The Gaming Outpost

Clackiting iron lines under steel wheels muttered in tune with the joggling of the line of sun that ran lengthwise down the vinyl rubber runner bisecting Rail Carriage #14. Strobing, flickering orange fuelled sunlight added a bale of thorns to the camel’s back which was reading the financials of Du Morganne Cement Plant, for Jeff Sundheim. So he chose gaslight, and the study of the back of his eyelids, although fear for the loss of proprietary information opened his eyes to stash the folders and its dozen papers in his rhino hide briefcase under his chair amidst the two iron V’s holding his bolstered seat up under his considerable weight. Then he snored the afternoon away.

Subconsciously realizing the train had stopped, and believing they had reached Conslan Port, Jeff began rousing himself from dreams of trumpet song in purple palaces and green mist-shrouded bark covered giants clustered in darkling woods which in his dream had gone together, although in reality, they had been in altogether different worlds and universes only to find his nose cold and his eyes opening, then crossing as he spotted a pistol barrel pointing to a small zit on his proboscis.

A short gasp, a tightening of his hands on the arm grips, and then he looked up, with a slight tremulous in his chest to see amused grey eyes, a wide whiskery smile, and a Forton hat of felt with a small belt about the scalp made to slick off the rains that came in off the ocean betimes.

“Well, sir. You are a heavy sleeper, and a cool customer.” The man had some admiration in his voice, and he leaned his head to the side to point with while still holding the pistol in his left hand with utter stillness. Everyone else in the rail car looked either frightened or outraged, but all were awake. And making sure no one ‘got any bright ideas’ was another fellow in a Forton hat with a shortgun probably armed with several dozen pellets suited to shred a man and the fellow next to him.

“Is this a robbery?” Jeff Sundheim asked, hiding his hope. He made to get off his watch on his wrist, and the leader laughed.

“We’re not common thieves. We only want what is our due, Mr. Sundheim, is it? Troubleshooter and accountant for Duke Morganne?”

Jeff sighed. He had hoped, but there was really nothing for it, but to go along. He could not start a gun battle at such a disadvantage, particulary so since there were children in the carriage.

“You have me, sir.”
“Indeed, I do. Now stand, slowly.”
Jeff did and permitted himself to be briskly and amateurishly frisked. They missed the stilletto hanging between his shoulder blades which was some comfort.
“Tell ‘the Duke’ of what happens. He will be sure to gift you a doubloon if you’re quick.” Jeff spoke to the room at large, and the helper with the shortgun made to bash him with it, but the leader stopped him.
“No, laddie. We’re a peaceful lot. Feel free, my hosts to get some of the Duke’s gold. I’d be right pleased to see some honest workingman got it rather than that crook. Tell him that the Union has his man, and the Cement Plant as well.” The cheery laughter and the quiet that met this told Jeff much. He was in enemy ground, and his enemy was a canny fellow. Jeff knew that he would need to learn much more to extricate himself and his employer in the next days, or he might find himself not so well treated.

And with that, he was led outside the stopped train in a dark wood and mounted on a horse to which his hands were tied, and another rider took up the reins of his horse. The leader of the kidnappers told five of his men to clear the barrier in the track, and the other four nearest Jeff to guard him well and take him back to some place known only as ‘The Camp’. It promised to be the beginning of a long night.

Ethereal black smoke domed the sky; the grit of it clung to the teeth, and clogged the throat. Looking down the descent of the white marble way, between the awnings of the avenue of merchants, while the distance distorted, blurred, and stung the eyes and the brain for the smoke drifted here too past the unseeing and unknowing residents of the City of Four Hills. But the hunter saw, smelt, tasted the bitter smoke. It creeped as if to jump up on his shoulder when he was not looking, hooked beneath his sole to make the stone unwelcome met, and curdled around ankles seeking trippage and damage.

The hunter knew it of old. He had destroyed vampires in Philly, and in Costa San Rico, and on the streets of Old London with each city a resident of different worlds. All these different in their form, and powers, and sometimes even natures, but all held the taint of the Undead, by their very existence they let into a particular Reality their gritty, bitter entropy.

For a vampire not only is often Damned, and soulless, and a bloodthirsty monster, but he hastens the heat death of the universe, and spreads ill luck by its mere existence. Thus the hunter hunted, but not as a hero. He had been such, but by his second hunt, when the screams of the burned thing echoed in his ears, he knew better. He was not a hero. He was a janitor, a garbageman, a sewer tech.

Still, he had not seen such a mass of mono-taste smoke. It meant several things. The single taste made it clear there was but one Monster. But the steadiness of it made clear that the Monster was a master.

But that saved the worse for last. For most Masters become reclusive and static. The hunter had met one that he had been unable to kill, somewhat unwilling in truth, who lived on a teaspoon of blood a month. Such was the nature of the Master Vampire. But, here…here was different. Here a master had not retreated from the world, and learned economy and durability. Here a master had gone the opposite way and become profiligate and debauched in a sea of blood.

And that worried the hunter greatly.

At the head of a column of mounted knights, Sir Raspers of Harrowgard aka Thomas Victor Jennings of Palmetto Lane, Pensacola, Florida, Earth rode forth on his giant bay horse. Leaving the castle behind and the cheering lads, and weeping maids, the double line of twenty kept at an easy trot down to the Sea Road. There, they turned south as they clattered throught the empty streets of what had been a fine fishing village before the raiders burnt it. Not wanting to as the ashen smell still clung to the ground, Sir Raspers known for his smoker’s voice, reined the column back to a walk for the Sea Road was treacherous underfoot with rocks bobbing to the surface after every winter, and on occasion a sheer drop off cliffs to the left and into the sea.

By noon, they had reached the first guardpoint, and they stayed to enjoy a repast and a report from the worried men there. Inside the low earthen walls, they ate their bread, cheese, and ham, and then set out again.

By nightfall, they were a few miles short of the next guardpoint so they pushed on into the twilight until they reached it. This caused no little bit of worry to the guardian quartet who heard a large group come up the road at night, and so they were greeted with especial relief and gladness.

The warmth of the fire after the occasional salt spray of the day, and the hard riding was also welcome as was the cooking sausage and pears. Sir Raspers went aside to talk with his lead men, and the captain of the guardpoint as he took the time to smoke one of his few remaining cigarrettes. Despite what people said, a pipe was just not the same for him.

He took the reports, and then had the chaplain pray, and then bade his men to sleep which they did for tommorrow would see them enter the Warthing Wood, a treacherous place home to bandits and unclean things once human, and the day would be even harder than the first.

The kevlax-silk blend armor short sleeve shirt rode up above the tattoo of a spider pierced by a dagger on the sergeant’s right bicep as he crouched by the entrance to the Tunnels. A dark mouth of concrete chunks, held together by molded-green spiderspit, stank of blood and acid as the sun went down, and the interior heat of the underground warrens breathed out into his face, his twitching nose. The scent told him things.

Putting down the heavy plasma rifle, he took up a single pulse lasecaster glove for his right hand, and a spitter digger for his left. Leaving the heavy rifle behind, the sergeant moved forward to the tunnel mouth across the crunching bones of rats, and an occasional cat. Above him, the abandoned downtown towers of Seattle watched with indifference, one might say. The sergeant thought they cheered him on, being the creation of Man, and he being a man, even if he was from another universe.

The glove held its juice in the palm of his hand, in a biological energy pack made of chitin, which were made of sugar in a maximal reflective energy cage that looked like diamonds, but was borrowed from a frog. Point a finger, will the shot, and zaaaaap! Energy would race from the pack, down a fiber optic line, and out a small gate at the tip of the finger.

In order to get in, he’d have to crawl on his belly, and considering he was hunting spiders, who ran at full human sprint in the same place he could crawl, that seemed a bad idea. So he sat the spitter digger to work. The conic mouth inhaled rock chunks at one end, digested them in the tubular middle of two inches, and shot them out the other fan shaped end.

In a few minutes, it was done, and he scooped it back up in the midst of it as his close combat ‘knife’. A spitter could also cut through spiderflesh as well as rock. One would think it was noisy, but the marvelous little machine used contra-vibrations so that running, it was actually more silent than not running. It was a black hole for sound.

The age of the scent, and the intensity told him that there was not a horde waiting for him in the First Waiting Chamber. If there had been, he would have been toting the plasma rifle. Every spider warren had such a place near its exterior mouth so that they could rush out and overwhelm a large foe. The flattened oval shaped clamshell room was fifty feet across tilting down about fifteen degrees, and six foot tall at its center. The sergeant slow stepped into it, looking right, left, up, and down because spiders could dig holes in dirt floors and be up a man’s leg, and in his face faster than you could blink.

Careful to not cut himself with the spitter, the sergeant wiped some sweat off the left side of his forehead before it dripped into his left eye, and then advanced some more, listening, feeling, smelling. They were out there, and it was his job to make the ‘terraformers’ extinct. In a few decades, their masters would arrive in sublight ships, hoping to find a planet all ready for their inhabitation. The sergeant intended to greet them with a spaceship the size of a moon. But first things first. Spider blasting.

“No. You don’t understand!” I shouted, and surgestepped across the bunker to slam Light Colonel Kellman in the chest, and up againsts the dirty ceracrete wall. His powered armor crunched under my bare hands, and his eyes widened at the frank impossibility. And then training kicked in, and he tried to armbar me, but I faded back, and spun him so that he landed facedown on the holotable.

“Stop.” General Cooper ordered. We both moved. Him to rise, and me to circle in the small space amidst the other officers in the Circle. “Next man moves, gets shot.”

The sergeant at arms racked his plasma cannon which was heavy enough that he needed his full powered armor to tote it. It was also big enough to tank down a pammier or an enemy Wolfjumper battletank.

We froze, and I looked calmly at the General. He viewed me with displeasure in his cold, gray eyes.

“Explain without the theatrics.” I started to speak in reaction to this demand, but the general pointed a finger at Kellman.

“Sir. Enlisting untrained women to fight the invading Wolfen would be slaughter. There are no armors available in their size. They have no training. In my pam, I could kill dozens. The Wolfen would gut them.”

General Cooper looked at me with a dead fish like mouth pursed.

“How many?” I said to Kellman.

He blinked, and shook his head.

“How many women would it take to kill you? Give them weapons familiarization and proton double barrels.”

He shrugged and spoke off-handedly.

“I don’t know. Two hundred.”

“Okay, then we send two hundred fifty to get you.”

I said calmly, and then waited. The explosion of outrage came from all sides. I waited some more until the sergeant at arms restored order by shooting a low power pulse into the ceiling.

“Its…” Kellman sputtered.

“Its exactly that bad, gentlemen. Ordinarily, wars avoid civilians. There are no civilians in this war. The Wolfen aim to exterminate the human race. Ordinarily, you want to keep your breeding stock, to be blunt, of young females alive so they can repopulate in one generation. We’re trying to survive for one generation.”

I paused and looked around them.

“If I have to, I’m going to send young women out armed with sticks.” I paused. “And so are you.”

There were tears and shock in everyone’s face, and then a broken voiced General Cooper spoke.

“The verser is right. This is a War to the Knife. Give the orders.”

….waaaghhhhh…
…but why does he get to…
…be brave, my son…
The voices came from inside the walled manor house, and then a pale-faced young man rode out the open gateway on horseback with his spatha blade hanging awkwardly at his waist to join our double column of twenty. Nodding to him, I checked his name off on my slate, and told him to take position eight which was near the middle and safer.

We rode away from the manor house, and the recently conquered city of Hisbran, out toward the lands of Co. We picked up two more young lads who had never gone to war before. But before we got much further on the granite block path, we met a small horde of females with swords barring our path.

I held up a leather gloved hand to halt the column, and we stopped in silence except for the nicker of the horses, and the whipporwill of a bird singing across the barren moorland dotted with heather and small bush trees.

“Ladies.” I said in a cordial tone, bowing my head.
“We demand to go to war.” Said the first, her broadsword held out at arm’s length. She was quite something with the flaming red hair, blue eyes, and while a bit heavy for my taste, she was the peasant’s ideal.
“Who am I speaking too?”
She breathed in, which caused a stir among my men.
“Chellisal of the House Likien.” In other words, she was a daughter of the Five Families which had ruled Hisbran until we conquered it for the greater glory of King Frand the Roadbuilder, and the growth of a trade network which would support the medical establishment I wanted to start. Too many of the peasant farmers and their families died from easily prevented diseases and ailments for want of a medic with a year’s training, but such was too expensive except for nobles. After I got a trading based economic boom going, it would not be.
“King Frand does not accept women warriors.”
“We’ve had them for over a …”
“Begging your pardon, Lady Chellisal, but your side lost. The conqueror gets to set the rules.”
She flushed, and shook her head like a pony indignant. Clearly such did not apply to her.
“Whatever my father said, he could not have meant to agree to this.” She said impassioned as I let my eyebrow rise.
“I do believe the terms were unconditional surrender.” I said as dryly as I could.
“But…”
“One side, young lady, or I shall tell my lads to pick you up and carry you out of the way.” The small horde of girls looked up at the faces of the soldiers with me that no doubt split into smiles, and hurriedly parted for us but Chellisal who stood alone for a long second, and then weeping and cursing joined her sisters on the side of the road.
As we rode on, she screamed behind us.
“Pig.” And I sighed for I really did not want to go here, but it had to be done. I could not take a collection of largely untrained Hisbranner men into war with a few veterans, and have girls laughing at them. Napoleon said ‘the morale is to the physical as three to one’. Walking away from this insult would lead to young lads killed through no fault of their own.

I looked at my two veterans, and caught their eye.

“Give her ten lashes on her bare back.”
My soldiers were horrified at my terrifying harshness, which I found amusing in a way. She had been demanding the right to get a sword through her gut ten seconds ago, and now the more merciful whip was madness. But none gainsayed me, and the deed was done.

And after Chellisal was bandaged, and reclothed, and sent home with her broken horde, I turned to my soldiers and spoke.
“Let’s ride.”

The Lady Chellisal would never believe it, but it was mercy, and a love for a kind of mercy called civilization that moved me.

“No.”
“Please.”
“We need you.”
“We?”
“We, I, everyone.”
“Remember?”
“Aaah.”
“Remember.”
“Ok. I remember. Happy now?!?”
“No.”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing. Nothing but to be left alone.”
“You’re pathetic.”
“Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Which is why you’re asking now.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“But I do.”
“What?”
“You think I…”
“Still hold a torch for me. No. I don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“I see.”
“Better be leaving then.”
“No, but…”
“No buts.”
“This is just vengeance.”
“This is me keeping my promise.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah, I said I’d leave you be, and never come back, no matter what.”
“But…”
“I had to say that.”
“Why?”
“That or go mad for you.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that bad.”
“Get out! Get out now, you lying puke.”
“I’m sorry. I…”
“I was pathetic, then. Still am.”
“You’re not pathetic.”
“Sweet of you to lie. But I am.”
“You really loved me that much?”
“I told you.”
“I’m used to people lying. Pretty words.”
“I’m a man of poor words and poorer deeds. But what I say is true.”
“I see. I begin to see.”
“So, I can’t. I’d open the door to madness.”
“You’d….die. Verse out…but…another world…”
“Most of the worlds I’ve been too have been horrible. I’ve been tortured to death twice. I…like it here. But that’s not the problem.”
“What is?”
“Sometimes I hang on by my teeth to a rope. Rope snaps. I could go very bad places.”
“Yes?”
“I’m immortal. Think about it. You’re asking me to risk ….”
“Other worlds being hurt. Your own immortal pain. And breaking your honor…for a girl too stupid to see.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you. I’m going now.”
“But…”
“You’re right. We will find another volunteer.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Why?”
“Be…because I’m pathetic.”
“You’re not pathetic.”

Jouncing, bouncing, right, right, left, up, and then improbably back; spitting gravel out from under its solid tires, Detective Tim Ripley drove, or perhaps guided, wished, and occasionally flung the heavy flaming orange rusted iron of the steam truck down the twisting, dipping, potholed gravel ruts between the enclosing low walls of green undergrowth, and the higher filigreed windows of trees and vines that closed in on both sides like Mother Nature about to close her fingers on your skull and squish it like a grape.

The totally needful air-conditioner jetted must-tasting air into my face as I carommed on the vinyl bench seat between Ripley and the stolid mass of Sheriff Mick Wall who had it seemed merged with the heavy right-side door, and rode with the grim faced endurance of the experienced steam trucker. The temperature outside was in the nineties, farenheit, and the eighties in humidity, but with a live steam engine shooting out blasts of superheated water four feet away both stats jumped by about forty.

We had to keep the windshield wiper going to swike off the condensation that instantly dropped out of the air.

Ripley split our ears with a steam whistle as we passed Kimberly Lanton’s place. He could argue to the sherriff that he was merely letting the delightful Widow Kimberly that we were on the job, as she had been the one who informed us. But even I, new to the district, knew better.

Kimberly Lanton was a widow of a good man, who had died a year ago when his steam tractor exploded. Mercifully, he was close to it, so he had a moment of surprise, and then he was being welcomed by the angels without the pain of being flashed. Now, she had no children, a farm, and a pair of lonely arms, plus she had the most lovely face of her school year in the district since she had been chosen such in the Lovely Lasses of 892 Year of the Starship Contest for North Ogoni District.

Herky-jerky, kidney-pounding, buttock smashing three miles later, from the Crosstown Linkway to the Ogonika River along Jackson’s Cut, and Ripley skidded the four ton monstrosity to a halt.

Trembling from the shock of the ride, and wishing yet again that this universe had invented internal combustion engines and air-filled tires, I followed the other two out of the truck, and jumped down the five feet to the ground. Put the typical steam truck up against a monster truck, and the steamer would drive right through the monster truck.

I pushed a button and the hundred pound weight, neccessarily power assisted door slammed shut behind me. Then I took a drink of water, and surveyed the muddy Ogonika River. It ran north to south, about twenty-five yards, or nineteen zeldrons, across here with a stiff five mile per hour currrent. A tractor wide concrete bridge with no railing spanned the flood. It had four columns rising ten feet above the water, each holding a slab of concrete to form the roadway. But it was not much of a roadway for its sole purpose was to let Farmer’s Lincoln and Jeffers cross along with Johnson and his whole clan to their fields on both sides of the Ogonika.

Following Ripley and the Sherriff up on the earth bank, dotted by broadleaf grass like a crocheted quilt, I caught the smell, the stink, the reek. It was overwhelming, nasty, vicious, and hateful.

I gagged, and noticed that the others were putting a solution like Vicks Vaporub under their nose. The sherriff grasped me by the hair, and pulled my head back to smear the gunk under my nose. It burned, and stung through my nose, and cut the worse of the nauseating odor to an eye-watering miasma.

“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet, rookie.” The sherriff replied, and for a long pause I wondered what he meant, and then I realized. Rookies got the slime jobs.

I followed my nose, and it led me to the bridge. And from there to the closest span on this side that served as a ramp. Getting down near the waters edge, where the clay earth grew slimy and moldable, I saw a head shaped thing bob in the current just above the bridge.

The ‘opportunity’ to retrieve a floater from the river had not yet been mine. We get our share of drunken idiots, just plain idiots, and the unlucky every summer and spring. And three years ago, we had a madgirl out poisoning guys, and dumping them in the river. But that was before I had versed into this universe.

Wishing I had chosen this day to take off, or even be sick (and I hate being sick), I gritted my teeth, and entered the water. It rolled about my ankles, and down toward the corpse. Pulling at the belt on my waist, I got out my baton, and walked toward the body into steadily deeper water.

I pushed it gently, just to see if it would move, but nothing more than a bobbing mockery of life came back to me. Sighing in regret, I pushed harder, and it went under the span. Without thinking about it, I followed the body under the darkness of the span. Spiders and snails waited for me down there, and cringing across the shoulders, I kept going knowing that I could not stop no matter how badly I wanted to.

And then light, and the body floated out, and I came after it in a two-step lunge to breathe clean air. Well, not that clean air, I thought as I choked on a cough, but still better.

Gasps and mutterings reached me from my rest in the river as I stood with my eyes closed. Unhappily, I opened my eyes and strode over the edge of the river, south of the bridge, where the two veteran peace officers were staring in shock at the body in the shallows.

One glance, and I knew why. Resticali. Thin, chitinous facial shields in mottled dark blue; insectoid eyes; a dominant gripper arm with three opposable thumbs, and a fine work small arm with twelve thumbs formed a basic bipedal that was in no way from Around Here.

“Resticali?” The sherriff said looking at me with a curious look that penetrated to the bones. I must have spoke without being aware of it.

Great. Now, I got to tell them that A. I was a verser. B. I had encountered Resticali in another universe. C. Resticali were a horde. They had little creativity, but rather than serve other wiser races, they chose to live the live of a barbarian horde. And if one was on Earth, that meant that tens of thousands of spaceships of all sorts, whatever they had been able to steal, were headed this way with Resticali intent on loot. They needed, we had, they took.

“Well, its like this, boss…” I began weakly with a smile.

My partner and I walked, our left hands held out warding off the encroaching spectators in the hallway, with our right hands sitting lightly on top of our laseblasters. The substandard concrete, courtesy of rent control and poorly paid easily bribed inspectors, hallway trembled under each step Jorgan in front of me took. He had not managed the softslipstep a true tower dweller learned with their first steps; his steps were the definite clomp of the Powered Armor Marine even if he had retired after losing his left ear to some relatavistic shrapnel.

I had not been born in a Tower either, one of the storage places for the unwanted and messed up, but instead in an exurb of Buffalo, New York in another dimension. But being a verser, an extradimensional traveller, teaches you skills on how to fit in with the locals. So I could speak Tower Trash with hardly an accent, and walk better than most although I hid that as it was a good way to sneak up on a Towhead you wanted to ‘talk to’ without him ‘tekken a strack’ or bolting off in a reckless rush.

The faces around me were closed, and resentful. They mistrusted the Law because often enough the Law abused them, but also because often enough they deserved a good smacking. This society is a dysfunctional family. The leaders are visionless yoicks, and the towheads are violent twits. I feel my job is to let the rare kid with something special a chance to survive his hateful peers.

I saw one. Kannie, eight years old, and already he cleans his ‘uncles’ apartment, and buys their food, and makes decent meals. He was born to be a five star chef, but already his peers think ‘you ta guid for us’ and have started the pattern of harrassment that ends with an ‘accidental fall down a staircase’ and a crushed skull.

I brush him with my elbow like I told him I would, and he shoves it back hard after a second. Then I turn and glare at him, which he meets with a very creditable full-teeth snarl with teeth pressed together which was the Towhead way of saying ‘I’m about to stomp you to snot’. I stared for a second, and then bounced him against the wall of the hallway and the door he was up against rattled good.

Then, smirking, I went on, while inside I congratulated the guy for his playacting. It would buy him some credibility to ‘stand up against the lady cop’, and that would give him some more time to grow up.

At the end of the hall, a smell like burnt meat filled my nostils. Lasers dump enough energy into a human body to turn the seventy percent of water we are into steam. The rest gets explosively blown out. But the smell varies.

The smell of a low power laser, like the sort a Towhead might use was a bit of not quite cooked meat smell. A police laser will get a man cooked to the point where its time to get out the mashed potatoes and gravy. It requires a seriously overpowered machine to burn a man’s exploded flesh this harsh.

The floor super, a fat woman built like a tank, with an annoyed look on her face was standing guard in front of the door.

“It stinks in there. And he owes me his weeks…rent.” Weeks graft more like. There were not enough apartments due to rent control because who would build an apartment when it costs five years to make a profit off the orginal investment? And Towheads could destroy a property in six months unless you had good floor managers, but the vicious type who could overawe gangbangers tended to want ‘extra’ for themselves, so they took.

It was only when she raised her hand that I saw why she was a supe. She had the oil smooth rigidity of a cyborg.

Jorgan, not being an idiot, stayed out of arms’ reach of her. She could easily break your arm with a simple grab and twist. And if you really ticked her off, she could rip it off, and beat you to death with it.

“Thank you for reporting.”
“Had too. Jerk overrided the security codes on the door. Can’t get in.” The supe said.
“Step aside.” Jorgan said with the attitude of ‘hey, I was being polite, now I’m telling you.’ Did I mention he was a pam? Yeah, they don’t take ‘tude from anyone.

She glared at him, and I stepped to his right, and smiled with my hand still on my laseblaster. She scowled at me, but my clear happiness about shooting her down on the spot, while a lie, was a convincing lie, and so she crossed the hall and took someone else’s living room for the moment.

I looked at Jorgan, and he grinned under his heavy helmet and above his coolant vest.

“You’re going too far someday.” I muttered, and he laughed.
“I’ve got Miss Perfect to back me up. I’m safe.”
Just because on my first test of the laseblaster I had been nervous and so used a slew of psionic biofeedback techniques taught to me on Vulcan and Babylon Five to improve my shooting, and had thus aced the Rookie Marksmanship Test with the only perfect score in history, I ask you, is that any reason to rag me about it three years later?

Grinning, I faced the door, and mouthed the police activation code. Others could hear me, but they could not detect the whisker laser from the button on my collar that sent out a pattern of dot dashes that could open any door in the city.

Except this one.

Jorgan tried as sometimes the Sesame Seed shaped button did not work. His did not either. We stared at each other, and then Jorgan shrugged, and kicked experimentally at the door. The response was a solid thump.

Not only was the door locked by a very sophisticated lock, but it had been upgraded to something very sturdy.

We looked at each other again, and then I went to very politely ask the supe for help. It took some grovelling, but eventually she sighed, walked over, flexed her shoulders, and pushed. The door creaked.

Her eyebrows rose, and she nodded to herself, and put both hands into the action, and took a brace on the floor. Then she started to push. I had no fear for her giving out, but the way the floor shuddered and the door creaked and moaned, I thought the tower folk were wise to scramble back.

We, being police who had asked her for help, had no choice but to stand next to her, and pretend we were not ready to dive wildly back if the floor gave out before the door.

And then one slip of her great muscles under the poly blouse, and the door slammed down coming loose from the top, and sticking at the bottom. Panting hard, the supe nodded to us, and walked off. The gangbanger thugs got out of her way as well they should for I saw indentations in the concrete floor the shape of her feet.

We stepped in and the smell was overwhelming.The former resident of the apartment surrounded us. But worse, his windows were sealed. And a detailed search of the place showed no laseblaster, particularly no massively overpowered one.

Just how had this towhead died in a room even I could not unlock? And by a weapon that was not here, nor could have been shot through a window?

Shaking my head, I began to search again.

Even my hair hurt, as well as being gritty with the everpresent dust of the Sarlanstafe Plains. I lay in my portable cot, face-down in the muddle of rough woolen blankets neccessary in the cool nights, and tried to stop.

But there was so much to do. Wells needed to be dug, young girls needed education to open the world to them, new laws to protect the disadvantaged were desperately needed. I could see without hardly trying the despairing, pleading glance of the young man born without an arm.

In a civilized world, he would have been fixed or aborted before birth, but the local tribes had reactionary notions. And there were only so many fights she could win before the all-male Council of Councils cast her, the so-called Witchwoman, out. And then she would be no good to anyone. Or so she tried to soothe her conscience wondering if she could have done more.

“Amhmmamgh.” Pla grunted from behind her, an embarrassed note in his voice. He had entered the dirty white flannel over pvc pipe box tent she used as her mobile headquarters, and found her naked back to his dismay. Given the way his eyes occasionally wandered over her lean frame, she knew he found her attractive, but he was not Zal, so all she found was irritation. Young Chieftain Zal was handsome, curly haired, and headed toward leadership of the Council of Councils. She would not mind if he ‘accidentally’ wandered in on her.

She sat up, back facing him, and heard him turn as she pulled over her tight blue spandex runner’s blouse. Then she rolled over, rubbed her eyes, and gave the very tall Pla her best businesslike smile.

“Lady,” He began, and she did not bother correcting him. In the locals schema, you were a lady, or a Capital L Lady, or no-count trash if you were a woman. Efforts to change this had merely caused perplexed frowns as if she were claiming to be low life scum. “We hear that Talina is out thrown.”

A rush of air came out of her lungs, and she found herself biting her tongue to keep from screaming even as she pile-drived her legs to her feet. Bolting out, she found her group of activists gathering. Tall, very skinny and intense Dorthan; the off-putting but very clever Stak; Jai who was no-count trash according to the locals because she had left her husband; and Laskoos who was unlike the rest of her entourage and laughed at her. She had beaten him in a swordfight, and his tribe held that you served whoever beat you as your life belonged to them. She found him attractive even as he silently laughed at her notions of reform.

But, what mattered was that he was tough, and he would do what he was told.

“Let’s go.” She snapped and waved her arm at the town edge, and her group ran. All of them were runners. It was one of her few rules, number 143. ‘You will run at least three miles a day.’ In the local jargon that was just under five furlongs.

They ran down the dusty main street between the huts, past the youfra trees with their late afternoon orange-colored blossoms opening and dodging the piles of oxen waste, and the occasional human waste from the drunks. And from then it was out of the small village by the Rond River, and out over the limestone flats with but a few trees here and there. Lungs started to burn, and pulling ahead of the others, she saw the Place of Casting.

A figure was laying on the ground, and above it was another crouching figure in a long dust-colored robe, belted, and with a turban wound about on top. He looked like one of the wealthy merchants of the Plain.

Anger burned in her heart, and she bolted up on him, drawing her stainless steel sword as she came. And then he stood, and his face was rough with a strong jaw, and what could be called a Roman nose, but no one in this world knew what the Romans were, and no one had such a nose. They most certainly did not have pale green eyes and yellow spiky hair poking from under their turbans.

In his right hand, he held a wineskin, which he carefully closed even as she skidded to a stop ten yards away. It was then that she realized he overtopped her by two feet. Some of that was the ridiculous turban, but still, he was man, and a tall one at that.

“I apologize. I thought…” She did not want to say that she had thought he was raping the sixteen year old girl chained to the dessert stone. It was a Place of Casting Away. Bad things happened here by definition. The best the girl could hope for was that a lover freed her and gave her a few coins so she could become a no-count in some far village. More likely, jackals would come and feast on her body.

He looked at the blade, and nodded.

“Always wise to investigate.” The words were mild, and spoken as from a deep, placid well, but in them she could hear her first husband saying ‘Assume makes an ass of u and me.’ and she flushed her sun-tanned face as the others came up. The man nodded, and she heard her life debt man chuckle.

“Witchwoman. You meet another of your kind.” He said. And she instinctively rejected it. She was alone. Some bizarre entity that travelled from world to world upon her death….

“Its called being a verser.” The same voice spoke. “Comes from ‘universe’.” He added to her perplexed and hostile look.

“I got that.” She snapped, not totally lying. She would have figured it out if he gave her a minute. He just stared at her, his face graven with wrinkles, and unmoving.

“Who are you? Where?” She waved her hand about the wild plain with the occasional dessert tree a dark jab in the brown and tan.

“Jon Wickham. Formerly of Seventeen Names I Can’t Recall Law Firm. I tracked you with my scriff sense, and I have to say I’m not surprised. I’d heard of someone called The Witchwoman. You have quite a reputation. I first heard of you three hundred miles to the south of here.”

She made a note to herself to find out what he meant by scriff sense later when she would not look the fool to ask.

“No one can live down there.” She denied his story instead. “You lying to me?” Her hand touched her sword hilt, and his face tightened just slightly.

“Witchwoman.” He said, and she flinched as she hated that name. “I have a few mods. And a solar still….”