A thin, cold rain fell from a grey afternoon sky onto the even greyer city of Newcastle. Like many coastal cities around the world, Newcastle's fortunes waxed and waned in cycles. Right now they were in a waning phase. After taking a beating during the War of Corporate Occupation thanks to its situation as a major spaceport, the city had experienced a renaissance of sorts in the early days of the Earth Alliance, when it had been chosen as the ground station for the Britain Skylink, an ambitious project to build the highest-latitude space elevator ever attempted on Earth. It seemed like the ride would never end... right up until the moment when it did.

The colossal mooring station for the Skylink still stood, about three-quarters completed, the weighty bulk of its lower levels contrasting weirdly with the skeletal silhouette of its half-built upper tower against the grey sky. The orbital end was never built, the project called off after billions of credits' expenditure. The construction jobs vanished and the operational jobs, obviously, never materialized. Fenced off and abandoned, a ruin that had never had a heyday, the "Lielink" loomed over the city, a constant reminder of Earthdome's broken promises to the people of Tyne and Wear.

A hatless young man in a belted grey trenchcoat stepped from the Interurban maglev from London at Newcastle Central Station, passed through the terminal and out onto the street. There he stood for a moment, gazing between the buildings surrounding the station at the ungainly bulk of the Lielink, his thin face expressionless as the rain darkened and flattened his wavy sandy-blond hair. Then he turned and walked away into the city.

He moved through the streets with a familiar ease, not pausing to consult a map or navigation device. He ignored other pedestrians, paid only cursory attention to the light downtown car traffic, and passed by the police and Nightwatch patrol posts on alternate street corners without concern. Cops and Nightwatch officers randomly stopped passing pedestrians to check their credentials, but none of them paid the man in the grey coat any attention. He might as well not have been there.

In the more residential neighborhoods, further from the city center, the security presence thinned, and there was no watch post just then on either corner of the block containing the small pub into which he turned. The pub was fairly crowded for the time of day, and apart from the man in grey, everyone there was a regular. Men in shabby clothes and women in cheap ones were watching a turfball match on the television in the corner. It was the sort of place where a stranger walking in off the street would have immediately silenced two dozen conversations and attracted the gaze of four dozen eyes... but no such thing happened here. Only a few people even glanced his way when his entrance jangled the bell on the door, and they turned disinterestedly back to their business almost at once.

The grey-coated man went to the end of the bar and slipped onto a vacant stool, waited until the bartender turned his way, and raised a single finger. The bartender finished seeing to a customer closer to the door, then made his way over.

"Get you something, sir?" he asked.

"Hullo, Charley," said the man in grey, a hint of a smile stealing across his face.

Charley glanced sharply at the stranger, surprised to be addressed so familiarly, and then blinked as if seeing him for the first time.

"Carter?" he muttered, leaning closer and striving to keep his voice down. "What th'ell're you doin' here?! I heard you was a Zetan now."

Carter shook his head. "Nah. Not my style, Charley, livin' in a birdcage."

Charley looked skeptical. "Yeah, well where you been then? Them psychic coppers was here lookin' f'you, oh, three year back."

"Oh, you know, Charley. Here 'n there," said Carter vaguely. "Away at school, mostly." He glanced around the bar, then turned his bright blue eyes back to the bartender and said in a lower voice, "Heard from Jax lately?"

The bartender eyed Carter narrowly. "I ain't seen seen her since the crackdown. Nobody has. I heard she was in New Zealand, but... " He shrugged. "People said all kinds o' stuff about all kinds o' people."

"You know anyone who might have a better idea? I need to talk to her." Carter made eye contact again, holding the barman's gaze. "It's important, Charley."

"Yeah, ain't it always," Charley replied. "Okay, look. You didn't hear this from me, y'understand? I hear Betty's dancin' at the Silverdome. For Bobby Weiss, get it? If anyone'd know where Jax really went, it'd be her... but nobody gets in there these days. It's reserved for security types. Them Nightwatch blokes an' that."

Carter chuckled dryly. "Bobby's moved up in the world."

"Yeah, well he paid enough for the license, didn't he. You know how this town works. Take more'n new badges for the cops to change that."

"That's so true," said Carter. "Thanks, Charley." He made a small gesture with his right hand and put a small bunch of folded money he hadn't been holding a moment before down on the bar. "If anyone comes looking for me," he added, catching the barman's eye once more, "I was never here, understand?"

"Right," said Charley, removing the money from the bar almost as deftly as Carter had put it there. "You got it."

Carter slid off his stool and straightened his coat slightly. "Be seeing you, Charley," he said, then left the bar and disappeared into the gathering twilight.

"Who was that?" a waitress asked as she rounded the end of the bar with an empty tray.

"Search me," Charley replied with a faint scowl. "Some out-of-town bloke wantin' to know where the girls are, thought we was the fucking tourist bureau."

Bobby Weiss's office, overlooking the main floor of the Silverdome nightclub just outside the city, was something of a contrast to the rest of the club. The Silverdome was a thoroughly modern establishment as far as its equipment went; it even had a variable-gravity dance floor and stage, the latter of which the club owner considered indispensable. You couldn't have zero-G pole dancing without a zero-G pole, after all. It also had the very latest in laser holography and the kind of sound system that, if you unleashed its full power, could annoy seismologists in Berkeley.

For all that his club was cutting-edge, though, Weiss was kind of an old-fashioned man, and his office reflected that, with its real wood paneling and its shelves of imposing leatherbound books. It looked more like the manager's study from a 19th-century gentlemen's club than the boss's office in a 25th-century topless bar, which was, at its heart, what the Silverdome truly was. Weiss's old-fashioned streak showed in the staffing of the club, too. Most modern joints of this type, especially the high-end ones, employed robots as waitstaff, security, sometimes even the performers themselves, but Weiss would have none of that. He didn't trust mechanicals; never had, never would. A robot bouncer might be more effective, strictly speaking, than a human one, but it couldn't be kept in line by threats or bribes, and those were the only two languages in which Bobby Weiss was really comfortable speaking.

He stood at the one-way window, watching the proceedings on the club floor below with an air of smug invincibility, when he suddenly noticed the reflection of another person in the blastproof glass. Whirling, he saw the thin young man in the grey coat standing just inside his office doors, hands in his pockets.

"Hullo, Bobby," he said.

"Carter! How the fuck did you get in here?"

Carter shrugged nonchalantly. "Oh, you know, Bobby. I turned this bit here," he said, indicating the doorknob, "and - "

"Save the cute routine," Weiss snapped. "You got five seconds to tell me what you want."

"You're open past chucking-out time," Carter said blandly. "I ought to get the law on ya."

Weiss gave that remark the hollow laugh it deserved. "They're my best customers." Angling a thumb back over his shoulder at the window, he went on, "The Nightwatch division chief for Tyne and Wear is in Booth 12. Maybe I should introduce you."

"Relax, Bobby. I'm not here to make trouble for you."

"You can make trouble for me just by being here," Weiss snarled. "You think I don't know about you? After you and your friends left Earth, the fucking cops almost shut me down. It didn't take them much digging to find out you used to work for me. They thought I knew where you went."

"Well, you didn't. And you seem to be doing all right now. Look, I just need to talk to Betty. Two minutes, then I'm out of your hair forever."

Weiss shook his head, his jowls wobbling. "No. Forget it. Get the fuck out of here and never come back. The only reason I don't turn you in to the cops is out of respect for your father, God rest him."

Carter raised one eyebrow. "That's touching, Bobby. It really is." His face and voice became colder, harder, as he went on, "You know what my father would've done if you'd taken that tone with him?"

Weiss snorted. "You're not your father."

"No." Carter walked slowly across the office, shaking his head in agreement. "That is very true. I'm not my father." Weiss felt an irrational little peak of fear and backed away a step, bumping into the window, as Carter invaded his personal space and stood gazing calmly down into his moon face with his strangely intense blue eyes.

Then he leaned down until he was nearly nose-to-nose with the gangster and said in a very low voice, "I'm a lot worse."

Behind him, the office doors opened and Carlo, one of the Sardinian twins Weiss employed as his personal security detail, poked his head in.

"Boss? Everything okay?"

Weiss's flushed face went slightly pale with relief. "It is now," he said, straightening up. "Mr. Carter was just leaving."

Carlo couldn't see Carter's face, so he didn't know that this news only elicited a small, sardonic smile.

"That was a mistake, Bobby," he murmured before Carlo's meaty hand clamped onto one of his shoulders.

Weiss wasn't entirely certain what happened next. Whatever it was, it all happened very fast. One moment Carlo was peeling Carter away from their little tableau while Emilio moved up on the thin man's left to provide support (not that he thought his brother needed any with a skinny weed like this guy). The next, Carter ducked his right shoulder from under Carlo's hand, pivoted inside his arm, took both his fists from the pockets of his trenchcoat, and drove one of them into Carlo's solar plexus with a power and speed that the Sardinian ex-prizefighter was entirely unprepared for.

Carlo let out an explosive grunt of pain and surprise, reeled back, and crumpled to one knee, trying to remember how that "breathing" thing worked. Emilio lunged, thinking to grab hold of Carter's coat and pull it down to trap his arms, but Carter was faster; continuing the turn, he lashed out his other fist at the end of a long, wiry arm and belted Emilio across the face, fracturing his jaw and liberating three teeth. Emilio made a half-turn of his own, spraying blood from his mouth against the inside of Weiss's window, and hit the floor like a sack of flour falling off a truck.

Carlo made an inarticulate sound at the sight and tried to get up, but Carter turned back and gave him a vicious kick to the forehead with one black-brogued heel. Halfway upright when the blow landed, Carlo flipped backward and crashed against the front of Weiss's desk, nearly overturning it, then slid down its face to lie inert on the floor.

Carter stood for a moment, satisfying himself that neither brother was likely to get up and give him more trouble. Then he slipped off his brass knuckles, put them back in his coat pockets, straightened his tie, and turned calmly back to the pale and trembling Weiss.

"Betty," he said. "Two minutes. Then I'm gone. All right?"

Weiss tried to speak, but no sound came out. He coughed, cleared his throat, and edged around Carter toward his desk, nearly tripping over one of Carlo's outstretched arms.

"A-all right," said Weiss. He fumbled at the intercom panel built into the top of his desk; then, trying to sound calm and authoritative as normal (but coming off a little more shrill than he'd really wanted), he barked, "Sarna. Send Betty to my office now."

Betty, slim and dark-haired, arrived a few moments later wearing spangly sequins and not a lot else.

"You wanted to see - oh my God!" she blurted at the sight of Carlo and Emilio scattered on the office floor like discarded toys. So shocked was she by that sight that she didn't immediately register who the thin man standing next to Weiss's desk was. She didn't even really notice him until he spoke, his voice softer and warmer than it had been when he addressed Weiss:

"Hullo, Betty."

Blinking, she looked at his face for the first time and, for a moment, didn't appear to recognize him. Then her eyes went wide and she gasped, "Carter!"

"Been a long time, hasn't it? Bobby treating you okay?"

"I... I can't complain," said Betty. "My God, Carter, what are you doing here? There must be a dozen cops down on the floor. If they find out you're here - "

"I'm not staying long. I need to find Jax. Charley said you might know where she was."

Betty looked him in the eye for a moment, then glanced away, biting at her lower lip. "I... I don't know. Last I heard she was in Wellington. You know, in New Zealand. I haven't seen her in years."

Carter gazed silently at her for a few moments, then nodded, his face a little sad.

"Okay," he said. "Thanks, Betty. See you around." He walked to the office door, touching Betty's shoulder briefly as he passed her, then turned back as if he'd just remembered something, taking a hand from his pocket. Weiss nearly flinched, expecting some new mayhem, but Carter only tossed a coin onto his desk.

"Sorry about Emilio," he said nonchalantly. "I hear there's some good dentists in Gateshead."

Then he was gone. Weiss and Betty exchanged baffled looks before Weiss picked up the coin and examined it.

When Carter got off the return train in London the next afternoon, he was still wondering whether Weiss would be clever enough to realize that what he'd left behind was an extremely rare double-struck 2407 United States quarter-dollar, one of only a few hundred made the previous year, just before the EA's abolishment of its individual member states obsoleted all such currency. Probably not. The dumb bastard would probably just assume it was a worthless pre-crackdown American quarter and throw it in a desk drawer, not realizing for a moment that Carter had left him a fortune to pay for Emilio's dental work.

Upon his return to London, Carter didn't go to Gatwick and book a transorbital flight to Wellington, to pick up his search there. Nor did he go to Heathrow and buy an offworld starliner ticket. Instead, he changed to the Tube at Kings Cross and went straight to Camden Town (by way of Mornington Crescent, which made him smile a little). Once off the train, he walked briskly along progressively less crowded pavements through a network of back streets, moving with slightly less confidence than he had on home ground in Newcastle, but still with the definite air of a man following detailed directions.

His course brought him, in time, to a brown brick apartment building, four stories high, slumping back from the street as if vaguely embarrassed to be in its present surroundings. He climbed a grimy, smelly stairway to the fourth floor, rang the bell, and waited. Nothing happened. He rang again. Still nothing. After a third ring and a further 30 seconds of no response, he took a small tool from inside his coat, deftly unlocked the door, and slipped silently inside.

The apartment fitted the building it was in; low-rent, shabby, and dirty, though it was too barren to be cluttered. The kitchen featured appliances that dated to sometime before World War IV and the glowstrips, poorly and crookedly affixed to the sagging plaster ceilings, didn't work when he threw the switch just inside the door. Navigating by the dim light filtering through the grungy windows and torn roller blinds, Carter walked quietly down the narrow hallway off the kitchen, through the empty sitting room, and into the bedroom at the end.

A single dark figure lay on the bed in the corner, facing the wall. Carter crossed to it, crouched down, and put a hand gently on its shoulder, murmuring softly,

"Hullo, Jax."

With an explosive motion, the figure recoiled from his touch and turned over at the same time, pulling a nasty-looking military knife from under the pillow and brandishing it in his face. Carter backed away, holding up his open hands.

"Whoa, easy, Jax. It's me," he said.

The woman on the bed blinked through her long, disordered hair, then reached up with her free hand and swept it out of her face. Her grey eyes widened in shock.

"Carter!" she rasped in a voice like a three-day bender. "God Almighty, what are you doing here?"

"I've come to get you out," Carter told her.

Jax lowered, but didn't put down, the knife, levering herself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. As she did, a slanting ray of light from a hole in the blind crossed her face, and it struck Carter how bad she looked. She'd never been the most chipper of people - bit of a goth, really - but now she looked as bad as she sounded, with heavy dark circles around her eyes that owed nothing to makeup and a gauntness that the Jax in his memory didn't have.

"And not a moment too soon, I think," he added in a quieter voice. "Christ, Jax. What's happened?"

Jax crossed one thin arm across her midsection, still holding the knife slackly in the other hand, and glared at him as well as her haggard face could glare.

"You fucking happened," she said. "We had to shut down the whole network because we didn't know what you might have told them, and you never bothered to let us know after making your big getaway, did you. So everyone scattered and here I am. No network, no support, no cover. Next year your pals cause the fucking crackdown, now I can't go out to work, can barely stick my head out of this fucking hole or I'll get nicked. Thanks. Well done."

"I couldn't risk trying to make contact after I got caught, you know that," Carter said. "It would've made things worse for all of us. And I'm sorry about '06, but I had nothing to do with that. I wasn't anywhere near Earth at the time. And I don't think it's right, you blamin' my friends for Bill Clark bein' a psychotic tyrant, either. What the hell happened to you? You used to be the toughest person I knew. You wouldn't let a reversal like that push you into this kind of hole!"

"Don't presume to tell me what I would or wouldn't do!" Jax snapped, something like her old fire coming back into her for a moment; but then it sputtered and burned out again, and she sagged, looking exhausted, and said, "Just go. Fucking get out of here. I wish you hadn't come."

Carter shook his head. "I came to get you out and I'm going to," he said. "Come on. I don't know what's happened to you, but I know people who can help - "

Jax bolted up from the bed in another flash of fury, the blade of her knife making a faint hiss in the air as she slashed at nothing just in front of Carter. He straightened up and backed away a pace, not in panic, but with dismay plain on his face.

"Get out of here, I said!" she screamed. "Get out and don't come back or I swear to Christ I'll kill you!"

Carter looked sadly at her for a few moments, then sighed, shoulders slumping. "All right, if that's the way you want it." He turned to go, hesitated, and seemed on the verge of making one last try; then, withing turning back, he left. As he let himself out of the apartment, he could hear her dry, racking sobs, almost like a smoker's cough, rattling up the hallways behind him.

Well, that didn't go quite the way I'd envisioned it, he mused to himself as he shut the door and locked it again. Glumly, he turned to go -

- and walked straight into a blinding flash of light that wiped immediately to blackness.

He came to and found himself strapped to a chair. Not a good start.

The next few observations didn't do anything to improve the prospect, either. The chair was fastened to the floor in the middle of a small grey room, the only other furnishings in which were a plain grey metal table with a second chair behind it. A middle-aged man with close-cropped grey hair stood by the table with a PDA in his hand, apparently reading something with eyes narrowed and lips pursed in concentration. Behind him was what looked like a window with a view of St. James's Court, though of course it could've been a hologram, and its real view could've been anything from a brick wall to the salt flats of Morton's Moon. For that matter, it might not really have been a window at all.

That possibility didn't really concern Carter, though. Most of his attention was focused on the uniform the grey-haired man was wearing: black and severely cut, with tight-fitting leather gloves and a golden badge adorned with a Greek letter.

The man seemed to notice that his guest was awake; raising his eyes from the PDA, he eyed the figure in the chair coldly for a few moments, then said without preamble,

"Devlin Carter. Fugitive 2405-3C-175. Eluded classification for three years, eventually identified and captured by the North American enforcement bureau... from whom you promptly escaped with the aid of a terrorist organization now under the protection of the International Police." He smiled slightly. "That incident rolled more than a few heads at the higher levels of Enforcement, I can tell you."

"Happy to oblige," Carter replied, sounding unconcerned with his predicament. "And I'm talking to... ?"

The Psi Cop shook his head. "You don't get to know my name, blip. All you need to know is that it's over. You're caught. As soon as my colleagues from Fugitive Debriefing get here, we're going to find out everything you know about the IPO, and then... well, what happens after that isn't up to me, but I have a pretty good idea what it'll be." He reached to the table, where Devlin's things were piled, and picked up the IPO agent's own badge, which was also gold and marked with a capital Psi, but was larger and also bore the IPO's stylized star.

"You know," he said, "the IPO likes to make a lot of noise about their amazing AEGIS operatives." He tossed the badge contemptuously back on the table and gave his prisoner a sardonic look. "So much for that. I didn't even think this operation would work. 'He'll never go for that,' I said. 'The bait's much too obvious. A fifth-grader would see through it.'" He shook his head. "You cost me 50 credits, blip."

"Happy to oblige," Devlin repeated. "It'll cost you more than that when I get out of here."

The Psi Cop snorted. "Don't even try to threaten me," he said. "Talk about pathetic. The only way you're getting out of here is in the back of a Prisoner Services transport. Or a bag, if you're stubborn enough with the Dominators when they get here."

Devlin smiled slightly and shook his head. "I'm going to get up and walk out that door within the next 60 seconds."

"Oh really. How do you figure?"

"Well, for starters I'm going to kill you," said Devlin conversationally. "After that... well, you won't really be in a position to care about the details after that."

Forty-seven seconds after Carter's initial pronouncement, the door of the interrogation room opened and he emerged, stuffing his things back into the pockets of his coat. Behind him, the Psi Cop lay sprawled on the floor, eyes staring blankly at the industrial ceiling. He wasn't quite dead, but he soon would be, having suffered what medical professionals still referred to, with the euphemistic delicacy of their profession's jargon, as a massive cerebral accident.

The problem with telepathic combat is, Devlin mused to himself as he looked up and down the hall to get his bearings, there'll never be a movie about it because it looks shit on film. Two blokes stare at each other for 30 seconds and then one falls over dead. Not really something you can set to heavy metal and shoot from creative angles.

As he walked quickly down the hall toward the fire stairs, he fished in one of the hidden pockets of his coat and found a single-use spray-hypo loaded with cordrazine, then fired it into the inside of his wrist. Cordrazine was tricky stuff, and Devlin didn't like messing with it any more than he had to, but he suspected he was going to need the boost to get out of here alive. Any moment now, someone was going to notice his dying friend back in the interrogation room; he was, in fact, vaguely surprised that they hadn't been under surveillance right from the start. He supposed the Psi Cop didn't think it necessary, since the Dominators hadn't arrived yet.

It was absolutely imperative that Devlin be gone by the time they did.

He had just reached the fire stairs when a man in the grey coverall and modular armor of a lower-grade Enforcement Division telepath appeared at the other end of the hall, did a double-take, and then yelled, "Hey! Stop right there!" Without slackening his pace, Devlin reached out and pulled down the fire alarm handle on the wall next to the door while simultaneously shoving the door open and lunging through.

That'll give them something to think about, Devlin said to himself as alarms started hooting and the PA system delivered a canned instruction to evacuate.

The sign on the wall opposite the stairwell door indicated that he was on the sixth floor of wherever he was. Taking the stairs three at a time in a barely-controlled sprint, bounce-rolling off the walls at each mid-flight landing, he had reached the third floor by the time the door above him banged open and the voice of that Enforcement cop echoed, "Hold it!" up and down the stairs. By this time office personnel were starting to stream into the stairwell in response to the alarms; they slowed Devlin down, but they also provided cover. That ED officer was unlikely to start shooting if he was just as likely to tag a member of staff.

Devlin blended into the traffic, trying to seem as if he belonged there, and indeed none of the office workers paid him much notice. All was going well, until the group Devlin had slipped into reached the last flight of stairs to the ground floor and bottlenecked against some congestion on the first-floor landing. Two people were trying to come up the stairs, against the traffic. This was causing considerable difficulty.

Until one of them fired a PPG into the ceiling and bellowed, "Everybody down!" The office workers, some screaming in sudden fright, hit the floor, leaving Devlin looking eye-to-eye over their huddled backs at two rather surprised Psi Cops.

"Don't move!" the one who'd drawn his weapon yelled, leveling it as his partner grabbed at her belt holster.

Devlin moved, if by "moved" you mean "produced his AEGIS-issue blaster from his sleeve and shot him." The other Psi Cop stood dumbfounded, like a child who's just seen a magic trick, as her partner crumpled, Devlin faded back to the first-floor fire door, and the already spooked office workers shifted into outright panic and stampeded.

The first floor appeared to be administrative offices, which fit with what Devlin knew of Psi Corps field offices. The area immediately paying onto the fire exit was a cubicle farm full of catercornered little desklets, idled workstations, and networked printers, and it seemed to be deserted. Semi-crouched so that his head wouldn't show above the cubicle dividers, Devlin made for the opposite side of the building, hoping there would be a second set of fire stairs giving onto an alley or loading dock or the like. Behind him, he heard the fire door clunk as the second Psi Cop finally forced her way through the fleeing crowd and made it onto the floor.

Devlin rounded a corner and pressed himself against a wall, trying to control his breathing and get his thoughts under control. That was the downside to cordrazine; it smoothed over the neural shock from a telepathic fight and boosted the metabolic rate to provide a useful shot of energy for an escape, but it also made both body and mind harder to control, and right now control was the only thing that was going to keep him alive. He'd got the drop on the first Dominator because he'd been so surprised. This second one wasn't going to be so easy. These people were trained to track, hunt, and kill people just like him.

On the other hand, he was trained to do exactly the same thing... so it was going to come down to who was better at the job, or who was luckier.

Devlin could feel the Dominator's mind sweeping through the empty cube farm like a searchlight beam, feeling for his own consciousness. With all the office workers gone, his would be the only mind in here, and both of them knew it. If she could sense his presence, lock onto where he was, even if she couldn't initiate a psychic battle with him on the spot - very difficult without a line of sight - she could at least pin down his location.

He ran through a couple of the calming techniques he'd learned at the AEGIS Academy, mental and physical exercises adapted from ancient methods employed by Jedi Knights and Salusian warrior monks, and wondered abstractly what similar things, if any, Psi Cops were taught. His hunter had just seen her partner gunned down before her eyes by a fugitive neither expected to meet where they did; she was liable to be agitated, off-balance, running on adrenaline, herself.

Besides which, as any night watchman in any warehouse in the galaxy could tell you, there's always a problem with looking for someone in a dark room with a flashlight. You may find him; but the beam of your light will tell him where you are first.

Got you.

Devlin swung out from his cover, aiming his blaster as he did, and came face-to-face down the central aisle with the pursuing Psi Cop, a youngish-looking woman with the dark hair and dusky skin of the Indian subcontinent, five or six cubicle doorways between them. Her expression was one of continued astonishment - the blip had just materialized out of thin air right in front of her again! - but she recovered almost instantly and aimed her own weapon.

"I'd rather not kill you," said Devlin, "but I will if I have to. What say you just put down your weapon and I'll get out of here?"

She snorted. "Forget it," she said. "Drop your weapon right now or you're dead."

For a few seconds they stared hard at each other across the dozen yards or so that separated them, each over the sights of a weapon. Devlin could feel her probing at his mental defenses, sizing him up to see whether a telepathic assault was worth attempting at this range. She was strong, and no amateur, but she wasn't convinced. One of them had to blink.

Suddenly, a man in the semicasual dress of an office worker emerged from a cubicle between them, apparently oblivious to the alarms and the conversation. He had a coffee cup in his hand and the white leads of a portable music player's headphones connecting his shirt pocket to his ears. Noticing the Psi Cop with her weapon aimed at him, he pulled up short.

"What the hell?" he said.

Whether startled by his sudden appearance or just angry that he'd blundered into her way, the Psi Cop shot him.

As he fell out from between them, Devlin shot her.

Then, despite having absolutely no time to lose, he walked toward her, checked on the office worker - dead - and then crouched next to the Psi Cop and picked up her weapon. She was alive, shot high in the right side of the chest; she was trying to reach for her commbadge, trying to talk, and not getting very far with either.

"Sorry about this," said Devlin, reaching down to tap her commbadge. "Medical emergency in the administration area," he said. "Officer down, officer needs assistance."

"Who is this? Pradesh?" a confused voice replied. Devlin reached again and tapped the channel shut, then straightened up and walked away.

As he'd hoped, there was a back stairwell, and it did lead to an alley behind the building. Even better, a deserted one; apparently all the office workers, except that one poor sod who was too wrapped up in his tunes to notice, had gone together toward the front stairwell, even those whose desks were nearer the back.

Tch, Devlin thought, that's poor fire discipline. They must not drill regularly enough.

He was engaged in this random woolgathering - a defense mechanism against the stresses he'd just endured - when he walked into a fist.

I've got to stop doing that, he remarked to himself as he sprawled on his back, his weapon clattering out of his hand. His assailant followed him down, one knee on either side of his hips, and laid the cold steel of a blade across his throat.

"Jax?!" Devlin blurted, looking up in shock at the face of his attacker.

"Going somewhere, Dev?" Jax replied, her voice a low, hate-filled hiss. "You don't think I'm going to let my ticket out of the shit pool just walk away, do you? After I went to all the trouble of bringing you here?"

Devlin blinked. "What?" Then his eyes went wide as, all at once, he realized what had happened, and his face fell. "Aw, Jax," he said, his hushed voice full of grief. "Not you."

"Get up," she snarled, backing up and dragging him upright by the collar of his coat. "You're worth more to me alive, but I'll cut you if you make me."

Devlin gazed mournfully at her for a moment, remembering her face as it had been before he left Earth. She was fifteen years older than he was, and he'd first met her when he was twelve, so there was nothing of that kind of history between them, but they had been close, all the same. Closer than family, maybe. Certainly closer than his family, at least the immediate one. Devlin had no idea where his mother was and never knew his father, only heard of him - and what little Devlin's uncle Edison and cousin Sam knew of the late Jack Carter hadn't been very complimentary.

By any measure, Jax was the closest thing to family he had left on Earth, at the least, which was why he'd risked everything to come back for her... only to find out now, at the end, that he'd come too late. His Jax was already gone.

"I'd rather not kill you," he said for the second time that day, "but I will if I have to."

Jax gave him a venomous look and pressed her knife against him a little harder, as if by way of reminding him it was there.

"What makes you think you're in any position to do that? Think you can stroke me out like you did Vukâciç? I taught you that fucking trick."

Devlin gave her a look of infinite regret for a couple of seconds, then said in a calmer voice than he felt, "Last chance."

"Don't fucking move," Jax told him, then reached into her beat-up leather jacket, flipped the corner back to reveal a differently colored Psi Corps badge - gold on black, the undercover division - and tapped it.

"This is 3C216," she said. "I have a blip in hand at - "

"Jax," said Devlin softly.

"Wait one, Control. What?"

Devlin looked into her angry, cold eyes a moment longer, saw no trace of anything human there, and then said, in a barely audible voice,

"Tintinnabulation."

"What the fuck are you - " Jax demanded, then stopped, looked faintly confused, and collapsed lifeless to the ground.

Devlin stood over her for a few seconds, gazing down, tears silently tracing his stress-hollowed cheeks. Then he crouched beside her, bent low, silenced the insistent inquiries of her commbadge, and kissed her gently on the forehead.

"Goodbye, Jacqueline," he said, then rose and walked away, disappearing into the city.

Friday, November 30, 2408
International Police Station Babylon 6
Orbiting Bajor, B'hava'el system, Centaurus sector

Her Highness Amanda Elektra Dessler, Crown Princess and Empress-Designate of the Gamilon Empire and that state's present ambassador to the Babylon Foundation, looked up at the sound of her diplomatic office door opening to see Devlin entering. At once she knew that his mission to Earth had not gone well. He looked like he hadn't slept since he left.

"Hullo, Amanda," he said.

Amanda rose from her desk and came around to him. "What went wrong?"

He smiled very slightly at her. "It's that obvious, is it?"

"Yes. Now tell me."

Devlin sighed. "She wasn't there."

"Could you find no leads as to where she had gone?"

"No, I mean... I don't mean it that way. I mean... sometime while I was gone, they got her. I don't know exactly how it happened, and probably now I never will, but... her body was still alive, and it knew some of what she once knew, but it had a shell personality doing the driving. They'd already killed what made her Jax."

Amanda's face hardened into the look of anger that it almost always took on during any discussion of the Psi Corps. "They used her to entrap you."

"Yeah. And it almost worked." He shook his head. "I should've gone back sooner."

"You weren't ready," Amanda countered at once. "You would have been killed."

"Maybe. But three people would still be alive now. One of them didn't even have anything to do with... anything. And God only knows what they'll do to the people I made contact with in Newcastle if they find out." He clenched a fist, weighed it a couple of times, and then let his hand fall with another sigh.

"Anyway," he said, "it's over now. Jax is gone. Two Psi Cops are dead and their London bureau office is probably in chaos. And I can confirm that our intelligence about the killwords they implant in turned blip doubles is accurate, though I'm sure they'll change the actual word now. I s'pose that's something, what?"

With a tsk of concern that might have made some of her rivals in the Babylon 6 diplomatic corps soil themselves with shock, Amanda drew him into an embrace.

"You did all that you could," she said, "and at no small risk. Honor is satisfied." Then, releasing him, she said, "Come. You look as if you haven't rested since Monday."

"I haven't," Devlin said. "And... thank you."

Amanda smiled a full, warm smile, the one she reserved for her closest intimates. "You're welcome, my love. If ever I chanced to wonder why you are my husband, you constantly remind me."

"Well," Devlin said wryly, "I'm not very smart, but I am persistent."

They met Kitarina Dragonaar in the corridor as they left, arm in arm; she immediately took his other arm, sensing that he was troubled even though she knew nothing about the specifics.

"Welcome back, Carter," she said. "How was Earth?"

Devlin considered his answer a moment before working his arm out of her grasp and putting it around her shoulders instead.

"Earth was shit," he said. "It's good to be home."

"Get Carter" - a Future Imperfect Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2008 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

Shame it was too late to save his teacher though... And I'll not make any cracks about omlettes and how their made either.

A "Bridge to Nowhere", indeed.

Sorry, I'm hard SF.

--rR

And Amanda knew exactly what it was that he had to do, what it cost him, and that sometimes you just need to pay that.

Also, nice to know that Carter never really changes.

--
-Pasha
What was that feeling again?
Oh yes.
-Rage-

You know, I never actually thought for one minute that Devlin Carter might be from my home town. But then again, I should have remembered that it's actually an old tradition to name the first son with a surname as a first name...

"It's difficult keeping up with the cross-continuity, but I think Cosmouse just gave The Saturnian Scraphunter his Ultimate Pacifier to use against Galactapuss..."

Very nice to see a well-trained AEGIS agent in action, get a little more information about just what kind of gloomy Police-state hell Earthdome was at the time. It's very much bittersweet to know that Carter's abrupt exit and escape from Earth in the early Symphonies caused so much chaos and wreck and turmoil for the hidden blip community back on Earth. Jaqueline was hardly the only broken-souled casualty.

Was the use of one name or another, Devlin or Carter, deliberate throughout the story? It seemed that way. 'Carter' almost had the feel of a hard-bitten, well-trained agent persona, which better matches the associations of the name. Carter is more neutral, everyman, potentially sinister or abrupt with it's consonants, and Devlin has the ring of that funny Englishman we know better, seemingly used in the more 'human' parts of the story or points of view. He's definitely had character development, regardless--I really enjoyed getting a good solid look inside Carter's head, and comparing it to his old persona and portrayal in other stories, etc.

At the end when they meet Kit in the hallway, it occurred to me how did Devlin manage to leave for earth on a mission so dangerous, and Amanda not send Kit with him as backup? Even if it was to shadow him from a distance, or guard the exit route off planet.