Because I had friends and contacts among shippers and smugglers, including some hired muscle with really illegal modifications—when I say illegal, I mean capital penalty, family-out-to-the-cousins, them first, and you watch ’em scream–type illegal—he sought me out. He was introduced to me by the Lotus King, who was the head of a nest of Greencloaks, drop-outs, off-the-books and off-the-wire types, but with glands for adrenaline-boosters, amphetamines, alcohol, opiates, painkillers.

I don’t know if you still have Greencloaks these days, but they were a cult of rejectionists. They turned their back on Darwin, turned their back on improving the race, turned their back on the End of Days, the whole roast pig, apple to arse, they flung it and said no-thank’ee. What did they care what the ultimate fate of the race that replaced mankind would be by A.D. Eleven Thou? Let the dead bury the dead, they said, live for the moment, and let the unborn worry about the not-yet. So as you can imagine, they were a bunch of petty crooks, glandular and hookweasels, and they supported their high-minded orgies with low-level crime.

Now, I seen you have some Greencloaks working in your infirmary and slopping slops in the cook-tent, and dithering anyone who’ll toke up with a puffball or two: right spicy harlots ready-eddy to spready? So I hear these AWOLs took over the whole damn planet, the whole snotball we call Third from Sol, and I tell you I am not surprised. Nope, not by a hair, because I saw it all and I were there! I was there when the Judge of Ages condemned the Chimeras and all their way of life to the recycling abattoir. He killed the greatest civilization history has ever known, to make way for a bunch of dunderbrains and sloshers to take over. Don’t ask me why, but you should ask if he’s planning to do the same right now to you!

You asked about the spike in the slumbering pop? It was all we talked about, all the bulletins carried. Why are so many Kine deserting, why are Chimerae wounding themselves to get a medical slip, and take the sleep? Everyone knew why. Because we could.

Y’see having Hibernation tech around, it changes people. Hell, I could see the white horse drawn in chalk on the hill outside my first-ever overseas station. And there was a statue of a man on a white horse right near the Sisters of Bon Secours hospital. People see these things, and they read kiddie yarns about adventures in space, and they get to thinking, why live through another war, another plague, another famine, and another round of population cuts or slave demotions? Why not just snooze through it?

Bye-bye world and worldly sorrow, hello world and new tomorrow. Y’see?

Hell, that’s why I entered the Tombs. One short nap fixes everything.

6. The Stealthboat

Like I said, Menelaus Montrose is armed to the nines and he comes to where the Lotus King is holding court, hiding out in a warehouse in an abandoned area near the waterfront. Montrose spread out these plans, describing a certain type of submersible boat he wants built, based on a principle of propulsion from the days before the fire. It calls for third-generation precision machine tools of a type that have to be built first from second-generation tools that have to be built from tools we can buy on the sly or pilfer. Money is no object: he threw down a bag of gold, doubloons from the Witch-days, lozenges and emeralds from the Giants, and microbrains like beads, each one worth a fortune, he scattered on the floor like musket balls from a kid’s game. Some of the components for the vessel he has on him, stealth counteremission technology, such as no one knows how to make, and some of the substances, he has the formula but not the raw materials, and he has to teach our blackout techs how to make it.

The Lotus King knew everyone in town, and he knew their kids’ birthdays and name days, and he knew which locks were left open, and which could be broke open without alerting the Chimerae. The boat was done in three months, we used it in a shake-down cruise, and to shoot up a pest or two, maybe trim back a long nose, before we knew it was ready, and the Lotus King sent for the Judge of Ages. That’s when he said all he wanted was a trip across the Atlantic, but he also wanted some musclers and some rustlers, fist and fingers. A break-in, y’understand?

7. The Gang

My gang was good for both and all, and that and more.

It was me, and my partner Brick of Back-alley, a razorgirl named Sugar-n-Slice, a brute born Obu Nobunagato, but we called him Oh-No, because he was modified for wrestling and he was as thick as he was tall and twice as dumb. Last was a snake-charmer named Hesperonado, who doubled as our brain-man, so he was natural to pilot the stealthboat.

This boat was a dream of a dream! Streamlined like a teardrop torpedo, the upper half one solid shell of some transparent material Montrose made, the thing rode on a hydrofoil shaped like a ring and had one long leg trailing aft to a pontoon. The engine had no moving parts: it ionized the water around it and magnetically accelerated a submerged stream of sea behind it. Now, I know you have heard of caterpillar drives before, and you say they are too noisy, but I am telling you this guy solved the problem of acceleration without turbulence. You sat in the vessel, and the water was like an endless gray white blanket being yanked backwards, and there was almost no sensation of motion. So smooth and fast, it was scary.

The vessel had an onboard brain that was nervous as a rabbit, and when she sensed anything out of the ordinary pattern, she cut power and submerged. And we knew when the Cities in Space were up, because that’s not the kind of thing you can hide, and we followed under the clouds as much as we could.

Well, we all pretty much hated each other to pieces by the time we made it to the cold part of the world. The Judge of Ages didn’t talk much. Didn’t talk at all, in fact, except to give orders, and since the boat mostly piloted herself, he didn’t give many of those. See, his mind was already on the year A.D. 70000—when his bride comes back, and so we were already dead and gone like the Neanderthals as far as he was concerned.

8. Streetlaw Larz on the Isle of Fear

Fear Island is best defended place I ever saw.

There was a ring of buoys around the whole island, and cables running along the ring, and listening towers buried in the sea, and watching towers on the rocks, and helicopters in the air, and boat patrols, and guard dogs, and—hell, there might have been guard fishes for all I knew. Then there were black walls of that reflex armor the Chimerae put on everything, pillboxes and lookout-shoot-out periscopes, and bright red boxes with lead-eyed radiation lamps, for giving anything organic a dose of lethal roentgens if the lamp blinked wide its eye.

But we bypassed all this. The stealthship came to ground on the ocean floor, in the middle of the ruins of what had once been a train station, back when this part of the world had been drier.

We suited up, dove out, set some paste, and melted open some old walls, slow-go explosives of the kind with no boom to set off the seismics. Then back in the boat.

The Judge worked some explosive bolts and dropped the ring and the line-accelerator off the boat, which caused some grumbling in my gang, seeing as how we didn’t see how we was getting back home. Judge didn’t care about our grumbling. I don’t even think he knew our names.

But now the boat was lean enough to dive into the hole we’d made.

We left our suits on, because the train tunnel was “hot”—not plutonium-style hot, but concentrated magnetic can kill you just as dead. Just ask any bird that flies into one of those big receiving dishes they use to talk to the Cities in Space. The tunnel was round as a gun barrel and twice as straight, made of those old substances we don’t have anymore—unless you folks reinvented them, which I don’t see any around so far—smartmetals and sail fabric and molecular hunger silk, and big rings of nanocrystal titanium-steel alloy, supercooled and superconductive.