SAILS THE MORNE

by Chris Willrich

Chris Willrich lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a children’s librarian. He’s best known for his sword-and-sorcery stories, which have appeared in F&SF, Flashing Swords, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, but he enjoys writing science fiction adventures, too. His third story for Asimov’s combines mystery and suspense with aliens and space travel, and is certainly an example of the latter sort of tale.

The morning that Eight Ball’s klaxon blared, heralding the disciples of universal night, her captain had gone fishing.

Gesar Chin—friends called him “Brick”—was a relic even for a long-hauler, and he appeared almost stony astride his fishing pole, like a terra cotta warrior with a patina of grease. His only movement was to chew the betel nuts that for all twenty-fourth century dentistry still left his teeth bloody red. Each chew bobbed him slowly in freefall, like an ebbing pendulum. Just an hour out of hibernation, he still ached. And one thing he’d learned in all his dubious careers was to take the morning slow.

Never mind you hate the Gwai Lo, he told himself. Deep breaths. Remember what Wigness said, just steer the ship. Keep a grip.

So he was eyeing a fat golden pictorial velcroed open among the charts (2,000 Years of Illuminated Manuscripts) and a fat silvery fish drifting beyond the big transparent dome, when the alarm screamed as of murder, and the lighting shifted red. The cod appeared to swim in blood.

“Aiya,” Brick muttered, still chewing his nut, reflexively touching the knife at his belt. “What the hell?” he croaked. But the cod couldn’t answer. He shot it a disgusted look.

Like all Eight Ball’s crew except Kybernetes, the ship’s resident Brain, he wore a two-dimensional rendering of a black sphere from an obscure Earth game. It incorporated a radiation dosimeter and a link to the ship’s network. He tapped it and said, “Captain here. Make it good.”

“Brick,” came the cool voice of the woman he knew only as Dagger Meza, his first mate. “Kyb’s spotted an object in an intersecting solar orbit.”

This time Brick stopped chewing. “Intersecting?”

“Close enough. It’s two hundred eighty thousand klicks away now. We’ll pass within a hundred sixty thousand.”

Brick swore louder this time. The thing was already closer than Earth was to its moon. “Uncharted iceball?” he said. “Or a ship?”

“The betting pool’s going with ship, sir,” came the glum tones of Kybernetes.

“I want to have a look,” Brick said, “with my own ‘eyes.’”

Martian by birth, he had the winsome but weathered look of those Sino-Tibetans who first walked the red world without masks. He also bore the hoarse voice and dark goggles of old spacers whose thyroid got too many Grays and whose eyes got too many gees.

“We figured you would,” Kyb said.

Brick sighed and spat into a self-sealing cup. Then he keyed the ascent. The hatch below snapped shut. Motors whirred; silver shapes darted off, including the one that got away.

The fishing bubble doubled as the astrogation bubble, even if Eight Ball’s specs had it the other way around. Eight Ball’s denizens—four fresh-thawed baseline humans, three revived aliens, and the ever-vigilant Kybernetes—dwelled in a titanium sphere about thirty-five meters across, itself sealed in a shell of carbon-steel-caged cold water, five meters thick. The water had many uses: cosmic ray shielding, heat dissipation, backup propellant. You could even drink it. But it was Brick’s innovation to stock it with Pacific cod, and to rig the bubble atop the inner sphere with a rod and reel, its handle just above the navigation charts.

The bubble rose like an elevator car in some Earthly undersea habitat. A circular panel irised upon the grey wall of the outer shell. Beyond was a special membrane that peeled away as the bubble peered through. Now the fishing rod dangled into space. The Milky Way sparkled beyond the orange lozenge of the lure. Stray water drops froze and scattered to join the stars, or drifted like snow onto the white hull around the bubble.

Eight Ball matched her name. Her outer shell was a black sphere studded with cargo modules, sensors, and heat radiators, but at the bow lay a circle of white paint threaded with a black infinity symbol. A docking port crouched inside the starboard loop; the astrogation bubble peeked from inside the port loop. Smirking dirtsiders supposed the black paint a nod to stealth, sabotaged by the white patch. In fact, both white and black were affectations. A ship’s heat glowed more livid to sensors than candy stripes. Barring odd “terrain” like dense convoys or the close vicinity of the Sun, stealth in space was a myth.

The principle worked both ways, however. No one should have gotten the drop on Eight Ball.

Grunting, Brick tapped his goggles and blinked, and the lenses responded. These were not true corrective glasses, but rather flat computer panels of a sort antiquated by direct neural links. The uniform black of the goggles absorbed photons while a computer perched above Brick’s nose tailored displays for his acceleration-damaged eyes. In effect, everything he saw was a simulation. When he glanced at his pictorial, for instance, with its swirling rendition of the Chi Rho page of the Book of Kells, the Greek letters denoting Christ filled with shimmering intricacies like some ecclesiastic fractal set; and he could choose to magnify the image, tease out the miniature animals and fanciful beasts and nearly as fanciful humans tucked within the dizzying Celtic knotwork, or delve deeper, examining the fine veining of the calfskin parchment so faithfully reproduced, or call up an annotated gloss about the original rich palette of pigments, such as iron gall, orpiment, and lapis lazuli.

He loved such explorations. But now he must look away, from illumination into darkness.

Graphical overlays crisscrossed Brick’s view of the stars. A green dot on a green line marked their destination, Kuiper Belt Object Quaoar, eight hours away and crawling with alien Gwai Lo.

A red line, thicker to indicate nearness, slashed at a slight angle across the green. Upon it pulsed a red dot, Kybernetes’ bogey.

Brick grunted, squinted, rapped, mixing the goggles’ information with Kyb’s data. He resolved a fuzzy, shadowy image. Soon he could guess its true shape, slender and tri-winged.

“Huh,” he said. “Very Flash. Gordon, that is.”

“Captain?” Dagger’s miniature face popped up in one corner of Brick’s display—or rather lack of face, since she always left her quarters shrouded in dark robe and cowl.

“Looks so out of place it’s crazy, I mean. Might as well be a sailing ship.”

Dagger’s image nodded. “We thought it might be an atmosphere-launched missile, but out here, that makes no sense.”

Brick scratched his nose beneath his goggles. “Probably a yacht,” he decided with surprise. It was hard to surprise him these days.

But it must be so. Any interplanetary vessel so sleek must be a toy of Rollers, plutocratic youth cruising the inner system before becoming Loaded, discarding flesh for electronic immortality. Even SolGov would bow to the economic wisdom of using different craft for atmospheres than for deep space.

“Who the hell is this?” Brick snarled, his thoughts now burning to his cargo. “How did he sneak up on us?”

“Working on the who-the-hell-he-is, sir,” Kyb said, her tone sparking with anger. At Brick? More likely at the Roller. There was no pop-up image of Kyb’s face, because she no longer had one. Brain-hood was a cheaper brand of immortality than Loading, and many of the elite sponsored the cybering of Brains in return for indentured servitude. That was Kybernetes’ story, until Brick had bought her freedom. But there remained the worry her Roller employer had left hidden overrides behind.

Maybe Kyb worried too.

“They can’t have chased us from the inner system,” Kyb was saying. “It can be done, but we’d have seen it.” Brick nodded. If life support was a candle, ship’s drive was a bonfire. Kyb continued, “So I would guess it was manufactured out this way. I’m searching our onboard registry. As for how sensors missed it, there’s almost no heat signature. I only spotted it because I got into a paranoid mood, and checked for star occultations.”

“Let’s hear it for moods,” Brick said. “Huh, no heat. A robot yacht?” Its appearance might be a ruse.

“Maybe, yes. But even for a robot it’s cold. If it wasn’t coming so close, I’d wonder if it was a derelict.”

Mercury “Merc” Jones, the flashily named engineer with the unassuming title Loadmaster, popped up in another corner of Brick’s display. “Been thinking about that,” said Merc, a thirtyish-looking black man leathered by years of solar exposure at Mercury’s Quicksilver Scrapyards. He bore a toothmark scar on his temple from the Eight Ball crew’s notorious barfight on Titan, where Merc accidentally switched his raw-egg drink with an Ixion’s bark juice. Though younger, the peripatetic Loadmaster had stripped and jury-rigged more ships than Brick had ever seen. “Could be running in some kind of dormant mode, you know ... like how old space probes carried little batteries, enough to run a few instruments, not enough to easily spot. Some late twenty-first century models could run damn cold. Sneaky.”

“Assuming the ship is not built with alien stealth,” Dagger said.

“Huh.” In her own way, Dagger mistrusted Gwai Lo as much as Brick did. One of the Lagrange space colonists, her home habitat had been an economic basket case since the Contact Crash, and while unlike Brick she wasn’t alive then, L5 still suffered.

(He’d never forget her fighting off that Ixion in the Titan barfight, wielding her tequila bottle with all the passion and precision of some drunken yet dragon-slaying Joan of Arc. Even now it generated thoughts unbecoming of a captain.)

He respected her worries. The Ixions in particular had boycotted Quaoar’s All-System Exposition in disdain for the smelly tree-beasts who nominally owned the system in question. Brick could imagine the ravenous, slimy, two-meter wasp-snakes vaporizing Eight Ball for emphasis. Still, the ships of the Kuiper Belt’s great colonial Powers, and even lesser lights like the Erisians, were as distinctive as works of art. Why would aliens go slumming on a human yacht?

“Okay,” Brick said. “For now we assume they’re human pirates. Or at least human-built pirates.” He sighed. “We’d better inform Ambassador Yee.”

“We going to launch her at them?” Merc said.

“She’s SolGov,” Brick said, “and we’ve got an obligation to keep her informed. Anyway, we opted for a laser cannon, not a missile bay. Put her on.”

“Pirates?” Chodon Yee sputtered presently. Like Brick, the Special Ambassador for Inter-species Conferences was Martian-Tibetan-Chinese, but the resemblance ended there. An icy beauty, she seemed eternally young, with a talent for gathering attention like Jupiter gathered moons. If he hadn’t seen her in the flesh before hibernation, Brick would have thought the sleek image in the pop-up display some virtual avatar. She just didn’t quite seem real.

“Robot pirates,” Dagger said.

“Ahr, buzz, ahr, matey,” Brick said. There was silence for a moment, before everyone ignored him. His crew could tell when he was talking as the captain, and when he was talking as the Old Coot. Yee probably thought he sounded no more stupid than usual.

“I trust you have an explanation for this?” she said.

“Piracy in deep space is difficult,” Kyb said, “because the detection ranges are so long. But this ship may have a workaround. Imagine a controlling AI ... or Loaded personality ... aboard a minimally powered ship. Give it drones to recover swag. We’re highly visible even coasting, because of the heat from life support. Our robot pirate doesn’t have that problem. And so now they’re here, well within weapon range.”

“I don’t want a lecture on pirate tactics,” Yee said. “I want to know how you ignored this possibility. I have never been comfortable with SolGov’s use of private haulers. This only vindicates my concerns.”

Brick chomped a fresh betel nut. He could almost hear Merc sharpening his knife. He said quickly, “This is somewhat unprecedented, excellency.” He remembered SolGov representative Wigness assuring him the threat from piracy was nil. He wished he could bring Wigness here now. “What little space piracy goes on, goes on closer to the Sun—”

“You shame your ancestors with excuses. No doubt you bring great negative karma upon this ship. You are certain it’s hostile? Have you tried hailing?”

“Madam.” Brick drummed his fingers upon the image from the Book of Kells. “It’s a ship close enough to spit on. That can’t be an accident, and I’m not taking chances. Our only advantage right now is that it might not know we know.”

Kyb tried to rescue him. “We do have another advantage, Captain. No life support means low heat profile, but only if they’re powered down ... they’ll have to go through a power-up before threatening us with more than bad thoughts.”

Yee said, “Then there may be time for Quaoar to help us. We should alert Ambassador Wintergrue.”

Merc laughed. “Quaoar never answers maydays, excellency.” The Loadmaster wasn’t bothering to keep the scorn out of his voice. Merc disliked officialdom, piety, and dirtsiders, and Yee wrapped all three up in one glossy package. Brick gathered Merc had spent years tangled with some well-heeled, Mars-based cult, the Moddies maybe, or a human branch of the Night Readers, and this had a lot to do with his love for the outer system. “For that matter,” Merc went on, “they’re so fussy about approaches they’ll blast anything that assumes a collision course, even by accident. Fun people.”

“Even with Wintergrue on board?” Yee scoffed.

“Let’s ask,” Brick said.

“Even with me on board,” the retiring Quaoran Ambassador confirmed a minute later, its translator affecting an easy, mellow tone. “It is simply that we don’t fool around with high relative velocities. At spacecraft speeds, accidental collisions are hard to distinguish from deliberate attacks. So we don’t. Too bad for me.”

Brick bit hard on a betel nut, looking at the Quaoaran’s grotesque image in his display, so at odds with its urbane artificial voice.

A Quaoaran—the name was a convenience, for its true home was light-years away—was like a ten-legged tarantula, stuck to the bottom of a meter-wide balloon composed of layers of spider-silk and crisscrossed with tiny, scampering young (plus robot versions of same), the whole works spray-painted white. Quaoran language was ideographic, formed of red threads dropped onto the white by those mind-linked (some sources said enslaved) younglings. So strange squiggles coiled around Wintergrue’s gasbag like bloody calligraphy, the Quaoran analog to his speech.

“Now, despite the fact that Quaoar will be no help,” Wintergrue continued, “I am curious why these pirates would choose to intercept when we’re relatively close. They could have caught you in hibernation.”

Brick frowned at the image. One of the child-spiders up top was looking quite big, almost as large as the parent.

“Maybe they’ve got a buyer at Quaoar,” Merc was saying, “you know?”

Dagger added, “And when piracy does happen, sometimes the raiders want an awakened target that will jettison cargo.”

“Excellency,” Brick put in, “pardon me for prying. But are you in danger of tipping?”

The amount of red writing on the Quaoaran gasbag tripled, but Wintergrue’s mild voice said simply, “All my young are leashed, Captain Chin. My eldest will be cut loose at Quaoar soon, before any psychotic takeover can take place. Thank you for your concern.”

Brick wanted to trust Wintergrue; horrific appearance aside, it was tolerable company, for a Gwai Lo. But Quaorans whose mind-linked young rebelled could become irrational. Sometimes the rebel could even masquerade as the parent...

“You’re wasting time, Captain,” Yee said. “What are you going to do about this pirate? How are you going to ensure the safety of the holy relic?”

“Holy relic?” Merc said.

“What my first mate suggested,” Brick said quickly. “Drop and run.”

“You’d jettison the cryptbox?” Yee exclaimed.

“No,” Brick snapped. “I’m talking about the outboard cargo. Kona coffee for the Quaoarans. Redwood bark for the Ixions. That sort of thing.”

“Cryptbox?” Kyb said.

Thanks, Yee, Brick thought. But I guess our pirates already know. The box was the likely target. Even as voracious as the Ixions, say, were for Earth plant matter (gluttonous omnivores though they were, the very scent of Earth meat could set them vomiting—he’d lost a good shirt to green splatter at that Titan bar), tree bark hardly justified piracy. But at least Eight Ball could shed mass.

To Kyb he said, “Later,” before tapping his badge for a shipwide announcement. “This is the captain. We’ve detected a probable hostile. All passengers to the storm cellar. All passengers to the storm cellar.” He killed the announcement. “Wait for it...”

The Orcan Ambassador to Quaoar (reassigned from Earth) cut in. Brick had run out of corners to stow the pop-up images, so it appeared beside Yee’s. By contrast to her chilly composed gaze, it was giving him the finger.

The Ambassador, whose name translated as Oddsgod, traveled in an aquarium about the size of Wintergrue’s gasbag, covered with extendable manipulator-claws. It made Brick think of one of H.G. Wells’ Martian war machines, with a fishbowl on top. The fishbowl’s interior frothed with smoky-looking water. Sometimes tendrils emerged into view, brushing the crystalline wall. The Orcan itself, Brick knew, dangled from an icepack mounted to the aquarium roof. It resembled an inverted blue willow tree with thousands of diminutive worms for branches, little eyeballs near the tips. Those blue tendrils were quite dextrous, so much that Oddsgod was able to make human-readable doodles just by shoving them against the crystal wall. Oddsgod’s latest masterpiece looked like a human hand with its middle finger jutting up.

“Screw that! You’re not hiding any secrets in the muck, human. You either, Wintergrue!” Oddsgod’s tendrils sketched a question mark beside a Quaoran interrogation-chop. “Say, are you about to tip?”

“I see rudeness is not confined to humanity,” Wintergrue observed.

Brick said, “I called you out of courtesy, excellency.” He sketched out the situation. “Expect a burn soon.”

“So begins the fabled All-System Exposition,” Oddsgod gloated, tentacles forming the outline of a fish floating upside down, X for an eye.

“I know you gain great prestige from any embarrassment to Quaoar,” Wintergrue said. “No need to drain a dead husk.”

“Oh, don’t worry. Time’s current will bring our own Worlds’ Fair along soon. I wager we’ll learn from your mistakes.”

“Start by learning some quiet, excellency,” Brick said. “Kyb, punch it soon as the yacht lights. No matter where the rest of us are.”

“I don’t have much propellant reserve,” Kyb said, “if we’re still going to decelerate for Quaoar rendezvous.”

“Forget rendezvous. Shoot us past Quaoar in an Oberth maneuver, close enough to wave, and get as much speed as you can. Just make it clear we won’t hit. We’ll have to hope they’ll reel us in eventually, since one of their people is on board.”

“They might do that,” Wintergrue said. “They are polite.”

“Oh, your words wound me,” Oddsgod said, tendrils doing a passable rendition of the face in Munch’s The Scream.

“Enough,” Brick said. “We give diplomats passage as a courtesy to your governments—”

“A courtesy unnecessary if not for the ban on civilized tech in your deeper system,” Oddsgod shot back. “Mass-driver launch tubes! Antimatter gas core engines! Ten-year transits! Hibernation! Even the Erisians could do better.”

Yeah, Brick grunted to himself, squinting at Oddsgod’s mobile aquarium, you Orcans love your contraptions, don’t you. Come to think of it, you’re awfully fond of robotics...

“Captain,” Merc muttered, interrupting his thought, “where is the Erisian?”

Brick frowned. The babbling octopus-vulture-thing should have popped up by now. His excellency the babbling octopus-vulture-thing. “None of you have seen him?”

Humans and aliens communicated their one point of unanimity.

“Damn it,” Brick said. “Kyb?”

“Can’t find him,” Kyb admitted. “We’re not exactly a fortress here, Captain. And Erisians do have a reputation for sneakiness.”

“Enough. Ladies and gentlemen and indefinites, prepare for a burn.” Brick cut off contact with the diplomats. “Merc, get the VIPs to the storm cellar. Dagger, grab a scanner and find that Erisian.” He hesitated. “Grab a pistol, too.”

“You think he’s in league with the pirates?” Dagger said, her tone sharp. Brick sensed a lecture coming. “Get a grip, Brick. Erisians are annoying, but they’re honest to a fault. That’s part of why they’re annoying.”

Dagger was always telling him to get a grip. Good general advice on a spaceship, of course ... but she meant much more.

I mistrust the aliens’ power and position, Brick, she’d said before. If I could ever find a way to get our whole system back, I’d probably kill for it. But you—I think ‘foreign devil’ isn’t just an expression for you. I think you literally believe they’re monsters.

Brick snapped, “Just get ‘em all into the cellar and in the rescue balls. That way if they make a fuss all they’ll do is play pool.”

“That game sounds weirder every time you talk about it, Captain,” Merc said. “Loadmaster out.”

There was a pause, then: “Dagger out.”

Brick said, “Kyb ... keep paranoid.”

“You don’t have to ask. It’s dark out here.”

“Captain out.”

* * * *

Silence and stars again. Brick frowned anew at the mystery yacht. Might it really be just a Loaded eccentric, out where he didn’t belong? Give me a clue, Brick thought.

For an instant there flickered in his goggles’ display an odd message, sandwiched between the distance and velocity estimates.

Beware the Eagle.

It was there and gone, like a quote on the Cislunar Stock Exchange.

The lack of tags made the message seem tight-beamed to the goggles, not pulled from Eight Ball’s network.

“Give me another clue,” he said hopefully. Nothing happened.

Grunting, Brick tapped his goggles and blinked. Data flickered as he tried to determine who’d sent the message. He found no trail.

Was somebody on board sending a private warning? Or ... he frowned out at the darkness. It was unlikely, but not impossible, the message actually came from the yacht.

Brick cursed and keyed a virus purge. The world dissolved into fuzz. He pulled up the goggles. The blurry view from his gee-damaged eyes was not a huge improvement, but at least he could get around ... and any viruses recently implanted would be caught. He raised Kyb again.

“A shipwide purge?” she repeated. “I haven’t detected any signals...”

“Guess it’s my turn to be paranoid,” Brick said. “Run it. And Kyb...”

“Captain?”

“Check the registry for yachts named Eagle. Captain out.”

Brick stared a moment longer at the stars, those uncatchable bright fish, thinking of old books and ships and storms. He ran a finger along a chart book’s spine, recalling a ballad of the thirteenth century, and a knight commanded to sail in bad weather.

Murmuring aloud, Brick repeated Sir Patrick Spens’ words to his crew: “Mak hast, mak haste, my mirry men all / Our guid schip sails the morne...”

And he answered himself as had Spens’ crew: “O say na sae, my master deir, / For I feir a deadlie storme.”

Wet sea or dark, Brick could empathize. There was a hint in the ballad that the knight had earned enemies, and Brick could relate to that too. Out of need, but more out of anger at the Gwai Lo and the humans who kissed their tendrils/manipulators/feet, Brick once had stolen and smuggled, old books being his specialty. He had concerns about his passengers, but truth to tell, any observer who knew his past would suspect Brick first of all. If pirates were coming, that was surely his karma. Perhaps he should accept it with the solemn grace of a Sir Patrick Spens, sailing to a fifty-fathom grave.

He spat into his cup again and withdrew from the stars. He’d better check his treasure.

* * * *

Back in the ship’s guts, with fish poking about the bubble, Brick slipped through the hatch below and pulled himself by handholds through the cluttered chart room. From there he nosed through the hatch into the axial ladder. Face-first, he descended.

The ladder was a twenty-five-meter crawl from bow to engine room. The trip was like a caving expedition through tangles of ducting and cables and pipes. Brick’s face felt the tug of air vents, the vibration of motors, the tickle of air freshener strips.

Brick wasn’t going all the way, just a deck down.

Everything looked as expected when he reached his office: neat and ordered, the wall displays flickering with the virus purge.

As expected—except for the alien crouched upon the steel-mesh desk.

The Erisian Ambassador to Earth (currently non-resident) stared with carrion-eater eyes. One hand on his blade, Brick stared back. His goggles should be fine now; he swallowed and with his free hand pulled them down. His vision clarified, and he beheld a thing out of nightmares.

The alien had its tentacles around the cryptbox like a tomb robber getting better acquainted with King Tut. Only in this case, the robber resembled some mutated Egyptian bird-god (vulture-headed, fish-gilled, bat-winged, and tentacled like an octopus shy two limbs, the whole package wrapped in corpse-grey skin); and the sarcophagus was instead a black slab proportioned like a briefcase. Red death’s-heads flickered across its surface. The cryptbox was magnetically clamped to the desk, and the ambassador did not seem to be trying so much to remove it, as caress it. That was disturbing enough.

It was even worse that the Erisian didn’t so much as glance at the box. Instead it focused on the human as though the antics of its own writhing tentacles were beneath its concern.

“Stop staring at me,” Brick said, “and attack or something.”

“I pray your forgiveness,” the alien kawed politely. “I’m waiting for your death.”

“Beg pardon?”

“How to explain ... My people evolved to spy carrion littering land, or drifting listless on the sea. When you hold still, my inner scavenger snaps awake.”

Brick shivered. “You’re not exactly calming me down.”

“I am not here to kill you, Captain Chin.”

“Huh. So what are you doing, Ambassador? Excuse me: thief.”

“I am not here to steal. I came to speak to you, then heard the shipwide alarm. Fearing the worst, I investigated your office. I crave the safety of the artifact, as do you.”

As the Erisian spoke, the viewer behind it resumed its normal schematic of the solar system, with the words No Virus Detected covering the eight inner planets of SolGov and the myriad alien-settled iceworlds of the Kuiper Belt.

“Artifact?” Brick said, with a twinge more confidence. “That’s just my MacGuffin.”

“ ‘MacGuffin’?”

“It’s a human term for old movies. This particular one is called Psycho. A classic. Ever see it?” Brick smiled evilly and drew the knife. He twisted a knob and a little display in the hilt switched from Q to E.

The Erisian closed double membranes over its multifaceted eyes, opened them again. “I know what truly occupies the box, Captain Chin. I know also that a menace occupies your vessel.”

“No shit, Sherlock. You break into my office, Ambassador Vul-ah-er...” As a dozen times before, Brick’s tongue tripped on his passenger’s name.

“I am Vulchuglurian Rogatnigok [SCREE] Gowlakach, of Eris and the Darkensea Aerie.”

“Ambassador Vulch. You break into my office, and you’re talking about threats? It’s all clear now. A robot pirate ship wouldn’t be half as effective without an inside man.”

“Fool,” Vulch squawked. “Pirates are not your chief concern. Grave danger lurks on board your vessel...”

“I’m with you there.”

“...a disciple of universal night, a pawn of the Devourers, an emissary of cosmic heat death. You cannot conceive your peril—!”

As the Erisian spoke, a fit engulfed it. The tentacles released the cryptbox and whipped the air as though in ecstasy or terror. The motion revealed the Erisian’s marsupial-like pouch, previously concealed by the ropy limbs. Brick saw various artificial objects protruding from the lip. He saw a tentacle drift toward one. He acted.

Brick yanked himself into the room at an angle, thumbing two buttons on his hypoknife as he came astride the Erisian’s open beak.

The blade shot from his hand on a jet of compressed air, giving Brick a slight impulse backward, as he’d intended, into his bookshelf.

Meanwhile the blade sank into the Erisian’s left shoulder.

Brick plowed into his collection, somewhere between Great Martian Pulps #5: A Princess of Virginia and A Child’s Christmas on Europa. With his free hand he ripped a book from its velcro. As the Erisian, tentacles quivering, looked up, it received Volume One of the Encyclopedia Luna (A to Antimatter) square in the snout.

The Erisian cartwheeled. Ambassador Vulch was resilient, and quickly braced itself against the bulkhead. But the hypoknife still sprouted from its shoulder, and its movements slowed.

The ampoule he’d loaded was prepped for Erisians. Kyb wasn’t the only paranoid one.

“Fool!” croaked Vulch, wings aquiver. “So bigoted are you ... you ignore the evil behind human faces.”

Adrenalin screaming in his veins, the words foamed out of Brick like water from a burst canal. “We didn’t ask you to come to our system, Gwai Lo! To crash our economy, make my family broke—”

He caught his breath, mastered himself. “What do you mean? Evil behind human faces?”

“Beware,” Vulch croaked, “the Evangelist...” Then the membranes fluttered over its multifaceted eyes. From time to time they flickered open and closed again.

“Perfect,” Brick called to the unseen, unseeing heavens, and swore oaths against foreign devils of all species.

When his fight-haze cleared, Brick gingerly recovered the encyclopedia volume, then yanked the groaning Erisian to the office hammock. A few old fisherman’s knots and the intruder was secured. Purple drops of Erisian blood drifted like spilled wine. Brick left the hypoknife in place. If he had to stow the alien here, he might as well leave it sedated; the blade would dose Vulch at intervals. Vulch muttered something about “Logovores” and “star death” and “devouring.” Probably random nonsense.

Brick yanked the cryptbox loose from the table’s magnetic mesh. Since the box wasn’t screaming, he knew the lock was intact.

Now, just as the Great Powers could swat aside his vessel, they could sidestep mere quantum encryption. But the best Erisian tech, Brick knew, was only a step ahead of humanity’s.

And yet. He had to check.

Though Brick wanted to yank the box open, instead he located a serene haven in his psyche’s stormy sea, the image of his family’s old redoubt on Mars. In his mind’s eye he walked the island estate and found a bottle glinting in the sand. The message inside was a series of numbers which Brick (back turned to the Erisian’s fluttering eyes) traced upon the box’s metal.

This sequence, fed by an implant in Brick’s brain, matched a sequence in the lock. Implant and lock were linked by quantum entanglement, acting as one physical system, despite their separation. Spooky action at a distance, as Einstein long ago put it. Brick should relax. Old Albert had his back.

He opened the box.

Eight Ball’s portion of the Book of Kells was gone.

* * * *

The worst of it, Brick thought as he regarded the empty box, was that he’d leapt to haul this treasure. Other captains back at Lagrange Four muttered SolGov had gotten giddy about this Exposition ... that even under-armed freighters ran bloated with swag. But Brick, book-loving Brick, had been too dazzled. He still had connections from his smuggling days, and from the days he’d turned informant. They’d come through for him.

You just steer the ship, SolPol Officer Wigness—now Program Specialist for Museums and Cultural Objects Wigness—had soothed. The cryptbox will do the rest. Top-end security, maximum shock absorption, nuclear bunker plating. Trinity College wouldn’t let its treasure off-planet otherwise.

Brick slammed the box onto the desk and confronted Vulch. The alien hissed something about “rising glory” and its eyes fluttered shut.

Brick mastered his anger, searched the Erisian. Inside the marsupial-like pouch he discovered a traveler’s medkit and toolkit and...

Wonders.

There was a purple scroll covered with Ixion taste-glyphs like green puzzle pieces...

A pale Quaoaran memory ribbon threaded with red wormtrail writing...

A blue Orcan stem-husk spattered with tiny black words of autobiography...

And a yellowed 2076 paperback of Common Sense.

“Night Reader,” Brick murmured. “You’re a goddamned Night Reader.”

It was a little like discovering a house burglar was a Vatican scholar, or a Buddhist monk.

The Erisian said nothing more. Its wings trembled as it slept.

Beware the Eagle, huh? Vulch was the only winged being on board ... But a Night Reader—

Shaking his head, Brick sealed the office and descended the axial ladder. He passed the V-shaped upper split of the laser cannon and paralleled the grimy chrome pillar of the cannon’s main trunk, down to the spin ring. The laser was Eight Ball’s sole armament. Its main function was deterrence, not so very unlike the little plaques outside proclaiming IF YOU CAN READ THIS I HAVE WEAPONS LOCKED.

But sometimes people ignored warnings.

“Beware the Evangelist,” he muttered aloud.

“Beware what, Brick?” A glint of polished metal shone from the darkness ahead.

Brick’s eyes focused on a cloak pin, blue and gleaming like an icy stiletto. The rest of the speaker was nondescript as a medieval monk. A dark, hooded cloak shrouded her, secured with a toolbelt instead of a rope. Inside the hood brown eyes blinked on a brown face, beneath coils of black hair. A thin-cut smile curled beneath. Teeth flashed.

“ ‘Lo, Dagger,” Brick said.

Dagger Meza hailed from the original L5 colony—known commonly as the “Elf Hive.” The “Elfs” now endured such choking population density they shrouded themselves for anonymity, camouflage ranging from masks to holograms. Even Dagger clung to the mores, to the extent of going cowled.

Perversely, it was Dagger’s modesty that occasionally fanned the spark of lust hidden in her captain. Brick kept it snuffed, of course.

“I said, ‘Beware Greeks bearing gifts,’“ Brick added, maybe too gruffly. “Or Norwegians. Shouldn’t have taken this job.”

Brick elaborated, leaving out only the “bewares.”

“So,” Dagger said, “we’ve lost the Book of Kells.”

“One fourth of it,” Brick snapped. The ninth century vellum manuscript comprised four volumes, more or less corresponding to the Christian gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had each boarded a different ship. Eight Ball’s charge was John, the most fragmentary of the four. (Brick recalled the other three vessels, weeks behind, were more advanced and better armed.)

“I see,” Dagger shot back. “Ireland will only lynch one fourth of the crew, then. I wonder who that will be?”

“That’s why you’re my first mate,” Brick said. “All that respect. The book’s got to still be on board, or they wouldn’t bother with the yacht. I think we can rule out Ambassador Vulch...”

“Vulchuglurian Rogatnigok [SCREE] Gowlakach,” Dagger corrected.

“I think we can rule the Erisian out,” Brick said. “I know that’s hard to buy...”

“Let me shock you by agreeing,” she said. “I’ve encountered Night Readers. They are insane, sure ... but they want only to protect the astral essences of literature from monsters from Beyond. Or something. All harmless mystic crap. Honorable fanatics. Like you.”

“Beg pardon.”

She smiled. “Seriously, Brick. Think of the mass we cart around in the form of books. You’re a bit obsessed.”

“Doesn’t make me a cultist.”

“No. You’re a romantic. We could be shooting at that bogey, you know. We’re powered up, they’re not.”

“We don’t have proof—”

“My point.”

“Gunning down innocents, even Loaded innocents, that’s Gwai Lo work. Buddha notwithstanding, we’re not much better. But we’re trying, damn it.”

“Brick...”

“I know, I know, get a grip. It doesn’t matter. You still got a scanner on you?”

“Of course,” she said, patting her cloak. Medieval-looking or not, it had plenty of pockets.

“Then let’s help Merc with our other passengers.”

“You believe one of them is our thief ?”

“Someone beat a cryptbox. That’s got to take Great Power technology. No Ixions around, so that means Oddsgod or Wintergrue.”

Dagger nodded. “It did seem strange that we got so many diplomats on this run. If one of them is carrying illicit tech...”

“They’ll be in big trouble.” The Gwai Lo weren’t allowed to bring their more advanced tech inside Neptune’s orbit. Diplomatic privilege had prevented scans or searches back at Lagrange, but if someone had boarded Eight Ball with a super-device, that would have repercussions in galactic law. Of course, discovery might encourage their government to do away with the witnesses. Eight Ball wasn’t inside Neptune’s orbit now. “Let’s just hope to God that’s not really a Great Power ship out there.”

“God may be displeased that you lost the holy gospel.”

“You’re an atheist, Dagger.”

“Just an observation.”

As they descended the tangential ladder into the spin ring, they could hear the passengers arguing with Merc.

The spin ring boasted a sixteen-meter-diameter interior, with a corridor circumscribing it and a series of cabins branching off, four for passengers, three for crew. What might have been Kyb’s cabin housed the medical pod. If necessary, Kyb’s brainshell could be shunted from the flight deck to the pod. For the others, the ring offered simulated lunar gravity, a boon to health and morale.

Given the snarling up ahead, however, it would take a lot more than spin-grav to restore morale to Eight Ball.

Brick jogged up the sloped floor. Despite his haste he tapped the handholds amid the multicolored piping on the right. Keep a grip ... because if Kyb punched a burn, the spin ring would automatically stop. Acceleration would transform the right hand wall into the “ceiling,” and the smooth left hand wall into the “deck.”

Thus, by the time Brick arrived, arguments had devolved into threats.

A glowering Merc, wearing a heavy toolpack as though geared for a hiking expedition to a scrapyard, gripped the piping on the wall. The Loadmaster, a health fanatic, made Brick feel fat and feeble just looking at him, but sometimes that was a reassurance. Now, for instance. Merc’s free hand brandished a hypoknife, pointing at the three remaining Ambassadors.

The graceful, cold-eyed Chodon Yee with her black gown swirling with red dragons still didn’t quite seem real. Adding to the surrealness was the ambulatory fishbowl of Oddsgod (tendrils sketching the symbol of a null set) and the drifting spider-nest gasbag of Wintergrue, whose overgrown child crouched atop the balloon, looking even bigger than before.

“Can’t convince ‘em,” Merc said, “can’t stab ‘em. You know?” The scars from an Ixion’s fangs looked shiny around his right eyebrow.

“Captain, be reasonable,” Wintergrue said. “We are grown beings, not fresh-cut juveniles.”

Oddsgod said, “I might feel more cooperative if your grease-monkey hadn’t drawn a knife on us.”

“Loadmaster,” Merc said. “His Loadmaster drew a knife on you.”

“I promise you,” Yee announced, “none of you will work in space again.”

Brick fetched a betel nut, bit down. For all his worries about Oddsgod and Wintergrue, Yee had uttered fighting words. He strove for a diplomatic tone, and got within maybe an Astronomical Unit of one.

“Excellencies. We face potential combat. Safety demands you visit the storm cellar.”

“A little late for safety,” Yee said, “after you let pirates down our throats.”

“Well, if I read the group’s mood,” Oddsgod said, “you’d better let us sift our own waters, Chin.”

“Have you already seized our colleague,” Wintergrue asked, “Vulchuglurian Rogatnigok [SCREE] Gowlakach?”

“He’s ... secure,” Brick said, then muttered, “Am I the only one who can’t pronounce that?”

“Nope,” Merc said. “I call him Squiggly.”

“The name isn’t so hard,” Dagger said.

“That’s just ‘cause you’re the smartest person on board,” Brick sighed. “Speaking of which, did you get that last task done?”

“I did,” she said, patting a pocket.

Brick nodded. Then he spat red juice. Hell with diplomacy. “All right. You don’t want protection, that’s your lookout. Address further complaints to the vacuum. You will now enter your quarters. Which will be locked.”

“Absurd!”

“Screw that!”

“This is hardly—”

Suddenly Dagger pulled a dark, glinting laser pistol from her cloak. “You heard him.”

“You’re finished, Captain Chin!” Yee said, as she and her colleagues stalked into their cabins. “You’ll be begging for oxygen at Lagrange—” The hatches clanged.

Brick removed his badge, tapped an instruction, and slammed it against each of the three hatch controls. Red lights proclaimed a priority lockup.

“Dagger, well?” he said, donning the badge like a sheriff at movie’s end. “Oddsgod or Wintergrue?”

“Brick...” Dagger said slowly, studying her scanner. “It’s Yee.”

Brick found himself another betel nut. “Beg pardon?”

“If I read this right, Yee is an android with an alien coiled in her abdomen. She ... it ... is loaded with enough alien tech to cause a galactic incident. Ambassador Yee is an Ixion, Brick.”

Brick stared at her so long, he did a passable imitation of a Erisian.

Then the burn began.

* * * *

Brick admired Kybernetes’ respect for orders. He’d told her not to worry about the crew, and indeed she had not.

Eight Ball sprang ahead, building toward three gees. The spin ring spun down simultaneously. A jarring acceleration spinward met a punishing shove toward the left wall. Brick’s right hand wrenched in its handhold. He yelped with pain, and heard his shipmates doing likewise.

There were small mercies: at least he hadn’t been thrown against his first mate.

He let go, slumping to what was now the “deck.” Best to ride a burn on your back. Brick’s eyes trembled and teared.

Kybernetes’ voice sounded in their badges. “You guessed right, the bogey powered up. We’re running like hell. How are you?”

“Taking it lying down,” Brick said.

“Had worse, you know...” Merc said, voice clearer via badge than through the air, what with the throbbing in Brick’s ears.

“Think ... broke finger...” crackled Dagger’s voice.

“Sorry,” Kyb said. “I’m getting a headache, for what it’s worth.”

“I weep for you,” Dagger said.

“Captain,” Kyb said, “I’d like to vent some water from the shell. Less mass, and snow might fuzz our profile.”

“Do it,” Brick said. More cosmic ray shielding gone. Well, he’d never expected to have children.

“Bogey’s too distant to effectively tag with exhaust,” Kyb was saying. “Not that I want him close. Uh oh, change that from bogey to hostile. They’re firing. Looks like missiles. Might have to get creative.”

“You have my...” Brick began, then stopped.

He noticed one, then another, then a third of the passenger hatches popping open.

“...Full confidence,” he rasped, as he saw three shapes approaching.

“Are you all right?” Kybernetes said. “You sound a little funny—”

“Everything on this deck is fine,” Brick said, as the two—no, three—aliens drifted or crawled or stepped out of their cabins. Wintergrue wasn’t obviously discomfited, although it and its juveniles moved more sluggishly, relying on the little spider-bots to scamper to the deck and tow the gasbag with silver threads. Oddsgod’s mobile aquarium strained visibly under three gees but managed to amble around. Meanwhile “Chodon Yee” seemed oblivious to the acceleration. There was even a little spring to her steps. “Believe you me,” Brick added, “no one has evaluated a deck as carefully as I am now. Just focus on running. Captain out.”

“Thank you for freeing us,” Wintergrue said to Yee.

“What’s your game, Yee?” Oddsgod added.

“I am a surprise guest,” said Yee, in a tone appropriate for afternoon tea. “An Ixion in savage’s clothing.”

Wintergrue sighed, or rather its transmitter did. “I confess I suspected you were not human,” Wintergrue said. “But lacking proper technology, I could not be sure.”

“Same here,” said Oddsgod. The tendrils sketched a fanged, wormlike shape. “I have to admit I’m surprised you’ve turned out to be an Ixion, Yee. All you air-breathing warm-worlders are noxious, of course, but the Ixions stink the worst. So, what, did you eat the original?”

“On Earth, only the plant matter is palatable,” said the Ixion. “No, not long before Eight Ball’s current flight, the original Yee had an unscheduled mishap.... Don’t look at me thus, ice-dweller. I know the emotional cues of seven species, and no, I am not a murderer, merely an opportunist. While I’ve enjoyed playing the role of ‘Yee,’ it is chance that brings me to this peculiar feast.”

“Given the Ixion hostility to our Exhibition,” Wintergrue said, “I find that difficult to believe.”

“Yeah,” Oddsgod said.

Yee smiled. “You Orcans are hardly enthusiastic about the Exhibition yourselves.”

“At least we’re in the game.” Oddsgod whipped tendrils to make a caricature of Yee, and then of an Ixion bursting out of her like an exclamation point with teeth. “And our kind would never hide as one of the scruffy tree-beasts.”

“Hey!” Brick snarled. “Are we invisible?”

Wintergrue projected a laugh. The red writing upon its gasbag got jittery. It wobbled a bit. “He has a point. Colleagues, whatever our agendas, let us discuss them privately—in the control room. After all, the fate of this flying deathtrap might merit our attention.”

Yee said, “My current form is proof even against low yield nuclear weapons. I fear nothing.”

Oddsgod scoffed, rippling its aquarium’s water. “Come on! The last thing we need is a skinsuit competition! I second the motion.”

“Very well,” said Yee. “I am feeling an unseemly urge to step on lesser life forms...”

As if reaching some Great Power quorum had dissolved all niceties toward the natives, the trio strolled, scampered, and bobbed toward the access ladder. “Wait!” Brick croaked. “Where’s the book, Yee?”

“Whatever you refer to, Chin,” the Ixion said, disappearing around the bend, “I know nothing of it.”

Brick snarled and crawled after the aliens, right hand throbbing, then slumped to the deck. His ribs ached. He tapped his badge. “Kyb ... company...”

“Don’t I know it,” she answered. “Missiles almost here. Hold on, firing the lasers.” The illumination flickered and Brick felt a new vibration in the deck. “Got one. But the second’s still coming ... hang on for a bigger burn.”

Brick gave up and heaved himself onto his back. That act saved him from serious injury as Kyb further stacked on the gees.

Blackout—

* * * *

Flanked by pagodas, embraced by plum trees, the manor crowned a little island in the Hellas Sea. The island was artificial, a coral matrix cradling the wreck of a colonial lander. A Chin had served aboard. His wealthy descendants considered the site sacred. They’d set the manor’s foundation by hand.

Gesar Chin’s nickname was no slap. His family venerated their history, and for a time they’d been, like all early Martians, bricklayers.

It had been too long since he’d fished here. He relished the lap of the water under the pier, the rainbow flashes of the local trout, the lifelike pages of the holo-book above his rod. Multiyear hauls and hibernation had snatched him from life’s flow; yet his kin understood that but for Brick the estate would have been auctioned in the hard times, two centuries ago. They called him Gungun, an honored elder, and spoke not of smuggling. Still, he was nearly a stranger. He felt most at home on the pier.

He was almost glad to see the flash of the SolGov shuttle.

Program Specialist Wigness was an Earther, a tall blonde Norwegian, and proud of his resulting bulk. He put stolid emphasis into the thunk of false-leather boots as he approached. Brick remembered Wigness’ hands around an ex-partner’s throat.

“Have you thought about it?” Wigness began without preamble.

“It’s too hot,” Brick said, slipping into old jargon. “Someone will make a play.”

“Even human tech could spot a pirate from months away,” Wigness said. “Don’t worry, Brick. I’m not sending you to your doom. There are no storms out in the Kuiper’s cold waste.”

“It’s too hot.”

Suddenly Brick’s holo-display of Mr. Midshipman Hornblower filled with static snow. It shifted, growing huge. There was now one vast vellum page, brown-gold, with illuminations like some angelic family album. Four portraits burned within a dizzying frame of Celtic knotwork. There was a winged man in the upper left, and three winged beasts: a lion, a calf, and an eagle.

“Folio twenty-seven verso,” Wigness said. “Behold the symbols of the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Consider the intricacy of line and pigment. Feel the lust of the bibliomaniac.”

“Enough,” Brick said.

“Very well,” Wigness said, and the display flickered through still more pages of the Book of Kells.

There were lines of dark, rounded text with capitals erupting into color like peacocks or fruit trees; a portrait of John the Evangelist, as regal as any king’s portrait but brandishing a book not a blade; and the Chi Rho page’s vortex of color, drawing Brick’s goggled eyes surely as the mandalas of his own tradition. The intricacy of the illuminations spoke of such dedication the monks might as well have bled onto the page.

“Enough!” said Brick, mouth dry. His hand blocked the vision as though warding the Sun.

Most Martians sought Buddhist detachment, but they coveted paper books. A historical quirk, perhaps, arising from a culture of epistles sent to Earth, Sino-Tibetan respect for learning, the expense of computer manufacture on Mars, the relative ease of growing plants in CO2-rich domes ... or just plain nostalgia. Brick felt the lure, and had profited by it too.

“All our species’ triumphs,” Wigness said, as though cracking the covers of Brick’s mind, “all our despair ... none of it means a damn without memory. And nothing speaks to memory like the written word.”

Brick wet his lips. “You so sure I’ve reformed?”

Wigness chuckled.

Fish leapt in the Hellas Sea, forgotten.

* * * *

—Awakening.

“Okay,” Merc said from somewhere as far away as Mars, “maybe I haven’t had worse.”

“Brick,” Dagger’s voice jabbed. “Wake up.”

Brick’s eyes and chest ached. He’d pissed himself, too. He opened his eyes, and saw not an evangelist icon but that of a dagger. His first mate’s face clarified, but memory nagged. What had he dreamed? It blurred, like a fish underwater. But his crew needed him.

The three shipmates floated in the shadowed spin ring. Glowpups in alcoves offered a green, spectral light. Dark betel nuts floated in a cloud around Brick. The burn was over, so there was no weight from acceleration, and the ring hadn’t resumed rotation.

Brick tapped his goggles. The ship’s network was silent. At least he could summon night vision: a grey-white scene etched with a blue framework from ship’s specs.

“I remember a godawful clang,” Merc said. His toolbag drifted, discarded during the burn, a decision that probably saved his spine.

“A dud missile?” Dagger said. Her robe billowed around her.

“Seems too gentle,” Brick said, “and I’m not feeling that lucky.”

“Electromagnetic pulse?” Merc wondered.

Brick checked his badge’s dosimeter; radiation count was normal. “Don’t think so. Kyb?”

“Couldn’t raise her,” Merc said.

Brick tried, with no result. “If she’s hurt...”

He grabbed a betel nut, threw it, winced at the pain in his injured right hand. He needed accuracy, though, so he did it again. Momentum pushed him to the “ceiling.” Dagger and Merc followed, using air-jets from their hypoknives.

“I’ll check Medical,” Brick said. “You two search the aliens’ cabins.”

“What are we looking for?” Merc asked.

“I’ll explain,” Dagger said.

Brick monkeyed to Medical. Inside, the backup power was active. White surfaces gleamed, including a sphere with flickering lights labeled PILOT KYBERNETES.

Brick tapped his goggles and established a tight beam.

“You in there?”

Here, Brick ... scrolled the textual response. What’s happening...

“Power’s out. You’re in Medical.”

Hackbot ... second missile had a hackbot ... I managed to burn it off ... took some hull with it ... but it decoupled me from ship controls. I think it ordered me sedated ... I’m on enforced medical leave. She added a green smiley face, squinting and sticking out its tongue.

“I hate emoticons. And hackbots. Okay, I’m getting you detoxed. We’re going to Control and getting you back online.”

Thanks ... Captain, have to warn you, we’re no match for them ... no Eagle out here, but the profile fits a Full Fathom Five, built at Quaoar’s human enclave by a mysterious client ... dozens of missiles aboard ... we may be finished but I’ll go down fighting, after all you’ve done...

Then another message, there and gone:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

“Those are the pearls that were his eyes...” Brick murmured.

Captain?

“Nothing, Kyb. Being senile.” His mystery signaler was still there. Either it was someone on board, or a deeply embedded virus.

“And you’re being maudlin,” Brick continued. “It’s the drugs. Hang on.” He cut the connection, and worked the medical console. He muttered, “Okay, fortune cookie guy, you have something to say, say it.” There was no response.

For I feir a deadlie storme, Brick thought, and returned to the others. They were poking through Wintergrue and Oddsgod’s cabins, having given up on Yee’s. Brick relayed Kyb’s words. “She’s alive,” he said. “But we need her live.”

“There’s nothing here,” Dagger said. “On to control.”

“Where the aliens are?” Merc asked.

“They’re not one big happy family,” Brick mused. “They must suspect each other, just like we suspect them. We’ve got room for talk, or trickery...”

“Or caveman grunts and sharp rocks,” Merc said.

“That too. But first I want to see the Erisian. He talked a lot of nonsense before I knocked him out, but he also warned me about ‘evil behind human faces.’ I think I should have heard him out.”

“Brick,” Dagger murmured. “I’m proud of you.”

“Watch it,” Brick said.

“What else did he say?” Merc asked.

“Well, I wanted to ask you about that, Merc. Don’t want to pry, but I know you got involved in a cult yourself, once. Was it the Night Readers?”

Merc frowned, ire evident even in night vision. “You think I’m involved, Captain, is that it?”

Brick couldn’t help glancing at the toolpack Merc had recovered. Then, despite himself, his eyes shifted toward Dagger’s cloak. Plenty of hiding room in either place. He was grateful the goggles concealed his gaze.

“We’ve all got pasts,” Brick said. “You two shouldn’t have to squint between the lines to know I was a smuggler once. Kells is just the kind of thing I’d have moved. In my dreams, anyway. Kyb, she used to be a Loaded bastard’s slave, maybe the one who’s out there now. Dagger, you grew up in a nasty place, thanks in part to our Gwai Lo pals. Maybe you wouldn’t mind wrecking their Exhibition.”

“I trust you have a point, Captain,” Dagger said.

“The point is, if I can’t trust my crew, I’m screwed, surely as if Eight Ball drops into a black hole. We’re a messed-up species and sometimes all we’ve got is each other. I’m making you trust a smuggler, so damned if I won’t trust you. I don’t suspect you, Merc. I just hope you know something that might give me an angle. Ambassador Vulch is a Night Reader. What’s he doing here?”

Merc nodded. “Okay, Captain. Well, I wasn’t one of them. That’s mostly an alien thing. But we did run into Night Readers, back when I ran with the Moddies.”

“The Moddies?” Dagger asked. “Rogue gene-modifiers?”

Merc chuckled. “Nothing so simple. I mean the Church of Christ the Moderator.”

Dagger nodded. “Ah, them. They believe reality is a simulation, correct? Jesus was some sort of high-level system administrator?”

“Close enough,” Merc said. “The universe is code, Word made flesh, you know. I didn’t get all that deep, though. There was a girl involved ... anyway, we talked to a bunch of Night Readers once, because we had a common enemy. Evangelists of Entropy.”

“Huh,” Brick said. “Would these Evangelists have anything to do with ‘Logovores’?”

“Logovores! Sure. Haven’t heard that word in a while. Tall tales told by aliens. Dead gods of space, you know, waiting for the day when they’ll wake up and eat everyone. Crazy stuff. They can send dreams to their servants, the Evangelists of Entropy, who go steal mojo for them.”

“What kind of mojo?” Dagger asked.

“They like to scrag important texts. Kind of like a sacrifice. They burn them, shred them, or literally eat them. They used a computer virus to hunt down copies of the Leet News ... Oh.”

Brick let out a breath. “Yeah. I think that’s it. The pirates are Evangelists of Entropy.”

“It might explain why they’ve been fairly easy on us,” Dagger said.

“Right,” Brick said. “They don’t want just any cargo, and they don’t want us vaporized. They want the book. And it went missing already, so someone on board is working with them.”

“It’s still got to be Yee,” Dagger said. “It took super-tech to crack a cryptbox, and her android body is the most advanced thing on board.”

“Not so sure,” Merc said. “If it was someone with an alien government, I’d go along with that. But if it’s this cult? Who knows what tricks they have? Or what allies?”

“You believe all that?” Dagger rejoined. “About the dead gods of space?”

“The Night Readers believed it.”

“Enough,” Brick said. “Now we’re just spinning in the dark. I have to talk to Vulch. From here on we stick together. Don’t want anyone’s ghost haunting my ship.”

“You’re an atheist, Captain,” Dagger said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I have point,” Dagger said. “The two of you are lightweights in a fight. Remember that bar on Titan?”

“I remember.” Merc smirked, rubbing the old scar. “I’ve got your back, friends. You know? Way back...”

“I need to draft a memo about respect,” Brick said.

Banter got them moving, and reaching the axial ladder was easier with the ring stopped. Darkness was a bigger hurdle, but Brick had his goggles, and Dagger had grown up in freefall. Merc could navigate the ship drunk and blindfolded; Brick had known that since the last refit party. They could handle this.

As they ascended, something shadowy shot from above and to the left, and scuttled up the axis to the bow. It wriggled toward the airlock.

“The Erisian—” Dagger said.

“Move,” Brick said.

They “climbed,” or in other words, “plunged.” Beside the open hatch to Brick’s office, dark blobs of goo pelted them: alien blood? It stained Brick’s goggles. He squinted around the blots, refusing to take the impromptu Rorschach test.

Up top, Dagger punched controls, yanked the hatch leading to the airlock’s alcove. The airlock shared a deck with Astrogation. It could access the ship’s exterior on a track parallel with the fishing bubble’s. The airlock proper was sealed.

Behind the airlock portal, Vulch’s multifaceted eyes stared back at them.

Brick tried the hatch. The safety was engaged. He would need the ship’s network to override.

“Vulch! We know you’re a Night Reader. Let’s talk.”

As Brick spoke, Merc pried off a panel and fiddled with the innards.

Vulch’s beak moved. Brick put an ear to the glass.

“You will be silent now,” croaked Vulch’s voice, “and listen. Your foe is an Evangelist of Entropy, who dreams of the cosmic Dark Age when all bright stars die. Then, in a universe of dim red suns, most of the galaxies gone forever beyond the dark horizon, the cosmos will cool. New forces of nature will spontaneously break from the ones we know now, even as the forces of today separated after the primal heat of the Dawn. Powers you would call supernatural will emerge. In that epoch belief, love, and memory will have physical power—as will fear, hate, and despair. Then will the Logovores awaken from dark comets, to raven and devour.”

Vulch was a little hypnotic when he got going. Brick blinked. “Wait. Back up. The book—”

“Silence! When the Logovores rise, they will slay the rejected and devour the favored.”

“There an Option C?”

“No. Devouring is a metaphor for absorption into the Logovores’ life process. The Logovores abhor the notion of other sentient life. They claim to be the first, and seek to be the last. A fluke of the Dawn created them, a freakish pocket of the universe’s inflation spawning a cloud of heavy elements in a manner distinct from later synthesis by stars. This was irrelevant to the cosmos’ overall scheme, but it birthed one lonely gas giant and its attendant moons. On one such moon, tidal forces sparked heat, and there, in an icy ocean below a starless vault, emerged the Logovores. They divined many secrets of the universe, and deduced the coming of the stars and other life. Enraged, they laid their plans and hid, awaiting the Dark Age yet to come. Intimations of that future and its changed forces ripple backward through time, touching their servants the Evangelists of Entropy. The Evangelists strive to weaken the other species, and strengthen their masters, by destroying the vessels of memory.”

None of it means a damn without memory ... Brick thought. Who’d said that?

“They have eaten much treasure,” Vulch continued. “I have known a world with deserts threaded by writings of glass, vast words towering like shining hills, laid down by those who brought life to that place. Evangelists of a crystalline species devoured the Testament of Life like fire along a fuse. I have seen a world of hiveminds where entire caste-nests comprise living texts. Evangelists of a gasbag species spread mad pheromones among the Nest of Nine Million Memories, scattered its constituents to the winds. I have beheld a distant star graced with sunspot poems. Evangelists of a plasma species—”

“Enough,” Brick said. “I get it. A religious nutcase—no offense—stole the book. They probably want to take it aboard the pirate ship for a nice little ritual with pipe organ and explosives. But who—?”

“No, Captain. They do not yet have the book—”

“Aha,” Merc said. The hatch popped.

Brick experienced a confused moment of peering through the crack, catching a blur of movement...

And Vulch did something, thrust its tentacles...

An invisible object whacked Brick in the face. Something flat, solid, but oddly spongy. He tumbled.

He really should have let Dagger take point.

The far hatch opened. Water surged in.

As if to add insult to injury, a message flashed across his goggles:

Nothing of him that does fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Suffer this, Brick thought, borrowing a gesture from Oddsgod as the water shoved him back. This time he did sprawl into Dagger.

They fell sputtering into the axial shaft, grabbing handholds as sparks hissed in the alcove and the interior hatch clanged. Merc had managed to close it.

“Bad timing, Merc—but good work! Now ... Merc?”

“Damn it,” Dagger said, launching up.

Merc was convulsing. Electrocution. The Loadmaster’s eyes danced upward in their sockets, and Dagger cradled him; he resembled a plague victim in a mendicant’s arms.

“His heart—” she began.

“Get him to Medical.” They had no medkit, and CPR was problematic in freefall. And Brick would not be free to help.

“You need me.”

“I’ll manage. Think I know who’s behind this. Go!”

She was already moving. Her laser pistol drifted behind.

“Take it!” she called back. “Luck!”

She plunged, while compressing Merc’s chest from behind.

Luck to you, sharp lady.

Then, “Now you’ve pissed off an old Martian fisherman,” he told the universe, and grabbed the gun.

* * * *

Before he got moving, he pushed up his goggles. Things went from grey/sharp to colored/blurred. He envisioned lurid monsters of space as if inscribed by medieval monks, scuttling and oozing through his vision’s shadowy margins. He dismissed them, cupping a water blob and splashing it against the alien stains on the goggles, which proved to be a yellow-flecked green.

Clean enough. He set off for Control.

But on impulse, he revisited his office along the way. There he found the hypoknife drifting end-over-end through the air. He caught it, and frowned at the stains upon the blade.

Pushing his goggles back again, he blinked.

In natural vision Brick discerned two kinds of alien fluid marking the steel.

One was purple, Vulch’s blood.

The other was that same green, yellow-speckled goo that stained his goggles in the shaft.

He studied this weird palette splattered across his knife. He sheathed the blade and pushed down his goggles.

God might be displeased, they read, before the message vanished.

“He can take a number,” Brick said, and moved on.

Control resembled a small operating room with tables for three patients. The tables were really acceleration couches, and what dirtsiders might take for surgical gear was rather a set of control panels mounted on mobile arms.

The representatives of the Great Powers clung to those couches, idly exploring the controls. Yee offered Brick a cold smile. Oddsgod’s tendrils contrived a grotesque human grin. Wintergrue drifted, some of its young upon the couch, anchoring the gasbag with silk-strands. The parent-entity was oriented to stare at the viewer “overhead.”

The viewer bore a split image. On the right loomed Quaoar, dark, icy, crater-pocked, yet glinting with scattered lights. On the left, a tri-winged vessel sliced a starfield.

“Friends of yours?” Brick jabbed the pistol at the viewer.

Yee shrugged. Oddsgod’s tendrils made a cartoon of a human raising hands in a “got me” gesture. Wintergrue said, “We might have asked the same.”

Brick reached the control panel beside the Quaoran, mastering his shiver at approaching what appeared a mammoth nest of spiders. He clung to the panel like a raft. Little ten-limbed creatures watched him interrogate it. He ordered Kyb back on duty; but that would take time. Meanwhile he could access secondary functions, like hatches and communications.

Okay. He was here. Now he had to plunge into the deep water, and act on all his hunches.

“Wigness,” he sent to Full Fathom Five. “I don’t want the job.”

“Brick!” came the voice of the Program Specialist for Museums and Cultural Objects. “How did you guess?”

“ ‘Beware the Eagle.’ That message has been bugging me. Then I remembered. To the scribes who made Kells, each gospel author had his symbol. The eagle was John’s, and we’re carrying his book. ‘Beware’ meant I shouldn’t have taken this job in the first place. You were taunting me. Right?”

“My little joke,” Wigness said. “The messages in your goggles are inspired, of all things, by ancient junk mail. The virus plays on words you’ll find suggestive, muddying the waters, making you jump at shadows. I wanted you distracted. But that first warning was mine. I figured you’d miss the point, and think the ‘eagle’ was my ship. Or even the Erisian, given your prejudices. Good show. You’re not as thick as I thought.”

Brick glowered. “How the hell did you get out here?”

“Why, I made it out here the fastest way of all—beamed at the speed of light.”

“You got Loaded,” Brick said.

“Absolutely. My masters can make a man wealthy, Brick. I’ll be doing even better after I deliver up the cryptbox.”

“Like you delivered me.”

“You weren’t listening very well, back at Mars, or else you brushed off my hints. So be it, I thought. My shuttle was loaded with electronic infiltration gear. While you were distracted with that holo-image, I left surprises in your goggles, too deep for you to purge. I took Eight Ball’s technical specs in trade. I know your ship, Brick. You’re outmatched. Unless you want her blown to Quicksilver Scrapyards, hold course while I match velocities, and hand over that box.”

“And betray my trust.”

“Well, if it weren’t for your history, you could probably explain. As it is ... you could always disappear into the Kuiper Belt. I could even help. I know people, and people who aren’t people.”

Brick cocked an eye at the aliens. “Speaking of people who aren’t people ... Who’s your accomplice on my ship? The Quaoaran? The Orcan? The Ixion?”

“What Ixion?” Wigness’ voice gave nothing away.

“Long story.”

“You are stalling, Brick. Just give me the box.”

“Hey, let a dumb fisherman think it over a little. For old times’ sake.”

“You’ve got just a few minutes, Brick. Fathom out.”

Yee the Ixion said, “You have a difficult-to-digest problem.”

“In other words,” Oddsgod the Orcan added, “you’re screwed.”

“This is a quandary,” Wintergrue the Quaoran said. “I sympathize. Do you preserve your ship by surrendering the treasure?”

“Your people wanted it for your Exposition, Wintergrue,” Brick answered. “What do you say?”

Younglings skittered; red writing curled upon the gasbag like blood upon snow. “You see us as exploiters, don’t you, Captain Chin? Yet we’d hoped this Exposition would improve the pride of your people, your works displayed alongside those of the Kuiper Belt’s colonists.”

“Then bail us out.”

“We honor your independence, Captain. If we did not, your system would be overrun. Your battle is your own.”

Brick took a deep breath. Rage would make him stupid. In his mind’s eye he transported himself back to Mars, to fish again upon the family pier.

He had to be patient, like a fisherman. There was a chance yet he might pull his fish from the water.

Water ... He imagined dark seas on an icy world, and the still colder thoughts of ancient dwellers there. He thought of the menagerie of little creatures in the art of the Book of Kells, all bound together within illuminated knotwork, as though huddling together against the dark. If Vulch was right, all the Gwai Lo and the humans too were like that, in the eyes of the Logovores. Tiny, fragile. All on the same page. Awaiting a sea change, as Shakespeare might have said, into something rich and strange.

So bigoted are you...

...sometimes all we’ve got is each other...

“I will condescend to offer advice,” Yee said. “You could discard the cryptbox into the water shell, like a sucked seedpod. Flush the water to space. This will give you some separation from Wigness’ prize.”

Oddsgod’s tendrils formed a pair of dice. “An interesting gamble!”

“We would regret its loss,” Wintergrue said, “but this tactic might save you.”

Brick tapped a control.

“That’s interesting,” Wintergrue said. “Why are you opening an interior airlock?”

“You’re adopting my suggestion, Chin?” Yee said. “That is surprisingly astute.”

“If premature,” Wintergrue said. “You havn’t shifted that airlock to the outer hull, Captain. Water will spill into the interior. Perhaps you’ve ‘tipped’?”

Brick set up a shipwide conference, pumped it to loudspeakers. “Dagger. How’s Merc?”

“Stable.” Dagger said, relief burnishing her voice. “Got his heart going. When he wakes he’ll feel like Eight Ball rolled over him, but he’ll live.”

Brick let go a long breath. Something was going right. “Thank you. Now, I’ve got to ask for more, first mate. You’re probably covered in that green goo that was floating around my office and in the shaft. You’ve got a lab there. You’re probably smarter than anyone else aboard. Quick analysis?”

“Of course...” she said, the question in her voice unstated.

“I’m happy your grease monkey will live,” said Oddsgod, “but what’s this ‘goo’?”

“Loadmaster,” Brick said. “My Loadmaster will live. And let’s review a few things. My old pal out there is awfully insistent I surrender the cryptbox. Not the book, mind. The box. Like he’s begging me to put one over on him...”

The klaxon rang.

Brick stared at the screen, which had automatically formed a triptych. Between the smooth orb of Quaoar and the sharp wedges of Full Fathom Five there glided a thing like an immense crystalline icicle, glinting with greens-blues-purples, tapering toward an auroral engine plume.

Brick’s heart hammered. That New Lhasa-sized monster could make Eight Ball disappear with one cold look.

“An Orcan warship?” Wintergrue said. “Here? You’d actually risk a conflict with Quaoar?”

“Hey, life’s a gamble,” Oddsgod said, tendrils sketching a cartoonish hand of cards.

Brick consulted his panel. “They’re not signaling.”

“Not that you can detect,” Yee said.

Brick stared at Oddsgod, weird anenome-thing from an icy moon of a distant sun, so like the world of the Logovores...

Deep breaths, Brick. Keep a grip.

“I’ve got it,” said Dagger. “The green material is stomach residue from an Ixion. Looks like it was eating some kind of processed beef with a peculiar garnish...”

“Define peculiar.”

“Well, there’s iron gall, orpiment, lapis lazuli...”

“Thank you.” Brick scowled at Yee, raised the laser pistol.

“You have an Orcan warship out there, and you’re worried about me?” Yee scoffed. “Was my breakfast that offensive?”

“You tell me. But first, go back to what you just said. You encouraged me to put the box into the water shell, so I could flush the book to Wigness. Maybe you knew who really had the book, and where he was. Vulch ... you back in?”

There was a caw of assent.

“Come to Control. It will be all right.”

Brick shut the airlocks. He held a finger over the red switch that would flush the water shell.

“Acceleration has damaged more than your eyes, Captain Chin,” said Yee. “Whatever you’re accusing me of, my skinsuit protects me from laser shots, projectiles...”

Brick saw Vulch’s shadowy form filling the open hatch. He nodded to the Night Reader.

Vulch slid something from his pouch, something shimmering and transparent, something that had, earlier, whacked him in the face ... something his vision couldn’t really process.

Or rather, not his vision, but the computer-generated images in his virus-compromised goggles.

Beware Erisians bearing gifts, goaded Wigness’ viral program. But now Brick knew to ignore it. “How about that famous Ixion indigestion.” He caught the control panel between his knees and opened his left arm.

Vulch guessed his gambit and tossed the invisible thing. Brick caught it, felt its weight like a wide, flat slab. He thrust it toward Yee.

“Remember this?”

Yee vomited.

Green ooze bubbled up between the buttons of her gown. Brick’s eyes widened as pressure parted the fabric and he beheld her android body’s navel, saw that it doubled as a tooth-encrusted mouth.

The body itself stood impassively, still smiling, as the true mouth heaved green blobs.

Brick fired into the maw. His right hand ached, but he kept the beam focused.

The android body darkened at that spot, absorbing what energy it could. But a vile stench rose from within. Finally, Brick had to let go the trigger, stretch his fingers.

Vulch flapped his way between Yee and Brick. The two other aliens, watching with spider-eyes and tendrils, stared at their immobile colleague/rival.

“Time’s up, Brick,” Wigness called on the radio.

Still smiling, Ms. Yee said flatly, “They’ve killed me, Wigness. It’s all revealed. Destroy us.”

“Pilot reporting,” Kyb’s voice chimed. “Did I miss anything?”

“Two gee burn!” Brick bellowed. “Collision course with Quaoar!”

“Collision? But—”

“Do it!”

Brick clung to the panel as Eight Ball rolled. Their new course further raised their relative velocity with Full Fathom Five. He watched the tactical display until the moment was right, then flushed the water shell.

Suddenly Yee sprang toward him, knocking Vulch aside. She slapped his injured right hand. He screamed and dropped both the gun and the other thing.

Then Dagger was there, stabbing into Yee’s midsection with a hypoknife. The two slammed the bulkhead hard. Thanks to acceleration, so did Brick.

Wigness’ voice snarled, “My missiles were destroyed! It wasn’t his laser—and there are no mines on Eight Ball’s specs! What the hell are those things?”

“Flash-frozen Pacific cod,” Brick gasped. Don’t mess with an old Martian fisherman.

Yee abandoned the crumpled form of Dagger, springing at Brick. But now two more aliens interposed themselves, Oddsgod grappling Yee with its aquarium’s manipulators, Wintergrue’s young and their robot analogs coiling silk around the three and leaping off to anchor the combatants to the bulkheads. Though the Orcan and Quaoran looked frail compared to Yee, Yee stopped struggling.

Oddsgod said, “Fun was fun. It was amusing to roil the waters. My government doesn’t trust cults, you see, Night Readers and Evangelists included. We knew agents of both were going to be aboard Eight Ball. I was instructed to tag along and watch, but not intervene unless things got too crazy. I’d guess this qualifies. You’ve strayed into dangerous waters, ‘Ambassador Yee.’ Dead or merely blooded, today the current brings you to Orcus.”

“Fool!” Yee cried. “One day, even you children of the iceworlds will be devoured—”

Oddsgod’s tendrils again sketched a hand, giving the finger to Yee and the room at large. The Orcan vanished in a flash of light, Yee disappearing with it.

Wintergrue remained, anchored by silken lines to a dozen nooks and crannies of the control room. Brick swallowed.

“The Orcan warship’s gone,” Kyb said.

“Tell me,” Brick said, “were any of the passengers just a diplomat?”

“I was,” Wintergrue said, “though I’m about to retire, one way or the other. So I will say, in my most diplomatic manner, that you’re on a collision course with my people’s colony, and you’re all about to die.”

“Now, now...” Brick said, struggling to his knees. “I know you’ve got a draconian reputation to maintain. The thing is, we’ve got an artifact on board Eight Ball that your people specifically asked to see. We’re just, uh, delivering it more efficiently.”

Brick smiled a friendly red grin, and wondered if it was the last thing he’d ever do. There were worse ways to go...

“Captain,” Wintergrue said, “it seems to me you could have fired on Fathom before it became a fully powered threat. Why didn’t you?”

“Gunning down innocents is Gwai. ... It seemed right to give them the benefit of the doubt. Excellency.”

Wintergrue said, “Interesting.”

Suddenly, the acceleration dropped to a light tug. Like a man expecting a full suitcase and lifting an empty one, Brick lost his balance.

The viewer showed a ceiling of ice and flashing lights and metal. Creaks and groans reverberated through the hull.

“Captain,” came Kyb’s wondering voice. “We’re at a dead stop. Inside a hangar. On Quaoar.”

“Aiya,” Brick whispered.

“It seems fitting,” Wintergrue said, “to give you the benefit of the doubt as well. Your ship’s been impounded for recklessness, Captain Chin. That this act rescues you from Fathom is incidental.” Wintergrue reeled in its anchoring younglings, in the process picking up some spin. This gave the impression of someone dancing free of a vexing job.

Wintergrue said, “It really is time I cut loose my eldest, before it truly rebels. Soon my people will arrive to secure your incarceration.”

“You’ve never incarcerated anyone before...” Brick reconsidered the wisdom of complaining about not dying, and shut up.

“We’re creative. As are you. It seems every so often your species deals with the horns of a dilemma by leaping the bull, so to speak. It will be fascinating to see if humanity can avoid being gored.”

Wintergrue too vanished, less flashily than Oddsgod, there and gone. Like a junk message.

“Bull to that,” Brick said, and then, “Dagger...”

Vulch already crouched over her. Brick had to contain his urge to shove the carrion-eater aside. The Erisian had already removed Dagger’s cloak, and though the grey tunic beneath was hardly revealing, Brick winced a little for the loss of her privacy. Then he winced at the nasty cut on her chest, and the twisted arm.

The other arm clutched something invisible, still rippling in Brick’s goggles’ display like heated air.

“I have given her something for the pain,” Vulch said. “I will help you reach your medical pod.”

“Thanks.”

“Wait...” Dagger groaned, focused on Brick. “You old lech, Brick, always knew you wanted to look at me...”

“Come on, first mate.” He spat. “I’m the soul of goddamn propriety—”

“Shut up. Fair is fair.”

She reached up with her good hand, letting drop her burden with a thud. She pushed his goggles up above his eyes.

Through the blur he saw his first mate ... and beside her, Eight Ball’s portion of the Book of Kells. Its cover was a modern transparent pane, and through it he could see the dazzle of the four evangelist symbols preceding the Gospel of John, the man, the lion, the calf, and the eagle all staring up at him, perhaps a bit reproachfully. He could also see the dampness across the top of the manuscript, and the big bite taken from one corner.

“Now we’re even,” Dagger said. “You have nice eyes, even if they’re nearly gone. But how did you see...”

“Come on. As you were, Kyb.”

“This isn’t good for my paranoia, Captain,” he heard Kyb saying. “I’ve been impounded...”

Vulch trailing, Brick carried Dagger fireman style down the shaft. He could navigate Eight Ball almost as well as Merc could. Damn it. He’d almost lost the Loadmaster, almost lost them all...

Dagger said, “No, tell me, how were you sure it was Yee?”

“Dumb luck.”

“Honestly.”

“Okay. She was a cultist, not with the Ixion government. Seems that even violating the tech ban, she didn’t have the tools to break a cryptbox. She recruited Wigness, or the cult did. He hacked my goggles, causing mischief ... including selectively removing the book from my goggles’ display. Muddying the waters. He hoped I’d find the cryptbox ‘empty,’ and leave it open. Or else go along with the letter of his demand for the box. Heh, like I’m that clever.... But if that didn’t work, Yee was more than ready to get rough with me.” Brick smiled his red smile. “But Vulch tripped things up.”

“Yes,” the Erisian croaked. “After your noble captain stabbed and drugged me, he opened the box and, believing it empty, slammed it down. The impulse pushed the book out—but he did not see it. I, slipping into oblivion, tried to report the rising glory of the relic behind him. This was insufficient to alert my heroic assailant.”

“Less editorializing,” Brick muttered.

“Keep a grip, Brick,” Dagger said. “Go on, Ambassador...”

They reached the spin ring.

“Later,” Vulch said, “I regained consciousness and found the Ixion devouring the book. No doubt it is the fate of Erisians to witness dire violence. No doubt also, the Evangelist of Entropy could not resist sampling her prize before delivering it to her masters. But as I watched, she convulsed, and vomited. I surprised her then, grabbing the only weapon to hand, the knife in my shoulder. I lost the knife in the melee, but fled with the book.”

“I see,” Dagger murmured. “Yee must have crossed over to Control ... while we were busy at the airlock...”

“Later on I found the knife,” Brick said. “There were two kinds of stain. At first I assumed the green stuff was yours, Vulch. But remember Titan, Dagger? Ixions love Earth cellulose, but our animal tissue makes them violently ill. You see, those Celtic monks didn’t use plant fiber for manuscripts. Today vellum is just a word for any fancy paper—but it originally meant paper made from calfskin.”

He checked to see if Dagger appreciated his book lore and his cunning, but found her asleep. “Good night,” he whispered, stowing her within the pod. Medical devices hissed over her. He regarded Dagger beside the slumbering Merc as he might study a rare tome behind museum glass. It could be a hard thing, sometimes, this detachment—appreciating without possessing. He’d already spent a long lifetime working on it. He’d keep trying.

Vulch lurked outside, clutching the mangled Gospel of John.

“Captain. I am sorry for the harm to your ship and crew.”

Brick took a deep breath. “My fault too,” he said at last. “But why couldn’t you have spilled it all when you boarded?”

“Would you have believed a Gwai Lo? You have a reputation.”

Brick glared. But Vulch deserved honesty. “No. Probably I wouldn’t have. Maybe that’s to my shame. Maybe it’s best I rot in the caverns of Quaoar.”

Brick had slowed, and now Vulch was staring as if at a fresh carcass. But the alien’s words were no pronouncement of death. “You, Captain, are a lover of books. Thus you have gazed time and again into the depths of other minds, other times and places. I know it is within your power to look beyond the peculiarities of flesh.”

He didn’t share the alien’s mysticism. Hell, he didn’t put any stock in human mysticism. And yet.

In John’s gospel, Brick knew, there was talk of the Word made flesh. It wasn’t his holy text ... but maybe he could take a bite from it, so to speak. Maybe he and Vulch, and Dagger and Merc and Kyb, were all just words made flesh, somewhere down deep. The universe yet in its morning, babbling to itself, trying hard to figure itself out before the night closed in.

He reached out and claimed the book. Then, with it nestled between arm and chest, he took a tentacle as well, improvising a handshake. Something rich and strange, he thought, sails the morne. Brick’s flesh crawled as suckers fastened, as though he suffered a sea-change, feared a deadly storm.

But he kept his grip.

* * * *

* * * *