Uli got himself to the door, and looked at the old man at his desk.  More than that – the Old Man; he wore his title today, and Uli could see it in the set of his shoulders.  The figurehead of the moon, Tabera I.  Of the colony that claimed the moon, that renamed it Islaka.  The impetus behind many of its decisions.  A kind of trickster king.  Itscha Harmless, a joke of a name, because he certainly wasn't.

Though at the very least, he'd probably done less harm than good.

Menley was mad. Colonist's dementia. Born on Earth, he was one of the unlucky six-point-three percent who set down outside the solar system in strange atmospheres, gravities, rates of orbit and rotation, and just snapped because everything was almost like Earth, but wasn't quite right. In his dementia, he'd defecated somewhere public; uncouth of him, but it wouldn't have got him thrown to the Ocean except that the governors were fed up with limited resources and strict colonial bylaws and Earth's fuck off on your own attitude, and Menley crapping on the communal lawns was the last insult they could take. He was nobody, here on Predonia. He was a madman. No one would miss him.

The hhaellesh stand at least six feet tall, and usually closer to seven or eight. Their skin is glossy black. Their digitigrade feet end in small, grasping pads; their hands end in two fingers and two opposing thumbs which are thin enough to fit into cracks and gaps and strong enough to pierce titanium composite and tear apart the alloys of landships. They are streamlined and swift, with aquiline profiles and a leaping, running gait like a cat or an impala. They can fall from high atmosphere and suffer no injury. They can jump sixteen meters in a bound. They are war machines and killing machines.

They are also human sacrifices.

I envy them.

When I die, if you ask the Andé what killed me, they will probably say it was the dragons. Ask me now, and I’ll tell you the Andé are responsible. They drove their dragons across our land.

Jarec smiled. His expression was carefully rehearsed, and had charmed diplomats, generals, and heads of state on a constellation of different worlds. It had as much effect on Pari as a blank screen. This was the problem with people who knew him. "I need a reason to come home?"

"You need a gun to your head to come home," Pari said.

"The President is a believer in witchcraft," the Colonel said. "And he feels strongly about pacifying the dead of this war. Do you know why you're out here?"

"It's because I can read the history of things," Benine said, and inhaled the smell of the sun-baked dirt to chase off the last vestiges of the cottage.

"Things like bones," the Colonel said.

There was a warmth to Io's transmission out. [I'm bringing Mota. She's the expert on ancient Earth.]

Which had always been a useless, hobbyist's expertise. Mota sat up.

The cradle of humanity was far enough away to be irrelevant. Any knowledge about it was historical or speculative: even the evidence of its planets, writ into the wobble of its star, was information that had been issued in light long before anyone on Se was born.

When it came time to carry her father's soul down from the mountain, she had nothing to carry it in. The bowl her mother had carved from heirloom ivory, fitted together like a puzzle mosaic and watertight without needing glue, had been shattered that morning in an argument with her father's retainer. No other bowl had been carved with the requisite love for him. But her father's soul couldn't be left up at the temple on Mount Ossus, so she went with the pilgrims to claim him before the sun did.

"And what makes you think I'd agree to this?"

Amad's fingers curled around his jammer.  "You used to be friends."

"Used to be."

"You're not that heartless," Amad said.

He was right.  The Su had a casual disregard for life. If the life in question didn't serve their ambitions, they had no compunctions about casting it aside.

Petra, human, balked at that.

Yes, she resented Nash.  Hated him, it felt like.  She would have liked to see him suffer for screwing her over, years ago.

Seeing him die was a little much.

Forthcoming.

The sky here was an awkward dusky blue-grey, shimmering uneasily.  The world above – it hung above, from this vantage – was barely visible.  Up there was the sum total of Uli's life.

And this... detour from it couldn't end soon enough.

His template fuzzed back into usability, as the divecraft receded past the sky.  It gave him the worst map he'd ever been afflicted with; spare on detail and completely devoid of sensory tags.  The template told him: It's considered good luck to eat at the dockside.  Your business partners will ask if you have, and highlighted a point on his map.

So he went.

The wall across the star sprang into relief, dark and oddly textured.  Patterned?  By natural process or thinking design?  For function or decoration?  Impossible for Keahi to tell.  Still, occlusion was the simplest possible explanation, and it gave her a momentary ease to let her mind rest there.  She was seeing part of a star, through an irregular rent in a vast, obscuring object.

It took a few minutes for her sluggish mind to realize: vast didn't begin to measure it.  This was so far out of scope as to be impossible, based on everything she knew of a pragmatic galaxy.

The simplest possible explanation was no explanation at all.

Roughing someone up would’ve made my day, and my day needed making. Go figure that John stepped aside and said “Of course” in that tone people use at police, all placid and don’t shoot me. She pulled her license and handed it over—and yeah, there it was: non-transitioned male sex, last Gender Assessment Test no more than two years ago, certified female register—certified female enough for government work, right—all of it signed by a state assessor I didn’t just recognize as legit, I knew personally. The grainy photo even had her damn beard.

Blind.  Kiu blinked, moving slightly; true to her suspicion, his head turned to keep his ear angled toward her.  Why someone would choose – with the number of augments and prosthetics available – to remain deprived of such a primary sense–

Of course, though, the same could be said about her, and everyone like her.  She had no augments to increase her awareness of electromagnetic fields; no augments to expand her visual spectrum.  That was her choice.  It was every bit as much a choice as this man's probably was.

And the network of filaments laced through her brain like capillaries didn't even tie into the social web of the station, the system, the entire Erhat cultural organization.  That had made her suspect here, long before she'd murdered someone.

"I believed we were being lied to," Aedo said. Back to the security of a canned answer. "And then I looked at the data and it looked a lot like we were being lied to, and I didn't—I don't understand how people don't get angry when they see that."

There was no ledge at the window, but good climbers never needed them. This window had a clothesline anchor, an outdated and rusting data satellite, a data network link, a lectric link, an illegal lectric link, and a canister full of mineral wool in which a few seeds were failing to germinate. He made the leap from the opposite building and caught the proper network’s lectric link—never could tell how the hack jobs would hold—and knocked on the window.

No one answered for a minute or so, then a shadow came up to the window grime and slid the plastic away. With that gone, the shadow became a young woman, who blinked blearily at him and then settled her eyes, as though by natural magnetism, on his arm.

“LEMR. What do you need?” Culin said, and shifted. If he hooked his foot against the bolts of the hydroponics pot he could lean away from the window. Give her some contage-free space to breathe.

She blinked at the band, then swallowed and looked at his eyes. “Data’s out.”

It was a beautiful explosion, and in a way Jordan was lucky to have such a good seat. She'd been watching the Earth swell up to fill and exceed her porthole, ignoring the thin strand of the space elevator and the wide modules of its ascender until one of them flashed and spilled its guts in a spray of diamonds.

This is a ghost story. Did I say that?

No. It’s a love story. But all love stories become ghost stories if you watch them long enough.

Uli had learned, over a Standard Terran Year ago, that it was wiser not to go about alone.  Not that he was in danger; no, he seemed to enjoy whatever protection the Old Man extended over him, now that the first panics were over.

But... people took it as an invitation to hassle him.  To treat his time as their own, and his ear as the Old Man's ear.

And so, the Old Man preferred that he go about alone.