Agnosis – Ch. 16

<– Chapter 15 / Chapter 17 –>

Nothing was where he had left it. Not the Korski, the table and chairs, not the alarmingly yellow cabinetry, or even, truth be told, the kitchen itself. Dorian flipped out of geek and found himself staring up at the heavy and worn crossbeams of an unfinished ceiling. An inordinate number of competing sensations surged toward the locus of his neurological matrix, all crowding together and shoving one another aside in an attempt to vie for his attention. There was the ache in his back, the rank scent of sweat tinged with the underlying sourness of urine, cool air on his flesh–on all of his flesh, from forehead to toenails. The familiar crackle of a fire in the hearth, the steady buzz of voices rapt in ardent conversation, the creak and clomp of footsteps treading across wooden floors.

Three days, Raville had said.

He lay still for several moments, putting together the pieces of lost time that presented themselves to him as physical evidence. His throat was parched, his tongue swollen and his lips cracked and dry. His stomach rolled, and if it had actually had anything in it, he would have vomited, but it was empty. It felt like a football, slick and hard and deflated. He was naked, surrounded by strangers, yet still in Danek and Lily’s house, miraculously relocated from kitchen to sitting room. He couldn’t make any sense of it. It was like trying to reconstruct from its various shards an expensive vase dropped on the parlor floor.

Dorian inhaled sharply and attempted to lurch to his feet, but the motion was too sudden for his recently revived body to handle with any sense of decorum after having been abandoned to its own devices for so long. Darkness fuzzed the edges of his vision.

“Hey, not so feisty there, partner,” a voice called out to him. Strong hands clutched his shoulders and eased him back onto his makeshift bed, a pallet of blankets on the living room floor. “The spirit is willing, my friend, but the flesh is definitely weak. Karo! Hey, Karo! Get some water in here.” A pause. “Check that! See if we’ve got any soup left.”

Dorian was in no position to resist. Still gripped by his unseen assailants, he let his limbs fall where gravity took them and closed his eyes again. He thought of Amara, but it was only fleeting. For a moment, the voice had reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t place the identity. It was certainly not Danek’s. That should have filled him with panic, but he found he wasn’t up to it. His body had burned all the energy it had for everything except breathing in his absence.

Besides, they were bringing him soup. The Forces of Evil never brought soup.

Hail the conquering hero, he thought. Ba-da-dadada-da-da-da…

Dorian grinned at his own foolishness and merrily passed out.

He woke again, how many seconds, minutes, hours later he couldn’t say, only that it was unwillingly, because it drew him from a luxurious dream. Vegetable beef, in a tureen larger than Morley Municipal Stadium, with carrots the size of tree trunks and all the crackers he could eat. It was possibly the best dream he’d ever had in his whole life.

In spite of the ample sensory evidence that he should shift his mental alert status straight to DEFCON 69 or some similar level of emergency response, Dorian moved carefully toward full consciousness this time. First the eyes, blinked and focused, rolled about like pebbles in a tin cup until he was sure that they were working. Then by steady degrees, the wiggledy-piggledy squinching of his fingers and toes to make certain they could both comprehend and reasonably obey complex commands. Wrists and ankles next, elbows and knees, shoulders and hips and finally his head lolled experimentally from side to side. Everything seemed to be in order.

Between episodes of emerging consciousness, someone had covered him with a blanket. It was thin and scratchy against his skin, which reminded him of the woolen-ish, olive drab military blankets they’d been issued during field deployments in the Border Marines. For some reason, he found that association reassuring. More importantly, it bespoke of a burning consideration for his personal modesty, which was another strike against the Forces of Evil Hypothesis that had still somehow failed to gain a convincing toehold in the battle campaign of his awareness. So fortified, Dorian attempted his most complicated maneuver yet and hauled the heels of his palms up from beneath the blanket to scrub them against his eye sockets. His arms proved clunky, but serviceable, which was a fair description for the state of his body in general, he determined.

Dorian slowly raised himself to a sitting position. He realized that the sweat and urine he had smelled earlier were both most likely his personal responsibility. The strands of hair falling across his forehead felt appropriately lank and oily, the way he’d expect them to feel after three days without showering or otherwise failing to devote any attention whatsoever to personal hygiene. His mouth tasted like he’d been sucking on a strip of catgut.

And beside him, on the floor, someone had placed a tall glass of cool water, just beginning to drip beads of condensation. Next to it was a plain saucer containing a pair of round acetaminophen tablets. Forces of Evil Hypothesis: strike three.

Dorian took them both, water and pills, in one greedy sweep and chucked them down before he could be told not to. The liquid hit his empty stomach like a hammer, but before it got there, it had to slosh pleasantly down his various digestive ditches and gullies, so he honestly did not care. It was like an alarm clock sounding to the bits and pieces of him that hadn’t realized it was time to roust themselves for work yet. He enjoyed the whole sensation of it immensely.

“I don’t know who you are,” he croaked to the room at large and any occupants who might be in range, “but I want you to know that I love you.”

“A man would sell his soul for a glass of water, if it was offered at the proper time,” a man answered him. “Beware of geeks bearing gifts.”

There was that tickle in his brainpan again, the familiar timbre of a voice he couldn’t place. Dorian heard the scuff of chairs across the plank floor and turned himself about. His pallet lay on the floor parallel to the fireplace in Danek and Lily’s living room. The rocking chairs and assorted other furniture had been cleared out and pushed back against the walls to make room for him. He shifted all the way around to look back in the direction of the dining room table. It was almost more than his body would tolerate, and his numerous joints cracked and popped like warning shots fired by his limbs across his mental bow.

There were three men there, two of whom had recently gained their feet. The one who had remained seated, hunched over elbows propped on the table’s edge, was Tyrus Danek. He gave Dorian an idle and appraising look, but didn’t otherwise move except to roll back and forth between his hands a longnecked bottle of beer. Though Danek’s expression had a hardness to it, it wasn’t hostile, only wary, as though he couldn’t make up his mind about how he should be feeling about recent events, and as Danek expressions went, that was close enough to normal for Dorian to take some small comfort. Whatever else these men might represent, they were not in and of themselves immediately threatening.

Which was odd, because Dorian would have perceived them as threatening if he had encountered them in a less familiar setting–in a shadowed alley after dark, for example. The one on his left was massive, shaped more like a boulder than a man, with arms the size of timbers and legs like pilings. He was hairless and gray-skinned, perpetually scowling and when he moved, his flesh made a grinding sound like smooth stones scraped together. Strapped to his back were a pair of heavy iron cudgels studded with sharpened tines that shone in the lamplight like bloodied nails. He looked like a man who not only could use them, but itched to demonstrate how much he liked to.

The other was thin, gothically pale, with limber, almost disturbingly long hands. His hair was dark, moppish, and worn in a style that completely obscured the left side of his face. The mouth was a gash, as pale as the rest of him, tight and bloodless. Dorian looked at him from across the room, and little bells chimed once more in his memory. Some distant familiarity, something in the sharp angles and ponderously chiseled lines of his face that should have meant something to him, he was certain. One didn’t forget a face like that. It was like looking at the personification of a cathedral, each bone a buttress, each hollow a shadowed and calculated nave designed to strike an impression of awe.

Peering at these two men, muscle and brains, Dorian realized that it was past time to get his head right.

“Where is Amara?” he demanded. His tone managed to sound considerably more dangerous than his current physical condition was capable of supporting if the need arose.

“Have no fear. Your friend is being more than ably tended by the lady of the house,” Brains said. “No, no, don’t try to get up yet. We’ll come over to you. You’re not in any condition to start getting yourself into a flutter just yet.” He spoke to his companion across the table. “See if the soup that was prepared for Mr. Dorian is still warm, Ghast.”

Muscle grunted his displeasure, but shuffled off in the direction of the kitchen. Brains abandoned the dining room table and made his way across the room. He drew a chair up beside Dorian’s nest of blankets and settled into it.

“There’s no need to be alarmed,” the man assured him. “You’re perfectly safe, as is your lady friend, at least for the moment. We, at least, mean you no harm, which puts us in an ever-shrinking minority, as you are probably aware.”

“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take your word for it,” Dorian answered. He started to wriggle out from beneath his blankets, then remembered that he was naked. “Where are my clothes?”

“Karo has them in the wash. You’ll get them back shortly, now that you’re awake.” Brains wrinkled his nose. “After you’ve been given an opportunity to bathe, of course.”

Dorian nodded an acknowledgement, but said nothing.

“I don’t blame you for your distrust,” Brain continued. “It is misplaced, but understandable given the circumstances. Part of that is my fault. If we had acted more appropriately, we might have spared you some trouble, and subsequently some of the discomfort you’re feeling with this admittedly strange situation you’ve found yourself in.”

Discomfortseemed like an insufficient term for what he had been through over the last few days, but Dorian wasn’t about to quibble. The man relaxing in Danek’s rocking chair beside him didn’t appear to be the sort who was easily impressed by the bizarre.

“As it is, I think you’ve performed admirably, given what you knew and what you’ve been led to believe was going on. There may be some fair criticisms of your actions, but overall, you should be granted at least some credit for your cleverness, John. Things might have gone badly, indeed, if you had sought refuge in a less suitable environment.” Dorian only stared at him stupidly, and Brain pointed one of his long fingers at the ceiling. “Signal damping tiles. Sergeant Danek put them in for Lily’s benefit, as you know, but they’ve done a startlingly competent job of frustrating the geeps devices of our enemies. My crew is doing their best to cover the ambient leaks and scramble the feedback ip pulses in the meantime.”

“Your crew? Who are you?”

“Oh, sorry. I’ve forgotten that you missed the introductions.” Brains gave him a significant look, gauging his reaction. “Collectively we call ourselves the Misfit Toys.”

Dorian stiffened in recognition.

“So you know of us, eh?”

“I’ve heard of you.”

The Brain grinned slyly. “Yes, a man in your line of work, I’d imagine that you have.”

He knew of the Misfit Toys, of course, mostly by reputation and their well publicized crack hx exploits. They were the crew who had taken down the Furman Che ice and exposed the silicate market manipulation scandal. They had ripped open the Chilton Banks ultra-secure parliamentary datastream and streamcast it in real-time across the Strand during a war cabinet meeting–an act which subsequently led to the arrest and prosecution of Lead Selectman Harlen Naid for his proposed unlawful annexation of surrounding territories. Rumor had it that they had single-handedly decimated the Tornwall Caliphate colony’s industrial base with datacore chewing viral worms for (allegedly) driving their emerging economic engine solely on the backs of illegally imported slave labor.

And there was more, much more, if all the stories were to be believed. Alternately admired as savvy anarchist jackmen and merry pranksters, and reviled as countercultural industrio-terrorists, they were infamous for their unpredictability, their technical competence and their unwavering hands-on pursuit of their peculiar brand of vigilante public infoshare justice. There wasn’t a sysop on or off the Strand who hadn’t studied their case histories in detail and then spent months of his life patching holes in his security matrix to fend off their intrusions.

Dorian realized that he should be flattered that such mercurial figures should even know his name. He also realized that this was how Brain wanted him to feel, which meant that he needed to proceed cautiously. What should impress him foremost wasn’t how they knew his name, but why.

He asked: “What did you mean when you said if you’d acted more appropriately?”

“You aren’t aware that we might have acted inappropriately, you mean.” Brain laughed. “We’ve monitored your network and Strand activity with growing interest for the last several days. Initially, it was only as a historical and technological curiosity. We take pride in keeping an eye on some of the more promising jackmen on the larger networks, and we’ve watched your progress for some time now. Unfortunately, this business you’ve involved yourself in happened to coincide with a delicate, long term operation we’ve been executing out near the Corsair Rim, and here recently we weren’t able to give you the attention you properly deserved. To be honest, I thought that you’d be at it for at least another several days before you cracked the spider’s logic.” He gave Dorian a shrug and grimace, as if that was a form of apology. “You surprised me. That was my mistake, and by the time I was able to get back ’round to you, events were already proceeding at too rapid a pace for us to do much else but scramble about and make fools of ourselves. I understand that our first offer of assistance missed you by a scant matter of minutes.”

The pieces fell into place, and Dorian gasped. “You’re the one who called the Archive.”

Brains covered his eyes. “Shameful, I know, to be forced to rely on such an antiquated an clumsy technology. But just like you, I hadn’t yet come to grips with the hornets’ nest you were stirring up, or I would have paid closer attention. I was as surprised as you when Raville’s agents sprang into action, and since you had pulled your plugs to the Strand, I didn’t have any other way to warn you except through the Archive’s switchboard. But it worked out well enough, I suppose. You lived through the night, though it was a fortunate turn of events that we were so close. We came as soon as we had wrapped up our business with Prime Minister Kahn.”

The Brain winked at him. “The question you’re asking yourself right now is how I could have possibly known either about this spider or Raville’s imminent attack on you given that it took place not in the wasteland of the public Strand, but within the confines of your own isolated network space.”

“It had crossed my mind, yes.”

“Someone of Michael Raville’s stature will always be an object of extreme interest to us. The troubling thing about men is that they can’t help but wield the power they acquire, and more often than not, they choose to use it badly.” Brains arched his right eyebrow in a way that suggested he knew more than he was telling. “By the same token, the movement of as many troops as have recently been dispatched on Raville’s command toward Phi Sophia would naturally also be of concern to the Misfit Toys. Toss along the subsequent covert paramilitary actions of this man’s network of private soldiers, and an interesting pattern begins to emerge. It especially draws our curiosity, however, when by apparent coincidence one of our favorite jackmen manages to land himself smack in the middle of all the fun immediately on the heels of illicitly unlocking the private world of Raville’s own digital doppelganger.”

Dorian suddenly understood and experienced a stab of outrage, but Brains waved him off, grinning wickedly. “Oh, don’t look so surprised. There are very few secrets in the dataverse that we haven’t tapped, and most of the ones that remain are only untouched because they aren’t worth the effort to peel them back. We’ve had our run of your network for ages, or at least ages in digital years, which is the way men like you and I think of time. If there was anything truly interesting in your precious Archive, more interesting than the mundane sexual and economic perversions of aging social glitterati I mean, you would have heard from us before now. We’re not interested in data theft for its own sake.

“But I see that I’ve offended your professional pride. You’ve forgotten the cardinal rule of this business: no matter how good you think you are, there’s always someone better out there waiting to take advantage of your lapse. No, no, it wasn’t any particular technical failure on your part, John. You run a tight ship. You shouldn’t need me to tell you that and stroke your ego. So while it’s true that you are responsible for our access to the Archive, it isn’t your fault professionally. Rather, it’s your fault nostalgically. You’ve always been one to hold tight to your friends, even when it wasn’t in your best interest. Sometimes, if you’re not careful, those friends cling to you in return. Even the dead ones.”

Dorian must have paled or given some other signal that his body was about to fail, because Brains leapt from his chair to catch him before he could fall over. He certainly felt like he was going to pass out again. His head swam, his stomach churned. A creeping numbness froze his limbs. He stared up into the face of a man who had been dead for more than fifteen years. A man who had been a proto-anarchist even then, all those years ago, but hadn’t possessed the tools to give structure to his ideals.

A man who had bequeathed to him the private datascape where Dorian had crammed a lifetime’s worth of secrets, both personal and professional.

A man who had once called himself Ray Morrical.

 

Ray refused to speak to him about his resurrection for the next several minutes. Plainly concerned about his ability to handle more surprises in his current physical condition, he insisted that Dorian eat first as much of the soup as his stomach would tolerate, then poured coffee down his throat on top of that, and might have even added a perilously sizeable dose of fine Mexican amphetamines on top of that if he’d had any handy. Danek was drafted to assist Dorian up the stairs and to watch over him while he showered and shaved and gratefully dressed himself in his freshly laundered clothes.

It helped to steady him, though he suspected that had more to do with having the time to work through the information he’d been given than with the food or other creature satisfactions. Too much had happened in the last few days. Too much data had been poured into his brain, too many complex relationships explored, too many gasping revelations of plots and counter-plots and deviously doublecrossing counter-counter-plots by seemingly disinterested third parties exposed. Oh, and lest he forget, his lovely cubicle mate had, by all indications, been commonly accepted in the meantime as some sort of pseudo-alien pan-dimensional divinity by an intergalactic conspiracy of financial, political and military leaders. The fact that this was the bit he was having the least trouble processing was one of those things that should worry him. The happy little community of neurons on the common sense level of his brain were shouting to him that this sort of thinking should at the very least be more critically examined before he made any life-altering or irrevocable decisions based on assumptions that arose from it.

He needed time to ponder these things, to dig into them and figure out what they meant. He was exhausted with feeling caught in a maelstrom, and having time to do nothing but react to shifts in the wind. But first he had to deal with Ray Morrical and figure out what this ghost from his past really wanted.

He was fairly certain that it wasn’t just to help.

As Dorian and Danek made their way back through the house, they encountered strangers whom Dorian could only assume were more of the Misfit Toys. Most of these were busily humping it from room to room, talking with knots of their compatriots or poring over racks of thrumming technical equipment. In many cases, they had to shout to one another over the racket of the portable generators that powered their complex scramblers and monitors and ex-connex router pinches. Often, they greeted Danek with hearty laughter and flashed him a thumbs-up, but Danek did little other than acknowledge them. Dorian quickly lost track of the people he encountered, despite the fact that they were in many ways typical jack pirates, which is to say physically distinctive, with incredible mods engineered to be memorable, if nothing else.

He met a willowy sprite of a girl with green hair and several too many arms, tripping back and forth between racks with a portable power dispersion unit, running the numbers on their erg signature. He didn’t catch her name, and she had laughed like a bird and darted off before he could ask it again. There was silver toned Karo, a stumpy and puggish man whose shaven skull was studded with micro-antennae, and whose eye sockets were encased in out-moded triDvid interaction goggles. The round, scarlet lenses made him look insectile, but he smiled massively, like a rotten melon split by the sun, and laughed cavernously with a whole battery of back-slaps and thigh jerks that made his amusement infectious. In addition, he met several long-bodied Screechers with protruding flexsteel exoskeletons, a young woman swathed in flesh-grafted diaphanous scarves of nano-woven scanmesh that could be inflated on demand to render her into a human receptor dish, and too many others to differentiate properly, each specimen of human modification more outlandish than the last. Most of them bore extra arms or bio-memetic extensors, both detachable and not, that enabled them to accomplish more tasks at once than the kits nature had endowed them with would have normally allowed. The whole carnival sideshow collection of them hummed efficiently at their appointed tasks, each mutant form in its place and intensely on-task with his or her duties.

What he remembered most of the whirlwind introductions, however, was that each of them was strapped with weapons. Clever blades and pin bombs, automatic Gibbon pistols and even military issue Krueger MatterKast rifles. Most of the weapons still had the well-oiled blue gleam about them that suggested they’d only been recently unpacked from storage, which told Dorian that this crew was not without resources and cunning of their own. If what Ray had said was true, that they had been off planet just a few days ago, it would have taken either a great deal of capital or a readily maintained storage depot nearby to supply them with so much equipment and weaponry so quickly.

Whatever else the Misfit Toys might be, they were not amateurs.

Dorian paused at the top of the staircase, and grasped at Danek’s forearm before he lifted the cover to lead them back into the living quarters. They were alone for the moment, and there were explanations he owed to his friend.

Because he wasn’t certain how to begin, Dorian simply launched into it, hoping to make up with sincerity what he lacked in oratory.

“I’m sorry, Tyrus,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bring this down on you.”

But Danek only snorted at him. “We invited it, boy. There’s nothing for you to apologize for, except maybe for addressing me by my God-given name. Not even Lily got to do that until we’d been married for close to ten years.”

“How long have they been here?”

“Since the morning of the second day.”

Dorian grimaced. His defenses hadn’t even lasted to the first of his worst-case benchmarks.

Danek squeezed his shoulder companionably, something he would never have done as his Sergeant. “It’s a good thing, John. Lily was getting frantic when I couldn’t wake you up, either one of you, and I don’t have the hardware to diagnose that sort of behavior anymore. We were sure that you were gone, brain fried or something worse, or that Raville’s thugs were going to crash through the door at any moment.” Danek gestured vaguely toward one of the extra rooms piled full of Misfit Toys. “Ray and his crew waltzed up here as calm as kittens and asked if they could help with our troubles. That was his word. Lily didn’t like it at first, but he went off on a rant about our signal leakage and ip spikes that could be read from the moon, punctuated with and all sorts of additional techno-jumble that I couldn’t even begin to understand. I filed all that stuff in the mental trash bin years ago. But it was clear that they knew something was going on, and they had enough of the general outline that it seemed worthwhile to see what they could do. I was sure you were going to be pissed when you woke up. If you woke up, I mean.”

Danek uttered a low, rumbling chuckle that caught Dorian by surprise. “They’re a handful, I won’t deny that. Always banging doors and flushing toilets and crashing down the stairs in a panic about some signal or datastream that isn’t reading the way it should. But to tell you the truth, I think Lily likes it, even if she won’t say so. It’s been a while since she’s had a house full of rambunctious youngsters who don’t glaze over when she comes in the room. That kid Karo, in fact, is something of a wizard in the kitchen. He’s been doing some modifications on the carb-paste the docs engineered for Lily to keep her weight up, and shoot me if he isn’t making it edible for human consumption. Lily just accuses him of trying to make her fat–but she laughs when she says it, and that’s good enough for me. It’s worth a little disorder in our lives.”

Dorian smiled at the image, feeling a flicker of relief, and maybe even a twinge of jealousy that he hadn’t been around to witness it, but he said, “You know who these guys are, right? The sort of work they do?”

“I watch the newswire.”

“The newswire doesn’t tell you everything.”

“I know they’re good, and good is what you need to help you get along against impossible odds. Lily seems to think this is a Divine Appointment.”

Dorian didn’t like that idea at all. “Lily should read more technical intrusion-prevention manuals and fewer spy novels. These aren’t nice people, Danek. Not evil necessarily, but they’re hard, and they’re well trained and they have an agenda of their own, or they wouldn’t have gotten themselves involved.”

He didn’t know how much Ray Morrical and the Misfit Toys might have gleaned from his foam, from the Archive itself, or even from their own covert bitstreams wired into Raville’s networks, but he felt safe in assuming they knew something at least, or thought that they did, about the events shortly to play themselves out in Phi Sophia. The last thing he needed was another set of greedy hands groping after the pearl. He wondered what Amara would have to say about this turn of events.

“There could still be some trouble,” he said at last. “Raville’s agents will find us if we stay here much longer.”

But Danek was unperturbed. “Raville’s agents may find more trouble than they’ve bargained for.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

“You and me both, boy. You and me both.”

With that, Danek pulled on the rope that raised the cover off the stairs, and together, they went down.

 

There was food set out on the table awaiting them, ham salad sandwiches, turkey sandwiches, rich slices of fried eggplant, heaps of potato salad and beer, plus a bottomless pot of coffee. It was early evening, and Dorian was mildly amused to find that he was hungry again, even after all the soup he’d consumed just an hour before. More chairs had been hauled up against the table, including Danek’s comfortable old rocker and the metal chairs from the kitchenette. The sandwiches were piled into a mountain of triangular slopes and beige crust ridges on a platter in the middle of the table. There were fresh vegetables, raw and cold, wedged into smaller dishes about the perimeter, but these seemed to be mostly ignored in favor of mustard and mayonnaise and vegetable-substitute condiments–which, as most grade school children knew, was the real form in which God had intended mankind to eat vegetables in the first place.

A number of the Misfit Toys, many of which Dorian had met fleetingly, had already descended on the spread, playing a fascinating game of musical chairs as they pawed for beers and cucumbers and whatever else was just out of easy reach. The moment anyone showed signs of putting a layer of air between themselves and their seat, someone else swooped in behind them to survey the culinary terrain, forcing the original occupant to move along. This went on for some time as plates were assembled and goodies piled into frightening, counter-gravitational stacks, a constant and curious revolving carousel of multi-colored skin tones and reaching arms and good-natured caterwauls from those who had been ousted. Ray Morrical sat at the head of the table, his plate empty except for a few odd crumbs, mostly watching the chaotic progressions playing out around him. When he recognized their tread on the stairs, he popped out of his place and took up a cautious stance behind it, warding the opening against opportunistic diners. With a stern word, he cleared out the spaces to the left and right and waved Dorian and Danek over.

They took their seats amidst the cacophony, Danek in his accustomed chair, and Dorian and Ray opposite one another to his left and right. Getting their own plates filled put Dorian in mind of wrestling a fish from an octopus, but he managed it with a little guile and some well-timed shoving of his own. When they had settled in, Ray leaned his shoulders against the high back of his chair and made himself comfortable.

“Lily peeked out a few minutes ago and let us know that your lady friend is awake. She’s gathering her senses and doing her best to fend off Lily’s determination to get some soup in her stomach, but she should be joining us shortly. She appears to be recovering nicely.”

Dorian restrained his sigh of relief so Ray wouldn’t see it, and hence squirrel it away for possible use against him later. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said airily. “But what I’m more interested in at the moment is how you recovered. Last I heard from you, you were dead on the front lines of the HD rebellion.”

“As far as the governments of human space are concerned, Ray Morrical is, in fact, dead. My mother receives a nice stipend from our community fathers for her loss, and I work hard to make sure the rupees continue flowing into her retirement accounts. These days I go mostly by my professional name, Hiram Lazarus, and I’d appreciate it if we kept specific knowledge of my previous incarnations between ourselves.”

“Lazarus,” Danek said. “The man who passed from death to life.”

Ray gave a self-deprecating cough. “It seemed less presumptuous than calling myself Jesus the Messiah.”

“What happened to you?” Dorian asked, doing his best to keep his voice low.

“A funny thing, actually,” he said, hunching forward as though he was about to share a secret. “I was aboard a Marine exploratory vessel when the HD broke out, and we were well inside the disputed territories. The craft was called the Mording Covenant. It was just a tug, really. Couldn’t have been carrying more than ten or twelve deuce-and-four Kent Disruptors in its entire arsenal. There were only fourteen of us on board, and most of us were technicals anyway. Marine Dispatch was using her as a forward listening post, which meant, of course, that someone had a sense that HD was verging toward an explosion. We spent most of our time holed up in a rad cluster outside their sensor range, catching media pulses peeled off from the comm and coord nets and running them through standard crypto-filters.

“After about six weeks of this, the CC nets spiked. We started getting all sorts of encrypted traffic from the Janus sector, heavy band stuff that suggested tight-beam, multi-thread matrix communications. We certainly didn’t need Trithemian command to tell us that most likely meant a fleet of battle cruisers, but Covenant’s skipper, a Captain Granczyk, informed us that it was his duty to pull us out of the cluster and broadcast our data back home. This was standard procedure, and none of us thought much of it at the time. The signals we were detecting were originating from a point still safely out on the rim of our territorial space.

“We dropped out of cluster right into a scrum patrol of advance Janite harriers. Fast little buggers, Incisor class, I believe. The Kents didn’t even get lock before they punched through our plating with half a dozen zippenclangs. You ever hear one of those?”

Ray shifted his visible eye to Dorian, but Dorian shook his head. “Saw a few of them used against battle groups on our side. Impressive damage radius, but not much visual candy in the vacuum.”

“The sound that gives them their name comes from projected Shavlet waves smacking against the Rand Integrity Matrix. Because it happens so close to the hull, the sound waves are propagated through the plating into the decks. It sounds, no kidding, just like a zipper being undone. The clang is the detonator head affixing itself to the hull. The explosion is instantaneous, which is perhaps why they aren’t called zippenclangbooms. Anyone close to the detonator head doesn’t live long enough to hear anything but the zip and clang.”

Ray frowned, grim with memories, and cupped his chin between his fists. “The first salvo took out our propulsion drives. The second narrowly missed the bridge, but gutted the reactor two decks down. Captain Granczyk, foreseeing the inevitable, focused all of our energies on transmitting our full data load like mad. It wasn’t much of a loss, I suspect, from his perspective, and certainly not from the tactical side of things. The Covenant was barely spaceworthy on its best days, and we’d all been backed up before shipping. At worst, we were out eight to ten weeks of tedium, but the data we’d assembled was irreplaceable. At least, that was the Captain’s opinion.”

Dorian had known Ray well enough to guess where he was going. “But not yours, I take it.”

“I’m afraid I’ll never be accused of romantic patriotism. You see, the workload aboard the Covenant hadn’t been what I would call exactly strenuous. Most of us were misfits of one sort or another, cast-offs from a variety of technical schooling and poor fits with the military-industrial culture in general. The Captain was probably the only one among us who didn’t recognize that most of our mission had always been about warehousing troublemakers at a safe distance rather than providing valuable service in the public defense. I only found out later that the Hamers-Doss Insurrection had been officially underway for almost two full weeks when we were attacked. Someone had apparently conveniently neglected to inform the Covenant that we had gone to war.”

“Or it could have been that the rad cluster blocked incoming comm transmissions just as effectively as it did HD and Janite detection,” Danek said. “It’s not uncommon.”

“I won’t argue with you, Sergeant. Believe me, I don’t take it personally one way or the other. After all, even if the communication failure was merely an oversight, the outcome wasn’t other than we deserved under military law. I freely admit that I’d been in active rebellion for some time when these events occurred. I’d spent a fair number of my leisure hours inciting a select few of my shipmates to mutiny throughout the cruise.” Ray spoke calmly, matter-of-fact, as though he was commenting on the weather. “The Janite attack was the opportunity we’d been waiting for, albeit unforseen. The zippenclangs conveniently disposed of most of the crew I had failed to persuade, and the others, including the Captain, were in no condition to oppose us when we offered to surrender the ship’s datacore to our enemies in return for our lives.”

“But how did you keep central command from recycling you from backup?” Dorian asked.

“We introduced Janite pre-extraction koruptor virals into some of the dead mens’ foam architecture as a way of convincing CC that we’d been compromised, most likely captured as prisoners of war. Central Command wouldn’t risk those virals escaping containment and running loose in the general backup storage bins for the sake of a few malcontents who’d gotten themselves captured.”

“You murdered them,” Danek said sharply. “Your own crewmates!”

Ray’s jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly. “We did what the Janites would have done as soon as they boarded the ship, nothing more. It was perfectly legal once the hostilities commenced, so I don’t think we were that far out of bounds. You could just as easily say that we spared those men a few days or weeks of torture.”

Dorian scowled at the casual way in which he discussed treason and murder. It was worth keeping in mind.

“That was the original core of the Misfit Toys, we deserters. I took Ghast, Second Officer of the Watch, with me, and Karo, the Logistics and Supply Chief. Marilea, whom you might have met by now, was our hardware specialist. Williams and Torres–whom you probably haven’t seen yet since they’re outside on patrol–came aboard as general security and communications officers. There were a few others who are no longer with us, unfortunately.” Ray’s lips curled into a grin, hard and fierce. “We didn’t prove to be much better citizens of Janus Prime than we were of Trithemius Orbis, I fear. They spared our lives, but didn’t earn our fealty, especially as the insurrection stumbled toward its conclusion. But I harbor them no particular ill will. Failing governments are like wounded predators, inherently dangerous and prone to attacking even their own kind. But they served their purpose. We learned much that was essential to trade by practicing our skills within the relative isolation of the collapsing Janite military regime.”

Ray bent his head in Dorian’s direction. “Don’t be too hard on me. I know my treachery galls you, but remember that without it, you wouldn’t have had access to the secondary foam architecture that so recently preserved your life.”

“Why do I have trouble believing that your sacrifice was completely altruistic?”

“I was banking that you’d go far, a man with your prodigious talents, or at least go to interesting places. Being useful to me on occasion seems a small price to pay for what you’ve gained in return.”

Dorian suspected that the price that he was being asked to pay hadn’t yet been fully calculated, but to say so would only invite more questions from Ray and the Misfit Toys. He sat in silence, formulating a neutral response, but fortunately, the door to Lily and Danek’s room opened, saving him from having to say anything to him at all. Amara appeared in the doorway behind Lily, looking timidly across the room full of strangers, and Dorian excused himself from the table at once and went to her. Lily lifted her face to him as he passed, and he paused.

“She’s been wanting to see you,” she said. “Be gentle with her. She’s a bit out of sorts.”

“Thanks for taking care of her, Lil.”

She smiled and moved off the way he had come to take up a watchful position on a pile of pillows against the wall near to her husband.

Amara looked worn to him, weary despite so much sleep, and her gaze was deep and troubled. He suspected that there was more behind it than the sudden accretion of so many odd folk to their cause, and he was careful to situate himself between her and any curious onlookers. She took his hands in her own with undisguised eagerness.

“How are you feeling?” he said, urgent, yet hushed, so they wouldn’t be overheard.

“I’m okay. Tired.” She peered with uncertainty over his shoulder, studying the unfamiliar faces. “I don’t know what I think about all of this, though.”

“You and me both.”

“Lily warned me that we were no longer alone. She says she thinks we can trust them, but that you’d know better than her how far.”

“I’m working on it,” he said, then added, “We don’t have much of a choice right now.”

“What do you know about them?”

Dorian thought of the things he had learned, and the things he had once believed that were no longer true. “It’s a long story, and not a safe topic for public discussion right now.”

“Can we talk in private? Maybe p2p?”

“No. I don’t have access to a private channel for the time being.” To her questioning look, he answered simply, “I’ll explain later, mouth to ear. The old fashioned way.”

She might have pressed him about the problem with his foam, but there came the sound of chair legs scraping across the floor back in the dining room and Ray called out to them. Dorian turned to see him beckoning with an outstretched hand.

“Don’t keep her to yourself, John. Bring her on over to the table. We’re all anxious to meet your companion.”

Heads swiveled, the tinkle of bottles and plates subsided, and Dorian became aware that all of the Misfit Toys present were looking at them, as if some codeword had been spoken. A knot formed in his throat. It occurred to him that everything that had gone on up until now had been preliminaries for this event, for Amara’s emergence. He had no reason for believing this, but the thought lodged in his brain all the same. Maybe he was paranoid.

“How much to do they know?” Amara whispered to him.

How much do we know? he thought. “I haven’t told them anything.”

“That’s not really an answer, is it?”

“Indeed,” he said. “Just be careful what you tell them. And for God’s sake, don’t bring out the orb, no matter how strong the urge might be.”

He meant it as a joke, but it only deepened the concern that clouded her eyes. He stroked her cheek with his fingers until she clasped his hand and indicated that she was ready to go, then he led her across the room to the table. An extra place was made for her at Dorian’s side, and they took their seats warily.

Ghast rose and whispered something into Ray’s ear, then lumbered off up the stairs and disappeared behind the covering.

Ray Morrical set his hands along the arms of his chair and considered Dorian and Amara, his eyes veiled and calculating as they flicked back and forth between them. At last, he nodded his head and put on a broad smile and said, “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance at last, Ms. Cain. I trust that you’ve emerged from your ordeal in good order. Your friend John and I have been renewing our long friendship, and it is my sincere hope that you’ll accept a similar offer of mutual conviviality between us. After all, any friend of John’s should consider themselves a friend of mine, which is the reason, one might say, that my companions and I have extended ourselves on your behalf.”

Amara glanced across at him uneasily. “I understand that we owe you a debt of thanks for what you’ve done.”

“Don’t think of it as a debt, please. It’s long been our self-appointed mission to defend the innocent against the schemes of those who deem themselves to be mighty because of circumstances of socio-economic or political power. In this case, it proved doubly pleasurable, because we were able to help a friend.”

“I see.”

“Is there anything I can get for you, my dear? Something to eat or drink, perhaps?”

She shook her head. “Lily brought me some food earlier.”

“Wonderful.” He paused, and a familiar glimmer passed across his gaze, a faint whicker of eyelid, that was all but imperceptible. His brow furrowed for an instant and his eyes clouded as his focus shifted to the virtual elsewhere, but he collected himself quickly and re-polished the shine of his smile. “I wish that we had more time to get to know one another properly, but unfortunately, time seems to be against us, which means that we’ll have to dispense with the traditional pleasantries and get right down to the specifics of what we can do for one another. What we bring to the table has already been partly displayed. We are the Misfit Toys, and we have placed ourselves at your service because an unexpected co-mingling of interests has made it clear that we should do so. For your part, you wish to avoid apprehension by the forces of one Michael Raville until certain tasks that may be essential to the future of mankind can be performed. However, your hope of long-term evasion has been significantly complicated by the imminent arrival of certain military forces recently dispatched to Mr. Raville’s present location. The problem, as I see it, is your inability to arrive at a certain location, in a suitable timeframe and with sufficient resources to accomplish your tasks on your own. Would you agree that this is a fair assessment of your current circumstances?”

“Generally speaking, yes,” Dorian said. “What I fail to see is how that qualifies as a co-mingling of interests.”

“An event as seminal as first contact with an alien species,” Ray said evenly, “should be of deep interest to all of us, I should think.”

There was that twinkle in his eye, that saucy playfulness that once again said Ray knew more than he was telling. Dorian gripped Amara’s knee before she could speak.

“I hear you,” he replied.

“Good. Then you’ll similarly agree that something of this magnitude–economically, politically and spiritually–should not be allowed to become yet another factor in the perpetuation of a system of class slavery wherein we are all ruled by the social elite. To call a spade a spade, as it were, it is immoral for a self-selected embassy of proto-tyrants to conceal the potential richness of such an experience from the common man on the belief that we are incapable of guiding our own destiny. And similarly, it is just as immoral for these powerful few to suppose that they can speak on all our behalf without our consent.”

Nodding vaguely, Dorian shrugged in agreement. “Sure.”

“While you slept, my people took advantage of certain data mining and reconstruction techniques with which you should be familiar, John, to follow in your footsteps. We have successfully managed to contact the disembodied essence of Michael Raville on the Archive’s network.”

Amara nearly yelped. “You’ve spoken with Raville?”

“In some depth,” Ray assured her. “He is a remarkable personage to have survived for so long and with such clear ideologies still intact. Nevertheless, the upshot of those conversations is that it has become plain to us–and I include Raville himself–that the two of you were selected for this mission out of necessity rather than any specific or native ability that would otherwise recommend you. We respect that you have suffered considerably for this cause already, and endured both perils and hardship sufficient to have earned you both the enduring gratitude of all mankind. Primarily, that is the reason we have felt obligated to offer you our protection to this point. On the other hand, it’s also clear that because you were the products of necessity, you’re not as capable as others might be of carrying off the things that have been asked of you. And while I appreciate, as I say, your courage in the face of impossible odds, I would submit to you that it would be better–that it would better serve the common good–for you to step aside and allow others to go on in your stead.”

“Meaning you, of course,” Dorian said.

“We are the most qualified apolitical organization in this particular field of endeavor.”

It was Dorian’s turn to furrow his brow. “You believe that you’re more qualified than Amara to prevent Raville’s war?”

“Oh, please.” Ray rolled his eye. “I could supply you with a hx of similar activities whose hard copy record would reach to your shoulder. Let’s not make this a personal pissing contest, John. I’ve said that I admire your pluck, but at some point, experience trumps blind courage.”

“Right, but humor me here. You’re saying that Raville specifically told you that you–” He waved his hands about to include the lot of them. “–that the Misfit Toys were more qualified than Amara and I to…to stop this exact war?”

Dorian looked about him, feeling a bit wild, even a bit hysterical. He happened to catch sight of Lily tucked away in the shadows beyond Danek’s shoulder. His eyes felt as big as saucers. But Lily lowered her head slightly and touched the claw of her third arm to her lips.

Hush. Listen.

Ray curled his lips sympathetically. “Yes, about that. Raville said he’d had to punch up certain elements of his presentation to get your attention. There is a mild threat that our future cosmic neighbors might be tempted to mis-perceive the military presence as a threat of war, especially if they are as unfamiliar with our cultural history as we are with theirs. But Raville explained to us much more credibly, I think you’ll agree, that the men-at-arms requested for this summit will be more focused upon keeping the undesirables–that is, the consumer-culture cash cows who will muster the rupees for alien products and services–in blissful ignorance, while the leaders of industry hammer out the trade agreements and technological exchanges and other forms of power currency that will maintain their status into the foreseeable future. That injustice cannot be permitted.”

Dorian almost exploded with laughter. Raville, he thought, you wily old wizard. He made a show of coming to grips with this new revelation. It involved a great deal of blinking in amazement and looking dumbfounded.

“So what are you proposing exactly?” he asked after a reasonable period had passed.

“In order for someone to reach these talks in time, that is, before the arrival of our well-armed and literally minded brother Marines, they would have to find a way to place themselves in the Phi Sophia sector in reasonably short order. Given our position relative to the spaceports of Stratiskaya Daransk, it’s obvious that this cannot be accomplished through standard burn plotting. Thus, another way must be found.”

“Zap. We know.”

“Precisely. Except that we have been informed that the summit’s zap depot address is a highly guarded secret. But we were also subsequently told that the only avenue for procuring that address without notifying the actual Michael Raville of our intentions to intervene had already been traveled.”

Ray and Amara exchanged a look that approximated wariness.

“We have it,” she said.

“You have it and cannot use it without exposing yourself to peril. It being a proprietary and secure depot, one also can’t simply stroll over to Southrange and zap themselves to that address without interference from certain public and private authorities whose business it is to protect the integrity of such addresses.” Ray smiled sagely, as though this conversation was proceeding exactly as he’d planned. “So you’ve reached an impasse.”

“But you can’t get there at all without our cooperation,” Dorian said. “How do we reach a mutually beneficial compromise?”

“My ship, the Proletariat Horde, is currently docked at the synchronous Southrange port, ready at a moment’s notice to burn for Glastenhame on Torburg’s Fortune, where certain associates of ours would be willing to allow an unauthorized transfer of data schemes into the arrival queue of our choice without asking too many ill-advised questions.”

Danek sat up. “I thought you weren’t particularly popular with the Janites.”

“Part of the reason we fell out of favor with the government of Janus Prime is the reason why these associates would be so willing to assist us.” Ray winked at Amara. “They owe us a debt of gratitude.”

“So you’ll get us to Glastenhame, where we’ll give you the address and then we all zap to Phi Sophia together?”

“That is the deal on the table.”

Dorian and Amara exchanged another quick glance. She squeezed his knee beneath the table. He tried as hard as he could not to appear giddy. They didn’t need to discuss it any further.

“It’s a deal,” he said. “Provided that you swear to keep your nose out of my foam from now on.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, if we can’t trust our friends, who can we trust?”

Dorian was sure he was lying, but he accepted Ray’s proffered hand over a plate of cold cuts and shook on it anyway. As if that was a prearranged signal they had all been waiting for, the Misfit Toys sprang up from the table as a group and scattered up the staircase like leaves blown before the lead edge of an autumn storm. Only Karo remained behind to collect the dishes.

Ray took an extra several seconds gathering himself and climbed slowly to his feet. He nodded to Lily, then to Danek and said, “It’s been a pleasure visiting with you again, Sergeant. You have our thanks for your fine hospitality.”

To Dorian and Amara, he added, “Gather your belongings. We leave on the hour.”

<– Chapter 15 / Chapter 17 –>