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CHAPTER FOUR

Three days later Solana and Utsuro set off down the central avenue for their assigned search territories. The backaches from walking in gravity had faded and she had toughened her feet with generous slatherings of liquid skin. With Utsuro leading the way they could walk briskly without fear of setting off a trap.

“I find myself wondering what the people in the Kuiper Belt will make of this, when it finally arrives,” said Utsuro. His face screen displayed a triangle colored soothing safety green.

“You mean all the bodies?” As she spoke they passed a pair of leathery corpses lodged against the front of a soil-building shop. Utsuro had already examined both of them so neither he nor Solana paid them much mind.

“Will they be horrified? Or just shrug it off as Pera and Atmin do, and feed them all into the disassemblers?”

“I met someone from the Oort once. There was a Salibi priest in Jiaohui when I lived there,” said Solana. “Father Mijel. He came from an Oort hab called Eindbaken, about five hundred AU out. It took him fifty years in hibernation to get from there to the Main Swarm.”

They walked in silence for a few steps before Solana continued. “He never talked much about his home, but I know that he and all the other Salibi had to leave. He was a full-borg like you, but his body was more like a cephalopod—a ball for his brain and life support, and a bunch of tentacles. That’s why they had him at Jiaohui, to work with us rescuees with slave programming. No face. He said the Salibi had to leave Eindbaken because some of the younger ones didn’t want to get borged up and the hab community said their bodies were using too much life support.”

“They sound like very unsentimental people—except your priest and his friends, of course.”

“I think so. It could be just that one hab.” She looked ahead at the transverse road which marked the end of yesterday’s search. “Time to get to work. I’ve got the stadium today.” They could both see it ahead on the left, a melancholy-looking oval of huge dead trees surrounded by what had once been gardens.

“A low-effort day for you,” said Utsuro. “I doubt you will find much of interest in there. When you’re done, go back to camp and take a long nap.”

Safdaghar’s full-gravity stadium stood in the center of a large park, with pavilions and playing fields among ponds and gardens. The ponds were frozen mud now, and the gardens were black and desiccated. Cafés and tavernas with outdoor seating lined the edge of the park. Solana checked the nearest ones.

Mercifully, those buildings were mostly empty of bodies—and of anything worth tagging. One had a display of team bodysuits for some local zukyu clubs, but those clubs and all their fans were mold-encrusted corpses now. Another had a diamond case holding a perfectly intact trophy made of gold and platinum. The base was inscribed “Safdaghar Fangshuo Champions” with the names of teams and dates below.

The trophy wasn’t beautiful, and certainly nobody alive would care about the victories of local Fangshuo teams. On the other hand it was literally worth its weight in metal. She tagged it for the bots.

Over at the edge of the habitat ring she found one café by itself among some houses. This place had no sports memorabilia at all, and the tabletops were all covered with layers and layers of graffiti. One table, occupying a place of honor in the front center of the outdoor seating area where passersby could see it, had a diamond protective sheet over the graffiti-covered surface. Under the sheet she saw crimson characters, still faintly luminous.


pride’s eye inflamed by truthful dust

hunts what it fears to see


Solana could certainly understand fearing to see something and still hunting for it. When she saw a face, especially a living human’s face, the urge to submit was seductively strong. Qarinas like her weren’t just programmed to obey—they were programmed to want to obey. All self-doubt, all guilt, all uncertainty just faded away. In total obedience she could feel like a master herself.

The Salibi couldn’t break that programming, not without altering her brain, and their weird superstitions didn’t allow that. To their credit, they hadn’t tried to use her conditioning to convince her of anything. It would have been ridiculously simple: if just one of the human Salibi had spoken to her unmasked, she might be among them still. They had never done that.

The cafés were a waste of time, she decided. Time to check out the park and the stadium.

The gardens didn’t have any obvious spots where tripwires might be strung. Solana kept the potter’s tool extended in front of her anyway as she followed the path to the stadium. The path was paved with an elaborate mosaic, but Solana couldn’t really keep her attention on the design. There were too many bodies.

She counted ten dead people along the path, and then stopped counting. The dried mummies were covered in the black mold, and each one lay in the center of a mold patch which Solana realized had once been a pool of blood. She picked her way around spots and rivulets of black mold until the mosaic path merged into the broad pavement around the outside of the stadium itself.

The stadium was an impressive piece of bioengineering. The outer wall was an oval of huge acacia trees, surrounding an area a quarter-kilometer long and a hundred and fifty meters wide. The trees were quite tall, nearly sixty meters. At the top their branches merged to form a leafy canopy covering the whole stadium and the surrounding pavement.

Solana could see entrances in the three-meter spaces between trees. Some led to the field, some to stairs up into the stands, and some opened into spaces under the seats which had once been food stalls or storage areas. It looked as if all of the entrances into the interior of the stadium were blocked by piles of boards and metal panels.

She spotted one entrance which was open. The occupants had evidently broken down the barricades from inside, and surged down the stairs, dying as they went. The stairway was covered in black mold and skeletons. Solana knelt to get a better look at them. All had severe injuries. Not neat little bullet holes, but massive gashes where something had sliced through clothing, skin, and bone in a single stroke.

“Uh, Utsuro? Can you come to where I am? I need your help,” she said over the comm.

“I will be there as quickly as I can,” said Utsuro.

Atmin made a disapproving noise but said nothing.

Solana waited outside the stadium, fighting the urge to run away. The darkness and cold now seemed almost malevolent. When Utsuro’s lights came into view across the central avenue Solana almost cried with relief.

He sprinted over with mechanical smoothness. “What have you—oh,” he said as he saw the bodies piled in the stairway. “Oh, dear. I suppose we ought to look inside. Please allow me to go first in case there are traps.”

Solana handed him the rod, and Utsuro held it vertically in front of him as they picked their way up the stairs. It proved impossible to avoid stepping on bodies, as they were stacked three deep in some places.

They emerged at the top of the stairs, halfway up the sloped tiers of seats which grew from carefully trained branches of the acacia trees. Solana surveyed the entire stadium with her goggles at high magnification.

“Most of the exits are blocked from the inside, and there’s a lot of stuff piled up down on the field. Looks like food printers and a stack of blankets.”

“Perhaps they were planning to be here for several days,” said Utsuro.

She could see weapons, too: spears made of graphene rods, a few laser cutters like Pera’s, some printed mag pistols and air guns, and even a couple of combustion-powered shotguns.

“So…they fortified themselves in here, with supplies and weapons. But then something happened. All of them tried to get out at once.”

“There are about twenty armed men down on the field. Did they attack the place? Are they what everyone was running from?” asked Utsuro.

“I’m not sure.” Solana zoomed in her vision on the hundreds of bodies scattered around the interior, especially the ones with weapons, trying to see any way to differentiate among them. Was it a rebellion? A faction war? A coup? Were the ones with weapons the murderers?

“Okay,” she said. “Most of the bodies are pointing that way, antispinward, lying facedown. I think they were trying to get out, and got cut down. But the bodies with weapons are behind them, back on the field, and it looks like most of them were facing the other way when they died.”

“Those were the last defenders,” said Utsuro. “They stood down there with their handmade spears and scavenged guns, facing an enemy coming from spinward, trying to buy time for the rest to escape.”

“And all of them died,” said Solana.

Solana had seen a real battle in her childhood, when the Salibi raiders came to Kumu. The Salibi soldiers and mechs were not amateurs. The biologicals wore power armor with smart surfaces, surrounded by a cloud of nanobot interceptors. The mechs were just as well protected, and moved with blinding speed. They targeted Kumu’s security bots and slave trainers with hypervelocity needles and self-targeting minimissiles.

Against power like that, Safdaghar’s scratch militia would have been helpless. It wouldn’t even take a full squad to massacre them all.

“But why?” she asked aloud. “Safdaghar wasn’t at war. Nobody looted the place. None of this makes any sense!”

“Once I traced my orbit back to here I did a lot of research,” said Utsuro. “I checked archives in every hab I visited, and sent out some autonomous queries to search all the major worlds. Not many people noticed when Safdaghar went dark, but there were some rumors that it was an attack by Deimos.”

“It still doesn’t make sense. Even if they had a reason, why would Deimos send troops to hack apart the people of Safdaghar one by one? They’ve got petawatt lasers and relativistic mag launchers—they could vaporize this hab from half a billion klicks away.”

“Most wars don’t make sense when they’re over.”

“There’s nothing here for us. I’m not going to search the bodies for loot. Let’s get out of here.”

“I want to scan them. You go on and I will catch up. Be careful.”

Solana left the stadium, wincing as the brittle freeze-dried bodies on the stairs crunched under her feet. There was nothing here she wanted to take. She walked around the outside and stood on the far side, looking across some practice fields at the remaining structures in her section for the day.

A flicker of movement caught her attention, and she zoomed in. The building was a shop selling frozen desserts. The front door swung lazily, as if someone had just gone through.

But…Utsuro was in the stadium. Pera and Atmin were a couple of kilometers away to antispinward. Yanai had stabilized Safdaghar’s spin. There was no wind. What could leave a door swinging? Her old fears of pale blind hungry survivors lurking in the dark returned, and she clutched the rod tightly.

Utsuro emerged ten minutes later. If he noticed her standing there fighting panic he didn’t mention it. “No traces at all. None of those people shares much of my genome.”

“Let’s get back to camp,” said Solana.

“I still have my section to search.”

“Can you maybe walk me back? I’m kind of scared. Please?”

“All right,” said Utsuro. “I will accompany you. Now that you mention it, I feel a bit creepy myself.”

On the walk back to camp Solana couldn’t keep her head from swiveling. The goggles did have one flaw: they limited her peripheral vision. Normally in the dark of the abandoned hab that wasn’t a problem, but now she couldn’t avoid the feeling that there might be something lurking just beyond the edge of her field of view. If Utsuro noticed her swiveling her head about, he didn’t mention it.

Getting into the well-lit medical center was a huge relief to Solana. She could actually feel her shoulders relax as they cycled through the airlock. After just a couple of nights it was home—or at least as much home as anyplace else Solana had ever known since leaving Kumu.

“Are you all right now?” asked Utsuro. “I need to get back to search my section.” He waited long enough for her to nod, then hurried off. She saw him through one of the diamond-pane windows, sprinting tirelessly away up the central avenue.

With nobody about, Solana peeled off her suit and wiped her skin down. She decided then and there that as soon as she reached some hab with gravity and clean water, she would indulge in a long hot soak. She put on a clean suit liner and then made some adjustments to her multitool.

Multitools were another long-established technology: a rod of smart matter with a handle, programmed with hundreds of different configurations. It could become a cutter, a gripper, a drill, a clamp, a wrench, a hammer, a punch, a puller, and so on through the whole menu. Solana’s was a serious technician’s model, and included a whole range of settings for work down at the submicron scale.

The default setting was a featureless rod. Most users had a short list of favorites which could be called up by turning a control ring on the handle, without going through the whole rigamarole of selecting from a menu. Solana edited her preferences now, choosing a new favorite tool setting and picking the “grip selection” option.

From now on, when Solana held the handle of her multitool in her fist, it would automatically shift into a twenty-centimeter chef’s knife with a sharp point and a molecule-thin slicing edge. It might be utterly useless against a mech or a borg, but just having it made Solana feel a little safer.


Two days later, Solana was searching a large, rambling house which had unwalled rooms opening into gardens, almost like a series of pavilions except that people had obviously lived there full time. She found a couple of bodies, and the possessions of a good many adults and children, but whether they were separate families sharing the space, or a single group marriage she could not tell.

Utsuro commed her as she was looking through a collection of seeds, evidently handpicked and carefully sorted. “Solana? I think I need your help this time.”

“Me?” It was hard for Solana to imagine anything Utsuro would need her help with.

“Yes. I will explain when you get here. I am spinward of you, at the lake.”

Safdaghar’s interior had two lakes—more like ponds, really, but the construction plans called them lakes, so the Scarab crew did, as well. They were placed opposite each other on the rim, and functioned as part of the water-recovery network and the hab’s internal ballast system. By pumping water among various reservoirs around the rim and the hub, Safdaghar’s controlling mind could regulate spin, damp out wobbles before they got serious, and even shift the hab’s orientation to keep facing the Sun.

Pera had scouted out the lake on the opposite side of the rim; that one was part of a wilderness area, set amid a tangle of old trees and understory plants which had been allowed to grow mostly unmanaged. The one on this side was more obviously artificial, part of a formal-style park, and included a large swimming pool.

She spotted Utsuro’s glowing face on the far side of the frozen lake. The ice was all shattered and smashed, then frost-welded into a rough and treacherous-looking surface. Solana elected to go around. The park was dotted with dead trees, and the ground was almost covered by leaves and twigs.

Utsuro stood in the center of a group of bodies. Like all the others, they were blacked by mold and mummified by cold and dryness.

“What do you need me for?” she asked when she was close enough to speak aloud.

“I found it. Here—a clear signal. My DNA. It’s unmistakable.”

“Congratulations, I guess,” she said. “Do you remember being here? Is anything coming back?”

He stood, an immobile machine, for several seconds. “Nothing. None of this looks familiar.”

She looked at the bodies. Her goggles didn’t even need to filter out their faces; few were even recognizable. “What do you think happened?”

“I can’t tell,” he said. “I was hoping you might be able to help.”

“It’s a mess,” said Solana. She cycled through the entire spectrum her goggles could image. Unlike all the other bodies she had seen, these were much more badly hacked about. The other dead of Safdaghar had been killed with quick precision—a single shot, a single slash. These bodies covered with dry leaves by the frozen lake were nearly dismembered. “There are weapons—the same kind of improvised stuff we saw at the stadium. No way to tell which side was which, or who won. I guess this was another last stand. Looks like the fighting was pretty brutal.”

“I noticed that, too. But why here? The stadium at least made sense as a refuge. This place is wide open. What were they defending?”

“I’m no soldier. Maybe Pera could tell you. So where did you find your own DNA?” she asked.

“It’s all around here,” he said. “Highest concentration is here.” He pointed to a spot in the middle of the mass of bodies. “There’s a lot of it. I think I must have been injured.”

“You think this is where it happened? Whatever nearly killed you?”

His face screen displayed a stick figure shrugging. “Hard to say. From what the mechs told me about my injuries I would expect to find some actual body parts, but none of these are mine.”

“Oh! Can you find a trail? Scan around the site, see if you can track yourself.”

Utsuro paced a wide circle around all the bodies and patches of mold, scanning the ground. Then he took a few steps outward and did it again, and then a third time.

While he searched, Solana zoomed in on the ground, looking past the mold and dead leaves. “There’s some kind of fiber here,” she called out.

“A tripwire?”

“I don’t think so. It’s not under tension.”

“Is it attached to anything?”

She took hold of the three-millimeter strand of braided carbon which threaded its way under the leaves and bodies. After a moment’s hesitation, Solana held her breath and pulled.

For a horrifying instant she thought she had fallen into a supernatural entertainment. All around her the leaves and bodies began to move. Then she realized it was just the long cable she was reeling in, stuck to bodies by ice and dried blood.

It went taut in one direction, and Solana saw that it led to a colder spot amid the dead leaves, about five meters away. “There’s an access hatch here.”

“Wait until I finish. It might be dangerous. Be careful you don’t fall in.”

He seemed to take forever to make his final circuit of the site, now at a distance of about a hundred meters. When he finally finished and walked toward Solana, his screen showed the standard cargo container icon for “empty.”

“I couldn’t find anything,” he said. “Plenty of DNA here, none in the surrounding area.”

“Maybe you left this way,” she said, pointing to the hatch.

“Maybe.”

They picked their way through the scattered corpses to the hatch. It was a square, a meter across, set among the fused regolith pavers of the walkway. The metal-and-carbon hinged lid lay flat open. One end of the cable was tied to the top rung of a ladder which led down into darkness.

“According to the plans, the next level down is all infrastructure—transport, data and power, raw materials storage and conveyors,” said Solana.

“That would be a good way to sneak around,” said Utsuro. “Perhaps my comrades and I tried an ambush here, striking at the foe from below when they did not expect it.” He scanned the ladder and the sides of the shaft, then did it again. “Nothing. Let’s have a look at this cable.” He gripped it and began to pull.

“Any idea what it was for?”

“A cable can be many things. You can pull with it, use it as a guideline, tie something down…”

“A snare? Some kind of trap?”

“There are many possibilities,” said Utsuro. “This is quite strong. I’m not sure I could snap it.”

He reeled in the other end of the cable. It was attached to a blackened hollow tube with a barbed tip. “A rocket?” he wondered aloud. “Ah! Now I see. Yes, it was an ambush, and was part of a trap. The enemy passed through this park, the defenders launched this from hiding and then attacked. And…it seems we failed. Many were cut down, perhaps most. I was wounded but somehow escaped.”

He was silent for a long time.

“I’m sure you did your best,” said Solana.

His head swiveled to show her his screen displaying a quizzical green cat face, not human enough to activate the filters in her goggles. “I am not afraid to learn I ran away,” he said. “Obviously we were outmatched. There is no shame in fleeing a foe you cannot fight. I only hope we managed to hurt them, even just a little. That would satisfy me.”

Solana looked around at the dead park. “So what now?”

“Now that I’ve found one place I was, I need to find others. Create a heat map. The place where my DNA is most common is where I lived. Perhaps I can find my home and my name.”

“Well, how about searching my section? You can scan for DNA and help me make up for lost time.”

“That sounds fine,” said Utsuro.

They walked through the park, heading back toward the residential area she had been searching. At the edge of the park Solana observed, “We still don’t know why they started killing each other.”

“I no longer believe that is what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“If this was an internal conflict, why were there no survivors? I simply can’t believe the two sides were so evenly matched that they fought to mutual extinction.”

“Weirder things have happened. Let’s try this place,” said Solana, leading the way into a house built over a series of frozen fishponds, her potter’s tool held out in case of traps. “What’s your explanation, then?”

“I think it was an invasion. Some outside force did this.”

“We didn’t see any hull breaches, except that place where the energy storage blew up.”

“I asked Pera about hab assaults yesterday,” said Utsuro. “While you were doing whatever it is you do with the door closed.”

“Exercising. The way I do it bothers some people.”

“I see. I meant no offense. As I was saying, Pera claims that more than half the time the invaders use normal docking facilities, with infiltrators opening the hatches for them. That could have happened here.” Utsuro picked up a bronze statuette from the mass of broken furniture and smashed crockery on the floor. “How about this?”

“I don’t know. Tag it. We’ll see what the bird thinks.”

Utsuro did so. In Solana’s field of view a virtual text box appeared, in an attention-grabbing yellow-green shade.

After a moment’s silent searching, Solana said, “But there’s still the problem of survivors. If someone invaded the hab and killed everyone, where are they? Why didn’t they take the place over? Or sell it?”

“Perhaps it was pirates, or predatory salvagers. The mechs who rescued me told me there are outlaw scarabs who prey on small, poor habs like this one, especially in the outer system. Slag the main mind, declare the biologicals to be sub-baseline, and scrap the whole hab. Nobody cares about a few hundred people among a billion worlds.”

Solana found a carved wooden chest about half a meter long, wedged into a corner. It looked intact, and was very pretty. She pulled it into the middle of the floor and tagged it. “Yanai said the same thing. But…if it was pirates or salvagers, why didn’t they scrap Safdaghar, then? Or at least take stuff? Even if they couldn’t recognize artworks the way Atmin can, they’d grab the metals and expensive printers. We haven’t noticed anything missing.”

“That box looks nice. Is there anything in it?”

“Oh, right.” The box was locked, with a hand-forged iron mechanism which couldn’t resist Solana’s shape-changing multitool for more than ten seconds. Inside was a dress which made her gasp as she held it up. It was silk and lace, all obviously handmade and very old. Under magnification the threads even looked biological rather than printed. A mindless bot or a printer could make it in a couple of minutes, but some human centuries ago had spent weeks at the job.

“Wonderful,” said Utsuro, as Solana folded the dress carefully and put it back in the box. “Another possibility occurs to me. Slavers.”

“Why kill everybody if you want slaves?”

“Other than that one infant, and the children in the launch capsule, I have only seen dead adults.”

Solana frowned behind her goggles, trying to remember if she had seen any children. There certainly had been children in the hab—she’d found toys, playgrounds, and child-sized clothing. But Utsuro was right: no bodies.

Even without the gene mods and prenatal tinkering which had made Solana a perfect slave, there were older, cruder methods to enforce obedience. The masters at Kumu had used them, too. Solana knew that for some customers, the process of destroying a victim’s will to resist held more appeal than the actual result.

“Wait,” she said. “That would take a ship—a pretty big one, too, even if they put all the captives in stasis. Yanai said there weren’t any ships tracked leaving Safdaghar when the disaster happened. And you can’t hide a spaceship.”

They crossed the icy garden toward the house next door. Utsuro pushed through the brittle hedge dividing the lots, snapping branches and leaving a gap Solana slipped through easily. “Actually, you can hide a ship,” he said. “If you know exactly where the observer is located. Put up a completely nonreflective refrigerated shield and keep your ship entirely inside the sensor shadow. If you don’t occult anything, the observer won’t see you. The technique is seldom used, if only because most sensors are networked. I don’t know how many eyes were watching Safdaghar when it happened.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I just know it. I don’t remember how.”

The next house was built in and around a twenty-meter banyan tree with dozens of subsidiary trunks. The nine rooms of the house were linked by bridges and ladders, and the walls were little more than cloth screens. Three of the rooms had torn loose from their attachments during the years of constant wobbling, littering the ground with bits of wreckage and sad little bundles of moldy fabric.

“Hold me up and I’ll look inside,” Solana instructed. Utsuro raised her up on one hand and moved carefully around the banyan while Solana balanced herself and looked into the treehouse rooms. In addition to making her obedient, the gene designers had given Solana perfect balance. She could stand on Utsuro’s upraised palm as he walked around as easily as she could stand on a floor.

“Nothing in this one,” she said after poking her head through a rip in the cloth wall of one room.

Just then the cyborg froze. “Please keep silent,” he said directly into Solana’s head via the comm. He lowered her to the ground slightly slower than dropping her. Solana looked around but could see nothing beyond the ruined garden and the broken hedge.

After twenty seconds Utsuro spoke over the comm again. “I thought I heard something creak in that first house we searched. Wait here.” He stepped to the hedge, moving swiftly but placing his feet precisely on spots where the ground was clear of anything that might make noise. As he reached the opening in the hedge he dropped to all fours with his arms and legs bent like a spider’s, his body just clearing the ground. Then he looked through, making a quick scan before pulling back. “I don’t see anything,” he said through the comm.

Solana stayed in one place but turned slowly around, scanning on visual and infrared with no lights. Anything that could move would give off heat, and against the uniform chill of Safdaghar’s interior that should show up like a beacon. All she could see was blackness, and a few spots on the ground where Utsuro’s footprints were cooling back down to equilibrium.

Still in four-legged mode Utsuro crept through the hedge and across the garden of the house next door, then raised his head to look through a window. He stood for a long time, absolutely still. Solana watched him and his surroundings.

After a minute of watching and listening the cyborg looked around once more and then walked back without trying to be silent. “Nothing,” he said aloud. “Perhaps we moved something and it fell over.”

Solana looked around once more, then up before answering. “I thought I saw something the other day. Near the stadium.”

“This place is making us jumpy,” he said.

“I can’t imagine why,” Solana answered with a laugh that was more nervous than amused. “Still, I think maybe from now on we should work together, no matter what Atmin says about efficiency.”

“It will slow us down. I want to scan as much of the hab as possible.”

“Could we at least be closer together? Maybe alternate blocks or something?” Solana tried not to sound as if she was pleading.

“I suppose that would work,” said Utsuro. “If it will make you feel less nervous, we can do it that way.”

“Don’t you get nervous?”

“Not in the same way you do. No adrenaline, no fight-or-flight, no panic. I don’t even have some of those glands anymore. But I can still feel a sort of existential horror about what happened here. It isn’t the fear of something sneaking up on me in the dark, so much as the knowledge that someone was capable of doing this.”

“People are capable of all kinds of awful things. All bios. Mechs, too. Basically everybody. How can you even be surprised?”

“I suppose I am an idealist at heart.”

For another two hours they searched Solana’s section, staying within a hundred meters of each other. Their methods were very different. Utsuro was methodical, doing a DNA scan of each house and checking all the rooms systematically. He could do that while moving with mechanical speed, never needing a rest.

Solana had to rely more on judgment and context clues to pick out houses and workshops which looked like good targets. Sometimes she skipped whole blocks if they didn’t look interesting. The result was that she leapfrogged ahead of Utsuro, even a couple of blocks at a time, but he inevitably caught up and passed her.

When the four of them gathered back at the medical center to eat and rest, Pera began the meal with an announcement. “Atmin and I have been talking about the way we’re searching, and we’ve decided to work as a team, even if it’s not as efficient.”

Solana fought to keep a straight face, but of course Utsuro could manage a perfect deadpan, his screen showing only a question icon in blue. “What is the reason for this change?” he asked.

“Both I and Pera are afraid,” said Atmin. “She worries that more traps are hid in houses, streets, or passageways. My fear is likely just a morbid fancy yet I must assert I think that something is at large within this hab.”

“At large?” asked Utsuro. Solana suddenly didn’t feel like giggling at all.

“He thinks he saw something,” said Pera. “I’m not sure.”

“I did, too,” said Solana. “And Utsuro heard some noises.”

“Though nothing certain,” said Utsuro quickly.

“This means our search will take more time,” said Atmin. “With double shifts it can be done—a sprint of work to search the rim, and then withdraw to Yanai and the hub for simpler toil.”

“Double shifts?” asked Pera.

“Eight hours of search, a rest, and then eight hours again before the daily meal and sleep. The pace is hard but surely you have served in worse conditions while at war?”

“I just signed up to get a ride.” The dino lashed her tail. “None of this makes sense. It can’t be a bio, not after so long. A mech? Why not show itself and get a ticket off this wreck?”

“I was discussing what happened here with Solana,” said Utsuro. “I wonder if we’ve made a mistake in assuming all this destruction was created by some sort of internal conflict. Maybe Safdaghar was attacked. A mech or high-level bot could remember that and assume we are the same sort.”

“What sort?” asked Pera.

“Pirates or slavers,” said Utsuro.

“We noticed that there aren’t a lot of kids among the dead,” said Solana. “Maybe somebody took them. Like those kids in the launch tube.”

Pera cocked her head and looked thoughtful.

Then Atmin spoke, slowly and sounding very tired. “I sadly must report that you are wrong. Two days ago I found a theater, which desperate folk of Safdaghar had fortified. A score of guards with scavenged arms lay dead outside. Within, still sitting in their seats, were near two hundred children, shot. I do not think that anyone of any age survived what happened here.”

“Why didn’t you mention that before?” asked Utsuro after a moment.

“I did not wish to cause you fear, or rage, or sorrow for the dead. I thought this was a tragic tale, of factions in a hab gone mad with hate. But if the folk of Safdaghar were victims of attack, that changes all. We should record their fate, and after leaving tell the worlds what happened here.”

“And our mysterious lurker?” asked Pera.

“If it exists at all—and still we do not know—we should extend the hand of mercy if we can. From now on if you think you see or hear some hidden watcher, call to it and offer help.”

“We should have done that anyway,” said Utsuro.


The array of tagged items outside the clinic covered the dead lawn and spilled into the street beyond. When she and Utsuro headed out after waking, Solana walked past paintings and ink drawings, sculptures, antique furniture, handmade ceramics and glassware, metalwork, even an ancient spacesuit.

The morning walk was long—by now the four of them had searched almost half the hab, and had to travel more than a kilometer to the part of the hab ring yet to be gone over. But for the darkness and the mold-covered mummies, it might have been a pleasant stroll. As it was, Solana and Utsuro tried to distract themselves by talking about their future plans.

“If I may ask, what do you intend after your brain modification? Will you continue working for Yanai as a scarab?”

“One or two more voyages, to build up some savings. But after that I want to go to one of the big habs, or a planet. Juren, maybe, or even Earth. Someplace with a whole lot of people, where I can fall in love and have messy breakups and it’ll all be what I choose, not some compulsion in my neurons.”

“Isn’t love just another kind of compulsion?”

“I don’t know,” said Solana. “I’ve never been in love. How about you?”

“I can’t remember. I suspect I have been—the word is attached to a very strong feeling. But I don’t remember who or when.”

“Do you think it was one of them?” Solana gestured at the darkness and death around them.

“I’m afraid so. Otherwise…why wasn’t anyone searching for me?”

“Maybe they think you’re dead.”

“I hope I wouldn’t give up so easily.”

Just then Solana caught a flicker of motion off to her left, from a house she had checked days before. Something had ducked out of sight from a window, she was certain. She clutched Utsuro’s arm and said “Something’s there—left!” on the comm. They both froze.

“Hello?” Utsuro called aloud. “Whoever you are, we mean no harm. We can help you!”

Of course there was no response.

“I’m going to see what’s over there.” Utsuro moved slowly, arms outstretched to either side, hands open. He repeated his announcement aloud as he approached the house, and waited nearly a minute before sliding the door open.

Solana remembered that house: small, cramped and cluttered inside, evidently inhabited by bad housekeepers before the disaster. The floor was a churned mess of broken furniture and dishes, with mold thick on every surface. She had given it a quick scan and moved on.

Now Utsuro stepped inside, cautiously placing each foot, making sure the surface was stable before putting his weight on it. He went in, poked his head into the two adjacent rooms, and pulled himself up to the sleeping space upstairs.

“I don’t see anyone here at the moment,” he said. “How certain are you?”

“Mostly,” she replied. “I wasn’t recording, so I can’t review the image.”

“I’ll take your word. Anything which could move around in this mess would have to be very light or very agile. A bot?”

“Plausible.”

“Wait a moment. I don’t think I—” His comm went silent.

“Utsuro?!” Solana felt momentary panic.

“I’m all right. Don’t worry. I just did a quick DNA scan, and I got a match here.”

“Your genome?”

“Strong match, good signal. I was here!”

She hurried over to the house, circling through the barren garden to the rear, where the house faced a shared courtyard with seven other houses. A fountain now sheathed in ice stood in the center, and much of the ground was icy from a long-ago broken pipe.

The other houses facing the courtyard had broad porches and upstairs galleries, with sliding doors open to the inside. Judging from the furniture scattered about, the people had spent a lot of time sitting on their porches. It must have been a jolly little place, she thought. But all those open doors and alleyways meant a couple of dozen ways for someone to flee.

She looked at the ground, seeking any heat traces, but found nothing.

Utsuro came out of the untidy little house and scanned the porch facing the courtyard. “Nothing here,” he said aloud. “I only got a signal in one room.”

“Not your house, then. That’s good. Whoever lived here was a slob.”

“I thought the same.” He made a circuit of the courtyard but shook his head when he returned to Solana. “I could have sworn I scanned this place already.”

“Maybe you skipped that room. I wonder why you were here, back then.”

“I think the resident was a singer. One room is soundproofed but there are no instruments.”

“Can you sing?”

Utsuro thought for a long time before answering. “I suppose it’s possible. I certainly remember a lot of music, and the mechs said I had some smart-matter hardware in my larynx. A variable voice.”

“Maybe the two of you were rivals. You and whoever lived here.”

“Or collaborators. Preparing a duet.”

“See? We’re figuring out all kinds of stuff about you.”

“All speculation. With a variable voice I might just as well have been an actor or a comedian.”

“You don’t seem like the comic type. You’re too dignified.”

They returned to the main avenue and pushed on toward the next search area. The route took them past the stadium and the park. Despite the fact that she had passed that way several times already, the two massacre sites still made Solana nervous. She let Utsuro lead the way, and kept looking to the sides and behind them.

Just past the park, the avenue passed by a shop which had once sold frozen desserts. The pavement blocks in front of the dessert place were painted to form a gigantic mosaic image of a bowl of frozen custard. Utsuro stepped onto one bright yellow stone and both of them heard a loud click. The cyborg froze. “Get away!” he said.

Solana didn’t argue. She sprinted ten meters to where a solid-looking planter made of glass blocks and filled with dirt offered protection.

“What happened?” she said over the comm.

“I don’t know. I stepped on a paving block and it shifted a tiny bit under my weight. You heard the click? I’m afraid it might be a trap. Like the one Atmin found.”

Solana raised her head over the edge of the planter and scanned the whole area around Utsuro at high magnification. “I don’t see any spring-loaded blades or anything like that.”

“I am more worried about an explosive. A mine.”

Solana switched to the general channel. “Pera! Utsuro stepped on some kind of trigger mechanism. He’s afraid it’s a mine. What do we do?”

“Did it explode?”

“No.”

“Then don’t do anything. Stay put. I’ll be there as quick as I can.”

Solana provided Pera with their location, then got up and walked back to where Utsuro stood, his right foot on the booby-trapped paving stone, his left just raised behind him.

“Are you okay?” she said aloud.

“You shouldn’t be here. There might be other traps.”

“Well, I’m here now. Are you okay?”

“I am slightly off-balance. If you could please provide me with something I can use to stabilize myself I would be very grateful.”

She handed him the long-handled pottery tool, which he gripped in one hand. With the end of it on the ground he was a tripod, much more steady.

“Thank you. Now you really should get to a safer spot.”

“How do we know what spots are safe? I thought this road was safe—we both passed this way yesterday.”

“Evidently neither of us stepped on the right block.”

She knelt behind him and peered at his right foot and the yellow block underneath it. It had definitely sunk, a good half-centimeter.

“So how do these things work?”

“Typically there’s a trigger—like a pressure pad or a proximity sensor—and an explosive charge. The bomb is often surrounded by shrapnel. Other versions place the explosive elsewhere, such as in front, firing at the entire area. There are also incendiaries, nanoburn sprays, goo bombs, and so forth.”

“You seem to know a lot about them.”

“Perhaps. I may have learned it here. This might be my own handiwork. I do know one thing about mines, though: putting your face right next to one is a very bad idea.”

“Pera won’t be here for twenty minutes. Do you really want to stand here that long?”

“Now that I can balance, it is no hardship.”

Solana drew her multipurpose tool. Following her new presets, it immediately turned into a big sharp knife. She called up the control interface in her goggles and made the tool into a long thin probe with an eye and a light at the tip. Then she worked it into the crack between the block under Utsuro’s foot and the one to the right of it.

Her goggles displayed the view from the probe. She seemed to be soaring through a very deep and narrow canyon. On either side, the walls were glossy and rippled like calm water. Here and there groups of straight parallel gouges marred the smooth surface.

Looking down she could see that the smooth wall of the glass paver ended at a layer of adhesive, bonding the block to a shock-absorbing layer. Below that was the graphene sheet of the habitat deck.

But beyond the intersection at the edge of the block, she could see something weird. The underlayers were roughly cut away, and below was an empty space. According to the hab plans, that was just available volume for piping and wiring.

The probe showed that the depressed block was mounted on a simple metal rod, which in turn connected to a very primitive-looking spring-loaded pressure switch. Solana couldn’t see any explosives, but wires connected to the switch ran off in six directions under the floor.

She described what she saw to Utsuro. “I’m just amazed none of this got set off during all that time the hab was wobbling back and forth.”

“One can hardly call it a fortunate chance.”

Solana tried to trace one of the wires under the floor. Her probe was only a meter long, and even at maximum extension with the light cranked up as bright as it could go, the wire just led off into darkness.

“This is quite a trap. It looks like it sets off half a dozen bombs.”

“Some might be fakes. Decoys to delay and distract the person attempting to clear the mine. Solana, please wait for Pera to get here. She is a trained combat engineer.”

“She can place mines and breaching charges, and maybe clear them by setting them off, but I’ve got the microtools and vision. Even if she was here I’d still be the one doing the work.”

“That’s true, but you could have waited,” said Pera’s voice, making Solana jump. She switched out of probe view mode and looked over her shoulder. The dino was there, breathing rapidly.

“How’d you get here?”

“I ran. You said it was important, so I ran. I can run a kilometer in ninety seconds.”

“Oh.” Solana considered Pera’s long legs, her horizontal body and massive rib cage, all obviously built for speed, and blushed. “Well, now that you’re here, how do I disable this thing?”

“Take a look at the pressure switch and describe it.”

Solana examined the switch unit again. It was bulky and crude, as if it had been made by hand, without even a printer. “There’s a rod glued to the bottom of the paver, and a steel spring which is compressed right now. I can see an electrical contact at the bottom.”

“Classic design. Very low-tech. Of course, if it was advanced you’d both be slush by now. The spring’s to keep it from going off if anything too small walks on the trigger. As long as you keep weight on it, the contact is closed. That sends an arming signal to the charges. When you release the contact, boom. Or whoosh, or ft-ft-ft, or whatever the weapon systems do. If we’re very lucky, the power supply is long dead and no signal got sent, but I don’t think we want to test that right now.”

“So all I need to do is make sure that contact stays established even if Utsuro lifts his foot?”

“Right. Bridge the gap between the contacts, or extract the spring. Both, ideally. What you don’t want to do is sever any of the leads to the weapons.”

“Got it.”

Solana rummaged in her kit and found a spool of micron-thick wire. She fed it into the handle of her tool and set it to spin ten centimeters of wire out at the tip, just between the tiny eye and the tiny light. Once the wire was in place she adjusted the tool again to make a little gripper, which she used to set the wire in place, one end on each metal contact. Another adjustment and the tip of the probe glowed white-hot as she spot-welded the tiny wire to the contacts. Then, just for safety, she did it all over again on the opposite side.

Pera stood nearby, singing softly to herself. When Solana was done she sent an image to the display inside Pera’s helmet. The dino nodded, and then both of them retreated back behind the heavy planting box ten meters away.

“Okay!” Pera called to Utsuro. “Your best bet is probably a vertical jump. Go!”

Utsuro crouched and let go of the pottery tool, then leaped a good two meters straight up. He came down a meter or so past the trigger stone.

Solana realized she was holding her breath. After a moment she looked at Pera, who had taken a small mirror on a telescoping handle out of one of the many pockets on her armored suit, and was surveying the site while keeping her head below the edge of the planter.

“Utsuro, are you all right?” Solana called out.

“I appear to be.”

She risked a look and saw him walking calmly toward them. Solana and Pera managed to get to their feet before Utsuro reached the planter.

“Now what?” asked Utsuro.

“Now you two stay right here. I’m going to clear the site.”

Pera cautiously approached the yellow paving block, studied it for a moment, then took a small disk out of another pocket and placed it delicately atop the block. She returned the way she had come, and then gestured for everyone to shelter behind the planter again. Only when they were all down did she transmit a short code.

The disk suddenly turned into two jets of blue-white plasma, one pointing up, the other down. The upward jet looked like a glowing sword three meters high before dissipating into vapor, and the downward one shattered and melted the paving block and the switch underneath it.

Three near-simultaneous bangs followed immediately, and then a rattle echoed around them as hundreds of tiny needles buried themselves in every surface facing the mine.

Pera gestured palm-down and the three of them waited a full minute before she gave thumbs-up and they could stand.

“Thank you, to both of you,” said Utsuro. “It was terribly careless of me to step on that thing.”

Pera lashed her tail irritably before speaking. “This changes everything. There could be others, maybe more dangerous ones. We should pull out now.”

“No, please! Not now. I’ve been finding traces of my DNA. I just need a little more time.”

“This is crazy. You’re crazy. All of you are crazy. We’re pulling out. Come on.” She switched to comm. “Atmin, get back to the camp. Fly as high as you can and do not set down anywhere.”

She set out at a cautious pace back to camp, looking intently at the ground before her. After a moment, Solana followed, trying to step where Pera had walked.

Utsuro stood still for several minutes, then walked straight down the center of the main road, heading for the camp.


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Framed