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Return to Morton Vischer    Contact Morton Vischer

LEONARD ASAD: March 1st, 4097
    The lights in the lab went out.
    I looked up from the dark monitor at my assistants. Both them lifted their gazes toward the window. Far across the concourse, passed the barracks of the cyborinfantry, Qadimgoundi climbed onto the perimeter walls of the Supervox Complex to man the laser cannons there. That only meant one thing; Chairman Chanzir's Damgoundi surrounded us.
    "Chanzir must have cut the power," one of my assistants said, his eyes wide and grave. He looked down at the sleek black stasis case floating beside my console. My daughter was inside.
    Fortunately, I finished downloading her mnemes into the cognitive core before the console lost power. Her soul was safe; hidden within the construct of the core where Chanzir would never look. I doubted that the Qadimgoundi could hold off the chairman's corporate forces for long. We were simply outnumbered. The chairman and the board of directors had been winnowing away my wife's control of the quadrant for years. They were Nanitech Corporation now. The Qadim, my wife's noble family, had been nudged decision by decision closer to the door of the boardroom at Nanitech Center Station until the Chairman and his board finally pushed the Qadim all the way out once and for all. By the time Malika Qadim ascended to the autocracy, she found her station hollow. She was little more than a figure head, but she had the bearing and the strength to be more. The chairman would have none of it, but Malika was incapable of keeping her place. The only might left to her were the few thousand Qadimgoundi troops that lived on the Supervox guarding the quadrant comweb complex and the Qadim ancestral home, the Kooch. They would not be enough.
    I could scarcely believe the glorious age of the Qadim was ending.
    As I looked out the window once more, I saw the air cavalry coming in. The attack hovers began strafing runs. Their targeting lasers gashed the clear desert air. Qadimgoundi answered with their own volleys. More targeting lasers strobed across the blue. Their cannons pivoted and wheeled expertly, but the hovers were far more maneuverable. The battle was futile. The wall cannons began to explode. Loyal Qadim soldiers began to die.
    What would become of us, I didn't know. I looked at my daughter's case. At least, I could be relatively certain that Chanzir would leave her alone. After all, she was harmless now; a vegitible without her mnemonic files. If she was lucky, she would end up in the mausoleum the rest of the Qadim dynasty. As for myself .... I might have a choice between incarceration in one of the Chairman's synaptic retraining centers or death by injection, but to live without my wife, without my daughter would be a betrayal to them. I would choose the needle in the end.
    "Doctor Asad."
    Captain Hait Harbin stood in the doorway, wearing dusty body armor, helmutless and holding a rifle pulser cocked up in one arm, the wire butt caught in the fold of his elbow. For a desperate moment I had hope. There was no Qadimgoundi more loyal to Malika than Hait Harbin. Like his father and his father before him, he swore his personal allegiance to the Qadim Family for life. He was Elite Qadimgoundi. Kooch Guard. It was an ancient Harbin tradition. I was relieved to see his leathery, brown-stoic face. It meant that Malika was safe. "Hait, is the Bin Qadim with you?"
    He gave his dusty, bald head a shake, still watching the battle outside my window with unyielding tan eyes. "Come with me," he said.
    "Where?"
    "I have orders to get you out of the complex."
    "Malika's orders?"
    "Of course." He answered my gaze at last with his own; augmented, sand colored irises that betrayed no emotion except urgency. "Please, Doctor. We must go."
    "Where is she, Hait?"
    Something in his gaze faltered, but all he told me was, "there's no time to explain. You must come with me now."
    I looked at the stasis case and my assistants. "But my daughter......"
    His gaze shifted toward the case a moment, then he looked at me and said, "she is a Qadim, Doctor. I will protect her."
    Of course. Reluctantly, I left her behind in the stasis case with my assistants to follow Hait.
    As we stepped from a service door into the sunlight, a military transport hover with no insignia or registration numbers descended to meet us on the concourse. A sudden and certain dread fell upon me. I turned to Hait, demanding, "Where is my wife? Where is the Bin Malika Qadim?"
    He never answered, but shoved me through the opening transport door. I sprawled on the floor dirtying my lab coat, even as the transport began to ascend. My confusion was compounded by the profound disorientation of sudden vertical acceleration. As I raised myself up on my hands and knees, I noticed the military issue field boots around me were black, not the regulation sand tan of the Qadimgoundi or even the Damgoundi. As I looked around me, I found myself surrounded by heavily armed men and women in chameleoned body armor.     Then I noticed the emblems on their right sleeves; two tigers on a globe. They were D.C.B. Black Guard. Among them was a man with a white crew cut and piercing blue eyes. He wore chameleon body armor as well, but no emblem. Later I learned he was an operative of the D.C.B. intelligence department. He smiled gently and offered his hand. As he drew me to my feet, he told me in that elegant, guttural Nosterran accent, "Bon Jour, Doctor Asad, my name is Gilbere Renard Delamare."
    "Where is my wife? Where is Malika Qadim?"
    "I’m sorry, Doctor, " Gilbere told me, "but the Bin is dead."
    "Doctor Asad. "
    I blinked out of the memories and found myself in the study of my town house in L'etoile on Nosterre, where I stayed each year through the spring to enjoy the annual Fete. I was light years away from the Supervox; my sandy home world and four decades removed from the coup that claimed my family. Remembering that someone had called my name, I looked toward the doorway of the study. My Nosterran house keeper stood there, her chubby hands folded over her apron. "Yes, Simone?"
    She smiled, "Your escort to the Palace has arrived."
    "Thank you. Tell them I will be down in a moment."
    In the placid oak panels and leather sitting furniture of my study, among the shelves of books, mementos from the Supervox and the images of my wife and daughter, I can still hear the Supervox wall cannons exploding and the screams of Qadimgoundi. In their dying cries, I heard not the anguish of death, but the outrage of it. I still felt an echo the intensity of the fear ... not for myself, but for my family. It's a feeling that has never really faded. They say that Malika's hover was shot down by Chanzir's forces as she tried to reach the Kooch for reinforcements. She died when her hover struck the mountain side. The news that she died instantly gave me some relief. The Damgoundi would have done the worst to her if she lived through the crash. As for my daughter’s body, D.C.B. intelligence learned that she had been interred in the Qadim Mausoleum along with my wife without ceremony or even public notice a week after Chanzir usurped Nanitech. After I arrived on Nosterre, the home world of the Du Coeur-Blanc, I learned that Malika and several loyal members of the Qadimgoundi had been aware that a coup was brewing for some time and prepared to escape to the quadrant of their closest allies; the D.C.B., but I was the only one to escape alive.
    The sadness lingers thirty-seven years later. One man's mad craving for power destroyed everything I knew and loved. Malika's grand old quadrant corporation could not have fallen into worse hands. Nanitech has not been the same since her murder. Nothing has.
    Yet, on this special day, I remembered the moment that the Qadim fell and wondered. Can they rise again? Perhaps. I held in my hands a cream colored velvet folder that promised a miracle. It was the Fete Boon, the highest accommodation from the Emperor and Empress Du Coeur-Blanc of Nosterre. Every year in honor of the start of Fete; The Imperial Birthday, the Empiri award this to one of their subjects who they deem to have been an outstanding servant to the Palace and to the people of Nosterre. It was a documented promise from the Emperor and Empress to fulfill any wish. This year I had been selected for my years of contribution in the field of nanicybernetics.
    I rose from the wing back and went to down to the front door.
    In the gleaming silver buttons, white silk piping and crisp midnight colored wool of their dress uniforms, two Black Guard stood in the entrance hall.
    The officer on the right looked out from beneath the glossy black brim of his hat with dutiful gray eyes. He gave me a crisp nod. "Good afternoon, Doctor Asad. I'm Lieutenant Shelby-Pique and this is Lieutenant Tressier-Crae."
    "Good afternoon, Doctor Asad." She nodded under her gleamy brim, and added a smile as she stepped aside to gesture with a white gloved hand down the way walk beyond my gardens and wrought iron gate to the bricked faced street and the security hover that waited there, poised no more than fifteen centimeters over the brick way. Its magnetic vorti stirred the tender spring foliage of my boarder violets at the base of the ironwork. The Lieutenant said, "If you're ready to depart, Doctor…?"
    "Of course."
    I had been summoned to an evening audience with the Emperor and Empress.
    As we settled among the pebbled leather cushions, I looked down at the pale velvet folder in my hand and lifted the coverlet again to reveal the pale linen parchment and gold script there. I thumbed the stamp of the Imperial Insignia. Embossed in a luminous, golden ceiling wax were two tigers rampant, back to back, their hind claws planted in a world, this world; Nosterre. Beneath the globe, on an unfurled scroll the D.C.B. motto 'Les Tigris Iss' or the "The tigers come" was inscribed. The Emperor and Empress signed it themselves. There was an ornamental page marker; a gold chord and tassel string around the delicate binding of the folder. I brushed it aside to read the documentation which, in essence, granted me an Imperial Wish. I cannot deny that the moment the Black Guard handed me that elegant folder was pure magic. I had not needed much time to meditate on my choices. I had but one wish, one very, very precious wish. Perhaps, so precious that the only beings capable of granting it were the super powerful sovereigns of Nosterre.
    Soon enough we passed out of the city and over the flowing, greening spring countryside toward the pale, spired palace nestled in the Imperial Forests of the eastern hills. There was no place like this on my sandy home world, on the Supervox, although I suppose the Nuni Mountains came closest. On those alpine slopes, winter snows fed the grassy woodlands around the Qadim Kooch year round. It was one of the few green places on the Supervox, but it hardly compared with the verdence of Nosterre. When I arrived here thirty-seven year ago, the green vitality of this glorious planet astonished me. I thought I had landed in paradise. In many ways, I had.
    As I watched our long approach to the palace, passed the pilot's braided shoulder, out our windshield, I marveled at the way Nosterre still impressed me after all these years.
     Lieutenant Tessier-Crae sat down across from me and briefed me on the evening itinerary. There would be the usual choke of news reporters, holocam crews and thronging Nosterrans on the promenade of the palace, and as always they would be kept well away from the hovercade as it entered the palace proper through the western archway. The Lieutenant looked me in the eyes as she urged me not to release my Boon Request to anyone prior to the Empiri. Announcements would occur at eighteen hundred hours, a private dinner at nineteen hundred to include only the standard compliment of Black Guard, the Empiri and myself in the William Hall dining room where I could present my Boon Request at leisure. At twenty-one hundred, if all terms are agreed upon, there would be a holovised press conference allowing me five minutes to make a public announcement of my Boon Request, offer my thanks to the Empiri, then five minutes to volley reporter's questions. The Empiri would also attend to field questions as well. Then the young lieutenant asked me if I had any questions. Of course, I had none.
    At that, she looked toward the front of the hover and told me, "We're arriving."
The Arch du Paix rose up over the roof of the security hover as we passed through it and entered the expansive Promenade. The great pale body of the palace, its grand halls, all laden with tall, fenestrated windows which held hundreds of tiny panes that flashed in the sunset, wrapped around the precise checker board pattern of pale marble walk ways, still black looking glass pools and exquisitely hedged gardens of the Promenade. Below us, Nosterrans crowded the marble, reaching up to our hovercade from far below with little blue, white and red pennants. The whole throng waved them furiously, creating a frenetic sea of flashing blue, white and red while a dark band of holocams at the edge of the barricades placidly tracked our arrival.
    Having been a member of the D.C.B. court so many years now as well as a member of the Qadim court before its ruin, public comportment is second nature to me, so I rose to stand at the wind shield where I smiled and waved down at the enthusiastic multitudes. Speakers mounted high in the architecture of each of the four arched entrances into the Palace proper began to play the Nosterran anthem as we cleared the Arch du Paix. The cheers died out and were replaced by thousands lifting their voices to sing along, The entire Promenade, the very center of the Palace, sang for Nosterre, for their beloved Emperor and Empress, for their beloved Imperial Family.
    At that moment, tens of thousands of voices tingling over my spine, I thought of my daughter and how she utterly crackled with excitement for Qadim pageantry during the holiday of the Zh'ra Shahr. We used to stand in the window of our penthouse in the Qadim District and applaud as Supervoxians poured flower petals from the windows of their apartments and businesses , creating a delicate confetti that covered the dusty streets and our own thronging, singing people on color and perfume. But that life, that grand old era of pageantry and nobility on the Supervox, along with the Qadim Regime and my daughter had been gone a very long time.
    We touched down on the roof of William Hall and stepped out of the hover to be met by a Black Guard officer from the Palace Varchives with a holocam on his shoulder, The captain of the escort indicated me to stand at the end of the ribbon of red velvet carpet that had been laid out from our hoverpad to the pale facade of the elevator vestibule. Except for the wind keening through the marble fleur de lye railing and the thin whine of the holocam recording, there was no other sound. Even the ceremonial swords on hips of the rows of Black Guard bracketing the carpet swayed silently in the wind. The announcements were brief, then the gold embossed doors of the elevator opened.
    Dressed identically in military whites, sashed in Nosterran blue, white and red, baring the medallions of state, epauletted and gold braided, the emperor and empress strolled from the elevator over that red velvet runner, through the long, stiff gauntlet of Palace Guard. The captain barked and his company responded with a crisp salute. They held it until the empiri cleared their lines and stepped up to me.
    The captain barked again and his company’s arms snapped back to their sides.
Gazing out from under the glossy black brim of his hat, Emperor William looked down at with clear-perfect green eyes; like sun back lighting the most translucent emerald disks. They glowed from within. His magnificently contoured features remained impassive as he offered his hand. "Doctor Asad, welcome."
    "Yes, Welcome." The empress showed a bit more expression under her brim. Those supremely engineered pale, pale blue irises, like benevolent ice beamed down on me with a reassuring mixture of mercy and command.
    They were, without a doubt, the two most powerful people of the entire D.C.B. corporation; the two chief share holders and co-rulers of a corporate empire that spanned thousands of worlds and an entire quadrant of space; the products of a thousand years of meticulous genetic refinement, imperial privilege, the most sophisticated nani-cybernetic augmentation in the galactic community and my dearest friends of thirty-seven years.
    They each shook my hand, then turned away as two Black Guard instantly inserted themselves between me and the empiri's backs. I followed them through the lines of guards to the elevator. A two guard escort filed into the elegant pebbled leather carriage with us.
    After all these years, these people are still marvels to me. Crossing that roof top, all of Nosterre's eyes on them, the emperor and the empress were elegant and stately, the absolute pinnacle of Imperial comportment, reserve and grace. Yet, the instant the elevator doors shut and the prying eyes of the press and the public could no longer see, William reached up, drew off his hat, revealing that wavy wealth of youthful black hair shot through with silver at the temples, and plucked hastily at the top buttons of his waist coast to loosen his snug, gold braided mandarin collar. He snarled gently through the task as he talked. "It's been a while, Leo. We've been meaning to ring you up, but this place …." The emperor frowned and cast his eyes around our elevator cab in comic aggravation until they found me again. "Well, you know. How have you been?"
    "Well, Thank you. And yourselves?"
    "Oh, we carry on," Empress Isadora smiled, lifting off her hat to unleash a tumble of gleaming auburn tresses that fell around her shoulders to clash pleasantly with her military whites. Her pale blue gaze betrayed mischief of a kind I could only guess at, although it has always reminded me powerfully of my beloved Malika.
    Since we had not spoken in many months, I made the effort to catch up. "The princes and princesses are well, I trust?"
    "William chuckled, "Leo, don't you watch the news?"
    "I do, but I rarely believe what I hear about the Imperial Family, Your Grace."
    The emperor and the empress laughed gratefully. The empress told me, "The children are fine Leo. Thank you for asking."
    "Any word recently from the youngest prince?" Although Sebastian Le Deuxieme left Nosterre to travel the stars many years ago, he has somehow managed to remain a consistent source of Nosterran gossip. Being a friend of the Family and, for a time, the youngest prince's personal physician when he became mortally ill as a child, my interest in his exploits was based on my genuine fondness for him, rather than the general kind of opportunistic disdain that has plagued his reputation since he was a child.
    "Sebastian drops us a com from time to time. He's healthy and doing well." Isadora stepped closer to her husband and twined a graceful hand over his white sleeve. Patting it lightly, she teased, "but that's not enough for some of us."
    It is true that over the years, the emperor demonstrated a certain favoritism for his youngest and has admitted that he preferred his adventure prone son remained within the mantle of protection on Nosterre that all the other Imperial offspring enjoyed. In temperament and appearance, there was a striking resemblance between Sebastian Le Deuxieme and the emperor, but William's pride in his youngest stemmed from a far deeper source than mere vanity. There was a certain something about that boy. I had seen first glimmer of it when he was recovering from surgery in the hospital. It was no more than a certain light; a presence of spirit in his young green eyes that I have not seen in any other human being before or since, even among the Imperials. His rehabilitation took years. Along the way he proved to be determined and that determination became the stuff of legend. He went from a slack faced, paralyzed near vegetable to a frenetic prodigy; a creative genius within the space of a few short, extraordinary years. The boy did it all under the relentless scrutiny of the press and public. An ancient tradition of genetic refinement has spoiled the Nosterran people. They have come to expect, even demand perfection, particularly of their imperial family. Not even a crippled six year old boy merited reprieve. Little Sebastian bore the pressure with an odd sort of stoic grace. If the child was ever wounded by the open, sometimes bitter criticism of his people, he never let it show. He simply set about methodically conquering his disabilities. It was that touching, un-self pitying and deeply private heroism of the child that William treasured so. I think the emperor considers Sebastian Le Deuxieme a kind of champion for the Family; the only one who had overcome a kind of suffering and deprivation none of his other siblings or even his people could genuinely understand. For William, the youngest prince became the embodiment of Du Coeur-Blanc courage and tenacity.
The emperor shrugged in his favorite son's defense, admitting only, "He is making a security risk of himself running around in space without an escort, Is."
    Which was true. There was no denying that Sebastian Le Deuxieme has become a bit of a rascal.
    We sat down to supper in William Hall, clustered fairly informally at one end of the long dining table that on many occasions seated the entire Imperial Family, that is five princes, five princesses, the emperor and the empress. Among the gold dinner service and fine china we were served, making conversation, while butlers dipped in and out of the pool of light over our end of the table pouring more wine, offering steaming entrees and clearing away finished courses. The pace was so relaxed that I began to feel some reluctance to offer up my request for the Boon. The longer I waited, the more I considered my wish and reconsidered my wish. The reckoning struck me like a hammer. My dearest wish, my Fete Boon, I realized was completely inappropriate and almost certainly impossible. My mind whirling with horrific doubt, I watched the butlers set out the desert and coffee service.
    The emperor chose that moment to lean toward me, acute green eyes twinkling and asked, "So, Leo, what do you want for your Boon?"
    At such a moment, I suppose most people would have been giddy with joy. On Nosterre they say, 'There is no wine so sabled as an Imperial Favor.’ Yet, my mind was frozen. I was mortified. I wanted the impossible.
    "You can have anything, Leo," Isadora urged softly, almost plaintively.
    My embarrassment redoubled as I grasped the importance of the Imperial Favor they were so eager to grant. It forced me to drop my gaze from their exquisitely genhanced features to the gold gilt edge of my porcelain cup. Why is everything on Nosterre so maddingly lovely and perfect?
    Paralyzed by a moment of catastrophic indecision, I watched the bowl fill with coffee and did not know what to answer even though there was but one wish in my heart, however impossible. For the passed month, since the accommodation was delivered to me, I had been turning it over in my mind, trying to make myself believe that the awesome mantle of the D.C.B. could enfold my one, true desire. "I want …." No. It was ludicrous. What could I have been thinking? Only now, seated in one of the oaken paneled dining halls of their ancestral palace, did I finally, fully realize my folly. I couldn't ask this of them. I would have been taking advantage of the honor of the Boon. Worse, I would have been taking advantage of four decades of friendship with these two, truly noble beings. Involuntarily, I shook my head. They had done enough for me. After all, they rescued me from almost certain death thirty-seven years ago when my corporation betrayed me.
    "Leo?" William arched a dark brow in good humor, his smile hovering patiently, while those knowing-seeking imperial eyes picked out the angst cringing in the creases of my frown.
    I admitted, "You've given me so such already."
    "Leo, I can't believe that after four decades of living on this planet, you haven't absorbed at least thimble’s worth of Nosterran arrogance. My friend, you are hopelessly humble." The emperor eased back in his gold leafed chair, looking all at once too young and handsome and agile to have seen two hundred and sixty-seven years of rule. He told me, "you are, perhaps, the greatest nanocyberneticist living. You have given more to Nosterre and the Imperial Family then we can ever repay, but we mean to, in some small way with the Boon. Now, " William insisted, smiling again, "spit it out. What do you want?"
    Obliged to answer, I found myself locked in a mental stalemate between embarrassment and the fear of their Imperial Veto. What I wanted ... couldn't happen. Even the power of the D.C.B. had its limits.
    Isadora sat forward in her chair, a long lock of red mane falling over her shoulder as she looked into my eyes with such mercy that when her graceful fingers fell upon my knee I felt all at once hopelessly indebted and tenderly implored. She told me, "Thirty years ago you used your genius to save the life of the youngest prince. Leo, we owe you a thousand times over."
    "Here, here, " William rejoined softly.
    If genius it was, it would never have come to fruition without the patronage of the D.C.B. Had they not arranged my escape from the Supervox, I would no doubt be interred in the Qadim Mausoleum alongside my murdered wife and undead daughter. The gift I gave the youngest prince, Sebastian Le Deuxieme was a gift of gratitude to the empiri.
    You see, the boy arrived at the hospital dying; his brain ravaged by a staphococcus infection that, as closely as we could determine, was caused by a contaminated set of invivo com implants he received during a series of wetware implants that the imperial offspring traditionally receive at his age. The infection spread so quickly that the organ could not be saved, but the boy could be. I rescued his mnemes from his dying brain just as I did my daughter's, then I restored them to a new repository, a prosthesis for the conscious mind and implanted it in the youngest prince. There were no guarantees that it would work. He was my first human subject, but it did work. It worked far better than anyone could have imagined, or would ever know, The procedure has been kept quite secret. Not even my patient, Sebastian Le Deuxieme knows that the very seat of his identity; his self and his soul are artificial.
    The empiri gave me their own son to test my theories. They had given me my life and an illustrious career. Perhaps, I gave them back their son, but that seemed like such a small thing compared to all else. These noble people owed me nothing.
    "Leo," Isadora urged, "there must be something you want?"
    I looked away from her and tried to swallow my one impossible dream and despised myself for belittling it as I shrugged slightly. "It's nothing of merit."
    "Who cares about merit," the emperor told me. Something of good natured, but rakish disregard flashed across his handsome features. "What do you want, Leo? Name it. It's yours."
    "You can have anything." Isadora insisted. Her humor deftly shifted to sincerity. "Of all our subjects and friends, you mean the most to us. We can never repay you enough for your dedication. Tell us want you want."
    The hush warmth in the empress's voice shamed me. Her expression reminded me of the one she wore the day I met she and William in the hospital hall outside their son's room and told them that young Sebastian had regained consciousness. I coveted her joy and relief that day, knowing that although I might share it, I would never really know it, not while my daughter laid in nanistasis in the vault of the Qadim Mausoleum so many, many light years away.
    "What do you want, Leo?" Isadora urged me. For a woman of such commanding beauty, the empress radiates compassion like a holy light. "What is your heart's desire?"
    My flesh tingling with Her Highness's sincerity, I swallowed, almost choking on the impossibility of the only thing I did want. At length, I found my voice again and admitted, "I'm afraid, my dear friends, it's not possible."
    "Let us decide what's possible, Leo," William said.
    For long seconds I couldn't look up from the velvet folder of the accommodation laying on the table at my right hand, but stared at the delicate gold flourishes pressed into the soft coverlet.
    Softly, urgently, the emperor, my sovereign and my friend, asked me, "What do you want?"
    At the precise moment that my courage tipped the scales of my conscience, I managed to utter, "My daughter."
    The leather cushions of their chairs wheezed softly as they both sat back. I was sure that when I looked up, they would be gazing at me as though I had gone mad. I had. My wish was vaulted away on a planet far across the black void of space. While her mind; the engrams; the very mnemes of her soul languished in the digital purgatory of the Cognitive Core; an undead and invisible prisoner of the very corporation that had betrayed us both. Even if by some miracle, she could be wrestled free of the Supervox Cognitive Core, the question of her very resurrection posed a serious policy problem for the D.C.B. My daughter was no ordinary little girl. She was the daughter of the last Bin. She was the daughter of Malika Qadim; the last Qadim to control Nanitech. The same quadrant corporation that Lahm Chanzir usurped when he assassinated Malika and made certain that her sole heir, our daughter, would never wake from her coma to reclaim that which was her birthright.
    No doubt, the emperor and the empress thought more in terms of the Qadim Dynasty and the implications of resurrecting its only heiress; Implications with monumental consequences for the D.C.B. as well as Nanitech; Implications that I, for the moment, cared nothing about. All I wanted was my daughter, but what I was asking for was the restoration of the Qadim Dynasty. Let it molder. All that mattered to me was that little girl in the mausoleum. She was the only blameless pawn in the coup against my wife. That child had no role in the schemes of corporate traitors, except that of a victim. Her only crime against Nanitech was her name. For that reason alone she was swept away. For that reason, she was still owed a life.
    When I finally raised my gaze, both William's and Isadora's expressions were neutral. My doubts paused a moment, while I dared to hope. Desperation found a sane voice as I urged them, "The files with her mnemes could still be intact. And her body .... I left it in nanistasis."
    "It's been nearly forty years, Leo." Isadora blinked. "Maybe her body has maintained fixation, but could her mnemes have survived this long?"
    "I left them in the Supervox Comweb, in the processor lattice of the Cognitive Core itself, in hidden files. Even if Chairman Chanzir himself knew they were there, he would not be able to find them. Her memories should still be there..." I swallowed heavily, "...waiting for me."
Watching the emperor, Her Imperial Highness asked, "Leo, what would you do if we could recover your daughter- body, mnemes files and all?"
    "I would restore her."
    Eying the empress, William asked me, "You mean you would use the same technique you perfected for Sebastian."
    I nodded, "Yes."
    The Empiri fell quiet then. I'm sure they were comming between them. Their eyes flicked back and forth at each other, volleying thoughts between their receivers.
    At last, William shifted in his seat, turning toward me. "You recall that we tried to negotiate for your daughter when you first came to us. Chairman Chanzir resisted for obvious reasons. We exhausted galactic law trying to have her exhumed and transported here."
    "I know. I'm willing to try again."
    William and Isadora looked at each other. Their expressions were grave, almost preemptory. Isadora shook her head gently. "No. We tried all the diplomatic channels that were open to us."
    "Perhaps, if I led the negotiating team myself…."
    "No, Leo," William shook his head, chuckling, "Sacre’ Mere. That would put you in serious danger. It's been almost four decades and you're still on Nanitech's assassination list. You're far too valuable to us. And you know as well as we do that Nanitech shut the door on you when they overthrew the Qadim regime."
    Knowing that was so, I nodded. Though my moment of hope was crushed, I was almost relieved. After so many years of wondering, I could finally stop. It was over. It had been over a long time.
    "However, there are other means at our disposal," the empress said, slitting cunning eyes at the emperor.
    He smiled suddenly. "Yes. There are." He drew his gaze from the empress and asked me, "Leo, can you provide us with details of where you placed the body and the mnemes file?"
    "How much detail?"
    "As much as you can provide." William urged me with serious green eyes. "Everything you remember about Nanitech and the Supervox Comweb would be useful, too."
    "I can tell you exactly where my daughter is. As for the rest ... I'll be happy to provide schematics, but I'm afraid my memory may be a but sketchy. It has been a few years."
    "And things have certainly changed since you left," the emperor admitted, eying the empress.
    "Hmmm. True." Isadora said as her blue gaze briefly searched the darkness beyond our table for her thoughts. She asked, "Leo, where would we be likely to find the most current information on the Supervox Comweb?"
    "That depends on what you mean by 'information'?"'
    She smiled with cunning. "Classified information like building layouts of the Supervox Complex, security protocol, the size, type and complexity of the planet's security force …."
    "I'm sure Nanitech Center Station has current records." After all, that was the seat of Nanitech Corporation even during Malika's reign. Then I realized the Empiri's intent. They were considering a covert exercise. I was shocked. "G’ydma! My friends. Please. I didn't expect - I can't allow you to -"
    "Leo." Isadora halted me with that commanding blue gaze. "Now is the ideal time to recover your daughter."
    "Why now?"
    The emperor and the empress gazed each other a consenting glance. William told me, "Recently we were contacted by one of the leaders of the Resistance."
    "The Resistance? But I thought all the Qadim Loyalists were discovered and sent away to the Conditioning Centers years ago. They were all reprogrammed."
    "Apparently not. It seems that after their initial rooting, they regrouped, went into hiding and have been building to toward another coup. We have reason to believe that Nanitech is going to face a rather serious quadrant wide crisis quite soon." William smiled devilishly. "Courtesy of the Resistance."
    "Now is the time, Leo. A number of members in the Resistance have reached ranking positions in the Damgoundi. They have power and they have asked for our help. They are ready and able to assist us."
    Of course, the resurrection of the Bin would have been the ultimate goal of the Resistance. They were, after all, Qadim Loyalists. We all wanted the same thing for different reasons. I looked at the emperor and the empress. "I don't want my daughter to become a political pawn, again."
    "Of course not. Once our operative has her, she'll be given asylum on Nosterre."
    "Your contact in the Resistance agreed to that?"
    Isadora nodded. "He'll have to, won't he? Until the Nanitech quadrant is secure, the Young Bin will be safest here, among Qadim allies."
    "In that case, I still want to try to recover her."
    "Excellent!" William sat forward, rubbing his hands together. "First things first, though. We need a story for the press."
    "A story?"
    "Leo, you can't tell Nosterrans that your Fete Boon is - pardon my bluntness - to have your daughter's corpse and consciousness rescued from Nanitech ... even if Chanzir has held them hostage for close to four decades."
    "I suppose not. Yes, a story." I rummaged through a while month's worth of suggestions of Fete Boons from my colleagues at the Imperial Institute and drew one, like a raffle ticket from my conscience. "How about a ten million franc grant to the cybernetics institute of my choice?"
    "Modest. Humanitarian." Isadora appraised and consulted William with a look.
    "Sound's fine," he agreed. "But make it forty million."
    I was still bewildered by the sheer strength of their conviction and confidence. "D-do you think it can actually be done?"
    "Forty million? That's nothing-"
    "No, Your Grace. I mean about my daughter. Can it be done?"
    The emperor smiled, gave a silent laugh and looked at the empress. She leaned back in her chair once more, smiling, sly eyed and told me, "Yes, Leo, it can be done. It will be done." She winked at the emperor. "We know just the operative for the job."

SEBASTIAN II: March 15th, 4097
    They were coming.
    Phasing up my audio, I registered the rattle of body armor as cyborinfantry broke from a service stair well at a run roughly one hundred meters at the end of the end hall. By the sounds of their hurry, those Nanitech Damgoundi were eager, blood thirsty and knew exactly where I was.
    This was not a good thing.
    Stacks of files names racing vertically through my oc' display, I noticed the black globe wedged into the ceiling in the middle of the security varchive of Nanitech Center Station. There was a possibility that someone discovered the loop in the digital feed. I used my invivo com to access the chip to the security system just before my partner and I entered the facility. Apparently, Nanitech Center Security was no longer seeing an empty Varchive center. They saw me sitting back in one of the programmer’s chairs with my field boots crossed on the black console, contentedly sucking the guts out of their intelligence database through my into my wet disk.
    I could have sat there all night, letting the security networked archive copy Nanitech's secrets into my invivo system, but I had run out of time and luck. I had gotten all I was going to get which was probably more than I needed to infiltrate the Supervox.
    Dropping my link with the console, I got up from my seat and turned toward the secured elevator at the end of the room. Of course, I had taken all the elevators off line when I broke in which meant those soldiers coming up the hall had to run up a good thirty flights of stairs. Tough. Now that I was finished, I opened my link to the elevator programming. The schematic for the lift circuits scarred my oc' display with red rays and nodes. Mentally highlighting, I picked the appropriate cab number to reactivated the one I was headed for so that I could grab a ride to the roof My partner would have a hover waiting there.
    An instant later, the elevator pinged and the doors parted to admit me.    
    Damgoundi panted and muttered outside the vault-door to the Security Varchive, reassuring me that they weren't bursting in any time soon. I had scrambled the access code to the locking mechanism. The only way they were getting in now was with a laser torch. Judging by the thickness of the steel there, it would take them twenty minutes even with the torch. I stepped inside my lit, functioning elevator cab and pressed the button for the roof. The wall panel went dark, then the cab went dark.
    Sacre’ Mere. They must have found the programming loop I placed in the power grid, disarmed it and cut the power to the cab. I blinked up my infrared function. Darkness gave way to the green tinged interior of the cab. I jumped for the trap door in the ceiling, knocking it loose with one fist, while I caught the ledge with the other hand and pulled myself up through the hole onto the roof As I replaced the trap covering, I detected the faint groan of the vault hinges down in the Varchive. I guess they unscrambled the code. The locking mechs must have been on a separate power grid. Great.
    Wasting no more time, I grabbed the greasy cables and started climbing, phasing my audio to listen to what sounded like an entire company of Damgoundi field boots scuffling through the Varchive Center below. I managed to scale about twenty meters before the trap door jarred below. For a simple pre-mission intelligence gathering operation, this was turning into a one hairy detail.
    Infrared scanning like crazy, I sought a ledge, a handle, another cable, any one centimeter or wider projection would do. The elevator cable I hung from was well greased so I was slowly, steadily sliding down the shaft toward the eerie green glow of the open trap door in the can roof and the muzzle of unfriendly fire arms within.
    At this stage of the game I started having regrets about not being able to vox this job. But. Nanitech was smart. The security Varchive wasn't linked to any outside comwebs, except for a secured communications beams to the Supervox which I didn't know existed until I broke into the Varchive tonight. For all intensive purposes, the Nanitech Center system was a closed system. The only way I could get to the information I needed to beat the Supervox was to break into Nanitech's Security Varchive. Well, I knew this wasn't going to be a joyride when our sublight coasted into the station to dock. My partner pointed out the cockpit window at the clots of bodies drifting around the perimeter of the ringstation like so many rag dolls caught in its gravity undertow; the Nanitech version of putting enemy heads on pikes outside the fort wall. The dead were undoubtedly an assortment of corporate traitors and double agents that Nanitech caught trying to infiltrate secured databases. Most ops who came here to spy or steal knew the risks. As for the naive or the uninitiated, there is no mercy. Industrial espionage ain't pretty.
    I looked down again. In the cab, chrome body armor reflected slivers of light flashed in my activated infrared lenses and stung my retinas as several Damgoundi looked up through the open trap, cocking their trademark bald heads, trying to decide if anyone was on the roof of the cab or on the cable. I was seconds away from being discovered. Once they blinked up their infrared ....
    I tried comming, (Uh, Cleo. Sweet heart. Are you within receiving range?) Crackling silence answered my receivers. Where was she?
    This was one of those times when I wish she had a com implant so that I could contact her and beg assistance. She uses a headset, which doesn't put out much gain. Our transmissions break up at the slightest interference; buildings, radio transmissions, even solar flares. Cleo is anti-augmentation; an adamantly low tech girl. The one thing she does believe in is weaponry. I could use that now. I was regretting one of my credos. No guns. I don't carry them. I don't use them. I've never needed one. I've always been capable of getting out of tight spot using my augments and my genetic enhancement ... until now.
    Cleo. Cleo. Cleo. Just one lousy com implant.
    Grease gushing out between my fingers and running down my wrists, I gripped tighter and looked around. There were a couple of floors between me and the cab. The doors to each one were closed, but I could make the jump from the cables, cling to the door frame and pry a set open. Of course, it would make noise which would alert the Damgoundi in the cab. I didn't have much choice. They were going to discover me any second.
    Calling up my terminus, function options appeared before my eyes, glowing in the darkness of the shaft. I blinked up thermography and looked down at the set of doors sliding up to meet me. The walls vanished. I saw in hues of heat radiance. Plumbing and electrical systems Criss-crossed my view in blazing red and blue lines. Caught behind the glowing multicolored web pipes and wires, were the vibrating auras of twenty armored bodies with pulsers. There wasn't a cool blue pixel of passivity lit in the entire detachment.
    I wasn't getting out that way. Worse, the moment I slid seven with that floor, the soldiers in the cab would spot me. One quick com between the two search teams and the guys on the other side of those doors would pop them and gleefully strafe me. Wonderful.
    (Cleo Q'mar, where are you?)
    The rude notion that they might have captured her occurred to me. She was only mortal after all. It amazes me that she has gotten this far in the business without getting killed. Makes me admire Nanitech training. Oh, did I mention she swung over a couple of years ago? It's one more reason for Nanitech to hate the D.C.B. We have a habit of stealing their best people.
    I squinted among the figures in the floor below. None of them wore her thermo-pattern. I knew it by heart. As far as I could tell, she hadn't been captured.
    I blinked down thermography and looked down at the cab, fumbling for options. They seemed more limited with every millimeter I slid.
    I still had my augments.
    My adrenal condensers were plenty loaded and according to me terminus, I was cycling a good twenty points above normal in all my enhancement categories. I could try scaling the slick cable. If I could get to a set of door above that weren't being guarded ....
    Just then someone below shouted, "Hey! I see him."
    Merde.
    Condensers releasing, I hyperflexed and starting scrambling. There's nothing more humbling to a cynanoborg than a greasy elevator cable. All my fancy enhancement weren't doing my jack-shit here.
    Cleo was right. This wasn't a good idea, but what choice did we have? We reviewed the mission material. Cleo agreed that the information on the Supervox was thirty or forty years outdated. Even her knowledge of the Supervox Complex, where she had lived and trained, was almost four years out of date. Worse, the Complex went fully automated just months after she defected. Neither one of us knew what to expect when we reached the Supervox. Current intelligence was a must. Nanitech Center was the only palace to get it.
    Below, pulsers clicked and cocked. I kept trying to make head way, cycled fingered sliding over the cable. Getting an ass full of avulsing pressure rounds was not one of the sacrifices a lowly field agent should make in order to serve the Crown.
    That's when the explosion hit. The building seemed to sway even before the boom deafened me.     The acoustic surge overloaded my com receivers, ramming itself through my entire nanicircuitry, knocking my interfacer off line. The electronic screech echoed all the way down to my toe nails. I clung tight to the cable, but the concussion threw me, cable and all against a wall of the shaft. I lost my grip and fell on to the cab roof, green sticking my left tibia. I was dazed only a second, then my interfacer snapped back on line, making all my functions flash before my eyes. My com receiver began to sizzle.
    I would have to do a diagnostic on that later. Fortunately, all my nanimedical software was still on line. Transferring B.E.s and CERMS to the fracture sight, I started up in the hissing dark and looked up the shaft. Smoke curled through the seams of the buckled doors on the floor above. It wasn't too hard to imagine the mess Cleo had just made of that detachment. They wouldn't be giving me any more trouble. Remembering the others, I looked down into the cab. The Damgoundi were just getting up, to. They scrambled for their pulsers.
    The cab doors below sprang open. Someone strafed them all prostrate.
    I smiled. Cleo. My love. My life.
    V-goggled, freckled faced and armed to the tits, Cleo stepped into the cab below as I pulled myself up to the opened trap. Velcro crackling, she peeled off the neoprene skull cap of her head set, letting it hand from her neck by its retention chord. Her short black hair was sweat matted to her skull, turning spiky along her temples and brow. She cocked the wire but of her pulser up on her hip as she smiled up at me, "You were late."
    "Sorry. Ran into some resistance." I cut the feed to my com. The sizzling in my damaged receivers was making it hard to hear.
    "So I see." She nudged dead man with her boot toe, then lifted her brown eyes. They were red rung from the suction of her goggles. "Coming?"
    "Yup."
    I swung my legs around to hang down through the trap, taking a little extra care with the one that was healing.
    "Break it?"
    "Not seriously." I admitted, taking a moment to gage the three meter drop so I would land on the good leg and not the bad one, I pushed myself off the roof and dropped down to land beside my partner.
    "Good timing. Merci."
    "C'est rein." Cleo's accent is becoming quite good. She shrugged the rescue off and pulled her snug hood back on, fixing the smoked goggles and throat mike in place. She must have had the plans to the building playing inside the tiny pools of V-space in her goggles oc' display. Otherwise, she would not have found me in time.
    Most that hunk of head gear was antiquated equipment by Nosterran standards, but it just saved my ass. I shook my head and laughed.
    Hardly noticing the corpses, Cleo pecked my cheek. "I cleaned out the roof, too."
    Meaning there would be more dead up there.
    "I figure we've got four minutes before reinforcements arrive." She took in the darkened
cab around us. "Stairs?"
    I nodded. We were just a few flights from the roof.
    Wading through the dead as we left the elevator, I suffered a guilty twinge. I suppose it was necessary to kill them all. After all, they had no intention of letting us walk away. We didn't have a choice. Eat or be eaten. That's the way this bloody business works.
    By the time we reached the roof, the fracture in my tibia had been knitted away by my CERMS. We slipped into the hover and lifted off. Reaching maximum velocity as quickly as possible, I dropped us heads first toward the center of the wheel, toward the cargo bays where we had made arrangements for inconspicuous passage out of Nanitech Center aboard a freighter earlier in the day.     
    As I worked the peddles and the stick, stalling our ascent and rolling us over to make the approach to the bays, the convex ribbon of cityscape below slid vertically across our windshield.
    In the earliest hours of dawn, waking star shine made long, weak shadows across the distant rooftops of the high rises. Just minutes away from pulser fire, bombs and blood, Nanitech Center Station already seemed placid and sleepy again.

HAIT HARBIN
Commander-General of the Supervox 5th Damgoundi; Air Calvary and Cyborinfantry.
Intersteldate 03.16.97/Supervox Date 02.01.34
Personal Log
    At zero five hundred hours, I took a camp chair and my morning cup of coffee to the north side of Nimr Company's barracks to sit, sip, gaze out over the desert at the Nuni Mountains in the north-west and collect my thoughts before revely. Having arrived only last night, I have not seen Colonel Hazin's new recruits drill, but he assures me that they are impressive. Knowing Rabin Hazin as long as I have, I have no doubt that I'll be more than satisfied with their performance this afternoon. Yet ... I could not help turning an eye toward their future for they may not have any. If Chairman Chanzir succeeds, the entire 5th Damgoundi, the cyborinfantry and the air cavalry will be phased out entirely, to be completely replaced by the drone militia within the decade. Once the experiment is declared a success on the Supervox, the Damgoundi warrior caste will be eliminated throughout the Nanitech quadrant to be replaced by Chanzir's nanimorphic minions. They are already a crucial element to the security of the entire quadrant. Nanitic production centers are pump them out at a rate of one thousand a day in every major settlement and wheel world within Nanitech's jurisdiction. Soon enough, they will outnumber the human forces meant to protect the civil population. When that happens, Chanzir will disband the Damgoundi, violently if necessary. Then he will have a quadrant wide force that is undefeatable and completely obedient to his will. The messy factor of human unpredictability will no longer loom over his ranks, but I doubt even that will satisfy Chanzir's craving for power. It is insatiable. The military will lose its human face in the Nanitech Quadrant and with it the sense of cost that tempers a true warrior's will to do battle; An ethic that has always eluded the chairman. He has always adhered to the code of ambition. Although some say that it was inspired the day he assassinated the last Qadim Bin, I say it was the cause of the Bin's murder. Men like Lahm Chanzir are born, not made. I would not be surprised to discover that he has hidden away a laboratory full of sycophantic scientists feverishly working to find a way to replace the masses themselves. He is quite mad.
    For the moment though, there was still a chance that the old codes of the warrior would survive. Those of us who remember the glorious Age of the Qadim, like Colonel Hazin and myself, had been planning a long time. The slow wheel retribution has begun to turn at last. There was little to do now but wait for the first signs of change.
    The distant rumble of thunder captured my attention. I looked toward the Nunis where the abandoned Kooch still stood on Ballout summit overlooking sheer cliffs and the ribbon of white wall that girded the Supervox Complex. A thunderhead loomed there. The rains had come early this year. The season being young yet, the storms thrashed out their fury on the northern mountains. Those angry clouds would evaporate quickly at the edge of the desert in the heat of rising sun. This dawn storm was especially violent as lightening flashes capered across the mountain range. The transmitter tower in the Kooch was struck twice as I watched. It was almost as if the Bin Herself lashed out through the storm, striking at Chanzir's transmitter standing like the hilt of a dagger in the heart of the Kooch. I sensed the Bin's fury there.
    Then, they broke over the dark brow of the thunderhead, glinting in the new morning light; Chanzir's drones. At first, I thought it was just an ordinary aerial patrol, but as I continued to watch, their numbers began to multiply. As they approached, they began to fill the horizon, east to west, until the sky over the Nunis was studded with gleaming, glinting drones. Alarm forced me to my feet. I studied their approach, activating my zoom function for a clearer look. The drones filled the northern sky. Worse, they had morphed into chevrons; their attack posture.
    The night com officer signaled me. (General Harbin.)
    (Yes?) I watched the drones approach.
    (General, Hammel Base is reporting that they're under attack.)
    (By who?) I already knew. Hammel Base would have been the nearest air cavalry unit.
    (Drones, Sir.)
    (The base is being laser strafed as we speak-)
    Air raid sirens went off.
    I commed the sentry net. (Who tripped that alert?)
    The northern perimeter sentry broke in. (I did, Sir. Corporal Narisba, reporting. General Harbin, Sir, there are drones-)
    (I see them, Corporal. What's their posture?)
    (They're chevronned, Sir. Coming in fast. They're over head now. Their cannons are morphed. Sir-)
    I lost the link, but saw a drone's targeting laser strobe, then heard the thin rumble of an explosion rise over the desert from the north. It sounded something like a distant thunderclap.
    We had a minute, maybe less before the drones reached Chanzir Base. I wasn't sure whether Chanzir sent them or not, but it didn't matter now. We were about to be attacked.
    There wasn't much time to act.
    I charged into Nimr Company's barracks, shoving and kicking sluggish recruits from their cots as I barked, "Move out. Move out!" to Nimr Company, most of which received their visual implants only seven days ago and had not begun to train with their new augments yet. They rolled from their cots in reflex, suited up, loaded and locked their weapons. Their calm must have been inspired by the assumption that this was a drill. Being green troops, they didn't recognize the sound of a distant explosion.
    Glancing out the windows above their bunks, I glimpsed the first wave of chrome chevrons glide in over the base. "Incoming!" I dove to the floor. Nimr Company went down with me.
    Explosions rang out across the base, deafening all of us, shaking the barracks hard. The windows blew out. A few recruits cursed.
    In the ringing silence, pieces of other buildings began to clatter on the roof of the barracks. I raised up on my hands and looked around the room. "Everyone all right?"
    They lifted their heads from their arms and looked at me. Surprise was in their eyes. The war ready few among the company answered and were already starting to their feet.
    When I looked outside again, the sky beyond the shattered windows was clear, but it wouldn't be for long. As for this new batch of cyborinfantry ... this was not the time to test their battle skills or their courage. The drones controlled Supervox security for two and a half years. They perform flawlessly. I should know. I write the bi-annual performance assessment report myself. Nothing human can stand against them and we had no air support to resist the attack. Hammel Base was the closest unit. There was no doubt in my mind that the drones destroyed it for the same reason that they were now attacking this base and probably hundreds of others all over the Supervox. Fighting now was suicide. The only safe place was the Shamsaah tunnels. They were meant for the peak heat months of the summer here, but they would protect the company from laser fire as well.
    "Into the underground. On the double."
    The private nearest the tunnel hatch, dropped to the floor, grabbed the ring and drew the entrance open. Nimr company began to file down into the dark.
    Down in the tunnels, the explosions grew muffled, but the frequency intensified. The entire base was being leveled.
    Their eyes lifted toward the ceiling, the company murmured. One of them asked, "General, does the Chairman know?"
    (Invivo communication only!) I ordered. It was a fair question. For the moment, I wasn't certain whether Nanitech had uncovered Resistance elements on Chanzir Base or not. I doubted it. Chanzir would have been more subtle, if he found out. But. If Chanzir did not sent the drones, who did? For the moment, it didn't matter. We were still in danger. (Demolition.)
    Two specialists stepped up.
    (You'll set charges and blow this entrance.) Otherwise, the drones would track the company down here.
    (Begging your pardon, Sir, Won't we be trapped, Sir?)
    (No. These tunnels are networked to the Ibra T'souqbs to the north. Get to it.)
    (Yes, Sir.) They knelt, shirked off their packs and started work.
    I turned to the rest of the company. Their new implants glowed green in the dark, making them look like anxious owls. (We're going to the Ibra T'souqbs.)
    (Sir, what about the other companies?)
    (We can't help them.) If they survived the attack, they would find their way to the tsouqbs on their own. I headed to the front of the line to lead Nimr Company to the bivouac on the Ibra plateau. Supplies and communications equipment for desert training exercises had been stored there. We could set up camp and remain in the tsouqbs there for months if necessary.

    By zero eight-thirty, we reached the Ibra Plateau through the tunnels; ancient tributaries of an extinct underground river that had created a maze of caverns deep beneath the Great Qadim Desert a millennium ago. As we climbed up the sandy slope into the mouth of the biggest t'souqb, I found Colonel Hazin had already arrived with Kalb Company.
    Hazin led me to the mouth of the tsouqb where the vista of desert to the south east provided a good view of Chanzir Base. The buildings had been flattened. Everything was in flames. Smoke rolled into the sky in thick, black clouds. Relaxed out of their attack shapes, the drones circled high over the destroyed base as silver crescents, glinting in the clear midmorning sky, coasting the thermals like vultures. No doubt they were scanning the ruined based for survivors.
    Frowning, Hazin commed, (Agent Ts'lab made it out, too.)
    (Unfortunate.) Ahmar Ts'lab was the divisional head of Intelligence on the Supervox and one of Chairman Chanzir's favorite lackies. He accompanied me on my tour of the bases this month scouting recruits for his espionage camp. Hazin brought me to him where he had set up a rough operations center inside a troop hover-transport that was stored in the tsouqb for desert drills.
    Ts'lab sat in the navigator's bucket in the cockpit. He stared at the blank screen of the console com, thin red fingers interlocked on top of his starchy head full of orange hair in a posture of surrender. "Agent Ts'lab."
    He turned in his seat. His ruddy complexion and saffron colored irises were as far from the swarthy ideal of Supervoxian male beauty as could be. "'Glad to know some of the senior officers made it out of the base alive. Any others?"
    "Most of my company captains, platoon officers and companies have reported in," Hazin told him. "They'll be arriving shortly."
    That was fortunate. Virtually all of Hazin's command personnel were members of the Resistance like he and I.
    Turning toward Ts'lab, I asked, "Any word on what's happened?"
    "Nothing. Communications are down. However, Nanitech Center was compromised last night."
Hazin glanced my way. (So, the D.C.B. operation has begun.)
    (Apparently.) I asked Ts'lab, "Compromised? How?"
    "Two agents broke into the Security Varchive and copied most of the database for the Supervox," he told us.
    "When did you learn about this?"
    "About five o'clock this morning. An E.Q.C came in just after it happened. Nanitech Center Intelligence downloaded a report and footage from the security camera and from one of the Damgoundi killed in the attempt to capture the thieves. I just finished reviewing it when the drones came in firing."
    "What's on it?"
    He must have activated the screen via his invivo com function. It lit and played, showing a man in sleek, dark body armor leaning back in a task chair, his field boots propped up on a control console. He almost looked as if he was napping until he opened his eyes; which were quite startling; a translucent green, and looked in the direction of the door.
    "Handsome devil," Hazin remarked.
    Indeed. His features were compelling by any standards, but I recognized the trademarks of his genotype instantly. I told Ts'lab and Hazin, "Nosterran genhance."
    "Very good, General," Ts'lab frowned. "He's probably a D.C.B. agent named Sebastian Le Blanc. He's also a cyborg, possibly with nanimetic augmentation."
    "Nosterran Cynanoborg. Formidable. There's a file on him?"
    "There's a file, but no visual confirmation."
    "Then how do you know this is Le Blanc?"
    "Because of this." Ts'lab sighed as the com screen flickered, loading fresh footage. "From the dead Damgoundi."
    Elevator doors opened. For a second a small, probably feminine, armored figure with V-goggles and a neoprene hood stood in the hallway outside with a Tahme 408 pulser rifle. She grinned as she started firing; strafing the carriage. The screen flashed and went dark.
    "'Can't confirm it because I don't have a clear visual of her face, but I'm sure that's one of our intelligence agents that was reported MIA a little over two years ago; one I trained myself. Cleo Q'mar. I sent her out three years ago to assassinate Le Blanc." He huffed. "I thought he killed her. Guess I was wrong." Ts'lab told me. "Le Blanc stole our security files and, somehow, managed to remote sabotage the drones. That's why they attacked Chanzir Base."
    "Among others."
    Ts'lab squinted at me.
    "As the drones approached Chanzir Base, the night com officer reported that Hammel Base had been attacked as well."
    Ts'lab groaned. "Of course. That's why air support never responded." Feeling my gaze, Ts'lab looked up at me. "What is it, general?"
    "You're sure Le Blanc sabotaged the drones?"
    "There's no proof, but what else could it be?"
    "Qadim Loyalists have been silent a long time."
    (Careful, Hait.) Hazin eyed me.
    Ts'lab laughed. "You think the Resistance made the drone militia turn on us?"
    "They're local, they're hostile, they have tried to sabotage the Supervox before and they have been quiet a long time."
    "They're quiet because they're extinct. 'Have been for thirty years. You sat on the Elimination Commission yourself. Mahlma, general, that's how you got those damned stars ... turning in all those Qadim fanatics so they could be conditioned."
    Of course, few of them were actually conditioned into mindless cogs of the Chanzir's Nanitech, although they were conditioned to fool Chanzir. I know. I was among the first to under go the treatment. My loyalties to the Qadim Bin were too well documented for me to escape it. My ancestors created the Qadimgoundi; the warrior caste who devoted their service to the protection of the Qadim family and their people centuries ago. I am one of that line. I had been a captain of the Elite Qadimgoundi; the Kooch Guard; the private army of the Qadim Dynasty. To the end, I protected the Bin and her family. I obeyed Her commands. Even after Her murder and the interment of Her undead daughter, the last Qadim heir, I obeyed Her wishes and rescued Her husband; the scientific genius Leonard Asad, giving him into the protective custody of the D.C.B., who's loyalty to the Qadim reaches back almost as far as that of the Qadimgoundi. In Chairman Chanzir's eyes, that made me guilty of treason; an enemy of the corporation-state. I had a choice; death of injection or fourteen days in Conditioning Center Seventeen on the Supervox. I chose the later. I had heard of people breaking the Conditioning. For the sake of the Young Bin, I knew that I had to be one of those people.
    Fortunately for the Qadim and the Resistance, the team leading my re-programming in the Conditioning Center had been wise enough to hide their true loyalties. During my incarceration, they told me that they had been turning out hundreds of Qadim Loyalists without forcing any to endure the kind synaptic retraining Chanzir intended. As we engaged in a secret program to condition my mind to effectively hide my true loyalties and intentions, we talked about the future of the Resistance and the things that had to be done to return the Qadim House to power one day. We developed a plan to penetrate Chanzir's government gradually. The foundation of our coup took decades to build. Now, so many years later, we had mortared the last brick in place. At the right moment, we would strike in devastating unison. For the moment though ....
    "Still the Resistance is a possibility."
    Ts'lab laughed. "That's why Chairman Chanzir trusts you, general. You're more paranoid about the Resistance than he is." He chuckled, "You're a damned poster boy for the benefits of The Conditioning."
    Naturally. Otherwise, I would have been executed with thousands of others in the weeks that followed the Qadim Bin's murder. Those of us who learned play the role of the facile sycophant well have survived. The rest perished. That is how the Resistance survived all these years under the Chairman's nose, but in a few more weeks the Qadimgoundi would rise again to cut it off. We would see the resurrection of the Bin and the return of the glorious Qadim Age. Colonel Hazin and I have been cultivating the young troops that train here as have other Resistance members throughout the Supervox, throughout the quadrant. Young minds are easily forged with the will for rebellion.
    Ts'lab admitted. "We have no hard evidence, but it was that D.C. B. bastard. Within hours of the break-in at the Center, the Supervox Complex cut its comlink with Nanitech Center, then the drones attacked. Le Blanc is coming here. And he's after the Supervox."
    I doubted the D.C.B. agent was the one who sabotaged the drones or the comlink to the center. He didn't need to. He already had the assistance of the Resistance and I was well aware that it was not the Supervox that he was after. He was coming for the Young Bin which left me to wonder who cut the Supervox link to Nanitech Center and caused the drones to revolt.
    "Has Nanitech Center given orders regarding his capture?" Hazin asked.
    "They've got Damgoundi special forces tracking him now. They have orders to terminate him before he reaches the Supervox."
    (Hait, that Nosterran mustn't be assassinated.)
    (Steady, Rabin.) But he was right. Our contact from the Mwevi told me that the agent who was coming was uniquely augmented with Asadian technology that would allow him to link directly with the cognitive core of the Supervox Complex and retrieve the mnemes; the very soul of the young Bin. I told Ts'lab, "Nanitech Center doesn't know that the drones have revolted, do they?"
    "Probably not. I lost contact with Nanitech Center shortly after the E.Q.C. came in." Ts'lab blinked, realizing the importance of what I was telling him. "If Le Blanc caused the drone problem, we may need him alive to fix it. Mahlma!" Ts'lab grabbed the com console and shook it. "We need communications!"
    Yes, we did. I needed to contact the other members of the Resistance and find out who corrupted the drones. They were endangering the coup.

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