Sample of “Escape from Conatus,” Book 1 of The Incepti Cataclysm trilogy

1

A cheerful morning to destroy a man.

The orange sun hung low in the west and tinged pink the puffy clouds scattered across the indigo sky. Anara didn’t know the names of the trees that extended branches over the footpath of living asphalt that curved over the gently rolling terrain. Her briefing about this world hadn’t gone into its plants and animals. A breeze rustled the few fallen leaves over the broad, unfenced lawns, and branches thick with deep green dappled her path with shadow.

Anara jogged in pale gray running shoes customized for her arches, and sweat-wicking shorts and shirt in shades of dark blue. Of the six small bottles of electrolyte drink clipped to her hydration belt, half were empty. She’d pulled her dark blond ponytail through the back of a brimmed cap woven through with transcranial stim circuits synced to her implanted subcutaneous computer. Her garments helped her look like anyone else who might be jogging through this neighborhood this morning.

An offworlder, yes, with a stocky build from growing up on a heavier planet, but thousands of offworlders came to study at the university. But a glance at her face, at her narrow chin and yellow eyes, would reveal she was no typical offworlder.

Anara descended from the survivors of the Incepti Cataclysm.

She knew her parents’ tales to her bones. Her mother, herded with her confused classmates by a frantic teacher to the spaceport, never to see Anara’s grandparents again. Her father, clutching his parents’ hands, glimpsing in the shuttle’s video screens the wall of iron-consuming nanobots advancing across their continent.

But the day of disaster, and the religious fanatics of Vela behind it, lay decades in the past, decades before she was born. Anara loped through the cool morning. No one came her way on the path or watched her from the window walls of the spacious houses set far back on the lawns. Which meant no shock of recognition in another’s face to remind her of her heritage.

The sweet tarry scent extruded by the footpath, the scrabble and chitter of squirrels over the trees’ ridged bark, the houses’ pale wood trim and slender nanotube beams flowing with the contours of the land…

How could an enemy of the Democracy of Carina live in as idyllic a place as this?

She reached to her left hip and tapped one of the small bottles, the one still full of pastel orange liquid. A bad habit. Of course the bottle remained clipped to her belt. Touching it could only clue in her target as to the contents. As dangerous as he must be, he must know that the forces of justice could close on him at any time.

Anara pulled her hand away and hoped Derro in the safehouse didn’t watch her too closely.

Onward she jogged, to a fork in the footpath. Her subcute overlaid onto her vision a green arrow pointing left. She followed it, around a grove of tall evergreens, these with smooth bark and deep green needles instead of leaves. A single aircar hummed through the sky in the direction of campus. Birds chattered, oblivious of both the enemy in their midst and Anara’s mission.

One of those birds could be a small flying bot, Derro’s eyes and ears.

She shook her head. A drop of sweat flicked off her nose. He had the right to watch, he ran the mission. And she would succeed at it.

The footpath curved and climbed a low hill. Her quads handled the angle change with ease. Through a gap between trees and houses, a one-room-wide tower peeked over the top of the hill, giving a glimpse through a picture window of a study with a plush armchair.

Her subcute popped up data. The tower rose from the main structure of the target’s house. The address: 17 Finchwood. The time: 0703.

Her heart pounded.

From the far slope of the hill came the metallic rustle of a door sliding back and forth and clicking shut.

Anara slowed to a walk. She kept her gaze forward, where the footpath crested the hill. Derro had overridden the neighborhood’s surveillance cams and assured her the residents of the nearby houses were asleep or away. Her subcute amplified the whisper of rubbery soles on the asphalt. A red outline appeared in her vision, as if she could see through the hill. A male shape, heading her way.

She kept her gaze on the crest of the hill. The Democracy’s enemy came into view.

An older man. Patches of gray at his temples and in a brown beard coming to a point at his narrow chin. Crow’s feet wrinkles imparted decades of melancholy to his yellow eyes.

Anara sucked in a breath.

The target was an Incepti.

2

Her legs trudged another step up the footpath while her arms froze. The bottle tugged down her left hip as if the pastel orange liquid had been replaced with molten metal.

Her gaze darted over the man. She knew what a terrorist leader or a Velan spymaster looked like and acted like. Not just from virtuals, but from her two previous missions. But here in the light of an autumnal dawn, the target reminded Anara of the kindly uncles of non-Incepti childhood friends. Average build. Limber movements. Gray sweatpants and a blue sweatshirt with the university logo of an owl roosted on a spiral galaxy. The same logo on his broad-brimmed digger hat pinned up on the left side.

Her mind clutched for answers.

A man old enough to be born on Mu Incepti V was an enemy of the Democracy? How? The Velans’ nano had toppled the garden cities, asphyxiated every animal and every person, and littered the planet with iron spheres. Impossible he could side with them, the devastators of his homeworld. But what else—?

His gaze met hers and he stopped. His mouth hung open for a moment until his words came out in a grandfatherly voice. Her subcute echoed the translation into her ears. She didn’t need it. “I thank the Divine for guiding my path to cross yours.”

Anara stopped too. Gooseflesh ran down her bare arms, though the morning was not too cool. She had a better ear than a voice for her parents’ native tongue. “Me, too,” she managed.

He switched to standard Carinese. “I don’t see many of us on Conatus Prime. You’re at the university? What are you here to study?”

He stood so close. She knew what to do. Quick motions, practiced in the basement of the safehouse. Unclip the bottle of orange liquid from her belt. Open and squeeze it as she raised it to her mouth. Aim for his face or other bare skin. Apologize for squirting him on accident. Then jog away and not look back.

But this wasn’t a Velan theocrat pretending to be a student on an exchange program. Not even a native of some other planet of the Democracy, motivated by greed or false ideology to betray all the worlds of Carina.

She unclipped a bottle. Green sports drink, from the middle of the belt. She raised it to her suddenly parched mouth and remembered her cover story. “Geochemistry.”

He nodded.

She took a drink and almost choked. Was he a member of the geochemistry department faculty? Or was good friends with someone she should know? She coughed her throat clear and quickly asked, “Are you a professor?”

“History,” he said. For a moment, the melancholy in his eyes grew stronger. “Professor Radano Tissart.”

Anara snapped the bottle of green sports drink back in place, then cupped her open hand over her fist without touching it. She bowed to him. Her mother would be proud of her manners, if Anara could ever tell her about this meeting. “An—” Not your real name! “—aïna Hamne,” she said.

Professor Tissart—the target—matched the gesture of greeting, though with a shallower bow befitting his higher status among seekers of knowledge and truth. “Welcome to Conatus Prime.” He put on a wry grin and shook his head. “I shouldn’t assume you’re a recent arrival.”

“I am.” Her cover story felt like a costume two sizes too big. Her mind fumbled to get into it. “This semester.”

“Then welcome. It’s a good place, with good people. You can make friends from many of the worlds of the Democracy. And if you ever grow homesick for comfort food, try Plump Tarsu’s, on the pedestrian mall east of campus. The curried poultryballs and eggplant stew aren’t quite as good as homemade…” The melancholy look returned to his eyes. Perhaps it never went far away.

“I’ll remember that,” Anara said. “My parents said they could never get the right spice mixture out of the autokitchen. Though I wouldn’t know.”

The target smiled through a wince. His foot pivoted to point down the slope. He switched back to Incepti. “I ask the Divine to guide your steps along your journey.”

“Same to you, Professor,” she replied in the same language. Her face flushed. What a horrible accent she had. But as he walked by, Professor Tissart gave no sign he judged her as a substandard descendant of Mu Incepti V.

He was in front of the next house, halfway down the slope to the grove of needled trees, when she remembered the bottle of pastel orange liquid still on her hip.

3

The safehouse looked like any other house in the neighborhood. Shielded by trees scattered across a lawn, the main structure of nanotube alloy and synthetic wood supported rooms bulging out of the upper floor like buds from some plant.

Anara labored up the slope despite the mild gravity. Her sweat stank. Despite the last cool breeze of the morning in her face, heat flooded her cheeks. And not from her easy jog. A mirror would show her how red they burned.

What would Derro say? You had him on the plate and didn’t stick the fork in or While you were all confused he could have gunned you down?

The last five yards to the side door, Anara walked a path of stepping stones through a zen garden. Small boulders jutted up like islands in a sea of sand. A bird feeder styled like a wrought iron lantern rose above the sand on a waist-high post, where a bird with a scarlet, scissored tail pecked at a block of grains and seeds. A maintenance bot like a giant spider with four legs and four arms raked the sand to look like ripples around the boulders. Waist-high to Anara, its torso was black with solar energy-absorbing paint and multiple camera lenses. Wide pads on its feet let it cross the sand without leaving prints.

The bot pivoted and lifted one arm in greeting, while another rustled the rake through the sand.

Anara ground her teeth. Derro’s voice spoke in her imagination. At least something around here does its job.

Inside, the safehouse kept up the cover story of a home for a rotating cast of students. Despite the steady hum of the ventilation system, the air smelled of beer, plus meat-and-salsa pies. The main room held billiards and fuseball tables, posters with video loops of off-world vacations, and couches and sofas mismatched in color and style.

A young man with a straggly mustache and wide ears, Tappis, Tannis, something like that, snored on a puffy yellow sofa with frayed fabric. They nicknamed him the Birdman because he filled the bird feeder himself instead of leaving the task to the bots. Derro hadn’t told her what role he played in the agency’s local operations. The Birdman might be an enrolled student, oblivious camouflage for the operations of the Democracy’s Intelligence Office.

Anara slipped past the sleeping young man. She leaned her elbows on the kitchen island’s synthesized granite top and thought words that her transcranial cap and subcute turned into an order to the autokitchen. Robotic arms swung out of the ceiling. After a few hums and whirs, the arms set a chocolate protein smoothie on the countertop next to her.

She sipped, chiding herself. Procrastination will just make it worse. She carried her drink in its insulated glass out of the kitchen and upstairs.

The command room was the last one on the left. The door showed a video loop of young men in boardshorts and women in bikinis from worlds across the Democracy. They splashed on a beach, drinks in hand, glimpses of a fat red sun on the horizon. People untroubled by their grandparents’ war.

People who could never know what Anara did to save them from another.

Another thought, and her subcute popped up words into her vision, over the cavorting students. Entry request sent… acknowledged… approved.

The door whispered open.

One more sip of the protein smoothie to fortify herself, and in she went to face Derro.

The room showed its false face for a moment. A chest of drawers bore a still holo of a band thrashing sitars and electric oboes. The tang of slothweed hit her nose.

Which meant the security system worked. A civilian who happened to walk by would glimpse these bits of Derro’s cover story. An easy trick of holo projectors and scent emitters.

She walked through the holo as if through fog. The door slid shut behind her. An air scrubber spun up its intake fan.

In place of the fake odors came cologne and hair pomade. An extruded plastic desk basked in the light of a translucent window. The desk’s only decoration was a foot-high trophy topped by a statuette holding a blaster, awarded in last year’s Office-wide speed-and-accuracy contest. The back wall held the locked door of a lift giving private access to the basement. A private door for the man seated behind the desk.

Derro had the same yellow eyes and narrow chin that she did, markers of their shared ancestry. Because of that, Anara had trusted him from the start. Derro was perhaps five standard years older than her. Experienced, but no old timer. Under his homburg hat, his gaze roved the room, as if a Velan with planet-killing nanobots lurked behind every corner.

He set down a cup of black coffee, then leaned forward. Steam rose from his cup as he planted his elbows on his desk and brought his hands together.

Quickly, Anara made the Incepti gesture of greeting as best she could with the smoothie in her hand. She bowed farther than politeness required, to hide the bloom of fresh heat on her cheeks.

He too formed a fist with his right hand, but instead of leaving a gap, his left hand touched it. His fingers drummed out a quick rhythm on the back of his fist. His voice was level. “What happened?”

Her emotions spun like an agrav coaster in an amusement park. Her words spilled out. “You never said he was one of us.”

A frown. Derro said, “He’s not and never has been one of our agents.”

“You know what I mean.”

Derro’s fingers stopped drumming. He regarded her over his fist. “Yes, Radano Tissart is an Incepti. And he’s a red-level threat to the Democracy.”

“A history professor? What could he have done? Red-level, that means serious, ongoing—”

“Kentatu Donnall himself signed the order.”

Anara wobbled on her feet. Donnall, the Democracy’s Chief Intelligence Officer, was the second-most powerful Incepti survivor in the Democracy, behind only Senator Vidarno Arensel. She’d met the chief a few times, but at each occasion had been struck by Donnall’s air of authority. Plus, he’d acted especially favorably to her as a fellow Incepti. She’d risen through the ranks faster than her Academy classmates and knew exactly why.

“May—may I sit?” she asked Derro.

He lifted his left hand far enough to indicate a visitor chair facing the desk.

Anara dropped into it. The plush red cushions molded to fit her frame, and the wheels rolled her into position square to Derro. “Then it can’t be a mistake,” she said.

“Of course not. Which you should have known when you left the house this morning. Which you shouldn’t have doubted just because Radano Tissart has yellow eyes.” Derro regarded her with cold appraisal. “If you can’t handle the mission, be honest with me now. I can find someone else. We can reassign you to desk work.”

Anara bristled. “I can handle it. I handled that Velan spymaster.”

“We extracted good intel from his brain. Did I ever tell you that?”

She squinted. She hadn’t seen the Velan die, or the team of agents and bots posing as emergency med techs who carried the Velan’s corpse out of the coffee bar, but she knew what she was doing when she spilled her cup of iced mocha on his bare arm. “What’s that got to do with this?”

“You must be fully on-side with what we do. We kill bad guys. Scratch that. You kill bad guys. Few people have the conscience for that.”

Anara weighed his words against her feelings. She’d questioned herself before, about the morality of working for an agency that killed, and the morality of her being the one pulling the trigger. But the inner balance settled as it always did. “They destroyed my parents’ homeworld. I can’t let them destroy anyone else’s.” She gasped a little. “Professor Tissart was a traitor? That could explain how he survived—”

Derro shrugged. “I haven’t seen the full dossier. But the chief has.” He regarded her again and let out a breath. “We can make this work. Anaïna Hamne goes out for a jog every morning. He’ll be even less suspicious when he sees you tomorrow at the same time, same place. You’re with me?”

She sat up straighter. “Fully.”

4

The basement put the lie to the house’s cover story.

Overhead lamps beamed with the sunlight of half-mythical Earth. Bots crouched in their charging cradles. Shelves with sliding doors filled the middle of this room. Behind the doors, shelves held hundreds of bits of spycraft. Among them a set of dull blue robotic birds, which made Anara think back to the grove of trees to see if she could recall seeing that model watching her.

On the side wall, climate boxes of various shapes and sizes, some rated for scalding heat and others for the cold of icy moons, bore chemical, bio, radiation, and nano hazard labels on their doors. On the near wall, to her right as she came out of the lift, alloy cabinets with keypad locks housed weapons of all types and sizes, anonymized hardware wallets, and various contraband—dangerous drugs, nano-faked handicrafts—to give agents a ticket into the underworld of smugglers and black marketeers.

Two steps out of the lift, a bot stirred from the cradle. Its four feet clacked on the concrete floor. It met her at the weapons cabinets. Though it had no head to turn to her, so many cameras dotted its torso it could see her from any angle.

She showed it open palms. “I went unarmed.”

It flexed its knees like a person raising a questioning eyebrow.

Her cheeks warmed again. She ducked her gaze from the bot. Derro might have watched her, but if Professor Tissart had been hostile, a dull blue birdbot couldn’t have done anything more than squawk at him.

Tomorrow she’d check out a blaster. A small one, to fit in a fanny pack.

With packs on her mind, Anara went to a thin and wide table in front of the refrigerators and freezers. A bot waited behind the table. She unhooked her belt and set it down. The pastel orange bottle caught her eye. “Do you need me to pull that one off?” she asked.

Its arms worked before she finished speaking. The bot picked up the bottle and carried it past the chemical hazard boxes. Not a poison. Not a biological payload, either. The bot went to the corner, to a tall freezer with a hazard symbol like three jagged throwing stars.

Nano.

Anara’s brow creased for a moment. Nano? There were far simpler ways to kill a man.

Indignation rose up her throat. And ways with fewer risks to the agent! She’d carried nano and Derro hadn’t warned her—

Tailored nano. Tuned to the target’s DNA profile. Safe for anyone else to handle. Office regs meant he’d had no orders to inform her. Why would he? He hadn’t even told her the target’s name.

The bot returned. It pulled the other bottles, the ones with dregs of nothing more harmful than sports drink, off the belt. Another bot clacked up next to her, then carried the belt toward the storage shelves while the first one threw the empty bottles into the cubical washer. The plastic clanked with each throw. A moment later, the washer exuded a steamy, soapy scent. Both bots returned to their charging cradles and crouched.

Good machines, she mused, as she walked to the stairs on the opposite wall from the lift. They did their work without questioning. Like her.

Like her?

5

Her excuse was she wanted to sell her cover story, in case some friend of the professor might see her near campus, then tell him about it. He would be more at ease when they met the next day. Make him an easier target.

Derro raised his eyebrow. With an air of embarrassment, she told him a truth. She wanted to try the curried poultryballs and eggplant stew at Plump Tarsu’s.

Derro sniffed out a chuckle, then raised his hand in approval.

Anara put on a smile that lasted until she left the front door to wait for a rideshare aircar.

The rest of the truth is she wanted to get away from the safehouse to think.

Iota Conatus hung near the zenith. Its orange rays glinted on a silvery aircar. The aircar descended on a hum of its agrav motor and flexed on its landing struts. A door popped up on the side of its horizontal-teardrop body.

A horseshoe-shaped leather couch waited for her. The aircar could seat five, but was empty for her.

Anara settled back in the middle of the couch. Through both the windows and the aircar’s cameras, the peaceful, wooded neighborhoods of Collegetown drifted by below. The campus itself came into view, like a dream smuggled from old Earth. Spires of quarried stone rose above quadrangles of deep green lawn. Lines of students scurried between buildings, along dirt paths worn by decades of feet. From her distance they looked like ants hustling to carry scraps of knowledge home to their nest.

A final bank of the aircar gave a view of a deep blue lake. Haze over the water veiled the eastern horizon. The vehicle descended to a parking pad at a shopping complex across from campus, then popped up its door.

Five minutes later, after slipping through crowds of students and townsfolk, Anara entered Plump Tarsu’s restaurant.

The aromas of holiday meals came to her. They dragged with them memories of her mother fighting back tears, and tales of grandparents Anara could never meet. Coriander, marjoram, oregano all mingled in her nose, laced with the scents of spongy cheese breads and poultryballs roasted crackling brown.

She glanced around. The scattered dozen others in the restaurant looked like Conatus natives. Long earlobes and bushy eyebrows. The smells didn’t take them back to childhoods haunted by history. At least none showed any sign they noticed the place’s impact on her.

Anara went to the kiosk and ordered poultryballs. After moment’s disappointment—out of eggplant today—she added a side of roasted sweet onion. She took a glass of water tinkling with ice, then found a seat. In a corner, a solid wall at her back, and a view of the front door. Just as she’d been trained. Through tall front windows, she scanned the grassy sward between the shopping center and the hedges of campus, looking for anyone in the crowd behaving out of the ordinary.

You’ll always be on duty, sounded Chief Donnall’s powerful voice. His speech to her graduating class at the Office’s training school. The enemies of the Democracy never rest.

Motion from the kitchen caught her eye. Instead of a bot, a man with a pudgy face and soft midsection brought a steaming plate to her. “Not common we see a daughter of Mu Incepti V here,” he said as he set down her lunch. “I’m Tarsu.”

From his name and the animated caricature on the front door, she’d assumed what his brown eyes and high forehead under his ballcap confirmed. He wasn’t one of her people. Anara groped for her fork and knife. Some confusion crept into her voice. “I thank the Divine for guiding my path to cross yours,” she said in Carinese.

He shook his head. “You flatter me, miss. I’m not Incepti, though you knew that by now. My wife. She’s happy here on Conatus Prime but she loves to hear more of your folk survived the plague of iron spheres.”

“I’m new at the university,” Anara said. The owl and galaxy logo on her sweatshirt had the crisp clean look of one fresh from the campus’ tailor bots. “Professor Tissart recommended you.”

A smile reached Tarsu’s eyes. “He’s been a loyal customer, let me tell you. Lunch twice a week, Oneday and Fiveday, regular as a pulsar—”

A jolt went through her. A quick thought to her subcute, and she soon relaxed. Today was a Fourday in the local calendar.

“—and dinner every Sixday night, with his wife, before she left this stage.”

This phase. Her mother always insisted she use the right words when learning the articles of Incepti faith. Though Anara had never understood why it mattered. “I hadn’t known.”

“A cancer. I don’t know what kind.”

Professor Tissart sounded less like a terrorist with each moment. She had to be overlooking something. “He stopped coming here after his wife entered the Infinite?”

“For dinners.” A chime sounded around a sudden swelling in the noise of the crowd on the pedestrian mall. “All the best,” Tarsu said as he went to greet the new arrival.

Anara cut a piece of poultryball and popped it in her mouth. The mouthfeel was off—maybe here farmers cultured meat cells differently than they did back home?—and too much black pepper and not enough coriander. Though maybe these flavors better kept to Incepti tradition, and her parents’ attempts always fell short? The roasted onions tasted much less sharp than the plates she’d turned up her nose at as a child.

The comparisons soon fell away. She was hungry. And she had work to do.

A few thoughts, through her scalloped-brimmed bucket hat to her subcute, and data popped into her vision. She added a note with the restaurant owner’s information. It fit with what she’d pulled off the public net about Radano Tissart.

A survivor of the iron-devouring cataclysm on Mu Incepti V. Rescued, in cruel irony, by Dark Goldenrod Bandicoot. The one kill ship among the Velan’s occupation flotilla. The Velans would have finished the job, would have massacred him and the other survivors to kill the last witnesses to their atrocity. Luckily, the fleet of the Democracy stormed through the jump point in time.

After the war, he found a place in the other Carinese worlds. A scholarly life, one of the highest aspirations an Incepti could have. Youngest full professor ever in the university’s history department. Respected lecturer, author of dozens of books ranging from scholarly to popular. Focused on the role of religious belief in the early interstellar era.

She stabbed her fork into her last, cold bite of sweet onion, and mashed it between her jaws while she frowned at the data.

Why did the Office consider Radano Tissart a threat to the Democracy?

6

The restaurant had thinned out while she wasn’t looking. Tarsu came over, a slice of chocolate crumble cake and a cup of hazelnut-flavored espresso, on the house. Anara thanked him and made small talk until he got the hint that she wanted to get back to her studies.

At least she had new info on the professor. She tracked down an obituary for Iëna Tissart, dated about two standard years before. A holo of a smiling woman with a few gray hairs and a few wrinkles around her yellow eyes. An Incepti woman in the prime of life. She and the professor would have expected a couple of centuries together. Survived by two sons, a daughter, eight grandchildren. A small family, given all the resources of all the worlds available to Democracy citizens.

Perhaps his wife’s death had driven him into madness? Medical care here on Conatus Prime had to be as good as anywhere else. Death by disease for someone in their age bracket meant extreme bad luck. A missed diagnosis, a bad side effect from med nano. Hostile nano? No, Velan black ops would have no reason to target her. The worst of luck, nothing more. But perhaps enough. Grief sometimes drove survivors to hate the doctors, to hate the worlds, to hate the Divine.

But madness? If so, Professor Tissart concealed it well, based on her encounter with him that morning. From his melancholy air, he still grieved. But not to the depths that could make him a threat to himself, let alone all the Carinese worlds.

Anara drained the last of her espresso. She gave the cup an extra clink on the saucer, the Incepti custom for letting one’s host know one had finished.

Perhaps she looked at the case from the wrong angle.

Why did the Office want to use nano against the professor, when a simpler, chemical poison would do?

At the academy, one of the tech-savvy cadets had showed Anara and her classmates how to spoof access to the Office’s databases, leaving a trail in the logs suggesting a routine maintenance job. After the icon for a secure connection, a red lock, pulsed in the corner of her eye, she used that illicit knowledge to access the servers at the safe house. Although she had access to most of the databases, what would Derro think if he got an alert that she poked around for information she had no need for?

Confident she covered her tracks, she swiped and tapped the air until she opened up the files on the Office’s nano tools.

She flipped through the summaries of dozens of assets. Nucleic acid modifiers to change the DNA fingerprints of biological samples. Antivenom generators to protect someone from poisons capable of killing before the victim could reach a hospital stocking the antidote. Cameras and microphones disguised as dust or smudges on uncleaned windows. Self-assembling chips that could interface, practically undetected, with the most common computer models of the Velan Theocracy.

All interesting bits of the trade, but did any of them make sense? Her orders weren’t to protect the professor. And if the Office wanted more intel, did they need molecule-sized cameras and microphones to spy on him, when parabolic mics and telephoto lenses could do the job?

Anara scanned further. Nano to hack into bots. Nano to make an aircar crash out of the sky, and look like an accident. Nano of all types. Fast, slow, hardy, ephemeral. All colors, too, imparted by the trace minerals each type required for optimal function. Green, blue, yellow, red—

She ran a search for pastel orange nano.

A moment later, a summary card appeared in the air before her. A 3d model slowly rotated, a smooth orange teardrop shape. The scale bar showed it to be about 200 nanometers long, slightly larger than the average virus. Proportioned like an aircar, but with fins and a propeller at the bulbous end. And a mouth of reactive oxygen moieties at the front that made her think of a brine piranha’s teeth. MemoryShred.

Designed to receive a target’s genetic marker profile, it would penetrate the target’s bloodstream, verify his identity, and pierce the blood-brain barrier. A brief itch at the contact site. Shortness of breath and irregular heartbeat within sixty seconds. Death less than a minute later, after the piranha teeth ripped apart axons and dendrites in the target’s brain stem, killing the neurons that controlled the heart and lungs.

Within ten minutes after contact, MemoryShred finished the job in the cerebrum. Every connection between neurons—and with them, every skill, every fact, every memory—would be eradicated, and not even the most powerful techniques of post-mortem information extraction could put them back together again.

Anara sat, immobile. A shiver wracked her. Professor Tissart’s threat to the Democracy did not lie in what he’d done. Or even what he plotted to do.

He was a threat to peace and security because of what he knew.

How could this be? What knowledge could be so illicit that it had to be expunged from the galaxy?

She managed to say thank you and see you next time to Tarsu, but like an actor going through the motions of a bad part. She staggered out of the restaurant, into afternoon sunlight. Sunlight as orange…

Orange, but warm on her cheeks. She took in breaths of clean air.

Another chill. You haven’t logged out!

Relax. A box breath, four count in, four count hold, four count out, and her mind steadied. She let sunlight warm her arms as people walked past her. She logged out, following the steps every trainee memorized. No trace left.

She did not know what dangerous knowledge lay in Radano Tissart’s head, but she would find out.

7

The orange sun of mid-afternoon smeared through the privacy screen on the window of Derro’s office. A graphic projected into his vision showed recent database access.

He lifted his hat, and with his other hand smoothed down his thinning brown hair. The graphic flickered away, but came back as soon as he pulled his hat back down. Came back, its facts unchanged.

A sigh escaped him. Anara, what in the Infinite are you doing?

A recent access had been spoofed in the name of the database management personnel. It was an old trick, from long before Derro’s time at the Academy. Kentatu Donnall himself might have come up with it as a young instructor decades ago, a few years after the Velan armistice. The cadets believed they could sneak into the database past their supervisors. They all fell for it.

The only challenge to someone on Derro’s side of the desk came when deciding whether to act on what he learned, which risked tipping off his junior agents in that their secret researches weren’t secret at all.

He sagged back in his chair. The ergonomic motors grumbled under him, in a vain effort to put him at ease.

Why had Kentatu Donnall sent Anara on this mission anyway? Only a few missions under her belt before this one. Just two of them neutralizations. She’d performed well on both, and in the aftermath, had avoided both traps a young agent could fall into. No sloppy overconfidence that every target would fall as easily as the first. No crisis of conscience when the good of the Democracy required her to kill.

But she’d never been sent to target a fellow Incepti before.

The chief must be testing her, to see how little she would question his orders.

The use of MemoryShred against Radano Tissart surprised Derro as much as it had Anara. A thousand tools of spycraft in the basement, a hundred pages of comms relayed in from the jump point every day, he had too many responsibilities to keep on top of the inventory, or wonder why Kentatu Donnall might order any particular weapon to be used.

Was Tissart a Velan spy turned double agent who had outlived his usefulness? That could explain neutralization and not being allowed to give up his secrets even after death.

Derro snorted out a breath. Why in the Infinite would the Velans recruit a history professor?

He swept the database access information out of his sight with a brusque motion. The facts were plain. Anara Orden knew who the target was, and what fate Kentatu Donnall had ordered for him.

The only question was whether these new facts would change whether she would fulfill the mission.

And in case she didn’t?

The gears of Derro’s thoughts started turning.

Anara Orden wasn’t the only agent based here who could deviate from the script.

8

Vibration in the upper right part of Anara’s chest, in the hollow below where her collarbone met her shoulder.

She grunted. Her arm fought through jumbled blankets and she pressed through her silk nightshirt. Her fingers found the thin, rigid disc of her subcute and pressed. The vibration ceased.

She shut her eyes. 0400 already? Even with the long night of Conatus Prime, a normal person would stay in bed. Especially after her restless night, tossing and turning, her mind racing over what she was going to do and how she could get away with it.

If she could get away with it. Was she about to throw away her career?

Her life?

Anara turned to her other side and pulled the blankets up to her face. Her head squirmed on the pillow to find an angle to breathe in fresher air. Maybe she could get more sleep. Put the plan off till tomorrow. Skip today, that’s fine, the cover story would be that she alternated cardio days with weight training—

Another buzz in her chest, this one stronger, as if bees flew inside her subcute. She tapped it off, but even though her eyes closed, she knew she couldn’t get back to sleep.

She would sleep better tonight. Whatever she found out. Whatever the outcome of this morning’s meeting with Radano Tissart.

Anara climbed out of bed. Through the window came dim light from one of the moons. Around the room, status LEDs on devices glowed like stars, too weak to be noticed in the light of day.

On her arrival, she’d unpacked with precision. Her usual habit, instilled by her mother and intensified by training, was to put everything away when she was done. Thanks to all that, she moved through the darkness without stumbling. She opened the drawer, pulled out the dull green set of jogging clothes, and put them on while chewing a toothpaste gum. Two minutes later, dressed and mouth fresh, she spat the gum into the recycling can. A faint thump against the plastic confirmed she’d hit the target.

She could have turned on the lights, but moving in the dark helped her practice. She never knew when she might need to act blind.

The ground floor of the house was as dark as her room. The red 0s on the fuzeball table scoreboard helped light her way. Dark, and quiet, too. No one snored on the couch and the household bots huddled away in their charging cradles.

Anara went to the kitchen. Hot water gurgled and the robotic arms set a cup of coffee on the counter in front of her.

She inhaled notes of cacao and cardamom. Vague memories of a college lecture came back. Crop plants sometimes took on new flavors as a side effect of the genetic engineering used to adapt Earthstock to grow on terraformed worlds.

Stop distracting yourself. She drank coffee in the dark, a sip at a time. Steeling herself for what she must do.

She risked her career, but she could not destroy the professor until she knew why he deserved such a fate.

Thank the Divine that Derro didn’t interrupt her solitude.

She left the empty cup for the kitchen to clean, then headed to the basement.

8

Anara was on the second step of the basement stairs when the door closed behind her. The basement lights snapped on. She squinted at the strong spectrum, supposedly of midday on distant Earth. Servos hummed and bot feet clacked on the concrete floor, echoing behind the table at the storage vessels and amid the tool racks.

One of the giant spiders waited for her at the bottom of the stairs. It bent its rear legs to tilt its front up toward her. Its forward arms spread wide and turned up as if it had palms.

“A jogging belt and five bottles of sports drink,” she told it. “Any flavor but orange. A radio jammer, range a hundred yards. A summons card for rideshares. Also a belt pouch.”

The bot bowed. A sheen of the overhead lights rippled along its black carapace, then to the side as it pivoted. It went into the aisles between racks. Cabinet doors whispered open and clicked shut. A soft glug sounded, a liquid being poured. Soon, the first bot gave her the equipment, one of its four hands at a time.

Anara clipped on the belt. Ice slurried in the bottles of sports drink, a lighter shade of green than her jogging clothes. She slid the bottle holders along the belt to make room for the pouch. A few thoughts through her subcute and the pouch’s magnetic lock keyed itself to her biometrics.

Into the pouch, she put the jammer and the summons card. Flexible rectangles, each a few millimeters thick and small enough she could close her hand around both at the same time. The biggest difference between the two cards came from a set of ridges on half a short edge of the RF jammer.

If Derro came down the stairs and asked why she needed these two items, she’d worked out answers in the middle of the night. The answers seemed solid enough under the harsh light in the basement. She’d tell him an uneasy feeling had woken her up, bringing thoughts that a bird had not been a bird, or an aircar had lingered a little too long over her route to the professor’s house. Had the Velans tightened security on their asset? The jammer would prevent enemy spy devices from relaying messages back to their handlers. The summons card would override the rideshare priority system and bring down a private aircar for a hasty extraction if the Theocracy of Vela had boots on the ground.

But Derro did not come. She slipped the items into her pouch.

Enough room to fit a small sidearm.

At the weapons cabinet, she flipped through a virtual catalog, tapped a few candidates, and asked the bot to pull them. One by one, she tested them for weight and fit in her hand. She settled on a needle-nosed blaster with ultraquiet capacitors. Not accurate beyond a few yards, but it did not have to be.

She double-checked the blaster’s battery. Fully charged. A dozen shots.

Anara slipped it into her pouch, then went to the last remaining station. Nano.

“Operation 22 X-ray Lima,” she said to the bot tending the payloads of death.

The bot went to the nano storage and returned with the bottle of MemoryShred. Such a commonplace action, and with only one cup of coffee firing up her brain, yesterday’s secret researches almost felt like a dream.

Almost.

Anara took the orange bottle and snapped it in onto her belt with one swift motion. With resolute eyes, she headed up the stairs.