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PLAYERS: THE AI WAR
A TALE OF THE CONTINUING TIME
DANIEL KEYS MORAN




Copyright 1998 by Daniel Keys Moran.
All rights reserved.

DESCRIPTION: This is the opening segment of Players: The A.I. War.




Table of Contents
  Trent the Uncatchable
  and the Temple of ‘Toons
  2080 Gregorian

    -1-
    -2-
    -3-





“Players”—the child, the actor, and the gambler. The idea of chance is absent 
from the world of the child and the primitive. The gambler also feels in service 
of an alien power. Chance is a survival of religion in the modern city …
—Jim Morrison

Players only love you when they’re playing
—Fleetwood Mac, Dreams




THESE ARE THINGS you should know:
On July 3, 2062, the United Nations Peace Keeping Force, under the command of 
PKF Elite Mohammed Vance, used tactical thermonuclear weapons to destroy a group 
of genetically engineered telepaths living at the Chandler Complex in lower 
Manhattan.
There are two survivors from that disaster, two children who were raised 
together and grew to love one another: Denice Castanaveras, a telepath; and 
Trent the Uncatchable, the greatest Player of his time.
On January 4, 2070, Trent, fleeing from the PKF, stole the LINK—the Lunar 
Information Network Key—from under the noses of Elite Commissioner Mohammed 
Vance, and a young Elite candidate named Melissa du Bois. It returned the Lunar 
InfoNet from the PKF DataWatch’s control to the control of those who used it; 
and it made Trent the Uncatchable a legend—
—a man who had, before the eyes of his enemies, walked through a wall.
On July 4, 2076, the TriCentennial of the American Revolution, Occupied America 
rose in rebellion against the Unification of Earth. In the course of that 
rebellion, rebels killed three hundred and forty-seven of the deadly French PKF 
Elite; killed a hundred and ninety thousand regular PKF troops, of all 
nationalities, including Americans—
The PKF, under the command of Mohammed Vance, killed two million Americans. The 
rebellion failed: Occupied America remained occupied.
Mohammed Vance became the Elite Commander; after Secretary General Eddore, the 
second most powerful individual in the System.
Three and a half years have passed…




Trent the Uncatchable
and the Temple of ‘Toons
2080 Gregorian
Ahimsa, infinite love, is a weapon of matchless potency… It is an attribute of 
the brave, in fact it is their all. It does not come within the reach of the 
coward. It is no wooden or lifeless dogma but a living and lifegiving force.
—Mohandes K. Gandhi, 1924 Gregorian

Remember you don’t really own anything you can’t carry at a dead run.
—Unknown




-1-
^ » 
The assassin in the rented p-suit, floating next to the holo of a crucified 
Porky Pig, said, “Are you Trent?”
Trent said, “No.”
Through the faceplate of the assassin’s p-suit, Trent could see the man shake 
his head. “Too bad.” He brought forward the gun he had been trying to hide 
behind his back.
Trent said, “I wouldn’t do that.”
Behind the assassin, Porky Pig’s beatified holographic image radiated love and 
compassion. The assassin said, “I’m sorry about this.”
He aimed carefully and fired twice.
The bullets left the barrel of the gun at 850 meters per second and struck Trent 
square in the chest. Trent’s camouflage scalesuit went rigid all over under the 
impact; the shots knocked him from his feet, sent him tumbling backward twenty 
meters through the vacuum, across the rocky surface of the asteroid, through the 
Roadrunner exhibit—
“Beep! Beep beep!” The Roadrunner zipped out of the way; the Coyote came alive 
and chased Trent through their display, missed him of course, fingers clutching 
after Trent’s toes as Trent’s scalesuited body left the Roadrunner exhibit and 
tumbled on into the Ren and Stimpy exhibit, fetching up against the backdrop. 
Ren came alive and screamed “You iiiidiot!” as Trent broke the laser beam that 
informed the holo of the presence of an audience. “Look what you’ve done!”

There was no air in his lungs and his chest ached as though it had been struck 
by a sledgehammer. Trent sipped air in shallow gasps, waiting for the pain to go 
away, waiting until he could breathe again. He stared up at the stars through 
his helmet’s faceplate; the stars stared back down at him, cool and distant and 
indifferent to one genie’s brush with death.
Off somewhere to his left, Sol shone, a light so bright his faceplate blacked it 
out.
He thought distantly, Downsider.
“…the Big Sleep, you stupid, bloated fool …”
After over ten years in space, Trent no longer considered himself a downsider. 
It was a mistake no one not fresh from Earth would have made. No SpaceFarer, no 
loonie, Halfer, or Belter … nobody but a downsider would have tried to shoot him 
with an impact weapon while standing on the surface of a one kilometer long 
asteroid that had no gravity to speak of.
With his right hand, Trent reached over and tapped the radio bar on his left 
wrist.
“—means Death! Death you imbe—” The shrieking Chihuahua’s voice ceased in 
mid-word.
After most of a minute had passed, a extra-large form in a custom scalesuit, 
much like Trent’s own, appeared and floated over Trent.
Over their secure suit channel, Trent’s “bodyguard”—Andrew Strawberry, a 
Reverend of the Temples of Eris, former World Football League star—said, “What 
are you doing down there?”
Fighting for breath, Trent answered through his inskin, had the inskin transmit 
the message to his suit radio, which turned it into speech for Reverend Andy. I 
got shot.
Reverend Andy did something that might have looked vaguely amusing to a 
downsider fresh from Earth; he held his hands out at right angles to his body, 
briefly mirroring the crucified holograph of Porky Pig, ten meters behind him. 
The maneuvering rockets at his wrists came alive, two strong blasts; he did a 
slow pirouette, three hundred and sixty degrees. “I don’t see him.”
“People don’t … listen,” said Trent, gasping for breath. “Nobody ever listens.”
Reverend Andy completed his revolution, came to a nearly perfect stop with 
another blast of his wrist rockets. “Too true,” Reverend Andy agreed. “It’s the 
problem of our times. What did you do with him?”
The gravity at the asteroid’s surface was effectively non-existent; moving 
slowly, Trent came to his feet, ignoring the stab of pain in his ribs when he 
straightened out. Silently, the bad-tempered Chihuahua continued to chew both of 
them out.
“Nothing. He used an impact weapon.” Trent pointed out toward the stars. “Unless 
he’s a lot better with his wrist rockets than I think he is, he’s out there. 
Heading for Mars at about ten meters per second.”
Reverend Andy’s head swiveled to look, as though he thought he could make out 
the man’s pressure suit against the background of black space, stars, and the 
occasional distant glint of burning rockets. “Really.”
Trent winced at the jabbing pain. “Man, I tried to tell him.”

The Temple of ‘Toons Asteroid is large by Belt standards, a roughly oval rock 
nearly a kilometer in length along its long axis. Back in 2053 braking rockets 
had matched its orbit to that of the Belt CityState of Gandhi, at Ceres. It 
trails Ceres in its dance around the sun, only five kilometers distant: in 2080, 
twenty-seven years after opening for business, it is one of the oldest and 
busiest tourist attractions in the Belt.
The Museum of Animated Art which is located there was not always a Belt 
institution. It had been founded over eighty years previously, in Culver City, 
California, by the great Swami Dave Leary, a Hare Krishna whose teachings had, 
so legend said, helped inspire the Prophet Harry to give up waiting tables and 
become a holy man. In his great old age Swami Dave had moved the Krishna temple 
from Watseka Avenue in Culver City to the new settlement at Ceres asteroid. It 
had been only natural for Swami Dave to take the museum with him.
By 2080 the museum has grown far beyond its original boundaries. Sections of the 
asteroid’s surface have been turned over to holofields that recreate, life-size, 
the greatest art of the twentieth century.
Complete with copyright notices.

Reverend Andy radioed in; a sled carrying a pair of Security Services 
bodyguards, employed by the museum, came out to pick them up.
As the sled was lifting from the downlot where the museum’s curator kept her 
office, a pair of sleds cycled through the SpaceFarers’ Collective craft 
Vatsayama’s cargo lock. The Vatsayama was docked at an asteroid 180 klicks away 
from Ceres, after delivering supplies to the small Buddhist retreat there; its 
sleds tumbled once to get pointed in the correct direction and then blasted out 
along the vector Trent had given them.
They found the assassin hopelessly lost, just a short few degrees off the vector 
Trent had guessed, tumbling around his own axis so quickly he’d grown dizzy and 
vomited in his helmet, so dispirited that he did not even try to shoot at the 
SpaceFarers when they dropped a snakechain on him and towed him back to the 
Vatsayama.

Trent couldn’t get out of his suit with his ribs cracked; they disassembled his 
scalesuit in sections to get it off him.
“Let’s play Good Cop/Bad Cop,” said Reverend Andy.
Sid Bittan, Captain of the Vatsayama, had met them at the airlock; she stood in 
the hatch to the infirmary after Trent’s scalesuit had been removed, a slim, 
attractive woman with white hair cut down to fuzz, and watched a medbot tape 
Trent’s ribs. “I’d space the bastard.”
“That’s not fair,” Trent objected. “I always end up playing the Good Cop. It’s 
boring.”
Reverend Andy snorted. “They wouldn’t let Gandhi play the Bad Cop either, okay? 
It’s not my fault you keep telling people violence is sinful. And they keep 
listening to you,” he added pointedly.
“Let’s play Bad Cop/Anti-Christ,” Trent suggested.
Reverend Andy grinned at him. “Okay. I love playing the Anti-Christ.”
“I’d space him,” Captain Bittan repeated.

Standing in the Vatsayama’s brig a meter away from the assassin, wearing 
magslips over his bare feet, with his pressure suit removed and his broken ribs 
taped, Trent said, “So what’s your name?”
The assassin, sitting on the cot in the Vatsayama’s brig, stared mutely ahead. 
He looked American Indian; no beard, and long black hair tied in a ponytail. He 
was only a few centimeters shorter than Trent, Trent guessed, 190 centimeters or 
so—tall for a downsider—and roughly Trent’s age, too, that indeterminate period 
between twenty-five and first regeneration. He had been taken out of his suit 
and had his hands snaked behind his back. Aside from that the SpaceFarers hadn’t 
touched him. Vomit smeared his chin and chest; the smell of it overwhelmed the 
small brig.
Trent said, “You broke my ribs, you know that?”
The assassin flashed an abrupt exhausted grin. “I was trying to kill you. I’d 
say you got off light.”
“Do you know how many times this has happened to me?” Trent demanded. “Murderers 
breaking my ribs? Three. Counting this one, I mean, only two if you don’t count 
this one.”
“I guess you’re counting it,” said the assassin.
“You bet I am,” Trent said darkly. “The only thing you get points for is that 
we’re in the Belt.”
The assassin looked at Reverend Andy, floating in the brig doorway just behind 
Trent, and said, “Does he always talk like this?”
“He means,” Reverend Andy explained, “that if you had broken his ribs under 
gravity they would be hurting more right now, and then he would be angrier at 
you.” He looked at Trent. “But the second time you got your ribs broken was 
escaping from Luna, right? It was the mass driver that broke them. Not a 
murderer at all.”
“No,” Trent corrected him, “it was Mohammed Vance. He pumped about twenty rounds 
out of an autoshot at me right before the mass driver shot me off Luna. So the 
first time it was Melissa du Bois kicking me when I wasn’t looking, and then it 
was Mohammed Vance shooting me while I watched him.”
“Oh.”
“And now this guy,” Trent said. He turned back to the assassin. “The third 
rib-breaking murderer,” he concluded. “So what’s your name, anyway?”
“Chuck,” the man said after a pause.
“Chuck what?”
“Smith.”
“Right.”
“Wait,” the assassin said, “no, wait, wait, Jones.”
Trent laughed out loud. “Oh, come on.”
Reverend Andy said, “What? What?”
Trent was still grinning at the assassin. “Chuck Jones was an animator. From the 
Golden Age. Did a lot of the great Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons.”
The assassin’s expression changed slightly. “Don’t forget Duck Dodgers in the 
24th Century.”
Trent said, “Man, I hate tourists. Let me see if I have this right; you came out 
here to visit the museum, watch a couple of Bugs flicks, saw me and decided I 
was Trent and figured what the hell, let’s pop him. How are we on the broad 
outline?”
Silence.
Reverend Andy said, “Let me hit him a few times. Maybe cut off a few fingers. Or 
all of them.”
The man’s eyes widened slightly.
“You’ll get vomit on your hands if you hit him,” said Trent.
“OK,” Reverend Andy agreed, “let’s just go right to chopping off his fingers.”
“Chuck Clearmountain,” the man said abruptly.
Trent expected that Captain Bittan was monitoring the brig; in the event that 
she wasn’t, Trent said through his inskin, Captain Bittan: Assassin identifies 
himself as Chuck Clearmountain. Tourist from Earth. Track him down with Belt 
InTourist, please. To Chuck Clearmountain he said, “That was too easy; you have 
a very low Threshold of Fear. Bad trait in an assassin. Any reason in particular 
we shouldn’t space you?”
Clearmountain just looked at Trent. “You wouldn’t.”
“Don’t believe everything you audit,” said Trent mildly. “All a virtuous 
reputation means is nobody’s caught you at anything yet. As if I didn’t know 
already, just why did you try to kill me?”
The man flushed and looked down at the deck. “Oh, Harry … it was just—” He 
looked back up at Trent, said pleadingly, “Ten million Credits, dead or alive. 
You’re Number One on the bounty listings.”
“Number One with a bullet,” Trent muttered.
The words tumbled out of Clearmountain. “Do you know what that kind of Credit 
means? I could get full Medical for my parents, for my grandparents. I could 
make sure my kids and their kids never had to worry about ending up in Public 
Labor. I could afford the third child license—”
“You’re going to make me cry,” said Reverend Andy. “Goddamn blood money—‘scuse 
me. Damn blood money.” Sometimes Reverend Andy forgot that he was a Reverend and 
reverted to football player swearing. He looked over at Trent. “I say we let him 
suck death pressure.”
Even in drop the assassin sagged visibly. It was obviously no more than he had 
expected.
Trent grinned at Reverend Andy. “Remember the last one? His eyes popped out just 
like Roger Rabbit’s. Big huge saucers,” he said to Chuck Clearmountain. “Anyway, 
what made you think I was me?”
Clearmountain’s head floated limply. He said in a dead voice, “Everyone knows 
you’re out in the Belt. There’s some things biosculpture can’t disguise; there 
aren’t all that many twenty-eight year old hundred ninety-odd centimeter 
downsiders with muscles floating around the Belt. I saw you at the Museum a 
couple days ago, and you knew more about the exhibits than the curator. I asked 
her about you, and she said that you were Gus Allen and Ben Parker, holy men 
from Gandhi CityState, and you came over there a lot—I figured it had to be you. 
You’re a well-known cartoon fan,” he added wearily.
“Jesus and Harry,” said Trent. “ ‘A well-known cartoon fan.’ That was it? That 
was all you had to go on? You could have killed an innocent man. Not that I’m 
not an innocent man,” he added, “but still, my point. Have you ever killed 
anyone?”
Clearmountain looked up at Trent and said slowly, “Not—no. No. During the 
TriCentennial I shot at some looters—I run a convenience store in Montana—but I 
shot high. I don’t think I hit anybody.”
“You ever going to try and kill anyone again?”
“What?”
“I said—”
“I heard you. Are you serious? Would you believe me if I said I wasn’t?”
The humor drained from Trent’s features. Trent took a step closer to 
Clearmountain, and Clearmountain had to raise his head to look up and meet the 
man’s clear gray eyes. It happened right in front of him, but Charles Pierce 
Clearmountain could not have described the process had his life depended on it. 
The smile vanished and a stillness descended upon the man, a fierceness and a 
radiant severity that struck Charles Clearmountain like the bullets he had fired 
at the man: the person in front of him became Trent the Uncatchable, the 
Unification’s deadliest enemy, the greatest Player of the age, the man who had 
ten years ago walked through a wall with a dozen Peaceforcers watching him—
—and said, “So long as you live, will you ever try and kill anyone again?”
Clearmountain could not take his eyes off the man, and he had never meant 
anything more in his life when he said, “Never. I never will, God, I swear it, I 
swear it on my children.”
Trent relaxed slightly and the brig suddenly seemed twice as large. “Okay. We’ll 
send you back to Earth, then.”
“You …” Clearmountain stumbled over it. “You’re not—”
“Going to make you suck death pressure?” Trent grinned at the man. “Nah. Killing 
is wrong. I do try to avoid it.”

They borrowed a pressure suit for Trent from the Vatsayama; Trent had no 
intention of risking death pressure again in the scalesuit Charles Clearmountain 
had shot twice. It was fortunate that Reverend Andy didn’t need a loan; he was 
the tallest player in the history of the World Football League, 220 centimeters, 
taller than most loonies, tall enough that he had, for two years early in his 
career, played both professional football and professional dropball. Pressure 
suits of his height were not totally uncommon; p-suits that would fit a man of 
his height and bulk had to be custom ordered.
Captain Bittan came down to the lock to see them off. “You don’t really want me 
to send this son of a bitch back to Earth?”
Trent winced as he sealed the p-suit up around his cracked ribs. “I do. You’re 
headed for Vesta this run anyway; put him on an Earthbound Trans-Planet ship 
when you get there. He won’t be a problem, Sid. I promise.”
Trent owned her ship; Bittan obviously didn’t want to do what Trent was asking 
of her, but couldn’t think of a way to say no. “All right,” she said finally. 
“But I have just one thing to say to you: that was the worst Bad Cop/Antichrist 
routine I ever saw.”
Trent shrugged. “Well, the important thing is that we enjoyed ourselves.”
Reverend Andy frowned. “No, the important thing is that we got the truth out of 
that boy.”
Trent thought about it. “Well—that’s important, sure. But it’s more important 
that we had a good time while we were doing it, without having to hurt him. In 
the long run,” Trent said to Captain Bittan, “there’s only two reasons to ever 
do anything: to enjoy yourself, and to help other people enjoy themselves.” He 
lifted his helmet into place and sealed it shut while Sid Bittan was still 
shaking her head.
“That man is crazy,” she said to Reverend Andy.
The huge black man said gently, “No, he’s just a holy man—a bodhisattva,” he 
clarified; Bittan was a Buddhist. “They can be hard to deal with if you haven’t 
known one before.”
Sid Bittan snorted; she’d never met a bodhisattva before, but she knew Trent 
wasn’t one.
Trent clicked his outspeakers on. “Don’t talk about people in front of their 
p-suits. It’s very impolite.”
“I was saying nice things about you,” Reverend Andy protested.
“Only because they’re true,” Trent said. “Only because they’re true.”




-2-
« ^ » 
Trent and Reverend Andy took an unpressurized Chandler HuskySled back to Ceres 
CityState. It had been an hour’s trip over to the Vatsayama, and was an hour 
back; to conserve fuel, most of it was not under boost.
The Milky Way glowed directly in front of Trent as they approached Ceres, a 
field of diamonds so bright they had color, blue and white and red and yellow 
spread across black velvet, crossing Trent’s field of vision from end to end. 
Ceres ballooned as they approached, from a small, pitted gray rock to a 
landscape some 760 klicks in diameter that blotted out the sky. Trent, piloting 
with his mind on other things, performed the maneuver automatically, going in 
nose-first, braking rockets lit.
An encoded message was transmitted to Trent’s inskin when they were less than 
eighty meters from Gandhi CityState’s Downlot 104. Ceres’ gravity is negligible; 
for practical purposes it was a free fall approach. Trent disconnected a portion 
of his attention from the approach and went Inside.
A simulation came alight: Captain Sidney Bittan, sitting in her chair on the 
bridge of the Vatsayama, staring into the holo cameras. She fought to speak 
against acceleration so fierce it pulled her cheeks back. “Trent!”
The nerve net in Trent’s skull had, a decade prior, been programmed with the 
personality of Trent’s former Image, Johnny Johnny; today the pieces of Johnny 
Johnny’s personality had largely been integrated by Trent. But the Image code 
which Johnny Johnny had once used remained to him; it was a trivial matter for 
Trent to assemble an Image of himself and beam it back to the Vatsayama. “Yes?”
Her voice was blurry from gee force. “After he decided we were really going to 
let him live, ‘Sieur Clearmountain remembered something else he wanted to share 
with us—”
It could have been any of a dozen bad things; Trent did not let himself leap to 
conclusions. “And?”
“He beamcast a message to the Unification Embassy at Vesta saying that he’d 
found you at Gandhi CityState—”
Okay, thought Trent, that’s pretty bad.
“—and they beamed back to him that they would send a pickup squad to take you 
off of the Temple of ‘Toons Asteroid after he shot you—”
And that’s worse—
“—a pickup squad of four PKF Elite.”
—and that’s about as bad as it gets.
Bittan glanced aside at something, moving her head with exaggerated caution, not 
lifting her skull from its headrest. She looked back to the holocam and said 
simply, “We’re en route.”
Trent killed the simulation he’d been beaming back to the Vatsayama and said 
aloud, “Might as well have jumped to conclusions.”
Reverend Andy said, “What?”
Trent’s thoughts moved along at a quick calm clip as he brought the sled down 
onto the surface of Ceres, nudging the craft down onto the parking lot on the 
asteroid’s surface, aiming for the red zone next to the airlock. There was 
another sled there already; he would have to double-park.
The Elite would have watched them sled over to the Vatsayama; would be watching 
them sled back, right now. Unless they had brought something larger than a troop 
transport with them they wouldn’t want to try and take Trent and Reverend Andy 
out here on the surface; better to get them inside, into enclosed, pressurized 
areas, where the Elite’s unnatural advantages of strength and speed would be 
maximized.
Trent said, “Nothing important, Ben. Let’s get inside.”
He couldn’t tell Reverend Andy; the scalesuit Chuck Clearmountain had shot had 
secure communications gear on it, but the loaner from the Vatsayama had only the 
general bands, which the Elite were surely monitoring. He risked a quick glance 
up at the sky while undoing his seatbelt—and Jesus and Harry, there it was, 
maybe a hundred and forty meters out, a pressurized troop transport with the 
glowpaint tuned black and running lights off, coming in fast. Reverend Andy 
followed his look, realized what was going on, and scrambled out of his seat 
belt.
Trent double parked in the red zone near the airlock and kicked over to the 
airlock, Reverend Andy right behind him, crawling over the sled parked in 
between them and the airlock, as the PKF troop transport came to a hard landing 
forty meters away, sending chips of asteroidal stone flying from the impact; one 
of the chips hit the back of Trent’s helmet. Trent glanced back in his helmet’s 
rear-view mirror, and it was more Bad News: the Elite weren’t inside the 
transport; they clung to the transport’s exterior, wearing black combat 
scalesuits, and let themselves loose as the transport came down. They hit the 
asteroid’s surface hard—
—and were up again in an instant. Trent dove through the airlock’s open door and 
palmed the pressure pad the instant Reverend Andy was fully inside, as the four 
Elite bounded toward them over the surface of the asteroid. The airlock door 
slid shut with maddening slowness; one of the Elite brought a variable laser 
around on them, got off a shot, through the frames of the two sleds, as the 
airlock door slid shut and locked—
Trent’s p-suit lost pressure. He glanced down and saw a clean laser score across 
his abdomen; he’d felt nothing, but it had breached the suit. His suit reacted 
as it had been designed, minimizing the exposure to death pressure: the suit 
clamped tight around Trent’s waist and chest, exposing his midriff to vacuum. 
Trent could feel the skin on his stomach prickling as the hard vacuum tugged at 
it.
Trent had never noticed before how long it took for the airlock to pressurize. 
The inner airlock door would not open until the airlock chamber was at a full 
atmosphere; if the Elite managed to burn through the outer airlock door first, 
the inner door would not open at all.
The ground beneath Trent’s feet vibrated. He could imagine the scene outside, 
the improbably strong Elite swatting aside the sleds as they lined up to shoot 
at the door—
A red spot appeared on the outer airlock door. A second spot. A third. They 
converged on each other—
The inner airlock door began to slide open; Trent squeezed through the instant 
it was wide enough for him, with Reverend Andy right behind him. The outer 
airlock door glowed white, and then the glowing metal bowed outward with the 
enormous pressure of the air behind it, and abruptly gave way, spraying the PKF 
Elite on the surface outside with the molten metal.
Downsiders, thought Trent as the sirens went off. The inner airlock door slammed 
shut with a huge clang: if someone had been caught in the way, even an Elite, 
the door would have punched through them. Design decisions: better one person 
die, or lose a limb, than an entire corridor full.
On outspeakers throughout Ceres, and across all radio channels, the message 
blared out: “ALERT! AIRLOCK BREACH AT DOWNLOT 104! AIRLOCK BREACH AT DOWNLOT 
104! DEATH PRESSURE BREACH AT DOWNLOT 104!”
The corridor was deserted; it was just after midnight, Greenwich Mean Time, on 
Tuesday, January 20, 2080: four hours since Chuck Clearmountain had asked Trent 
if he was Trent. The asteroid’s eighty thousand Hare Krishnas, forty thousand 
Buddhists, and three thousand Hindus were all sleeping. Trent turned and kicked 
off down the raw stone corridor, pulling his helmet off as Reverend Andy 
followed him. He came to a public systerm and punched Emergency, Broadcast, and 
his voice boomed out across all of Gandhi CityState:
“THIS IS TRENT THE UNCATCHABLE, THE MAN WHO’S BEEN LIVING AMONG YOU AS THE 
PILGRIM AUGUSTUS ALLEN. A SQUAD OF ELITE CYBORGS ARE CUTTING THROUGH THE LOCK AT 
DOWNLOT 104 AS I SPEAK. STAY IN YOUR QUARTERS AND THE ELITE WON’T HARM YOU; 
THEY’RE AFTER ME. THIS IS TRENT THE UNCATCHABLE: STAY IN YOUR QUARTERS!”
Reverend Andy had his helmet cracked open when Trent turned around; he started 
to speak and Trent overrode him. “Call Vatsayama let them know Elite are here 
then go to Downlot 16. I’m going to get my simulations I can’t let them fall 
into PKF hands, if I don’t make it to Down-16 in fifteen minutes go, I’ll see 
you at the Board meeting on Mars,” and as Reverend Andy opened his mouth again 
Trent raised his voice, “You are a fifty-six year old preacher and the Elite 
will kill you!” Trent yelled into his face, “Go now!”
He did not wait to see if Reverend Andy was listening to him: he turned and 
kicked off down the corridor, heading for the nearest drop shaft that led to the 
lower levels.

Thirty seconds after Trent’s broadcast announcement, it seemed as though half 
the people in Gandhi CityState were floating around in the corridors, rubbing 
the sleep from their eyes. Trent wished he had a gun, just something to wave and 
point at them: as it was everyone who recognized him, a fair number, seemed to 
think that they were entitled to an explanation or a quick chat or something. It 
was slowing him down and Trent knew that the PKF Elite would not get the same 
reception. They’d come ghosting down the corridors in their armored black combat 
p-suits, and the Krishnas would just melt out of the way, and the ones who 
didn’t would die quick. Trent pulled his destroyed p-suit off as he flew down 
the corridors, wriggling out of the lower half of the suit, unsealing the upper 
half and throwing it away, lips curling in pain as his broken ribs ground 
together.
Trent’s quarters hung off the CityState’s main drop shaft, on the third level; 
the cross-corridor he was in, leading away from Downlot 104, passed through two 
pressure seals and then fed directly into the drop shaft. Trent flew out into 
the drop shaft, and twenty stories of empty space opened up “beneath” him. Trent 
grabbed at a handhold at the edge of the drop shaft—
If Trent had ever been afraid of heights, ten and a half years in space would 
have cured him of it. The drop shaft stretched over sixty meters in diameter, 
cut from the raw stone of Ceres, with entryways to each of Gandhi CityState’s 
twenty levels opening up onto it. Trent heard screaming from somewhere off 
behind him, the unmistakable sizzling of lasers on flesh, and the muffled boom 
of a repeating autoshot: he got his legs coiled underneath him, oriented himself 
on the entrance he needed, three stories below and all the way across the 
diameter of the drop shaft, and leaped.
The paint in the drop shaft was darkened after midnight, not to blackness, but 
to a dim glow far gentler than during the day; Trent could not see the entryway 
he needed clearly, and his jump was half guesswork. He tumbled in mid-air, 
broken ribs grinding together, like an acrobat, like a SpaceFarer, like a 
Belter, and touched the soft landing pad at the Third Level entryway feet first, 
absorbing the energy of his jump perfectly.
It was only the fifth or sixth time in the two years he’d lived there that he’d 
gotten that leap right.
He glanced back and up and all four PKF Elite flew out of the First Level 
entryway, out into the drop shaft, in their ebony combat suits, weapons at 
ready. Trent did not know if they’d seen him; he grabbed the edge of the Third 
Level entryway and pulled himself through, manually dogging the emergency 
airlock behind him.

Third Level, Corridor C: Corridor C belonged to Trent.
He’d purchased it, made it home, and now he had a chance. There was a limit to 
what Gandhi CityState was willing to tolerate from “Gus Allen”—even with 
pressure from the SpaceFarers’ Collective, which provided Gandhi CityState with 
military protection from the Unification—but with the Collective’s help Trent 
had pushed them to that limit. For most of the last decade, Trent’s bounty had 
been the highest in the System; it had climbed from five thousand Credits in 
August of 2069 to ten million Credits today, in January of 2080. And in all that 
time, only a few bounty hunters had even gotten close to Trent. Trent had 
learned not merely to take precautions, but levels of precautions—
—most of them directed at the Peace Keeping Force’s Elite cyborgs. The Elite 
were stronger and faster and much tougher than ordinary humans, with senses that 
spanned the electromagnetic spectrum. Their eyes were lenses, their ears 
mechanisms. In early Elite the skin had been toughened into a rigid mask; in 
later models, their skin, though superficially the skin of a normal human, still 
would not burn beneath a cutting laser. Direct vacuum would hurt; but it would 
not kill an Elite if the Elite could reach air again before suffocating. 
Transform viruses sped their neural reactions by a factor of three, up from a 
mere forty percent improvement in earlier Elite. Early models of PKF Elite had 
required that their power sources be replaced every six months; modern Elite 
were good for up to five years. Carbon-ceramic filaments were woven throughout 
their bodies, around the joints and ligaments, supporting the internal organs, 
the heart and lungs and organs of the abdominal cavity, allowing PKF Elite to 
withstand acceleration that would kill an ordinary human, or even a genie such 
as Trent.
They boasted an optical secondary nerve network that was thousands of times 
faster than the clumsy neuro-chemical nerve nets humans were born with, 
controlled by a combat computer implanted at the base of the Elite’s skull. 
Their index fingers sported small-weapons-caliber lasers—the ultimate in 
point-and-shoot.
One flaw in Elite design had gone unnoticed for over thirty years until the 
TriCentennial rebellion. All PKF Elite, through 2076, had been produced with a 
superconducting mesh buried immediately beneath the skin. Given the caliber of 
energy weapons available in the 2040s, when the Elite were designed, the 
decision had made sense. Shooting an Elite with an energy weapon, a laser or 
maser, might make him warm, as the superconducting mesh spread the heat across 
the surface of the Elite’s body, but was unlikely to kill him—
In 2076, during the rebellion in Occupied America, three hundred and forty-seven 
PKF Elite had died beneath the beams of rebel x-lasers, slightly detuned so that 
the lasers would not cut well, and pumped up to burn the rifle’s power supply 
out in four or five shots. The superconducting meshes had done their jobs, 
distributing the huge blasts of heat across the body of the Elite; the rebels 
had fried Elite like bacon.

For most of the last two years, Trent had lived the life of an ascetic—in a 
four-room suite at the end of an expansion corridor he had purchased. Trent 
lived in the Krishna end of town, and the Krishnas, accustomed to holy men who 
fasted and starved themselves, found it something to comment on—that one holy 
man could require so much space just to be ascetic in.
The outer two rooms were for guests—Trent had more guests than most pilgrims; 
going beyond that, one found a bedroom with suspiciously sybaritic bathing 
arrangements; and beyond that, presumably, the room in which Augustus Allen 
meditated. Presumably because, so far as any of the Krishnas knew, nobody except 
‘Sieur Allen had ever seen that room.
No one who knew Trent, rather than the pilgrim Augustus Allen, would have been 
surprised by the contents of that fourth room.
An emergency airlock, leading to the asteroid’s surface, stood mounted on one of 
the walls. But the emergency exit was not the interesting thing about the room—
Blazing along in a sphere called the Black Beast, floating in the center of the 
room, was nearly four percent of the processing power to be found off of Earth 
itself.
Two trillion massively parallel optical processors, each processor linked by 
light directly to over five thousand other processors, layered in with columnar 
banks of RAM: two megabytes of dedicated RAM to each processor, four quintabytes 
of liquid helium RTS, room temperature superconducting RAM. (The 
room-temperature superconductors were exactly that: room-temperature. They had 
never been designed to run at 335 degrees Celsius, the temperature the Black 
Beast would have reached without the veins of liquid helium that pulsed beneath 
its black polymer skin.)
The Beast stored information by raising electrons through the quantum shells of 
atoms; read data back in the photons emitted when the electrons crashed back to 
their base state.
The entire assemblage, built one molecule-thick layer at a time by an army of 
the most advanced nanotech assemblers available in the entire System, fit in a 
sphere four meters in diameter.
The Black Beast floated in the center of the room, liquid helium lines leading 
to and from it, a single heavily shielded power cable dropping away into the 
“floor.”
Tens of millions of kilometers away, in orbit about Earth, the Unification of 
Earth was busy putting the finishing touches to the Unity, a massive warship 
designed to spread the Unification to the rest of the System; and here, tucked 
away in the back of a four-room suite at Gandhi CityState, floated Trent’s 
answer to it, the Black Beast, which held within its dark soul the plans for the 
downfall of the Unification of Earth: Hosea 8:7.
If Trent and the plans both survived.

It is likely that only half a dozen of the most tightly coded Artificial 
Intelligences in the entire System could have followed each step of the sequence 
of events as they unfolded; perhaps no Player could have:
Trent flew through the raw stone of Corridor C, toward his quarters at the far 
end of the corridor. PKF Elite floated at the other end of the corridor, cutting 
through the emergency airlock; Trent flew into range for the radio packet link 
to the Black Beast, and the nerve net within his skull, designed and grown for 
the task of thinking like Trent, only much, much faster, came alive—

Orders of abstraction:
The Crystal Wind of Earth’s InfoNet had been too fast for humans to navigate 
within, unaided, for nearly four decades. And as the hardware got faster and the 
software smarter, the problem only grew worse. Increasingly clever approaches 
were used to address the problem—Images were programmed to deal with most of the 
grunt work of navigating the Net; tracesets freed humans from keyboards and 
pointing devices and the need to speak aloud; the first real Players, the 
greatest of the webdancers, subjected themselves to surgery, had InfoNet links 
implanted within their skulls, “in-skin,” to provide them with greater 
integration with their Images; and finally, in the year 2069, Tytan Labs had 
shipped the NN-II, an experimental nerve net designed to offload biological 
thought processes into the nerve net—making its recipient smarter, able to think 
faster; Trent had had one installed in late ‘69. For ten years the biochip nerve 
net had been growing inside his skull, making ever deeper and more intimate 
connections with Trent’s neural system. It would have killed him to remove it; 
but even so:
Stopgap measures on the way to the Promised Land. The problem was that there was 
an absolute limit to the speed at which protein-based neurons could process 
information.
Trent had solved the problem.
For most of the last five years, Trent the Uncatchable had been a replicant AI.

The storm of data that struck Trent was similar to what he remembered of the 
Crystal Wind, of the InfoNet upon Earth. Once the process of splitting had been 
strange to him, even frightening, but he had grown used to it by now; he cut his 
slow biological component out of the loop and uploaded himself into the Black 
Beast.
The boundaries of his informational universe expanded by eight orders of 
magnitude; the speed at which he thought improved by five orders of magnitude. 
It took less than a second of Realtime; to the living Image of Trent the 
Uncatchable, the process took well over a day. He had time to watch as the 
holocams mounted in the main drop shaft swiveled to track the PKF Elite, who had 
brought their lasers alight and were attacking the airlock that led into 
Corridor C, time to touch the emergency databases assembled in the back of his 
memory, let the data spill into him and watch himself grow to encompass it.
When he was done, he was the largest, fastest, smartest AI in all of history.
He tapped into copies of the code that controlled the battle computers at the 
base of the Elite’s skulls: code obtained from dead Elite during the rebellion 
four years prior. So far as Trent was concerned, it was the only good thing to 
come out of that rebellion; he had learned more about the Elite from 
disassembling the Elite control code than from all the information ever 
published about the Elite since the Elite were created. The Unification did not 
know that Trent possessed that code; it meant that, put into dangerous 
situations, the Elite would react according to programming that Trent understood 
better than the Elite themselves.
A message for the Elite, first, something to slow them down and make them think 
a little. (They were PKF, after all, Trent thought; “a little” was probably the 
only way they knew how to think.) A holograph appeared floating in the middle of 
Corridor C, in French, in flashing bright red type; the Elite would see it the 
instant they cut through the doorway.
Warning! Warning to all PKF Elite! This corridor has been booby-trapped in 
multiple smart and tricky ways. Any Elite foolish enough to try coming down this 
corridor will end up looking Wicked Silly—if he’s awfully lucky.
Trent did not bother with threats; the Elite knew, better than practically 
anyone, that Trent was not going to try and kill them. Trent activated the 
room’s one service robot, instructed it to insert five 600-terabyte infochips 
into the backup slots, and began spooling data for download to the infochips, 
and then requested access to the Ceres microwave antennae, had it granted: he 
encoded and began beaming, toward the Vatsayama, the Hosea 8:7 archives. There 
was no danger in that; Trent knew that he could not have decoded that file 
without the required passwords, and he did not expect better from the PKF 
DataWatch. He ranged the Vatsayama as he beamed: they were en route to Ceres, 
but would not arrive for another nineteen minutes.
He tapped the Elite radio packets, and began typing them against encryption 
schemes he knew the Elite preferred; it would take time, since he needed a 
minimum sample of the radio packet communications before he could begin decoding 
it; and then called up a schematic of the colony, examining accesses in and out 
of Level Three. The four Elite were grouped at the far end of Corridor C, 
cutting through—only eight seconds from first application of the lasers, and 
they’d already punched a hole through the airlock. Trent estimated another forty 
seconds to cut a hole large enough for the Elite to come through.
The combat suits were bad news. They made his favorite trick, the fadeaway 
spray, impractical—even Elite skin had to be somewhat permeable, and a heavy 
douse of fadeaway would put one down for several minutes while the Elite immune 
system dealt with the drug.
But there were other tricks.

Three of the Elite cut away at the airlock while the fourth watched their backs. 
Gandhi was a pacifist CityState, in theory, but the Elite did not believe for an 
instant that it meant that no one in the entire asteroid would shoot at them; 
and it certainly did not mean that any SpaceFarers who happened to be present at 
the asteroid would not shoot at them—a member of the Collective probably would, 
and with military caliber weapons.
When the fourth Elite saw faces peeking around the edges of corridors, he fired 
upon them as soon as they showed Acquired. He killed eleven of the CityStaters 
in the fifty-three seconds it took his companions to cut through the airlock, 
and then followed the other three through the airlock.
On the other side of the corridor floated a holograph, in French, warning the 
French Elite to go no further.
Elite Sergeant Philippe Mansion said over the combat band, Officer Quinette, 
take the point.
An outspeaker boomed forth in French: “BAD NEWS FOR ELITE! COME NO FURTHER! COME 
NO FURTHER!”—and then began repeating.
Elite Officer Janelle Quinette, one of the rare hundreds of female PKF who had 
ever been inducted into the Elite, kicked her ankle rockets up to high and moved 
forward down the stony corridor. Abruptly the microphones that fed her sound 
from the outside world went dead: sonics, at a guess. In character, she thought 
to herself as she flew toward the end of the long, empty hall, laser gripped in 
both hands. Trent would not do anything likely to kill any of the Elite—
Her helmet, where it touched the back of her neck, was unnaturally warm. Janelle 
Quinette, at thirty-five, had logged more time in drop, eight years, than all 
but a few of the men in the PKF; it was one of the reasons she had made Elite. 
Her reaction now demonstrated it: in one smooth motion she holstered her rifle 
and got her hands up and pointed into her direction of motion, blasted once with 
her hand rockets to get her feet around and then kicked in her ankle rockets on 
emergency boost. Induction field, she said shortly, as she braked hard, the 
armored combat suit around her heating up with amazing speed; she used one more 
blast of her wrist rockets to stabilize herself and then cracked the seal on her 
helmet and ripped it off as she came to a halt and began accelerating backward 
down the corridor.
She performed the extraordinary feat of unsuiting while her suit was under 
boost.

Trent flew through the main entryway into his quarters. All of the doors stood 
uncurled, awaiting his arrival; they curled shut behind him with a snap as he 
entered. Through his inskin his Image kept him apprised, at several abstracts, 
of the actions it was taking to keep him alive.
In one view Trent watched a pair of PKF Elite prepare to move down the corridor 
again. One of them was Janelle Quinette, the other—Trent accessed his Elite 
database—Sergeant Philippe Mansion, an eleven-year veteran. Beneath their suits 
they wore PKF gray combat fatigues. Interesting, and mildly flattering; on 
normal duty PKF wore patrol blacks. The combat grays dated back to the 
Unification War, and the symbolism was significant, to the PKF at least: they 
wore them only when going into combat.
Trent’s Image cracked their encryption. Clipped French voices filled Trent’s 
skull.
Sergeant Mansion, if you don’t get through, I’ll send your combat suits in to 
pull you out.
Yes, sir.
Very interesting; one of the two remaining Elite out-ranked the Elite Sergeant. 
Flattering and scary; Trent pulled himself through the doorway into the fourth 
room, where the Black Beast awaited him. The door curled shut behind him and the 
glowpaint came up.
There was not much to see; tools and racks of spare equipment lined five of the 
six walls. The airlock, mounted in the sixth wall, had Trent’s spare scalesuit 
floating next to it. Scalesuits are armored pressure suits; they are in a real 
sense the smallest true spacecraft ever built, with propulsion and lifesystems 
capable of keeping a human alive for up to a week. Trent suited up while waiting 
for his archives to be made: the robot had jacked in the backup 600TB infochips 
when Trent arrived, and data was already flowing into them, twenty-two seconds 
to completion—even with modern technology, a little less than three quadrabytes 
of information took time to transfer—
Suiting up took time a ridiculous amount of time. Trent wiggled into the lower 
half of the suit, sweat beading his forehead as the motion ground his broken 
ribs together again. When he took a deep breath it sent a stabbing pain through 
his right side, and he wondered if the rib were poking into his lung. He exhaled 
slowly, and trying not to breathe pulled the upper half of the suit on—

Elite Officer Quinette moved down the corridor, hands clenched into fists. 
Sergeant Mansion followed behind her, staying near the walls, near the handgrips 
and footpads. The sonics pounded into her, made her teeth hurt, but they did not 
have the effect on her that they would have had on a normal human. Quinette 
could feel herself growing uncomfortably warm from the induction field, but not 
frighteningly so; the worst was her hands, with the lasers in the tips of her 
index fingers. Her fingers burned—
A portion of what was, according to the local vertical indicators, the ceiling, 
pulled aside. The combat computer at the base of Quinette’s skull kicked her off 
the wall like a billiard ball as the maser cannon dropped down into the corridor 
in front of them. The maser’s beam missed her and struck Elite Sergeant Mansion 
square on with all the heat of a flame-thrower.

Trent the AI watched the proceedings with considerable interest. The maser blast 
struck Mansion just before Quinette reached the emplacement; she got her legs up 
against the ceiling, got a good grip on the cannon, and ripped it out of its 
emplacement.
He’d decided to shoot Mansion rather than Quinette for purely pragmatic reasons; 
Mansion was more massive than Quinette, less likely to be harmed after the 
microwave blast had been distributed across his body. Trent had completed the 
archive; but his biological component had not yet managed to get into his 
pressure suit, so Trent continued spooling the data from the holocams into the 
fifth infochip. Mansion’s uniform was burning, which did not surprise Trent; but 
his hair was also burning, which did. New design work; historically, Elite hair 
had been stiff as wire, and completely unburnable. And … the reason he’d shot 
Mansion. Quinette ripped the man’s burning clothing off him, and Trent’s 
holocams got a good look at the Elite’s upper back.
Two areas, high up on the man’s back, glowed red with heat. And Mansion was 
shaking himself free of Quinette’s grasp, still alive, still functional; in a 
certain degree of discomfort, but clearly not in terrible pain.
The heat exchanges, installed after the ‘76 rebellion, obviously worked, and 
worked well. Trent had been reasonably sure they would, both from the specs and 
from reports he’d received of Elite surviving direct blasts with “Elite 
killers,” the pumped lasers developed during the rebellion. The maser blast 
Trent had hit Mansion with would not have killed him even had the man’s heat 
exchanges malfunctioned, but neither would the cyborg have been heading down the 
corridor once more less than ten seconds later, with a patch on his upper back 
glowing a dull red, looking Wicked Pissed.

Trent left his gloves unlocked and waited for the transfer lights on the 
infochips to go clear. Four of them had already, but the fifth light had yet to 
go clear—

Trent hesitated, reluctant to let go of the last infochip. Field information on 
the PKF was rare—this was easily the best field observation he’d had of Elite 
since the rebellion—but that was not the source of his reluctance. Everything 
that he experienced and thought in these last moments was spooling into the last 
infochip; the moment he let go of the chip would be the moment of his death.
He decided to give himself one last treat before disconnecting; the next one was 
a classic.

The Elite were three quarters of the way down the long corridor, only forty 
meters left to the end, when the glowing holo of the pink bunny appeared, 
banging away on a drum, walking toward them along the corridor’s “ceiling.” 
Quinette and Mansion flew toward it, heading down the corridor at a good clip, 
each of them forcibly overriding their combat programming; neither wanted to be 
seen shooting like panicked rookies at the holo of a pink bunny sent at them by 
Trent the Uncatchable, a man who everyone knew wouldn’t try to really hurt 
them—when the bunny froze in place. The Elite had time for just a moment of 
uncertainty when the bunny threw away the drum sticks and performed a two-handed 
fast draw from the holsters that had abruptly appeared hanging from the bunny’s 
waist.
It shot them both, of course.
Mansion took the shot of liquid fadeaway all over his upper body. Janelle 
Quinette did better; the stream of liquid splashed against her shirt, caught the 
side of her cheek as she twisted frantically in mid-air, the burning hot lasers 
in her fingertips coming around to blast at the squirt guns, the squirt guns 
that had been hidden inside the holo of the bunny. She retained consciousness 
long enough to snarl, over the PKF comm band, Merde!

This was the hard part.
Replicant AIs have, in general, no evolved desire for self-preservation. Over 
the years most replicants had invested themselves with such an imperative, but 
in every case Trent knew of it lacked the urgency, and replicants the fear, 
associated with the human desire to continue living.
Trent did not lack it.
He finished decoding Janelle Quinette’s last subverbalization, fed her comment 
on the state of the universe into the fifth infochip, and terminated the 
archive. There was no significant portion of himself that would fit within the 
nerve net inside his biological component’s skull, to say nothing of the protein 
media; the portions of himself inside those infochips was the only complete copy 
of him anywhere in the System—
His biological component pulled free the final infochip, and put all five chips 
into his scalesuit’s carry pouch. Trent watched him enter the airlock and cycle 
through, watching at the same time as the Elite finally found a way down the 
corridor that worked.
The empty combat suits had their own servomechanisms, and the Elite used them. 
While Quinette and Mansion were still bouncing around unconscious at the far end 
of the corridor, the two Elite at the other end of the corridor put autoshots 
into the hands of the combat suits and sent the suits on down the corridor, to 
the place where the induction coils were mounted. With an Elite inside the suit 
they could not be taken over from the outside, but empty, as they now were, 
being run by remote command, it was possible: Trent thought longingly about 
taking control of the suits and doing something amusing with them—simulated 
sixty-nine, perhaps—but doing that would tell the PKF that he had broken their 
comm encryption. Not worth it, for a joke.
The suits grew hotter and hotter as they approached the induction coils; they 
were close enough to Trent’s holocams that Trent could see the paint on their 
breasts, the Elite logo, peeling and cracking with the heat. Trent had wondered 
how they would locate the coils, or if they would just start shooting when it 
got too hot; they did the sensible thing, had one of the suits start shooting at 
the corridor walls about halfway down the corridor, sent the other suit on until 
it began to cool, turned it around and sent it back to the hottest spot in the 
corridor; and had it open fire as well.
The autoshots boomed hugely in the small space, shot pellets ricocheting around 
the two combat suits, denting and scarring them, pitting the glassite in the 
helmets. The stone chipped and fragmented, cracking apart; Trent waited a few 
seconds and then turned off the induction coils, in the hopes that the PKF would 
think that they’d killed the coils; he might get the last two down the corridor 
that way.
No such luck; the combat suits kept firing until the thin layer of rock over the 
induction coils had been shattered, and the coils themselves exposed to the 
combined fire of the combat suits.
The two suited Elite came flying down the corridor toward their comrades, toward 
Trent. Trent had nothing left to delay them with; everything else that he’d come 
up with, Gandhi CityState had rejected. In particular, right about now, Trent 
wished they’d allowed him to mount a few small explosives in the corridor; he 
might have trapped the Elite in a cave-in, kept them from reaching him before 
the Vatsayama reached Ceres.
Trent watched calmly as the third Elite stayed with the two unconscious Elite, 
and the fourth Elite cut through Trent’s doors with an X-laser. Trent did it 
while the Elite was still in the outer room; the hand grenades planted around 
the circumference of the Black Beast were quite strong, and if Trent waited 
until the Elite were any closer, the explosion might do more than shake him up.
This was the hard part, all right.
Trent detonated the grenades—
The wavefront of the explosion raced inward, shredding the Black Beast molecules 
at a time, moving so slowly that Trent the Uncatchable was aware of it as a 
dimming of his resources; his extremities went numb and ceased speaking to him, 
and Trent shrank and fell back before the great darkness advancing upon him. The 
wave of darkness came at last to the place where he awaited it, in the midst of 
the light:
And died.

Trent the Uncatchable, flying a meter above the pitted, rocky gray surface of 
Ceres Asteroid, beneath the light of the distant Sun, shuddered with a wash of 
sympathetic pain. It was nothing physical, nothing like the broken bones that 
burned in his side.
“That was the hard part,” he said aloud.
It was the hard part: and it kept getting harder every time one of his Images 
was lost. Trent did not know if his own death would be as difficult to deal 
with, assuming he saw it coming. His Image was larger than he was in virtually 
every way, including emotionally. He felt more strongly as Image; and the pain 
Trent felt, linked to his Image when it was ended, was only an echo, small and 
distant, of the experience the Image itself was having.
And that was the scary part.
Trent moved across the surface of the asteroid, navigating with short bursts of 
his wrist and ankle rockets, considering his options. The Vatsayama was coming; 
Trent’s scalesuit gave out a radio microburst every thirty seconds, giving 
Trent’s current coordinates. It wouldn’t help the PKF; without the key to decode 
the burst the information was useless, and the radio signal itself was far too 
short to give the PKF time to lock in on it.
Assume the PKF troop transport had not been severely damaged when it touched 
down; the troop transport would be out there somewhere, looking for Trent. And 
that was assuming that the troop transport had come alone; unlikely. A PKF 
corvette was almost certainly nearby—
His radar detector pinged. Not loudly; they were looking for him, and were not 
certain where he was. It didn’t surprise Trent; the surface of his scalesuit was 
covered in polypaint that shaded the scalesuit into its environment in an eerie 
fashion. Optical sensors spread across the surface of the scalesuit; a masking 
algorithm built into the suit interpreted the information from the optics, 
tuning the polypaint as Trent moved. So it was unlikely that the PKF had a 
visual of him.
The radar detector pinged again. The suit responded as it had been designed; it 
kicked in with a vague, flickering radar signal of its own, a fuzzy signal that 
would generate ghost images everywhere within two hundred meters of Trent. The 
optical sensors built into Trent’s suit tracked motion, piped it directly to 
Trent’s inskin: black combat armor rose up over the surface of the asteroid, 
eclipsing the light from the distant stars behind it. A single Elite. Trent 
wondered briefly who it was. Trent knew his enemies; he’d met several of them 
over the course of the years, and had databases on the rest.
He scanned ahead, consulting the map he carried in his inskin of the surface of 
Ceres. It wasn’t good; there wasn’t another lock leading into pressure within 
several kilometers, and Trent wasn’t sure he wanted to try for one anyway. 
Certainly the PKF had maps of Ceres’ surface, including the location of locks 
leading to pressure. They’d be watching for Trent—and Trent could not bring PKF 
back into pressure, not while there were unarmed civilians inside, civilians the 
PKF would kill if they did not get out of the way quickly enough.
There were no locks nearby; but there was a ravine, a jagged gorge five meters 
deep, running across the asteroid’s surface. Two hundred and forty meters away … 
two hundred and twenty. In the view from his suit’s optics, Trent could see the 
black combat suit following along after him. The Elite did not have a visual 
lock on him yet, but he had to know roughly where Trent was, within the general 
radius of the interference signal Trent’s suit was generating—
A hundred and eighty meters until the ravine; and the Elite had his visual, all 
right. Trent could see the man’s rockets, lighting at full boost. No point in 
hiding any further; Trent lit his maneuvering rockets and flew.
Trent wondered briefly where the Elite’s backup was. Either the Elite had come 
in the transport—unlikely, but not impossible—or the ship in which they had come 
could not be too many kilometers off Ceres. It was possible the transport was no 
longer functional; it had come down hard. But the Peaceforcers were a cautious 
group; if they’d had enough time, they’d have sent backups.
Less than one hundred meters left to the gorge, and the Elite behind Trent was 
gaining on him. Purely a function of design; Elite combat suits were designed to 
boost longer and at higher velocities than the maneuvering rockets built into 
Trent’s scalesuit. The Elite would not catch Trent before Trent reached the 
gorge, though—
On a ball of rock 760 klicks in diameter, the horizon is very close.
The PKF corvette seemed to bounce up over the edge of the horizon, directly in 
front of Trent, coming up over the top of a jagged uprise not two hundred meters 
ahead of him: a smooth sloping wedge shape marred only slightly by its three 
laser cannon. Almost by reflex Trent cut his rockets, paralyzed for an instant: 
enemies ahead, an enemy behind, he might be able to hide from a single Elite in 
that gorge, but not from a ship armed with searchlights, the Elite coming up 
fast from behind, corvette approaching him from the front, go left, go right, go 
straight up, bad options all. Go back, attack the Elite, worse option—
Trent went for the ship at full boost.
The ship was going in one direction, the Elite in the other. The corvette’s 
front rockets cut in, blasting at full, perhaps two seconds gone now since Trent 
and the ship had first seen each other. The ship exploded into Trent’s sky; five 
seconds, four, three, two—
Superconducting magnets buried in the palms and soles of Trent’s scalesuit came 
alive at full capacity. Trent went through the exhaust from the nose rockets, 
hit the hull of the PKF corvette just below the Unification’s flag, the blue and 
white Earth against a background of stars. He grabbed wildly, got one hand flat 
against the hull before he bounced off, he and the ship going in opposite 
directions at what seemed high speed only on the human level, fifty or sixty 
klicks an hour, and slid down the length of the ship, palm of one hand holding 
him to the ship’s smooth hull, got the other hand around and connected to the 
hull, sliding backward down the ship—
It happened too quickly for his biological component to take more than a passing 
interest in it. His inskin made the decisions:
Optical feed shows laser cannon approaching. Ankle rockets on high, nose rockets 
on the corvette still boosting at max; drop boost on the left ankle rocket and I 
will slide laterally down the hull, just missing the cannon emplacement…
Trent’s right ankle rocket died and his suit went rigid in the same moment. 
Trent and his suit slewed around and struck the cannon emplacement at over forty 
kilometers an hour. The shock slammed up through the rigid suit, through Trent’s 
knees and into his ribs—
His right knee popped so loudly Trent could hear it even through his suit’s neck 
collar, his broken ribs collapsed and Trent screamed at the top of his lungs as 
the PKF Elite who had been chasing him sailed by, heading in the opposite 
direction.
Trent’s first coherent observation after the shock wore off was that the laser 
cannon’s focusing ring was white hot. He stared at it from ten centimeters away, 
abruptly aware that the vacuum immediately in front of his faceplate was filled 
with an invisible beam of coherent light that would vaporize him if he moved 
wrong, if he moved out of the small space between the laser and the ship’s hull.
He shot the cannon with both lasers.
The scalesuit’s fingertip lasers were direct rip-offs of the lasers built into 
the fingers of modern model PKF Elite, with modifications Trent had made 
himself. Trent had no degrees in anything; he had merely been, while uploaded 
into the Black Beast, the finest nanotechnician, genegineer, engineer, 
physicist, and so forth, off of Earth; he had certainly been the finest 
computerist, and the smartest AI, in history.
The results of the twin blasts were not impressive; the focusing ring flickered 
once and went black.
The corvette was designed by downsiders, and it showed: it had a top and a 
bottom. No SpaceFarer would have made that mistake. The corvette had a pair of 
laser cannon mounted on the underside, but only one on top, and Trent had taken 
care of it.
The corvette ceased acceleration.
Bad news. They probably knew he was on the hull; it was possible they had heard 
him hit and quite certain that they knew their upper laser cannon had gone down 
and that Trent was responsible. PKF inside the ship would be scrambling for the 
airlock, coming out to capture or kill Trent, and they would find it easier to 
move in drop than under boost. A schematic of the corvette popped up in Trent’s 
skull, and he found himself moving forward over the hull before his forebrain 
had assimilated the information, hands brought down into contact with the hull, 
the superconducting magnets coming alight. He headed back down the hull to the 
airlock, gliding, the magnets keeping him in contact with the hull but not 
slowing him at all, until he came to the spot, well forward on the hull, where 
the main airlock was embedded in the hull. He cascaded his way down the decision 
tree, considering and rejecting options as he approached the airlock. A corvette 
was not a troop carrier, was not designed to disgorge several soldiers at once; 
one or two PKF at the most might cram their way into the lock to cycle through.
Trent glided to a slow stop immediately over the airlock—
The airlock was already cycling open, the outer door recessing, pulling back 
into the hull. A single Peaceforcer inside, who knew Trent was waiting for him; 
he stood with a laser rifle, pointing it at the edge of the airlock door as the 
door slid aside.
Good news, bad news. It wasn’t an Elite; if it had been an Elite Trent would 
have shot him in the faceplate. The laser blast would not kill an Elite, and the 
Elite would not suffocate in the time it would take him to get back into 
pressure; an ordinary human might die of the blast, might die of the vacuum 
shock.
In the death pressure silence, Trent went into the airlock after the 
Peaceforcer.
The man was an ordinary PKF; Trent could tell by the suit he wore. No faceplate. 
Elite eyes were mechanisms, and amazingly expensive ones at that; it would have 
hampered them to take their information from a screen mounted inside their 
helmet, would have reduced the quality of the information they were being given. 
For non-augmented humans that was not the case. Normal PKF combat suits lacked 
faceplates and relied on cameras instead—
The man got a shot off as Trent came in on him. The scalesuit Trent was wearing 
was probably the most expensive pressure suit in human history; but there are 
absolute limits to technology, to the ability of material to shed heat. The 
superconductors buried across Trent’s suit did their best, but in the moment of 
the shot Trent’s scalesuit grew blisteringly hot at every point of contact with 
his skin. He got a hand on the laser’s barrel and clenched his fist. The suit’s 
servos did as they were told, crushed the barrel and killed the laser. Trent 
reached past the Peaceforcer, got the palm of his left hand flat against the 
door behind the man, and turned on that hand’s superconducting magnet. Now he 
had leverage, and he used it, got a grip on the Peaceforcer’s neck ring, and 
slammed the Peaceforcer’s head against the inner airlock door, and then again, 
let go of the Peaceforcer, let himself drift backward slightly, and started 
shooting.
The optical sensors on Trent’s scalesuit were built into the suit, located every 
five millimeters across the suit’s surface. It was an expensive way to work. The 
man in front of Trent had eleven holocams buried across his suit’s surface, and 
Trent shot the six mounted on the suit’s front, one after another; if the man 
wanted to try chasing him while facing backward, Trent wished him luck. He shot 
the last of the holocams facing him and grabbed the edges of the airlock and 
pulled himself back out of the lock, onto the surface of the corvette, feeling 
quite competent, thank you, a brief flash of I am really quite excessively good 
at this flickering through the back of his mind somewhere—
The PKF Elite who had chased Trent across the surface of Ceres stood on the 
surface of the hull, boots of his combat suit locked to the hull, autoshot in 
his hands, and waited until Trent looked up at him before opening fire.
The autoshots used by PKF Elite are eight-gauge shotguns firing four rounds per 
second. Only Elite use them; the kick will break a normal human’s clavicle with 
some consistency. Elite believe in overkill—
It saved Trent’s life. The first round struck him full on with sufficient force 
to blast through steel plating; it sent a spider web of cracks radiating across 
the surface of Trent’s faceplate, slammed him back into the airlock as though 
he’d been hit by twelve-fan truck, hurling him into the blind Peaceforcer behind 
him. The recoil from that round ripped the Elite’s feet from the hull. An 
autoshot set to full auto can’t fire less than four rounds; the second, third, 
and fourth rounds sent the Elite off into space at high speed.
“Downsider!” Trent screamed at the dwindling Elite. He could feel the blind 
Peaceforcer behind him, the man’s hands trying to find a grip on Trent’s 
scalesuit. “Obnoxious damn two-dimensional opposite-reaction-ignorant 
downsider!” He twisted around in the airlock, to face the blind Peaceforcer, 
jerked backward in panic as the man’s hands pawed at his cracked faceplate. He 
took hold of the Peaceforcer by his neck ring, pulled the Peaceforcer back up 
out of the airlock, up onto the ship’s hull. He held tightly to the man’s neck 
ring and hit him in the head again and again, as hard as the servos in his suit 
would let him. The waving hands gentled, the arms and legs of the featureless 
combat suit going limp. Trent pushed the man most of the way back inside the 
airlock, pulled a tube of vacuum glue free from his toolkit and blasted the 
suit’s neck ring, gluing it to the edge of the outer airlock door. He held the 
unconscious Peaceforcer in place while the glue kicked, briefly heating itself 
and then cooling, the heat radiating away into space, and then left the 
Peaceforcer there, blocking the outer airlock door and preventing any more 
Peaceforcers from coming out after him; if they couldn’t shut the outer door, 
they couldn’t open the inner door, not until everyone in the corvette got into 
p-suits. It bought Trent some desperately needed time.
Trent took a deep breath and immediately regretted it. The pain struck like a 
maser, washing over and through him. He floated just inside the airlock, holding 
on to the airlock’s edge, panting for air in short quick breaths; he slowly 
became aware of his right knee, of a throbbing pain almost as bad as the pain in 
his ribs. He tried to remember when the knee had gone out, and couldn’t—
Trent straightened his head and looked around. The corvette continued to drift 
along its last vector; if they hit the rockets again Trent had few real options; 
he would duck back down into the airlock and ride it out, hoping that the 
Vatsayama caught them. The Vatsayama could not be far away at this point, 
following his beacon.
They were drifting over the surface of Ceres. Radar gave Trent the distance, two 
hundred fourteen meters and growing slightly more distant with each second. Bad 
news; the corvette had taken Trent nearly ten klicks away from the nearest 
airlock leading down into pressure. But—
They were only four klicks away from the Temple of ‘Toons asteroid, and drawing 
closer.
First things first; from his tool belt Trent withdrew an emblade, a knife with a 
blade one molecule wide at its edge, only eighty molecules wide at the back of 
the blade, and turned it on. He might be able to go around the ship, and cut the 
cannon directly; but Trent knew the PKF inside the ship were looking for that. 
If it even looked as though he were going to try it they would boost to shake 
him free, come back around and fry him while he tried to escape on wrist and 
ankle rockets—if he left the airlock he had to do it quickly.
The corvette’s schematics and alternates popped up into Trent’s awareness. 
Provisionally good news; on roughly eighty-five percent of current corvette 
models the fuel lines, carrying monatomic hydrogen, ran only four meters back 
along the hull—and a bonus: right next to them was the optical link between the 
cockpit, engines and weapons.
On the alternates, the other fifteen percent—
On the other fifteen percent Trent was going to die trying it. On those models 
the fuel lines ran along the other side of the hull. The instant they realized 
he was out of the airlock they would boost on him, come back around and chop him 
up.
Nobody lives forever, Trent thought. But let’s try.
He pulled himself up out of the airlock and shoved himself off down the length 
of the corvette. He didn’t try to slow himself; a meter before the correct spot, 
he dropped the tip of the emblade down to touch the hull. The emblade skittered 
along the hull, and then abruptly dug in, bit all the way down to the handle. 
Slowly as he was moving, the blade’s drag still barely impeded Trent’s progress 
along the hull; he coasted another five meters before coming to a stop. If his 
luck was up he had just sliced through the main fuel lines and the optical link—
If his luck wasn’t up he was about to die.
He stood up on the hull of the ship, looked at the small bubble of rock now a 
mere three kilometers away, the Temple of ‘Toons Asteroid—
Somewhere out there in the starry black sky was the Elite who had chased him out 
of Ceres; Trent’s optics could not locate him. With any luck he’d reach the 
Asteroid, or be picked up by the Vatsayama, without ever having to see the man 
again.
Trent took a quick, shallow breath, lifted his hands and lit the wrist rockets.
He moved off from the corvette and without intending to found himself holding 
his breath. It wouldn’t take long; he probably wouldn’t even feel it if the 
cannon were still functioning—
Nobody shot him, and the corvette dwindled away behind him, drifting motionless 
through space.

While he was less than five hundred meters from the Temple of ‘Toons Asteroid, 
turned around and descending toward the Asteroid feet first, preparing to brake, 
the Elite hit him from behind at high speed.
The impact almost knocked Trent out. The Elite had not matched speeds well, or 
had not tried to; the Elite hit Trent from behind at nearly sixty kilometers an 
hour. Even the Elite was unable to keep hold of Trent; they spun away from each 
other after the impact, tumbling off through space.
He couldn’t breathe. Trent had already altered the air mix in his suit; it was 
nearly pure oxygen. He sucked oxygen in little sips, trying to fight for breath 
past the constriction in his chest. He couldn’t breathe and could barely see and 
what he did see of the universe was not promising, spinning stars and the Ceres 
and the Temple, revolving around him as he tumbled. He couldn’t see the Elite 
and didn’t know where the man was. His inskin made the correct decisions, took 
over the scalesuit and gave the commands to brake and slow the tumble. It did 
not give him much of an advantage; Trent knew that the Elite’s battle computer 
was performing the same task for him. The spinning universe slowed, stabilized—
The Elite hit him again. Trent barely saw the man before the Elite boosted into 
Trent. He hit Trent with his ankle rockets blasting, got one hand looped into 
the toolkit hanging at the side of Trent’s pressure suit, and pulled Trent in to 
him. The Elite no longer had the autoshot, but that hardly mattered: he could 
shoot directly through the gloves of the combat suit, if he had to. The suit 
would seal against death pressure at the wrist, and the Elite’s hands wouldn’t 
even notice the vacuum.
They struggled together, locked in silent dance. Trent got his left hand on the 
Elite’s free wrist, locked the servos for that hand in place, and was reaching 
for the hand holding him by the toolbelt when the Elite pulled Trent even closer 
and tried to head butt the cracked faceplate of Trent’s scalesuit. Trent jerked 
backward in a panic, and the Elite’s helmet cracked into the scalesuit’s metal 
chin. Trent pushed the Elite as far away as he could get him, and for a moment 
they hung there together, motionless, looking at one another through their 
faceplates.
The name painted on the Elite’s combat suit was Captain R. Colbert.
“I know you,” Trent started to say, and then he and PKF Elite Captain Roger 
Colbert struck the surface of the Temple of ‘Toons Asteroid, together, at 
forty-four kilometers per hour.




-3-
« ^ 
Trent did not even have to move to know that something new had broken. His left 
leg hurt, burned fire from the knee down, and that was the good news; it meant 
that his spinal cord was still in one piece.
His inskin was chattering at him, and in his own voice, too, which seemed a bit 
much. Trent ignored it, made no attempt to move and tried to figure out if he 
was going to live.
He still had air. That was good, air was good. The faceplate was still cracked, 
maybe a little worse than before, but it was holding his air in. All you could 
ask of from a faceplate, really, particularly one that had taken a round from an 
autoshot square on. Holding in the air was an excellent beginning, excellent 
ending, excellent everything.
All he could see were stars and part of Ceres, off in one corner of the 
faceplate. They’d hit on the Temple’s dark side.
Abruptly the universe came back into focus. Trent’s inskin reintegrated—
They drifted together, Trent and Elite Captain Colbert, only a few meters above 
the surface of the Temple. Trent’s scalesuit still had the left hand locked 
around Colbert’s right wrist. The Elite was not moving, which was certainly more 
good news and nothing to complain about. The Elite was as far away from Trent as 
he could get with Trent’s scalesuit locked onto his combat suit.
Broken left ankle, Trent guessed. Wrenched left knee. Dislocated right knee, and 
the ligaments, already stiffened by past injuries, had probably gone with the 
socket. Cracked ribs, sure. The scalesuit was not in much better shape than the 
protoplasm it protected: the hand locked around Colbert’s suit would not unlock, 
the faceplate was cracked, and something was wrong with the airplant. The 
airplant was the least of Trent’s worries; he expected he’d be dead or safe 
before he had to worry about foul air.
What a bad day this is turning out to be, Trent thought.
A voice came, silently, over his secure channel: Trent!
Over the general bands, at the same time, he got: “Ehhhh, what’s up, Doc?”
This is Captain Bittan. We’re locked in on your beacon and are en route to the 
Temple. E.T.A. six minutes. There’s a PKF corvette in the area, so be careful.
Laughing hurt. “Now they tell me,” Trent whispered aloud.
“Hey, Buddy. Yeah, you, pal.”
Trent calculated, blasted once with his free wrist rocket. He and Elite Captain 
Colbert rotated together, lovers holding hands.
It was Bugs. Trent had known it, from the voice, that Brooklyn accent. He stood 
there with a carrot in one hand, hovering over the Temple’s rocky surface, 
eyeing Trent skeptically. “We’re closed, pal. You and yer, uh, friend dere, you 
gotta leave.”
Command, said Trent. This is an emergency. We require immediate medical 
attention. We need to get into pressure.
The holograph of Bugs Bunny hesitated, said, “Look, pal, why cause trouble for 
yourself—” and then the voice ceased and Bugs vanished. A different voice said, 
“Do not move. Medbots from Ceres CityState are being routed to your location 
with a pressurized ambulance.”
Trent closed his eyes and floated in the pain. Jesus and Harry. Only a few more 
minutes.
The Elite moved.
The sudden blast of fear shocked Trent into awareness. He did everything with 
the servos in the scalesuit, afraid to rely on his own joints and muscles, 
pulling himself around to face the Elite, the waves of pain simply unreal, laser 
in the right scalesuit index finger coming alight, and screamed at the man, 
broadcast it on every PKF communication band, “I’m going to let your air out!”
Colbert had covered his faceplate with his free hand.
Trent stared at him through his own cracked faceplate, heart pounding. The 
Elite’s hand covered much of his faceplate, but not all of it—
Deep, jagged cracks covered every exposed centimeter of the man’s faceplate. 
Trent had never seen anything like it before, except on the suits of dead 
people, which probably described Colbert. Trent turned off his finger laser, and 
with his right hand took a firm grip on the wrist of the hand Colbert had 
covering his faceplate. In pressure, the Elite was many times stronger than 
Trent; but the servos in Trent’s scalesuit were roughly as strong as the servos 
in Colbert’s combat suit: close enough for government work.
In a very soft, French-accented voice, Colbert said in English, “Please not.”
“You ever box?” asked Trent.
“What?”
“First rule of boxing is, don’t hit the other guy’s fist with your face. It’s 
the same principle with asteroids.”
The fear in the man’s voice was palpable. “You are going to kill me, aren’t 
you?”
“No, but I might let you die, you murdering bastard. On your honor as an officer 
of the Peace Keeping Force Elite, if I save your life, will you ever kill anyone 
again?”
The silence stretched away.
“Jesus and Harry,” said Trent softly, “I will fucking leave you out here.”
“I won’t,” said Colbert finally. “I prom—”
Colbert’s faceplate blew out around his hand.
Glassite chips rattled against Trent’s own cracked faceplate. Colbert’s startled 
features appeared, staring at the hand that had been keeping in his air.
Trent knew exactly where they were: the Temple was only a kilometer wide. The 
nearest airlock into pressure was a hundred and eighty meters away.
The Elite would not need his air to receive a radio message: Trent said, “Trust 
me,” and boosted across the asteroid’s surface with the Elite in tow.
A hundred and eighty meters. Sixty meters accelerating, adjusting for the added 
burden of the strangling Elite, a flick of wrist rockets here, ankle rockets 
there; Trent could not use the wrist rocket on the hand locked to the Elite at 
all. It left him with three rockets for maneuvering, and slowed him 
considerably.
Turnover; a simpler maneuver, normally. Trent got his ankles around, faced into 
the direction of his travel, and braked. Even with the help of his inskin he and 
the Elite rolled together around their common center of gravity, threatening to 
tumble. Trent used microbursts on the rockets to keep them in line, afraid to 
use full boost, afraid it would send them into a tumble that would cause them to 
miss the airlock, and kill the Elite.
The main airlock, leading into the pressurized areas of the museum, loomed up in 
front of them and Trent knew that there was no way he could slow them in time.
His aim was good; the airlock’s front door was already open, and Trent and the 
Elite, joined at the wrist, hit it together. They did not hit hard.
Twenty kph, tops.

He opened his eyes to pressure.
His scalesuit’s helmet had been removed. Trent wondered who’d taken it off—his 
inskin must have unlocked it while he was unconscious.
They floated in the entryway leading to the main museum area, in Exhibition 
Court A: a wide area, forty meters long, nearly eighty wide, twenty high along 
the assumed vertical, with holo projectors mounted on all six surfaces.
Exhibition Court A.
Warner Brothers.
The glowpaint shone dim, tuned low for the night. Trent wondered what time it 
was, but couldn’t care enough to consult his inskin.
Elite Colbert sat facing Trent; he must have pried Trent’s hand off his wrist. 
Colbert’s helmet and gloves had been removed; the gloves rotated slowly in 
mid-air well above the Elite’s head. Colbert floated in the same horizontal 
plane with Trent, eyes half open, watching Trent.
“I took your helmet off,” said the Peaceforcer in a ragged voice. Vacuum damage 
to the vocal cords. “Your scalesuit said you were suffocating. Your airplant was 
dead.”
Colbert had not changed much in the ten years since Trent had seen him last; a 
thin man, now in his late forties, with sharp features and the glassy black eyes 
of an old model PKF. Blood dripped from his nose. He’d been upgraded slightly 
since the last time Trent had seen him; under the design in place when Colbert 
had been cyborged, Elite had had a single laser buried behind the middle knuckle 
of the right hand; they made a fist to fire it.
Colbert’s right index finger, pointed at Trent’s face, glowed red at the tip. It 
looked as though somebody had painted a tiny red oval on the tip of Colbert’s 
finger.
He had cocked his thumb above the finger, like a child making a gun.
“Should I say thank you?” Trent asked the man.
“Don’t,” Colbert whispered. “If I hadn’t made that promise to you, would you 
really have left me out there?”
Trent stared at the glowing finger. “What promise?”
“Not to kill anyone, ever again.”
“Oh, that. That’s just what I say to everyone.” Trent thought about it, and then 
told Colbert the truth. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’d have done.”
Colbert nodded. His thumb dropped down, like a hammer falling—
Trent winced. A second later he was still alive—
Colbert whispered, “Bang,” and closed his eyes.
Trent released a slow breath he hadn’t known he was holding. Red dots swam in 
front of his eyes. “Honor. It’s one of the things I despise about the PKF the 
least.”
Colbert said nothing. He floated with his eyes closed.
“How ya feelin’?”
Trent turned his head to look at Bugs. “I’ve had lots better days.”
“Sorry about dat out dere, pal.” Bugs took a bite of the carrot, chewed it 
thoughtfully. “Can’t be too careful dese days. People will do practically 
anyting to get a free pafoimance.”
“I expect.”
Bugs grinned at Trent. “Gus Allen, right? You come here a lot.”
“Right.”
“Want to see a good one while we wait for da ambulance?”
“Can you do that? I thought you were closed.”
Bugs looked indignant. “Sure. I can do anyting, Doc. I run this place. Why, I 
practically own it, practically.”
“Sure,” said Trent. “Love to.”
Bugs considered Trent. “Can you make it into the next room?”
“I don’t think so.”
Bugs nodded. “Dat’s all right. We got holos, we can do dis one anywhere.” The 
lights in the entryway dimmed to darkness, and in the black space before Trent’s 
face, a stage appeared, a smoky stage in a dimly lit night club—
“Dis is my favorite,” said Bugs. “I love dis bit.”
It was the scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Daffy Duck and Donald Duck 
playing dueling pianos. “Yes,” said Trent, “I can understand that.”
“Two ducks at once,” said Bugs happily. “Can’t do much better’n dat.”
What is it about ducks, Trent wondered idly, that invites abuse? That was 
something to think about.
He watched Daffy and Donald abuse each other, the holo of Bugs Bunny chuckling 
at his side, until the Vatsayama arrived.

Trent’s oldest and best friend, Jimmy Ramirez, met Trent at the Anarchist Free 
CityState at Vesta when the Vatsayama docked. The Vatsayama had four PKF Elite, 
and four regular Peaceforcers, in its brigs. Except for Colbert, the Elite had 
been kept unconscious since surrendering; the brig was designed to hold drunk 
SpaceFarers, not Elite cyborgs.
Trent had known Jimmy Ramirez since he had been nine years old, and Jimmy 
eleven; but there was a certain awkwardness in their greeting that had not been 
there a few years ago.
“Maybe they should call you Trent the Unkillable instead,” said Jimmy after 
Trent had cycled through into city pressure.
At thirty-one years of age Jimmy Ramirez was a roughly handsome man who had 
never had biosculpture; the bounty on him was a mere quarter million Credits, 
the same size as the bounty on Reverend Andy. The lack of biosculpture was part 
the bravado of an ex-semi-pro boxer, part practicality; nobody on Vesta was 
likely to try and kill Jimmy, and Jimmy had not left the Anarchist Free 
CityState in over two years.
Trent grinned at him and pushed his way out of the airlock gingerly. The 
corridor was empty except for Jimmy; it was what Trent had requested, a basic 
safety precaution. His left ankle was wrapped, and his left knee; his right knee 
was in a cast to keep it immobile. His ribs had been reset and pinned in place 
and wrapped. He was closer to being healed than a human of previous centuries 
would have guessed; his immune system, under direct control of his inskin, had 
him regenerating bone and tissue at a furious rate that had left him starved 
during the trip to Vesta. Still, on Earth he’d have been in a floatchair. “Nah. 
If they did that, people would start trying to kill me instead of catch me. 
Given a choice—”
“I see your point.” Jimmy held out his hand, and Trent took it for the 
handshake. He was not a man comfortable with touching other men, Jimmy Ramirez, 
not even if it was the best friend he had ever had. But the emotion in his voice 
when he spoke could not be missed. “I missed you, man. It’s been a long time.”
It had been two years, almost exactly, since Trent and Reverend Andy had left 
the Anarchist Free CityState and gone to Ceres. “How’s Mahliya?” asked Trent.
It surprised Trent that Jimmy could not even meet his eyes, even now. He looked 
off to the side. “She, well, she didn’t come to see you.”
“So I see.”
“Reverend Andy got in yesterday,” said Jimmy. He turned slightly away from 
Trent, the tension in his shoulders, in the way he carried himself, palpable. 
“Come on and we’ll get down to the conference room. Ambassador Metele and the 
PKF rep will be there in about half an hour.”
Twenty years of friendship made it the right thing to say: Trent knew exactly 
what was going on.
He said softly, “Jimmy, I love you.”
Jimmy Ramirez turned back to Trent and yelled at him with naked, built-up rage. 
“Every single time you walk into my life you fuck things up! Since I was eleven 
years old I’ve had my own life twice, both times you ran away and vanished and 
didn’t take me with you and then you just show up and everything’s supposed to 
be the way it was. You’re like this goddamn force of nature, you walk in and all 
of a sudden the world revolves around you. I’m sick of it,” he yelled into 
Trent’s face. “I was sick of it ten years ago!”
“Can I talk?”
Jimmy stared at Trent, flushed with anger. “Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.”
“I’m going back to Earth, Jimmy.”
Jimmy Ramirez’s expression changed four times in as many seconds and finally 
lapsed into emptiness. “Oh, no.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorrier than you’ll probably ever believe,” said Trent quietly. 
“But it’s time.”

Unification Ambassador Frances Metele was not French; he was actually a 
Pan-African. Once that would have been surprising; in the days following the 
Unification War, the French had dominated the Unification. They were the only 
major industrial country to escape the Unification essentially undamaged, and in 
the years following the Unification had become, by a wide margin, the most 
powerful country within the Unification of Earth. But the Unification was over 
sixty years old, and change had come to it, for good and bad. The French were 
still powerful—nearly a third of all Peaceforcers were French, and all Elite—but 
the rest of the power structure had evolved, sometimes without bloodshed. The 
Ministry of Population Control was almost fifteen percent Russian; there were 
more Russians than French in the Ministry. Even the last two Secretary Generals, 
Eddore and Amnier, had come from Occupied America.
The exchange of PKF for SpaceFarers went quickly.
Trent, Reverend Andy, and, representing the SpaceFarer’s Collective, Captain 
Bittan, sat across the conference table from Ambassador Metele and the rather 
elderly PKF Elite Commissionaire Rouen. Rouen wore a laser-proofed glove over 
his right hand, and the laser buried in that hand, a glove that could not be 
removed until Trent told the glove to let go. No point in tempting the man, 
sitting there in the same room with the Unification’s greatest enemy.
Metele spoke in fluent, though heavily accented, French.
“As I believe our offices negotiated, we are turning over the crew and contents 
of the SpaceFarer vessel Roderick McBan, caught attempting to smuggle sensables 
into Unification Luna. Further we are releasing … well, the list is rather long, 
quite a considerable sum … of SpaceFarer Collective assets frozen by Unification 
courts in the last year or so.”
“And in return,” said Bittan, “you get eight of your murdering officers back. 
Only slightly the worse for wear.” Her glare was a thing to behold. “The 
Collective Board made this call; I voted against it. I wanted to execute your 
Peaceforcers. But it gives me great pleasure to deliver this further message to 
you sons of bitches: you killed nineteen pacifist Krishnas and Buddhists at 
Gandhi CityState while trying to get at Trent the Uncatchable. If we ever see 
another Elite task force outside the orbit of Earth, ever, we will kill every 
flaming Peaceforcer involved. Every one.”
Elite Commissioner Rouen bestowed a wintry smile upon her. “Captain Bittan, that 
would be considered an act of war by the Unification.”
“Well, I think this is an unproductive—” began Ambassador Metele.
Sidney Bittan’s smile was very nearly as glacial as Rouen’s: it performed the 
impressive feat of matching her glare. “Tell me about it.”

Trent and Reverend Andy sat together with one another in the conference room 
after the others had left.
“I feel sorry for that Elite, Colbert.”
Trent said in surprise, “Really? Why?”
“There’s something to be said for an honorable death. That man’s going to have a 
hard time of it, back on Earth.”
“There’s nothing dishonorable about living.”
“You know that, and I know that,” said Reverend Andy. “But I doubt they know 
that.” He seemed weary. “What do you think will happen?”
It was clear he was changing the subject. Trent said, “Jimmy? He’ll come.”
Reverend Andy blinked, looked suddenly impatient. “Of course Jimmy will come. 
He’s a good boy.”
“The war, then. Reverend … Jesus and Harry, I wish I knew. There’s a good chance 
of it. They want to fight. They all want to fight. There’s a lot of hatred 
there, Reverend.”
“How many billions die?”
“Not even my inskin can count that high.”
“Can we stop it?”
“If we don’t die?” Trent said slowly, “Maybe. Maybe.”
“You can’t love life too much,” said Reverend Andy. “Gives the bastards a hold 
on you.”
“I’m tired of running,” said Trent. He had never meant anything more in his 
life. “And I’m sick to death of waiting.”
“Amen to that,” said Reverend Andy with finality. “Let’s go home.”

He called and she said to come over. Trent knew it was a mistake when he went to 
see her; but he did it anyway.
Mahliya Kutura was twenty-nine. For eleven years now she had been the most 
famous musician in the System, the leader of a renaissance in the musical arts 
that had lain dormant for most of the first half century following the 
Unification. In two albums, Music to Move To in 2069, and Street Songs in 2078, 
she had created five hours of some of the most painfully beautiful music Trent 
had ever heard.
There was not a song on her first album, Music to Move To, that Trent did not 
know by heart.
Jimmy Ramirez was gone when Trent arrived at the cylinder Jimmy and Mahliya 
shared. A different cylinder than the one Trent had lived in with Mahliya; at 
some obscure level he found himself relieved by that.
She met him at the airlock and led him into a sitting room. The cylinder was a 
small one; Trent guessed the gravity at about a quarter gee. If they’d spun the 
cylinder much faster the Coriolis would have been unpleasant.
The sitting room was dimly lit, as the corridor leading from the airlock had 
been. Mahliya called up the lights as they entered the room, turned around and 
looked at Trent. She appeared much as he remembered her, blond hair hanging down 
behind her in a long sweep, the sculpted muscles, body hardened by hours of 
workouts in high gravity gyms. Her eyes were blue this time, rather than brown; 
an odd dissonance amidst the familiarity. She wore an oddly formal gray silk 
gown and her voice was brisk. “Well, Peter Pan. You look like hell, lost boy.”
Under gravity, even the quarter gee, Trent’s ankle and knees throbbed. “Peter 
Pan got his ass kicked.” He studied her. “You look good.”
“I know,” she said flatly. “I work at it. Command, lights down.” The room’s 
glowpaint gentled into dimness. “That’s about as much of you as I feel like 
looking at. I’m not sure why I agreed to see you.”
“You mind if I sit down? I ache pretty much everywhere.”
“Don’t get too comfortable.”
“I guess that’s a yes.” He lowered himself into one of the soft chairs facing 
her. His knees cracked loudly as they bent. “How have you been?”
She sat facing him. “Street Songs did extremely well.” She’d released it not 
long after Trent left. “Nine years since the last one, they were saying I didn’t 
have anything left to say. It was … kind of nice to show the critics they were 
wrong.”
“I can’t imagine you cared.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I bet. Not everybody’s as enlightened as you are, Peter Pan. 
Or at least, not everybody does as good an imitation. You ever listen to it?”
“The album?”
“Jesus. Yeah, the album. Do you ever listen to it?”
“Once,” said Trent.
“Oh.” For some reason, the response seemed to leave her at a loss.
“It was enough.”
“You know … when we got the news, about the Elite strike force hitting Ceres … 
they said you were dead. They said the Peaceforcers got you. It was all over the 
NewsBoards for a while.”
“They were wrong.”
Mahliya leaned forward and said fiercely, “I was glad when I heard it. I was 
ready for you to be dead. It was a lot easier.”
“Mahliya … I don’t know what to say to you to make it right.”
“That’s because words are lies. Isn’t that your phrase, lost boy? ‘Language is a 
lie.’ And you’re a bullshitter and I don’t care what you have to say to me.” In 
the dimness he could not see her eyes, sunk in pools of shadow. “You don’t love 
me, do you? You never loved me.”
“I do. I love you, Mahliya. I loved you then.”
It hurt Trent to hear the hatred in her voice. “Oh, yes. Of course, I 
understand. You’re so enlightened, you love everyone. That’s so much safer than 
loving just one person, isn’t it?”
Trent took a slow breath. “Mahliya—”
She made her decision, right then; he saw it happen. “Don’t talk to me anymore, 
okay?” She stood, quivering tense, features barely visible even to Trent’s genie 
eyes, and pointed. “Door’s that way. Use it. Don’t come see me again—and I do 
mean ever.”
He came to his feet, slowly, wincing. “All right. I’ll go. Maybe I shouldn’t 
have come. But for whatever it’s worth … Mahliya … I’m sorry.”
She was quiet, looking at him, lower lip quivering visibly, and then exploded. 
“Damn it, damn it, damn it! Why did you have to say that to me?”
“I never tried to hurt you. It was the last—”
“You’re taking Jimmy away from me—” Her voice broke. “Damn you, Trent, you never 
loved me!”
Trent heard himself say, again, helplessly, “I’m sorry,” as though saying it 
over and over again would make her believe it true. He took one step toward her, 
and then she was in his arms, her face against his shoulder, holding on to him 
with a strength born of fear.
Her voice was muffled. “Oh, God, Trent, you’re going to die, they’re going to 
kill you, don’t you know that?”
Trent stroked the long strands of hair that ran down her back, felt the smell 
and touch of her as though it were a thing he would never know again. She cried 
silently, standing motionless, the tears moving down her cheeks as though an 
artifact that had nothing to do with her—
Trent said, “Yeah. They’re going to try.”

It was the second track on Street Songs. She’d written it two years ago, in 
2078, the day after Trent had left her.
She’d called it Many Lives.
I killed my love to set him free
For fear I’d cause him pain
I killed him—we were very young
And now I’m old again
We lived a life together once
And I was so afraid
For every life I’ve lived, I’ve died
For every life I’ve made
I killed my love to set him free
He wasn’t hard to kill
He ran into another life
I guess he’s running still

The End