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  “ ’Nother?” he said.

  Michael took his and popped the top. He reached over to clank his can against Rusty’s. “To us,” he said.

  They drained the cans as one.

  Barbara Baden had called the meeting of the Committee members aboard the ship. Michael knew what it meant; they all knew. He could see it in their faces as they entered the meeting room belowdecks of the Tomlin.

  “Hey, Kate,” he said. He took the seat next to her at the table. Rusty sat on his other side. Across the table, Lohengrin nodded to him, and Tinker smiled. Barbara was at the whiteboard near the head of the table. There were notebooks in front of each of them, with the UN logo prominent on the cover. “We’re the last, I guess. Sorry, Babs.”

  Baden smiled. “Not a problem, DB. I just finished talking with the secretary-general and John Fortune. So here’s the situation: unless something changes in the next day, we’ll be going in before dawn two days from now; the Tomlin is already heading to a new position just off Kuwait City.”

  “Going in where?” Lohengrin grunted. Goinguh in vhere? “To the oil fields?”

  Baden shook her head. “We need a better staging area for that—there will be several UN battalions involved, not to mention the ground and engineering support we’ll need when we take control of the actual oil facilities. We plan to take Kuwait International Airport first.”

  Michael couldn’t contain his laugh. Six arms waved like a spastic tarantula. “You’re kidding, right? We’re going to take Kuwait International, in one of the Caliphate’s biggest cities, and the Caliph and Prince Siraj are going to just let that happen? Hell, they’ll have every inch of the ground covered with troops.”

  “We’re hoping that won’t be the case,” Baden said stiffly through the smile that appeared to be chiseled on her face. “Even though negotiations have broken off, Secretary-General Jayewardene has kept the lines of communication open with Prince Siraj. He has reminded the prince and the Caliph what happened the last time they attempted to interfere with the Committee aces. We hope that they understand that ‘permitting’ a small incursion into the Caliphate would be better for them politically than resisting one and losing.”

  Rusty grumbled something unintelligible, Kate said nothing. Tinker was staring at his hands. Michael looked at Lohengrin. “You buying this?” he asked.

  “Well . . .” Vell . . . A shrug. “I trust that John won’t give us anything we can’t handle.”

  “Must be nice to have that kind of trust in him.” Michael felt Kate’s gaze snap toward him with that.

  Barbara continued to smile at him. “I’d also remind you, DB, that you’re here because you specifically requested this mission. John told me to tell you that if you’ve changed your mind, he’ll arrange to fly in another Committee ace to take your place. Should I tell him to make that call?”

  Michael had no good answer for that. They were all staring at him. His fingers tapped his chest involuntarily and the sound of sticks on a hi-hat reverberated in the room. “No,” he told Barbara, not daring to look at Kate. “I haven’t.”

  “Good, then,” she said. Smiling. “Then we’re in agreement. Now, if you’ll open your notebooks, we’ll look over the initial attack plan . . . .”

  I know you hate me,

  I know seeing me gives you pain

  I don’t care, but

  You better not try to stop me again

  Michael tugged on the cord to pull the earbuds from his ears. The current studio mix of “Stop Me Again” and The Voice’s acid voice went to shrill, insectlike piping, to be replaced by the thrup-thrup-thrup of the CH-47 Chinooks’ rotors and the shriller whine of fighter jets and attack helicopters farther overhead. Each of the aces had been placed on a separate chopper—Michael declined to consider the obvious logic behind that. He glanced down through the smeared windows and saw the buildings of Kuwait City’s southern outskirts below them. His stomach churned; at any moment, he expected to see the bloom of antiaircraft fire, or fighter jets with the insignia of the Caliphate on their wings diving on them, or the fiery stem of an RPG arcing up toward their Chinook from the houses below to bloom in death and fire. He leaned toward Lieutenant Bedeau, with thick earphones over his blue helmet. “Anything?” he half shouted.

  Lieutenant Bedeau—in command of the troops in Michael’s chopper—shook his head and gave a thumbs-up. It did nothing to reassure him.

  Taking Kuwait International couldn’t be easy. At any second, it was all going to go to hell. Michael knew it. He could feel it. Any second now, he was going to hear the chatter of machine guns and the sinister thrump of mortars. Helicopters would be pinwheeling down to crash to the tarmac. There were going to be explosions and smoke choking the air, and blood. Too much blood.

  They dipped and turned sharply, and Michael’s eyes widened. Below, he could see the concrete lines of the airport, coming up fast toward them. A couple of the flotilla of choppers had already landed alongside the main terminal, and he felt their own craft touch down. No chatter of guns. No explosions. The rear door of the Chinook slammed open, letting in a wash of harsh light and swirling sand. “Go! Go! Go!” Lieutenant Bedeau shouted in French-accented English, waving his arms. The cord of the headphones jiggled heavily. “Move!”

  It’s gonna happen now. Now.

  The troopers from his Chinook piled out from the rear ramp in a quick, nervous double line, fingers caressing the triggers of FAMAS G2 automatic weapons. There was no answering gunfire. There was no resistance at all: no Caliphate soldiers eager to defend the airport, no tanks clanking toward them, no fighter jets dropping bombs, no RPGs streaking red death. No Islamic aces. Nothing.

  Yet, DB reminded himself. He was lugging two M-16 rifles himself, one in each set of his four lowest arms. A custom-made armored vest was pulled tight around his heavily muscled, tattooed body, and he wore one of the blue helmets over his shaved head. He was the last one out, hitting the ground under the wash of chopper blades and blinking at the gritty sand that still managed to get past the plastic goggles.

  The landscape was dun dotted with green, pinned under a vicious, relentless sun. Back in the desert. Fucking lovely.

  Around the tarmac, the rest of the Chinooks had also landed, UN troops spilling out like blue-capped coffee beans from broken bags, the aces of the Committee team—one to each chopper—following them: Lohengrin and Rusty, who like Michael might also be having flashbacks to Egypt; Barbara Baden; Tinker.

  And Kate. Michael waved to her—a hundred yards away. She waved back perfunctorily. The dry air felt cloying, as if somehow, impossibly, a thunderstorm was about to break. He hoped not too many people were going to die when that happened.

  “DB!” Lieutenant Bedeau was gesturing at him. “Let’s move!” He pointed toward the terminal.

  Michael grunted assent and took a single step. That was as far as he got. Something whined past his ear—like one of Hive’s wasps in some great hurry—then a duller k-chunk came from the fuselage of the Chinook behind him. He half turned his head to see a ragged, circular hole torn in the metal. The sharp report of a rifle came in that same breath. “Sniper!” he yelled.

  That was when an invisible semi slammed into his chest and knocked him to the ground. He went down hard, barely able to breathe from the force of the impact. The world went dim around him momentarily and he nearly blacked out. He heard the M-16s he was carrying scratch along the concrete of the runway, dropped from stunned hands; he heard other people shouting and the familiar, bowel-churning rattle of automatic weapons fire. Hands pulled on his multiple arms, dragging him away. He shook his head and pulled away from them. “I can do it,” he growled, but the effort of moving and talking hurt like a son of a bitch. He half crawled, half limped to the other side of the Chinook where the blue helmets were crouched, scanning the rooftops and windows of the terminal. He fell more than crouched. The fingers of his middle right hand probed his chest: there was a hole torn in the Kevlar-and-steel vest, right above his heart.


  With the realization, the world spun around him once.

  Another bullet ricocheted from the ramp, leaving a bright scratch close to Michael’s head. “There!” one of the soldiers shouted, pointing to a puff of smoke from the terminal. M-16s and FAMAS chattered and stone chips flew from the building’s facade. A Tigre Eurocopter attack helicopter, looking like a monstrous wasp, lifted fifty feet in the air. Weapons fire spat from the front guns of the Tigre, then stopped. A soldier waved from the chopper’s open window, then drew a finger over his throat. The Tigre banked and moved away.

  “Drummer Boy!” Lieutenant Bedeau was crouched next to him, his thin Gaelic face concerned. “You are okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay. At least I think so.” Michael used his lower hands to push himself up to a sitting position. He grimaced. “Fuck, that hurt.”

  “There was only one man, and he wasn’t a very good sniper, luckily for you. A trained sniper would have gone for the head shot.” Bedeau tapped his own forehead and grinned suddenly. He slapped DB’s shoulder. “Now he’s a very dead amateur.”

  “Good,” Michael told him.

  “The people of the Caliphate, they don’t like you very much because of what you did to the Righteous Djinn.” Bedeau said it with a faint smile. DB was damned if he knew what was so amusing about any of it.

  “Yeah,” Michael answered, rubbing his chest through the vest. “So I gather.”

  Double Helix

  THE WORDS OF A TALEBEARER

  ARE AS WOUNDS

  Melinda M. Snodgrass

  I’VE LEFT THE MOISTURE- LEACHING heat of Baghdad for the steaming heat of Kongoville. The tropical heat makes me wish I could strip off not only clothes but skin as well. What is it about the British that we seek out such dreadful climes in our pursuit of empire?

  Exhaustion has left my mind feeling like a gray blank. I wasn’t sure I could effectively picture one of the rooms of the palace so I gave myself more room by picking the garden. The night air is filled with the sounds of insects and frogs. I wonder if one of those deep ribbets is Buford out grazing on bugs. I giggle.

  It dies when I hear the distinctive sound of a gun being cocked. Whirling I see one of the Leopards, his eyes glittering in his dark face. The gun is coming up. He recognizes me before his finger tightens on the trigger. The barrel drops, and I can feel my knees trembling with released stress. The wash of adrenaline is ebbing, taking with it the last of my energy. I grope in my pocket, pull out a Black Beauty, and toss it into my mouth. It seems monstrous passing down my throat. I have to cough before I can ask, “Où est John Fortune?”

  He takes me.

  Fortune is slumped in a large armchair, dressed only in boxers, staring blindly at the insects circling the table lamp. Sweat gleams on his bare chest, and forms drops in his sideburns. Sekhmet humps beneath the skin of his forehead like some grotesque tumor. I wonder how Curveball feels with this voyeur present at every tender fuck.

  “Lilith,” he says as if remembering who I am.

  There’s an overstuffed ottoman near his feet I sink down onto, and feel the leather stick to the moist skin of my calf.

  “We’re getting some blowback from the Caliphate,” I say.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That annoyed locals are shooting at us.”

  That makes him straighten. Suddenly another soul is looking through his dark eyes. It’s old and cold and I recognize a kindred spirit.

  “They have brought it upon themselves.”

  “Yes, well, that may be the case, but however naughty they are or pure we are, bullets are still lead and they still kill. As DB nearly found out.”

  “What?” The decibel range goes high and the young man is back.

  “Bullet to the chest. Fortunately his vest sucked most of it. But it was a near thing.” I pause for just the right amount of time. Cast down my eyes, then look back up at him. “Kate seemed very concerned. She was still with him when I left to report to you.” I pause again. “Oh, she said to give you her love.”

  There is again that strange snapping shift in the eyes, and Fortune’s voice rasps as he says, “You are an evil thing. Dark and—”

  My lips skin back in a smile. “John, dear, do exert a little control over your senile mummy.”

  Fortune seems like an inexpertly controlled marionette as Isra tries to propel him out of his chair, and he struggles to stay seated and composed. There’s something so wrong and disturbing about this symbiosis that I find myself taking a step back. Fortune was supposed to have the power of Ra, the power of the sun itself, but it was taken from him when his father cured him of the wild card. Sekhmet was to be the handmaiden of Ra. Two powers wedded to form a whole. But Fortune is just a nat, which makes them only half of what they were meant to be.

  Thank God. Fortune’s self-righteousness melded to Isra’s vindictiveness would be a truly terrifying prospect.

  Political Science 201

  Ian Tregillis & Walton Simons

  YVETTE: Fourteen days, nine hours.

  YVES: Fifteen days, eighteen hours.

  YECTLI: Sixteen days, two hours.

  CHRISTIAN WAS OUT THE door on the way to his regular postcoital physical before the first egg appeared.

  Don’t trust him, Yvette had said.

  Zoë, a petite girl with a pageboy bob of strawberry-blond hair, asked, “Why not?” Not-not-not-not . . . The echoes came from every corner of the room. They made concentration difficult. A strange deuce.

  Her brother Zane flashed his chromatophores into ripples of fire-truck red by way of response. He snuffled at Niobe’s palm with his tentacles.

  Zoë frowned. “What does that mean?” Mean-mean-mean . . .

  “It means shut the hell up,” said Zenobia, the frail and birdlike baby of the clutch.

  “Mom! Zen swore at me!” Me!-me! . . . Zane recoiled, covering his earbuds. He retaliated, using a camouflage ability that extended to projecting invisibility. Zoë bumped, loudly, into an invisible nightstand.

  “Ouch!” ch!-ch!-ch!-ch!-ch!

  Niobe said, “Hey. Be nice, you two.”

  But why would she say that about trusting people?

  I’ll find out, Mom. Zenobia walked to the door, dispersed into a cloud of mist, and was gone. Niobe considered calling her back. But in the end she wanted to know what Yvette had meant, too.

  Zenobia drifted through the entire medical wing and found no sign of Christian. He was nowhere to be found. It appeared he’d left the facility, until Zenobia heard laughter and muffled voices coming from a storage room.

  Behind the industrial-sized cans of tomato paste and five-gallon tubs of elbow macaroni, four folding chairs were arranged around a card table. One chair sat empty, but Christian was there, chatting with two men.

  Mom, I found him!

  Good work, sweetie. I see him.

  I don’t think he had a physical.

  I know.

  A fourth man hurried in. He sat across from Christian.

  “What’s the good word, Pham?”

  “Girl, boy, girl. Deuce, joker, ace.” The man named Pham summarized Zoë, Zane, and Zenobia for the others.

  “Good work, Pham,” said Christian.

  “Why can’t you just stick around to see what pops out of those eggs, Chris?”

  “Would you stay any longer than you had to?”

  Twin pangs of hurt and betrayal passed each other on the way up and down the bond between mother and daughter.

  Smitty slapped Christian on the back. “He does the hard work. Who can blame him, wantin’ to get out of there?”

  “Yeah, speakin’ of hard, how the hell can you do her, anyway? She’s disgusting.”

  “Gentlemen, I just sit back and think about my bank account.” Christian grinned. “Every litter of freaks is another hefty little bonus.”

  “Yeah, so’s you can afford all the child support!”

  “You get paid extra to screw her?”

  “Of course, retard. Wo
uld you do it for free?”

  Far on the other side of the complex, Niobe cried.

  “I would if she looked like Curveball. Shit, I’d pay to screw her. Yeah, I would wreck that girl. I’ll bet half the guys on the Committee are bangin’ her.”

  “The way I hear it, Tom, you got no choice but to pay for it.” More laughter all around the table at this.

  “This season’s better. Green chick? Talk about hot.”

  “I like that acrobat, Minx. Now she’s bangable.” Tom leered. “And I’ll bet she’s freaky in the sack, too.”

  Smitty laughed again. “Could you imagine Genetrix on American Hero? Fucking before each challenge? Her teammates would have to draw straws.” Pham pounded the table with his fist, laughing.

  Christian took a deck of cards from the table. “Okay, so we got a deuce girl”—Christian removed the deuces of hearts and diamonds and set them in the center of the table, faceup—“a joker boy”—he added a joker to the deuces—“and an ace girl”—the aces of hearts and diamonds went into the mix. “Someone do the honors.”

  Mom? What are they doing?

  Niobe didn’t say anything. Even Zoë had fallen silent. Zane’s mantle faded to gray.

  Pham flipped a coin. Christian added the deuce of hearts back to his deck. They repeated the process, and the ace of diamonds went back.

  After shuffling and letting Tom cut, Christian dealt four cards to each player.

  “Okay, gents. Ante up.”

  Niobe gasped. They’re gambling, Zenobia. They’re gambling on you and Zane and Zoë.

  A little salad of green bills accumulated in the center of the table. It grew as bets and raises and calls swirled around the table.

  “Fifty bucks says the octopus croaks first.”

  A pang of terror and anguish through the bond. Niobe stroked Zane’s head. His mantle turned ink black. “Shhh, shhh. Don’t listen to them. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”