Upon reaching his apartment, he put the frozen dinner in the microwave and started coffee brewing. Only then did he sit down with the envelope, slitting it open with a thumbnail and putting the disk into his computer. He flicked the machine on, and it booted from the new disk.

An interrogation box came up on the screen with a question mark and a flashing cursor. He typed in the name of the dog for which the reward had been offered, then double-checked the spelling before hitting the Enter key because an error would erase the key disk by writing a zero to every location on it. There was no recovery and no forgiveness for that sort of mistake.

The machine accepted his input and he returned to the kitchen. While he finished preparations for his dinner, the computer fed data from the boot program to another program that lurked invisibly on the computer's hard disk. That program, in turn, went out into the public-access system and downloaded the periodicals the smaller disk had instructed it to find.

It discarded half of them immediately. The rest it scanned, choosing certain words from appropriate pages and paragraphs. When all the words had been chosen, the computer discarded the rest of the magazines. A separate section of the hidden program took input from the key program, and scrambled the chosen words. Having organized them, it presented them to the screen with a beep.

The assassin returned to the computer and looked at the message being displayed. Because the first word was five letters long, he ignored everything but the fifth word along in the message. Because that word was seven letters long, he looked for the seventh word following it. Because that word had a circumflex over the fourth letter, he looked up at the previous line and counted back four words from the end.

Slowly and laboriously he put together the true message. Once he had it, he punched a button on the computer that erased the key disk and blanked the message. The computer ejected the disk and the assassin snapped it in half before tossing it into the trash compactor.

He ran the message over in his mind. Two months until he was to hit his target. The manner of her death was left to his discretion, and collateral casualties were acceptable. He smiled because the method he had first selected would work perfectly, especially in the crowded place where he would have to take her.

The microwave dinged and Karl Kole smiled. The assassin inside him smiled as well.

In two months both Karl Kole and Melissa Steiner Davion would be dead.

15

Zhongshan

Federated Commonwealth

13 May 3055

Nelson Geist looked up as the Red Corsair entered the room he'd been assigned at the temporary raider base on Zhongshan. She wore an olive jumpsuit similar to the one draped over the foot of his bed. Even by the half-light coming through the open window, he could see the red stain already beginning to show near her left shoulder. He could also smell a cooling vest coolant leak.

Her eyes blazed. "How dare you!"

"Dare what?" He tore his blanket back, and despite being naked, stood to oppose her.

"You told people I ordered the diversion" of foodstuffs to a ComStar hideout south of here."

"I did." Images of his grandsons hovered in the back of his mind. "The food you take feeds us slaves. That ComStar center was being converted into a home for orphans. I sent the food because we can't use all we have liberated here and you were going to put the rest to the torch."

The Red Corsair struck without warning. Her stinging backhanded slap knocked him back onto the bed. Lunging forward and straddling his chest, she pinned his arms to the bed with her knees. "I am the leader here. You are less than nothing. If you give orders in my name, they will be obeyed. If you give false orders in my name, you will be punished."

Nelson tasted salty-sweet blood from his split lip. "I understand. Punish me, then, if you want. Make war with me, not children."

"I do not make war on children," she spat out contemptuously. "We have slain all the warriors worthy of the name on Zhongshan. I would have slain you if you had made the warrior's choice." She slapped him again. "You are a freebirth nothing. I have ordered the orphanage razed."

Fury pumped power into his muscles. His stomach knotted and he heaved upward. The Corsair leaned forward to use her weight to keep him pinned, but the movement allowed him to slip his right arm free instead. He struck out blindly at her head, but the blow missed, and he ended up driving his steel bracelet into the wound in her shoulder.

Coolant mixed with blood splashed up from the wound. The Corsair slid off his chest and fell back on the floor. She landed hard, with a thump, then lay there with her knees drawn up and her head lolling to the right.

Nelson sat up on the bed, then slid to his knees beside her. He reached up with blood-spattered fingers to snap on the bedside lamp, then tore open her jumpsuit and saw the hole in the cooling vest. A jagged piece of shrapnel had slashed open at least three coolant lines. The fluorescent yellow-green liquid oozed from the tubes and mixed with blood to become the color of a squished caterpillar.

"Stupid warrior." Nelson stripped the jumpsuit down to her waist and tied the sleeves around her like a belt. He unlaced the cooling vest and tossed it aside too. Then he tore a chunk of cloth from the sheets, using it to dab away at the wound. It looked fairly clean, but Nelson knew that told only part of the story. While coolant might keep a warrior alive in the cockpit, the stuff was only slightly less toxic than snake venom if taken internally.

He tore off another piece of cloth and wadded it into the wound. The Corsair moaned in pain, and he was half-tempted to make sure it was set in place very well, but he refrained. She might not think of me as a warrior, but that's what I am. Torture is not part of the job—at least not for me.

Lifting the Corsair up bodily, Nelson placed her carefully on the bed. Next he stepped quickly into his jumpsuit and boots, then wrapped her in his blanket and picked her up again. He carried her out to the elevator and down two floors to ground level at the Zhongshan Militia base. Back to the right and around the corner, and he reached the infirmary the raiders had appropriated.

A raider doctor looked up. "What is this, now?"

"The Red Corsair. She took shrapnel in the shoulder." Nelson kicked an interior door open and laid her down on a paper-swathed examining table. "She's been getting coolant in the wound. You'll want to wash it and start chelating agents to get rid of the coolant."

The doctor, who had followed Nelson into the room, reached for a wallphone. "I will have to inform Bryan that he is now in command."

Nelson pulled the man forward with his good hand and shoved him around toward the table. "I will call Bryan and give him the news. You just take care of her."

Nelson wasn't surprised when a pair of armed guards came to escort him to the DropShip's infirmary. If she had come for him, Nelson knew that the Red Corsair would have shot him on the spot. He knew she'd never assign that job to anyone else; these two were probably called in just so she'd have somebody to haul his body away. When they came for him, he signed to Spider not to wait up for him, then followed the guards without comment.

The guards stopped at the door to the Red Corsair's private room. She looked up at the sound and nodded for Nelson to enter. He went in alone and the hatch closed behind him.