<\ Appreciate it. DCS has been on me for weeks about the Q4 projections. Soy might come in a little light. But wheat is going to be— >> * WARNING! PRIVACY BREACH!

[DCS.REG#A-16523.14.82] * <\ Just adding my note to the lady's. No need to cut the red tape twice, right?

>> * VIOLATION! YOUR INFRACTION HAS BEEN LOGGED— <\ Hey! Whoa there!

>>--AND WILL BE SUBMITTED TO DCS-S-- SSSSSSsss* \\\ >>(...) ˜ STANDBY/REBOOT >>(..) >> () <\ Partner?

<\ You OK?

>> APOLOGY. UNKNOWN SYSTEM ERROR.

>> PLEASE REPEAT PRIOR REQUEST.

<\ Nah, we're all set. Have a safe slip, you hear?

>>AFFIRMATIVE. \> The NAV computer had no idea why it had temporarily shut down. It had no memory of its COM with Mack. The AI's file was there—encrypted and attached to Sif's report. But the NAV computer believed the two documents had always been linked. It rechecked its slip calculations and increased reactor flow to its Shaw-Fujikawa drive. Exactly five seconds later, a sunburst of sundered space-time appeared off Wholesale Price's prow.

The rift remained open after the freighter disappeared, its shimmering edges warping the surrounding stars. The blazing hole flickered stubbornly, as if it was determined to choose the moment of its closure. But once Wholesale Price moved deeper into the Slipstream, pulling its sustaining power with it, the rift collapsed in an insignificant burst of gamma radiation—the quantum mechanical equivalent of a shrug.

CHAPTER TWO

EARTH, GREATER CHICAGO INDUSTRIAL ZONE,

AUGUST 10, 2524

When Avery woke, he was already home. Chicago, the onetime heart of the American Midwest, was now an urban sprawl that covered the former states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. The territory wasn't part of the United States, not in any formal sense. Some people who lived in the Zone still considered themselves American, but like everyone else on the planet they were citizens of the United Nations—a sea change in governance that was inevitable once humanity began to colonize other worlds. First Mars, then the Jovian moons, and then planets in other systems.

Checking his COM pad on the military shuttle from orbit to the Great Lakes Spaceport, Avery confirmed he was on a two-week pass—that he'd be able to enjoy his first extended break from operation TREBUCHET. There was a note on the pass from Avery's CO detailing the injuries sustained by the marines on his last mission. All of Avery's alpha squad had survived with minor injuries. But bravo squad hadn't been so lucky; three marines were killed- in-action (KIA), and Staff Sergeant Byrne was hanging by a thread in a UNSC hospital ship.

The note said nothing about civilian casualties. But Avery remembered the force of the hauler's blast, and he doubted any had survived.

He tried not to think—let his mind go blank—as he boarded a maglev passenger train from the spaceport to the Zone. Only later, when Avery stepped out onto the elevated platform of the Cottage Grove terminal, did the hot and humid air of a late Chicago summer snap his senses back into focus. As the sun dove to a fiery finish, he enjoyed what little breeze was coming off Lake Michigan—lukewarm gusts that hammered up the east-west blocks of tumbledown gray- stone apartments, scattering the autumn leaves of the sidewalk maples.

Arms laded with duffel bags, and wearing his navy-blue dress pants, collared shirt, and cap, Avery was drenched with sweat by the time he reached The Seropian, a center for active retirement—or so its hospitality computer told him—as he stepped into the tower's stifling lobby. Avery's Aunt Marcille had moved to the complex a few years after he'd joined the marines, vacating the same walkup apartment on Blackstone Avenue they'd shared since Avery was a boy. His aunt's health was failing, and she'd needed the extra care. And more to the point: she was lonely without him.

As Avery waited for an elevator that would take him up to the thirty-seventh floor, he stared into a recreation room filled with many of The Seropian's bald and silver-haired residents. Most were clustered around a video display tuned to one of the public COM's all-news channels.

There was a report of fresh Innie attacks in Epsilon Eridanus—a series of bombings that had killed thousands of civilians. As usual, the broadcast featured a UNSC spokesman who flatly denied the military's campaign was faltering. But Avery knew the facts: The Insurrection had already claimed more than a million lives; the Innie attacks were becoming more effective, and the UNSC reprisals more heavy-handed. It was an ugly civil war that wasn't getting any prettier.

One of the residents in the rec room, a black man with a deeply lined face and a crown of wiry gray hair, spotted Avery and frowned. He whispered something to a large white woman in a voluminous housedress, overflowing a wheelchair by his side. Soon all the residents that weren't hard of hearing or too dim-sighted to see Avery's uniform were nodding and clucking— some with respect, others with scorn. Avery had almost changed into his civilian clothes on the shuttle to avoid just this sort of uncomfortable reaction. But in the end he'd decided to stick with his dress blues for his aunt's sake. She'd waited a long time to see her nephew come home all spit and polish.

The elevator was even warmer than the lobby. But inside his aunt's apartment the air was so frigid, Avery could see his breath.

"Auntie?" he called, dropping his duffels on the well-worn blue carpet of her living room.

The bottles of fine bourbon he'd bought at the spaceport duty-free clinked together between his neatly folded fatigues. He didn't know if his aunt's doctors were letting her drink, but he did know how much she used to enjoy an occasional mint julep. "Where are you?" But there was no reply.

The flower-patterned walls of the living room were covered with picture frames. Some were very old—faded prints of long-dead relatives his aunt used to talk about as if she'd known them personally. Most of the frames held holo-stills: three-dimensional pictures from his aunt's lifetime. He saw his favorite, the one of his teenage aunt standing on the shore of Lake Michigan in a honey-bee striped bathing suit and wide straw hat. She was pouting at the camera and its cameraman, Avery's uncle, who had passed away before he was born.

But there was something wrong with the stills; they seemed oddly out of focus. And as Avery stepped down the narrow hallway to his aunt's bedroom and ran his fingers across the frames' sheets of glass, he realized they were covered in a thin layer of ice.

Avery rubbed his palm against a large holo-still near the bedroom door, and a young boy's face appeared beneath the frost. Me, he grimaced, remembering the day his aunt had taken the still: my first day of church. Wiping downward, his mind filled with memories: the suffocating pinch of his white, freshly starched oxford shirt; the smell of carnauba wax, liberally applied, to mask the scuffs in his oversized, wingtip shoes.

Growing up, Avery's clothes were almost always worn out hand-me-downs from distant cousins that were never quite big enough for his tall, broad-shouldered frame. "Just as they should be," his aunt had said, smiling, holding up new pieces of his wardrobe for inspection. "A boy isn't a boy that doesn't ruin his clothes." But her painstaking patching and sewing had always ensured Avery looked his best—especially for church.

"Now don't you look handsome," his aunt had cooed the day she'd taken the frozen still.

Then, as she'd done up his little paisley tie: "So much like your mother. So much like your father," according to assessments of an inheritance Avery hadn't understood. There had been no pictures of his parents in his aunt's old house—and there were none in her apartment now.

Although she'd never once said anything unkind about them, these bittersweet comparisons had been her only praise.

"Auntie? You in there?" Avery asked, knocking softly on her bedroom door. Again, there was no answer.

He remembered the sound of raised voices behind other closed doors—the angry end of his parents' marriage. His father had left his mother so distraught that she could no longer care for herself, let alone an active, six-year-old boy. He took one last look at the holo-still: argyle socks beneath neatly cuffed tan slacks; an unabashed smile, no less sincere for his aunt's prompting.

Then he opened her bedroom door.

If the living room had felt like a refrigerator, the bedroom was a freezer. Avery's heart dropped into his stomach. But it wasn't until he saw the line of sixteen evenly spaced cigarettes (one for each hour of her waking day) untouched on a bedside vanity that Avery knew for sure —his aunt was dead.

He stared at her body, stiff as a board under the layers of crocheted and quilted blankets, as the sweat on the back of his neck froze solid. Then he stepped to the foot of the bed and lowered himself into a threadbare armchair where he remained, spine set against the cold, for almost an hour—until someone keyed the apartment door.

"She's in here," muttered one of the complex's orderlies as he tramped down the hallway. A young man with a sunken chin and shoulder-length blond hair peered into the bedroom.

"Jesus!" He jumped back, catching sight of Avery. "Who are you?"

"How many days?" Avery asked.

"What?"

"How many days has she been lying here?"

"Listen, unless I know—"

"I'm her nephew," Avery growled, his eyes locked on the bed. "How. Many. Days."

The orderly swallowed. "Three." Then in a nervous torrent, "Look, it's been busy, and she didn't have any—I mean we didn't know she had any relatives in-system. The apartment is on automatic. It dropped to freezing the moment she …" The orderly trailed off as Avery stared him down.

"Take her away," Avery said flatly.

The orderly motioned to his shorter, plumper partner cowering in the hallway behind him.

Quickly the two men positioned their stretcher beside the bed, peeled back the layers of bedding, and gently transferred the body.

"Records say she was Evangelical Promessic." The orderly fumbled with the stretcher's straps. "Is that right?"

But Avery's gaze had returned to the bed, and he didn't reply.

His aunt was so frail that her body left only the barest impression in the foam mattress. She was a small woman, but Avery remembered how tall and strong she'd looked when Zone social services had dropped him on her doorstep—a mountain of surrogate maternal love and discipline in his wary, six-year-old eyes.

"What's your COM address?" the thin orderly continued, "I'll let you know the name of the processing center."

Avery drew his hands out of his pockets and laid them on his lap. The squat orderly noticed Avery's fingers tighten into fists and coughed—a signal to his partner that now would be a good time to leave. The two men worked the stretcher back and forth until it pointed out of the bedroom, then bumped it noisily down the hallway and out the apartment door.

Avery's hands shook. His aunt had been teetering on the edge for some time. But in their recent COM correspondence, she'd told him not to worry. Hearing that, he'd wanted to take his leave immediately, but his CO had ordered him to lead one more mission. A whole hell of a lot of good that did anyone, Avery cursed. While his Aunt lay dying, he was strapped to a Hornet, circling the Jim Dandy back on Tribute.

Avery leapt from the chair, stepped quickly to his duffels, and pulled out one of the fifths of gin from the duty-free. He grabbed his navy dress coat and stuffed the glass flask into an interior pocket. A moment later, he was out the apartment door.

"Dog and Pony," Avery asked the hospitality computer on the way down to the lobby. "Is it still in business?"

"Open daily until four a.m.," the computer replied through a small speaker in the elevator's floor-selection pad. "Ladies pay no cover. Shall I call a cab?"

"I'll walk." Avery twisted the cap off the gin and took a generous swig. Then he added to himself: While I still can.

The bottle only lasted an hour. But others were easy to find, as one night of drinking became two, then three. Gut Check, Rebound, Severe Tire Damage: names of clubs filled with civilians eager for Avery's money but not the slurred stories of how he'd earned it—except for a girl on a low-lit stage in a dive off Halsted Street. The pretty redhead was so good at pretending to listen, Avery didn't mind pretending it had nothing to do with how often he'd tapped his credit chip against the jeweled reader in her navel. The money drew her freckled skin and smell and lazy smile closer, until a rough hand fell on Avery's shoulder.

"Watch your hands, soldier boy," a bouncer warned, his voice raised above the club's thumping music.

Avery looked away from the girl, her back arched high above the stage. The bouncer was tall with a substantial gut that his tight, black turtleneck could barely contain. His strong arms were padded with a deceptive layer of fat. Avery shrugged. "I've paid."

"Not to touch." The bouncer sneered, revealing two platinum incisors. "This is a class establishment."

Avery reached for a little round table between his knees and the stage. "How much?" he asked, raising his credit chip.

"Five hundred."

"Screw you."

"Like I said. Class."

"Already spent plenty …"Avery muttered. His UNSC salary was modest—and most of that had gone to help with his aunt's apartment.

"Aw, now see?" The bouncer jabbed a thumb at the girl. She was slowly sliding backward on the stage—her smile now a worried frown. "You gotta talk nice, soldier boy." The bouncer tightened his grip on Avery's shoulder. "She's not one of those Innie sluts you're used to out in Epsi."

Avery was sick of the bouncer's hand. He was sick of being called boy. But having some civilian puke insult him—someone who had no idea what he had actually gotten used to on the frontlines of the Insurrection? That was the last straw.

"Let me go," Avery growled.

"We gonna have a problem?"

"All depends on you."

With his free hand, the bouncer reached behind his back and pulled a metal rod from his belt. "Why don't you and me step outside?" With a flick of his wrist, the rod doubled in length and revealed an electrified tip.