Demensions - The J-hawker Imperatove: Part I

     They say home is a spiritual place. I don't know about that. Matters of the soul don't mean a hell of a lot in my line of work. Hoods and terrorists I can handle without a problem--it's the things with inner meaning that mess me up every time.
     It was Tuesday, 0650, one week into what should have been a month-long furlough in Elysium-Ganymede. I stormed onto the Agamemnon's command deck like a bolt of Jovian lightning and didn't stop until the massive doors of the captain's war room slid shut behind me. I dropped my carry-on with a heavy thud.
     "Just once I'd like to finish a leave without you pulling rank on my ass," I growled.
     Captain Rachel McKenna glanced up from her desk of polished Europan biotite, completely unaffected by my righteous outburst. She held a small data pad in her hand.
     "Welcome back, Commander. I like the beard. You should keep it."
     The captain and I went way back--it's the only reason she put up with me. Strong as hullsteel inside and out. The platinum shield of the Terran Expeditionary Navy glistened on her black-on-black uniform. She tossed me the pad. I considered crushing the thing in my righteous mechanical grip.
     "And this is...?"
     "Your new assignment. A crewman has disappeared in one of the outer tesseracts. No 'buts' this time, Will. I need you in the field ASAP."
     Status monitors confirmed that the ship was under full acceleration--wherever we were going, we were getting there fast. My reflection glowered in an unlit comm screen, a two-meter tall amalgam of man and cybernetic machine: unshaven, disarrayed, electric bimech eyes smoldering under a scowl etched in dark brown skin. Looking not at all like the decorated Tactical Security Officer of a Trojan-class heavy cruiser.
     Inspector Xanish Thoom'niista leaned against the bulkhead opposite the captain, stylish as ever, his arms folded in a pose that was thoroughly human. Not surprising, since the shape-shifter had once again assumed human form. He sported a brand new tattoo beneath his left eye, the heraldic glyph of his birth-caste, embossed in bright metallic gold. Top of the line and very expensive, no doubt.
     "Clue me in, Xano. What's this all about?"
     The ship's Symb'ral Intelligence Officer raised a hairless eyebrow. "Why yes, Will. I did enjoy my holiday. Thanks so much for asking."
     Jeez.
     "Nice tat, Space Man."
     "Much better."
     In their natural state, symb looked like giant black-and-red centipedes on steroids, yet despite their considerable morphing abilities they couldn't change color or mimic human hair. Instead, jet-black cilia flowed from Xano's head like dreadlocks woven with beads and precious gemstones.
     "If you darlings are quite finished." Captain McKenna rounded the desk and keyed something into its interface. "We've got some deep shit here, gentlemen. Have a look."
     A hologram appeared above the desktop emitter, the bust of a young woman in Systems attire.
     "Wow."
     Rachel nodded. "I thought that would shut you up. Her name is Grace Isobe, age twenty-six. Systems Integration, Biotechnician First-Class, specializing in life support."
     The girl had flawless Asian features; tousled hair tucked behind one ear, brown almond eyes so deep they were almost black. A playful smile rose just a bit higher on the right.
     "One week ago Isobe boarded the Kansas-4 hypercube to repair a series of climate control relays. She vanished five days later."
     "Systems is part of the Science Directorate," said Xano.
     "Why involve the Navy in this?"
     "Command wants us to keep it in the family. This girl is married to Kiril Lysenko's line-daughter. Standard two-year contract, renewed eight months ago."
     I leaned back. "And Lysenko is...?"
     "Adjutant Kiril Lysenko-as of 2300 hours tomorrow, the Agamemnon's new Polity Liaison Officer. Transferring in from the Ulysses. Bureaucrat through and through."
     "Aw, shit."
     "My word exactly. I've got just enough time to drop you two off and still make the rendezvous." She pointed to the data pad. "That's Isobe's file, straight from Leda Main Memory. Her personal entries are in there as well. Learn them, fast."
     So much for Elysium-Ganymede. "I've never been to Kansas. Anything special I need to know?"
     A wry smile I knew only too well crept up Rachel's face. She tapped her comlinq. "Jeddah, call up Lieutenant Commander Battad's drop site, please."
     "Right away, ma'am."
     She pointed. "Watch this."
     Grace's hologram broke apart in a flurry of multicolored light and reformed as a map of the outer Evacuation Territories, the ring of manmade habitats that circled the giant planet Jupiter like God's own halo. Ten thousand of them, each one a brilliant pinpoint diamond. One of the diamonds just beyond the orbit of Callisto grew and unfolded into a detailed schematic of the space habitat Rachel had identified as "Kansas-4". Fractal alphanumerics scrolled alongside.
     The captain nodded at the display. "Here's where it gets interesting."
     The holo expanded again. In a flash we were inside, zooming down through crystal blue sky, soaring above endless fields of amber and green and gold. A vast agricultural biome recreating the fabled prairies of the lost planet Earth.
     A town sprang up on the horizon. Clapboard houses, weathervanes, a cropduster swooping over dusty country roads. Behind it all, a continuous monochrome loop strobed the centuries-old history of the years 1933, 1934, 1935...
     "Aw, jeez. It's a frigging dizneyland."
     "A cultural preserve," Rachel corrected me. "There's a difference."
     "Not much. They're either playgrounds for the sinfully rich or asylums for the reality-impaired."
     "Wildcards are fostered in the preserves, that's true. I've seen it. For all I know, Grace Isobe chose to disappear. I need to send in two wildcards of my own to find out."
     "Captain--"
     "Command wants the best, Will. They want us. I want you."
     "Girl, I'm as urban as they get. I don't know squat about rural habitats."
     "You had farmers in your family," Xanish pointed out.
     "Everybody did if you go back five or six hundred years."
     "That's close enough for me," the Inspector countered. His eyes reflected the cascading imagery like twin golden mirrors. "My ancestors lounged about in salt-water swamps for half a million millennia."
     "Captain--"
     "Commander, the choice is really very simple." She reached up and patted my biomechanical shoulders. "You can either shut up and accept the assignment or get your urban ass busted down to perimeter detail along the protosoid outlands."

     Xanish had already assembled our field gear, so we left as soon as the ship was within range. To my duty uniform I added a weapons harness, fractal sapphire-quartz lenses for my eyes, and a floor-length duroflex duster that became rigid as hullsteel when bullets or other flying projectiles tried to invade my personal space. I was just glad to get out of there before meeting our new Liaison. Seriously regimented bastards, every one. "There's a New World to Put in Order" and all that.
     A new world.
     Try ten thousand.
     The Sword of Agamemnon shot through Callisto sector on full fusion burn and jettisoned our drop shuttle without even slowing down. We chewed up God knows how many klicks in high-gee deceleration, then locked in a tight catenary to the main Kansas docking portal beneath Topeka.
     Jupiter at first quarter loomed beyond the portal's outer observation bays, half its colossal bulk ablaze with red-orange storms, the other half lost in darkness. Evac Territories were visible even where the ring sliced across the planet's night side, a particle stream of godlike proportions, forged from steel and architectural diamond. Carbon, crystallized out of Jovian methane. Heavy elements from the asteroids, water and biogenic compounds from the Galilean moons. Freighters and merchant rigs sailed between the habitats, with more than a few Navy patrol boats thrown in and armed to the teeth, bound for another pointless border skirmish with the protosoids. Terran Expeditionary's ever present show of force.
     But it was the wounded sun itself that drew your attention, awesome in its tortured state. A giant blood-red monster, seething and hot, its apparent diameter swollen to an insane forty-two minutes of arc. Seven times its natural size.
     Seven times, since that day in 2023 when Symb'ral refugees in the outer solar system discovered five bodies of collapsed matter racing out of the dark beyond Pluto, orbiting the sun in billion-kilometer spirals. Faster and faster as the generations passed, their orbits ever tightening, counting down, until they finally plunged into the star's heart one hundred years later.
     Pressure massed in the shock wave ahead of the fragments. Fusion ran faster. The sun flared hotter. Swelling, reddening, belching the runaway heat from its battered core out into space.
     The children of the Earth fled.
     And the inner planets burned.
     Our ride was waiting for us, a black-and-white Packard that had wheels, for Chrissakes. A Kansas state trooper named Chaney drove us into downtown Topeka, where we left the 24th century far behind.
     The troopers' HQ was a three-story block of brownstone in the heart of Topeka's commercial district, a fully functioning representation of rural life in the Reformed Collective of North American Electorates--nee old U.S.A--during the New Deal 1930s. The streets bustled with men and women in period dress, raggedy children darting through traffic congested with reproduction Fords and De Sotos. The Provisional Government loves this kind of thing. "Monuments to the Worker Throughout Time" and stuff like that.
     It's all just bread and circuses to me.
     Chief Ed Earl Magoffin greeted us with the static you come to expect whenever Expeditionary sticks its nose into local affairs. I had to point out that Grace Isobe was habitat Crew, not part of the Kansas population. That made her our affair.
     "She's not here," Magoffin spat as we gathered inside the station's garage.
     "You don't know that, Chief."
     "Where is she, then?"
     "That's what we're here to find out," Xanish replied. "If you'd focused some of that attitude on the matter at hand instead of venting it at us, the Commander and I wouldn't need to be here at all."
     "That's it. Battad! I want this goddamn symbie worm out of--"
     "And if you call me a symbie worm one more time I'll carry your hayseed carcass back to Makrograd on principle. I'm a Citizen with a badge and a really big gun. Would you like to see me use them?"
     The chief was a red-headed bull of a man with overt political aspirations, if our dossier on him was correct. He stood there for a moment, then snorted something unintelligible and retreated to a neutral corner.
     "Navy..."
     Xanish joined me at the big tactical board. Grace's final journal entry wouldn't stop gnawing at me. "Oh my God, it's beautiful," she'd said, in a voice surprisingly deep for a woman as petite as she. What was beautiful?
     The local boys had found her car in a parish northeast of here. A map of the tesseract's interior landscape was displayed on the tac board, superimposed with a grid of the climate control system and Grace's pre-set itinerary. Her confirmed stops were highlighted in green, only six out of sixteen: Topeka, Moline, Baileyville, Fostoria (where the car was found), Galesburg, and Penokee. The next closest relay was in Belle Plaine, but she never got there.
     I looked from the board to the car to the board again.
     "Look at the randomness of her route," I said to Xanish. "She's all over the map."
     Xano's species had a natural affinity with recognizing patterns, or "data nodes" as the symb called them. So much so that in his native language, the literal translation of Xano's Naval rank of Inspector was node-hunter. He nodded. "Not the systematic approach you'd expect from an engineer."
     "It's completely haphazard."
     He studied the map. "Perhaps not. Try 'spontaneous'."
     "As in?"
     "Seek out the Grand Design, Commander. She was born on Tokyo-9, the second most densely urbanized collective in the Territories. When she's ten her family emigrates to Makrograd Prime, the most densely urbanized. Post-graduate work on Io, her name on the waiting list for the next expedition to Beta Herculis. She's never seen a place like Kansas before, never seen 'blue' sky. She zig-zags from one corner of the hypercube to another once she gets here..."
     Realization dawned in my flesh-and-bimech brain. "She was sightseeing." I pointed to the non-highlighted areas of the map. "She could've gone anywhere."
     "Nope," said Magoffin. "She couldn'a gone any further than Fostoria. Her mileage and power consumption match the route she confirmed point by point in her log."
     "Instrument readings can be changed, Chief."
     I climbed into the car, a nondescript black monstrosity from the county motor pool, and looked for anything out of the ordinary. I grew up surrounded by machines like this. My old man was a mechanical historian at the New Philly Museum of Automotive Antiquities. I never knew him not to have replicated axle grease smeared up to his elbows.
     "Maybe she ran off with some good ol' boy," offered a lug named Lewelling. "Prob'ly sparkin' with him right now."
     Xanish glanced at me through the car window. "With a good old boy? Not bloody likely."
     I couldn't discern any evidence of foul play inside the cab, my eyes scanning from one end of the EM spectrum to the other, and the dash instruments seemed to be in good order. Then a splash of color on the floor caught my attention. Three or four scattered petals of pink and faded violet. I looked closer, and pulled from under the seat two handfuls of dry velvety blooms.
     "What the hell is this?"
     The blossoms were bunched in clusters of violet and rose, some of them red with white spots, dirt still clinging to the brittle stems.
     "Sweet William," said Lewelling.
     "Sweet who?"
     Chaney stepped between us. "The flowers, Commander. They're sweet William."
     "Why haven't they been tagged as evidence?"
     "They aren't evidence, sir. They're wildflowers."
     "Oh for the..." I tried again. "Where do they grow?"
     "Look out the window, sir. They spring up like weeds this time of year. Sunflowers, clover, goldenrod, morning-glories..."
     "What exactly are you drivin' at now, Battad?" barked the chief. "The countryside is covered in the damn things. Play hell with my sinuses. Hardly worth a glance at all."
     "Only if you're used to seeing them everyday." I looked up at the big map of Kansas.
     Xanish leaned in. "You're thinking again, aren't you?"
     "Humor me."
     "I always do."
     "Chief, I'd like the names of the men you have in the field and a vehicle, please."
     "Why?"
     "I'm going sightseeing."

     After a creative bout of name calling and finger gestures, Magoffin finally gave us one of his squad cars. We pulled out of Topeka trailing prairie dust and gravel, gears grinding unmercifully as I retaught myself how to drive a manual transmission. Since I was making this nonexistent plan up as we went along, Belle Plaine was as good a place as any to start.
     "I'm still humoring you," noted Xanish.
     "I appreciate that."
     "Aside from the missing girl, we're looking for...?"
     "I'm not sure. I'll know when I see it."
     "This is that 'gut' thing again."
     "'Fraid so, Space Man."
     "Ah. Remind me to morphose some human entrails the next time I take on this form."
     I glanced across the cab and caught him staring with rapt attention at the wheatfields passing by outside. Xanish had even less cultural experience with rural environments than I did. His ancestors had been forced to evacuate the dying worlds of Proxima Centauri long before mine had fled the Earth. His alien sensibilities were awed once again that such a place as this could ever have existed at all.
     As were all the Territorial habitats, Kansas-4 was a hypercube--a tesseract--an immense four-dimensional fusion of human and Symb'ral technologies. Twenty-four vast interior planes angled over, below, and tangent to one another with the dizzying perspectives on an Escher drawing. Induced gravitic fields mimicked the effects of one gee, uniformly perpendicular to each side of the planes. The overall structure measured more than fourteen thousand square kilometers of usable surface area, a hell of a big neighborhood for one woman to get lost in.
     We rumbled past three children who smiled and waved through our cloud of grit: a little girl with strawberry blond curls and two boys, much older, each toting a rifle and game birds of some sort. All were barefoot and in need of a good scrubbing.
     "That really pisses me off," I said, looking after them in the rearview mirror. "Nobody should have to grow up that way just because it's the 'historically accurate' thing to do."
     "But look at the symbolic value," the Inspector offered. "This era represents your countrymen's unparalleled spirit of hope and optimism, even in the face of hardship well beyond their control. Not unlike our own Jovian exile, wouldn't you agree?"
     "I'm just saying they deserve a lot better."
     "And how do you define 'better'? The Provisional Government fully supports the preserves as living archives of societal development."
     "ProGov can go to hell."
     "As you've suggested on any number of occasions." He looked at me pointedly. "Earth burned to a cinder a long time ago, Will. The best any of you can do is rebuild from the wreckage."
     I stopped him with a wave of my hand. "Enough. Please. I was just making a point."
     "So was I."
     He returned his attention to the passing wheat. I drove on in silence, knocking around what he'd said about hope and the choices people make. I'd heard those words before, from a hospital chaplain after my eyes, arms, and the contents of my chest had been blown to smithereens. Wreckage, indeed. I ran my fingers over the thick biosynthetic muscles that replicated my abs and pectorals. Integrated cardiorespiratory bimechs pumped away beneath them, souvenirs from my reckless youth and a disastrous firefight with Adrastean ice pirates. Total cyborg transformation. Not for the first time, I wondered if that was the point at which I began to feel disconnected from my own humanity. I hate it when things come back in circles--I'd like to at least pretend I'm going forward with my life.
     We hit Belle Plaine and examined the relay site, not finding what I'd hoped. West through Russell and Independence after that, then south again to the seedy river town of Lehigh where we stopped for the artificial night. Street lamps flicked on one by one as the holographic display untold kilometers overhead faded to starry black. We checked in with the local P.D. and arranged to meet Sergeant Avery a short time later at his favorite watering hole. Xanish chose not to join us, opting instead to access Leda Main Memory from the county courthouse.
     The night air smelled of the river and red cedars. I kept thinking about the petals of sweet William we'd brought with us from Topeka. Grace had touched these flowers. She'd picked them, held them in her hands. After two centuries of hiding from the sun behind Jupiter's irradiated shadow, the bulk of humanity had forgotten what it was to exist outside. That Grace Isobe had reveled in a terrestrial environment like Kansas-4 spoke more of her vision and spirit than anything that was written in her bio. A girl like that was our future. We had to find her. And these flowers were the key.
     I just couldn't recognize the lock.
     Shouts and raucous laughter pealed through the tavern's windows as I crossed the street. Avery hadn't yet arrived, so I lit an herbal cigarette and glanced inside.
     The tension in the room was palpable. It was a dark, crowded little dive: mismatched tables, a beat-up bar along the back, two or three dozen boozy locals drinking too much. A wiry bastard who looked like a weasel sat off to one side, loud and cocky and drunk off his ass.
     A barmaid in black lace and blood-red features struggled in his lap--a female symb in human guise. She bore no visible glyph the way Xanish did, its absence marking her as lower class, a menial in the symb's rigid caste-stratified culture. The weasel held her tight, pale hands locked around her wrists, his watery gray eyes glistening with lewd intent.
     I turned up my augmented hearing.
     "You're lookin' mighty fine tonight, Taasmed," he said. "C'mon here an' give me a big wet kiss."
     "Lonny you're hurting me." The Symb'ral woman twisted and turned, the long black cilia on her head writhing in reflection of her emotional state. "I swear to Bangalu'r, Lonny Tucker. Let go or I'll take your damn fool head off."
     The bastard just laughed. "You best mind that sassy tongue, girl. Me an' my boys are gonna own this town before long. We're gonna be kings. I might not fancy no symbie whore then." He planted his lips on her smooth crimson neck.
     The barmaid pulled sideways and drove a spiked heel down on Tucker's shoe. He yowled and doubled over. Taasmed spun free and rammed her knee into the weasel's pointy face, and in the blink of an eye she reverted to her true Symb'ral form. Black lace ripped into shreds as her spine arched back into a long serpentine S, fifty pairs of red segmented legs erupting from her sides.
     Lonny's head snapped back, dark blood spraying from his mouth and nose. A second blink and Taasmed was human again, deathly afraid, covering herself with torn lace.
     Tucker's men howled and jumped her. An equal number dove in and pummeled them. The weasel leapt to his feet, holding his face. Gore streamed between his fingers.
     "Get away from her!" he roared. "She's mine." He whipped a gun from beneath the folds of his ratty coat and leveled it between Taasmed's golden eyes.
     Everybody froze. The weapon gleamed despite the dim light, cold and deadly, like electric ice. A Maxim-Giessen troop decimator, brand new by the look of it--tachyon sights and alpha-class augmentations. Identical to the type manufactured for the Defense Directorate on Eisenach-3.
     What the bleeding hell was it doing here?
     My artificial heart slammed into overdrive. I grabbed a hand taser from the weapons harness strapped around my chest--a custom Loessing number, non-lethal but wickedly effective -- spat my cigarette into the street and thumbed the taser's safety to maximum stun. Tucker's gun was still trained on the nude woman's head. Symb could survive just about anything except excessive loss of blood, but I couldn't chance it. I had to time this to the instant.
     One of the men inched forward. "Sweet Jesus, Lonny, don't be a fool. Put that damn thing away--"
     "Not until I learn Miss Taasmed Sim'baasiyahn here some manners." Lonny's eyes blazed. He was over the top and ready to fire.
     "I'd take your friend's advice, pal." I stepped through the shadowed door, arm locked, my taser fixed on Tucker's heart. "Put the gun down. Very slow. Right now."
     He flinched, threw his crazy drunken stare at me for a moment but kept the gun trained on the woman. I took another step forward, then a third. My bimech finger tightened around the taser's firing stud. Cybernetic hardwiring gave me perfect hand-eye coordination. I never missed.
     "You know, it's really not a Navy man's job to get involved in domestic matters, but it's been a real pisser of a day and taking down some worthless asshole would do me a world of good."
     In a flash he yanked the gun off Taasmed and aimed at me. We fired point blank. Duroflex went rigid on impact; his bullet ricocheted away as a taser-stream of electrified flechettes nailed him dead center. He fell back, zapped into electric oblivion. The decimator flew from his hand.
     "Get it!" someone bellowed.
     Tucker's men leapt in from the right as the barflies who'd opposed them sailed from the left, two human waves crashing into each other with the mystery gun as the prize.
     And me caught in between.
     I was slammed from both sides and forced down, the Maxim rebounding away from my fingertips. Fists and thrashing limbs swept me up again as the Kansans tore into each other with a ferocity that shook the rafters. They wanted the gun; my presence didn't matter at all. One mighty shove and I was airborne, crashing through the bar's center window.
     I hit the sidewalk in a flying cascade of glass and rolled alongside a red Ford at the curb. The fight broke through the tavern doors and spilled out into the street, exploding up and down the humid waterfront in a matter of seconds. A chair sailed through the broken window and shattered the windshield above me.
     That tore it. No one laid into me twice.
     I holstered the taser. Pulled an ugly black Odessa variable-bore recoilless from my harness. Slammed in an oversized clip of chromed explosive .45s and fired into the night sky above the mob.
     Four sharp cracks roared from the recoilless, deafening bursts that rattled every window within earshot. I drew the taser again with my free hand and raked the crowd. Men dropped like sides of cloned beef.
     I dashed across the street, both guns drawn. My comlinq began to chime. Dropped down behind a grocery truck along the opposite curb and fired into the melee again. A police siren wailed. I tapped the communications disc fastened to my collar.
     "Your timing sucks," I said.
     "If you could stay out of trouble for more than five minutes at a time, this wouldn't be an issue," came Xanish's sardonic reply. "What the hell's going on over there?"
     "Barroom brawl out of control, with a twist you won't believe."
     "I've got Avery with me. We'll be there any second."
     "Keep your heads down. Our perps are packing heat."
     "Heed your own advice, Commander. My head will grow back. Your's won't."
     No sooner than I'd popped in a fresh clip, the Lehigh P.D.'s lone squad car came squealing around a corner. Xano jumped out, his own taser drawn. Silver-haired Sergeant Avery and three of his deputies waded into the mob with billy clubs swinging.
     The brawl fell apart as quickly as it came together, vanishing into shadows and side streets thick with river mist. The broken and bloodied who hadn't escaped were lined up in piles along the curb. The story that came out was simple enough: Lonny and his band of uglies had been bullying the townsfolk for months. It was just a matter of time before the tension finally snapped. A little too pat, maybe, but that was Avery's business.
     The presence of military hardware in a backwater like Lehigh was another matter altogether, one the P.D. wanted to keep quiet at all costs. The Maxim was nowhere to be found, spirited away in the confusion of the brawl--presumably the real reason I'd been lobbed through the tavern window. I put the question to our man Tucker as he was handcuffed there on the sidewalk.
     "You mind your place, boy," he spat, still groggy from the taser zap. Blood oozed from his torn lips and nose. "I got nothin' to say to the likes'a you."
     "Hush up, Lonny," barked a deputy. He hustled Tucker into the back seat of the squad car. "You done enough here already."
     Xanish stepped beside me. "And racism rears its ugly head once again. I see it more often then you, believe me."
     "As if the water's weren't muddy enough..."
     Just then I noticed Taasmed Sim'baasiyahn watching us from the shadows of the barroom door. She'd found an overcoat to wear. Her golden eyes flicked away for a moment, then locked back onto mine. She backed into the tavern.
     Xano shot me a glance and we followed her inside. The police had already cleared the place out. We three were alone.
     With tentative steps Taasmed approached Xanish, touched the glyph on his cheek, and bowed before him. The Inspector's birth-caste had some weird religious significance that none of us mere human mortals could understand, and he rarely talked about it. The two symb spoke in whispers. I could've turned up my aural implants to listen in but out of respect did not. When they'd finished Xano steered the woman to me.
     "Hell of a burg you've got here, ma'am," I said.
     "It used to be," she answered quietly. She was uneasy, didn't know what to do with her hands. "Times were hard but hopeful, you know? I could relate to that. I fit here, in my own way. But then darkness came, like a blight."
     "So I gather." I brushed thin splinters of glass from my shoulders.
     "You went after those men by yourself, sir."
     "My name's Will. I got lucky."
     "Luck's got nothing to do with it. You did what was right. Stopped that nonsense before it turned ugly. That's something to think about." She shook her head. "J-hawkers."
     I didn't know the word. "Does that mean something?"
     She hesitated a moment, then pulled us away from the broken windows, away from prying eyes.
     "When I have thinking to do, I find a nice elder to sit under," Taasmed said. She looked at Xano. "There's nothing like them where we come from, is there. Amazing things, trees. Elms and maples will do, but an elder is what you want. All the answers you need are there, just waiting for you."
     "An elder." Xanish pulled Grace Isobe's data pad from his uniform pocket and tapped it on. A holographic display appeared in the air above the tiny emitter. "Any nearby?"
     "No." Taasmed patted my arm. "But you'll find one, if you look hard enough. Good night... Will." She bowed to Xanish once again, then left the room.
     I watched the kitchen door swing shut behind her. "And that helps us how?"
     "Maybe it doesn't." Xano handed me the pad. "Then again, maybe it does..."
     Stored in the pad's memory was Grace Isobe's original set of work instructions, straight from Systems Integration. Maps, travel documents, schematics and diagnostic files for each of the climate control relays she'd be repairing. Displayed before me in bright holographic green were the last four towns on her itinerary. I scanned the names again, then re-read them more slowly: Thayer, Olivet, Maple Hill, and Glen Elder.
     Glen Elder.
     "That's it, Xanish." I slapped the pad back into his hand and pointed to the display. "That's what she meant."
     "You believe her?"
     "I do."
     "Entrails again."
     I looked out the barroom window, over the prairie to the black, deceptively close horizon. Couldn't see a thing. But I knew she had, and that was good enough.

Go on to Part II now!

The J-hawker Imperative: Part I

© 2001 Dean Wells