Phelan frowned. "Vlad?"

"Won the decision and killed his Elemental opponent in twenty seconds." The Black Widow smiled slyly. "They'll say you don't have the heart to kill, and therefore, you'll lose."

"Good," Phelan growled as he scraped Dean's blood from his arm. "I hope everyone I face keeps chanting that like a mantra." He jerked a thumb at Dean's unconscious form. "It will only make my job that much easier."

"Seyla," Natasha breathed, and then followed Phelan out of the hold.

11

Dove Costoso, Alyina

Trellshire, Jade Falcon Occupation Zone

8 February 3052

Kai Allard-Liao, sandwiched between two ROM agents bearing automatic rifles, followed Demi-Precentor Khalsa down the creaking stairs to the basement. Pulling an old key from his pocket, the rotund ComStar official made a great show of unlocking a wooden door and swinging it open on squeaking, rusty hinges. The ROM agent behind Kai gave him a shove, sending the slender MechWarrior sprawling into a pile of clutter.

After crossing the threshold stiffly, but under her own power, Deirdre knelt beside Kai in the rectangle of light from the doorway.

Khalsa eclipsed the light. "I apologize for such messy surroundings, but we have not completed our renovations on this building." He flicked on the lights from a switch outside the room, then pointed to a waterpipe and spigot. "You can refresh yourselves there, and something in this midden should serve as a chamber pot if you need such. The Com Guards have already dispatched a squad to take custody of you, so your wait should be no more than twenty-four hours. Again, my apologies for your lodgings, but I cannot trust you otherwise."

Kai rolled to his knees. "Just wait until you get our return invitation to pay back your hospitality."

Khalsa smiled painfully. "Keep your wits about you, Mr. Jewell. You'll need it." The demi-Precentor stepped back out of the doorway, and a ROM guard swung the door shut. With a grating creak and heavy thunk, the key turned in the lock.

Kai shook his head. "You have a score for survival and evasion exercises forged into your records and you just hadto make it near perfect, eh?"

Deirdre shrugged. "The guy in administration and I were dating at the time. What can I say?"

" 'I'm sorry' would help." Kai stood slowly and raised a finger to his lips. He pointed to the floor above and tapped his ear. Deirdre's puzzled look faded quickly as she understood his warning about possible listening devices being present.

"I'm sorry."

"You're forgiven." Kai nodded. The single, bare bulb hanging down from the ceiling did little but cast a web of shadows radiating out from the center of the room. The basement walls were made of fitted stones of odd sizes, shapes, and colors. Four thick, wooden, support pillars split the room into nine areas, with the one in front of the door and the one in the middle the most clear. The rest were choked with trash piled up to two meters high—all of which Kai quickly characterized as broken.

"As long as we're going to be here for a while, we might as well make ourselves comfortable. Let's sort through this junk and see if we can find anything useful. We need a chamber pot, and anything passing for a mattress or cushions would help."

"Yes, sir." The mock seriousness in Deirdre's reply lacked the venom she usually directed at him. She held up a battered tin stewpot. "Personal hygiene objective obtained, sir."

Kai turned and raised an eyebrow. "You outrank me, remember, Doctor?"

She thought for a second, then shook her head. "Military situation, let the military handle it. Military and civilian don't mix well."

Sorting through a pile of miscellaneous tangles of wires, electric switches, and old paint cans, Kai disagreed. "As much as you hate war, Doctor, even you would have to admit military technology has positive benefits in the civilian sector."

The sarcastic tone in her voice lowered the temperature in the room by several degrees. "Is that so, Mr. Jewell?"

Kai coiled a frayed extension cord around his left forearm, then tossed the looped wire into the center of the floor. "Without a doubt. In your own field, you know that surgical procedures developed to deal with medical tragedies carry over into the civilian sector. Reconstructive surgery on military casualties has created techniques used to help people born with genetic defects. Even something as primitive as radar was developed for military use first, but it allows civilian air traffic and weather-detection."

"I'll concede you the latter point, Mr. Jewell, but not the first. It is well that the means for relieving the suffering and tragedy of a war victim can be put to good use, but I'd rather not have that suffering in the first place." She stopped and clawed away at a heavy piece of canvas. "Yeeeaaagh! What's this?"

At her yelp of horror, Kai leaped over a half-buried water heater and crossed to her side. She reached out for him and he felt her trembling. Though the thing was still partially concealed by the canvas, she hung back from a large, sluglike mass of tissue sagging at the base of the rough-stone wall. The exposed end looked hard and white and rectangular, but had nothing to indicate whether it was the head or tail.

"Is it alive or dead?" she asked in a whisper.

Kai yanked the rest of the canvas away. "Neither, I think." When the thing was more fully exposed to the light, Kai saw where long strings of tissue had been stripped away from the back. "This is myomer. Looks like a finger actuator from a 'Mech."

"That is myomer? I've never ... I mean, the myomer I've used in surgery was different."

Kai nodded. "Yeah, it probably was. This is one of the artificial muscles used to move a 'Mech's finger, all right." He pointed at the serial number on the underside of the white insertion cap. "Came from a Valkyrie.This is the industrial-strength stuff. The myomer you use in surgery is manufactured differently and has to be layered in with real muscle tissue to be useful. In surgery the stuff is used more like rubber bands."

Folding her arms across her chest, Deirdre looked down at him. "When did you get a medical degree?"

"My ...," Kai hesitated, "friend's mother had breast cancer. She'd had some myomer replacements in her shoulder from an old war wound, and when they discovered the cancer they did a radical mastectomy. They rebuilt her pectoralis major with myomers. The doctors explained it to him and I was there." From the distant look in her eyes, Kai knew Deirdre realized he was speaking about his own mother.

"So what's this actuator doing here?"

The Mech Warrior ran his hand across the area from which long strips of myomer fiber had been peeled away. "Offhand, I'd say whoever lived in this house before ran a little repair business on the side." He picked up a slender strand of wire with a bead on one end. "He may even have been a musician using myomers to replace broken guitar strings."

"What?"

Kai handed her the broken string he had found. "Myomers contract when an electric current is run through them. The contraction is instantaneous, but by varying the power level, you can control the amount of contraction and how quickly the fiber will lose its tension. It's a very exacting task, but with a computer chip and electric power, it's fairly easy. Some folks started experimenting with this variable-tension idea in things like tennis racquets, but it really only caught on with musicians. But with the need to rearm after the war, myomers have been hard to come by for this sort of application. Somehow the person who owned this house got an actuator and was making some money from it."