Worst, I actually found myself liking it.

  I looked at his sideways grin, and on impulse turned my head. Sorscha’s face was unreadable, but her eyes were heated. I turned my head back.

  “Should—you—we….” My question trailed off. I had no idea what question to ask, or even whom to ask it of. I only knew how I’d feel if someone discussed me in third person in front of me.

  “I don’t need Sorscha’s permission. Do I?” The Governor addressed the last over my shoulder.

  “No, Master,” Sorscha said, her voice dry and level.

  “Master? Is she—your slave?” I asked, the question sounding funnier than it was really meant to be. Slaves were a thing of the past, now that the planetary government had taken over, but—well, she had called him Master.

  Matthew snorted. “Slave? No, not even close. Long-time companion, yes. Protector. Friend. Servant, sometimes. But no, Sorscha is no slave.”

  “Well, good. I—ah, this is really awkward.” And strange, but I wasn’t going to explain that to him. Despite all my years of learning the gentle art of flirtation, I felt like a young and silly girl in front of him.

  “Indeed. I’m sure we’re needed up in the command center, anyway. People might take our absence as a sign that we require replacement.” He flipped the button back out. The elevator smoothly regained its pace toward the top floor.

  “So why would the enviros want to commit a suicide attack and wipe out half of the continent in so doing?” I asked, pleased to be getting back into more tangible business. That question had been bothering me; the environmental movement had been protesting against reactors for years, despite how safe modern science had made them, and they had fought tooth and nail against the creation of the “nuke pit” as they called this headquarters, but I couldn’t recall them ever doing anything of a violent nature.

  “What makes you think those were environmentalists?”

  “Well, they looked like enviros.” Yes, I said that. Yes, it sounded silly to me when I said it. I know what you’re thinking; bite me.

  The Governor—I was going to have a hard time thinking of him as Matthew—shrugged and said, “It’s a mystery we still have to solve. Don’t assume that things are as they appear, though. It’s awfully easy to grow a beard and buy the olive drab clothes that the environmentalist cult members are so fond of. Besides, you’re right that it’s completely out of the group’s nature to violently attack and kill people and then try to melt down a station.”

  The elevator dinged its arrival and the door opened to the control room.

  “Let’s talk more over dinner tonight,” the Governor said as he strode by me projecting supreme confidence and, well, earlier I’d’ve called it arrogance. A kiss changes things sometimes, I guess. His tone was no different from the one he’d used earlier to give his orders, yet now it sounded to me like a gentle request.

  I shook off the emotion with some effort, hoping that nobody in the control room had seen any sign of it on my face, and followed him out of the lift. The station control room was configured similarly to the ones in the reactors below. The circular wall contained a map of the complex with little blinking dots that showed the locations of all exception reports (there were a lot of those at the moment, but nobody seemed to care) as well as plenty of other charts and status screens. The consoles around the inner circle controlled various systems in and around the complex, including communications and security in addition to the less exciting transportation and climate control installations. Unlike below, doors in between the charts and maps along the circular wall opened to the offices of the various directors who helped me run the place.

  All the familiar techs were at their stations looking supremely spooked yet functional. Also present were far more than the usual number of security force members, including the captain of the guard himself, who was engaged in a one-way, rapid-fire information dump directed at the Governor. The Governor, meanwhile, seemed to only barely be hearing the old veteran, his attention focused instead on the corpse that lay near the middle of the room.

  I recognized the body. My God, I didn’t want to, but I did. I rushed over, ignoring the techs who acknowledged my presence somberly as I passed. I knelt down opposite the Governor, both of us paying silent homage to Stephen, my director of information systems.

  Mark, the director of security, kneeled close by, trembling slightly. “I—I had to, Ms. Allen,” he stuttered, his voice sounding far away. “When the attacks started, he was the only director who wasn’t down in the conference room. I ran up the stairs as fast as I could to try and regain control from whatever it was, and I found everyone but him down. He was rushing around in his gas mask, turning off systems as he went. I pulled the mask out of the stairwell emergency kit, told everybody there to stay back, and rushed in. I shouted for him to stop, but he turned and pointed his blaster at me. I—I shot him before he could shoot me. I’m sorry. I know how much you liked him.”

  Have you ever heard a story that should’ve made perfect sense, yet it didn’t really make any sense at all? Stephen was the only one who had the codes to shut down the entire comm system at once, it was true. Beside him lay a gas mask that had apparently been removed by someone else for identification purposes. His blaster was still gripped by his cold right hand. But—well, hell, the shock was getting to me. It just really didn’t make any sense at all. Stephen had been in charge of IS since before I took over the station. From the day I’d introduced myself as his new boss, we’d had a wonderfully friendly working relationship. Days when it got tough—reports were due, projects lagging behind schedule—had always been made brighter by Stephen’s radiant smiles. I’d looked up to him, for his ability to keep a smile going in the most stressful times, for his expertise in the communications systems that did his bidding, and for the steady romance he’d kept going with his wife for over thirty years. I’d spent my adult life using love; he’d spent his living it.

  And now he was dead. A terrorist, apparently. It didn’t make any sense.

  Matthew rolled Stephen’s body onto its side. Checking for pulse? I didn’t know. With the new blasters, weapons that used energy to do their damage, it was impossible without medical lab equipment to tell where someone had been shot. My eyes met
Matthew’s for a moment. It apparently didn’t make any sense to him, either.

  I noticed it then, the faint aroma that reminded me of the hallway downstairs. I hadn’t smelled it at first; maybe the movement of Stephen’s corpse or clothes had released some. It was sweet, though, and just a little bit irritated my throat. I coughed twice. Ugh.

  “What is that smell?”

  “Sleeping gas, Doctor Allen,” the captain of the guard told me. He started a lecture on the types of ethers being used for the purpose of knocking people out, how this one had been dispersed using an aerosol-like canister that had been seen extensively in the southern colonies, how it required a heat source to make it into a vapor. After about ten seconds of his lecture I had an urge to punch him in the face, which was really not like me. He just kept going on and on about useless crap, ignoring that one of my favorite co-workers was lying dead in front of me.

  “That’s enough,” the Governor said, coming to my rescue. He stood.

  “Station Director Allen, I’m sure you have personnel and systems to check up on. Brief me in half an hour. Captain, I want a briefing from you in fifteen minutes. Get the morgue up here to remove the body. They need to hold it for investigation, and you should have your men guard it well. He may not have been the only one involved, and if that’s the case someone may try to remove the body. That will be all, Doctor Allen. Your briefing is now due in twenty-nine minutes.” He had cut me off coldly when I’d started to object, but surely he couldn’t believe that Stephen had been involved. “Everyone else, I’m sure you have something that needs doing.” He rose, entered an empty elevator, and punched a button as the lift doors closed.

  Empty? I looked around. Where had Sorscha gotten away to?

  Twenty-eight minutes later, I exited the lift on the Governor’s level. His office and apartment combination took up the entire top floor, and parts of it, it was rumored, had glassed ceilings that allowed the only clear view of the night sky in the entire station. The captain of the guard had exited the same lift I was getting on, a grim expression on his face after his briefing with the Governor. I couldn’t help my own grim countenance. For one thing, I had some bad news; the systems were all back up, but some of the people would never be so lucky. For another, I had no idea what I was going to say regarding what had happened in the elevator. Would he bring it up? Part of me hoped so, and the other part, didn’t. I was used to being the one in control, and now I wasn’t, and I just didn’t know how to deal with that.

  “Good morning, Governor,” I said, standing outside his open door as protocol dictated.

  “Good afternoon, Doctor Allen,” he corrected me. Damn, how could I mess up on the easy part? Mistakes like that weren’t normal for me at all.

  Suppressing a grimace, I walked in and gave my report. He was as outwardly pleased as he ever was that all systems were up and running normally, which is to say only barely. He asked pointed questions about some of the more obscure systems in the plant; I was surprised that he knew about them, and he did seem pleased in return that I was able to report on them. Hey, I’m very thorough.

  The loss of manpower didn’t faze him as much as I’d expected. No, that’s not exactly true. It fazed him as little as I’d expected, but not as much as I’d hoped. Earlier he’d proven that he had a glimmer of humanity, but it seemed to be turned off as I told him the names of the technicians and security personnel who’d fallen. Some had been shot with blasters to allow the invaders initial entry, while others had died from asphyxiation where the sleeping gas had been too concentrated. All totaled, I had close to two hundred technicians and crew members who worked under me on that shift, and I’d lost twenty-one of them in the attack. Not a huge loss, to be certain, if you weren’t counting a single human life to be a huge loss. I was, though.

  When I finished my report, he sat and held me with his gaze for several long moments. Finally, he broke the spell by asking, “Do you think Stephen was responsible for the attack?”

  “No.”

  He sat forward, eyes narrowing. “Why not?”

  I took a moment to inhale a deep breath and then slowly exhale it. The Governor sat patiently, unmoving and unblinking, his blue eyes locked onto mine. Finally I thought I had my thoughts organized enough to make a coherent argument, and so I started. “First, there’s the personality issue. I knew Stephen. I know his wife. Neither of them has any sort of violent tendency. I find it….”

  “Inconceivable that he could have done such a dastardly thing?” the Governor cut me off, his expression never changing. “Jeff said the same thing. But many of the greatest crimes of the past few centuries have involved betrayal of some sort, and betrayal never happens when it’s conceivable. Give me something you know, Stacy, not something you think you know.” His switch to my first name didn’t go unnoticed; suddenly I was struck by a terribly unexplainable desire to melt into his arms again.

  Get a grip on yourself, Stacy Allen, I told myself, and continued with my other points. “Stephen knew the access codes for the comm system, but others could have known them also. What he didn’t know were the locations and times when security was at its weakest.”

  The Governor shrugged. “He could have found that out, right? Is that all you have?”

  “No, there’s one other thing.” I was pretty proud of what I had up my sleeve, and so I waited.

  After a few long moments, he rose to the bait. “And that one other thing is?”

  “The reason he was late to the meeting. He’s never late to meetings, as you must know. He was complaining this morning of a stomach ache, and there are three people who say he was in the restroom at the time of the attack.”

  “They could be lying.”

  “Could be, but I don’t see why.”

  “He could have started the attack using his cell, right?”

  Now I knew he was testing me; he had to know better than that.

  “No,” I said, “His cell could send and receive informational messages, but not control signals. Our comm system uses an out of band control system, which means you can’t send shut-down commands in the same channel you send texts through. The shut-down commands had to have originated from the comm console.”

  “So who tossed the gas canister in?”

  “No one saw. It came flipping in spewing its gas, and by the time people thought to look around, they were already going down. One significant point, though, is that it came from the direction of the stairs, not the restrooms.”

  The Governor nodded. “Thank you. That confirms everything Jeff said. So who did it, do you think, if not your IS director?”

  I hated to admit ignorance, but it was the only honest thing to do, and somehow honesty seemed to be the way to go. “I don’t really know,” I said. “I could make guesses, some of which would be based partly on evidence, but they’re still just guesses.”

  The Governor nodded and sat back.

  “Southcentral melted down,” he said, his face still expressionless.

  Somehow I found a chair to sag into as my heart skipped a beat. “Did they get out?” I asked with barely enough breath to make the question audible.

  “Some did. Most of the families in the dorms. Some techs. Most of the folks upstairs did. A couple hundred didn’t, though. They didn’t have a station director who was smart and brave enough to assault head-on and take out the attackers.”

  That would’ve been cute, if I’d been in the mood for cute. As it was, horror filled my gut as I thought of the scope of disaster that a power plant the size of Southcentral melting down represented. The area within several hundred miles wouldn’t be inhabitable for hundreds of years. That plant actually still had a couple of wooded areas in its zone, so wildlife would have perished as well. The Governor was right, I think, about not automatically dumping this on the environmentalists.

  “The other plants?” I finally found the strength to ask.

  “All were hit in the same manner we were. Only the attack on Southcentr
al was successful, if you’re defining success as a meltdown. The attack on the reactor in Europe was probably the least successful, as the attackers failed to even shut down its comms. I guess they assumed that all of the reactors used the same protocols for their systems, which strikes me as silly. Amateurish, even.”

  “Hold on. I didn’t know there was a reactor in Europe.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You still don’t, technically. It’s a secret known to just a very few, a case of the council putting an egg or two in a different basket, as it were.”

  “If it’s known to just a very few, how did the attackers find out about it?”

  “If I knew that, we wouldn’t be sitting here still having this conversation,” he said, a wry smile on his face.

  “Guess not,” I said. Now that he had kissed me in the elevator and shared a state secret with me, I figured I could get away with a little flippancy, and I was still both horrified and angry enough inside to want to try it.

  “Of course, some might say that the trails of circumstance lead back to you.”

  “Some might,” he agreed, nodding gravely. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know what to say at this point. You do seem to know a lot about the attacks.”

  “Of course I do; I’m on the International Council. You can do better than that. Do you think I might be behind the attacks?”

  I thought back over the events of the day. If anyone could have orchestrated the attack, it was him—him and his strange metallic-haired sidekick. She’d been in the right place at the right time to help. He’d known where to go and what to do. He certainly knew enough of the security codes to have orchestrated the whole charade. But there was one problem: I didn’t believe he’d done it. I’d seen the flash of anger in his eyes as he’d readied himself to attack. I’d heard his voice, though I hadn’t realized what he was saying, when he was alerting security. Some things men can fake; the intensity of the Governor’s reaction to the attack wasn’t one of them.

  “No,” I said, confident in my answer. “I don’t think you’re behind the attacks. I also don’t think you have any idea who is.”

  “You’re right. I don’t,” he said.

  I’ve become pretty good at reading men over the years, and at that moment I could tell the Governor was honestly innocent. There’s always a tell when they’re admitting that they don’t know something, since it’s an activity that is seldom practiced by the male half of the species. It’s kind of an apologetic eyebrow thing. Tough to explain, but I know it when I see it, and I saw it then.

  “Well, if you’re clueless, and I’m clueless, where does that leave us?” I asked, still feeling saucy.

  His lips and eyebrows quirked up the tiniest bit at that. It would’ve been barely enough to measure, but I saw it. That fraction of an inch of movement changed his expression completely, though, as he morphed from the supreme bastion of governmental authority into a man, a mere mortal, who found something mildly humorous and romantic at the same time. “It leaves us,” he said, “with some theories and some investigation still to do. It leaves us with plenty to do before dinnertime. You will join me, I hope?”

  “You’re my boss,” I objected. Yes, it was weak as hell, but I had to come up with something, as raw as my emotions still were. From the look in his eyes he was pretty much set on having dinner with me tonight, and I—I have to admit, I was intrigued by the idea. Here he was, one of the most powerful men in the world, and an enigma to boot. Both made him irresistibly sexy.

  The abrupt change in my attitude toward him surprised me till I realized that he hadn’t been an enigma before. I’d understood him and his motivations quite well, I had thought, up until the moment our lips met, and then all my certainty about him had flown out of a window.

  Yes, I was going to have dinner with him. I just wasn’t going to make it that easy.

  I came out of my thoughts to see that he was still sitting, staring at me mutely, the quizzical expression perched on his face. I cracked.

  “What? You are!” I said, knowing as I allowed my mouth to open and gush out words that I was handing him the win. Dammit! I knew this game too well to give in this quickly!

  “So? You know as well as I that I have no disciplinary authority over you; that leash belongs to your guild. Besides, the regulation regarding dating the chain of command is mine to enforce or not.”

  “But will the council…?”

  “My brethren on the council have long understood that since everyone on the planet qualifies as a subordinate, any rule against involving ourselves with our subordinates would lead to a long sentence of being alone. I’ve been there for some time, myself, and it’s really not any fun.”

  “Oh,” I said, my voice soft. I understood, or at least I thought I did. “So, when and where for dinner, boss?”

  “Eighteen hundred, and here. I have a dining room in this apartment that will be nice to finally put to use, and besides, I have a façade to manage. Were your colleagues to see us dining together, they would either change their opinion of me or of you, and most likely it would be my reputation to be shattered. By the way, what cuisine do you prefer?”

  “I’m used to enjoying whatever cuisine the mess hall is glopping onto our plates,” I said. It wasn’t exactly true; we had a good mess hall, and the chef always made sure I had the best food. Rank has its privileges and all that stuff, you know. “What’s your preference?”

  If he minded the deflection, he didn’t show it. “I don’t really have a preference either. I don’t usually eat an actual meal at dinner, in fact. How about if I just ask the chef to bring me up two plates of his most delicious surprise and a nice bottle of bubbly to go with it?”

  I had other questions, lots of them, having to do with the man-made disaster that had happened just an hour before. I’ll be damned if I could remember any of them, though. “Okay, that sounds wonderful, G—Matthew.” I couldn’t believe I actually stuttered like a schoolgirl on his name. It was absolutely foreign to me after the years of referring to him by title only. Well, that was my story, anyway.

  His expression turned up into one of the first warm smiles I’d ever seen on his face. “Stacy? I’m—well, I’m pleased that you’ll be joining me for dinner, more than you probably realize. But before you go, a little business. I took the liberty of putting a copy of the communication system log files into your home directory on the server and locking them down. The password to unlock them is your first name, capitalized, followed by the year you took over this station, followed by your last name, also capitalized. Analyze them to determine exactly what command sequence was used to take the systems down, and when, where, and how it was issued. Also, find Jeff, the captain of the guard. I trust him completely, and he and you are the only two I’d say that of. He knows how to unlock the copies of the log files for the security access system. Help him sketch out the exact sequence for the breach of our perimeter, and correlate that to the communication systems commands. Look for patterns and synchronized events. Don’t tell anyone else what you’re doing. I want a report from you, and you alone, by seventeen forty-five in this office.”

  “Yes, sir!” I said, unable to resist a little more banter. I playfully snapped what I thought was a fairly respectable about face, and then stopped and turned back around.

  “Wait. Why are we believing that the log files went unmodified by whomever did this?”

  “I figured—hoped—you’d think of asking that. Whoever cut off access to the communication system also prevented himself access to the log files. He probably expected them to be destroyed in a catastrophic meltdown, and if the attack didn’t succeed I’d assume he was prepared to yank the files away as soon as the link was fixed. What he didn’t expect was my re-establishment of the link from Reactor B, and the subsequent copy of the log files to safe directories. He didn’t expect it, and I’d like to believe that doesn’t know it, because I left the original log files there. Might be interesting to see how they’ve cha
nged recently, incidentally, but only after you’re done with the first investigation.”

  I left then, serious thoughts in my head once again as I walked down to the main control room. I was impressed. It must’ve taken a pretty awesome feat of programming to have linked into the main comms through the reactors’ comms system. I wasn’t sure I could’ve done it. The Governor had some skills, apparently.

  I exited the stairs at the same time the elevator doors opened and expelled the captain of the guard. “Ah, you’re back down,” he said. “I presumed you’d want to talk, so I hurried my rounds up a bit. All is well downstairs. Shall we convene in your office?”

  I nodded. Idly, I wondered why the Governor had such unquestionable faith in either of us, but of all the people on the station to be stuck in an office for hours with poring over data and reports, I was glad it was him. As captain of the guard, he was the chief law enforcement officer for the entire station and its surrounding support systems—in civilian terms, a city of nearly a hundred million people. He was also one of the few people at the station who reported directly to the Governor instead of to me, since his authority extended beyond the immediate reactor facilities and the two hundred personnel who worked on them. Most important, he was a grizzled but level-headed veteran who was always easy to talk to. He was my father’s age, but that was the only characteristic he shared with my dad, a neuroscience professor who moved from university medical center to university medical center every few years and who had been devastated that his only daughter hadn’t followed him into medicine. What my dad had never realized was that as much as he liked to control those around him, his only daughter wouldn’t have followed him into anything. If he’d been a nuclear engineer, I’d’ve probably gone into—well, not medicine, but something else. Whatever, just nothing close to him.

  My father, the vaunted neurological researcher who sneered at anyone who failed to use at least one four-syllable word in each sentence. Jeff, the captain of the guard who rarely if ever used words that were any longer than they needed to be. My father, who at one point was so taken by himself that he told me to call him Doctor Allen. Jeff, the captain of the guard who commanded more good men than my father had ever even met, who liked to be called just Jeff. My father, who went off the handle if his tea were the wrong temperature. Jeff, who was calm even now as we began the investigation into the attempted murder of hundreds of millions of people.

  Well, of course I preferred to be around Jeff. What sane person wouldn’t? Yes, it pissed my father off that I’d stuck around the station on holidays, sometimes allowing myself to be folded in with Jeff, his wife, his kids, and his grandkids, instead of buying transport to whatever city my father lived in since mom passed. Screw him. He’s my father. I love him. I don’t like him, though.

  Whatever. I had a mystery to solve, and no more time to think about my father.

  “So,” I said, once the door was securely closed and locked. As the station director, I rated one of the few lockable office doors. “Can you make sure my office is secure?”

  Jeff snorted. “Are you suggesting that I’m an amateur, young lady?”

  “No, Jeff. I’d be too scared you might turn me over your knee and spank me for it,” I said, flirting gently with him as usual. I wasn’t sexually attracted to him in the slightest, and I was willing to bet pretty much anything that the lack of attraction was mutual. He and his wife were one of those epic pairs that you couldn’t even consider separated, and—no, I wasn’t even willing to think of him that way. Eww. No. But the safety was what made the flirting that much more fun.

  Regardless, I’d never suggest that he was an amateur, either jokingly or seriously. Not him. He’d been doing security since before I was born. He was the most competent man I knew, and I respected him a great deal for the manner in which he’d gotten there. My father had gotten into his field by obtaining a scholarship to the best pre-medicine school in the world. Jeff, meanwhile, had gotten into his field as a basic warehouse security guard, and had risen to prominence over the years by doing his job well while not being killed in the line of duty. My own direct report, my director of security, had gone to college for the post, had learned about the social implications of the prison system and how crime and the economy fluctuated together. Jeff had survived a great many fluctuations of the economy and had lived to tell me the story.

  To say that I respected the man really was an understatement. I still wasn’t certain what it was about him that made the Governor trust Jeff so much, but hell, I felt the same way.

  There were two terminals in my office by my own request; sometimes I got a bit impatient when one terminal bogged down on code. Two terminals proved useful, though, as Jeff logged into one and I the other, and as a quiet but coordinated pair we began accessing stored log files, comparing entries, and coming to conclusions.

  At seventeen forty-four hours precisely, I knocked on the Governor’s office door on his level in the tower. It wouldn’t do to be late.

  “Come in!” he looked up and called through the open door. The formality was unnecessary; the Governor always maintained an open door. That said, everyone was so scared of him that even an open door presented a barrier.

  I entered and closed the door behind me.

  “Found something interesting?” he asked. I nodded, and he grinned.

  The satchel I’d been carrying was full of reports and sketchpads. I slowly and deliberately laid each document in front of him while building the case verbally as Jeff and I had created it. It was slow going, being that methodical, but we hadn’t seen any way otherwise to ensure that the Governor would come to the same conclusion we had.

  Evidence laid out neatly entirely across his desk, the Governor watched as I delivered the coup de grace in the form of a few logged messages sent outside the station. I held half of my attention to the delivery of the conclusion, and the other half on his face, hoping to see some approval of our results.

  “Hmm,” he said. He crossed his arms and stared at the pages I’d spread in front of him. Once, then twice, he sat forward and pointed to notes we’d taken, only to read them and then fall back to his position of contemplation.

  “This is a pretty serious accusation,” he said, finally meeting my eyes.

  “I know.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, then I don’t have much choice but to accept it, too.” The Governor frowned at the data in front of him once more, and then looked at me and smiled. “First thing tomorrow, then. Are you ready for dinner, Stacy?”

  It took me a second to recover; I was startled. In the thrill of discovery, I’d completely forgotten about our date.

  “Didn’t change your mind, did you?” he asked, his voice teasing.

  “No, no. I just wasn’t ready for the abrupt shift in topic.”

  “Attempted murder of hundreds of millions, to steak. Yes, I can see that. We can continue talking about this if you’d like, sort of wind down the topic slowly, but I heard the food arrive moments ago. Your steak will get cold.”

  “Steak? Real steak?”

  He nodded. My goodness, he was going all out. A history teacher had once explained to my class that we’d once had herds of meat creatures even here, on this continent, but as the population of the world had blossomed, the available land for ranching had shrunk. We’d all found that as hard to believe as the dinosaur claims, honestly. Most “meat” was now produced in factories, with man-made protein structures bound to man-made edible polymer fibers and flavored with man-made chemical combinations. The result sufficed. Real steak, though, from an actual—what was it called, a cow?—was exceedingly rare to find and usually cost more than my annual salary, per gram. I’d never had one, nor did I know anyone who had.

  Matthew led me into his dining room. It was larger than I’d have imagined, but I guessed he might need the space to entertain any number of visitors from anywhere. Of the fourteen places at the long table, only two plac
es were set, both together at the end farthest from the entry. He held my chair out for me, a gesture I hadn’t seen before. After I sat he walked to the side wall, opened a sliding compartment, and brought back two plates to the table. He set a plate for each of us, poured each a glass of wine, and then sat down at the table’s head.

  The plate he sat in front of me was mostly foreign. I recognized the potato, of course. I’d even had one baked in the same manner before. In our dining facilities, though, we tended to get the crushed, then dried, and later reconstituted version. The long white spears I had never seen before; he called them asparagus. Apparently they were difficult to grow in a lab environment and so I was enjoying yet another rare treat from one of the very few remaining old-style farms.

  The steak was strange. At first I was put off by the reddish-clear liquid that oozed when I cut it, but Matthew assured me it was to be expected. After, of course, he got his chuckle at my expense. But the texture was—oh, I don’t know how best to put it. Normal steak, or at least the steak I had thought of as normal to that point, has a consistently chewy, sort of rubbery texture. I would never have guessed that real steak isn’t consistent at all. It’s not really all that chewy, either. I mean, some is. The parts around the outside, the kind of clear parts, were chewy, and Matthew told me not to eat them after I’d chewed on one for a bit. But the rest was firm and fibrous in a way that the normal steak wasn’t, and instead of a single note of lab-created flavor it left an amazing, robust sensation rolling around my taste buds.

  I savored every bite. The wine helped, but wasn’t necessary.

  I really don’t recall what we talked about while we ate. I think at some point Matthew told me something of the farm where the strange vegetable had been grown. I recall also learning that different parts of the cow were made of different types of steaks with different textures and flavors, of all the strange things. It was a weird conversation, I guess, but not any more weird than the talk of who might be interested in melting down nuclear reactors, and there was far less at stake too.

  As Matthew cleared the table, I risked a sensitive query. “So is Sorscha off duty for the night?”

  He didn’t seem fazed in the slightest as he dumped the plates into the same compartment from which he’d taken them and then walked back.

  “Sorscha’s never off duty,” he said. “But she doesn’t hang out here, if that’s what you meant. She can be here very quickly if I need her, though.”

  “Probably taking some back pathway that even I don’t know, right?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. “She knows how to get around quickly if needed.”

  As interesting as the thought was that there were halls I didn’t know about as station director, I decided it was time to get to the main point.

  “She doesn’t like me much, does she?”

  He chuckled and said, “Not much, no. Does that bother you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m honestly not sure whether to be concerned or not. I guess I don’t know where I stand in the Matthew, Sorscha, Stacy triangle.”

  Shrugging, Matthew replied, “Well, it’s complicated, but most of that triangle is mutually exclusive. Matthew and Sorscha is a long-term protective relationship. She’s had my back more times than you’d believe. We’ve built up a solid friendship over the years, but it’s one that is not at all romantic. Matthew and Stacy is a new idea, and hopefully a romantic one, that I’d like to explore more. Sorscha and Stacy, meanwhile, may not ever be on friendly terms, but then again they don’t really need to be.”

  That sort of made sense. He liked having his silver-hared ninja around to karate chop any attackers, and he wanted me to sleep with him. The only problem was that I had no interest in being the Governor’s girl-toy. I was doing just fine on my own, thank you. No official patronage needed.

  I must’ve let my thoughts show on my face; hopefully it was the wine that caused me to slip like that. Whatever caused it, he somehow caught on to what I was thinking. He reached across the corner of the table and rested his hand tenderly on mine. “I’m not looking for a casual sexual encounter, Stacy,” he said, his eyes fixed intently on mine.

  “What are you looking for, then?” I asked. It was the wine. It had to be. My head was spinning, and no man’s gaze had ever had that effect on me. It was an absurd question, asked in an absurd manner—who would ever answer it honestly?—but it was the best I could do in my besotted state.

  “You, I think,” he said. “Look, I’m not much of an expert at this romance game. But as I’ve watched you in your leadership of the station, I’ve grown more and more attracted to you. To call you smart is an understatement, right? The tech just comes to you, second nature. I’ve never met someone who is so complex, so interesting. I’m taken with you, Stacy. I want to get to know more about you. It may work, or it may not, between us. You have my word that if it doesn’t work, your job will be protected. I just—I just have to try. You’re too intoxicating not to at least attempt it.”

  I hadn’t been called intoxicating in a long, long time. Back then, it was the fanciest word that the love-starved college kid could come up with in the hopes of getting in my pants. Now, coming as it did from the foremost, and most handsome, bachelor in the agency that ruled the entire planet, it made my knees weak.

  I tried one last defense. “Aren’t you old enough to be my father?” Again, it was clumsy, but I was running out of options, and the damned wine was—well, just damned. Dammit.

  “How old do you think I am?” It sure didn’t take him long to turn it around on me.

  “Early forties, I think.” Men like to be thought in their early forties; older, and they’re old men, younger, and they’re just kids. I had absolutely no idea, since the Governor had no age creases in his face or anything else to clue me in and I’d never been given access to his personnel files. Lacking reasonable evidence to the contrary, why not pick the age range that best suited me?

  In response he snorted and sat back, a neutral expression on his face. Gods, I hoped I never had to play poker against him.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “You’re twenty-seven. An early forties man would have fathered you awfully early in his own life, yes?”

  I shrugged. “Math was never my strong suit,” I said, hoping he would let me out of it.

  He didn’t. Chuckling, he replied, “Right. Nearly every day I meet nuclear engineers who never really got that whole math thing.”

  I tried to be indignant and failed at it. That was funny, dammit. I chuckled, and then I guffawed. Matthew’s laughter intensified, too. It didn’t take long till we were laughing together, a pair of drunken sots who’d just eaten a once-in-a-lifetime dinner and who were rapidly and completely falling for each other. At some point—I have no idea when, and it really doesn’t matter anyway—we laughed our way into another room with a music player, and we continued laughing as we danced, and danced, and danced some more. Of course he was an excellent dancer, but at that point I didn’t give a damn. Other things were on my mind.

  Damn the wine. I woke up the next morning expecting some degree of fuzziness in my brain, but there was none. Damn, damn, damn. How could I blame the blasted wine for my actions when I didn’t wake up with a hangover? I actually wanted a hangover, dammit! Ah, well. I wrestled with my conundrum quietly as I walked back toward the bedroom door picking up my clothes off of the floor, hoping he wouldn’t wake up.

  He did.

  “Slipping out quietly, I see,” Matthew’s voice filled his bedroom, a royal-sized chamber containing a regal four-poster bed.

  I’d had a few more or less successful attempts at sneaking out of a man’s room back in college. This attempt definitely fell into the less successful bucket, so I did what any naked girl would do when caught sneaking out of a man’s room. I froze.

  Matthew’s gentle chuckle filled the room once again with his voice. He said, “By standing still and not looking at me, you’re thinking that your beautiful naked body will fade o
ut of my eyesight, yes?”

  I was too damn old to play the game, and so I turned and glared at him. When the glare proved ineffectual, I said, “Look. You got what you wanted, right? Let me at least….”

  He cut me off, his voice still resonant but now carrying a sharp undertone. “Stacy. I told you last night what I was after. I’m honored that you graced me with a night of lovemaking, but that wasn’t what I intended to happen.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to be angry about, so I intensified my glare and kept searching. Nope. I really did remember how we had ended up in bed. While he hadn’t objected, he certainly hadn’t forced me there. He had everything I’d always wanted: a well-defined physique draped by an intellect that challenged my own and decorated with a sense of humor and gracefulness that had brought several smiles to my face the previous day. All that, and he was rich and extremely powerful to boot. He was everything any girl ever living had ever wanted. Why on earth did I want to lash out at him and storm back down the stairs to my own room, never to cast a shadow in his room again?

  His voice cut into the silence between us. “You’ve been running away from relationships your whole life, haven’t you?” Well, damn. How did he know?

  “How do you read my mind?”

  “I’m reading your face, actually. And, I confess, I’ve read your personnel file, just as I’ve read the files of every senior official at this station and the others. Not a lot of personal information in yours, but what is there points to some pretty obvious conclusions. Look,” he said, rising and walking around the bed to me, “I want you in my life, but only if you want it too.”

  Alarm bells sounded loudly in my head. Way too many besotted men who could never have coped with me long-term had invited me into their lives with no idea what that meant.

  “By ‘in your life,’ you don’t mean….”

  “No. Sorry, bad phrase to use. I want to get to know you more, but I don’t think either of us is ready to jump at anything—um, long term. I’ll be happy to jump elsewhere in the meantime, though,” he said, his tender smile turning into a lustful leer, his gaze going suggestively to the bed.

  “I probably ought to get to….” I’d been just about to say ‘work’ when a buzzer on the nightstand sounded, ripping Matthew’s attention away.

  “Ah, Mike’s coming for a visit.” He correctly read my face once again and explained away my confusion. “Michael is one of my favorite colleagues on the council. That he’s come this far instead of just calling probably isn’t good news, though. Get dressed; I’ll introduce you.”

  That I was just about to meet another member of the planetary ruling council unnerved me more than I cared to admit. The Thirteen had stepped in as a group and incredibly saved the world from itself a couple decades ago as nations that had been sovereign at the time stood on the brink of mutual destruction. They had literally walked into the chamber and stood in the middle of the saber-rattling, genocide-threatening mass of idiot rulers and presidents and appointed themselves all-powerful leaders, answering to none but each other. I mean, literally, right there on the world news vid channel. Immediately after, they had abolished all other governmental bodies and split the world up into thirteen colonies. All without a single drop of bloodshed. Some day I’d have to ask Matthew how that had been possible, though I suspected the chance of him answering truthfully was small.

  I dressed and then walked out into the antechamber where Matthew was standing talking quietly to another man. As I entered the room, the conversation halted and the newcomer turned to leer at me, his dark eyes seeming to follow every curve on my body.

  “Well, well, Matthew,” he said. “I see you’ve gone native.”

  Matthew snorted, the only indication that he’d heard his companion’s insult. “Michael, may I introduce this station’s director and nuclear energy prodigy, Dr. Stacy Allen. Stacy, meet my somewhat churlish colleague Michael. He doesn’t get out of his uncivilized colony much, so you’ll have to forgive him for forgetting his manners.”

  I wasn’t a protocol expert, but I knew enough to realize that he’d paid me a grand compliment, and his colleague an insult, by the order of his introduction. It was getting interesting. I smiled and bobbed my head politely, content to let these two godlike men fight it out as they might. They faced off in the center of the room. Matthew was the tall and stocky one, his red hair done just so as to radiate his trademark arrogance. Michael was even taller than Matthew, the black hair on his head reaching somewhat about six and a half feet above the floor, but he was thin. Gaunt, even. His eyes were truly black and deep-set; they peered around his sharp nose and gave him an unmistakable resemblance to a raven.

  His thin lips curled just at their tips into what was almost, but not quite, a smile as he said, “Pleased to meet you, Doctor Allen. Nuclear technology, then?”

  I nodded, inexplicably nervous that the man might be about to quiz me on atomic theory. I knew my stuff, certainly, but he gave off an air of intellectualism that I suddenly didn’t feel quite up to. He spared me, though, instead turning back to Matthew with a dismissive grunt.

  “You were saying, old chum, that Benny was implicated in your research?” Michael said. Matthew nodded, and Michael pursed his lips. “How best should we address that, do you think?”

  As they continued their discussion it became even more obvious that they were out of my league. In the log files there had been a ciphered transmission out to a place on the opposite side of the world. I was proud of myself for recalling my study of Riknik, a computer language used in the writing of code-making and code-breaking programs, and I’d had the cipher broken pretty quickly. It was to someone named Ben’thra, and carried the message It is done. Matthew had recognized the name immediately but hadn’t told me anything. I assumed at the time that meant it was another of the thirteen, and the commentary on which I felt I was eavesdropping now confirmed that.

  There was no point involving myself further, so I slipped quietly toward the door while the two titans of the ruling class excluded me from their planning session. Michael stopped me in my tracks, though, with a sharply-phrased command.

  “Stay, child.”

  I turned, furious, and snarled, “I am not a child.” Okay, that sucked. Hey, it was the best I could do on short notice and on a shorter fuse.

  Michael sneered. “No, I can see that from the curves your body displays in quite unremarkable quantity,” he said. That made me even madder; I’d always been sensitive to the fact that my breasts and hips had never won any awards.

  “Stacy,” Matthew said, his voice level, his eyes locked on Michael’s face, “stop letting Michael push your buttons. You do need to stay here, because you’re still one of the few humans here that I trust, and because it was your work that uncovered all of this, and, finally, because at some point we’re going to have to talk about what to do next, a topic that will include you. But please, just have a seat over there and ignore Michael for the time being.”

  “What….“

  “Don’t interrupt us again, child,” Michael said, cutting through the question I’d been about to ask.

  “Michael,” Matthew corrected his colleague, the one word conveying more toward sticking up for me than any other men’s speeches I’d ever heard. I was pleased, but—what had he meant when he’d said “humans” in that differentiating tone?

  “What?” Michael asked as he returned Matthew’s glare defiantly, his challenging tone making it clear that the question was rhetorical.

  Realizing that the interplay might become entertaining after all, I sat where Matthew had indicated. I wasn’t being docilely compliant; I was being curious, I kept telling myself.

  “Stacy is my station director. She’s not one of us, but she still deserves the respect due her position as a direct report to the governor. While you’re in my land, you will keep a civil tongue toward her and toward all of my—employees.”

  As much as I appreciated the boss’s sticking up fo
r me, my attention was drawn away by the realization that the air in the room was getting a little heated. Not the temperature, exactly—it felt more like electricity was building all around us, and the feeling reminded me of a camping trip back in my childhood—the only time I ever saw Dad venture outside of the protected areas of the stations and the conveyances in between.

  He’d taken us “old school camping,” as he’d referred to it, and we’d even had to unfold a disastrous little sleeping compartment that he’d called a “tent.” It had taken a couple of hours of fighting with little connected rods and metal stakes before he gave up and brought out the nice, modern emergency shelter that went up at the touch of a button. Even that, though, hadn’t protected us fully from the storm that night.

  I’d never seen a real storm, and haven’t since, thanks to our domes. The one that night was beautiful, though. Sexy, even. The sensation of standing there feeling the wind whip around my body from side to side, the rain soaking me instantly and then continuing to pound my skin with its huge raindrops—larger drops than any of the vids had ever led me to believe were possible—was incredible.

  The lightning is still what I remember the clearest, though. It set my skin on fire with tingly electrical sensations, and then the world went from black to blazingly bright as a massive bolt of energy struck a hilltop a few dozen meters from me. I read, later, that the lightning was most likely striking something on the hilltop—a tree, probably. I couldn’t tell. The sensations went by too fast to gather any useful data. My skin came alive, and then the world turned white, and then a sonic crack sounded like it had split the very earth on which I stood. It was in that order, I know, but it all happened in the same microsecond. Then my dad’s hands grabbed my shoulders and pulled me back into the shelter, and I don’t remember much of anything until my vision returned several minutes later and my pulse stopped racing.

  It was the most awesome thing I’ve ever felt. In that one microsecond I felt more alive than I’d ever felt before and have ever felt since. And as I came back to the present, in the room watching the two council members face off silently, the air felt just like it had back then before the world had gone white. Part of my mind—probably the smarter part—was screaming silently at the rest of me to flee, but I couldn’t. I sat, riveted.

  Then it was gone. Just like that, the electricity disappeared. I’d say dissipated, but it wasn’t gradual in the slightest. It was there, and then it wasn’t. Matthew relaxed, smiled, and gestured toward a chair.

  “Shall we sit and continue our discussion, Mike?” he said.

  I realized that I’d been holding my breath. I let it out slowly, quietly, but not quietly enough. Both pairs of eyes turned toward me from the middle of the room, Michael’s gaze bearing down while Matthew’s stare appraised me with a good-humored glint. After a moment, both pairs of eyes turned back toward each other, a soft grunt of disapproval from Mr. Hawk-nose the only sound for several long moments.

  The rest of the conversation passed without serious incident. I was even included in a great deal of it, to my surprise and pleasure. I learned a few things, had a couple of my hunches confirmed, and got to be the principal plotter in what I’ll call, for lack of a more official title, Operation Stacy’s Vengeance.

  But I get ahead of myself. It’s not surprising, as much as I wanted to see the jerk who’d murdered one of my best friends put down, but I should start at the top.

  First, this Ben’thra fellow was the ringleader. What was most surprising to me in that revelation was that it didn’t seem to surprise either of the two men. Michael, who was, it turned out, the governor of the other continent that had been attacked, had also intercepted some transmissions, similar to but more detailed than the one I’d found addressed to Ben’thra. That pretty much clinched the case against him in their books as well as mine, but it left me wondering why a member of the council would do such a thing.

  I expressed the question, and Matthew answered by outlining his theory, Michael nodding agreement. The Council, as they simply called themselves, was not the unanimous ruling body that they so often presented to the world, but was instead made up of members who squabbled as much as any group. Benny, as Matthew referred to Ben’thra, had a mischievous streak a mile wide. He acted in concert with his fellows most of the time, but he liked to play pranks, and setting the world against the enviros must have seemed a grand prank to him. Michael joined in the discussion then, explaining that in his colony the enviros had been gaining ground in the public sympathy arena. Their message of a better life through a return to nature resonated in a land where natural spaces no longer existed, as the population over there had increased to the point of completely obliterating anything that wasn’t man-made. “Nature-camps” and “nature-vacations” were the new thing, growing to a multi-billion-credit industry in a short couple of years. That movement, of course, led to a backlash from the techies who insisted that “tree hugging” (whatever that meant) would lead to a regression from the prosperously self-sustaining science-based lifestyle we’d come to enjoy. The population in Europe Colony, Michael concluded, was about ready to turn inward on itself.

  That all made sense. I tended to ignore the news, but I’d seen glimmers of the nature expeditions here, and we had some of the same simmering arguments. Our governor, though—the man I’d slept with last night, I reminded myself—had so far kept a lid on the pot, preventing the mutual distrust from boiling over. At least, he had managed to keep a lid on it until yesterday.

  This Benny had a particular enmity build up toward Matthew, Michael explained, a result of a long-standing feud of some sort. Add to that his nature as a trickster, and the evidence reached critical mass.

  “So what are we going to do about him?” I asked, expecting to be involved in the application of retribution. Both men fixed me with stares that made it clear I was wrong.

  “We?” Michael said, his haughty voice dripping with sarcasm. “Matthew, your toy is so cute when she’s angry. She actually thinks she can take one of us down.”

  Matthew’s expression of amusement turned to one of disgust. “Mikey? Stuff it, asshole.” Again he glared at his counterpart on my behalf, an expression I tried to imitate.

  Several seconds later, Matthew turned back to me and, his voice tender and soothing, said, “Stacy, dealing with Ben’thra truly is a matter best left to Michael and me and the rest of the council. I need you to focus on your counterpart here who, I think we all agree, must have been Benny’s right hand man in planning this.”

  I nodded, mollified for the moment. Matthew was right, and as much as it pained me to admit, so was Michael. I was a station director, high on the local hierarchy but nothing compared to a member of the world’s ruling council.

  “You know, as much as I hate to say I told you so, I told you so,” Matthew said to Michael. “Of course it’s irrelevant to the matter at hand, but it needed pointing out. When we decided to abolish sovereign governments and create a single planetary oligarchy, didn’t I tell you all that the removal of wars over land would just lead to people fighting amongst themselves over even sillier things? That international wars cause people to come together as a cultural entity against an outward foe, while the lack of such strife then allows the same groups to splinter and fight amongst themselves? Benny is, in a way, just helping to prove me right. Granted, it’s something I’d have never actually wanted validated.”

  Michael aimed a derisive grunt toward Matthew. “Yeah,” he said. “You were right. Good job. Woo hoo! Do we need to call a council meeting so we can all pat you on the back?”

  “Oh, stuff it. We do need to call a meeting to address what Benny has done.”

  “Indeed,” Michael said. He turned toward me. “Now, let’s talk about your part in this operation. I’m given to understand that you lost a dear friend in the attack.”

  I nodded. “He was shot to death in the control room, in the middle of trying to make the comms system work, I suspect.”


  “And we know who shot him.”

  I nodded again.

  “And we are all in agreement that the evidence amply identifies who was behind the attack.”

  I nodded a third time.

  “Well, then, since the man who murdered your friend is the same man who was primarily behind the attack, I think that the right to vengeance belongs to you,” Michael concluded. “Tell us what you need to effect such delightful reprisal, and I, for one, will be pleased to assist.”

  We’d satisfied ourselves that it was Mark, the director of security, behind the attack. The entry points for the attackers had been too cleverly chosen, laid out as though the planner knew the station’s security design well but had decided to put in a couple of bad choices to make it look a little less like his handiwork. The bad points, of course, were scheduled to be breached just after the others, and they’d only been attacked by a couple of enviros—no! they weren’t enviros, I reminded myself—each. Jeff, the captain of the guard, had taken one look at the incident map and immediately decided upon Mark’s guilt. I hadn’t been willing to call it till we’d seen the logins under Mark’s codes, as well as nuclear plant security codes that not even Jeff had known used to bring systems to a halt. The comms codes had been Stephen’s, true, but Jeff’s search of his office had revealed an easily-accessible notepad containing all of the special codes. Stephen, then, was quite guilty of a breach of station security protocol, but nothing else.

  Mark, on the other hand? Mark needed to pay for the murder of a friend. And both Michael and Matthew were agreeing to help me make sure he did pay.

  “Timing is important,” Matthew said. “I don’t believe either Ben’thra or Mark is aware that we know who was behind the attacks. As soon as either of them know, both of them will know. Ben’thra cannot escape the other twelve of us, so I’m not worried about him, but Mark will undoubtedly run for the hills and make your part harder. We need to strike simultaneously.”

  “No disagreement here,” Michael said. “So tell me, Station Director Allen, what evil retribution scheme you have planned for Mark. I love hearing plans for pain, and in my experience women come up with the best ones.”

  Michael’s purring voice brought me up short. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, honestly. I knew I wanted to cause Mark a great deal of pain, but I certainly hadn’t planned it.

  Michael’s voice cut into my thoughts. “Well? Haven’t you planned your revenge out in great and gory detail? Or are you somehow not really a woman?”

  His insults were finding far less purchase in my skin, thanks to Matthew’s continued defense on my behalf. I grinned at Michael and countered, “Oh, I’m really a woman. I’m sure your buddy Matthew will confirm that.”

  Matthew nodded, an amused grin on his face as he agreed. “The only part of that I’ll contest is your reference to me as his buddy. Colleague, perhaps, but never buddy.”

  “So, my plan,” I said. It hadn’t taken me that long to come up with something once I’d put my mind to it, and the joking had covered just enough time. I outlined what I was thinking, and by the time I was done both men wore smiles. Granted, Matthew’s smile was broad and happy while Michael’s was thin-lipped and vindictive, but I was pleased that I’d gotten both of them to smile at the same time regardless. They added a few points, and Matthew insisted that I involve Captain Jeff in the activity. I wasn’t sure, figuring that the grizzled veteran wouldn’t inflict pain if he didn’t have to, but Matthew assured me that he would bring Jeff into the fold personally when the time arose.

  My biggest concern still rested in the why. We knew Mark had done it, and we knew how. We knew where and when. I just didn’t understand what could possibly turn a security professional against his own to the point that he was willing to murder one of his own colleagues in cold blood, much less risk the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Hopefully the interview phase of my little plan for retribution would bring answers.

  Conference over, Michael bid us both farewell—surprisingly polite to me for a change—and left. Matthew and I sat quietly looking out the window as a single-seat transport containing Michael dipped down to point its nose into Matthew’s apartment, wiggled its wings, and then shot up and away. I looked down and was pleased to find Matthew’s hand grasping my own as we sat on the couch together. The stress of the encounter we’d just been through washed over me, and somehow sitting on his couch holding his hand was the perfect thing to do.

  “One of your favorites on the council, you said?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Matthew said. “Michael is. Why do you ask?”

  “If you call your favorite friend an asshole, I wonder what you call your least favorite colleague.”

  Matthew chuckled. “We of the council have unusual relationships with each other. Mike and I have spent so long working closely together that our jocularity is second nature. I admit that he did piss me off with the insults he hurled your way, but I also know him well enough to understand that they were rooted in jealousy rather than disdain.”

  “Jealousy? He’s a governor, too. Can’t he have anybody he wants?”

  “Sure he can. So can I. But that which is easily accessible rapidly becomes undesirable, dear. We both want the same thing. I found it. He hasn’t.”

  “What is this ‘it’ then, besides a crude reference to me?”

  “A reference to you, indeed. You’re an exceptionally rare woman, Stacy. Very few people in the world have such an intuitive grasp for the forces that lie behind our technology. Both nuclear theory and electrical engineering came naturally to you, didn’t they?”

  “Sure, but….”

  “But nothing. There might be one in a hundred million people on this planet with that ability. Add to it the fact that you’re a very pretty and pleasant young woman, and you have a combination that—well, that inspires me. It inspires Mike, too, apparently.”

  “Oh. I’ve never really thought of myself that way.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve always run with the knowledge that guys are only after breasts, and since I don’t have much of those I have to secretly supplement with my brains.”

  “Still focused on physical beauty, I see.”

  “That’s all that matters.”

  “Not to me.”

  I looked at him sideways, trying to judge his sincerity. His words were awfully tough to accept. Every man I’d ever known had really only been interested in a physical relationship. Some had said they weren’t, but those men had been liars. I’d always dreamed of being stunningly beautiful, but you know how dreams are. Dream in one hand, spit in the other, and see which one fills up faster, right? I’d just learned to use what I had.

  Not finding anything in his face to hint at deceit, I steered us another direction. “How old are you?”

  “Why do you want to know?” He turned and met my eyes.

  I decided on a hunch to play the round with honesty. “I guess I don’t, really. I mean, age doesn’t matter all that much in the scheme of things. But there were some comments earlier that led me to wonder who you and the other council members are, and where you’re from. You said the word ‘humans’ like a guy says ‘girls.’ Are you one? A human, I mean?”

  Matthew looked at me for a long, long period, his face still and composed, his eyes searching my face from top to bottom and back up, repeating the cycle several times. Finally he took a deep breath and answered with a single word.

  “No.”

  “Some super-powerful race from the stars that has come to take over the planet, then? A dolphin that looks like a man?”

  “Heh. No. Funny, though.”

  “A god, then?”

  “An immortal. It may be accurate to call me a god. I and my brethren were around when the planet was created. We’ve been content to sit around and mostly just watch, but with the multiple threats of nuclear annihilation of the entire planet going around we decided to step in and use our powers for good. You heard my comment about ho
w successful I thought we’ve been.”

  “Is Sorscha an immortal, a goddess?” I couldn’t get the silver-haired beauty and the resultant pang of jealousy to leave my head.

  “No. She’s not human, though. Her race was created to be servants to the gods.”

  “A race of kung fu masters as servants? Impressive.”

  Matthew snorted. “Actually, a race of dragons who shape-shift into humanoid form, which is probably harder for you to accept than a race of kung fu masters. Besides, she’s strong and fast enough that she doesn’t need much kung fu. Her race is also immune to energy weapons.”

  “Oh. Of course. I thought I saw a blaster beam hit her, but I dismissed that as impossible.”

  Matt shrugged and asked, “So, any more questions?”

  “Plenty, but you’ve got my brain spinning enough for now. I always supposed there had to be some sort of supreme higher power omni-whatever immortal types, but I never figured I’d get to sleep with one. I think I need to absorb all of this before I ask anything else for fear of making my head explode.”

  “Probably true. And now, Stacy, you hold a precious secret in your hands. I feel like I really haven’t done you a favor in the revelation, since you can never tell anyone what you know. But you do deserve the truth, and, frankly, I’m impressed that you haven’t dismissed me as crazy.”

  Crazy? The entire previous twenty four hours had been crazy. I’d been stuck on an elevator in the dark, shot at, and kissed by my boss. I’d killed people, shot them with my own blaster fired by my own hand. I’d seen a good friend murdered and a colleague lying to get away with it. I’d eaten steak, real steak, with real cow juices running out of it. I’d slept with my boss. And he expected me to blink over a revelation that he was an immortal who had a pet dragon? Bah.

  I snickered. I don’t think I’ve ever snickered before, but I did then. It seemed the only logical thing to do. I looked at Matthew’s face, and I snickered again. Hell, the second one felt even better than the first had, so I snickered a third time.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what going insane felt like.

  Matthew joined me. He didn’t snicker, exactly; he guffawed. At the sound of his laugh, though, I took a turn at actually laughing, and my laugh made his stronger, and then vice versa, and soon we were both convulsing in laughter, tears flowing freely.

  The laughter attack dwindled, leaving us staring into each others’ tear-streaked faces. I did the only thing that was reasonable at the moment. I reached for him, pulled him to me, and we shared a long, deep kiss.

  “You should change clothes,” Matthew said, several minutes later. The kiss had been explosively passionate, but we were both too wound up for it to go any further. “Come back when you’re done, and I’ll summon Jeff. Then we can get the dirty work out of the way.”

  I took the stairs down; my own apartment was on the floor right below the control room, and two stories was an easy jog. Besides, I really didn’t want to risk the elevator door opening at the control room. Nobody would likely have the guts to ask why I was coming down from the boss’s level in the same outfit I’d worn last night, but there wasn’t any point starting rumors, founded or no. Besides, no one ever ran the stairs except for Jeff and me.

  Several minutes later I was back, sitting in Matthew’s top-floor office, this time in a crisply pressed uniform with freshly combed hair and renewed makeup. Jeff sat in the other chair, and together we laid out the plan for confronting Mark.

  It was surprising that Jeff wasn’t as opposed to the brutality of the plan as I’d thought he would be.

  “I know how you felt toward Stephen, Stacy,” Jeff said. “It’s one thing to lose a friend in the line of duty, but to have him murdered in cold blood is a whole new level of miserable. We owe it to Stephen to deal with his murderer, and we also have to find out if there’s a chance he had co-conspirators. I don’t enjoy dirty work like this, but it won’t be the first time I’ve had to do it. When do we start?”

  Matthew left to get into his own transport pod while the two of us called Mark into Jeff’s office, my own office being too difficult to get into or out of should anything go awry. Matthew assured us he could adapt to whatever timing we needed; Jeff didn’t question where the boss was going or how he could get there at any speed he wished, and I was just about done being surprised by the Governor—the man—the god—whatever!—for the day.

  Mark came immediately to Jeff’s request for a conference. It wasn’t surprising; all that the station’s director of security really had to do all day was run background checks on technicians, write policies, and publish reports on the meaningless data that a few dozen access points into a nuclear reactor facility generated throughout a twenty-four hour window.

  Mark walked into Jeff’s office, saw me, and froze. His face lit up with panic and his hand twitched toward his holster. Jeff stopped Mark with a quick shake of his head, a slight motion with the blaster that he held leveled at his Mark’s chest, and a single word: “Don’t.”

  “Why don’t you close the door and have a seat?” Jeff asked, his voice switching to light and casual. I had no idea how he kept his composure, but I was glad he did. I don’t know if it was fear, or anger, or just pure adrenaline that caused my own hands to shake behind my back. Jeff had suggested I stand with them held there so that I would have a single-motion pull of my blaster to make if needed, but he must have known my hands would be shaking and dripping sweat. Better to hide that from Mark, obviously.

  Mark crossed the few feet to the chairs warily and started to sit, but Jeff stopped him.

  “Take out your blaster slowly and put it on my desk over there, please,” he said, motioning with his head to the corner closest to me. Mark did as he was told and then sat down. I managed to slow the trembling in my hand just long enough to slide the blaster to a spot out of Mark’s reach, and then my offending extremity went right back to where it couldn’t be seen.

  “So, it’s obvious that you know why you’re here,” Jeff said. “Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

  Mark shrugged. “You’re just going to kill me anyway, aren’t you? Why should I bother?”

  “Actually, we don’t murder people in cold blood. Give us a chance, why don’t you?”

  “Look,” Mark said, sweat beading his brow. “I didn’t intend to kill Stephen. He was supposed to be downstairs in the meeting room. You all were. But when he started darting around trying to fix things—he knew. All our plans, everything we set in motion, it all would have been for nothing if he’d let people know what was really happening.”

  “Our?” I started to ask, but Jeff spoke over me. “Why did you want us to think the environmentalists had attacked us?”

  “They are attacking us! If not this time, then there are plenty of other attacks they’re planning. We must be rid of them, and the only way the people will ever rise up and be strong is if they are angry. Don’t you see? They’re pushing all this tree-hugging, ‘let’s get back to basics’ crap. It spits in the face of progress. Besides, there’s documented proof out there that they’re plotting to overthrow the council, end our peaceful life. They’re the terrorists, not us.”

  As Mark’s rant wound down, Jeff asked, “How long have you felt this way?”

  “Always. I’ve always felt this way. I’ve just learned more of the truth over the years, with the growth of the green movement, those filthy long-haired freaks. I’ve heard more of what they do, more of what the media covers up that’s really going on. The master says….”

  “The master? Who is that?” Jeff said, interjecting in a sharp voice.

  “I—I can’t say. But he’s powerful. He’s as powerful as the Governor. Way high up there in the ruling council. I won’t tell you who it is, though. No, the work must go on. The plan must proceed. It must!”

  “What’s the next part of the plan, Mark?”

  Mark’s laughter pealed as he said, “You don’t really believe I’m going to tell you th
at, do you?”

  “No, I presume the Governor is going to have to find out when he and the rest of the council pay their visit to Ben’thra.”

  As the name passed through Jeff’s lips, Mark’s face turned white. His mouth worked strangely and I heard the sound of glass grinding. I’d seen enough crime thriller vids to know what a suicide pill is. Shrieking, I leaped forward, abandoning all thought of defensive posture in the hopes of holding his jaws apart.

  It was too late. His eyes turned up in his head, and his body convulsed. As I stood, trying to hold his head upright, Jeff’s strong arms reached around me and pulled me away.

  “Stacy, there’s nothing we can do,” he said.

  I wasn’t convinced. “We never found out who the ‘we’ was.”

  Jeff forcibly turned me around to face away from the still-convulsing man and looked me in the eyes as he spoke slowly and calmly. “I’m fairly sure that his ‘we’ consisted of himself and Ben’thra, and maybe others like him at other stations. Did you see Mark’s eyes as he talked of the enviros? He was crazy. I don’t know if there was something Ben’thra did to unhinge him or if it was something else. I do know that crazy men don’t gather teams. Mark figured he could pull this off all by himself. It’s why he didn’t have a plan for if somebody was in the restroom. A sane and careful man would’ve planned the attack for the middle of the meeting, not the first couple of minutes, but in Mark’s head he was better than all of us. No, I’ll bet my pension on him being the only one.”

  “If you’re wrong?” I asked.

  “If I’m wrong, the Governor will find out. Relax, Stacy. It’s over.”

  “But I thought….”

  “That we were going to torture him? I know. But I also knew that the director of security might have access to a suicide pill.”

  “You knew this would go down this way?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Knew is a strong term. Let’s just say I suspected it, based on a long life of battling crime. Stacy, I know you were looking forward to angrily avenging your friend, and trust me, I understand why you wanted it. But that wouldn’t have done Stephen any good. We know what happened, and those who did it have paid the price. It’s time to move on. Let’s get past it right now. Okay?”

  I raised my hand to wipe the tears I hadn’t realized were falling. It’s sad how, when all is said and done, the relief just washes away into emptiness. The corpse in Jeff’s office was testament to the fact that the person behind the attack on my station had suffered vengeance. And—that was it. It was done. It was, as Jeff said, time to move on.