Click.

The question is always how far you’re willing to go to get what you want. Kill or be killed? Betray or be betrayed? Win or lose? At each step, you place your bets; you take the result. You don’t cry about it. There’s no one to cry to.

Click.

If there were anyone to cry to, the world wouldn’t be in the mess it was in. Every place would be prosperous and free, and everyone would be happy. And some of us wouldn’t have to fight like hell to get out of the holes we’d been born in and some place where we were left alone to live our own way. We wouldn’t have to be ready to kill or be killed…

Click.

The cheap lock to the tiny room I occupied – high up on the North tower of Babylon Seacity – clicked again. This time the sound was graver and resonated, as if a deep cord had been struck in the hollow metal shell anchored to hollow ceramite. My first impulse was to sit up, throwing off both sheets and blankets.

But you don’t stay alive very long by giving way to first impulses. Someone was unlocking my door. This meant they probably suspected something. The identity under which I’d come to Babylon was not that interesting. Unskilled, young – thanks to extensive cosmetic surgery – and with an assumed IQ in the high nineties. My coverup identity would mean nothing to them. This meant either that they’d suspected something – that I’d let my guard down somehow – or that the person opening my door had some other intention in mind.

Tense, beneath the flimsy blanket, I opened my eyes, just a little, just enough to see through my long eyelashes. Moving casually, in a seemingly aimless way, I twirled the fake stone on the cheap ring I wore.

Oh, I had other tools, for the job I’d come to do, and those had been difficult enough to smuggle in, in the false bottom of my suitcase. But I had not come as an assassin and my tools for defense were few. A knife, secreted with my other tools. My ring, which the trainer had told me would fire one beam only, and only once. After that, I was on my own. For everything, including hiding the body.

Good thing, then, to wait, and make sure the beam was needed. And what would come after too. I would kill if that’s what it took to keep me alive, but I would not kill if it would jeopardize what I was here to do. And my chances at a visa to Olympus Seacity. Step, shuffle, step, shuffle, the intruder moved stealthily across the room, stopped at the foot of my narrow bed.

I kept myself still and maintained the deep, regular breathing of a sleeper. The last time I’d been in Babylon, I’d left just before being killed. I’d only been lured back to the pleasure-and-crime paradise that was Babylon Seacity by the bait of an Olympus Resident Visa. A safe place. Sanctuary. What I had lost forever after the last stint in Babylon, when, shocked by some of the events on the isle, I’ reported the chairman’s deeds to the world press. After that I was too hot to hold. It was said that wealthy, dirty Babylon had their fingers everywhere and in everyone’s business. If they couldn’t buy you, they’d kill you. If they couldn’t kill you… They’d find a way to corrupt you. Step, shuffle, step, shuffle.

Even United Europe wouldn’t take me. What was I saying? Of course United Europe wouldn’t take me. The barren wastelands of the land states, with their aging, dependent population, couldn’t defy the Seacities in anything. Not in trade, not in law enforcement. Not in strength.

Olympus…

They said the streets of Olympus ran with gold and everyone was rich and happy. I didn’t know about that. But in my rapid, haphazard tour of the seacities, one step ahead of Babylon enforcers, I’d found that Olympus was the hardest city to get into. The hardest to stay in illegally. Other than that, they had damn few laws and they didn’t collect taxes – though there were port fees for the vessels docking on the isle and police fees, if you wished your business and home guarded.

They were the only place that would defy Babylon. That did defy Babylon.

Most Seacities were law abiding. Various flavors of democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, but all bound by laws where the human being mattered and where you knew how to stay alive and how to get yourself killed, even if the latter was through stupidity. Babylon…

Step, shuffle, step, shuffle.

Babylon was wealthy and dirty. Dirty in a way that went beyond laws or the lack thereof. On its shores, no vice was too bad, no virtue too stellar. If you wanted to kill a woman during sex, why, one of the teen whores Babylon imported by the score would be there for that need. Drugs so violent they scrambled your mind forever? You could have a Babylonian agent give them to your chosen enemy. You could mind-wipe your enemy – or the object of your lust – on Babylon and own them forever.

Other Seacities – the landstates too – clawed fruitlessly at Babylon, wanting to rein it in, wanting to stop the harm to its citizens, and the flood of corrupt money that spilled out to destroy their politics and commerce. But they couldn’t.

Babylon had three things that kept it safe.

First – it was mobile, its base poured onto a vast, floating dimatough shell, permanently fitted with motors that charged from the ocean currents. Permanently moving, at the whim of a computer program that studied how to keep it away from sea traffic. And from arm.

Second – a program, also run by its central computer – which would beam its location only to those who had one of the ever-changing codes which were given hand to hand, person to person, to those they could trust.

Third – a scanner called the eye attached to the computer that warned of any large, incoming group of flying vehicles at one time.

I was here to neutralize them. I was here to allow the Seacities to police their own and end the corruption of Babylon.

I’d pledged myself to disable the bio-electronic eye that protected Babylon from air attack, and to set off locator transmitters so that even if Babylon sailed off, the allied forces would still be able to follow and destroy it. It was no part of my job to kill…

But I would kill if I had to.

The shuffle, shuffle, step, moved on towards the window. Turning, I looked through my eyelashes. He - definitely a he - had turned on a ring light. In the yellow-white circle cast by it, I saw him pull up my small, compact suitcase, cheap ceramite, the cheapest kind available everywhere. Of course, it only looked that way.

He took a deep breath, broad shoulders straining against dark fabric and flipped the finger lock. It opened easily enough. It was supposed to.

Outside, the waves broke against the base of the island, several stories down. This far up, it made the tower vibrate and the doors and locks rattle, with a sound like fine china vibrating together.

Closing my eyes, I told myself he would never find the false bottom. A breath later, I heard the click, click of his fingers working the hidden combination lock.

My stomach twisted. I don’t want to kill you.

My heart tried to speed up, and I wanted to take a deep, deep breath, but then he’d hear me. Instead, I pointed my hand, putting him in direct line with where the ring would release its beam. I had to do it now, before he realized what he was looking at. I had to do it now before he turned. I had to.

Preemptive self-defense, my trainers had called it. In United Europe they didn’t believe in any such thing. Murder is murder is murder. One touch on the ring in the right place and I was a murderer.

Better than being killed.

I opened my eyes. The man bent over my suitcase took another deep breath. I could practically hear the thoughts going on behind his eyes. Now he’d turn around and he’d shoot me. One line in a report. Suspicious intruder eliminated. Unless, of course, he thought I might give away my accomplices, or those who’d sent me. Then he’d give me to his bosses to –

He started to turn around. I fired.

A beam of white, blazing light flew from the ring. It caught him mid chest. He made a sound like a scream that doesn’t have the breath to echo and comes out as a sort of a weird sigh. And he crumpled.

Thick gagging stench filled the air in the tiny room. Blood and burn and other, more common body fluids.

I swallowed. My insides twisted and felt as though they’d gone liquid. I was surprised they didn’t slosh as I flung a foot out of bed and stepped onto the cold, glassy ceramite floor. He’d fallen on his stomach. His right hand had flung wide, and the light ring on his finger was pointed straight up, showing a slice of greyish ceramite floor, a bit of greyish ceramite wall and a pale, pale hand. Square fingers and nails and thick knuckles. A strong hand, but not a worker’s hand.

You can’t recognize anyone by his hand.

The single burner ray from the ring had gone all the way through his chest, all the way out the back. I couldn’t see any damage to the window behind him, but the hole on his back was big enough to put my fist through. Not that I did.

One look at the hole, semi-cauterized by the intense heat of the laser, showing the burned edges of flesh and bone and something that might be the remains of a still-pumping heart, made me bite my lips together against wrenching nausea. Blood seeped out of the wound. Not very fast, perhaps because the burner had created charred tissue as a barrier.

I walked to door of my room and locked it again. Little protection against intrusion, but better than have anyone walk in while I decided what to do with the body.

What to do with the body…

My Olympus trainers hadn’t done more than tell me I needed to be ready to dispose of a body. They couldn’t tell me what to do to it. They weren’t here. They didn’t know what room I’d been assigned. They didn’t know which places I’d have available.

I didn’t know what places I’d have available in this tiny room. There was one bed, with thin mattress, flimsy sheets and a deplorable excuse for a blanket. There was a table that my suitcase rested on. And that was it. Oh, there was also a grate for ventilation in the wall, but if I put the corpse in there, I’d best be prepared to live with eau de dead body. As would anyone who came in here. Maintenance and cleaning staff included.
I might as well leave the body out in the open, for all the cover that would give me.

I returned to the corpse and edged a foot underneath his shoulder to turn him, as if knowing who he was would give me a clue on what to do with him. It made no sense whatsoever. But then again, it bought me time while I tried to figure out what to do with a hundred and some pounds of dead meat.

He flipped over with an all too organic sound. I squatted and, grabbing for his still warm hand, I bent it and pointed the ring light up at his face.

And gasped.

Of course he looked much paler than I remembered, but it would have been hard for me not to identify the dark blond curls, the pouting lips, the bluest eyes this side of bio-engineering. Sweet Johnny Dulce. Johnny had been my best friend and lover the five years I’d lived in Babylon. I’d left him behind as I left, just ahead of the law. Which probably explained why he’d suspected me. Despite the new, larger breasts, the blond hair replacing my dark mane, the eyes that were blue and not dark brown, he must have recognized the turn of the head, or the way I walked, or any of the things I’d supposedly been trained out of. But not enough for a discerning eye. Not enough for someone who’d lived with me for that long.

What if he hadn’t meant to betray me? What if he hadn’t meant to give me away? What if he was only–

Cool it. It would be callous to say there was no use crying over dead boyfriend. It would also be true. Johnny had known I was wanted, but at no time had he tried to join me in my flight. At no time had he even sent me a message of encouragement. Hell – as head of security of Babylon – he could have given them wrong directions, confused the issue.

Right.

Nausea became a cold lump in my stomach as I realized that Johnny had probably led the hunt for me. All of which made my hands stop shaking, but didn’t give me any help finding a way to dispose of the body.

Ah, Johnny, Johnny. You were always trouble.

The poured dimatough walls couldn’t be pierced or broken. The ventilation hole in the wall would provide a whiff of Johnny to the whole floor. The window, also dimatough, was no less impenetrable for being transparent. The attached fresher allowed barely enough space for me to stand between the utilitarian toilet and the narrow high-pressure showercube. I couldn’t flush Johnny down the toilet or throw him into the disintegrator hole in the wall. Not without the lengthy, bloody task of cutting him up.

I looked at the body on the floor and shuddered. I might have left him. He might have betrayed me. But dismembering any body would be difficult. Dismembering Johnny– No.

That left the bed. It was the only piece of semi-substantial furniture in the room; the only place to hide a body. I shone Johnny’s ring light on it, unwilling to turn on the light in the room. Who knew if they had some way to determine someone had done that? Babylon liked to keep its lowest of low help under guard, as witness the literal, human guard at the end of the hallway.

I had an image of sticking Johnny between the mattress and the wall, and then try to do something in the next twenty four hours, before he got too smelly. But the mattress was so thin anyone coming to check on me would see it. Besides, the idea of lying in bed and pretending nothing had happened – squish, squish, squelch – gave me the horrors.

The headboard that curved in an almost dainty way around the head of the bed was too thin to be dimatough. Was the rest of the bed dimatough?

I pulled the mattress and the blanket off, tossed them to the side, opposite Johnny. The rest of the bed was an inverted rectangular box, the presumably open side resting on the floor. The only reason to have solid sides was that they were made of ceramite, a cheaper compound than dimatough but much flimsier.

A sharp knuckle rap against the side confirmed my suspicions. I could also see the seams where the sides had been cut, then joined to the top. Any decent burner could melt ceramite.

Unfortunately – I looked down and at my spent ring – I was fresh out of decent burners. Unless Johnny–

Well, he was security. He should have a burner around his person, somewhere, even if it wasn’t in a visible holster .

I bit my lips together again. I was going to have to become far more intimately acquainted with Johnny than I ever meant to again.

I had gloves in my kit, in the false bottom of the suitcase he had ever so thoughtfully opened for me. They’d been provided so I wouldn’t leave prints while I made my slow explorations of the compound and found the eye. I thought that slow explorations were now, officially, out. Even if the body disposal trick worked, I’d have two, maybe three days. Death and fish. After three days, they smell.

And I’d be damned if I was going to dig through Johnny’s clothes with my bare hands. Okay, so I was squeamish. I had killed a man. I could be squeamish about playing with the leftovers.

I slipped the gloves on. They were thin enough that I could feel through them, and I felt Johnny’s cooling skin. How fast one lost vital heat. He felt cool to the touch, like he’d been sleeping all night naked, atop the blanket.

I shut the image out of my mind and instead searched through his pockets first, then unzipped the black jacket of his uniform, and searched within. The burners – two –were on twin holsters, under the jacket.

The whole holster might come in handy. I set the them, with the burners still in them, besides the mattress. And then I hesitated.

I felt a great temptation to just open the bed, throw Johnny under there, close it again. But as I said, I’d learned not to listen to my impulses. Johnny might have something on him that told me where the eye was, or that helped me in my mission to disable it. Or… Johnny might have the name of his underling – someone he warned he was coming here. I doubted that. It wasn’t like Johnny to think he might need backup. Certainly not against a woman. He could always persuade us. But it would be stupid not to look.

I’d never searched anyone – dead or alive – so I just looked haphazardly, revisiting the pockets. I’d looked only for burners before. Now I paid attention to other things. And found a small, rolled up package. Bringing it out and looking through it showed me it was a lock-pick kit better than the one I’d been provided. With a particular mimic-hand that could defeat gen locks. Not a real hand, of course, but a flat surface made of nano material that would first read the genetics the locks were coded for and then act on them. Good. Olympus had not been able to supply me with one of those. I had told them Babylon possessed them – having heard of them before – but they’d said it was an urban legend.

I pocketed the kit. There was nothing else. It was left only to work Johnny’s ring out of his finger and into mine, and then to return to the bed, and apply steady burner heat to the seams.  I cut the solid front panel of the rectangle that formed the bed proper, away from the rest, broke its fall and eased it noiselessly to the floor.

I removed Johnny’s jacket, then pushed Johnny into the hollow space I’d uncovered. With his jacket I wiped whatever blood was left on the floor. There wasn’t much. Then I tossed the jacket in, after the corpse, set the front panel back in place, resealed it with my burner set on the highest heat that wouldn’t cut.

I closed the false bottom of my suitcase.

My hands trembled. Jitters and something else, a hint of regret for Johnny. No matter how bitterly our affair had ended, we had once loved each other. Not that it mattered.

A knock on the door interrupted my thoughts.

Shit. There was no reason for anyone to knock at my door way before dawn. None at all. I threw the mattress and sheets back on the bed, even as I made my voice thick with startled awakening. “Yes?”

“Miss?” a man asked.

“Yes?”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right,” I answered. Mitch’s voice. Mitch had been my friend as long as Johnny had been my lover. He came from United Europe too, though not the same place. And he was Johnny’s underling in charge of cyber security.

Had Johnny told him about me? Why? Did he think he needed help? How uncharacteristic of him!

So. Mitch was at the door. What was I going to do about that? We’d been friends – good friends.

But four years had passed. I’d been a fugitive. And what did Mitch think about me? More importantly – how did he feel about me?

“Miss? May I come in and see if everything is all right?

“Uh…” I tried to sound vacuous and confused. “Sure.” A quick look at my hands with the ring light, and then the ring went into the pocket of the violently pink robe I wrapped around myself before opening the door.

Mitch stood outside, looking officious and concerned. He’d lost weight and the black fluffstuff one-piece worn by most people in Babylon security hung loose on his frame. There were dark circles around his eyes and he looked like he badly needed a shave.

I met his gaze with my most innocent expression. “Shouldn’t I be all right?”

He took a step back startled. That’s right, Mitch, I thought. Not the woman you expected, is it? I made big, startled eyes at him. “Is anything wrong, sir?”

He shook his head, slowly, while his eyes gave me the full scan treatment.

Look all you want. I batted my eyelashes. Very little of it is unchanged.

“No,” he said, slowly. He rubbed at his chin – a gesture I recognized as something he did when he was confused. He’d do that while working on a difficult bit of programming.

He looked at me and frowned a little, his dark eyes reflecting an expression I couldn’t quite place. Until I did. I should have. It was the same look I’d seen from my mirror many times in the last few years. The look of someone desperate, who was ready to do what he must to survive.

His eyes focused on the space between my breasts. He spoke to it. “If I might check your documents, Miss…”

I danced into the room, returned with my immigration permission, a broad yellow sheet.

He glanced at it. “Miss Annie Green?”

I nodded, wide-eyed, my lips slightly parted.

He tilted his head. “You came with a worker visa….” He looked over my papers again. He looked me over. “I see you have a general work permit. Have they told you what you’ll be doing?”

“I can do just about any manual work.” I watched him flinch.

He knew very well that women with my assumed IQ did only one job in Babylon. He stepped closer. What, honey, do you want a freebie?

“When do you start work?”

I gave him the big smile with the straight, perfect teeth that had cost Olympus a small fortune. “In two days, sir.”

He stepped yet closer, bent his head, and whispered into my ear, his breath tickling me. “Leave,” he said. “Today.”

I stepped back and stared up at him all big wide eyes. “What? Why?”

He stepped forward, again, into the room, and again bent to speak in my ear. “You know why.”

My heart sped up in panic. What did he mean? What did he want? Were bosomy young blondes his thing? “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” I said, all panting chest and dripping honey.

His features fell into seriousness. His dark green eyes looked me over head to toe. He sighed. Without a word he walked out of the room, closing the door softly.

I stared after him. Did Mitch just warn every would-be teenage prostitute off the isle? No.

He’d recognized me. That was the only explanation.

But why hadn’t he killed me? Giving second chances to an old friend?

I should leave. Leave Babylon by the next ship that ferried passengers to terra firma. After all, Olympus knew that, despite surgery, a chance remained that someone would recognize me. And no one expected heroics from me. They’d only hired me because I knew Babylon’s computer system inside and out.

On the other hand… If I left here, I’d be on the wanted list again. I’d be a pursued woman again. Fugitive. No sanctuary.

Hell, given my change in appearance, even United Europe wouldn’t take me back. And who’d be able to protect me?

No.

I threw on the first dress that came to hand, flufftuff in eye-searing cerise red. After transferring the contents of my secret compartment and Johnny’s so kindly supplied kit to a supple pouch I fastened it around my waist, underneath the dress. The holsters were more of a problem.

The only jacket I’d brought was a decorative little thing, black with embroidery. Short, at least it wasn’t molding. I fastened the holsters under it, and, if I fastened it only by its top tie, it hid the burners well enough. Good. I knew how to use them, but I’d never carried them. After all, programmers don’t often have to shoot things. Even though sometimes we threaten the computers.

Now… how to get out of here without raising the alarm… Well. If Mitch was willing to raise the alarm, I was already screwed. If not… If not, I needed to get past the guard. Killing him would be awkward. Either it would get really crowded under that little bed, or the dead body would be left around to give me away and start a search. Besides, I didn’t like killing people.

No. Better to act the naive new arrival, and to get the guard to let me out for just some minutes. I knew why the guards were there – everyone knew. It was to prevent someone from sneaking in and breaking the computer system or killing an important guest or something of that sort.

But Miss Annie Green, with her soft, breathy voice, her twittery way? Well… any guard worth his salt would see that she was no threat to anyone.

The guard was young. Tops all of nineteen. And bored. As I walked up to him, he grinned at me, his grin widening as I did a little hip roll and blushed and looked down and away from his stare. At the end of the hallway, I stood on my tiptoes, as if to look past his shoulder.

There was nothing much to see, just the end of the hallway and, past it, an antigrav well leading to the next floor. Though only this floor was guarded – because these were the lowest level employees and not tested or investigated before they were hired, there were three levels of employee dormitories, before you got to the areas for the paying guests.

But Annie Green would be stupid enough to try to look past the guard, so I did.

“Now, then,” he said, with a hint of laughter in his voice. “What are you trying to do?”

I brought what I knew were almost as blue and innocent-looking eyes as Johnny had had to bear on him. “Oh,” I said. “I was just hoping… you know… to see? I’ve heard so much about Babylon, and it seems like such a waste to just lie in my bed and sleep when there’s…” I made a helpless gesture with both hands. “A whole world out there.”

His lips twisted a little, and I could almost hear him calculate the chances I’d reply favorably to a suggestion that I could do something non-boring with him. I could also see his eyes reflect disappointment as he realized that teenagers like Miss Annie Green were often brought in to be prostitutes, but they didn’t usually start out that way. And he probably knew as well as I did that if she chanced to be a virgin, her virginity would be worth quite a lot for her first customer. I could see him deciding Annie, Alas, wasn’t worth the demerit on his performance review.

Which didn’t mean, of course, he couldn’t get something out of it. I saw that thought hit too, as his eyes lit up. “Tell you what,” he said. He spoke Glaish with the slow, singing accent of the North American division. “If you promise you’ll go down and take a look and come back up before an hour or so, I get out in an hour, and I can come to your room and tell you all sorts of stories about Babylon. And give you all sorts of pointers.”

Right. Like pointers on how to have fun without losing your virginity. “Oh, thank you,” I said, my voice grateful enough to thank him for, oh, a small fortune.

He stepped down, and I walked past him, fell down the gravity well. Then again, then yet again.

I landed at the end of a hallway in the public floor – restrooms to my right, massage parlors to my left and walked past them as if I had not a care in the world. It’s long been my understanding that the guiltier you are, the more confident and innocent you should look. I could practically feel a hallo shining above my head as I walked.

Past a set of double doors and into the casino – which took up most of this floor.

Rushing past players hunched over their machines, some talking softly to them, as they would to lovers, some kicking and cursing and screaming, I heard five different languages in as many seconds and thought to myself that it was small wonder the earthworms were mad as hell at Babylon. And the Sharks too.

It wasn’t, as they would claim, child prostitutes or brain-destroying drugs that fueled their indignation, either. For all that the land states assumed the cloak of moral rectitude, what galled them was the vast amount of cash flowing daily from their coffers to Babylonian pockets.

I walked straight to the service corridor by the side of the restroom. Opening a door marked Personnel Only, I stepped into a square walk-in closet that held mops and pails, screwdrivers and dimatough extruders. The door at the back required an authorized gencode to enter. My authorization had been revoked, but – thank you Johnny, dearest - I had his genhand. I pressed it to the lock. The mechanism extracted the necessary, microscopic sample. The door opened noiselessly, into the computer room, the nerve center of Babylon Seacity.

I closed the door behind me, turned, ready to start work. And stared into Mitch’s amused eyes and the burner he held pointed at my chest.

“Hello, Sandra,” he said. “What took you so long?”

Damn. I didn’t scream. I could barely breathe. “Put that down, Mitch. I know when to give up.”

He smiled, a slow, lazy smile. “Like hell you do, Cassandra Reis. If you knew when to give up, you’d have died four years ago, when Johnny turned you in. They’d have caught you every time he picked up your trail, instead of your leaving a trail of maimed and bewildered agents in your wake. And by the old gods, you certainly wouldn’t have come back.” His gaze flickered to my bosom. “For your information, when having one’s body done, one should remove beauty marks.”

I backed up, slouched against the door. “The flunkies are on the way, aren’t they?”

He smiled. The burner moved down, then back up again. “That depends, doesn’t it, Miz Green?”

“Depends on what?” My heart hammered at my mouth. What did he want? He couldn’t kill me. But I’d killed Johnny, who’d been much closer to me than I’d ever been to Mitch.

The hand that didn’t hold the gun went up and made a wiping motion at his forehead. “What is your mission, Sandra?”

“What?”

“What is your mission?” The gun poked forward, ever-so-slightly.

“What makes you think I have one?” I asked, making use of my recently acquired baby-blues.

He grinned. “Don’t insult my intelligence. If you weren’t working for someone, you wouldn’t have come back here. And you certainly wouldn’t have a brand new body. You’d be dead or still running.”

Right. So he wasn’t stupid. I knew that. That had been the most annoying of Mitch’s characteristics. He could figure out what I was up to, pretty much all the time.

“My offer is simple,” he said. His voice sounded suddenly very tired and his mouth went droopy and even his eyes seemed to sag, as though he couldn’t keep himself alert anymore. “I want out. I want to go with you. I’ve wanted out for five years. What you did… those exposes you smuggled out, I would have done it if I’d known how. I watched you and watched you, and wondered how you could be serious about Johnny, and how you could believe him every time he accidentally slipped into another woman’s bed, and Sandra, I would have intervened. I would have intervened and told you that you deserved better. But I thought you were fully committed to this place and it made me sick. And then when you left, it was too late and I was stuck.”

I essayed a nervous laugh, prayed this wasn’t a trap. “I thought you were fully committed.”

His mouth turned up in what should have been a smile but wasn’t. “No. There’s only so many thirteen year old earthworms I can see seduced by the promise of big money, turned onto drugs they can’t afford, selling themselves on the streets. Or worse, killed during their first night with a client.” From his lips the high moral indignation sounded real. “Yes, I know, I knew what happened here when I took the job. But I didn’t know how. I thought that if some rich old fogies wanted to blow away their fortunes on drugs, gambling and babes, it was none of my business. But I never thought about the other side of the equation.”

“So, if you’re so sick of it, leave.”

He shook his head. “You know better, Sandra. I know too much. Even if I managed to leave, I’d always be looking over my shoulder. Like you were. I need to know I can get a visa somewhere safe.”

I took a deep breath. “Is the room clean?”

He raised his eyebrows, vaguely surprised. “Am I an idiot?”

I shook my head. At any rate, at this point he knew enough that if he was playing a double game and I didn’t give him what he wanted, he’d just have me tortured. If I gave him what he wanted now, and he betrayed me, the worst that would happen would be he’d kill me right now. I preferred death to torture any time. “All right. I’m working for Olympus, fronting an alliance of Seacities.”

“Seacities?” He whistled under his breath. “I always assumed you were an earthworm agent. What do the other sharks have against Babylon?”

“The Seacities in the alliance are the techno-industrial ones. Atlantis, Olympus, Syracuse, Sea York.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “The respectable states who established themselves outside the range of the land states for taxes and patent reasons.”

“So?” Mitch asked.

“So, while they are thorns in the earthworms’ sides, lost taxes and all considered, Babylon is a thorn in their side. Not just the fortunes that vanish into Babylon’s pleasure-centers. Though I’m sure that doesn’t help.” I gave him a rueful smile. “But the true problem is the corruption of their government systems by large infusions of Babylonian money or the promise of other pleasures. Bribes to politicians. Outright vote buying. All democracies are prone to this sort of manipulation, and the sharks don’t want to be Babylon’s sock puppets.”

“And what, exactly, is your mission?”

“To confuse the guidance system of Babylon, disable the eye,” I answered. “So that when I set up the signals to tell our position to the allied forces, Babylon will be immobilized and helpless.”

He stared me. “And you’ll get out before the fighting begins.”

I shrugged, smiled, a nervous smile. “I’m hoping.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said. It wasn’t a demand. Just a statement.

The door opened.

Two men and a woman in black one-pieces burst into the room, their burners drawn. Mitch grabbed for me, dragged me behind the chair. He fired. One of the people who’d entered the room fell. Then another.

I managed to draw my own burner and finished off the last one.

Mitch and I stood, shaking, both of us holding burners. We traded a cautious look. Mitch pointed his burner at the floor. I did likewise.

Mitch fired an insurance shot into each of them. He turned pale as he identified each of the bodies. “So hard to get good help these days,” he said, in what tried to be a casual tone. He grabbed the chair we’d used as a shield.

The cynicism he affected sounded hollow. Men are always more sentimental than women.

“Stopgap,” he said, as he closed the door and edged the chair under the door handle. “For the backups. I’m obviously not trusted and your cover is clearly blown.” He turned his burner on and started fusing the Ceramite of the door to the dimatough of the wall. Shouts echoed from the outside. “We know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up.”

Someone kicked the door. Imperfectly joined to the wall, the Ceramite panel shook with the blow. Mitch yelled something incomprehensible. His burner went out and he grabbed one from the dead attackers on the floor.

I turned my burner on and joined him.

Kicks and blows on the door multiplied, their sound deafening.

“Sooner or later one of the idiots is going to think of using a burner on it,” Mitch whispered, his voice urgent and scared. “And we can’t get out of here. All the walls are dimatough. Sorry Sandra. I shouldn’t have delayed you.”

My brain worked frantically.

He forgot that I’d been in charge of the installation of this behemoth computer system. I remembered the ventilation shaft that ran behind the computer, connecting this room to the air ducts that ran the island over, keeping it cool in summer and warm in winter. Sidling up to the computer, I pushed the prepared data gem into the reader slot, ran the program that caused Babylon’s fusion plant to direct power to one of the storage spools, leaving the propulsion systems unpowered.

“Sandra, they’re almost inside,” Mitch yelled.

A quick look over my shoulder showed me the door hanging by a patch less than a hand long.

I threw in another gem that would play havoc with the computerized sighting of Babylon’s guns mounted on the wall around the isle.

I used my small electrical screwdriver to unscrew the myriad fasteners and pull the computer forward, revealing a slotted panel over the vent, started unscrewing the panel, cursed mentally, as a screw stripped.

Grabbing the panel with both hands, I pulled. It gave, but still remained attached. I braced my legs against the wall above the panel, contorted my arms underneath to hold onto the panel and pushed. The screw head came off, the panel went flying, and I fell back.

Mitch yelled. “Damn, damn, damn.”

The door fell to the floor, with all the weight of all the eager young people on it. I stood up, grabbed Mitch’s arm, shoved him towards the vent.

He made a sweeping motion with his burner, sending the pursuers three steps back, and squeezed himself into the vent hole.

I threw down my first transmitter, which called the allied troops to us. Scarcely larger than my thumb and as black as the wall by which it fell, it transmitted a variety of signals in communications frequencies that the allied forces had specified.

Grabbing the two burners remaining on the two stiffs nearest me, I crawled in after Mitch.

“They’ll come after us,” Mitch said, crawling fast along the glass-smooth tube.

“That’s nice,” I told him. “Crawl forward, damn it. They don’t even need to come after us, if we don’t get to a turn in the tunnel. A single burner shot and–”

Looking over my shoulder, I saw a hand, holding a burner, push into the tunnel. Curse all bright young people. Looking ahead, I saw Mitch’s regulation shoes disappear around a bend in the tunnel. I sped ahead madly, trying to get enough traction from hands slick with sweat and blood, and feet in sleek pumps.

I’d just turned the bend when the flash behind me told me our pursuers had done the obvious thing. The heat was enough to make me speed the rest of the way, pushing Mitch ahead in my scramble to escape. I felt my feet blister.

“Are they near?” he asked.

“Not likely. They fired into the tunnel. The dimatough will be too hot at the entrance for at least a few minutes, so crawl. Forward.”

“Fork ahead,” Mitch said. “Which way?”

“How should I know? Do you think I memorized the damn vent system?”

He laughed, hollowly. “Sandra, where do you need to go?”

“I have to disable the eye,” I told him.

“The eye? Are you insane? Why didn’t you do it from the computer?” He turned right.

“Because I know what the computer can do and what it can’t, and it can’t disable the eye. There are failsafes.”

“We can try,” he said. “Anything for a residence visa to a Seacity, that’s us born earthworms, isn’t it?”

It was unnerving to talk to Mitch’s feet, to have only his ambiguous words and amused tones to go on. I stared at the black, rugged soles pumping methodically ahead of me, shuffle, shuffle, scrape, scrape, down the glistening tube.

He stopped. “Tube goes down,” he said, flatly.

“Well, then so do we,” I told him.

“All right. What’s a few broken bones between friends?”

He got his feet into the downward portion of the tunnel, then the rest of his body, till he was holding on by his fingertips. “Wait a little, give me time to crawl away, before you go in after me.”

I motioned him forward. I could hear diffuse noise in the distance.

I heard him fall and hit bottom. I waited, until I heard the scrapes of his motion, again.

Putting my feet into the hole, I let myself fall. The mirrored walls rushed around. I saw my face, mouth open in an O, eyes wide, reflected a million times. I stretched my feet, tip downward and hit in perfect athletic style. Squeezing down into the tunnel that ran parallel to the floor was harder.

“Next time we need to do this head first,” Mitch said. “Now you’ll have to crawl backwards, as I have.”

“Next time?” I did as he told, backing down and into the horizontal tunnel, which felt narrower than the one on the higher level, and forced me to a lying-down position.

“Come.” Mitch twisted his hand over his left shoulder, and fired at half charge over his own prone body. The walls glowed, unbearably hot. I screamed at him.

He hit with his feet. Something cracked. He crawled out, muttering something about, “-only way to melt the screws.”

I crawled out and stood on shaky legs. My melted fluffstuff dress left vast portions of my anatomy exposed. Mitch didn’t look much better, his own suit scorched and worn, his hair matted down by sweat.

We’d emerged into a fortunately deserted restroom.

“The heat will delay them,” Mitch said, as he fired yet another shot of his burner into the vent opening making the walls glow. “Come.”

He pulled me out of the restroom.

In the dark hallway outside, he paused, closing the door and quickly fusing a patch of the door to the door frame with his burner “If I navigated right, we’re near the first floor play rooms.” He motioned me to the left, where the hallway opened up.

Before we entered the brightly lit playroom, Mitch grabbed for my right wrist with his left hand.

We ran in a crazy zigzag pattern, avoided the first gravwell downward and took the second.

He pulled me through a playroom amid the press of sweaty, euphoric customers. Behind us the cries and shouts changed tone to sharp orders, caustic warnings. Our pursuers continued their chase. But it was now morning and the gambling and other activities had hit full swing and the very atmosphere of Babylon played in our favor.

We left the casino, ran down a side street, hurried through a maze of little ways, beneath glittering skysigns. Above and slightly ahead of us, a sign glittered, its letters glowing green serpents that entwined to form the words: Girls, Girls, Girls. As I looked, it changed to Boys, Boys, Boys, then promised, all in capitals: Exotic Bios.

I prayed our pursuers wouldn’t second-guess us, wait for us at the eye.

Mitch shoved me into a doorway and pressed his finger to the identifier. When the door swung open, he exhaled, grabbed me and led me through the doorway, tightly held. The infrared backup security system would detect a single warm body coming through.

At the top of a narrow stairwell, a man with drawn burner barred our way. Mitch shot him. We stepped over his body, opened the door. I wanted to tell Mitch that this man might have let us through, but I could guess his answer. He might not have. We couldn’t gamble.

At the top, I found the eye, much like a giant human eye without a colored iris, that provided Babylon’s security and guidance systems. Above us, a transparent dimatough shell showed the morning sky. Trapped again.

I turned my burner on wide dispersion and burned the eye in its casing.

Alarms shrieked.

Mitch climbed to the ledge, where the dimatough shell met with dimatough wall, one transparent, the other the shiny black of most walls. Since they were different colors of dimatough, they couldn’t have been poured together.

Mitch had gone to work on the sealant between the two with his burner.

I set my last transmitter, stretched my arms, to grab at the dimatough lip near the dome, and raised myself up, to sit on the ledge, near Mitch. I turned my own burner on low heat and started attacking the spongy sealant, going in the opposite direction from Mitch’s.

Looking outside as I worked, I saw the orange uniforms of Olympus peace keeping forces pouring out of a land-sea vehicle at the southern port of Babylon. “The pumpkins have arrived.”

A cluster of shiny white objects, much like eggs in formation, appeared in the horizon. Atlantis flying troop transports.

On the street, chaos reigned. Incoming forces, clients, and forces from Babylon all fired at each other with no apparent order.

The sealant burned well and we’d unsealed three quarters of the perimeter of the tower. The wind whistled through the opening, bringing with it the smell of burners and the salty sting of the sea.

The door downstairs opened. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. I crawled to the center of the unsealed space, wedged my body under it, head first.

Mitch joined me. His shoulders were considerably bulkier than mine. With him wedged in position, I could wiggle free.

Our pursuers were now within the tower, aiming their burners at Mitch.

Standing on the narrow ledge outside the dome, I lifted the massive dimatough shape just enough for Mitch to wriggle out.

The people below fired. Dimatough glowed, harmlessly.

A small orange flyer hovered above us.

A tube with handholds inside was thrown down from the transport. I climbed it, holding onto the top set of handholds, I saw the young, well-scrubbed face of a Sea York volunteer smiling down at me. “Welcome aboard, Miss Reis.”

“I have a friend,” I said, breathless, panting. “He helped me.”

The young face tensed.

“His name is Mitchell Avenant. I vouch for him.”

The young man hesitated, then shrugged. Bless Olympus’ policy of letting their operatives make decisions in critical situations. “Fine.”

We climbed up the tube to a small cramped cabin.

The pilot started the fly, turned to a communications console, put a privacy hood on, and spoke, asking wiser heads about Mitch. After all, no doubt he thought he could always shoot Mitch. “Did you have anything to do with the Avenant bio-electronic surveillance system?” he asked after a while.

“I invented it,” Mitch said.

The young man turned to his console. He spoke a while longer.

The fly picked up speed, headed northwards, to Olympus. After a while, our pilot removed the privacy hood and grinned back at us. “They say you can have a Visa too. There’s an engineering group that wants to talk to you.”

Mitch tightened his arm around me, as we flew off to what we’d grown up thinking of as dream land.

Looking down, I saw the streets Babylon turned into a riotous turbulence of burner rays and multicolored uniforms. Babylon would not reach out to hurt me again. All my running was done. I had found sanctuary.

Written by Sarah A. Hoyt

Illustration, Windy City, by Paul Davies.