A chill tightened my skin. “You did this, didn’t you, you bastard! You made me bait. Things went bad and you try to make me a scapegoat, and you get me fired. You’re one sick man, Reis.”

“Yeah, maybe I am, but at least I have a job.”

I shot to my feet, sending the chair skittering back. I cocked my left fist to punch his flat face out the back of his bald skull, but Lakewood grabbed my wrist.

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“I’m sure, yes, I do.” I did, but as she released my wrist, I lowered my fist. “But I won’t. I won’t give him the satisfaction.”

Her emerald gaze flicked toward Reis and back again. She lowered her voice. “I’m sorry he did that.”

“Yeah, really?” I snorted. “As long as you’re going to play his game, you’re a liar. As they say, m’lady, jackals run with jackals. If I were you, this isn’t the company I’d want to be keeping.”

“Words you should live by, Mr. Donelly. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Like you think I can do anything but.” I tossed her back the water. “Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t want you to think you’ve done me any favors.”

Overton

Joppa, Helen

Prefecture III, Republic of the Sphere

14 November 3132

When moving between the stars, you have to take a DropShip up to a JumpShip, and that JumpShip then rips a hole in reality and crosses up to thirty light-years in the blink of an eye. In that moment, since the Kearny-Fuchida jump drive is playing with all sorts of quantum mechanical things, human perception can go all weird. When I’ve jumped, for that nanosecond, I feel like the whole universe has opened up for me, revealing all its secrets and its immeasurable possibilities.

When I snap back into reality, trapped again in my body, I feel the lack. I feel as if all the doors that I viewed as opened have shut again. It’s almost suffocating to go from omniscience to ignorance in a flash.

Well, walking out of the Constabulary headquarters, I felt like that, but worse. Reis getting me fired, I’d not expected that. I knew he was trying to turn the pressure up on me to get me to confess to my involvement with GGF. In his worldview, since he could do no wrong, his mistake was my fault. He had just enough cunning to paint a picture that Lakewood could buy into, so I was stuck and stuck hard.

I started wandering down the street and passed by a ComStar office. ARU had my universal linknumber. They’d wire my severance, if there was any, to it, and forward any messages there, too. Having a ULN was really useful when the commo-net was truly universal. With the HPGs going down it still functioned planetwide and, as with Rusty’s birthday greeting, offworld messages did get through, but slowly and unreliably.

I opted not to go in and see if ARU had sent money already. If I had it I’d spend it, and since I really was thirsty, I didn’t want to drink it all up. I didn’t figure it would be much of a stake, but I’d have to work with it. If I couldn’t, if I weren’t able to maintain a job, Reis would come after me, nab me on vagrancy charges and get me expelled from The Republic, and then where would I be?

A couple generations back I’d have headed for Outreach and tried to hook up with some mercenary company. I was good with ’Mechs and in my grandfather’s time there was always enough work for a pilot with some skill, some luck, and enough neurons to form a synapse. I could have gotten work, maybe not with Wolf’s Dragoons or the Kell Hounds, but some smaller company or some minor noble who wanted his own security force would have snapped me up in a heartbeat.

Devlin Stone and his reforms changed all that. Back in the dawn of time, when the Word of Blake launched their jihad on civilization, they did a lot of damage and took over some worlds. Devlin Stone was a guy they tossed into a reeducation camp, but he did the reeducating. He escaped, and with the help of confederates liberated the camp, then the world, then the worlds around it, creating the Kittery Prefecture, which was a prototype for The Republic.

Stone realized fairly quickly that when unscrupulous people pilot BattleMechs, violence is just going to break out. After all, if someone has a hammer, all problems look like nails, and when your hammer is a BattleMech, you can do some serious pounding on that nail—be it another BattleMech or some tiny village.

He embarked on a two-step process for changing society. First, he restricted those who could use hammers. In some cases they gave their hammers up voluntarily, and in other cases they were convinced this was a good idea. A lot of blood got spilled, but a lot less has been spilled since then, so that was a good thing.

The second step was to institute programs that helped folks see that not all problems were nails and, furthermore, that there were other tools that could solve those problems. Since Stone had the only hammers and no one wanted him to see them as a nail, they started making use of his other tools and we flowed into this Golden Age of peace that worked for everyone.

At least, that’s what the school files would tell you. As with generalizations, things fray around the edges. I wandered into a worn and grubby section of Overton. If it had seen a golden age, it was the old days when Hanse Davion sat on the throne of the Federated Suns. The whole area just had the stink of rotting garbage and overheated engines.

I knew I’d found an area where I could lose myself. I trolled through the streets, looking down alleys for just the sort of sinkhole that could swallow me up and found it half hidden behind a Dumpster. I threaded my way around the rusting metal box and down some steps. The neon sign over the door was supposed to read “Banzai,” but the way things had burned out all I saw was “Banal.”

Perfect.

I shoved the door open and stepped into the dark bar. The miasma of rotting veggies made it into the place, but the reek of human vomit overpowered it rather sharply. A couple of steps in from the door I picked up the stronger perfume of stale beer and the sharper scent of whatever burning herbs the two guys in the back corner were sucking out of a hookah.

Those two were clearly the cream of the crop for clientele. Most of the other folks huddled over drinks at their tables. They looked like ticks sucking supper from some dog, all bloated and disgusting. Save the guys in the corner, and the bleached blonde working the tables, I had to be the youngest person in there by twenty years.

I slid onto a stool at the bar. I had plenty of choices and picked a place with two empty stools between me and an old souse nursing a beer. He watched me sit down, sprinkled a little salt into his beer to bring the head up, then gave me a nod.

I returned it automatically, which I knew was a mistake. The bartender had been keeping well away from him at a time when he should have been pushing more suds, which meant he didn’t want to deal with the guy. My nod was a nice little acknowledgment of his existence, so sooner or later I knew I’d be listening to his life story.

I glanced at the bartender. “I’ll have what he’s having.”

“You can’t. We’ve had a new delivery since then.”

“Just draw it wet, will you?” I fished in my pocket for a couple of five-stone coins, got a knight and an exarch in change. I left the exarch for the bartender, then drank. The beer was surprisingly good, which meant I was doomed.

It is a fact of life that the better the beer, the greater the idiot sitting near you.

“Young fella like you shouldn’t be in a place like this.”