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nova
Ke i t h R . A . D e C a n d i d o
POCKET STAR BOOKS
New York London Toronto Syndey Tarsonis
“Flick this noise.” Two-Bit
lunged at Nova.
She pushed him back with her mind, sending him
head over heels to the back of the lobby.
“Stay down.” She was practically pleading now.
“If you don’t get up, I won’t hurt you.”
Poppo, realizing that there was no way for him
to win this, dropped his weapon and held up his
arms. “Yeah, okay. Crap, Fagin ain’t payin’ me
’nough for this.”
Two-Bit wasn’t as bright as Poppo, and couldn’t
see past the fact that a teenaged curve knocked him
on his ass without even touching him. He got to his
feet and charged again.
Nova knocked Poppo into him and they both fell
to the floor.
His anger now palpable, Two-Bit whipped out
his P100 and placed the muzzle right in Poppo’s
ear. “You flickin’ with me, stud? Huh?”
“I didn’t do nothin’, I swear, Two-Bit, that curve
did it, I’m tellin’ you, I—”
“Don’t do it!” Nova cried, realizing that Two-Bit
intended to pull the trigger.
She wasn’t fast enough to stop it.
nova
Ke i t h R . A . D e C a n d i d o
POCKET STAR BOOKS
New York London Toronto Syndey Tarsonis
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
A Pocket Star Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and
incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2006 by Blizzard Entertainment
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue
of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 1-4165-6006-8
POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of
Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
introduction
I’m very proud of this book. I’m especially proud of
what it represents. Sometimes, amidst the general
insanity of the video game business, you just have to
latch on to a good idea and follow it wherever it leads.
The game StarCraft: Ghost, on hiatus as of the time
of this writing, has been in development for almost as
long as the PS2 and other console platforms have
been on store shelves. Designing and building this
game was a pretty crazy process. While there were
many reasons for the game’s development taking as
long as it did, one key design element always stood
out and gave us inspiration to keep pushing onward:
Ghosts are very, very cool.
These nearly superhuman agents who stalk unseen
across raging battlefields were a major component of
the StarCraft mythos. Not only were these units fun to
play with, but they seemed to have a certain mystique
that made them stand out amidst all the other (bigger
and more colorful) units in the game—I personally
think it was the stunning voice-work. While we knew that
v i I N T R O D U C T I O N
a Ghost would make the perfect focal point for a con-
sole game, we were faced with a lot of options about
how to bring our new Ghost character to life.
A lot of folks thought it would have been cool to use
Sarah Kerrigan, arguably StarCraft’s most famous Ghost,
and have the game focus on her origins. While that
could have been a killer direction (pardon the pun), we
all know how Kerrigan’s story ends. Ultimately, we
decided to create a new character whose origins—and
more importantly, whose destiny—wasn’t yet set in
stone.
Thus, young Nova was born. Her personality and
visual design were the result of a lot of hard work by a
talented group of people. The spunky, lethal Nova was
one of the first characters we had ever created that
would take center stage in her own game and really
anchor StarCraft: Ghost as a new part of the StarCraft
setting. Needless to say, we were immensely proud of
how she turned out.
I’m very pleased that we’re finally able to tell her
story and show the world just who this enigmatic
young character is—and what events molded her into
one of the most dangerous assassins in the universe.
Of course, this take would not have been possible
without the amazing talents of Keith DeCandido.
Keith seemed to have a deep affinity for this charac-
ter, and he not only brought out all the dark, disturb-
ing nuances of Nova’s past—but provided a fresh new
look at the gritty underbelly of the StarCraft setting as
well. I can’t imagine this story in anyone else’s hands.
I N T R O D U C T I O N v i i
So, while we might not be seeing StarCraft: Ghost as
a video game anytime soon, we will definitely be fol-
lowing Nova’s continued adventures through novels
just like this one.
Enjoy! I hope y’all dig it!
Chris Metzen
Vice President, Creative Development
Blizzard Entertainment
May 2006
To the staff of the
No. 1 Merrion Street Pub
in Dublin, Ireland,
who kept the pints coming
when I needed them . . .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As with my Warcraft novel Cycle of Hatred, the most
thanks have to go to Chris Metzen of Blizzard Games.
I’ve worked with dozens of licensors in my career, and
none of them can match Chris’s enthusiasm, energy,
and creativity. The usual thanks also to editor Marco
Palmieri, publisher Scott Shannon, agent Lucienne
Diver, and GraceAnne Andreassi DeCandido, my
ever-reliable first reader.
A lot of what is done with telepathy in this novel is
influenced by two seminal works of my misspent
youth: X-Men comics, which were a constant compan-
ion throughout my teen years, and the novel The
Demolished Man, which I read as a seventeen-year-old,
and which blew my brain out one ear and stuffed it
back in through my nostrils. So a big tip of the ol’
fedora must go to Chris Claremont and the late Alfred
Bester. Thanks also to fellow StarCraft novelist Jeff
Grubb, from whose Liberty’s Crusade I, uh, borrowed
the news report in Chapter 3.
Also thanks to the various locales in three different
x i i A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
countries where this book was written, including the
Corus Hotel in Glasgow, Scotland; the No. 1 Merrion
Street Pub and the Mont Clare Hotel in Dublin, Ireland;
the Duane/Morwood estate in Grangecon, Ireland; the
Hyatt Regency Atlanta in Georgia; assorted planes,
trains, stations, and airports to and from those places;
and the usual café and Starbucks in New York City, two
locales where a great deal of my writing gets done these
days.
The usual thanks must go to the Forebearance (for
perpetual encouragement), the Geek Patrol (for the
usual goofiness), the noble folk of CGAG (for helpful
critique), Kyoshi Paul and everyone at the dojo (for
beating my body and spirit into shape), and the
Malibu gang, the Elitist Bastards, the Inkwell After
Hours folks, and the Novelscribes loonies (for all the
wonderful online conversations).
And finally thanks to them that live with me, both
human and feline, for constant encouragement.
HISTORIAN’S NOTE
This novel takes place in the three years leading up to
the StarCraft: Ghost game. Much of it is roughly simul-
taneous with the novel StarCraft: Liberty’s Crusade by
Jeff Grubb.
PROLOGUE
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
AS SOON AS SHE FELT CLIFF NADANER’S MIND,
Nova knew that she could destroy her family’s mur-
derer with but a thought.
She’d spent days working her way through the
humid jungles of the smallest of the ten continents of
Tyrador VIII. Funny how I tried so hard to avoid this
planet’s twin, and now I wind up here, she had thought
when the drop-pod left her smack in the middle of the
densest part of the jungle—before the rebels had a
chance to lock onto the tiny pod, or so her superiors
on the ship in high orbit insisted. The eighth planet in
orbit of Tyrador was locked in a gravitational dance
with the ninth planet, similar to that of a regular
planet and a moon, but both worlds were of sufficient
size to sustain life. They also both had absurd
extremes of climate, thanks to their proximity to each
other—if Nova were to travel only a few kilometers
south, farther from Tyrador VIII’s equator, the tem-
perature would lower thirty degrees, the humidity
2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
would all but disappear, and she’d need to adjust her
suit’s temperature control in the other direction.
For now, though, the formfitting white-with-navy-
blue-trim suit—issued by Director Bick at the Ghost
Academy when her training period had come to an
end—was set to keep her cool, which it did, up to a
point. The suit covered every inch of her flesh save
her head. The circuitry woven throughout the suit’s
fabric might interfere with Nova’s telepathy, and since
her telepathy was pretty much the entire reason why
she was training to become a Ghost, it wouldn’t do to
interfere with that. This suit wasn’t quite the complete
model she would be using when she finished this final
assignment and officially became a Ghost—for one
thing, the circuitry that allowed the suit to go into
stealth mode had yet to be installed. Once that hap-
pened, Nova would be able to move about virtually
undetected—certainly invisible to plain sight and
most passive scans.
But she wasn’t ready for that yet. First she had to
accomplish this mission.
The suit’s design meant that sweat dripped into her
eyes and plastered the bangs of her blond hair to her
forehead. The ponytail she kept the rest of her hair in
tugged on her skull like a heavy damp rope hanging
off the back of her head. At least the rest of my body is
comfortable.
The suit’s stealth mode would probably have been
redundant in this jungle in any case. The flora of
Tyrador VIII was so thick, and the humid air so hazy,
N O V A 3
she only knew what was a meter in front of her from
the sensor display on the suit’s wrist unit.
Intelligence Section had told her that Cliff Nadaner
was headquartered somewhere in the jungle on this
planet. They weren’t completely sure where—Nova
had already learned that the first half of IS’s designa-
tion was a misnomer—but they had intercepted sev-
eral communiqués that their cryptographers insisted
used the code tagged for Nadaner.
In the waning days of the Confederacy, Nadaner
was one of many agitators who spoke out against the
Old Families and the Council and the Confederacy in
general. He was far from the only one who did so.
The most successful, of course, was the leader of the
Sons of Korhal, Arcturus Mengsk—in fact, he was so
successful that he actually did overthrow the Con-
federacy of Man and replaced it with the Terran
Dominion, of which he was now the emperor and
supreme leader. Nadaner did somewhat more poorly
in the field of achieving political change, though he
was very skilled at causing trouble and killing people.
Days of plowing through the jungle had revealed
nothing. All Nova was picking up was random back-
ground radiation, plus signals from the various satel-
lites in orbit of the planet, holographic signals from
various wild animals that scientists had tagged for
study in their natural habitat, and faint electromag-
netic signatures from the outer reaches of this conti-
nent or one of the other nine more densely populated
ones. All of it matched existing Tyrador VIII records
4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
and therefore could be discarded as not belonging to
the rebels. And now she was reading a completely
dead zone about half a kilometer ahead, at the
extreme range of the sensors in her suit. This is starting
to get frustrating.
She had completely lost track of time. Had it been
four days? Five? Impossible to tell, since this planet’s
fast orbit gave it a shorter day than what she was
accustomed to on Tarsonis, with its twenty-seven-
hour day. She supposed she could have checked the
computer built into her suit, but for some reason she
thought that would be cheating.
Let’s see, I’ve been eating pretty steadily, more or less on
track for three meals a day, and I’ve gone through fourteen
of the ninety ration packs they gave me, so that makes—
Then, suddenly, it hit her. A dead zone.
She adjusted the sensors from passive scan to active
scan. Sure enough, they didn’t pick up a thing—
nothing from the satellites, nothing from the animal
tags, nothing from the cities farther south.
Nothing at all.
Nova smiled. She cast her mind outward gently
and surgically—not forcefully and sloppily, the way
she always had back in the Gutter—and sought out
the mind of the man who ordered the death of her
family.
Nadaner had not actually committed the murder
himself. That was done by a man named Gustavo
McBain, a former welder who was working a con-
struction contract on Mar Sara when the Confederates
N O V A 5
ordered the destruction of Korhal IV—an action that
killed McBain’s entire family, including his pregnant
wife Daniella, their daughter Natasha, and their
unborn son. McBain had sworn that the Confederacy
of Man would pay for that action. However, instead of
joining Mengsk—himself the child of a victim of
Korhal IV’s bombardment with nuclear weapons—he
hooked up with Cliff Nadaner’s merry band of agita-
tors.
Nova learned all that when she killed McBain.
Telepathy made it impossible for a killer not to know
her victim intimately. McBain’s last thoughts were of
Daniella, Natasha, and his never-named son.
Now, three years later, having come to the end of
her Ghost training, her “graduation” assignment,
which came from Emperor Mengsk himself, was to be
dropped in the middle of Tyrador VIII’s jungle and to
seek, locate, and destroy the rest of Nadaner’s group.
Mengsk had even less patience for rebel groups than
the government his own rebel group had overthrown.
Within five minutes, she found the thoughts she
was looking for. It wasn’t hard, once she had a general
location to focus on, especially since they were the
first higher-order thoughts she’d come across since
the drop-pod opened up and disintegrated. (Couldn’t
risk Dominion tech getting into the wrong hands,
after all. If she completed her mission, they’d send a
ship to extract her, since then they could land a ship
without risk, as Nadaner’s people would be dead. If
she didn’t complete it, she’d be dead, and her suit was
6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
designed to do to her what was done to the drop-pod
if her lifesigns ceased. Couldn’t risk Dominion
telepaths getting into the wrong hands, either, dead or
alive.)
It was Nadaner and a dozen of his associates, but
their thoughts were focused on Nadaner—those that
were focused at all. The man himself was chanting
something. No, singing. He was singing a song, and
half his people were drunk, no doubt secure in the
knowledge that no one would find them in their jun-
gle location, with its dampening field blocking any
signals. It probably never occurred to them that an
absence of signals would be just as big a signpost.
Complacent people are easier to kill, she thought, par-
rotting back one of Sergeant Hartley’s innumerable
one-sentence life lessons.
She was to kill them from a distance, using tele-
pathy. Yes, her training was complete, and she should
have been able to take down Nadaner and his people
physically with little difficulty—especially since half of
them were three sheets to the wind—but that wasn’t
her assignment.
The mission was to get close enough to feel their
minds clearly and then kill them psionically.
For the next two hours, Nova ran through the jun-
gle, getting closer to her goal. After her “graduation,”
the suit would be able to increase her speed, allowing
her to run this same distance in a quarter of the time,
but that circuitry hadn’t been installed, either.
The hell with the mission. That slike ordered McBain and
N O V A 7
the rest of his little gang of killers to murder my family. I
want to see his face when I kill him.
Soon, she reached the dead zone. She could hear
Nadaner’s thoughts as clearly as if he’d been whisper-
ing in her ear. He’d finished singing and was now
telling a story of one of his exploits in the Confederate
Marines before he got fed up, quit, and started his
revolution, a story that Nova knew was about ninety
percent fabrication. He had been in the Marines, and
he had been on Antiga Prime once, but that was
where his story’s intersection with reality ended.
With just one thought, she could kill him. End him
right there. You don’t need to see his face, you can feel his
mind! You’ll know he’s dead with far more surety than if
you just saw him, his eyes rolling up in his head, blood leak-
ing out of his eyes and ears and nose from the brain hemor-
rhaging. And it’s not like you haven’t done it before. Kill
him now.
Suddenly, she realized what day it was. Fourteen
packs, which means the better part of three days.
Which means today’s my eighteenth birthday.
It’s been three years to the day since Daddy told me I was
coming to this very star system.
She shook her head, even as Nadaner finished this
story and started another one, which held even less
truth than the first. A tear ran slowly down Nova’s
cheek.
It was such a good party, too. . . .
PART ONE
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
chapter 1
CONSTANTINO TERRA HAD LONG SINCE GIVEN UP
throwing surprise parties for his daughter. She always
knew they were coming and ruined the surprise. In
retrospect, he thought, that should’ve been the first clue.
But other evidence had also presented itself, and soon
Constantino realized that his darling Nova was a
telepath.
Were he someone else, Constantino would have
been forced to give in to the inevitable and turn his
daughter over to the military for proper training. But
the Terras were one of the Old Families, descended
from the commanders of the original colony ships that
had brought humanity to this part of space from Earth
generations ago. The Old Families did not turn their
daughters over to anyone they didn’t want to.
Her mother agreed. There was little else that
Constantino and Annabella Terra agreed upon, not
that they needed to agree on anything save that they
remain married. Like most Old Family marriages,
1 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
theirs was based on financial expediency, a union of
two fortunes that would work better together than
apart, and would also produce worthy heirs. Those
heirs were created by an injection of Constantino’s
seed into Bella’s body, thus saving him the distasteful
task of sleeping with the wretched woman. He had his
mistress for that, just as she had her jig, as was proper.
Constantino had heard whispers among the servants
that Bella was growing tired of her jig and seeking out
other household employees for her sexual sport. But
then, he’d also gotten word of similar rumors regard-
ing him and his beloved Eleftheria, and he would
never betray her trust. The mistress-husband bond—
and the jig-wife bond, for that matter—was far too
strong and important to the household for him to
consider sundering it.
Instead of his daughter’s spending her fifteenth
birthday in some government facility being trained to
use her psionic talents as a tool against the alien
threats the Confederacy now faced, she was instead
being thrown the finest party since . . . well, since the
last time one of the Old Families’ children had a birth-
day. It was a competition, in many ways, with each
family throwing a more and more outlandish celebra-
tion to prove that they loved their children the most.
As a result, the domed roof of the penthouse atop
the Terra Skyscraper was decked out as never before.
The dome had been polarized to provide an optimum
view of the city of Tarsonis without interference from
the sun. (The Terra family’s building was one of the
N O V A 1 3
few that had a virtually unobstructed view, matched
only by that of Kusinis Tower and, of course, the
Universal News Network Building.) A massive chan-
delier, six meters wide, hung in midair atop the dome,
supported by state-of-the-art antigrav units guaran-
teed not to fail. (The guarantee was that Constantino
would drive the manufacturer to complete ruin if it
did fail.) Food from all across the Confederacy was
laid out, as expected, but he actually managed to get
his hands on Antigan buffalo meat and a limited sup-
ply of Saran pepper slices. The price for the latter two
items was higher than the aggregate salaries of any
ten of Constantino’s employees, but it was worth it for
his little girl.
All the important people were there—at least three
representatives from each Old Family on Tarsonis, and
a few from offworld—and UNN had dutifully sent all its
gossip reporters, and even one of its news reporters, a
woman named Mara Greskin. Constantino smiled at
her presence. She must have cracked off somebody to get
assigned to cover a birthday party. Usually such occasions
were fodder only for gossip columns; news reporters
considererd such assignments beneath them, which
was why Greskin simply had to have annoyed some-
body important—or gotten in UNN editor-in-chief
Handy Anderson’s doghouse.
Then again, if they’re covering this, it means one less
paranoid story about how aliens are going to wipe us out. It
seemed all UNN was talking about these days were
the horrors in the Sara system and the emergence of a
1 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
strange alien threat. Constantino knew more than
UNN did, of course—for example, that there were, in
fact, two alien species fighting a war that the human
race got caught in the middle of—which only made
him worry more, especially since Arcturus Mengsk
and his band of butchers in the Sons of Korhal were
using the invasion as a propaganda tool to stir upris-
ings on planets from here to Antiga Prime.
In the face of all this, Constantino threw a party. It
was, after all, his daughter’s birthday, and he was
damned if he’d let Mengsk or alien scum distract him
from that.
Nova was becoming a woman. According to the
girl’s nurse, she had started what the nurse insisted on
calling “her monthly time”—as if Constantino wasn’t
familiar with the female anatomy and its functions—
and she had started to develop a woman’s chest. Soon,
the prepubescent disdain for the opposite sex would
give way to hormonal imperatives. Which means an
endless array of unsuitable suitors for my little girl.
In truth, Constantino was looking forward to it.
There was nothing quite so satisfying as watching a
young man trying desperately to impress one of the
most powerful men in the Confederacy and failing
miserably, that failure compounded by Constantino’s
holding him to an impossible standard. He’d already
gone through it with Nova’s older sister, Clara—now
engaged to young Milo Kusinis—and was looking for-
ward to it again with Nova.
Now, Nova stood in the center of the domed space,
N O V A 1 5
wearing a beautiful pink dress that had a ruffled neck,
the white ruffles opening like a flower beneath her
chin, a formfitting top, and a huge hoopskirt that
extended outward half a meter in all directions and
came to the floor. She walked with such grace and
ease that the skirt’s hiding of her feet made it seem as
if she were floating when she walked. (Other girls
achieved the same effect by attaching gliders to their
shoes, unseen under the skirt’s voluminous mass, but
Nova, the darling girl, had always felt that to be cheat-
ing.) She wore very little makeup, simply enough to
highlight her green eyes; her smooth skin needed no
cosmetic enhancements, and so far the ravages of
adolescence had not blemished her visage.
Her normally straight blond hair had been curled
for the occasion and piled atop her head elegantly.
Constantino made a mental note to apologize to
Rebeka. He had doubted the hairdresser’s word when
she said Nova would look marvelous with curls; he
should have known better after all these years. After
all, Rebeka had made even Bella look presentable on
more than one occasion.
All around them, the partygoers were partaking of
the food on the tables, the servants ably refilling any
plates that were in danger of emptying. The punch
bowl remained three-quarters full no matter how
much of it was imbibed—and, it seemed, old Garth
Duke was determined to imbibe most of it himself;
Constantino made a mental note to have Boris keep
an eye on him in case he started undressing again—
1 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
and the empty glasses and plates were whisked away.
As ever, Constantino had the most efficient servants.
If he ever had an inefficient one, he didn’t have one
for long.
There were those who expressed confusion at his
employing of human servants—most of whom were
members of the younger, newer rich, the so-called
bootstrappers who had made their fortune during the
boom a decade earlier. Robots, they pointed out, were
more efficient, and you only had to pay for them
once. Constantino generally just smiled and said he
was old-fashioned, but the truth was, he owned Servo
Servants, the largest robotics company in Confederate
space, and he knew that you paid for them a lot more
than once. Planned obsolescence and sufficiently inef-
ficient mechanisms that required regular repairs were
what kept SS in business.
Besides, he preferred to keep people employed. The
more he employed, the fewer were infesting the bow-
els of the Gutter.
Nova glided over to him. “Daddy, you’re always
going on about how wonderful the servants are—but
you never let them partake.”
“I beg your pardon?” Naturally, if he was thinking
about the servants, Nova would know that, even if
only subconsciously.
“They’re people too, Daddy—and they work so
hard. Don’t you think they deserve some of this fan-
tastic Antigan buffalo a lot more than, say, him?”
She pointed over at Garth Duke, who had appar-
N O V A 1 7
ently decided that the punch bowl was a wading pool,
and was taking off his boots. Constantino looked
around, but Boris was already making a beeline
before Garth could make a scene. Or, rather, more of
one.
“Well?”
Turning back to look at his daughter, he found
himself unable to resist her pleading green eyes. It
wasn’t the first time she had begged an indulgence for
the servants, and she usually got what she asked for—
a weakness of her father’s that she hadn’t taken
nearly as much advantage of as she might have.
Eleftheria said once that her telepathy probably
allowed her to think of the servants as people rather
than servants, since they had thoughts just like every-
one else.
Nova herself didn’t know this, of course. She sim-
ply imagined herself to be a very perceptive young
woman.
He reached across to cup her cheek in his hand.
“My darling girl—you know I can deny you nothing.”
He turned around and activated the mic built into the
top button of his suit jacket.
Amplifiers placed discreetly throughout the room
carried his voice over the partygoing din. “May I have
everyone’s attention, please?” As the room started to
slowly quiet down, he grabbed two glasses of wine off
the tray of a passing server and handed one to his
daughter. “Today is the fifteenth birthday of my beau-
tiful daughter, November Annabella Terra. She is the
1 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
last of our children to reach that age, and indeed the
last of our children.” He tipped his glass toward where
Bella stood, her arm in that of her jig, and she was
kind enough to return the gesture and provide an
almost-genuine smile. “But being younger than her
sister Clara or her brother Zebediah does not make
her inferior or any less loved. Indeed, the day she was
born was one of the four happiest days of my life, the
other three being when her siblings were born—and,
of course, when Continental went out of business,
granting me a monopoly on holocams.”
Ripples of laughter at the admittedly mediocre joke
spread throughout the room. Nova just glared at her
father, apparently not appreciating the humor. Or
maybe she just didn’t like it when Constantino used
her full name.
“In any case, because that day made me so happy,
it pleases me more than I can say that all you good
people are here today to celebrate that day’s anniver-
sary. So I ask you all to raise your glasses and wish my
darling Nova a happy birthday.”
Everyone in the room did so, and the words were
spoken raggedly throughout. Nova smiled and her
cheeks flushed.
After everyone had drunk, Nova looked at Con-
stantino and said, “Daddy!”
“Of course, my dear. And now, I’d like to ask
everyone to please step back from the food and drink
tables for a time. My household servants have worked
hard for weeks to get this party ready, and have
N O V A 1 9
worked even harder to keep things running smoothly
now that it’s begun. So as a reward and to show my
great appreciation, I invite all the servants to come
forward and partake of this magnificent spread.”
Several chuckles spread throughout, and a smatter-
ing of applause. Constantino noticed that most of the
patrons were less amused. In particular, Bella looked
like someone had poisoned her drink. And many of
the patrons looked unhappy at having to move aside
for servants.
Nova, however, beamed at him with a radiant
smile. Turning around, he saw that Eleftheria was
favoring him with a similar smile. Those were the
only two reactions Constantino cared about.
A moment later, Zeb came sidling up to his father.
“Dad, did you have to use my full name?”
Nova rolled her eyes. “Don’t be such a baby, Zeb.”
“Oh, that’s funny. I suppose you liked him calling
you ‘November,’ huh, little sister?”
“I’m fifteen years old, and I’m taller than you.”
Constantino chuckled again. “He’s got you there,
son.” Nova was already taller than both her siblings,
and almost as tall as her father, and he doubted she
was done growing yet.
Zeb shrugged it off. “That’s just the clothes.”
“You just keep telling yourself that, ‘big’ brother.”
“Mr. Terra!”
Constantino whirled around to see Lia Emmanuel.
Constantino himself was the president of every one of
Terra’s business ventures, with the individual day-to-
2 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
day left to assorted vice presidents. Lia was the vice
president in charge of the vice presidents, as it were,
and Constantino counted on her as his right hand in
all matters relating to his many and varied businesses.
She was dressed in the same suit she always wore.
Lia had twelve identical suits, and wore a different
one each day, laundering them when time permitted
or when twelve days passed, whichever came first.
Constantino doubted she owned any other clothes—
which was a pity, as she was the only one in the room
in business attire. Everyone else was wearing a much
more celebratory brand of formalwear.
Moving away from the sibling argument—which
would probably keep going for at least another five to
ten minutes—Constantino approached his vice presi-
dent. “Lia—haven’t seen you all night. Where’ve
you—?”
“Sir, I’m sorry, we need to talk.” Lia stared at him
intently with her piercing brown eyes. Her curly
brown hair was tied sloppily atop her head, as if she
just wanted to get it out of her way as quickly as pos-
sible. “In private.”
Constantino sighed. “Why didn’t you simply call me?”
Lia’s stare intensified into a glare. “Because you
turned your fone off and left it in your bedroom, sir.”
“Imagine that,” Constantino said dryly. “You’d
think I was throwing a party that I didn’t want inter-
rupted by business.”
Now Lia winced. “I’m sorry, sir, truly, and I wouldn’t
have interrupted Nova’s party normally, but—”
N O V A 2 1
Again, Constantino sighed. It was true, Lia would
never have been so gauche as to have business
intrude upon family like this unless it was urgent. “All
right, all right, what is it?”
“Rebels, sir. They’ve attacked and destroyed the
plant in Palombo Valley.”
Constantino blinked. “Destroyed? The entire plant?”
“Effectively, sir. I believe some of the structure is
still intact, but the plant is functionally useless at pres-
ent. This will set back production of the 878 and 901
hovercars and especially the 428 hoverbikes by—”
Waving it off, Constantino said, “I don’t care about
that right now, Lia—how many people—?”
“The entire night shift, sir. The ID tag scans of the
wreckage matches all but three of the night-shift
employees, and of those three, one was on vacation
and the other two called in sick. Everyone else is
dead. DNA verification will take another hour, but
we’re pretty sure—”
“I want all three of them investigated—find out if
they’re collaborators.” Constantino let out a breath
through his teeth, trying to rein in his temper. It
wouldn’t do to cause a scene here, especially with so
much of his competition present.
“That’s already under way, sir. The attack was such
that it had to be an inside job. The bombs used were
very specifically targeted to the areas of the plant that
either would be most densely populated during the
night shift or would have the equipment that would
be most expensive to replace.”
2 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Knowing this was a stupid question—who else
would do this sort of thing, after all?—Constantino
nonetheless had to ask, “We’re sure it’s rebels?”
Lia nodded. “Completely sure, sir. Mengsk did one
of his pirate broadcasts at the same time as the attack,
condemning the Old Families in general and you in
particular as symptomatic of the decay that has
gripped—”
Again, he interrupted, not caring about Mengsk’s
propaganda. “All right, fine. Keep on it, and prepare a
full report. I’ll read it when the party’s over.” He
sighed. “Dammit. This was a good evening, too.”
“Sir, the news gets worse. I’ve run the financials
and—well, you can either rebuild the plant or you
can give bereavement pay to the families of the vic-
tims. You can’t do both.”
“Then we’ll put off rebuilding the plant,”
Constantino said without hesitation, “we—”
“Sir, we were counting on that plant to produce
enough vehicles, especially the 428s, to counteract
last year’s falloff.”
Sales of most Terra products had flattened out of
late, due in part to an economic downturn, in part to
fear of rebel and/or alien attacks driving down con-
sumer spending. The one exception to this was the
428 model of hoverbike, which was incredibly popu-
lar among both children and younger adults.
Lia continued: “We can stave off maybe a few
months, but we have to get that plant back up and run-
ning right away. Mengsk didn’t choose it randomly—
N O V A 2 3
he knew that without that plant, our ability to get back
into the black will be next to impossible without—”
“Without screwing over the families of the victims
of his attack.” Constantino shook his head. “That
slike. If we don’t rebuild, we start falling apart. If we
do rebuild, we give him more fodder for his crap
about how we exploit the workers.” He had to resist
the urge to spit. “Dammit. All right, Lia, thanks.”
“Sir, I’m afraid—”
“I’m not going to make a decision about that now.”
“Sir, that’s not what I need to tell you about.
There’s more bad news—the Protoss have wiped out
Mar Sara. The Confederacy managed to pull back, but
I’m not sure how many got out alive.”
Constantino shook his head. He knew the experi-
ments being done on the Zerg they’d captured in the
Sara system would come back to haunt them all.
They’d already wiped out Chau Sara, and now Mar
Sara had gone the same way. And who knew where
these Protoss slikes would stop?
“Thank you, Lia. We’ll talk after the party, all right?”
“Yes, sir.” She turned on her heel and headed for
the lift.
Looking down at his left hand, Constantino saw
that he still had the glass of wine in it. Aside from the
sip he took for Nova’s toast, he hadn’t touched it. Now
he swallowed it all in one gulp.
Eleftheria intercepted him on his way back to Nova
and Zeb. As was often the case with mistresses,
Eleftheria was the opposite of Constantino’s wife.
2 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Where Bella was a short, stout brunette with olive
skin and an hourglass figure, Eleftheria was a tall,
slim, willowy redhead with pale skin.
“That was Lia. She came late, talked to you for two
seconds, then immediately left. That usually adds up
to bad news.”
“No flies on you, m’dear.” He chuckled without
mirth. Eleftheria had always been observant. He told
her only about what happened to the Palombo plant;
he couldn’t tell her about the Protoss. That was some-
thing she wasn’t cleared to be aware of, much as it
pained him to keep anything from her.
Eleftheria’s already-pale face grew paler. “My God,
that’s awful. How could they do that?”
“Apparently, we all have to pay for the sins of the
Council’s idiotic decisions.” Constantino had been
the loudest among those arguing furiously against
the bombing of Korhal IV as too extreme a solution,
but many of the Old Families took the Council’s
side—as well as that of the military—in believing
that extreme problems demanded extreme solutions.
Except that Constantino and his allies had been
correct. Korhal IV had backfired rather spectacularly,
turning public opinion further away from the
Confederacy. And the bombing gave rise to Mengsk
and his band of butchers, not to mention dozens of
other smaller rebellious groups who didn’t have
Mengsk’s profile, but were irritants just the same.
He looked over at Nova and Zeb, now talking more
N O V A 2 5
civilly to each other. Lia said it was an inside job. Maybe
one of the three who were out. Maybe one of the corpses in
the plant, willing to be a martyr for Mengsk’s cause.
“What are you thinking?” Eleftheria asked.
“That we’re going ahead with the plan.” He put
down the empty wineglass and grabbed a full one
from a passing server.
His mistress’s eyes went wide. “I thought you
said—”
“I said I was considering abandoning it, but this
attack makes it imperative.” Not to mention what just
happened in the Sara system. “If they can get someone
inside the plant, they can get someone inside this
household.” He smiled grimly. “Security’s a lot more
stringent for my businesses than it is for my home,
I’m afraid.” He took a sip of the wine. This was an
inferior vintage to the previous one. We must have run
out of the ’09. This tastes like the ’07. As he recalled, the
grape crop on Halcyon was awful that year. He made
a mental note to ask the wine steward why they had
any of that vintage in the wine rack at all.
Eleftheria asked, “But if one of the household staff
was untrustworthy, Nova would know, wouldn’t
she?”
“Not necessarily. She’s not trained, she doesn’t
know what to look for.” And whose fault is that? a little
voice in his head asked, but Constantino tamped it
down. The only way to get that training was to lose
his daughter altogether, and that he would not do—
2 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
not to the very same imbeciles who nuked Korhal IV
and started this entire nonsense.
“When are you going to tell her?” Eleftheria asked.
“After the party. Let her have a good time
tonight—then I’ll tell her that she’s going to have to
go offworld for a while.”
chapter 2
NOVA DIDN’T REALIZE THAT SHE HAD BEEN
ignoring Zeb for several seconds until her older
brother asked, “Uh, Sis, you okay?”
“Hm?” Nova turned toward her brother, who
somehow managed to look rumpled and disheveled in
an immaculately pressed tuxedo, despite the fact that
it was cut to his measurements down to the millime-
ter. He held a plateful of Antigan buffalo in one hand
while shoveling said meat into his mouth with the
other. “Sorry, Zeb, I was just worried about Daddy.
He’s upset.”
“How can he be upset?” Zeb asked through a full
mouth and while chewing, a thoroughly revolting
sight. “It’s a great party.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Nova said auto-
matically, knowing it was a lost cause. Zeb could
speak as properly as the next scion of the Old
Families, could hold his own in a conversation about
business with Daddy—good thing, since he was in line
2 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
to take over the Terra businesses after Daddy retired
or passed on—and could perfectly dance every step he
was likely to have to know at any social function, but
he was constitutionally incapable of eating neatly or
of refraining from speaking while doing so.
Zeb swallowed and turned to follow Nova’s gaze.
“Yeah, he does look kinda off.”
Nova hadn’t noticed how he looked, really. She
could just feel that Daddy was annoyed about some-
thing. For as long as Nova could remember, she’d
always had a gift for knowing how people around her
were feeling. In fact, it had come as something of a
shock to her when she was seven years old and was
told by her mother that other people weren’t as
empathic as she—which was also when she learned
the word ‘’empathic.” Mommy always said that it was
because she was such a sensitive child, and that it
meant she would make an excellent mother someday.
That always made Nova happy to hear; she loved both
her parents more than anything in the world, and she
hoped to be half as good at parenting as they.
She walked over to her father, Zeb trailing behind,
stuffing the last of the meat into his mouth. Now that
she looked at him as he chatted with Eleftheria, Nova
could see how even Zeb would notice he was upset.
Daddy’s broad shoulders were slumped, his sandy hair
was slightly mussed from running his hand through
it—which he did unconsciously, and only when he
was distressed—and he periodically tugged on the
edges of his thick mustache.
N O V A 2 9
Nova asked, “What’s wrong, Daddy?”
Her father put a smile on his face, but Nova could
still feel the worry emanating from him, and
Eleftheria as well. “Nothing you need to worry about,
my darling girl. Just some business problem.”
Now Nova glared at him. “Daddy, you promised
you wouldn’t have any business at this party!”
“It was brief, my dear, and unintentional.”
Eleftheria added, “And the nasty young woman
who brought it in here has been summarily dismissed
so we can get on with your party.”
“Good.” Zeb seemed to think that was that.
But Nova knew better. “Daddy, what is it?”
“It’s nothing that can’t wait until after the party,
Nova. Now, you enjoy yourself, and we’ll talk later, all
right?”
“What’s all this rubbish about servants eating the
food? A damned nuisance, if you ask me.”
Nova whirled around to see a sea of patrons parting to
allow the hoverchair containing the one-hundred-and-
fifty-year-old Andrea Tygore to approach the food tables.
Andrea was the matriarch of the Tygore family, and the
most formidable presence among the Old Families, a
group laden with formidable presences. She had proba-
bly just arrived, and therefore missed Daddy’s toast.
Andrea was often late to such occasions, as she preferred
to make a grand entrance when everyone else was
already present. Nova had always gotten along with
Andrea better than the other children, probably because
Nova was the only one who wasn’t afraid of her.
3 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Excuse me, my darling girl,” Daddy said. “I had
best pay my respects to Andrea.” He spoke the words
with a dread finality.
“Don’t worry, Daddy,” she whispered, then spoke
aloud to the old woman: “The servants are eating
from the food at my request, Ms. Tygore. After all the
work they’ve done, I feel it’s a just reward, don’t
you?”
“Balderdash. They’re servants—work is what
they’re supposed to do.” She looked up at Daddy.
“Honestly, Tino, what are you teaching this girl?”
Wincing at the use of the nickname—which only
she could get away with using—Daddy said, “My
youngest daughter has a mind of her own, Andrea—a
trait I would think you’d appreciate.”
“To a degree, I suppose.” She looked back at Nova.
“You’re growing into a fine young woman, November.”
She was also the only person outside her family
who ever called Nova by her full first name, which
she hated—though she deflected Zeb’s comment ear-
lier, she hated her full name as much as her brother
did his—but she could no more correct Andrea than
Daddy could. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“But be careful. Your lessers are just that—your
lessers. You treat them with anything other than the
contempt they so richly deserve, and they’ll turn on
you. How do you think those awful rebels have got-
ten so pervasive? Nonsense like that, it’ll be the death
of us all.” She looked back at Daddy. “I understand
they attacked one of your hoverbike plants tonight.”
N O V A 3 1
Nova turned and looked in shock at Daddy. “Is that
true?”
Letting out a long sigh, Daddy glared at Andrea.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Filthy rebels.” Andrea shook her head. “We
should find them and bomb them, like we did on
Korhal.”
“But isn’t that what caused the rebels to start up in
the first place?” Zeb asked.
Andrea made a tch noise. “Don’t be an idiot, boy—
it was that Mengsk person that started up the rebels.
Korhal’s just an excuse for the likes of him. Tino, fetch
me some of that buffalo meat.”
Daddy raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you
should be—”
Waggling a finger at him, Andrea said, “Don’t go
lecturing me, Tino. Bad enough I have to listen to that
garbage from my doctors. I’m a hundred and fifty
years old—I can eat what I damn well please, and if it
kills me, fine. A life without buffalo meat isn’t a life
worth living, if you ask me. Now fetch me some, then
follow me. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
Nova couldn’t help but smile at the helpless look
on her father’s face as he let Andrea lead him on. She
looked around for Eleftheria, but she had wandered
off without Nova’s noticing, distracted as she was by
Andrea. Nova was disappointed, as she had wanted to
talk to Eleftheria a bit about what was bothering her
father. One of the many advantages to there being a
jig and a mistress was that one could speak to them as
3 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
both parent and confidant—they were especially good
for gauging the moods of the parents, while acting as
a sounding board for the child. Maybe I can talk to her
later, before Daddy has the talk he promised.
“Hi, Nova.”
Nova turned around to see Morgan Calabas walk-
ing up to her. He was wearing a tuxedo of the same
design as Zeb’s, but on him it fit perfectly. His dark
hair was neatly slicked back, and the money his par-
ents had spent on skin modification had paid off, as he
no longer showed any signs of the acne that had
plagued him a year earlier.
“I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday.” He
raised a wineglass to her.
Ever polite, Nova said, “Thank you, Morgan.”
“I was wondering—the d’Arbanvilles are having
their ball next month, and I was wondering if I could
escort you there.”
Not if we were the last two humans in the Confederacy.
However, her training kept her from saying it aloud,
and she substituted instead the words, “I’m honored
by the offer, Morgan, truly—I will consider it and get
back to you.”
Morgan flushed with enjoyment, but Nova knew
that his interest was not in her company—especially
given that his eyes strayed more toward her chest
than her face. “Thank you, Nova. I hope you consider
me a suitable escort.”
Under no circumstances. “You’re welcome, Morgan.”
N O V A 3 3
And then she heard him say, I’ll get under that skirt
in no time flat.
Nova went pale. She’d heard Morgan say the
words, as clearly as he’d said he hoped she’d consent
to be his escort, but his lips hadn’t moved.
Morgan walked away before she could respond.
Zeb snorted. “You shouldn’t lead him on like that.”
“Hm?” She turned to look at Zeb. “What do you
mean?” She hadn’t been paying attention to her
brother, as she was far more worried about what had
just happened. Being sensitive to how others felt was
one thing, but she’d never been able to hear what
someone was thinking before.
“Please, Sis, you can’t stand that guy. And I don’t
blame you—nobody can stand him. If he wasn’t
Arturro Calabas’s oldest son, nobody’d give him the
time of day.” Zeb grinned as he grabbed a small plate
of fish bits off a passing steward’s tray. “I heard he
may not even be at that ball anyhow—Charlie Quinn
says Old Man Calabas is sending Morgan off to
Tyrador IX.”
That surprised Nova. “What for?”
“Well, Charlie said he thinks it’s to some kinda
reeducation camp, and that some other people are
sending their kids there, but I’m not sure I believe
that.”
“Why not?”
Zeb grinned. “ ’Cause Charlie said it. Charlie usu-
ally hears all the good gossip, but he always gets stuff
3 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
wrong.” He popped a fish slice into his mouth, then
asked, “So who are you going to the ball with?”
Too embarrassed to say that no one was, she
instead asked, “Who’re you going with?”
Nova immediately knew Zeb was lying when he
said, “I haven’t decided yet.”
“You mean you haven’t worked up the courage to
ask Thérèse yet.”
Gently hitting her on the arm, he said, “That’s a
dirty lie!”
Nova just stared at him.
“Yeah, okay, I haven’t asked her yet.”
“If you wait too long, somebody else will.”
Zeb chuckled. “Maybe Morgan will.”
Sighing, Nova said, “I should be so lucky. He’s only
interested in the fact that my chest is twice the size it
was six months ago and in getting under my skirt.”
“Maybe you should stop stuffing balloons under
your blouse.”
Now it was her turn to hit him. “Take that back!”
“Actually,” Zeb said as he stuffed more fish in his
mouth and talked over it, “Charlie said that Amelie
Tygore did do that.”
Nova’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Well, it likely wasn’t balloons—she probably just
programmed her tailor to make the chest extra big or
something.”
Shaking her head, Nova said, “Well, she always
complained that the boys never noticed her. Maybe
she got tired of waiting.”
N O V A 3 5
Suddenly, as it had during the toast, her father’s
voice rang out over the speakers. “Ladies and gentle-
men—the dessert!”
Three of the servants then brought in a huge cake.
Nova couldn’t help but grin. She had spent an hour
with Mommy and the cook going over precisely what
she wanted in a cake. It had to have a lot of chocolate,
and framberries from Halcyon, and ice cream, and
frosting from Olaf’s in downtown Tarsonis.
Based on the huge four-layer confection that took
three servants to wheel in, the kitchen staff had suc-
ceeded in bringing these elements together—a feeling
that was confirmed when Mommy and her jig,
Edward, came over.
“It’s just what you asked for, precious,” Mommy
said.
“Even the framberries?” Nova remembered Mr.
Sim, the kitchen staff supervisor, blanching when she
mentioned framberries, which wouldn’t be in season
for another nine months.
Mommy smiled. “Even the framberries.”
Nova put aside her distress about what was hap-
pening with Daddy, her revulsion at Morgan, and her
confusion at hearing Morgan’s thoughts, and followed
the cart to the dessert table, where she would receive
the honor of being served the first piece of the birth-
day cake she had designed.
chapter 3
BELLA TERRA WENT STORMING TOWARD HER
husband’s bedroom. It had been a long time since she
had been this angry, and to have it happen tonight
made it all the more galling.
Being married to that overbearing ass had been
agonizing enough, but at least he was usually good
enough to stick to his proper duties. This, however,
was beyond the pale.
The door recognized her and slid open to allow her
ingress. Bella was grateful that he hadn’t put a privacy
seal on the door, which would have ruined Bella’s
grand entrance—though it also meant she wasn’t
interrupting a private moment between Constantino
and Eleftheria, something she always derived sadistic
pleasure out of, mainly because of the irritated look
he got on his face. (It never seemed to bother
Eleftheria, who was actually much easier to deal with
than most mistresses. Bella got along with her better
N O V A 3 7
than she did her own jig, truth be told, as Edward was
something of a cold fish much of the time.)
At first, when she entered, she thought Constantino
had company, but then she realized that the second
person in the room besides its primary occupant was
the holographically projected body of a UNN reporter
whose name Bella couldn’t remember; behind him
was a panoramic, if generic-looking, view of Antiga
Prime. Mercifully, Eleftheria was nowhere to be found.
While Bella generally liked her husband’s mistress, she
often tried to mediate between them, and Bella simply
wasn’t in the mood for that right now. She just wanted
to yell at Constantino directly.
The holograph was in mid-sentence: “—earned that
Mengsk and the Sons of Korhal are in control of powerful
mind-control drugs, which they have been using freely on
the populace. Hundreds have died as a result of interdimen-
sional spraying, which can only be described as chemical
attacks against innocent citizens. Others have been warped
into strange mutagenic shapes as a result of the side effects of
these drugs. Mengsk sent a sabo—”
Noticing Bella’s entrance, Constantino touched a
button on the nightstand, which paused the reporter,
leaving him with his eyes closed and his lips comically
pursed. Bella thought he came across more intelligent
this way.
“Bella—what can I do for you?” Constantino asked.
He was in the process of removing his tuxedo.
“What in the hell are you playing at?”
3 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
His nostrils flared, making him look like a particu-
larly idiotic horse. “I beg your pardon?”
“Beg all you want, you won’t get it. How dare
you?”
“Bella, I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re car-
rying on about, but—”
“Nova just came crying to my room, you jackass. I
don’t ever remember seeing her cry before—or at least
not since she was an infant—but I can’t blame her for
doing it now. She’s a fifteen-year-old girl who just got
told by her father that she’s being sent for reeducation
on some godforsaken rock in Tyrador!”
Constantino’s green eyes—which he had passed on
to his daughter—widened and his mouth hung agape,
making him look like an especially confused fish. She
wondered if he’d work his way through the entire
animal kingdom before this conversation ended.
“Reeducation? That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever
heard.”
That brought Bella up short. “You mean you’re not
sending her to Tyrador?”
“Of course I am, but it has nothing to do with any
kind of reeducation. Where could she have gotten
such a notion?”
Bella’s fury returned a hundredfold. She couldn’t
believe he’d spoiled what had been a glorious evening
for Nova like this. “And when were you planning to
inform me of this momentous decision regarding my
daughter, precisely?”
“She’s my daughter too, Bella, and—”
N O V A 3 9
“You didn’t sneak off and get a sex change behind
my back, did you? I only ask because you may have
mistaken your role for that of the head of the house-
hold. Besides, it’s an honest mistake to make, since
you seem to have lost your testicular fortitude.”
Now Constantino rolled his eyes. “Very droll, my
dear, very droll, but this is a necessary step. It’s not
safe on Tarsonis. The hovercraft plant was attacked
last night.”
Again, Bella found herself brought up short.
“Rebels?” she asked in a much quieter tone.
“Yes.”
“How many—how many died?”
“Almost the entire night shift.”
For what seemed like the millionth time, she
cursed Arcturus Mengsk and his band of murdering
scum. She swore that if she ever saw him . . . well, if
they were ever in the same room, he’d probably have
her shot, but she’d do her best to try to kill him first.
A forlorn hope, but one she had kept burning in her
gut ever since that rabble-rouser first started causing
his unrest.
“And then there’s the aliens.”
Bella rolled her eyes. “Please don’t tell me you
believe that nonsense on UNN. Mind-control drugs?”
Constantino smiled wryly. “Oh, UNN’s reports bear
only a passing resemblance to reality.” He touched the
control on the end table, and the reporter started up
again.
“—teur aboard the Norad II and exposed the crew to a
4 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
virulent toxin. The result was the recent crash of that ship.
Agents of the Sons of Korhal captured those affected by the
mind-control drugs, and left the rest to die at the hands of
their Zerg allies. I believe that General Edmund Duke, scion
of the Duke Family of Tarsonis, has fallen prey to these
mind-control devices, and now has been reduced to a men-
tally reprogrammed zombie in the service of the terr—“
He paused the playback again. “The best lies con-
tain a kernel of truth.” He walked up to Bella, looking
down at her and putting his hands on her shoulders.
“Bella, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but— An
alien race called the Protoss destroyed Chau Sara and
Mar Sara.”
“D—destroyed?” Bella couldn’t believe it. Planets
weren’t just destroyed—well, except for Korhal. . . .
“That can’t be right.”
“I’m afraid it is. And those Zerg that they’re talking
about on UNN? They’re real, too—but they’re not
allied with Mengsk or anyone else. They are enemies
of the Protoss, though, and I suspect that our fate is to
be caught in the middle of their war. That’s why a
number of us have agreed to get some of our children
off Tarsonis. And Duke has turned—but not because
of any drugs. Mengsk has convinced him to join his
side.”
Bella felt as if she’d been slapped with a metal
plate. “That’s insane.” She wasn’t even sure which of
the revelations her husband had dropped on her fit
that bill best—though the fact that Edmund Duke had
gone rogue was no real surprise. The man was always
N O V A 4 1
an idiot, and an embarrassment. If he had been mentally
reprogrammed into a zombie, nobody would know the dif-
ference. Then again, recalling Garth’s antics at the
party, she thought that perhaps that whole family had
gone mad.
“This wasn’t my idea originally, to be honest, it was
Arturro Calabas’s. Morgan Calabas, Antonia Tygore,
and several others are going to a resort on Tyrador IX,
just in case the Protoss or the Zerg target us next.
Besides, in a world where a Duke joins the Sons of
Korhal, we can’t trust anyone.”
A resort at least sounded better than a reeducation
camp. Where do these children get these insane notions?
“You still haven’t answered my question,” she said
testily.
“Which question is that?” He removed his hands
from her shoulders and pulled out his loosened tie
from the collar.
“When were you going to tell me? The children are
part of the household, and that is my responsibility!”
“Yes, along with choosing the wine. What were
you thinking using the ’07?”
“I like the ’07. And so does everyone else.” She
sighed. “You never had any taste for good wine,
Constantino, I don’t know why you insist on bringing
it up every time a vintage doesn’t strike your fancy.
And you’re changing the subject. The disposition of
the children—”
He took off his jacket as he spoke. “It’s a security
matter, Bella, which does fall under my purview—and
4 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
to be honest, I wasn’t going to send her at first. When
Arturro told me about his plan, I thought it too pan-
icky. But when Lia told me about the plant and about
Sara, I . . .” He trailed off.
“What about Clara and Zeb?”
“I need Zeb here. Besides, he’s a man now; it’s time
he started acting like it. As for Clara . . .” He sat down
on the edge of the bed and sighed. “Milo refuses to go,
so she’s staying as well.” Looking up, he added,
“Besides, we can’t appear to be abandoning Tarsonis
altogether—it’s a show of weakness we can ill afford,
especially now. To all outward appearances, it will just
be some of the children going on an outing to the
resort on Tyrador.”
She sat down next to him and put a hand on his
thigh. Normally, she’d never think of being that affec-
tionate, but if what he was saying was really true . . .
“Do you really think they’ll attack us?”
“I don’t know. A year ago, if you’d told me that
there were aliens, I’d have laughed at you. But now?”
He put his hand on hers. It felt cold and clammy. “I
don’t know what’s likely anymore. And I don’t know
if this will really do any good. But I’ll feel better if I
know Nova’s safe on Tyrador. It’s for the best, Bella,
truly.”
“You’re right, it probably is.” She hadn’t had cause
to say those first two words to her husband in many
years. “But you had no business making this decision
without consulting me. I’m your wife, Constantino,
and Nova is my daughter. If you ever make this kind of
N O V A 4 3
decision without me again, I will flay you alive, you
understand?”
He looked over at her, staring at him with those
damn green eyes. “You’re right, Bella, I’m sorry. I
guess we’ve been working so independently of each
other that it never occurred to me to—”
“Save it.” She stood up. “Don’t make excuses. You
shouldn’t be cutting me out of family business. That’s
grounds for divorce—and no,” she said quickly, hold-
ing up a hand, “I’m not threatening that, merely try-
ing to make you realize the gravity of what you’ve
done.”
He shook his head and chuckled, looking up at her.
“You’re right. As usual, I suppose. I really don’t give
you enough credit, Bella—and for that, I truly do
apologize.”
Biting back a snotty retort, Bella decided to accept
what Constantino offered. “Apology accepted.”
“Thank you. I promise you, I won’t cut you out of
such decisions again, my dear—all right?”
“See that you don’t.” Turning on her heel, she
stomped out of the bedroom. What a jackass. Yet she
had to admit, the plan was a sensible one. If he had
come to her when Arturro proposed it, she probably
would have been more enthusiastic about the notion
than he was. Her only objection to the plan itself was
that Clara and Zeb weren’t going. She could accept
Zeb’s remaining—now that he was all grown, it was a
business matter, and therefore in Constantino’s
purview—and Clara was her own woman now. But
4 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
dammit, she’s also my daughter, and I want her to be as safe
as her sister.
As she headed to the door, Constantino restarted
the news report. “—orists. In this way, Mengsk and his
inhuman allies hope to confuse the brave warriors of the
Confederacy and cause them to lose faith in their leaders.
Only by eternal vigilance can we root out such terorrists as
Mengsk and his mind-controlled minions. As I speak, a mas-
sive Confederate blockade is surrounding Antiga Prime, and
the terrorist should be destroyed within a few days. This is
Michael Daniel Liberty for UNN.”
Bella departed, thinking, Liberty, that’s his name.
What a stupid name for a reporter.
She stomped toward her bedroom, hoping for his
sake that Edward was still up. If he wasn’t, he would
be soon. She needed some serious comforting, and he
wasn’t going to get away with pleading exhaustion
tonight. . . .
The seats in the puddle-jumper were quite comfort-
able. But then, Nova always got to travel first class.
The puddle-jumpers were small, thirty-passenger
transports that took one from Giddings Station on
Tarsonis to Osborne Port in orbit. This particular
puddle-jumper’s entire first-class section was occu-
pied by scions of the Old Families who were going to
be taken in the Calabases’ yacht, the Padraig, to
Tyrador IX.
Nova didn’t want to go.
She had cried in her room for hours after Daddy
N O V A 4 5
told her she was going. Her anguish only abated
mildly when, later on, Daddy assured her that she
wasn’t going to be reeducated along with Morgan
Calabas, but was simply being taken somewhere
where she’d be safe from the rebels and the aliens.
Nova’s first instinct was to dismiss his paranoia, but
she knew as soon as he said it that his fear was very
genuine, that there really were aliens out there who
had killed humans and would likely do so again.
But she still didn’t want to go.
To make matters worse, she was sitting next to
Morgan on the puddle-jumper, and he would not
shut up.
“This is smart,” he was saying. “This way, if some-
thing terrible happens to our families, the best and the
brightest will still be safe. Plus, have you been to the
resort on Tyrador? It’s amazing. Beautiful country-
side, state-of-the-art padball courts—maybe we could
play?”
Stunned that he gave her an opening to speak,
Nova said, “I don’t know how to play padball.” Even
as she spoke the words, she realized that it wouldn’t
help.
“I can teach you, then. I’m a master padball player.”
In fact, Nova knew that he was a dreadful player,
and was only not cut from the school padball team
last year because his father was the one who paid for
the school’s courts. Nobody had ever told her this—
mainly because she never cared enough to ask—but
she simply knew it now.
4 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Nova leaned forward and punched up the menu on
the food unit. To her great disappointment, they
didn’t have any framberry juice. She settled for tan-
gerine juice, which was dispensed in a plastic bottle
through the slot a moment later.
Morgan was still droning on, but she’d stopped
paying attention.
For three days, she’d tried to convince her parents
not to make her go. Mommy and Daddy were both
insistent. Eleftheria was less sure, but supported
Daddy. The only one who argued against her going
was Edward, which surprised Nova. Edward was
always hard for her to figure out; it was as if his mind
was closed off. Zeb joked once that it was because he
was so boring, that there was nothing there for her
empathy to pick up. So she was surprised to see him
argue for letting her stay.
But no amount of cajoling would work, especially
after the reports of rebel attacks on Antiga Prime
came in. Whatever doubt was in her parents’ minds
were gone after that. They were adamant that she go
to Tyrador—at least for a few months, until the cur-
rent unrest died down.
If it died down. If they weren’t overrun by aliens.
“Of course, I had my choice of women to escort,
but I chose you for a reason.”
Nova realized that Morgan was talking about her.
“Oh?” she said noncommittally. It wasn’t as if her par-
ticipation were necessary; Morgan simply adored the
sound of his own voice.
N O V A 4 7
“That’s right. But you’re special, Nova. I don’t
know what it is, but there’s something about you that
stands out from all the other girls.” As he said those
words, he was staring right at her chest.
Then she again heard Morgan speak without his
speaking: I can’t wait to see what she looks like naked.
And she heard something else. Something that
spoke in her father’s voice. What the hell are you
doing?
Then biting pain, as if someone had punched her in
the face.
Without knowing how, she simply knew that some-
one had just hit her father.
At the same time, a computerized voice sounded
over the speakers. “Attention, passengers. We will be tak-
ing off in ten minutes. Please activate your restraints in
preparation for takeoff.”
Morgan immediately pressed the button that acti-
vated the padded restraints that combined with the
seats—which would blow up into huge balloonlike
cushions before takeoff—to protect the passengers
from the intense G-forces of escape velocity.
Nova, however, did not. Something was wrong.
She didn’t know what it was, but she suddenly, with
crystal clarity, knew that her family was in trouble.
She got up from the seat. “I have to go.”
Morgan looked boggled as she climbed over his seat
to the aisle. “What? Nova, what’re you—?”
Ignoring him, and thrilled at the prospect of not
having to listen to him prattle about padball and think
4 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
about her body all the way to Tyrador, Nova moved
toward the exit.
A steward blocked her path. “Ma’am, I’m sorry,
but—”
Drawing herself to her full height—which was con-
siderable for a girl her age—and using the same over-
bearing tone she’d been hearing from Andrea Tygore
all her life, she said, “I am November Terra, daughter
of Constantino and Annabella Terra, and you will let
me disembark this vessel now!”
The steward swallowed once, considered respond-
ing, then decided that it was best to accede to her
request. The Terra name was not one to be trifled
with.
Several people behind her asked her where she
was going, but she ignored them as she left the
puddle-jumper, then jogged across the catwalk to the
gate, and then ran through the corridors of Giddings
Station to the cab stand.
Bypassing the queue for hovercabs, she went
straight to the dispatcher and informed him of her
name and family in the same tone she used on the
steward. He got her a cab forthwith, leaving several
disgruntled people in her wake.
The feeling grew worse, if less well defined.
Somehow, someway, she could feel that her parents,
her brother, Eleftheria, the servants—they were all in
trouble.
All except Edward, for some reason.
Oh, no. No, no, no.
N O V A 4 9
She cast her mind back to her conversation with
Daddy two nights ago, before the attack on Antiga
Prime made him cease all discussion. “My darling girl,
you don’t understand. The reason why the attack on
the plant worked so well is because Mengsk had
people there, working undercover. If he could infil-
trate the plant, he might be able to infiltrate this
house. I can’t take the chance that you’ll be hurt, so
you have to go.”
Although she still didn’t understand how she could
possibly know this, she was sure now that Edward
was a rebel, that he had been suborned to the cause
after years of dissatisfaction as the jig to a woman he
couldn’t stand, and that he had now betrayed the
Terra family.
That was why he wanted me to stay.
The cab pulled up in front of the Terra Skyscraper.
Throwing all the bills she had on her into the slot in
the wall that separated driver from passenger and
hoping it was enough, she ran into the building, past
the public lobby, and to the entry to the private lobby,
to which she gained ingress via retinal scan.
As soon as the door opened to admit her, she knew
something was wrong. Something smelled funny, and
she knew that Bryan, the daytime lobby guard, wasn’t
there.
No, he was there. Or at least his body was.
Nova had never seen a dead body before. She had
been to funerals, of course, but one never looked
upon the dead at such occasions—it was sacrilegious.
5 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Even when she was a little kid, she had refused to
look at the body of her grandmother, though Zeb tried
to get her to sneak into the back room of the funeral
parlor with her to take a look.
Dead bodies, she realized, felt empty. A big noth-
ing. And they smelled.
Bryan’s uniform was stained with something red
that she realized was blood.
If they killed Bryan, they’re already here. I’m too late!
Tears streaming down her cheeks, she ran to the
elevator and gave another retinal scan. The lift came
immediately, of course—she was a Terra, after all, and
they always got what they wanted.
As the elevator shot up the hundred stories to the
penthouse where Nova had lived her entire life, she
found herself overwhelmed by hatred and pain, nei-
ther of them her own. Strange thoughts intruded
upon her. What’s happening to me?
Edward, you slike, how dare you!
That was Mommy. She could feel Mommy, as if she
were right there next to her.
Dammit, look at me! How could you—
Then she didn’t feel Mommy anymore. Mommy
was ripped from her, like the wings Zeb used to pull
off insects when they were little.
“Mom—mommy?”
You’ll pay for this, you hear me? You won’t get away
with this—
That was Daddy. He didn’t get to finish his sentence
either.
N O V A 5 1
She collapsed, even as the elevator door opened on
the top floor.
“Daddy? Oh God, Daddy, please, don’t be dead,
please!” She managed to clamber out into the domed
space, but she couldn’t make her legs work right, and
she collapsed again to the floor.
Three days ago, this had been the site of her fif-
teenth birthday party. Now it was full of men and
women dressed in all-black clothing, holding
weapons of various types. She saw a goodly number
of the serving staff lined up against the wall—and a
few more of them among those in the black clothes.
All the people in black wanted nothing less than to
wipe out the Old Families—she could suddenly feel
that overwhelming imperative in their minds. But
they weren’t associated with the Sons of Korhal, the
group that was all over the news, the ones who
attacked Antiga Prime—no, these were just agitators
who had no plan beyond making sure the Old
Families all died.
Edward was standing over three corpses. Two of
them were her parents; the other was Eleftheria. Next
to Edward was a man named Gustavo McBain, who
was aiming a pistol at Zeb. Her brother was on his
knees, his hands behind his head.
“Y’know,” Zeb was saying, “you always were an
asshole, Eddie.”
“Takes one to know one, kid,” Edward said. Then
he looked at Gustavo. “Do it.”
Gustavo fired the pistol. The bullet slammed into
5 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Zeb’s head, causing it to snap back, his blood and
brains splattering on the wall behind him.
“Zeb?”
Nova had felt her mother and father die. Now she
had felt and seen her brother die.
“No.”
Edward turned to look at her and smiled. “Well,
well, well. After all that, you come home anyhow.”
“No.”
He walked over to her and raised a pistol of his
own. Edward was a tall, skinny man with curly black
hair and a black beard, though both hair and beard
were flecked with gray. She had never seen him smile
quite the way he was smiling now. He had never
killed anyone before, and she knew that he was afraid
to kill someone now—that was why he had had
Gustavo do it, because Gustavo hated the Old Families
even more than he did, and would enjoy the killing.
Edward wouldn’t enjoy it.
But he was going to do it anyhow.
“No.”
Aiming the pistol’s muzzle at her head, just as
Gustavo had done to Zeb, Edward said, “Say good
night, Nova.”
“Nooooooooooooooo!”
chapter 4
ONCE, MALCOLM KELERCHIAN WAS THE FINEST
investigator in the Tarsonis Police Force’s Detective
Squad. But the TPF didn’t keep good investigators for
very long—they were often snapped up by the mili-
tary or the government, deemed far too useful to be
wasted on mere local policing.
That was a pity, as far as Mal was concerned. He
liked being a detective. His clearance rate was three
times that of any other detective in the squad.
Admittedly, this wasn’t a difficult feat to accomplish.
The TPF was primarily made up of thugs and bruisers
who mostly just made sure that the interests of the rich
were protected. The few who had at least a modicum of
brains generally got promoted over to the Detective
Squad, but even then, if the crime didn’t involve some-
body who made more money than the chief of police, it
wasn’t worth a detective’s time. Everyone in the squad
perfected the “Well, you know, it’s really hard to track
down criminals in these cases” speech, which invari-
5 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
ably was given to the middle- and lower-class victims of
robberies, assaults, and the like. The only crimes that
were solved were the ones whose perpetrators were so
completely brain-dead as to be impossible not to catch.
At least, until Mal joined the squad. He actually
made use of the TPF’s resources, and used surveil-
lance sensors employed by the Traffic Control
Department to regulate those who abused the hover
laws (who were legion and whose fines helped pay
the TPF’s salaries) to identify criminals—a technique
that was heralded as revolutionary by the bosses, but
which in fact dated back over two hundred years to
Old Earth. He also actually made use of the techno-
logical identification tools available to him to track
down criminals.
This was all well and good, and did wonders for the
public image of the TPF—right up until the Rample
murder. Two children of a semiprominent shop owner
were viciously murdered and left in an alley in the
Gutter. What at first seemed to be a typical Gutter
“dead drop” quickly became a huge case once the
bodies were identified. The chief put Mal on the case
right away, assuring the public through numerous
press conferences on UNN that their best detective
was on it and the butchers responsible for this repre-
hensible crime would be prosecuted to the full extent
of Confederate law. Mal used every means at his dis-
posal to find the killer—
—who turned out to be Emmett Tygore, a scion of
one of the oldest of the Old Families.
N O V A 5 5
Suddenly, other cases became more interesting.
The unknown perpetrator of what UNN called the
“gore in the Gutter,” who was referred to in editorials
as a “butcher” and a “deviant,” was now a “victim of
his own psychosis” and someone who “snapped
under the pressure.” Rather than being prosecuted to
the full extent of Confederate law, he was sent to a
rehabilitation facility on Halcyon where the Tygores
hoped he would be forgotten.
And he was. The press coverage moved on to other
things—there were always new scandals, new attacks,
new crimes to cover—leaving only a prominent shop
owner to wonder why.
The only person left to speak for the victims was
Mal, who objected vociferously every time his
attempts to properly prosecute Emmett Tygore were
stymied. The chief was caught between a rock and a
hard place—Mal was a fairly well-regarded detective,
probably the first in TPF history, and his successes had
meant budget increases, ones the Council only
approved because of the force’s improved clearance
rate. But the Tygores were calling for the head of this
presumptuous detective who dared to sully their good
name.
Finally, the military came to the chief’s rescue.
Someone in the Ghost Program found a notation in
Mal’s file that he had a Psi Index of 3.5—the average
person was a PI2 or lower, with actual telepaths being
PI5 or higher. A 3.5 meant that he was sensitive to
telepathy, albeit with no telepathic skills of his own.
5 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Which would make him an ideal Wrangler.
When Mal was told he was being transferred over
to the military to become a Wrangler, the first thing
he said was, “What the hell’s a Wrangler?”
In truth, Mal knew the answer—Wranglers were
the ones who hunted down telepaths and brought
them to the Ghost Program, or wherever else the mil-
itary thought teeps would be useful—but he was too
cracked off to admit it.
Mal had been a detective long enough to under-
stand the politics involved. It got rid of a problem for
the chief, and covered his ass with both the Council
and the public by looking like it was the military’s
fault for taking Mal away from him.
That transfer had happened a year ago. The first six
months were spent in training—one month of it in
using the equipment, the other five in honing his abil-
ity to detect telepaths into something useful. Sadly,
the latter five months didn’t really do any good. Prior
to being recruited, Mal always got a headache when
he was around a telepath. Twenty-five weeks of brain
probes, mental exercises, meditation, and increased
focus resulted in his always getting a headache when
he was around a telepath.
My tax dollars at work, he had thought bitterly at the
time.
Still, at least he had some fun new toys to play
with.
Those toys were mostly embedded in the formfit-
ting suit he was forced to wear. Years of eating food
N O V A 5 7
that was bad for him and drinking more than was
good for him (particularly in the last year) resulted in
a form that wasn’t really suited to being so closely
conformed to by his clothes, so he tended to wear a
leather duster over it. The holographic badge identify-
ing him as a Wrangler was affixed to the lapel of the
duster.
Now, on the six-month anniversary of the completion
of his training, and his identification offically changing
from Detective Malcolm Kelerchian, Detective Squad,
Tarsonis Police Force to Agent Malcolm Kelerchian,
Wrangler, Ghost Program, he found himself standing
in the charnel house that the Terra Skyscraper had
become.
Even before he got the call to go to the location in
question, he had been drawn here by the mother of
all migraines. He had been sitting at his desk catching
up on some long-overdue paperwork when all of a
sudden someone drove a spike through his head.
Moments later, he was told to report to the Terra
Skyscraper, but he didn’t even let the dispatcher finish
the instruction. A telepath had done some major
psionic mojo at the Terra Skyscraper, and a damn
powerful one at that.
The TPF had already cordoned off a four-block
radius surrounding the skyscraper. When Mal went
through the cordon, he saw why: There were bodies
everywhere. Not a single sign of trauma on any of
them. Also damage consistent with a major explosion,
but without any of the signs. No burn marks, no
5 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
scorching, no evidence of any kind of explosive agent.
Plenty of broken glass, metal, plastic, and wood,
though.
What was of special note was that the damage was
the same regardless of the tensile strength of the
material in question. To Mal’s now-trained eye that
could only mean one thing: telekinesis.
Which meant this telepath was on a level greater
than anything Mal had encountered. Meant a Psi
Index of at least eight or higher. Any lower, and you
just had telepathy; adding the ability to move things
with your mind put you in a class all your own.
Mal had encountered only one PI8 in his six
months on the job. That person was currently locked
away in the basement of a government building,
drooling uncontrollably and unable to form words.
As for the bodies, there was, in fact, one sign of
trauma: bleeding through the nose, ears, mouth, and
eyes. It was that fourth thing in particular that indi-
cated the likely cause of death to be a psionic attack.
Which meant that Mal would be seeking himself
another telepath, who was also telekinetic. Teep/teeks
were always nightmares to deal with. Joy of joys.
He entered the skyscraper to find more of the
same. The only variation here was a dead body whose
COD was different from everyone else’s: a gunshot
wound to the chest. The DB in question was wearing
the uniform of a skyscraper guard. That added a
whole new wrinkle to the equation.
When Mal stepped off the elevator to the roof of
N O V A 5 9
the skyscraper, his headache intensified almost to the
same point it had when the attack first happened—
which meant that he was now at ground zero of this
psionic attack. The first thing he had to do upon
entering the room was touch the control on his belt
that would deliver four doses of an analgesic into his
bloodstream. The headache was getting in the way of
his ability to think.
Thanks to good old-fashioned Confederate know-
how, the analgesic took effect almost immediately,
which let Mal do the second thing he had to do, the
thing he always did better than his fellow detectives:
investigate.
All around him were several more DBs, about half
of them wearing all black and armed, the other half
dressed in either the expensive stylings of the ultra-
rich or the just-as-expensive outfits of the servants to
the ultrarich.
Just like the Tygores. Only a pity it wasn’t them.
Mal’s boots crunched as he walked. He double-
checked his computer, and was reminded that the
Terra Skyscraper’s roof was usually covered by a steel-
glass dome—which meant the telekinetic attack
destroyed the dome, something that was only physi-
cally possible with a nuclear weapon. Mentally possible,
though—that covers a much bigger range.
Either the place had been decorated by a paranoid
schizophrenic or the attack had tossed the furniture
around pretty thoroughly. Just on first glance, Mal
saw a table up against a wall, a chair embedded in the
6 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
chandelier—itself lying on the floor at an odd angle—
and a sofa split in twain.
Also present in the space were various TPF techs—
the ones who could never be bothered to make it to a
crime scene in the Gutter were out in force here—and
one of Mal’s former colleagues in the Detective Squad.
“My my my,” Mal muttered as he wandered
through the sea of corpses, “what a mess.”
He noted that the DBs here were also bleeding out
the eyes—with four exceptions. Like the guard down-
stairs, there were four people dead from bullet
wounds.
“Well, well, look who’s gracing us with his pres-
ence.”
Mal looked up to see Detective Jack Pembleton
smiling at him insincerely from behind the mirror-
shades he always insisted on wearing. Today, at least,
he had an excuse, as the mid-afternoon sun was shin-
ing down on the roof, and with the dome shattered,
there’d be no polarizing it.
“What brings you to my crime scene, Mal?” Jack
asked.
Mal touched another control on his belt, and a
holograph projected out from the buckle. “Not your
crime scene anymore, Jack. It’s gone confederal. This
is a signed and sealed order of the Council officially
putting this case under the jurisdiction of the Con-
federate Military, and putting me in charge.”
Jack didn’t bother reading the holograph, espe-
cially since it contained many words that Jack didn’t
N O V A 6 1
know, but instead glared at Mal through his shades.
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“Nope. This is mostly a psionic murder, so it’s us
Wranglers who get to deal with it.”
Shaking his head, Jack said, “Crap. I was hopin’ to
keep this. We got somethin’ like three hundred bodies
here, between everyone in the building and the peo-
ple on the street around it. You know what three
hundred closed murders’d mean for my promotion
chances?”
“As it happens, bupkus.” Patting Jack on the shoul-
der, Mal insincerely said, “Sorry.”
“Yeah—especially since I got more wormfood than
everyone else.”
Mal frowned. “Anyone else?”
“Yeah, we got something like seven attacks on Old
Families today. But this is the only one that has a real
body count. Couple of geezers bought it, and some
kids, but mostly security forces did their jobs. Not
here, though.”
That explains why Jack’s here alone, Mal thought.
Normally, a murder of this magnitude, they’d send
the entire Detective Squad to cover it. It would be
what they used to call a “red ball” back on Old Earth.
But attempts on the lives of the Old Families meant a
whole lot of red balls. . . .
“Hey,” Jack said suddenly, “whaddaya mean
‘mostly’? Lookit, all these stiffs are bleedin’ out the
eyes. That means teep, right?”
Amused at Jack’s slow thought process, Mal indi-
6 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
cated the four corpses. “These four died from gunshot
wounds, right at the center of the head. Two men,
two women, and one of the men looks a helluva lot
like that photo of Constantino Terra that’s in the
lobby, which means the other man’s probably his son,
and the two women are some combination of his
wife, mistress, and/or two daughters. There’s another
one downstairs, one of the guards, shot in the heart.”
“Huh.” That was about all Jack was likely to be
capable of.
“These people were executed. And the guy down-
stairs was shot to stop him sounding an alarm.” He
turned to Philbert, who was the only tech who had
anything like a brain. “Hey, Philbert.”
“Detective Kelerchian, long time no see! Oh yeah,
it’s ‘Agent’ now, yeah?”
“I need you to ID these two women quickly.”
“I can tell you now, the brunette’s Bella Terra, the
redhead’s Constantino’s mistress.”
Mal nodded. Then he activated the computer in his
suit, asked it for a location on Clara Terra and Nova
Terra and for the identification of Bella Terra’s jig, the
only other member of the family unaccounted for.
“Talkin’ to yourself again, Mal?”
“Yeah, it’s my only way to get intelligent conversa-
tion.” He gave the computer its instructions by subvo-
calizing, so it sounded to Jack like he was muttering
to himself.
The computer gave back the results into his ear-
piece: Clara Terra was last known to be home with
N O V A 6 3
her fiancé, and Nova Terra was scheduled to depart
that very morning on a private yacht from Osborne
Station to Tyrador IX. Ms. Terra’s jig was named
Edward Peters, and he was supposed to be in the
tower somewhere. Sadly, he had no image on file, so
he’d have to be identified retinally—or, if the blood in
the eyes made that difficult, by DNA.
“We need to account for the two daughters. Jack,
can you send a patrol to the home of Milo Kusinis and
make sure Clara Terra’s there?”
Jack nodded. “Whoever’s there’s gotta tell her her
parents’ve croaked, right?”
“Yeah.”
Grinning, Jack said, “I’ll send Grabowski.”
Mal sighed. Jack had hated Grabowski ever since
he married the woman Jack claimed to be in love
with, so naturally he would saddle him with the oner-
ous duty of telling a scion of the Old Families that she
was one of the only members of her family left alive.
He then asked the computer which yacht Nova
Terra was supposed to depart on, but was told that
that information wasn’t available, thanks to a privacy
seal.
Damn Old Families . . . They and the Council were
the only ones who could put such information under
a privacy seal, and it was probably the Terra family or
one of their cronies.
Mal put a call through to his boss.
There were many reasons why Mal hated talking to
Director Ilsa Killiany, primary among them being that
6 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
she was the one who found out that he was a PI3.5,
which was what led to his being exiled to the
Wranglers in the first place. But mostly he hated talk-
ing to her because she was a royal pain in the ass.
However, that was what he needed right now. Not
that Mal wasn’t capable of causing distress to a per-
son’s backside all on his own, but Killiany had more
authority to throw around.
While he waited for Killiany to be able to spare a
second to talk, Philbert walked up to him. “Uh, Agent
Kelerchian? We got the scan results, and the bullets
that killed these four people?” He pointed at the Terra
family corpses. “They all came from that gun.” He
pointed now at the weapon that was under the hand
of one of the black-clad corpses.
Mal wondered how Jack could be so surprised that
the quartet were executed and not killed by the
telepath when Philbert already knew they were killed
by bullets—then remembered that he knew Jack.
“Good job, Philbert. I want an ID on that man, now.”
“You got it.”
At the same time Philbert said those three words,
Director Killiany’s voice sounded in his earpiece.
“What the hell is it, Kelerchian?” she asked in a tone that
made it abundantly clear that “it” had better be damn
good or she’d be filleting him with a rusty butter knife.
“Ma’am, I’ve got four dead members of the Terra
family, with three more unaccounted for. I’m tracking
down two of them, but the third, Nova Terra, is sup-
posed to be on a ride out of Osborne.”
N O V A 6 5
“So what’s the problem?” It sounded like she was
rummaging through her desk for the knife.
“Computer won’t spit out the name of that ride,
ma’am. It’s under privacy seal.”
There was a pause. Then: “Give me five minutes.”
As soon as Killiany signed off, a thought occurred
to him, and he queried the computer for passenger
manifests for all puddle-jumpers going from Giddings
to Osborne today.
Sure enough, one first-class passenger turned up:
Nova Terra.
Except there was a notation on her reservation,
that she had left prior to takeoff. This sort of thing had
to get noted, as it changed the weight of the craft,
which had an effect on takeoff procedure.
Philbert came back over. “Sir, I haven’t ID’d the
shooter yet, but I just got a pos back on one of the
other bad guys here, and you’re not gonna believe it.”
“Try me,” Mal said dryly.
“It’s Edward Peters—the Terra lady’s jig.”
Mal nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Jack stared at him through his shades. “Makes
sense? How, exactly?”
Ignoring both of them, Mal put another call in to
Director Killiany. “Dammit, Kelerchian, I’m in the mid-
dle of—”
“Forget the privacy seal, ma’am, it doesn’t matter.
Nova Terra never made it up to Osborne. She’s our
killer, ma’am.”
“What?”
6 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“She left the puddle-jumper before it could take
off. She probably came back home, saw a bunch of
people killing her family, maybe even saw one or two
of ’em get shot. She also saw that one of the people
doing the killing was her mother’s own jig. So she’s
seen her family slaughtered, she’s been betrayed by
someone who’s as close to her as her father, and she
loses it. We’re standing right where she did it—I’ve
got a four-dose headache right now, and that’s a cou-
ple hours after it happened.”
“How can Nova Terra be a teep and we don’t know about
it?” Killiany asked.
“Old Family, ma’am, how the hell do you think?”
Mal knew firsthand how much power the very rich
wielded in the Confederacy.
“Yeah. All right, we need to find this girl. If she’s power-
ful enough to wipe out a whole building plus, not to mention
going all these years without training, we need to find her,
pronto.” He heard Killiany inputting something into
her computer. “Kelerchian, you’re off the murder.”
“What?” Mal couldn’t believe it. He finally had a
chance to investigate a crime again, and she was tak-
ing it away from him.
“I’ll have Fiorello handle it. The most important thing
right now is to make sure that girl gets found. So move your
ass.”
Mal sighed. “Moving my ass, ma’am.” Dammit.
All right, Nova, looks like you need finding. First thing
I’m gonna need to do is refill the analgesic supply. . . .
PART TWO
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned. . . .
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
chapter 5
YOU REALIZE THAT (AND THEN THE GUY JUST
sticks it) this is crap, right? I’m not trying to (in his pocket!)
fog you, I’m just (Don’t you dare walk) sayin’, this is total
crap, and (out on me, or I) I can’t take it. (swear, I’ll blow
your flickin’ brains) I’m tellin’ you, this (all over the floor,
you scan me,) is the best you’ve ever had, trust (you stupid
habhead?) me. She did (Why won’t he do this for) that? I
mean, she really (me? I’m not asking) did that? Why didn’t
he just shoot (much at all, dammit) her? Come on, just a
(This outfit makes me) little bit, you can (look stupid.) spare
it! I promise, you’ll (Can’t the Council do something) get it
back next (about all these habheads?) week—at the latest! I
haven’t eaten (They’re disgusting!) for so long, I’ve (Why
won’t he talk) forgotten what food tastes (to me anymore?)
like. Don’t you ever do (Hab here, hab here) that again!
(getcher hab here. . . .)
Silence.
Somehow, Nova had managed to quiet—or at least
dim—the voices in her head.
7 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
She didn’t know how she had done it—nor did she
know where she was. The last thing she remembered
was . . .
I don’t remember anything. She blinked. You have a
name—what is it?
But she couldn’t recall.
“Excuse me, but you are interfering with my nor-
mal operation, and I must ask you to stop.”
Looking up, she saw an AAI—advertising artificial
intelligence. Okay, I know what that is, so why can’t I
remember that my name is—
“Nova.” It came to her suddenly. Her name was
Nova. Short for . . . something.
Still, that’s a start.
“You are interfering with my normal operation,
and I must again ask you to stop.”
At last, Nova realized that she was curled up on a
filthy patch of pavement, at the feet of the AAI. At the
moment it was in its standby mode, between adver-
tisements.
Nova sat upright. All around her were buildings
crammed together, with small lines of pavement
between them. It was still daytime, she could tell that
much, as the artificial lighting was minimal, but no
sunlight made it this far. The paved section she was in
was a cul-de-sac. On three sides were different build-
ings, none of which had any windows or doors—no,
wait, one of them had a door, but it was closed and
barricaded with a maglock, which meant the entrance
was long abandoned. She looked up, but couldn’t
N O V A 7 1
clearly see the tops of any of the three buildings. It
was like they went on forever.
At the mouth of the cul-de-sac was a crossroads of
two more strips of pavement.
Realization dawned. I’m in the Gutter. The poor, the
dispossessed, the people who couldn’t find work, or
who could find only the worst work, what little there
was, were all here. Crime was, she knew, rampant in
the Gutter.
She’d never set foot here, of course; her kind didn’t
belong. Scions of the Old Families never came down
here. She probably ran on instinct, coming into this
abandoned alleyway because there were no people—
aside from an AAI, here to remind anyone who acci-
dentally wandered this way that there were still
products to be bought.
This area beneath the city of Tarsonis was where
people were crammed together in substandard hous-
ing in tall buildings—none as tall as her father’s sky-
scraper, of course, but—
Daddy! Oh no!
Unbidden, it all came back to her.
Her family was dead.
She saw Edward, her mother’s jig, a man she had
always thought to be family, give the order to kill her
brother and mother and father. The order had gone to
Gustavo McBain, a man whose entire family was
killed at Korhal IV. When Mommy was killed, she was
filled with fury at Edward for betraying her. When
Zeb—poor Zeb; she saw him get shot as well as felt
7 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
it—died, he was thinking about how he’d never get to
ask Thérèse to the d’Arbanvilles’ ball.
When Daddy was killed, he was grateful that Nova,
at least, was safely en route to Tyrador IX.
Poor Daddy. He died thinking she was off Tarsonis.
Instead, she had come back to their home and—
The voices.
The voices would not stop.
She heard Edward gloating over how he had fooled
the Terra family. She heard McBain’s glee at avenging
the death of his family, even though Nova’s family
had nothing to do with it—indeed, Daddy had urged
the Council not to bomb Korhal IV. She heard one ser-
vant, Maia, wonder if dying would hurt. Another,
Natale, hated that he’d never see his mother again.
One of the killers, Adam, didn’t care about the revolu-
tionary sentiments of Cliff Nadaner, the man who’d
ordered them to do this horrible thing; he just
enjoyed killing people. Another one, named Tisch,
was looking forward to living in a world where all the
Old Families were dead so the common folk could
rule the world like it was supposed to be. A third,
Geoffrey, was scared that they’d be caught and put in
jail, a concept that frightened Geoffrey to his very
core. A fourth, Paul, was aggravated that they were
killing pointless rich people, when what he really
wanted to be doing was killing the Council.
Nova couldn’t stand it anymore. Too many voices,
too many thoughts, all in her head at once.
She made them stop.
N O V A 7 3
But all that did was surround her with more dead
bodies. So she ran—but that only made things worse.
The farther away she ran, the worse the voices got.
At least, until now. When she came to the AAI, the
voices quieted. Perhaps because the only “person”
around was an artificial intelligence that didn’t have
any thoughts.
Because that’s what I’m hearing. Thoughts. Like with
Morgan. Maybe like it’s been all along. I can feel what peo-
ple think.
I’m a freak.
She was also a murderer.
“You are interfering with my normal operation. If
you do not cease, I will be forced to contact the
Tarsonis Police Force.”
Realizing that the AAI was going to get her in trou-
ble, she clambered to her feet.
Then she laughed bitterly. Trouble, right. Like inter-
fering with an AAI matters when I just killed hundreds of
people.
With a shock, she realized that she wasn’t exagger-
ating. She knew what each person was thinking when
he or she died, whether it was Edward or one of his
fellow cronies of this Cliff Nadaner person on the roof,
one of the servants they had captured, or someone
else in the skyscraper or nearby who simply had the
misfortune to be in the wrong place. The woman who
was worried about her daughter’s grades in school.
The man who was afraid his wife would find about
about the affair he was having with her brother. The
7 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
child who was on his way via hoverbike to meet his
parents on their lunch break. The—
“Do you want to sail through the air faster than
anyone else?” The AAI looked different now—like a
kid wearing hoverbike gear. The holographic projec-
tors had changed its shape.
Now the AAI’s mouth moved and the voice
changed to that of a little kid. “You bet!”
The AAI now appeared to be on a hoverbike, riding
over terrain that was suddenly projected behind it.
“The new 428 hoverbike. Get yours today.”
Nova fell to her knees. She felt pain in her
kneecaps from the action, but it barely registered.
The 428s were the ones Daddy’s company made.
Daddy was dead.
In fifteen years of life, Nova Terra had never cried.
Her life had been a happy one, with nothing that
would give her reason to be so sad that she’d be
brought to tears.
Now, on a street somewhere in the Gutter, with
only an AAI—which was now hawking a soft drink—
for company, Nova felt tears stream down her cheeks
for the fourth time since she turned fifteen. Happy
birthday to me, she thought bitterly.
Lookit (Hey, Freddie!) here, it’s (What’ve we got here,
then?) a curve!
The thoughts slammed into her brain, denying her
the peace that the AAI had given her.
“Hey, Freddie! What’ve we got here, then?”
“Looks like a curve to me, Billy.”
N O V A 7 5
“I believe you’re right, Freddie.”
She looked up and saw, through tear-streaked eyes,
two boys who weren’t much older than her. They
wore clothes that were too big for them, and smelled
like they hadn’t been introduced to the concept of
bathing. They were standing between her and the
mouth of the cul-de-sac.
When she’d heard Morgan’s thoughts involving
her for the first time, she’d thought them kind of dis-
gusting, but she was so overwhelmed by the fact that
she heard them at all that she hadn’t given much
thought to their content.
What she heard from Freddie and Billy was far far
cruder. And far far scarier. Had Morgan acted on his
thoughts, he would likely have been clumsy. If these
two did, it would be violent.
“Get away from me.” Her voice was hoarse and
barely audible.
Freddie feigned surprise at her tone. “What’s this,
Billy?”
Billy did likewise. “I think she don’t like us, Freddie.”
“We should show her what good sods we are,
Billy.”
“I agree, Freddie.” He started to move toward her.
His thoughts became, amazingly, more violent.
“Don’t come any closer.” If anything, Nova’s voice
was more ragged. She clambered backward, trying to
move away even as they approached. Her stomach
twisted with nausea. With a thud, she crashed back
into the AAI.
7 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“You have interfered with an official advertising
artificial intelligence. This is a misdemeanor punish-
able by a fine. The Tarsonis Police Force has been con-
tacted and will be here shortly.”
Freddie and Billy both laughed. They knew that
the TPF didn’t come to the Gutter to hand out fines. It
was an impressive day if they came to make an arrest.
Usually they just beat folks up, but Billy and Freddie
were both paid in full for the month, so no cops
would touch them.
Under other circumstances, Nova might have been
disgusted at this revelation of graft in the TPF, but she
was too busy quaking in fear.
Not of Billy and Freddie, however. Rather, she was
afraid of what she might do to them if they tried to do
what they intended.
“Now now, little curve, don’t you worry your
pretty little head. We’ll take right good care o’ you,
won’t we, Billy?”
“That’s right, Freddie.”
Freddie was now imagining the very specific things
he was going to do to the area between her legs. Nova
tried to clear her throat and said, “I’m warning you!”
Billy laughed. “Oh, that’s solid, isn’t it, Freddie?
She’s warning us.”
Shaking his head, Freddie said, “Don’t no cops
come down this way, curve. And even if they did,
they wouldn’t be doin’ nothin’ to us. So you can
scream all you like.” Nova knew that Freddie, in fact,
N O V A 7 7
wanted her to scream, as that would give him more
enjoyment.
At first, Nova did nothing. She couldn’t. It was one
thing a minute ago—she wasn’t thinking. But now
she knew what would happen if she cut loose.
So when Freddie grabbed her by the blouse, she
did nothing. (Only now did she even notice the blood
all over her blouse, and the rips that, she now remem-
bered, came when the dome collapsed on top of her.
Some of the blood might even have been hers. . . .)
When Billy grabbed at the waistband of her pants, she
did nothing.
Then she saw what Billy intended to do.
“Get off of me!”
A second later, they did. Both Freddie and Billy
were lying on the far end of the cul-de-sac. Billy felt a
sharp pain in his chest, and Freddie was dizzy and
couldn’t focus his eyes.
Nova stumbled to her feet. Her first attempt to
stand up straight failed, and she almost fell to the
pavement again, but she managed to keep her bal-
ance, thrusting her arms out to steady herself. Then,
finally, she stood up straight.
A spark from behind her drew her attention. She
turned around to see that the AAI was so much metal
and electronic slag. She was sorry to see that—the
AAI had been a refuge of sorts. It doesn’t have any
thoughts—it’s quiet. Not something I’d ever think about an
ad. Maybe I can find another one.
7 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
She turned back around to face her attackers.
Neither showed any sign of getting up anytime soon.
Walking over to them, she cleared her throat again.
“I warned you. Stay away from me. Or next time it’ll
be worse.”
Freddie was too focused on his inability to focus to
truly respond. But Billy’s brain went into a red haze of
rage. “Flickin’ curve! I’ll kill you!”
Billy jumped at her clumsily—he was coming
straight up from a bent-over position—and pulled a
pistol of some kind out of his oversized shirt. Billy
himself had no idea what kind of gun it was, so nei-
ther did Nova—she knew only that he got it from
someone named Grabien, and that he’d always sold
Billy good weapons in the past.
He aimed the pistol right at Nova, and she lashed
out. The pistol exploded a second later, sending Nova
flying backward, pain slicing into her forehead.
This time when she fell to the pavement, she regis-
tered the landing quite well. Her own thoughts were
now as unfocused as Freddie’s, and she felt her grip
on reality loosen.
Maybe now I’m dying, too. She found this to be a
happy thought, and she embraced the darkness that
overwhelmed her.
chapter 6
“SO LET ME SEE IF I UNDERSTAND THIS RIGHT,
okay? You been selling hab in O’Callaghan for the last
two months. Now that’s prime territory, okay? My
kids, they don’t give that to just anyone. You sell in a
place like O’Callaghan—or Kitsios or Stephens or
somewhere like that—well, then you can carry your-
self some weight, okay? That’s good. That’s someone
who knows how to grab the yous and make ’em take
what they know ain’t good for ’em. O’Callaghan,
that’s like a reward, okay?”
He paused, then. Over the years, he’d learned that
such pauses were useful, in part for the rhetorical
effect, but also because silence engendered fear. He
liked to soliloquize, it was true, but there were times
when not saying anything was the scariest thing.
Right now, he was going for scary, at least to a
degree.
He had been born with the name Julius Antoine
Dale, but nobody called him that anymore. Most
8 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
people didn’t know his real name, which was how he
preferred it. There were some who knew him from his
younger days as a pavement wrestler, and then later
as a bruiser, who called him “Jules,” but only a few of
them were still alive.
These days, he was known to almost everyone in
the Gutter as “Fagin.” It was more title than name,
though most people didn’t differentiate much. They
just called him that because they knew better than to
think about calling him anything else.
The object of Fagin’s diatribe was a young man
named Ian. He was in no position to criticize Fagin’s
delivery, nor his choice in dramatic pauses, seeing as
how Ian was, at the moment, strung up by his ankles,
dangling from one of the creakier ceiling beams, while
two of Fagin’s kids—Sam and Dani—each had a P220
trained on an ear. (Fagin’s kids only used P220s. The
P180s were always misfiring, and anything else
wasn’t suitable for the work he needed. His kids
needed the best if they was to stay on top, and Fagin
intended to stay on top till he died.)
“So after you get this reward, what do you do? You
start skimming. Now, it’s not like you don’t get a good
wage here, okay? You deal O’Callaghan, that means
you’re takin’ twenty percent—that’s better than any
other flicker in the Gutter’s gonna give you, okay?
Which makes me wonder, where do you get off think-
ing you can get away with that?”
Still, Ian said nothing. That was wise, as far as
Fagin was concerned, since he had told Dani and Sam
N O V A 8 1
that they were to fire their P220s if Ian so much as
uttered a peep.
“Some people would say I should make an example
of you. That would be the thing to do, okay?
Everyone does that. All the time. Someone does that,
all right then, let’s make an example of the little
flicker. Show him who’s boss.” Fagin let out a very
long breath. “Except for one little problem: That never
works. Seriously, when has killing someone ever been
a deterrent? The death penalty has never stopped cap-
ital crimes. In fact, capital crimes usually go up when-
ever there’s a death penalty.”
Ian still said nothing, though Fagin noted that
there was more sweat on his brow, no doubt due to
the topic of his imminent demise now being the sub-
ject of Fagin’s monologue.
“So, really, what would I gain? All right, yeah, I’d get
the satisfaction of watching as the bullet from a P220
tears a massive hole in your skull and splatters brain
matter, blood, and bone all over the back wall. But then
I’d have to get the wall cleaned, okay? That’s annoying.
And besides, I’ve seen brains a hella lot smarter than
yours splattered on walls before.” Another long breath.
“So that leaves me with punishment. See, those same
studies I was talking about? The ones that show that
capital crimes go up when there’s a death penalty,
okay? There’s a flip side to that nobody doesn’t talk
about. See, if it goes up when there’s a death penalty, it
goes down when there isn’t. When there’s actual pun-
ishment, then people aren’t likely to do it no more.”
8 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
For the first time since his monologue started,
Fagin actually looked at Ian. The amount of sweat on
Ian’s forehead increased even more.
“You started out as a runner, okay? Just a little
acnoid, beggin’ for work ’cause your parents were too
poor to give you an allowance. That’s how they all
start, okay? Doin’ whatever everybody else tells ’em
to do. And the ones that don’t get out, or that don’t
get killed, or that don’t get brain-panned, they move
up in my little world, okay? Like you did.”
He smiled. When he was a wrestler, Jules had had
all his teeth filed down to points in order to intimidate
his opponents. Because of that, he didn’t smile very
often now, saving it for when he really wanted to
scare people like he did back then.
Ian was now gushing sweat.
“Only now you’re moving down, okay? You’re a
runner again, Ian, and you’re the lowest of them. Some
ten-year-old acnoid we just picked up yesterday? He’s
got more clout than you, okay? You scan me?”
Now Ian nodded quite emphatically.
To Dani and Sam, he said, “Lower your guns and
cut him down.”
Sam did so right away; Dani looked disappointed
for a second, then helped Sam cut Ian down.
Ian fell to the floor with what Fagin imagined was a
hollow thud.
Fagin turned around to face Evan, the one who
handled Cramville, which was the neighborhood far-
thest away from Fagin’s HQ here in Duckworth.
N O V A 8 3
Duckworth was the closest the Gutter had to a nice
neighborhood—which, in real terms, meant that
some of the living spaces were more than four hun-
dred square feet. “Put him to work, okay?”
Evan nodded and walked over to Ian, yanking him
to his feet. “Move your ass,” Evan said. Ian stumbled
more than walked toward the door, Evan on his heels.
Fagin then turned to Manfred, who ran O’Callaghan.
“Nice job bringin’ that to my attention.”
Manfred nodded. “Thanks.”
Then Fagin took out his own P220 and shot
Manfred four times in the chest.
To Sam and Dani, he said, “Call Wolfgang, have
him clean that crap up. And somebody get Tenilee up
here. She’s runnin’ O’Callaghan now.”
The other area-runners were either looking agape
at Manfred’s bloody corpse or staring blankly at Fagin.
One of them, Francee, who ran Kitsios, said, “The hell
happened t’all that crap ’bout the death penalty not
deterrin’ nothin’?”
“I said it wasn’t no deterrent, okay? Didn’t say it
wasn’t useful. See, Ian, he’ll learn. He’s just a typical
panbrain that got too greedy for his own good when
we put him in charge of a street. Went to his head.
That won’t happen again, and by the time he works
himself back up there, he won’t be stupid.” Fagin
pointed down at Manfred’s corpse. “Now Manfred—
Ian pulled that crap for weeks before Manfred figured
it out. Or Manfred knew about it and didn’t tell me.
Means either he’s stupid or ain’t loyal. Since I took his
8 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
territory from him, I figure it’s disloyal. ’Sides, he’s too
smart, and too solid to learn nothin’. So he’s gone.”
Francee just shook her head.
“Anything else? ’Cause I got an appointment I’m
real late for, okay?” Fagin had postponed a ren-
dezvous with one of the twelve people he kept
around for his personal pleasure. He was actually
starting to get bored with Number Five—he never
knew their names, as he wasn’t interested in them for
who they were but for what they looked like—so he
was thinking he might have to replace him, maybe
with someone a little older, more experienced. But
tonight was his current favorite, Number Eleven, and
Fagin was eager to get in her pants, as it were.
Markus, who was in charge of Pyke Lane, which
was the neighborhood geographically closest to the
snooty part of the city, stepped forward. “I got some-
thin’, Fagin. I think it’s legit, too.”
“What?” Fagin asked, hoping this would be brief.
“Freddie and Billy found—”
Holding up a hand, Fagin said, “Stop right there.
The last time Billy and Freddie found something, it
was an AAI that could spy on TPF HQ, okay? And
that’s because they were high and hallucinating. So—”
“They ain’t foggin’ with this one, Fagin, honest,”
Markus said, insistently. “They found a curve down in
Hunter Alley—she’s a teek and a teep.”
Fagin rolled his eyes. “Teeks’re a myth, okay? If
you said she was just a teep, I might’ve—”
“She broke Billy’s ribs, Fagin—and Freddie’s got a
N O V A 8 5
concussion—and then she blew up Billy’s gun. She’s
just a girl, Fagin—little taller’n most, but still a girl. No
way she could take out Billy or Freddie for nothin’. I
ain’t foggin’ you, Fagin, I think this curve’s legit.”
“You sure they didn’t beat each other up and then
Billy’s gun misfired?” Sam asked. “ ’Cause Billy’s
always buyin’ substandard crap.”
Turning to Sam, Markus said, “He was holdin’ a
T20—they don’t blow up.”
Fagin had to allow as how that was true. T20s
jammed up all the time, but they never blew up. If
Billy was still holding his old TX2, that’d be one thing,
but if he had a T20 . . .
Markus looked back at Fagin. “I think you should
meet her. At the very least—” He hesitated.
“What?” Fagin asked, thinking that he was going to
have to wake Number Eleven out of a sound sleep by
the time he got to her at this rate.
“She’s definitely a teep. She—she knows things.”
Francee chuckled. “Crap, Markus, if she knew
about what happened in the Firefly Club, we all know
about that.”
Markus’s dark skin went darker with a blush. “Not
that—she knows other stuff. Stuff I ain’t told no one.”
Favoring Markus with his sharp-toothed smile,
Fagin asked, “Like what?”
“I—I don’t wanna say, Fagin. Trust me, though,
don’t nobody know this.”
Fagin sighed. “All right. Bring her by tomorrow.”
“Fagin, I—”
8 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Raising his P220 and aiming it at the same spot on
Markus’s chest where he’d hit Manfred, Fagin said,
“Tomorrow.”
Quickly, Markus said, “Yeah, yeah, okay, I scan, no
problem, tomorrow.”
Fagin lowered his P220 and put it back in his
jacket. “I’ll see you all in the morning.”
Then he retreated through the back door that led to
his private chambers. Two of his bodyguards—he
didn’t know their names, as the names of his guards
were as irrelevant as those of his sex partners—
stepped in front of the doorway to keep any potential
intruders out. They were supplements, and less
important ones, really. He mostly kept them around
for the symbolic value of having two very large men
with no necks standing in front of his private cham-
bers. His real security, however, came from touching
the control on his belt buckle that sealed the room
with a force field that couldn’t be broken down by
anything short of a large explosive device, and not
necessarily then.
Number Eleven hadn’t gone to sleep. She also had
gone to the effort of removing her clothing, which
disappointed Fagin. “Put your clothes back on, okay?”
he said sharply. He wanted to be the one to undress
her.
A teep-teek, huh? he thought as he removed his
clothes as a prelude to removing hers. This could be
interesting.
chapter 7
MARKUS RALIAN REALLY DIDN’T WANT THAT
girl around any longer than he had to. But when
Fagin went and pointed a gun at your chest two sec-
onds after he shot up Manfred for no good reason,
well, crap, Markus wasn’t no panbrain.
So when Fagin’s little object lesson was done,
Markus went back to his square in Pyke Lane to see
what he could do with the girl.
Markus grew up in Pyke Lane—actually on the
lane that the neighborhood took its name from—and
he knew early on that he wasn’t goin’ nowhere legit-
like. His dad was a musician who couldn’t get work;
his mom worked as a cook at a diner down in Kitsios,
which paid for crap. Mom kept hoping that Markus
would get himself a scholarship, go to one of the good
schools in Tarsonis City, but they kept turning down
his applications. Never gave a reason, just turned
them down.
Being no kind of panbrain, Markus didn’t waste no
8 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
time. If the world outside the Gutter didn’t care about
him, he wasn’t gonna care about it, neither. If he
couldn’t make it up to their world, he’d do the best he
could in this one. That meant drugs.
Again, Markus was no kind of panbrain. Everyone
around him, including his dad and both his siblings,
did crab, snoke, turk, and especially hab, so he saw
what it did to them. Dad was a great sax player—
when he wasn’t high on hab. Problem was, those
times weren’t very often, which was why he got
kicked out of the Trank Club, and hadn’t had steady
work since.
No, the people who made it weren’t the habheads.
The people who made it were the ones who sold it.
Like everyone else, Markus started out as a run-
ner for the local dealer. In his case, it was Orphy
Jones, back when he ran Pyke Lane. By the time
Markus worked his way up to being a barker, Orphy
got his head blown off by a rival dealer, the guy
everyone called Grin, on account of how he didn’t
never smile. Grin’s main lieutenant was a fast-loader
named Jules.
Wasn’t long before Markus saw the words on the
screen: Jules was the brains. Grin was just muscle,
and wasn’t much longer before a bullet from Jules’s
T20—this was before the P220s came out—was in
Grin’s skull and Jules started callin’ himself “Fagin”
for some reason and started taking territory.
Nowadays, nobody who made money on drugs or
sex or booze did it without Fagin getting himself a cut.
N O V A 8 9
As for Markus, he just made sure he was loyal to
whoever was in charge. Didn’t matter if it was Orphy
or Grin or Fagin, if he said “Jump,” Markus asked,
“How high?”
That was how you survived.
Worked, too. His square had a living room bigger
than the place he grew up in. Markus’s brother and
sister both worked for Fagin, too, and he’d gotten at
least Geena off of crab. Gary, though, he kept saying
he’d given it up, and then Markus’d find him with a
hab booster on his arm.
So when Fagin said he’d look at the teep curve
tomorrow, that meant that all Markus could do was
figure out what the flick to do with her for the night.
Normally, he wouldn’t have even questioned Fagin,
but after that curve started talking about what Dad
did. . . .
Markus shuddered. He hadn’t even thought about
it. Markus himself had just been an infant when it
happened, before Geena or Gary was born, and it
wasn’t something he wanted to remember. Most
times, he didn’t have to—but then that curve started
talking. . . .
He came into his square to see Geena sitting in the
living room, counting the day’s take, with Tyrus
standing over her polishing his T20. Geena looked as
pretty as always, especially after she’d had her nose
redone for her eighteenth birthday—a present from
Markus, who knew that was all she wanted. The op
was pretty straightforward, but until Markus started
9 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
dealing, the Ralians could never afford even that sim-
ple an op.
As for Tyrus, he was supposed to be in the spare
bedroom with the teep girl. So what the hell’s he doing
out here?
Shaking his head, Markus asked, “What the flick
you doin’ out here, Ty?” Years ago, Markus never
would’ve shot off at someone like Tyrus, who was at
least twice his size, and who could crush Markus’s
head with one outsized hand.
But Markus was the head of the neighborhood
now. He could boss people like that around. It felt
good.
Tyrus shrugged his massive shoulders. “Girl ain’t
doin’ nothin’, ’cept mutterin’ stuff.”
“I told you to keep an eye on her.”
Geena repeated Tyrus’s words. “She ain’t doin’
nothin’, Markus. Just lyin’ there all curled up. Ain’t
like she can go nowhere.”
“I don’t care, I don’t want that girl to be alone.”
“Markus, she can’t go nowhere without us
seein’—”
“She’s a teep. She can leave without us knowin’!”
Tyrus shuddered. “Got that right.” At Markus’s
look, he said, “She was goin’ on about my sister. I
didn’t want to be hearin’ that, so I came out here.”
Markus sighed. Tyrus’s sister had worked as a sex
dancer to pay for her hab, and died when one of her
regular customers got annoyed when she wouldn’t go
home with him. Because Fagin was the type to
N O V A 9 1
reward loyalty, and because Tyrus had been a good
soldier, Fagin had made sure that the customer in
question died very slowly and very painfully, but that
didn’t bring Tyrus’s sister back. It was the only thing
that ever made the big man get emotional, so Markus
could understand why he wouldn’t want to be in a
room with someone reminding him of it.
That didn’t make the situation no better, though.
Glaring at his sister, he said, “Then you shoulda got
someone else. That girl’s dangerous, and Fagin wants
to see her in the morning.”
“Crap,” Tyrus said, “we gotta be keepin’ her for the
whole night? You see what she did to Billy and
Freddie?”
“Yeah, and that’s why Fagin wants to see her—but
not till tomorrow.” Turning to Geena, he said, “Get
some people over here. I want three people in the
room with her all the time, and two more out here.
She even twitches, she gets shot, you scan me?”
“That’s what you told us before you left,” Geena
said testily as she grabbed a fone.
“Yeah, and that worked real good.” Markus shook
his head, pulled out his own P220, which Fagin had
given him when he gave him the Pyke Lane neigh-
borhood to run, and walked into the spare bedroom,
from which Markus had had all the furniture
removed after the girl threw her first temper tantrum
and almost broke his favorite chair. It was an interior
room with no windows to the outside—in fact, the
entire apartment only had one room with windows,
9 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
and Markus took that one for himself. Geena had
been right, in theory—the girl shouldn’t have been
able to leave without someone in the living room
knowing it, since the spare bedroom’s only way out
was into that room. Still, with a teep, Markus wasn’t
taking any chances.
He closed the door behind him, cutting off Geena’s
summoning some more muscle. Markus knew she’d
find someone. The Yorod was closed for renovations
for the next week, so that was at least four bruisers
who probably were at loose ends for a while, plus
they’d settled their little problem with the turk sup-
plier—all, Markus was proud to say, without having
to involve Fagin, which made the boss very happy—
so Zelik and Marina would be free.
It took Markus a second to find the girl—which
was surprising, since the room was just a square space
of about fifty square feet with nothing in it but the
girl.
She was curled up in a corner, her knees tucked
into her chest, her hands up, covering her face.
“Go away.” Markus could barely hear her speak
through the mask of her forearms.
“Can’t do that, curve.”
“I can’t stop it if you’re in here.” Her voice was a
mild whimper. “If you’re in here, I know all of it! I
know about what your father did—”
Markus held up the P220. “Shut up! Don’t be
talkin’ about—”
The curve sat up. “Then leave!”
N O V A 9 3
She had a pretty face, the curve did. Even with the
tears running down her cheeks and the puffy eyes,
Markus could see she was pretty. And it was a natural
pretty, the kind that happened from good luck, not
from a surgeon’s laser the way it did for most of the
curves in the Yorod.
Which was why Markus made sure to hold up the
P220. Pretty faces made studs do some stupid crap, and
Markus prided himself on not being stupid.
“Nobody’s leavin’, curve. Fagin wants to see you in
the morning, and that means—”
She put her head back behind her arms. “I can’t
stop it if you’re here! I can’t stop your brother from
drugging himself into a fog, I can’t stop your sister
from selling her body, I can’t stop your cat from dying,
I can’t stop Orphy from not listening to you and get-
ting his head shot off, I can’t stop you from singing at
the Firefly Club, I can’t stop your father from killing
your mother, I can’t stop—”
“Shut up!” Markus screamed, thumbing the safety
on his P220. “I swear I will shoot you in the face if you
don’t shut up!”
“Then get out!” she screamed right back. “I know
how much you hate Jules, how much you want to kill
him, I know how much you want your father to die,
too, and—”
Markus fired a shot over her head.
She didn’t even flinch.
Whimpering again, she said, “You really think
that’s gonna scare me? Don’t you get it?” She looked
9 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
out from behind her arms again. Her green eyes were
bloodshot. “I want to die!”
“Well, too bad, curve,” Markus said, trying and fail-
ing to keep his voice from shaking. “Fagin wants to
see you in the morning, and that means you don’t
move, you scan me?”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned around
and left the spare bedroom as fast as he could.
“Damn, Markus,” Geena said. “You ain’t looked
like that since the cat died.”
Markus snarled at his sister, but didn’t say any-
thing.
Tyrus said, “I told you, Markus. That curve ain’t
uploadin’ right, you scan me?”
Nodding, Markus said, “Yeah. When the others get
here—tell them to stay outside the door. Don’t
nobody talk to her for nothin’.” He shuddered. “That
curve’ll be Fagin’s problem tomorrow morning. Till
then, we keep her locked up.”
“No problem,” Tyrus said emphatically.
Markus then went straight for his bedroom. He had
a private stash of whiskey in there, and he intended to
drink all of it before he went to sleep tonight.
Malcolm Kelerchian was getting entirely the wrong
kind of headache.
He’d spent the past three days talking to everyone
who knew Nova Terra, both on Tarsonis and off. He’d
spent the better part of yesterday talking to the people
who were now on the Padraig, still en route to
N O V A 9 5
Tyrador IX despite the tragedy that befell several of
their families—supposedly it would be safer there. At
least Mal had been able to talk to them, and only then
by throwing his Wrangler credentials around. Certainly
he wouldn’t have been able to swing talking to the pas-
sengers on an Old Family yacht when he was a mere
detective, which marked the first reason he’d had in a
year to be grateful for his transfer.
Sadly, those interviews did very little good. Nobody
knew anything about Nova beyond the fact that she
left the puddle-jumper suddenly for no good reason,
and that she had always been a rather empathetic girl,
always given to caring about other people’s feelings.
Mal’s impressions upon hearing that from most of
the younger scions of the Old Families was that such
was a concept wholly foreign to them.
Talking to her acquaintances on Tarsonis proved
equally useless, mostly because they were only
acquaintances. They knew who Nova was, they knew
she was Constantino Terra’s youngest child, they
knew she had blond hair, and they knew damn little
else.
Now Mal was in the home of Clara Terra and her
fiancé, Milo Kusinis, a lavish suite on the upper floors
of Kusinis Tower, one of the few buildings taller than
Terra Skyscraper. Clara was seated on a wooden chair
that was, Mal knew, a reproduction of a French chair
from the nineteenth century on Old Earth, and which
also cost more than Mal’s annual salary. Clara had her
mother’s brown hair and full figure, and she had also
9 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
done considerable work to make her face perfectly
proportioned. She was holding an embroidered hand-
kerchief to her face and dabbing her eyes, though Mal
could find no evidence of crying. The surgeon’s laser
may have prevented that from showing, of course—
with the Old Families, there were lots of ways to buy
your way out of feeling emotions, after all.
Mal was seated on a chair just like it, sitting at a
dining-room table that was three times as expensive
as both chairs combined, protected by a lace table-
cloth that was probably as proportionately expensive.
If Nova had been here, he’d have a different kind
of headache. But she hadn’t been here since the day
of the attack.
Among Mal’s instructions from Director Killiany
was that the fact of Nova’s telepathy was classified
and only employees of the Ghost Program and mem-
bers of the Terra family were to know of it. That
meant that—unlike his interviews with the other Old
Families—Mal could be direct with Clara.
“Ms. Terra, did you know that your sister was a
telepath?”
“A telepath?” Clara looked up from behind her
handkerchief. “That’s ridiculous. Nova was no such
thing.”
And how nice of you to talk of your sister in the past tense.
“I’m afraid she is a telepath, ma’am. There’s no doubt
of that.” In truth, there was still some doubt, as the
evidence was fairly circumstantial, but he saw no rea-
son to share that with the sister.
N O V A 9 7
“It’s nonsense. If Nova was a telepath, I’d have
known.”
That, it seemed, was all there was to it. But Mal
pressed on. “Ma’am, right now, Nova’s a danger to
everyone around her—but mostly to herself. I have to
ask—have you seen her since the attack on your fam-
ily?” He knew the answer was no, but he was curious
as to what her reaction would be.
As she set the handkerchief down on the lace
tablecloth, Mal saw a look of determination that
might have been more fierce on the visage of some-
one who was better at it. “Agent Kelerchian, I agreed
to speak to you because I received word from the
Council itself that I was to cooperate with you in any
way. But I will not see my sister spoken of in this
way! Especially after the horrible tragedy that has
befallen—”
“Yes, yes, the terrible tragedy that’s left you and
your darling fiancé in charge of the entire Terra for-
tune.”
“What are you implying?”
Malcolm Kelerchian rarely smiled. He’d tried it a
few times, and found that it never conveyed any
sense of jocularity. So he saved it for occasions when
he wanted to put the person with him completely ill
at ease. “I’m not implying anything that isn’t blind-
ingly obvious to anyone paying attention. A bunch of
rebels broke into the Terra Skyscraper—”
“Led by my mother’s jig.” Clara looked away and
made a tch noise. “I told her not to trust that man. . . .”
9 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Sure that Clara had never said any such thing to
her mother, Mal ignored the interruption and pro-
ceeded. “—and killed the three people who stood
between you and control of the Terra family, all at a
time when you weren’t home, because you were busy
with your fiancé—who stands to inherit control of the
entire Kusinis family fortune and businesses. That
looks suspicious to people, given the likely prospect of
your two families merging completely, instead of par-
tially the way it would’ve been a week ago. Now most
people wouldn’t question a scion of the Old Families.
But, as my presence in your apartment amply demon-
strates, I’m not most people. I’ve got the Council’s
ear—” An exaggeration, but again, Clara didn’t need
to know that. “—and if I tell them that you’re suspi-
cious, they’ll be all over you—and your fiancé. One
way to keep me from telling them that is to answer my
damn questions.”
Clara’s lips set into a small line under her unnatu-
ral nose. “Very well. Ask.”
In fact, Mal had already done so, but in the inter-
ests of moving things forward, he asked again: “Have
you seen your sister Nova since your parents and
brother were killed?”
“No.” Clara let out a breath, and she seemed to
deflate. “I can’t imagine why she didn’t come straight
to me.”
Mal drummed his fingers on the table. “Ma’am, it’s
my belief that Nova didn’t know she was a telepath
until she walked onto the roof of your family’s sky-
N O V A 9 9
scraper and saw Edward Peters kill the rest of the
family—right before she killed him and his cohorts. A
lot of telepaths’ abilities don’t get activated until they
experience some kind of traumatic event.”
Clara nodded. “This certainly qualifies.”
“Exactly. I doubt very much that she was thinking
straight, which is probably why she didn’t come to
you. Now I’ve gotta ask—is there anywhere she used
to go, some kind of secret favorite place she didn’t tell
anybody about?”
“I’m afraid if she did, she kept it a secret from me. I
must admit, Agent Kelerchian, we weren’t as . . . inti-
mate as sisters should be. She was much closer to her
brother.”
Yeah, but I can’t really question him. Somehow, Mal
managed not to say the words out loud. He reached
into the inner pocket of his duster and pulled out a
card. On it was encoded his personal comm code;
placing that in a fone would transmit the user to his
headset instantly. Normally, he simply gave out the
cards in his outer pockets, which went to his mail
cache, but on this case, he wanted instant gratification—
even if it meant talking to this woman again. “If you
think of anything else, or if you hear from Nova, or if
there’s anything you come across or remember that
might help me find Nova—please call me immedi-
ately.”
“Of course.” Clara took the card and said the words
in that noncommittal voice that drove Mal crazy.
Getting up from the chair, Mal pumped two doses
1 0 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
of the analgesic into his bloodstream to stave off the
headache.
Wherever Nova Terra was, Mal was more and more
convinced that it wasn’t among the Old Families.
Facial ID scanners had long since been set up at
Giddings and all the other ground ports, as well as
every train station in Tarsonis. They’d gotten three
hits of women who looked similar enough to Nova,
but weren’t her—they were neither the right age nor
telepathic. One had threatened legal action against
the government, to which Mal wished her the best of
luck and agreed to appear as a witness on her behalf,
an offer she declined frostily.
If Nova went off-planet, she did it before the cor-
don fell—unlikely, as it was imposed within two
hours of her disappearance from the puddle-jumper
at Giddings. More likely, she was still on Tarsonis. But
she wasn’t among any of her peers.
So if I’m a telepath who was just confronted with the
death of my entire family and hit with abilities I haven’t the
first clue how to control, where would I go?
The best answer Mal could come up with was: As
far away from my life as possible.
Which meant Mal was going to have to check the
Gutter.
chapter 8
FIVE PEOPLE ARMED WITH GUNS ESCORTED
Nova from the tiny apartment that Markus Ralian
owned. She had awakened there after she blew up
Billy’s gun. Her first hope—that she was dead—was
soon dashed, and she struck outward, wrecking all
the furniture in the room before falling unconscious
again.
When she woke back up, the room was empty.
She noticed that, when nobody was in the room,
she had an easier time screening out everyone’s
thoughts. They were still there, but it was like the
background noise of a crowd in a filled stadium, just a
wall of mental noise.
But if someone came through the door, she
couldn’t hold the dam up. First it was Markus with his
murdering father and angry mother and ex-prostitute
sister and hatred for his boss and so much else, and
that led to her hearing the thoughts of the couple in
the next apartment who argued all the time but loved
1 0 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
each other anyhow, the bruiser in the next room who
secretly loved dancing but couldn’t tell anyone for
fear of ruining his reputation, the woman down the
hall who kept trying to fix her holo because she
couldn’t afford to buy a new one or pay someone to
repair it, the family across the way who were eating
the last of their leftovers and didn’t know if any of
them would find work and thus be able to afford to
buy food tomorrow, and everything else. . . .
Then Markus left, and she was able to silence the
voices.
For a time.
It got worse when the bodyguard came in, but she
was able to scare Tyrus Fallit enough that he left.
Same for when Markus came back in.
Now, though, she was overwhelmed again, mostly
with the four who escorted her, plus Markus.
This is a fine-(Damn, I hope Markus don’t tell) lookin’
curve. Gotta (nobody that my gun ain’t loaded) get me some
of her (I’m hungry.) when Fagin’s all (’cause that’ll get me
in some serious crap) through with her. (with Fagin.) I can’t
believe we made it (Maybe I’ll watch that holo tonight)
through the (with Mom like I) night. Couldn’t (promised her
last week.) get a flickin’ bit of sleep (Hope I can score me
some hab after this, gotta) ’cause of that curve. She’d better
be worth (get some hab or I’m just gonna) whatever Fagin
wants (I’m hungry.) with her, or I’m gonna put the bullet
(flickin’ explode right here in the street, ’cause) in her brain
my own self. (I gotta get me some!)
Nova closed her (Need some hab!) eyes and forced
N O V A 1 0 3
herself to focus, (A nice curve.) to not think about (I’m
hungry.) the thoughts (Hope Mom remembers.) that
were pounding into (Almost there.) her mind.
The next thing she knew, the thoughts had gone
away—no, not entirely. Just four of the five did.
Markus was still there—and a new one.
She opened her eyes and looked up to see Markus
and another man. He was shorter than Markus, but
he seemed taller, somehow. Nova suspected that he’d
always seem to be the tallest person in the room. He
had a need to be in charge of everything he surveyed.
He was a little taller than Nova herself was, with dark
skin, a shaved head, and a full beard.
Even if she hadn’t been able to see into his mind,
she’d have recognized him from Markus’s thoughts.
“Your name is Jules,” she said.
He laughed. “Not bad. Ain’t too many people that
know that name. But I’m called—”
“Fagin.” She knew that already. She knew every-
thing. “You named yourself after a character in an old
novel called Oliver Twist—a novel you hated when you
read it, but you liked the character of Fagin, and you
hate the fact that your name is Julius Antoine Dale.”
Markus looked over at Fagin—at Jules—in surprise
at that. He hadn’t known Fagin’s whole name until
now.
Now Fagin was angry. “Markus was right, okay?
You are a teep. Which means I got only one question
for you, curve.”
“I just want to die.”
1 0 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
This prompted a wide grin. “That may still be possi-
ble. But first, I gotta see if you’re of use, you scan me?”
“Use people is all you do,” Nova said quietly.
“That’s right.” The grin widened. “Now why don’t
we start with your name? I’m guessing it’s something
fancy—maybe with some money behind it—since
your clothes are a lot nicer than most of what you see
down here.”
She saw where this was going before Fagin started
talking. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she
remembered her parents being killed. “You won’t get
any ransom. My family’s all dead.”
Suddenly, she remembered that Clara was probably
still alive. She had forgotten all about her older sister.
But still, she couldn’t, she daren’t let this monster
know that. He had to believe that the entire Terra
family was dead.
Luckily, that would be an easy fiction to maintain.
“So you are rich. Good, good. There’s got to be
somebody—”
“There’s nobody!” she shouted. “They’re all dead! I
killed all of them!” Nova wasn’t sure why she said
that, but it had an immediate effect on Fagin.
Running with what she saw in his head, she contin-
ued: “Why do you think I came down here? I killed
my entire family, and I don’t want the TPF to find me.
So I came to the Gutter—cops don’t come down here,
from what I’ve heard.” In fact, she’d heard no such
thing—mainly because she hadn’t cared enough to
inquire—but she saw clearly in both Markus’s and
N O V A 1 0 5
Fagin’s minds that the police left them alone as long
as they didn’t interfere in the world outside the
Gutter.
Fagin rubbed his bearded chin. “So what you’re
saying is—you can kill with your brain, okay?”
“That’s right. I can. But I won’t do it for you.”
“Oh, I think you will. Because if you don’t—”
“You’ll shoot me?” Nova said, though she saw that
that wasn’t what he was thinking. He was thinking
that she would starve, which was a ridiculous notion.
“No, shooting’ll be a mercy. You want to die, you
said—I heard you say it. But that’s not the worst thing
that can happen to a rich little curve like you. No, the
worst thing is to suffer. I’ll bet you’ve never sufferered,
have you, little curve?” He pulled out his pistol—a
P220, apparently, the best handgun that money could
buy—and pointed it right at her head. “Now I want
you to leave here, little curve, and I’m gonna make
sure that nobody helps you, okay? You won’t get no
food, you won’t get no place to live, you won’t get no
drugs, you won’t get nothin’, you scan me?”
Markus, Nova knew, was surprised at this turn of
events—he thought that what Jules was doing was
cruel and unnecessary. But he also knew better than
to argue with him.
“Get out, curve! Out!”
Nova couldn’t believe what she was hearing. A
minute ago, he was convinced that she’d be the best
weapon he’d ever had. Now, he wanted nothing to do
with her. He was convinced that the only way she’d
1 0 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
work for him was if she was on her own for a while—
then she would come to him begging him to take her
in, in much the same way his literary namesake took
in Oliver Twist in the old Charles Dickens novel.
Right there, Nova swore to prove him wrong.
“All right, I’ll leave. But first, let me tell you some-
thing, Julius Antoine Dale. You’re never going to get
your mother to love you. None of the twelve people
you keep locked up in the back rooms even like you—
they’re just scared of you. Everyone thinks you look
like an idiot with the shaved head, since that look
went out of style ten years ago. And one of your most
trusted lieutenants is going to kill you.”
She made that last one up—well, not entirely. The
image of killing Fagin was very clear in Markus’s head.
Then she turned around and walked out.
As she moved past the four guards (I’m hungry.
What, she’s leavin’? Gotta get my hab! Hope Mom’s okay.)
and the other people in this large apartment—which
was called a “square,” she realized, because most of
the low-income housing that the Confederacy built
down here consisted of square-shaped apartments—
she heard one final thought from Fagin. It wasn’t
anger at what she’d revealed to him because, she now
understood, they were all things he already knew,
and they didn’t scare him, not even the fact that he’d
die at the hands of a trusted lieutenant. Perhaps it was
because that was how he rose to power, so he
expected the same to be visited on him.
In any case, he had only one thought in mind:
N O V A 1 0 7
She’ll be back. And then she’ll be mine.
Nova swore she would die before she let that hap-
pen.
Mal arrived at the Southwestern District Head-
quarters of the Tarsonis Police Force, knowing that he
would be violating his director’s orders when he
entered.
He had already requested all the records from all
the TPFHQs in the Gutter, and they’d told him noth-
ing useful—as expected. That’s because very little
went on in the Southwestern and Southern Districts
that made it into the records.
If he was going to find out what was really happen-
ing in the Gutter, he was going to have to talk to
people.
Or, specifically, talk to a person.
He entered the main reception area. The walls were
several unfortunate shades of green. The district HQs
were first constructed shortly after humans settled on
Tarsonis—the ruling class felt that keeping law and
order was critical—and they were constructed from
bits of the colony ships. Over the years, most of the
HQs were replaced with more modern structures that
reflected the growing prosperity of humans on
Tarsonis.
But in the Gutter? Nobody bothered. Besides, the
metal they built the HQ out of was designed to with-
stand the rigors of space, which meant it could stand
up to whatever the Gutter could throw at it.
1 0 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Not that the Gutter threw much. The cops down
here were bought and paid for by the various criminal
elements, after all. If nothing else, the salary for graft
was a lot better than the one they got from the
Council.
As if to prove that point, Mal saw that the sergeant
in charge of the surveillance cameras was watching
UNN on a screen on his desk. The other screens were
showing empty alleys and streets; three weren’t
working. Mal assumed that someone paid good
money to keep those three cameras down.
Still, just for the hell of it, he asked, “What hap-
pened to Cameras 4, 5, and 9?”
“Busted,” the sergeant said without looking up
from the UNN reporter. It was Mara Greskin, which
Mal only knew because she’d interviewed him once
or twice, and then asked him out to dinner. He’d said
yes, which was a mistake, as the dinner was a disaster,
like every date and attempt at a relationship Mal had
ever made.
“I need to see Officer Fonseca.”
Jerking his thumb behind him, and still not looking
up from Greskin’s story, the sergeant said, “Desk
duty.”
“Figures. Who’d he crack off this time?”
The sergeant shrugged. “I stopped keepin’ track.”
Yeah, that sounds like Larry. “Which desk is his?”
“The one up against the wall.”
Anywhere else, Mal might have thought it odd that
the sergeant never bothered to request Mal’s creden-
N O V A 1 0 9
tials, or at least look up to see who it was. But this was
the Gutter.
Mal walked past the sergeant through a long, dark
hallway. He saw light fixtures, but they weren’t work-
ing. He wondered how long they had been out, and if
anyone even bothered to report their failure.
The hallway emptied out into a large room full of
desks, all but one of which were empty. That figured.
Most of the shift probably were out on patrol, were
doing favors for whoever had paid for them, or had
called in sick because they had better things to do
today. In mid-shift, very few cops would be in HQ for
any reason.
Unless, of course, they were on desk duty.
Officer Larry Fonseca was older than Mal, but
beyond that Mal had no idea what his age was. He
was white-haired and wrinkled, but that was the case
when Mal first joined the TPF twenty years earlier. He
was always just old, though it was possible he’d added
a jowl or two, his white hair had gotten a bit thinner,
and his belly had gotten a bit thicker.
“How you doin’, Larry?”
Larry looked up from staring at the same UNN
report the sergeant had been watching. His blue eyes
were virtually hidden by folds of aged flesh, hovering
over his bulbous nose.
“I’m doing for crap, Mal, whaddaya expect? What
in the name of the sun in the sky is that you’re wear-
ing?”
Sitting down in the guest chair next to Larry’s desk,
1 1 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
which creaked with his weight, Mal said, “Been trans-
ferred over to the confeds. Ghost Program.”
“What’d they do a stupid thing like that for?”
“As soon as I know the answer to that one, old
friend, I’ll let you know.”
Larry chuckled. “Yeah, that figures. So if you’re a
fancy-ass confed now, the hell you need to talk to me
for?”
“I need to know what kinds of assaults have been
happening down here the last four days or so.”
Looking at Mal’s earpiece, Larry said, “C’mon, you
can get all that—”
Waving a hand in front of his face, Mal said, “I
don’t mean the records, I mean what’s actually hap-
pening down there.” He took a breath, then proceeded
to violate several confederal laws. “What I’m looking
for is a teep/teek. Got a Psi Index through the roof,
and I’m pretty sure she’s loose down here.”
“Don’t you got special fancy-ass confed equipment
to help you find that stuff?”
Mal shrugged. “Yeah, sure, I can pick up her
psionic wavelength pattern. Only one problem—I
don’t know what it is.”
“Whaddaya mean you don’t know what it is?”
Sighing at the digression, Mal leaned forward and
said, “If you’re looking for some mug’s DNA, you can
scan for it—and then you comp it to the database,
right?”
Larry nodded. Then his eyes widened a bit, and he
N O V A 1 1 1
nodded again. “Oh, I get it. You don’t got nothin’ to
compare it to.”
“Right. She’s a renegade, never got into the pro-
gram. I mean, I can do scans looking for a heavy wave
pattern—and we have been, and I might find her that
way, but I’m not about to count on that.”
Again, Larry nodded. “Yeah, I can understand that.
S’like a needle in a haystack.”
“What’s so hard about finding a needle in a
haystack? Just run a magnet over the haystack, the
needle’ll pop right out.”
As always when Mal pointed that out to someone,
Larry got a confused look on his jowly face; then it
brightened, as if he’d just received enlightenment.
“Hey, yeah, that would work. Okay, so whaddaya
need?”
“Anybody who’s been attacked but left no marks.
Or a DB that’s bleeding out the eyes. Or just people
being assaulted by a little girl who you wouldn’t nor-
mally expect to get assaulted by a little girl.”
“Yeah, okay. Gimme a day.”
Mal smiled. He knew he could count on Larry. “So
who’d you crack off this time?”
Shrugging, Larry said, “The captain. He wanted me
playin’ bodyguard for a turk shipment from the
Heights. I told him to go flick himself, so he put me on
a desk.”
“You know, Larry, you could just take the money
and be done with it.”
1 1 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Larry shook his head, then folded his arms over his
chest. “Nope. Can’t do it. Took an oath.”
Shaking his head, Mal got up. “You’re nuts, you
know that?”
“Whatever.” He went back to watching UNN.
For his own insane reasons, Larry Fonseca kept to
his oath to keep the peace and uphold the law. He was
also as good a cop as they came, so he always knew
what was going on on his patrol and was always will-
ing to cooperate with a fellow officer—even one
who’d been transferred to the confeds—which made
him a more useful resource than anyone else in the
Gutter. The other cops here were all beholden to
other masters, and wouldn’t cooperate with Mal for
anything short of cash that he wasn’t authorized to
provide officially and couldn’t afford to provide per-
sonally.
In the meantime, Mal would wander around the
Gutter for a while. Maybe he’d get lucky and get a
headache. . . .
chapter 9
NOVA HAD THOUGHT THAT STARVING TO DEATH
would be easier than this.
After leaving Fagin’s place, she just walked until
she found an alley like the one Billy and Freddie
found her in. This one didn’t have an AAI; but then,
it didn’t have much of anything beyond a large trash
bin. Nova had been disgusted to see that they still
had trash bins down here—back home, the trash
was incinerated regularly right on the premises.
Apparently, down here in the Gutter it was collected
and then sent somewhere else to be incinerated,
which struck Nova as a colossal waste of time. Why
not just do it there?
She found a trash bin to lie behind, and fell asleep,
hoping never to wake up.
The problem was, she did wake up. And when she
did, she was very hungry.
Ignoring it proved impossible. Her stomach rum-
bled as loudly as the thoughts of the people around
1 1 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
her—which she was getting better at tuning out, even
as she got worse at ignoring her hunger.
She tried to think of other things, but it just sent
her back to food—or to things she didn’t want to think
about. Thinking about home made her think of the
banquets Mommy used to put together. Thinking
about her family made her think of how they died.
Thinking about Morgan made her ill.
After two days, she got a distraction: a very small,
very filthy tabby cat with half its left ear missing, who
enjoyed foraging in the trash bin. The background
noise of human thoughts around her had dimmed a
bit, but when the cat came up to her, she found her-
self almost embraced by the cat’s own rather straight-
forward thoughts. Food? Not food. Find food. Sleep. It
never got more complicated than that. However, the
cat decided that, even though she wasn’t food, Nova
was a decent enough sort for her to curl up next to
when they both went to sleep.
By the fourth day of her Fagin-imposed exile, she
had decided to name the cat Pip, after the kitten she’d
had for about two weeks when she was a girl.
Unfortunately, while Pip—who was a Siamese—got
along fine with Nova, she constantly hissed at every-
one else in the house, from the hired help to Zeb, and
Mommy and Daddy both agreed that she had to go.
Pip wound up with the family of the one servant the
cat could stand—Rebeka, Nova’s hairdresser. Nova
visited her as often as decorum permitted a member
of the Old Families to visit the home of a servant.
N O V A 1 1 5
Whlie Pip wandered off occasionally, she always
came back to Nova, unlike her namesake. At one
point, she even offered a mouse that she had caught
her very own self. Food for big hairless cat was her
thought upon dropping the mouse in front of Nova.
“Big hairless cat,” Nova had soon realized, was how
Pip thought of her. The idea of a creature other than a
cat never entered her worldview.
She was very displeased when Nova refused to eat
the mouse, and Pip disappeared for the better part of a
day. Nova had wondered if she’d ever come back, and
found that she was pleased when she did, almost
twenty hours later. When Pip was around, it was eas-
ier to keep the other thoughts silent. Pip wasn’t quite
the dead zone that the AAI was, but that was better in
a way. Getting used to the cat’s thoughts provided
good practice for human thoughts—at least that was
her theory.
A small voice in her head said, What difference does it
make? You want to die anyway, right? She ignored it.
On the fifth night, she awoke with a start, having
dreamed of a very large steak with a three-color salad
covered in the cook’s mouthwatering mustard vinai-
grette, all of it washed down with framberry juice.
She couldn’t take it anymore. She had to eat some-
thing.
Getting to her feet, she looked down at her clothes.
Her blouse, which was once white, now was streaked
with gray and black and other colors she wasn’t sure
she wanted to identify. Her white denim pants had
1 1 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
even more colors on them. Somewhere along the
line, she’d misplaced her shoes; her white socks were
riddled with holes, and her feet were killing her. Her
hair felt like strands of wheat attached to her head,
and her teeth ached. It had been days since her last
shower or dental, and she probably looked terrible.
But it didn’t matter because she had to eat some-
thing or she’d die.
You said you wanted to die, the small voice reminded
her once again, but now it was drowned out by the
much bigger voice that was reminding her of the
steak dinner she’d just dreamed about.
Forcing her feet to move for the first time in several
days, she inched out of the alley—
Why do I gotta (All these bills,) go to school? Ain’t (I
don’t know how the flick I’m gonna) none of that (pay them
all.) gonna do me (Now listen to this song, this song is) crap
lotta good in (utter garbage, you won’t believe) the real
world. (how bad this song is, really.)
—and instantly regretted it. The thoughts beat into
her head. She tried to force them out.
After a few moments, she was able to tamp them
down to a dull roar. It was easier this time.
Pip sauntered up alongside her. Big hairless cat go
away?
Crouching to give Pip a scritch on the neck, which
she liked a great deal—her thoughts when Nova
stopped were always Why stop itch-go-away?—she said,
“I’ll be back soon. I have to find some big hairless cat
food.”
N O V A 1 1 7
With that, she stood back up and set out, deter-
mined to walk the streets of the Gutter until she
found something to eat.
Aside from hoverbikes, vehicles didn’t generally
come down this way, except for the buses on the main
thoroughfares. Most of the streets of the Gutter were
walkways, with the neighborhoods divided by those
main thoroughfares.
When she turned the corner out of the alleyway
onto Decker Way, she saw a few stores, and several
AAIs imploring her to purchase a particular product.
She easily ignored the latter, paying closer attention
to the former—but none of them sold food.
And how are you going to buy the food once you find it?
she asked herself. You don’t have any money.
Nova decided to worry about that when she found
a place. She started walking down Decker.
After passing a pharmacy, a pawnshop, and a bar—
which she considered, until the minds of the people
inside told her that they didn’t have food, only alco-
hol, which was the worst thing she could have right
now—she finally went by a small place with a sign
that said MILTON BODEGA. The place was notable for two
reasons: It was the first source of food she’d found
since leaving her alley, and it didn’t have an AAI out-
side its door hawking its wares.
She knew that the second word had its origins on
Old Earth and referred to what they called a neigh-
borhood store. The first word derived from the owner
of this bodega, a couple by the name of Gray and
1 1 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Alanna Milton. They’d bought the store five years ago
from the previous owner with money they’d saved up
working at the hoverbike plant owned by Nova’s own
father, the same one that was attacked by rebels the
night of her fifteenth birthday. A tear streaked down
Nova’s cheek at the memory, which she wiped away
with her filth-encrusted sleeve.
Neither of the Miltons were in the store at the
moment, as they were asleep in a tiny apartment one
floor above the bodega so they could run the
overnight shift, since they didn’t trust their hired help
to mind the place during that time of night when the
bad elements came in. They’d been robbed several
times, all when the hired help ran overnight, so they
decided to just take care of it themselves.
Nova also learned that the Miltons didn’t have an
AAI because they thought it was an extravagance.
They were known in the neighborhood; the AAI
wouldn’t bring in enough new business, Gray said, to
justify the expense. Their customers knew them, and
word of mouth did the trick a lot more than one of
those stupid machines.
Since it was still early evening, they had the hired
help in the store: a boy named Benjy, who was
Alanna’s nephew, which was the only reason why he
had the job. Benjy wasn’t very bright, and was being
lured by the easy money of the drug trade, and so
Alanna convinced Gray to let him have the job to at
least give him a chance.
Nova stopped. She realized that the only way she
N O V A 1 1 9
was going to get food was to steal it. Which meant
that she’d commit a crime on Benjy’s watch, which
meant that Benjy would fail in what he was supposed
to do—keep the bodega safe—which would get him
fired and back out on the streets and probably, before
too long, working for Fagin. She wouldn’t wish that
on anyone.
So she moved on. She wouldn’t do that to Alanna
and Gray, or to Benjy. They all deserved better.
Eventually, she reached the main thoroughfare,
which was called Colman Avenue. The side she was
on was called Pyke Lane, after one of the walkways
parallel to Decker; on the other side was the neigh-
borhood called O’Callaghan, so named for the thor-
oughfare that divided it from Kitsios. Buses went
zooming by on Colman at high speeds. After a few
minutes of that, she realized that she was supposed
to go to one of the footbridges that went over
Colman.
Rather than do that—she didn’t want to venture
too far from her trash bin, which had become rather
like home, mostly thanks to Pip’s presence—she
turned up the walkway that was adjacent to Colman
and went up to the next street.
Fittingly, the next big street was Pyke Lane, and
Nova turned down it, hoping to find some food. The
steak dinner never strayed far from her thoughts.
An AAI implored her to get a new fone, with the
first day free; it stood outside a fone shop. Another
stood outside a jewelry store saying that these were
1 2 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
the best prices in all of Pyke Lane, a guarantee sup-
ported by a money-back promise.
The one that caught her attention stood outside a
news vendor, providing the current feed from UNN,
which was a male reporter with black hair and a
Vandyke beard. Since the AAI didn’t have thoughts,
Nova had no idea who it was. “Today, in a UNN exclu-
sive, this reporter has learned that Sons of Korhal leader
Arcturus Mengsk signed a treaty two weeks ago with the evil
reptilian alien Protoss. This reporter has exclusive informa-
tion that Mengsk has promised the entirety of the
Confederacy of Man to the Protoss in exchange for letting
him rule Antiga Prime as Monarch-for-Life. Mengsk and
his forces took Antiga Prime three days ago, in part using
mind-control drugs to suborn General Edmund Duke and
his forces to his treacherous cause. UNN urges everyone to
enlist now in the Confederate Army to help fight the com-
bined menace of the terrorists of the Sons of Korhal and the
foul aliens who stand against everything humanity stands
for.”
Nova shook her head. She didn’t know what scared
her more, that UNN was saying this or that people
around her were believing it. She knew from Daddy
that the Protoss weren’t reptilian, and they hadn’t
made contact with any humans—certainly not two
weeks ago.
Half a dozen people were either in the news vendor
or just outside it, and they were all watching the AAI.
That Mengsk (What crap. There’s no) is such a panbrain.
Where does (such thing as) he get off (I’m so scared.) getting
N O V A 1 2 1
into bed with (aliens, everyone knows) aliens? (that, I can’t
believe) I should sign (I’m so scared.) up right now, (they
run this stuff on) and kick those aliens’ asses! (UNN. It’s
just) Somebody should do something (embarrassing, that’s
what it is.) about all these aliens. (I’m so scared.) Where the
hell is the (I hope Mengsk takes all the planets!) Council,
anyhow?
The AAI then shifted to another image, that of a
different reporter.
“For the first time since the murder of several members of
the Terra family in the tragedy at their skyscraper, the lone
survivor of the family, Clara Terra, has spoken.”
Nova felt her stomach tie up in knots.
“Several attacks on members of the Old Families have
been carried out in the past few days, but none so specatacu-
lar as the kamikaze raid on the Terra Skyscraper, where the
evil terrorists—possibly affiliated with Arcturus Mengsk and
his Sons of Korhal—took their own lives in order to wipe out
virtually the entire Terra line, plus several hundred civilians
in the surrounding area.”
“That isn’t true,” Nova muttered. Edward and his
cronies worked for someone named Cliff Nadaner,
not Mengsk, and they weren’t kamikaze at all—Nova
knew from her history classes that that word applied
to suicide bombadiers in one of Old Earth’s wars. She
forgot who employed them—the Germans, maybe? It
was so hard to keep track of Old Earth’s wars. . . .
In any case, that didn’t apply to Edward and his
people. And it was Nova who killed everyone else, not
Nadaner’s rebels.
1 2 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Today, Clara Terra gave a press conference, where she
had this to say.”
The AAI shifted to an image of Nova’s sister. She
was dressed in mourning black, which was appropri-
ate. Under different circumstances, Nova would be
doing the same for the six days following the death of
her family. Then again, she thought wryly, with all the
dirt on my outfit, I’m most of the way there. . . .
Clara spoke hesitantly. Nova’s older sister had
never liked public speaking—even though she was
probably speaking in a studio where the only other
people were technical personnel, and possibly her
fiancé. The AAI wasn’t sophisticated enough to show
Clara’s surroundings, but Nova expected that Milo
would be standing behind her as a show of support.
Clara didn’t really care about Milo very much, except
as a means to more money, but Milo was devoted to
Clara. Nova had always thought it rather sad, really.
“I—I want to thank everyone who has consoled me in
this—this terrible moment of grief for me.”
“Moment?” Nova found herself uttering the
stunned word aloud. Next to her, a woman, whose
name, she now knew, was Donna, shushed her. Nova
knew immediately that Donna eagerly followed the
gossip regarding the Old Families—she apparently
believed that Nova herself was having an affair with
one of the Duke boys, whom she had never actually
met—and would be mortified if she knew that she
had just shushed one of the people whose life, and the
lies told about it, she had obsessively followed.
N O V A 1 2 3
“The death of my parents, their mistress and jig, and my
two siblings—”
Until this moment, hunger had been the all-
encompassing emotion smothering Nova’s entire
being. Now, though, it was replaced with outrage.
“Two siblings!”
“—in this cowardly and—and brutal terrorist attack has
been devastating. You can rest assured that my darling
fiancé Milo and I intend to go ahead with our wedding,
which we are dedicating to the fond memory of our departed
family—my beloved mother and father, their jig and mis-
tress, my dear brother Zebediah, and my darling sister
November, all of whom were killed by those cowardly slikes.
After the wedding, the combined forces of the Kusinis and
Terra families will show those nasty terrorists and those icky
aliens just what we can do!”
The AAI returned to the reporter. “Ms. Terra went on
to say that the investigation into her family’s death has been
closed, and she intends to hold a funeral ceremony for all six
of her deceased family the day after tomorrow. Donations
should go to Constantino Terra’s favorite charity, which
was—“
“No! That’s a lie!” Nova lashed out with everything
she had, and the AAI exploded in a fiery conflagration
of sparks and twisted metal.
Oh no. (We’re gonna die.) She’s some kind of (We’re
gonna die.) freak! What is she? How’d (We’re gonna die!)
that happen? She’s looks (We’re gonna die!) really cracked
off. I hope she (Oh, flick, we’re gonna die!!!!) doesn’t
hurt us.
1 2 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Nova started (We’re gonna die.) backing away from
all the (What did she do?) horrible thoughts (How’d that
happen?) directed at her.
The news vendor herself, Martina Dharma, came
running out of her store, wielding a P180, which she
pointed right at Nova, even though it wasn’t loaded.
Martina couldn’t afford the bullets, but she kept the
weapon itself to scare people. As far as Nova was con-
cerned, she needn’t have bothered, not only because
Nova knew the gun wasn’t loaded, but because she
was plenty scared already.
She hadn’t meant to destroy the AAI.
What she wanted to destroy was her sister.
How dare she? Clara knows I’m not dead. If nothing
else, Nova knew she left bodies behind—she knew,
because she stepped over them when she ran away.
Nova’s body wasn’t one of those left, so Clara should
have known that Nova was still alive.
“Hey! Blondie!” It was the empty-gun-wielding
Martina. “Get your ass away from my place ’fore I fill
you up with enough metal to open a shop, all righty?”
(Please don’t hurt me, don’t bust up my place anymore, I
can barely afford the insurance and I don’t know how the
hell I’m gonna convince UNN to replace it without charging
me. And please don’t make me fire this empty gun. . . .)
Nova turned and ran away as fast as her legs
could go.
That wasn’t especially fast, as it happened—days of
lying next to a trash bin had left her legs rather rub-
bery when called upon to do anything more compli-
N O V A 1 2 5
cated than walk—but nobody gave chase. She could
feel that much; everyone was too scared to get near
her.
By the time she reached the intersection with
Gladstone Way, she stopped and leaned against the
side of a novelty store. She was horribly out of breath,
and her hunger was now of epic proportions.
Across from the novelty store was another bodega.
This one didn’t have an AAI out front, either, but
unlike the Miltons’ place, Nova knew that it was
because the owner didn’t care if people got food from
there or not. The back room was used for card games,
ranging from poker to haunan, and the place was also
a popular meeting/dropoff spot for Markus Ralian’s
people.
Nova decided she’d have no problem stealing food
from this place.
Still out of breath, she went into the bodega. The
owner was behind the counter, watching the same
UNN reporter who had been talking about Clara, only
on a flatscreen. He was now talking about the new
security measures at Osborne because of the increased
terrorist attacks and the alien threat.
“The rebels have proven with their suicide run on the
Terra Skyscraper that they’re not above killing themselves to
achieve their evil goals.”
Snarling with disgust, Nova lashed out at the
flatscreen, which sparked and exploded in a very sat-
isfying manner. So did the credit reader on the
counter, which she hadn’t intended to destroy.
1 2 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“What the flick—” The owner shielded his eyes
from the sparking, then looked at Nova. “Who the
flick’re you?”
“I need food.” To her own ears, Nova’s voice
sounded desperate, which hadn’t been her intent—
she wanted to sound tough, although she had no
experience in doing so.
It seemed to work, though. “Damn, curve, when’s
the last time you ate?”
“Shut up! I want food, now, or I’ll blow up some-
thing else! You scannin’ me?” She added this last
because she remembered Fagin and his people using
the phrase, or something like it; she hoped that it
would help her blend in.
The owner—whose name was Terence, and who
was older than Nova’s grandfather had been when he
died—laughed. “Curve, you got a lotta jones comin’
in here and threatenin’ me, but I gotta tell you that if
you don’t get your pretty little ass outta my place, you
ain’t never gonna get your pretty little ass outta my
place, you scan me?”
Nova knew that Terence didn’t take her seriously as
a threat, mainly because he thought that the blowing
up of the flatscreen and reader was due to their being
of inferior manufacture. She was also really angry at
herself for getting the phrase “you scan me” wrong.
Closing her eyes, she focused on where she knew
Terence was standing, thanks to being able to feel his
thoughts, and then scrunched her face in concentra-
tion as she tried to lift him.
N O V A 1 2 7
She almost collapsed from the effort, but she got
him up in the air—
—for about a second. Then he fell to the floor.
Pain sliced into Nova’s head behind her right eye.
She’d never tried anything that focused before, and it
hurt like hell.
And it had mostly served only to crack Terence off.
“You flickin’ curve!” he cried as he clambered to his
feet. He pulled a T10 out from under the counter. It
was his prize weapon, one he’d been issued by the
Confederate Army when he served in it sixty years
ago. It didn’t work very well, and it took Nova only
half a second to jam the firing mechanism—after
reading how to do it in Terence’s mind.
Terence found that out when he tried to fire and
the clip opened up unexpectedly and cut into the
area between his thumb and forefinger. “Ooowwww!”
He dropped the gun and shook his hand back and
forth.
“I can keep this up all day, Terence,” she said. “And
not only that, I can tell Markus Ralian that you let a
fifteen-year-old girl—yes, I’m only fifteen—make you
look like an idiot. The only way to stop me is to give
me some flicking food!”
Nova had never cursed in her life before.
Somehow, though, it felt like the right thing to say
just at the moment.
Cradling his injured hand in the other arm, Terence
said, “Who the flick are you?” He shook his head.
“Flick it, don’t matter. Take whatever the flick you
1 2 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
want, just get the flick out of my place when you’re
done. I don’t ever want to see you in here again.”
“Fine.”
All of Terence’s food was prepackaged: sandwiches,
most of which looked like they had been on the shelf
long past their date of expiration, so she skipped
them; fruit and vegetables, most of which had gone
bad, so she avoided them as well; mealbars, most of
which were still good, so she took the three that were
framberry-flavored; an assortment of drinks includ-
ing, bless him, framberry juice, of which Nova took
four bottles. Realizing she couldn’t carry all that, she
turned to Terence. “A bag?”
Terence, who was applying a salve to his hand,
couldn’t believe she was asking. “Take a flickin’ bag.”
She decided to try something. Closing her eyes
again, she focused on the bags, which were on a rack
next to the now-useless cardreader. She tried to bring
them over to her.
The experiment was only a partial success—she
actually grabbed the entire rack of bags, and she got
them only halfway to her before they fell all over the
floor.
Sheepishly, she bent over to pick one up. Terence
was just shaking his head and wondering when the
crazy curve was gonna get the flick out of his place.
Dropping the mealbars and the bottles of juice into
the bag, she then took all ten bags of jerky that
Terence had on the shelf—that never went bad, and
the protein would be good for her—and a bag of
N O V A 1 2 9
camthar cookies, which she hadn’t had since she was
a kid.
About to leave, she had a thought, and grabbed
Terence’s entire supply of canned cat food: fifteen
cans, ranging in flavor from salmon to tuna to eilik-
fish. This would be better for Pip than the scraps she
retrieved from the trash bin or the occasional alley
mouse.
“You done yet?” Terernce asked angrily. At least, his
tone was angry. In truth, he was scared to death.
Nova decided to keep him scared. She knocked
over the entire fruit rack, sending the bruised and
green fruit—which, like all his food, he only kept out
for show, anyhow—tumbling to the floor.
She smiled at him. “Now I’m done.” Then she
turned on her heel and walked out, leaving Terence to
curse her name, her parents, her ancestors, and who-
ever she might have been related to back on Old
Earth, while cleaning up the mess she made. He was
also thinking about how he was going to pay for a
new flatscreen and cardreader. . . .
Malcolm Kelerchian had to wait two hours to see
Director Killiany. He would have just stormed into her
office, but the door was coded only to open when it
scanned the retinal patterns of either Killiany or her
assistant, or when the latter touched a control on her
desk. Said control was attuned to her DNA, so if any-
one else touched it, the door wouldn’t open.
Mal had spent the two hours he sat in the waiting
1 3 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
room trying desperately to ignore the holofeed from
UNN and figuring out ways to subdue and/or kill the
assistant and use her finger—preferably after it was
violently and painfully removed from the rest of her
hand—to touch the control.
Finally, the assistant—whose name Mal didn’t
really care about—said, “The director will see you
now.”
Rising from the uncomfortable couch, Mal gave her
the most insincere smile he could muster—which was
quite insincere indeed—and said, “Thank you so much.”
She gave him an equally insincere smile back,
though hers was due to training in always providing a
smile no matter what, as opposed to the contempt
that motivated Mal. “You’re very welcome, Agent
Kelerchian.”
At her touch of the control, the door to Killiany’s
office slid open.
Ilsa Killiany fooled a lot of people. Short, skinny,
weighing less than Mal’s leather duster, with short
brown hair, a hook nose, and a pair of spectacles that
were wholly unnecessary in the age of Retinor, she
gave the initial impression of being harmless.
That lasted right up until she opened her mouth.
Her tongue was so barbed it had brought thirty-year
veterans of the Confederate Army to their knees, and
she didn’t brook fools for more than about six and a
half seconds.
Mal didn’t consider himself to be any kind of fool,
so he figured he was good for half a minute.
N O V A 1 3 1
Killiany’s desk was immaculate, which was one of
several reasons why Mal had always assumed her to
be more than a little insane. The only thing that broke
the monotony of the shiny wood surface of the desk
was her computer terminal and a holoprojection of
UNN, which was currently paused, leaving the
reporter—not Mara Greskin, so Mal didn’t care which
one it was—standing in mid-grin with her eyes closed.
It looked both revolting and amusing at the same
time.
Without preamble, he said upon entering her
office, “Why the hell is Clara Terra going around
declaring her sister to be dead?”
Killiany glared at him from over her spectacles.
“I’m fine, Kelerchian, how are you?”
Mal took a seat in Killiany’s guest chair. Her chair
was made of very rare, very expensive leather. The
guest chairs were rickety wood that felt like they’d
collapse under you at any minute and, Mal knew,
would do the watusi on his spine if he sat in it for
more than ten minutes. Luckily for him, Killiany
rarely let people stay in the office that long.
“Why is Clara Terra telling everyone who watches
UNN that Nova Terra is dead when I’m picking up
every rock in the Gutter trying to find Nova Terra?”
“And how is that going, exactly?” she asked in a
sweet voice that lowered the temperature in the room
by ten degrees.
“Lousy.” Mal had never been one for equivocating.
“All the Terra vehicles are accounted for, down to the
1 3 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
hoverbikes, so she didn’t take one of those. Her ID is
on file at every train station, bus depot, and ship port
in town, and she hasn’t tripped a one yet. Plus—”
“She’s a teep—and a teek. She can—”
Holding up a hand, Mal said, “She’s an untrained
teep/teek. If we were talking an actual Ghost, then
yeah, she could fool people and scanners into think-
ing she was someone else, but as far as I can tell, she
didn’t even know she was a teep, and she definintely
didn’t have any training worth a damn—and before
you ask, yeah, I talked to all the people here. Nobody
did anything for the Terras on the side, and nobody
outside here’d give her the right kinda training.”
Killiany smirked. “Good work.”
That brought Mal up short. Ilsa Killiany wasn’t one
for giving compliments. “Uh, thanks. Anyhow—she’s
probably still in Tarsonis, which means she’s either
uptown or downtown, and she ain’t uptown.”
“So you think she’s in the Gutter?”
Mal nodded.
“You get files from the districts?”
Sighing, Mal said, “Nobody reports this kind of—”
“That isn’t what I asked, Agent Kelerchian.” The
temperature went down another five degrees.
“Yeah, I got the files. Nothing. I also asked a cop I
know in the Southwestern to look for signs of a teep
working the area.” Five, four three . . . “He hasn’t heard
anything yet, but I’m holding out—” Two, one . . .
Killiany leaned forward in her chair, setting her
hands palms-down on the surface of the desk. “What
N O V A 1 3 3
the hell are you doing talking to a grunt about a classi-
fied—”
And zero. “Ma’am, do you want me to find Nova
Terra?”
Tightly, Killiany said, “That is your assignment.”
“Then let me find her. I can’t work the Gutter
blind, and without a psionic wave to compare hers to,
our scans are just spittin’ in the wind. I need someone
who’s got his ear on the street, and that isn’t anyone
in this department, it’s someone who works the
Gutter every day. Fonseca’s a good cop, and he—”
“Oh, Fonseca?” Killiany leaned back. “Why didn’t
you say it was him? Never mind.”
Mal felt like he missed a step. “You know Larry?”
“We’ve targeted him for recruitment plenty of
times. For as long as we’ve been targeting you, actu-
ally,” she added with another smirk. “Difference is,
with you, we had a convenient crapstorm to use as
incentive.”
With an effort, Mal bit his tongue. “Incentive”
wouldn’t have been his first choice in words.
Killiany continued: “But Fonseca’s got nothing we
can hold on him. His jacket’s clean.”
Of course it is. He’s in the doghouse all the time, but it’s
never anything that they can have paperwork on, since it’s
all connected to graft. Everyone knows about it, but with no
record of it . . . “So it’s okay that I went to him?”
“No. It would’ve been okay if you cleared it with
me first.” She leaned forward again. “Understand
something, Kelerchian—you work for me. I know
1 3 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
you don’t want to be here, but it’s way past time you
got comfortable with several facts.” The director
started enumerating on the fingers of her right hand.
“Fact: You’re making more money and have consider-
ably better benefits as a Wrangler than you ever did as
a cop. Fact: If I hadn’t pulled your ass out of the
Detective Squad, your head would be on a pike out-
side the Tygore Estate, and you know it. Fact: As long
as you are a Wrangler, you are answerable to me, and
you do not break the mission specs without clearing it
with me first, and the only way I’m going to clear it is
if you provide full disclosure.” Closing her hand into a
fist, she added, “I’m not an idiot, Kelerchian. I know
you have skills and your own methods. But this is a
serious business here. We’re training people who are
the last line of defense for the Confederacy against
scumwads like Mengsk and whatever these aliens are
that have been showing up. We’ve lost two planets at
least, and the only way we’re gonna survive is with
soldiers like the Ghosts. That makes our work
extremely important, and I won’t have you making it
more difficult with your bull. Am I clear, Agent
Kelerchian?”
Mal had spent Killiany’s diatribe picking at a splin-
ter on the arm of his chair. He’d stopped paying atten-
tion somewhere around the phrase “full disclosure,”
but he knew it was impolitic—if not suicidal—to tell
the director that. “Plasteel clear, ma’am. Now would
the director be so kind as to answer my damn ques-
tion?”
N O V A 1 3 5
The sweet smile came back, which was never a
good sign. “What question would that be?”
“Why is Clara Terra going around saying her sister’s
dead when I’m trying to find her sister? My cooperation
with the TPF, as limited as it is beyond Officer Fonseca,
will be crippled if the TPF thinks the target is—”
“Agent Kelerchian, what happens if you find that
Nova Terra is dead in some alley in the Gutter?”
“I’ll—”
Killiany went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “What’ll
happen is that the Terra family—or, I guess now the
Kusinis-Terra family—will cover it up, pay off who-
ever needs to be paid off, and make like she died in
the skyscraper with everyone else. Now, what hap-
pens if you find that Nova Terra is alive?”
“If that—”
“What’ll happen then is that she’ll be taken into the
Ghost Program and trained. From that moment for-
ward, November Annabella Terra will be, for all
intents and purposes, dead, and she will be replaced
with Agent X41822N.”
Mal was more than a little disturbed by the fact
that Nova had already been given a designation, since
she hadn’t actually been recruited into the program
yet.
“So, Agent Kelerchian, what possible use is there in
having Clara go on UNN and talk of her sister as if she
were alive when the only possible outcome of your
mission will be Nova’s being dead, whether literally or
not?”
1 3 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Suddenly, Mal saw it. “You told her to go on UNN
and make that speech.”
“No, the Council did—but yeah, it was my idea. Set
the record straight that Nova’s no longer alive.”
“What if she turns up alive somewhere else?”
Killiany frowned. “What do you mean? You said
she hasn’t left Tarsonis.”
“I said she probably hasn’t left Tarsonis. True, she
hasn’t tripped an ID scan yet. But no dragnet’s a hun-
dred percent foolproof. Yeah, she’s just a fifteen-year-
old kid with no training, but she’s still a teep/teek,
and who the hell knows how well she can use it?
Sure, we think nobody trained her on the side, but
how do we know that some renegade we don’t know
about hasn’t been giving her pointers in the servants’
quarters or something? Plus, she had a lot of hush
money to throw around if she wanted to do some-
thing secret, and you know as well as I do that the Old
Families can keep secrets better than anyone.”
“What’s your point, Agent Kelerchian?” Killiany
asked in a tone that brought the room’s temperature
closer to absolute zero.
“My point is, she could be halfway to Tyrador by
now and we may not know it. My point is, she could
be any one of a thousand places where we won’t find
her. My point is, if we don’t find her, and then she
turns up alive somewhere, it’ll be bad.”
Shrugging, Killiany said, “It might be bad for the
Terra family, but that’s their problem, not mine. If she
N O V A 1 3 7
turns up alive somewhere, we take her for the pro-
gram. Period.”
Ilsa Killiany was completely certain in her words. If
the neat desk weren’t enough, this proves it—she’s crazy, just
like every zealot. In her case, she was a zealot for the
Ghost Program. To Mal it was a job, and one he didn’t
even want; but for Director Killiany, running the
Ghost Program was what she was born to do.
Or at least she believed it was, which was the same
thing.
“Is there anything else?” she asked in a tone that
made it clear that the answer to that question had
best be in the negative.
“No.” Mal got up from the uncomfortable chair and
stretched his back, cracking a vertebrae or two. “I’ll
keep you posted.”
“See that you do.” Killiany touched a control on
her desk, and the holograph started up.
“The Warp Drive gave a stellar performance at the Waits
Amphitheatre last night, playing to a full house—”
Mal shook his head as the door shut behind him,
cutting off the entertainment reporter. Wouldn’t have
thought Killiany was a classical music aficionado. . . .
TEN
FAGIN SAT AT HIS DESK, GRINNING FROM EAR
to ear.
It had cost him a year’s supply of hab to three cops
in the Southwestern District for him to get access to
the traffic sensors, but it was worth it. The sensors
were used by the cops to monitor vehicular traffic. On
those rare occasions when they used them, it was
mainly to extort fines out of kids on hoverbikes or to
nail the bus drivers who were so drunk or stoned that
they couldn’t drive straight—which was about half of
them. Usually that was only every three months or so,
when the Council did an audit and made noises about
efficiency, at which time the TPF levied some fines
and arrested some drivers; then, after the fuss died
down, business went on as usual.
By tapping into those sensors, Fagin was able to
survey his empire.
Today, what he wanted to survey was the little
blond curve that Markus brought him.
N O V A 1 3 9
Oh, she’ll be mine, that’s for damn sure. She just gotta
learn a little.
He’d programmed his sensor feed to alert him
whenever it picked Blondie up. Never did get her name.
“F-F-Fagin?” the sleepy voice of Number Nine
came from the futon behind him.
“Go to sleep, darl. Daddy’s busy, okay?”
“Mmmph.”
The alarm—a small beeping noise—went off right
after he had finished a marathon session with Number
Nine. It had been a long two days—Tenilee had been
having some difficulty in her first few days on the job
running O’Callaghan. It turned out that Manfred’s
betrayal ran much deeper than one street skimmer, and
it had taken a great deal of work on the parts of both
Fagin and Tenilee—who was eager to please and des-
perate not to meet the same fate as her predecessor—to
straighten it all out. Several demotions, corpses, and
broken limbs later, O’Callaghan had more or less settled
down, though now Tenilee was getting complaints
from the customers, and she was concerned that people
were going to start going across Spring Street to Kitsios
for their stuff.
As a result of all this, he’d had a stressful few days,
and he found himself relieving much of it with
Number Nine, who wasn’t the best-looking person in
his harem of twelve, but who had the most stamina.
Then, to his glee, the sensors finally found Blondie.
She was first picked up stumbling down Decker, a
glazed look in her eyes. Fagin recognized the look
1 4 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
instantly, of course: hunger. I warned you that you
wouldn’t be able to stand it for much longer.
Then she stopped outside the Milton Bodega before
moving on. Now Fagin was confused. Why didn’t she
go in?
While she wandered, Fagin opened a desk drawer
and took out his fone. He called Sergeant Morwood.
“Morwood.”
“Fagin. My order come in?”
“You panbrain, I told you not to call me when I’m—”
“Did my order come in, Sergeant?”
“I’m still working on it. I’m hoping to have some-
thing for you tomorrow.”
“I’d better. I’d hate for your wife’s hab supply to
suddenly disappear, okay?”
Fagin could hear Morwood gulp over the fone.
“Look, it’s not easy getting stuff from that department.
You sure I can’t get you something easier—a nuclear
warhead, maybe?”
“Sure, I’ll take the warhead—so I can shove it up
your ass when you don’t get me what I asked for, you
scan me?”
Blondie had made it to Colman now. She turned
and walked up toward Pyke.
Morwood was whimpering. “Fine, fine. I’ll call you
tomorrow. Now I’ve really got to go.”
“I’d better hear from you.” Not that Fagin had any
doubts. Although he always complained and insisted
he couldn’t do what Fagin asked, Morwood always
came through in the end. His wife was as bad off as
N O V A 1 4 1
any habhead in the Gutter; it was a need that could
not be fulfilled on the salary of a supply sergeant in
the Confederate Army. However, as a supply sergeant,
he was in a position to get things Fagin needed, so he
kept Diane Morwood in hab and her husband sup-
plied Fagin with the occasional government toy.
Fagin disconnected with Morwood as Blondie went
onto Pyke, stopping at a news vendor and joining the
crowd watching the AAI that provided a UNN feed.
All Fagin could see was the reporter—the sensor
picked up only visual images, not sound, so Fagin
couldn’t hear anything. Not that he cared all that
much—
—at least until the AAI changed into a teary-eyed
woman who said a few things that had a profound
effect on Blondie.
A second later, whatever doubts Fagin had about
whether or not Blondie was a teek were dispelled by
the AAI’s exploding right after she screamed at it.
Frowning, Fagin reverse-cued the feed to a few
minutes before, then focused in on the AAI.
The image it was projecting was a woman who was
older than Blondie, dressed in the black of mourning.
She was definitely related to Blondie—too young to
be her mother, unless she had a damn good surgeon,
so probably a sister.
And seeing her made Blondie go all panbrain. So
maybe your family isn’t all dead after all.
Fagin called up the UNN menu to see if he could
figure out which story Blondie was watching.
1 4 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Scrolling through a bunch of thumbs, he finally found
one that showed the same face. The thumb had a cap-
tion that read: CLARA TERRA GIVES FIRST APPEARANCE
AFTER FAMILY MASSACRE.
Crap.
Fagin played the story. When it was done, he was
torn between breaking into a dance and shooting
himself in the head.
On the one hand, Blondie—or, rather, Nova—did
have family who could pay a ransom. In fact, they
could pay a king’s ransom out of pocket change,
because she was from the Terra family, one of the Old
Families.
The problem was—well, she was from one of the
Old Families. They didn’t pay ransoms. If you were
stupid enough to kidnap one of theirs, they wielded
their tremendous influence to crush you like a colony
of cockroaches.
Fagin knew his limits. He was able to keep the cops
off his ass down here because the cops didn’t have a
better offer, and because he kept off the sensors of
anybody important. But he was just a little chip in the
machine, and the nanosecond he came to the atten-
tion of someone on the Council or one of the Old
Families, his entire life was gonna be as nuked as
Korhal.
Besides, based on the story he just watched, Clara
Terra thought her sister was dead. He couldn’t be sure
without an audio feed from the traffic sensors, but it
was probably right around when she talked about her
N O V A 1 4 3
sister as a corpse that Nova decided to go all teek on
the AAI and blow it to crap.
Speaking of which, Fagin started up the sensor
feed again, which showed the woman who ran the
news vendor running out with a gun. Fagin wasn’t
sure why a woman with a gun would scare Nova—
certainly Fagin shoving one in her face hadn’t had
any kind of impact on her a few days ago—but now
she ran away.
Eventually she wound up in Terence’s place. Stupid
curve, Fagin thought with a smile. She’s about to find out
just how far my arm reaches.
That smile fell in short order, however, when Terence
allowed her to take food. To be fair, it wasn’t until after
Nova blew up his flatscreen and his cardreader, and
after she picked him up and dropped his fat ass on the
floor, and after she jammed up his T10.
Fagin grabbed his fone and called Markus.
Geena answered. “Chaneed, Fagin?”
“Where’s your brother?”
“Goin’ over the count.”
Frowning, Fagin checked the time on his monitor,
and saw that it was the time the day’s cash came in.
Time flies when you’re having fun. “Tell him to cut
Terence’s percentage by ten.”
“What’d he do?”
“It’s what he didn’t do, okay? Just make it true,
you scan me?”
“Sure.” Geena sounded like she didn’t understand,
not that Fagin gave a crap if she understood or not.
1 4 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
I told Markus to tell all the stores to keep her from get-
ting anything. True, Nova made it hard on Terence,
but Fagin didn’t care. You start not following
through, you may as well give the empire to some-
one who’ll run it right, ’cause people stop listening
when you don’t follow through. Fagin learned that
one early on when Grin started doing things like
cutting only ten percent when he said he’d cut
twenty, or breaking someone’s arm when he said
he’d kill them. In this business, that was a weakness,
and weaknesses got you killed. That was why Fagin
didn’t have any.
He followed Nova carrying her new bounty back
down to Decker. He lost her somewhere after Barre’s
Pharmacy. She’s probably been holed up in one of the
alleys.
Grabbing the fone, this time he called the Pitcher.
“Chaneed?”
“Got a target for you,” Fagin said.
“Brutal. When and where?”
Pip was aloof when Nova first returned to the alley,
but when she realized that the big hairless cat had
provided some new food, she became very friendly,
rubbing up against Nova’s leg and purring. Good food
from big hairless cat. Happy.
Nova set out a can of tuna for Pip, which the tabby
commenced to consuming at a great rate. Then she sat
down behind the trash bin and stared into the bag,
realizing that she had no idea what to eat first. After
N O V A 1 4 5
not having eaten for days, she found herself with an
embarrassment of riches.
Finally, she settled on the mealbar, figuring it was
framberry-flavored and also would provide the most
nutritional value.
Cautiously, she unwrapped it and took the first
bite.
Seconds later, she ate the second one, having eaten
the first down in three bites.
Once the dam broke, she found she couldn’t stop.
Before long, all the mealbars were consumed, and her
stomach ached from being forced to digest after being
inactive for so long. Her mouth dried up, and she
grabbed one of the bottles of juice.
Leaning back against the wall, she drank half the
framberry juice bottle in one gulp, and wondered how
long she’d be able to keep this up. This food would
last her a few days—maybe less if she kept going
through it like this—and then she’d have to steal
some more.
What does it matter, since you want to die anyway? the
stupid little voice pointed out, but she had gotten as
good at tuning out the little voice as she had the
thoughts of those around her—at least those not in
the immediate vicinity. More and more she was
thinking that dying wasn’t such a good idea.
But living didn’t hold great appeal either. She had
no idea what she was going to do.
Her old life was gone. Mommy and Daddy and
Eleftheria and Edward and Zeb were all dead. Clara
1 4 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
had callously written her off also. And how could she
go back anyhow? If she did, she’d be imprisoned for
the murder of all those people. There was no way she
could get away with mass murder, there just wasn’t.
So where does that leave me? Spending my days sitting in
an alley with a moody tabby cat eating food I’ve stolen from
crooks?
That didn’t sound like much of a life.
But I don’t want to die, either. She finally was able to
admit that to herself. As terrible as life had become,
the idea of not being alive was one that scared her
more than anything—even more than the memory of
what she had done at the skyscraper.
Edward dying with hatred in his mind, Gustavo dying
looking forward to being with his family, Rebeka dying won-
dering why men were holding guns to her head, Marco
dying wishing he’d told Doris that he loved her, Doris dying
wondering why Marco never spoke to her, Walter dying
thinking about how much fun it was to watch Gustavo kill
the Terra family, Yvonne dying thinking that she hadn’t fin-
ished cleaning the study yet and Ms. Terra would just kill
her if she didn’t do it, Derek dying thinking that—
“No!” she cried, forcing the memories out of her
head, and also startling Pip, who jumped away from
her can of tuna. What’s happening? Will big hairless cat
hurt me?
Once Pip realized that no harm would come to her,
she went back to eating.
Nova pressed her fists against her eyes, tears
squeezing out between the lids. Every time she’d
N O V A 1 4 7
thought she’d finally started having a handle on
things, something would come up to make her realize
that she had a long way to go.
It suddenly occurred to her what she needed: train-
ing. After all, when Clara, at age seventeen, decided
she wanted to take her natural talent for the piano
and hone it, Mommy hired the virtuoso Dee Palmer
to train her. She later decided not to bother pursuing
it, which Nova knew was because Palmer refused to
respond to her outlandish attempts to flirt with him,
but that didn’t change the fact that when you wanted
to learn how to do something, you found an expert.
Are there any experts on what’s happened to me?
Nova thought about it a moment, and realized
there had to be. She couldn’t possibly be the only per-
son who could do the things with her mind that she
could do.
Which raised the question of where she would find
someone to train her.
Not here. The Gutter was, she realized, the worst
place to find such training. But sadly, she had
nowhere else to go. And even this place was inhos-
pitable to her—she could tell from the thoughts of
Markus and the thugs he had guarding her that Jules
Dale was the most powerful person in the Gutter.
Without his patronage, she had no chance here; even
with it, there were no guarantees.
But what else could she do?
With these thoughts swirling around in her head,
she lay down in the little cubbyhole behind the trash
1 4 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
bin that had become her bedroom of late. It was nice
and warm—it was next to a cooling unit that kept the
building that used the trash bin cool, so it pumped out
warm air. The condensation from that unit had also
provided her with water, albeit warm and icky water,
her desperate sips of which often prompted the little
voice to ask her why she was drinking this wretched
stuff if she wanted to die.
She slept comfortably—well, as comfortably as pos-
sible in an alley behind a trash bin—and for the first
time since her family died, she had no dreams.
Kill kill, maim maim, I love to take little girls and rip
their tiny throats out, yes I do.
Instantly awake, Nova shot upward, hitting her
head on the top of the cubbyhole. The intensity of the
thoughts she suddenly heard was overwhelming.
She climbed out to see Pip hissing at the mouth of
the alley. Glancing at her watch, she saw that she had
slept for fourteen hours, which was the longest she’d
been able to stay asleep in the alley. Food is obviously
good for my ability to relax, she thought wryly.
Rubbing the top of her head where she’d hit it, she
looked over to see what the cat was hissing at.
Can’t wait to bite off her ear, yes, that’ll be fun, ripping
the ear right off with my teeth, oh yes.
It was a large man with piercings all through both
ears, both lips, both nostrils, and both eyebrows. His
heavily muscled arms were covered with holographic
tattoos that showed a variety of acts of violence being
perpetrated by large people upon small people.
N O V A 1 4 9
Nova couldn’t tell what his name was, because he
himself no longer remembered it. He was referred to
as the Pitcher because he once drank an entire pitcher
of grain alcohol with no obvious ill effect—probably
because he was already so fogged as to be clinically
insane.
The little girl he wanted to kill right now was Nova
herself.
He started moving down the alley toward her, with
only her violent, brutal death in his thoughts. . . .
The little girl was right there in the alley, ripe for
the taking, just like the bald man said she would be.
He loved it when the bald man gave him things to
do. It provided him with a purpose that a bland and
meaningless life had left him with no possibility of
gaining on his own.
Or maybe it was the booze talking. It was hard to
be sure.
He touched his arm, and that pumped the hab into
his system. It had no effect. It hadn’t had any effect
the last six hundred and forty-nine times he’d tried it.
That was what he hated about life in general, was that
he got used to everything. But he was an optimist at
heart—or maybe he was a pessimist at heart, he could
never keep those two straight—and so he kept trying
the hab in the hopes that this time it might get him
high.
But it didn’t. It never did anymore, and he won-
dered why he bothered taking it six hundred and fifty
1 5 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
times when he knew, just knew, that it wasn’t going to
ever work ever again and there was just no point,
dammit!
He forgot where he was.
He touched another part of his arm, and that sent
the turk through his system. Turk made him more
aware of his surroundings, which was good, because
he couldn’t possibly be less aware of his surroundings
than he was right now and he didn’t know where he
was and wow the colors in this alley were so vivid it’s
a good thing he noticed that now because he didn’t
notice it before and the stonework was especially
pretty except for the parts where it was cracked and
ugly and filthy and dirty and covered in the fecal mat-
ter from assorted birds and rats and cats and dogs and
whatever other animals came through here like that
cat over there next to the blond girl who—
Sometimes turk made him too aware of his sur-
roundings. But he remembered now. The blond girl.
The bald man wanted him to kill the blond girl. The
bald man promised a brand-new drug that was fresh
off the market—hadn’t hit the street yet, hadn’t even
been made illegal yet, it was so new—and the bald
man promised that, once he killed the girl, he would
get as much of it as he wanted for free, just like
always.
The bald man was the only person who was ever
nice to him. He liked the bald man.
He hated everyone else.
Except for Grandma, of course. She was always
N O V A 1 5 1
nice to him to. In retrospect, killing her probably
wasn’t the smartest thing he ever did.
Thinking about Grandma made him sad, so he
touched his arm again, this time giving him a combi-
nation of crab and snoke, which let him forget. As
soon as he did that, he realized it was a bad idea,
because then he’d forget—
Something.
He was supposed to do something.
It was something very important, too.
Incredibly important.
Yes.
He had to do it.
He had to do it right now.
What was it?
It probably involved violence.
That was pretty typical.
He was good at violence.
He wasn’t good at anything else.
Especially remembering.
Whatever it was.
He was supposed.
To remember.
A cat meowed. Brutal—now I remember. He touched
his arm again, this time to clear all the drugs out with
caffeine. That had the added advantage of getting
him all excited about whatever he was supposed to
do—which he now remembered was to kill the blond
girl who was standing next to the cat who just
meowed.
1 5 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
He touched his arm again—what he needed was
bog.
Bog wasn’t anything that was on the market any-
more. You couldn’t even find it on Tarsonis, so he had
been thrilled beyond all possible imagining when the
bald man found it for him. It was a limited supply, so
he was sure only to take it when he was about to kill
someone.
And he was about to kill the blond girl.
The bald man had told him what her name was,
but he forgot it. He couldn’t even remember his own
name. He knew he was called the Pitcher because of
that time he drank the pitcher of grain alcohol. He
killed the girl who called him that, but her nickname
stuck, mainly because he couldn’t remember what his
own name was. Grandma knew it, but he killed her,
so she couldn’t say.
Of course, when the bog took effect, it didn’t mat-
ter. Then the only thing he remembered was how
much he loved little blond girls—especially when he
ripped out their throats.
And her ear. She had a good ear. He’d enjoy biting
that off. Maybe chewing on it.
“Get away from me.”
He blinked. It took him a moment to realize that the
blond girl had spoken. How can she do that without a throat?
Then he remembered—he hadn’t actually ripped it
out yet, he’d only thought about it. That was careless.
He started advancing on the blond girl.
N O V A 1 5 3
“Don’t come any closer—I’m warning you, Pitcher,
if you come into this alley you’ll—you’ll regret it.”
How’d she know my name? He decided to ask her.
“How’d you know my name?”
“I know everything, Pitcher. I know how Fagin—”
That was the bald man’s name. Why can’t I ever
remember that?
“—gives you free drugs so you’ll do his bidding. I
know how you killed your grandmother. I know that
you want to rip my throat out and then bite off my
ear.”
He must have been talking out loud before. Except
he didn’t remember doing that.
“And I know that if you try to hurt me, I’ll hurt
you instead.”
That was the funniest thing he’d heard all day. In
fact, it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. So he
started laughing.
“Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-
hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!”
His stomach almost exploded, he was laughing so
hard. He couldn’t believe that this little girl thought
she could hurt him.
“Yes, I can hurt you.”
Finally, he spoke. “Know’t I did t’last girl?”
“You mean the one in the Firefly Club? The one
who asked you where you got the ugly tattoo?”
Okay, now this was starting to really fog with his
brain. There was no way—no way—that this little
1 5 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
blond girl knew about what happened at the Firefly
Club with that dark-haired girl. “You were there?”
“No. I’ve never been to the Firefly Club.”
The blond girl’s words were coming really fast out
of her mouth now, and she was breathing heavy, like
she was on something, and she was starting to cry. He
was impressed—they usually didn’t start crying until
he got closer to them than he was right now.
She continued: “But I know that you put your
hand over her face and kept it there until she stopped
breathing. What kind of monster are you?”
He knew the answer to that one. “I’m th’one ’at’s
gonna kill you, curve.”
“You’re never killing anyone ever again, Pitcher.
You hear me? Never.”
He decided that this girl was even more fogged
than he was—and he didn’t think anyone was more
fogged than he was—and the only thing to do was to
start ripping her throat out.
Touching his arm to pump some more hab into him
even though he knew it was pointless, he advanced
on her.
He decided he was going to rip her arms off first. He
wasn’t sure where that thought came from, but as
soon as it arrived, he knew it was very much the right
thing to do. She’d stand there, staring at the stumps
that her shoulders would be and then—yes!—then
he’d beat her to death with her own arms. Brutal—
that’ll be fantastic!
For effect—and because it was easier for him to
N O V A 1 5 5
walk that way ever since the accident—he stomped
his feet on the pavement as he moved closer, hoping
to scare the crap out of the little girl so she’d be sweat-
ing by the time he actually ripped her throat out.
No! Ripped her arms off. That was much better. . . .
He picked one leg—he was pretty sure it was his
left one—up to stomp down.
Then he stopped.
He wasn’t sure why; he just couldn’t move. For
some reason, he couldn’t put his leg back down. Or
blink. Or move his arms. Or anything.
His head started to hurt.
No, it was on fire. Like someone drove a hot metal
spike right through his skull.
This was worse than the time he ran his head
through a brick wall just to see if it would work,
worse than the time he lit his hair on fire to see how
long it would burn, worse even than the time he took
raw turk for the first and last time.
“AaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-
HHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!”
It had been easier than she thought it would be.
And that scared Nova more than anything else in
the world could have.
Pip walked over to the Pitcher’s body and sniffed it
curiously. Big hairless cat fell down.
When she’d lashed out at Edward and everyone
1 5 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
else at the Terra Skyscraper, Nova did so without
thought or focus, just throwing all her rage, all her
grief, all her sadness, and all her anger out in one
shot.
It was enough to kill three hundred and seven
people at once.
This time, she’d focused very specifically on one
mind instead of over three hundred, and smashed it
to pieces.
It only took a few seconds. And then the Pitcher
was dead. He screamed and then fell forward, his
ugly, multiply pierced face smashing into the pave-
ment with a bloody splat. Blood trickled out his ears.
Reaching out with her mind—she couldn’t bear the
thought of touching him—she managed to roll him
over.
Blood was coming out his nose and eyes and
mouth as well. Some of that was probably from the
impact of his face hitting the ground, but she knew
from home that when she killed someone this way,
they bled out of every orifice in the head.
Nova collapsed to her knees, sobs now racking her
body. I shouldn’t have left the alley. I should’ve stayed here
and died. Today she’d seen so much, from her sister
declaring her dead to the miserable lives of the people
around her to the casual vileness of Terence to the
insane bruality of the Pitcher.
She didn’t know how much more she could take.
Pip wandered up to her. Big hairless cat hurt?
Sniffing, Nova tried to wipe her eyes with her shirt-
N O V A 1 5 7
sleeve, then realized it was so dirty as to not be of
much use. She used the back of her hands instead,
though they were hardly cleaner.
“Mrow?”
“I’m sorry, Pip, I just—” She looked over at the
corpse of the Pitcher. “I don’t know what to do.”
Fagin said that he was going to leave her alone,
make her survive on her own until she came back to
him, begging for forgiveness and a chance to work for
him the way seemingly everyone in the Gutter did.
He’d lied to her. Instead of keeping his word, he
sent a monster to kill her.
What was more, the Pitcher probably wouldn’t be
the last one he’d send. He had hundreds of hired
thugs who did his bidding. She’d met some of them,
from Markus and his dirty secrets on down to Tyrus
and his dead sister.
Nova had just learned how easy it was to kill some-
one. Particularly someone as disgusting as the Pitcher.
He, at least, had his insanity to blame for a lot of what
was wrong with him—that and a frightening ability to
metabolize drugs and alcohol.
But Fagin was considerably more disgusting, and
didn’t have the mitigating factor of being crazy.
Standing up, Nova made a decision.
“Mrow?”
“I’m going back to Fagin, Pip, just like he said I
would. But I’m not gonna beg him for anything. I’m
going to kill him.”
chapter 11
WHEN TWO HOURS PASSED, AND THE PITCHER
never came out of the alley, Fagin assumed that the
plan didn’t work.
This really cracked him off. The Pitcher was both
his most valuable enforcer and his most useful test
bed for new drugs that came on the market. His
metabolism was such that his response to a drug was
about ten percent of how normal people would react.
Back in the old days, Fagin had a source for some
great designer drugs on Korhal IV. Sometimes,
though, the stuff was too intense—you didn’t want
drugs that killed on the first shot, because then you
don’t get repeat business. So he’d use the Pitcher—if it
made him sick, it’d kill anyone else, and so he knew
which ones to put on the market.
(The day the confederals nuked Korhal IV was a
bad day for Fagin. When Arcturus Mengsk started up
the Sons of Korhal, Fagin had sent a rather generous
N O V A 1 5 9
contribution to Mengsk to further his cause, just
because he was cracked off about the attack. . . .)
Three hours after the Pitcher went into the alley,
Nova came out. The expression on her face was much
different from the one a day earlier. Where yesterday
she looked starved and desperate, today she looked
angry and determined.
Between that expression and the fact that she sur-
vived an encounter with the Pitcher—something no
one had managed in years—Fagin knew he was about
to have bigger problems.
Someone knocked at the door. “Fagin, you got a
package.”
A protest that he’d left instructions not to be both-
ered died on his lips—the only exception to those
instructions was if a package arrived. “Bring it,” he
said as he touched the control that would lower the
force field and open the door.
Jo-Jo came in holding a shipping box with the
holographic label MEDICAL SUPPLIES, and a return
address from the Confederate Army Supply Depot in
Grange Village.
Fagin grinned. Morwood came through.
After Jo-Jo put the package down on Fagin’s bed,
he left. Fagin grabbed the mailscan out of his desk
drawer and ran it over the package; the mailscan’s
display showed him an alphanumeric code, which
he then entered into the keypad on the package.
With a pneumatic hiss, it opened, revealing a mass of
1 6 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Pakstuf surrounding the item he had ordered from
Morwood.
While reading over Morwood’s note, he grabbed
his fone and called Markus.
“Chaneed, Fagin?”
“I need you to grab every habhead who’s short and
needs a fix, and every little kid you can scrounge up,
okay? I’m talkin’ pre-acnoid here—and nobody
hooked, I don’t want no yous.” He thought about
who was on his list—the one of people who were a
filament away from having their heads blown off by
Fagin’s P220. “And get Poppo, Jonesy, Two-Bit, and
Mags down here, too, and tell them to bring all their
guns. Get ’em all here in half an hour.”
“What do we need little kids for?” Markus asked.
Fagin frowned. Markus wasn’t usually one for ask-
ing stupid questions—or any other questions, it came
down to it. “The hell do you care? Get it done, you
scan me?”
“Yeah, okay.” Markus didn’t sound happy, though.
What the flick is wrong with him? Fagin shook his
head. Worry about it later—it’ll keep until this business is
taken care of. Right now he had a crisis, but he’d also
been given the perfect weapon to fight it.
After reading Morwood’s note, he clipped his new
toy onto his right wrist and stuck the head unit into
his ear. Then he checked the traffic sensors. Nova was
walking right toward here. At the rate she was going,
it’d be an hour of walking before she arrived.
Grabbing his fone again, he called Wolfgang. When-
N O V A 1 6 1
ever there was a body needed taking care of before the
TPF stumbled across it, Wolfgang was the one to call.
Most crimes, the TPF would look the other way, but
when bodies got knocked, they had to pay at least
some attention. So he had Wolfgang and Wolfgang’s
girls remove the evidence.
After giving Wolfgang his orders—and making sure
he brought all his girls, as the Pitcher had considerable
mass—Fagin then called Jo-Jo in, and took him into
the back room, where his harem had their pallets. All
twelve of them were lounging about, some reading,
some nibbling from a bowl of fruit, the rest sleeping.
He woke them all up and had Jo-Jo take them to the
other place. Most of them agreed right away but, typi-
cally, Number Three asked, “What’s going on?”
“Ain’t gonna be safe here.” Fagin turned to Jo-Jo.
“Anything happens to any of them, it happens to you
times ten, okay?”
Nodding quickly, Jo-Jo said, “I scan, boss, no wor-
ries.”
By the time Jo-Jo cleared all twelve of them from
the room—some of them were a bit languorous in
their movements, not enjoying being put out—Grotto
came in.
“Poppo and Two-Bit’re at the door, Fagin—they
look kinda scared.”
Fagin grinned. His complaints notwithstanding,
Markus, as usual, did exactly what he was told. It was
less than half an hour, and Poppo and Two-Bit were
already here.
1 6 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Five minutes later, Jonesy came in, quickly followed
by Mags. Jonesy was the only one of the four of them
who came with just one gun. Shrugging, he held up his
Z50, which fired .70-caliber bullets. “I don’t never need
nothin’ but Karla,” Jonesy said with a smile.
His predilection for naming his weapons was one of
several reasons why Jonesy was on Fagin’s list.
The others had all packed at least four guns each.
Two-Bit went overboard and brought ten. “I can’t
never figure out which one I wanna use, so I like to
keep my options open, y’know?”
Fagin had ’em sit in the outer room. Ten minutes
later, Markus showed up with Geena, Tyrus, and a
bunch of kids—all pre-acnoid, which was exactly
what Fagin wanted.
“Bring the kids into the back. Have Ty keep an eye
on ’em.”
Markus shot him a look. “What?”
Holding up a hand—this was a question Fagin
could understand—he said, “It’s clear back there. The
kids’re what you call a last line of defense.”
Looking cracked off at something, Markus told
Geena and Tyrus to bring them into the back room.
“Geena, you take care of ’em—they need anything,
send Ty up front.”
Fagin looked at the other four recent arrivals.
“There’s a girl comin’ here lookin’ to do me harm.
Your job is to stop her doin’ me harm, okay? I don’t
care what you gotta do, but don’t let her back into my
room, you scan me?”
N O V A 1 6 3
Three of them brightened. Bodyguarding duty was
usually a choice assignment, especially since most
folks knew better than to flick with Fagin. Either
they’d find out pretty soon that this wasn’t such a soft
deal, or they’d surprise Fagin by actually stopping a
teep/teek, in which case, they’d have earned their
way off the list.
Poppo didn’t brighten, though; he was the only
one of them who was on the clever side of dim. “You
need four of us to stop one girl?”
Hefting Karla, Jonesy said, “He won’t, don’t worry.”
Sounding like he was getting his hopes up, Two-Bit
asked, “Can we do anything to her ’fore we kill her?”
Mags snorted. “Only way you’re gonna get some
snap is if you kill her first.”
“Yeah, well, your sister tells a different story.”
“Stud, you couldn’t keep up with my sister.”
While the banter went on for several more sec-
onds, Markus walked up to Fagin and talked to him in
a low voice, his back to the other people in the room.
“Are we talkin’ about that girl?”
Fagin nodded. “Her name’s Nova. I sent the Pitcher
to take her out.”
Markus blinked. “What happened to lettin’ her
starve on her own? You said—”
“Her name’s Nova Terra.”
Now Markus’s eyes went wide. “Crap.”
“Yeah, crap. Once I found that out, I figured best be
sure. But she took the Pitcher out. So that means we
gotta get creative.”
1 6 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“That why you wanted these four panbrains?”
Again, Fagin nodded. “See how she does there,
then spring the trap.”
Unsurprisingly, Markus looked confused. But this
time, he didn’t question. He knew what Nova was,
after all. “What about the habheads? I got Preach,
Seer, and Diva roundin’ ’em up.”
“She’s a teep. Figure brains like theirs oughta be
pretty distractin’ to read while these four panbrains’re
shootin’ at her, okay?”
Markus nodded. “Yeah, makes sense.” He looked at
the item from Morwood. “What’s the new toy?”
Grinning, Fagin said, “Insurance.”
“Look, it was terrorists, okay? You gummint types’re
supposed to stop ’em Nephews o’ Korhal, or whatever
they are, right?”
Martina Dharma was starting to seriously irritate
Mal Kelerchian, which was frustrating, as she was the
first real lead he’d gotten in a week.
Larry hadn’t heard anything that sounded like
Nova might have been responsible. A few reports of
people being beat up by girls, but Larry knew who the
girls were, so they couldn’t have been Nova.
Then, finally, a news vendor reported that terrorists
blew up her AAI. Problem was, no scorch marks on it.
When Larry heard about it, he figured that might
mean teek, so he called Mal.
The first thing Mal did was head to Dharma’s place.
It was a pretty standard vendor’s: She sold chips with
N O V A 1 6 5
the various magazines on them, plus subscriptions for
UNN feeds, all in a tiny space that barely had room for
the candy and drink machines. The charred remains
of her AAI were now piled behind the small counter.
Dharma—a short, shabbily dressed middle-aged woman
with fake red hair who had attempted to use cut-rate
surgery to remove her wrinkles, and got what she
paid for—had pointed to those remains when Mal
arrived, then stood angrily back there while Mal tried
to question her.
As soon as Mal arrived, his head started pounding.
It wasn’t as bad as the Terra Skyscraper—he needed
only one dose of analgesic—but it was still pretty
intense. Nova, or another really powerful teep—and
that concept didn’t even bear thinking about—had
been here recently.
But the Dharma woman was fixated on terrorists.
“Ma’am, can you just please give me a description
of who—”
“I don’t know who! I toldja, it was them terrorists!
They’re everywhere—saw on UNN that they took out
some of the Terra folks. If you can’t protect them, how
the hell you gonna protect me?”
Mal tried not to grit his teeth and was only partially
successful. “Ma’am, I think you have me confused
with someone else. My job isn’t to protect you, my job
is to find someone. She’s a girl, fifteen years old, long
blond hair, green eyes, and—”
“I see lotsa people every day.” Dharma folded her
arms defiantly. “Look, you’re with the gummint, you
1 6 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
said? Well, I been tryin’ to get the confeds to take my
claim, ’cause my insurance contract says that acts of
terrorism are covered, and it had to be them terrorists
that did it.”
Deciding to play along for the moment, Mal asked,
“What makes you so sure it’s terrorists, ma’am?”
Dharma swallowed, and her arms fell to her sides.
“Well, stands to reason, don’t it? I mean, they was
talkin’ about them Terra folks when it ’xploded.
Betcha it was the same folks what killed the Terras,
showin’ that they’ll stop the freedom of the press.”
She started gesturing, warming to her rationalization.
“And—and what better way to do that than to take
down the very symbol of freedom of the press? Right?”
Slowly, Mal started clapping his hands. He also sub-
vocalized instructions to his computer. When he was
done with that, he said, “Brava, ma’am. That was a
fine performance. Only one problem—I happen to
know for a fact that it wasn’t terrorists who did this.”
He stopped clapping and leaned onto the counter.
“Now ma’am, there’s one of two ways we can do this.
The first way is that you tell me what happened with
the blond-haired, green-eyed, fifteen-year-old girl
who came through here and blew up your AAI. The
second way is that I report you to your insurance
company as someone who’s trying to defraud them.
Take your pick.”
Dharma swallowed again, more audibly this time.
“Defraud?”
“That’s right.” He then conveyed the result of his
N O V A 1 6 7
computer request. “The penalty for such a crime is a
fine of whatever amount deemed appropriate by the
judge, with the option of up to six months in jail.”
In a very small voice, Dharma said, “Jail?”
“Oh, and no insurance company will give you a
policy after that—which means you’ll probably have
to close the store.”
Now her eyes went wide; that thought seemed to
distress her even more than the jail time. “Close the
store! I can’t do that! S’my livelihood! ’Sides, Frobeet’d
kill me.”
Mal neither knew nor cared who Frobeet was. “So
how’re we gonna do this, ma’am?”
Dharma’s mouth twisted around once or twice.
“Yeah, okay, there was a girl like that. She started
muttering and then screaming when they had the
Terra survivor on, and then I pulled my gun.”
Raising an eyebrow, Mal asked, “Gun?”
Reaching down under the counter, Dharma pulled
out a P180 that had seen better decades. The stock
was cracked, and the thing hadn’t been polished or
cleaned in months. Mal figured if she tried to fire it,
it’d blow up in her face, even if she wasn’t pointing it
at a teek.
“I know whatcher thinkin’.” Dharma no doubt
read the expression on Mal’s face, which annoyed
him, as he didn’t like his feelings to show that obvi-
ously—but then, the gun was in really rotten condi-
tion. “But I ain’t got no bullets for it. Don’t want to be
shootin’ nobody—just, y’know, threatenin’ them.”
1 6 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Mal didn’t see how anybody could possibly feel
threatened by that weapon, but said nothing about it,
instead returning to the topic of Nova. “What hap-
pened after you pulled the gun?”
Shrugging, Dharma said, “She ran off.”
“Which way?”
Another shrug. “I dunno, down the street. You’re
not gonna report me, are you?”
“I’ve recorded this entire conversation, ma’am. As
to what I do with that recording—we’ll just have to
see.”
With that, he turned around, ignoring the squeak-
ing noises that Martina Dharma was now making.
Nova probably saw Clara declaring her dead and went
crazy. So where’d she go from here?
According to the report Dharma had filed with the
insurance company—which Mal had read over before
talking to her—the AAI exploded yesterday at 18.55,
which was confirmed by UNN’s Remote Feed
Department. Mal therefore instructed his computer to
provide him with all the traffic sensor feeds on Pyke
Lane from 18.50 to 20.00 the previous night.
It would take a few minutes for the computer to
request the files, verify his authorization, go into the
files, extract the specific feeds required, and transmit
to him, so he decided to question the receptionist at
the surgeon who operated out of a storefront two
doors down from Dharma’s place. The person work-
ing there at the moment wasn’t there the previous
N O V A 1 6 9
night, but his badge gave him access to the person’s
contact information, and Mal made a note to call
him.
When he walked out, the computer spoke into his
ear that the feeds he requested were no longer avail-
able.
“What?”
The computer repeated the information, but Mal
interrupted and subvocalized a command for him to
be put through to the Southwestern District’s Traffic
Control Center.
A bored voice said, “Southwest Traffic, Sergeant Volmer.”
“Sergeant, my name is Agent Malcolm Kelerchian
of the Wrangler Squad.”
A pause, then Volmer spoke with more attention,
having verified the source of the call. “Yes, Agent
Kelerchian, what can I do for—”
“I just requested the traffic feeds for Pyke Lane yes-
terday at—”
“Uh, I can stop you right there, Agent Kelerchian—we’ve
already wiped those feeds.”
Mal couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Say
that again, Sergeant—slowly.”
“Uh, that’s standard procedure, sir. At the end of each
shift, we go over the feeds, and if we don’t find any viola-
tions, we wipe ’em. There weren’t any violations on Pyke
last night, so—”
“Sergeant Volmer, if I look up the regulations gov-
erning evidence, I can guarantee you that I’m not
1 7 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
gonna find a damn thing about how it’s ’standard pro-
cedure’ to—”
Volmer laughed nervously. “Agent Kelerchian, that
wasn’t evidence.”
“And how do you know this? Did you verify that no
crimes were committed? Did you run facial scans of
every person on those feeds to see if they matched any
known fugitives?”
“Uh, sir, we’re traffic control—that ain’t our job. The
only evidence we care about on Pyke Lane relates to hover-
bike violations and people bringing illegal vehicles onto the
street. Otherwise, we can’t spare the storage.”
That, Mal knew was crap. “Sergeant, you can’t tell
me that you don’t have enough storage—”
“Sir,” and now Volmer sounded like he was trotting
out a very old argument that he was tired of making,
“we’ve only got fifty kilomemes.”
“Fifty?” Mal was stunned. That was a quarter of
what the Northern District—the precinct that also
housed the Detective Squad—had, and they didn’t
need more than a quarter of it.
“Yes, Agent Kelerchian, only fifty. We’ve been requesting
additional memory for the last three years, but the budget com-
mittee keeps telling us it’s an ‘extravagance.’ The courts down
here are backed up to three years ago, ’cause everybody contests
their citations ’cause they know it’ll take years to settle it. We
have to keep those feeds around indefinitely, and it adds up, to
the point where we can’t keep files we don’t need. There’s a lot
of traffic violations down here. I’m sorry you can’t look at those
feeds, sir, truly I am.” To Mal’s surprise, coming from a
N O V A 1 7 1
Southwest cop and all, Volmer sounded sincere in that
apology. The sergeant continued: “But those feeds are gone.”
Mal let out a very long breath. “All right, Sergeant,
thanks for your help.” Then he hesitated before end-
ing the call. After a hasty subvocalization to his com-
puter, he said, “How sorry are you?”
Now Volmer sounded confused. “Sir?”
“You said you were truly sorry, and I’m asking you
to put your money where your foot is. You sorry
enough to do me a favor?”
“I, uh—I guess that would depend on the favor, sir.”
“I just sent you a photo of a girl I’m trying to find.
She’s to be considered armed and dangerous. She’s
the one I know was walking down Pyke Lane last
night, and who I was hoping to get a track on. Can
your people check for her facial profile on your traffic
feeds when you go through them?”
The sergeant hesitated. “I can’t promise anything, sir,
but we will keep an eye out.”
Mal nodded. It was better than a poke in the eye
with a sharp stick. That was about all it was better
than, but he’d take it. “Thank you, Sergeant.”
“You’re welcome, Agent Kelerchian. And good luck.”
Yeah, I think I’m gonna need it. Mal sighed and put a
call through to the surgeon’s receptionist.
Nova’s stomach was killing her.
She should have realized that this was going to
happen. After not eating for several days, she had
stuffed herself worse than she did on her birthday.
1 7 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Maybe I should just go back to the alley and to Pip.
No. Fagin had sent the Pitcher, he’d send someone
else. Maybe several someone elses. She didn’t want
anyone else to die because of her.
Except for Jules “Fagin” Dale. She intended to do
everything she could to make sure he suffered before
she destroyed his mind.
But only him. She’d already heard the dying
thoughts of three hundred and eight people, and she
only wanted to bring it up to three hundred and
nine.
She managed to keep the thoughts of the people
around her out, though the effort to do so was giving
her a headache to match her stomachache. The
important thing was to focus.
By the time she got to the very building that Fagin
Dale had kicked her out of days ago, she started to
feel woozy. The thoughts she was hearing didn’t
make any sense at all. It was disjointed and full of
weird stuff and colors oh wow the colors are just so
amazing and you can’t believe that there are rats crawling
all over the place and crawling right up my butt which
looks so incredibly fat in this outfit what the flick was I
thinking when I bought this outfit I hate this outfit it’s the
worst outfit ever I hate you and everything you stand for
you panbrained slike and I’m gonna just run around in lit-
tle circles that get smaller and smaller every time until I dis-
appear into a singularity of nothingness and then
everyone’ll be sorry they ever made fun of me just because I
only have one nostril I mean really is that fair at all to be
N O V A 1 7 3
doing that sort of thing to a child a child a child I never
wanted and don’t—
“No!” Nova had stumbled to the street, clutching
her now-pounding head.
Two people were standing around her. Nova clung
to their thoughts as if they were a lifeline. The woman
was named Dorian and was a housecleaner for folks
in the middle-class neighborhood of Sookdar’s Point—
people who had enough money to not have to live in
the Gutter, but not enough to be able to afford auto-
mated housecleaning—and had just come from her
favorite client, the Frieds, who always left out cookies
for her when she came to clean. The man was named
Max, and he was a counter clerk at a laundry facility
who hated his boss and had come up with seventeen
different ways to kill him, none of which he would
ever enact in real life, but the thoughts of which
allowed him to get through the day.
“You okay?” Dorian asked.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Nova lied. “I’m sorry, I just tripped.”
As soon as Nova got to her feet, Max, satisfied that
all was well, went on his way, the beginnings of the
eighteenth way to kill his boss formulating in his
head.
Dorian, though, lingered. “You sure?”
Putting on the same smile she used on Andrea
Tygore when the old woman was being particularly
patronizing, Nova said, “Yes, thank you, ma’am.”
“Such a polite girl.” Dorian was genuinely sur-
prised and pleased to see a teenager with manners,
1 7 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
especially considering that her own three boys and
one girl never used the word “please” in their lives.
“Your momma is raisin’ you right,” she added with
regret that she hadn’t been able to do the same for her
own kids.
Nova tried not to think about the fact that her own
mommy was dead, instead reveling in the domestic
simplicity of Dorian’s mind. She used it to steel herself
against the insanity that was waiting for her at Dale’s
place.
After excusing herself from Dorian and thanking
her again for her help, she kept walking, her teeth
gritted, sweat beading on her forehead, as she tried to
hold back the onslaught of drug-induced thought pat-
terns.
Why do people do this to themselves? she found herself
wondering. It makes your thoughts all crazy. Why would
anybody do that?
She clung to her outrage, adding it to her consider-
able anger at Jules for making her do what he’d made
her do, as well as her fury at Cliff Nadaner, a man
she’d never met, yet about whom she knew so much,
the man who ordered her family killed.
That anger allowed her to shove the drugged
thoughts to the side, even when she approached
Fagin’s building and saw them all gathered there
around the big metal door that led to the lobby. Some
were standing, some were sitting, some were lying
down, but all of them were high on something—or sev-
eral things.
N O V A 1 7 5
Stepping around or over them, she approached the
front door—
—and knew immediately that four people were
standing on the other side, ready to shoot her.
Cursing herself for missing that, she lashed out
with her mind, going for the guns. She didn’t want to
hurt anyone—except Fagin—but she wasn’t going to
let herself get hurt, either.
She knocked the gun out of the hands of the one
named Richard Roman, but whom everyone called
Poppo because of his habit of popping chewing gum
when he was a kid. He hadn’t actually chewed gum in
ten years, but the nickname stuck.
The other three were still holding their guns, and
laughing at Poppo for dropping his, despite the latter’s
protesting that he hadn’t dropped it.
One of the people on the other side of that door was
Hieronymous Jones—usually called Jonesy due to
people having trouble pronouncing “Hieronymous”—
and he knew everything about guns. Nova clearly read
in his mind the best way to keep a Z50 like the one he
was carrying—which he called Karla after the first girl
he ever dated—from firing. All she had to do was keep
the bullets from moving into the chamber properly.
After she did that, she read ways of jamming the
others’ guns as well. Some she couldn’t jam—she
didn’t know where the trigger switch was on Poppo’s
P30, for example—but she did the best she could. It
was almost like a game. . . .
She felt the thoughts of the habhead who walked
1 7 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
up to her while she stood outside Fagin’s door before
he spoke: “Hey, curve, wha’s the feed?”
Nova turned to give him a funny look. Nobody’d
said “What’s the feed?” since Nova was a baby.
The habhead—his name was Joey—was thinking
that he hadn’t had any good snap in years and Nova’d
be a fine way to break the streak.
Just by thinking about it, Nova knocked Joey
down.
“What the flick jus’ happen’? Coulda sworn I was
standin’ a second ago.” Joey studied the ground
intently, as if it would provide some kind of clue, his
desire for Nova already fading into his hab-addled
brain.
From next to him, one of the other habheads who
was lying on the pavement said, “ ’Ey, flickface,
getcherown bed. I’m sleepin’ ’ere.” Her name was
Sharie, and she had been born addicted to hab, since
her mother got hooked on it when she was pregnant
with her by an unknown father (well, Sharie knew
the father, she just didn’t know which of the dozens
of possible sperm donors whom her mother enter-
tained was the culprit, since the money for a simple
DNA test instead went to feed mother and daughter’s
respective drug habits).
Not to be confused with Eamonn, who fought in
the Confederate Marines until he was dishonorably
discharged for being drunk on duty, then wound up
in the Gutter, having graduated to snoke following his
court-martial; or Harry, who’d worked for UNN but
N O V A 1 7 7
was discredited when he made up a source on a story
that supposedly exposed corruption in the TPF (not
that the story was false—Harry knew it was true—but
he didn’t have a documentable source, so they fired
him), and he wound up hooked on turk; or Maria,
who had been an actor who spent more time going to
parties that producers went to partaking of the snoke
than she did actually acting; or Donna, who used to
be a nurse before the stress of the emergency room
led to her taking a hit of crab here and there just to
get through the day, a habit that got worse and worse
until she wound up here; or Michael, who dreamed of
opening up his very own martial arts school but
meanwhile kept on the turk because it got him peppy,
at least until the sensei tossed him out on his ass for
being high in class; or Jorge or Kara or Debbie or
Wendy or Kelly or Marianne or Jim or Todd or Leia or
Steve or Thomas or Chris or Sarah or Liza or—
“No!”
Shoving her fists into her temples, Nova tried to
block the thoughts from her head, crying in pain and
anguish, desperately clawing for some calm from
Dorian, but unable to find it amid the cacophony of
thoughts that assaulted her now.
Dimly, she registered that she had blown the door
off its hinges and also physically thrust away several
of the possessors of the thoughts that she felt.
Turbulence was added to the thoughts as they tried to
figure out who and what knocked them aside.
Then she heard voices.
1 7 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Crap, you all okay?”
“The hell happened to the door?”
“Hey, that’s a blond curve! Think ’at’s her?”
“Flick, I ain’t waitin’, let’s shoot her.”
Nova’s ears rang moments later when all four of
their guns jammed, resulting in two of them literally
blowing up in their users’ hands.
The pain that Jonesy and Mick Stanislawski, who
was called Two-Bit, felt as shrapnel from their ruined
weapons shredded their hands and forearms allowed
Nova to focus and get her bearings. She got to her feet
and stared at Poppo and Elois Magwitch, whose guns
had simply jammed and stopped working.
Mags was furious as he took out another weapon.
“Knock this curve!”
“Flickin’ yeah,” Poppo said, doing likewise.
Nova jammed those weapons as well, tears stream-
ing down her cheeks. “Please stop, I don’t want to
hurt you.” Jonesy and Two-Bit were screaming with
pain, their blood all over the floor of the lobby to
Fagin’s building.
“Feelin’ ain’t mutual, curve.” Poppo removed
another gun, but that jammed to.
“Flick this noise.” Two-Bit lunged at Nova.
She pushed him back with her mind, sending him
head over heels to the rear of the lobby.
“Stay down.” She was practically pleading now. “If
you don’t get up, I won’t hurt you.”
Poppo, realizing that there was no way for him to
win this, dropped his weapon and held up his arms.
N O V A 1 7 9
“Yeah, okay. Crap, Fagin ain’t payin’ me ’nough for
this.”
Two-Bit wasn’t as bright as Poppo, and couldn’t see
past the fact that a teenaged curve knocked him on
his ass without even touching him. He got to his feet
and charged again.
Nova knocked Poppo into him and they both fell to
the floor.
His anger now palpable Two-Bit whipped out his
P100 and placed the muzzle right in Poppo’s ear. “You
flickin’ with me, stud? Huh?”
“I didn’t do nothin’, I swear, Two-Bit, that curve
did it, I’m tellin’ you, I—”
“Don’t do it!” Nova cried, realizing that Two-Bit
intended to pull the trigger.
She wasn’t fast enough to stop it.
Poppo’s brains, skull, and blood splattered on the
wall behind where he and Two-Bit had both fallen.
His last thoughts before Two-Bit killed him were con-
fusion as to why Nova had done that to him after he
surrendered.
“I said no killing!” Nova screamed, even though
she had said no such thing. But she’d thought it, felt it,
knew it, that the only person who was going to die
today would be Julius Antoine Dale.
Now Two-Bit had made a liar of her.
“Flick you, curve,” Two-Bit said as he whirled
around and aimed his gun at her.
She destroyed his brain, the same way she destroyed
the Pitcher’s.
1 8 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
It was even easier this time.
Nova couldn’t bring herself to look at the bodies.
Instead, she looked at Jonesy and Mags, who were
still writhing in agony on the floor.
Mags said quickly, “Do what you want, curve—I
ain’t gettin’ on your bad side, no flickin’ way.”
Jonesy, though, was livid. “You flickin’ panbrain,
didn’t you hear what Fagin said?” He tried to get to
his feet, made difficult by a right hand that was so
much shredded meat and bone.
“Fagin can kiss my entire ass,” Mags said. “Little
curve, you do what you want. I’m stayin’ far from
you.”
However, Nova was looking at Jonesy. “Stay down,
Jonesy, or what happened to Two-Bit and Poppo will
happen to you.”
At that, Jonesy stopped—not so much from the
threat, but from this curve he’d never met knowing
his, Poppo’s, and Two-Bit’s names. He let himself col-
lapse back onto the floor.
Nova walked to the back of the lobby and blew the
door that led to the hallway off its hinges, too.
The main room Fagin used—the one from which
he’d kicked her out onto the street—was just down
this hall. She felt the thoughts of several of Fagin’s
hangers-on, including Markus Ralian, as well as sev-
eral little kids—but no Fagin.
This was wrong.
Nova wanted to end this. Fagin had to be here, he
just had to. She knew from the last time she was here
N O V A 1 8 1
that Fagin very rarely left his headquarters, having no
real reason to. He was secure there, could have any-
thing he wanted delivered to him, and so never
needed to leave.
So where is he?
Bad enough that Two-Bit and Poppo had to die.
They were not going to die while Fagin got away.
Nova had sworn it, and she would not go back on that,
not ever.
When she got to the door, she blew it away, too.
She was getting rather good at this.
“Hey, those doors are expensive, okay?”
Nova’s stomachache intensified. It was Fagin. But
where was he? She couldn’t feel him. . . .
He was standing right there. She could see him, but
that was the only way she knew he was there. She
also saw Jo-Jo, Markus, and somebody named Guy,
but all her eyes were doing was confirming what her
mind had told her before she blew the door off. She
also felt Geena Ralian, Tyrus Fallit, and two dozen
children in the back room.
“How can you be here?” she asked in a voice she
recognized as being somewhat ragged. Her stomach
was pounding, she’d killed two people today, and
now Fagin was—was doing something to her.
“I live here, curve, okay?” He grinned, showing
teeth that had been filed down to points. Nova found
it somewhat gross. “But you can’t read me, can you?”
“No,” Nova said in a small voice. “How’d you—”
“I have got to start giving Morwood’s wife the good
1 8 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
stuff.” Fagin laughed—actually, it was more of a
cackle. “What I’m wearin’, curve, is—”
“Something you stole from the confeds.” Nova
couldn’t read Fagin’s mind, but she could read Markus’s.
“Yeah, well, you ain’t the first teep/teek, okay?
Them confeds got to protect themselves against the
likes o’ you, curve. And this is one of the things they
use to do that. And that means you can’t touch me.”
“Not exactly.” There was a chair on the other side
of the room. Nova sent it flying toward Fagin, but he
managed to duck it.
“Nice try, curve, but you’re gonna run outta crap to
throw soon. ’Sides, I got me a backup plan. Tyrus!”
“No!” Nova screamed as she realized what Tyrus
was going to do. Just as with Two-Bit, it happened too
fast for her to stop it, and by the time she realized that
Tyrus was going to shoot his T20 at the head of one of
the little kids, he had already done it.
Tyrus’s T20 blew up a moment later, but too late to
save poor Mandy, a little girl whose father was a TPF
cop and a turk junkie, and whose mother was dead.
Fagin was blurry now, because of the tears welling up
in her eyes, but she stared at him and cried, “Stop it!”
“No.” Then he pressed a button on his wrist.
Pain! It was like a laser saw started drilling through
Nova’s head, slicing through her eyes and forehead,
like it was trying to split her skull wide open. . . .
Then it stopped. Only then did Nova realize that
she had fallen to her knees. Her body was racked with
sobs she could no longer hold back.
N O V A 1 8 3
“See, them confeds don’t just like to protect them-
selves, okay? They also like to keep you teeps in line.
That’s where the second setting comes in.” Fagin knelt
down next to her. “You try anything else, I’ll leave it
on longer and I’ll kill another kid. Don’t matter to me
none, okay? But I figure it matters to you. Spoiled lit-
tle Old Family kid like you, seems to me you don’t
know crap about death—or at least you didn’t, till
they done went and killed your whole family.”
Nova whimpered. “I don’t want anyone else to
die.”
Fagin hit her with another sharp-toothed smile.
“Don’t work like that, Nova. See, you’re in my world
now. In your world, people didn’t die. Or if they did, it
was neat—tidy. We don’t do tidy here in the Gutter.
We do ugly, we do nasty, we do mean—like what I
just told Tyrus to do, or like what I did to you, or like
what you did to Two-Bit, or like what Two-Bit did to
Poppo. Or like what the Pitcher would’ve done to you
if you didn’t kill him.”
Only a small part of Nova’s mind registered what
Fagin was saying. The rest was focused on little
Mandy, a girl who never hurt anyone, killed just so
Dale could teach her a lesson.
“I wanna die,” she muttered between sobs.
“Not an option, curve.”
Pain! Jules turned the other setting on again, and
this time it seemed to last hours, days, years, before he
finally turned it off again.
“So here’s the scan, Nova. It’s simple. You work for
1 8 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
me. Like I told you last week, I can use you. You’re
going to do everything I tell you to do. Because if you
don’t, I will kill another child and I will do this—” He
touched his wrist again.
She had hoped the pain would be easier to take
with more exposure to it, but the third time hurt
worse than the first two times combined. Every cell in
her body felt like it was attached to an electrical cir-
cuit, her skin felt like it was on fire, and her muscles
were as weak as boiled noodles.
Why couldn’t I just have died?
“—over and over again, you scan me?”
After Nova didn’t say anything for a second, Fagin
touched his wrist again.
“Yes!” Nova screamed through the bone-jarring
agony. “Yes, I’ll do it, yes!”
The pain stopped.
Nova collapsed.
“I’ll do it,” she muttered. “I’ll work for you.”
“That’s my good little curve, Nova.” Julius Antoine
“Fagin” Dale stood up. “We’re gonna do some great
things together, okay? Great things.”
PART THREE
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
chapter 12
KEHL HAD BEEN HOPING THE MONEY WOULD
get transferred today.
She called up her account on the crap-ass house
computer that came with the tiny square that she
shared with three other women. It was hard to push
the right keys, seeing as how her fingers were shaking
so damn much, but she made it happen, and she got
into her account records.
Her balance still read in negative numbers.
Why the flick haven’t they made the flickin’ deposit yet?
Flickin’ panbrains . . .
She reached into her pants pocket to grab her fone.
Rather, she tried to reach there, but she missed. After
concentrating as hard as she could, she made her
hands stop shaking long enough to go into the small
pocket.
But it wasn’t there. Crap, what the hell happened to my—
Then she remembered—she sold the fone to Pix so
she’d have something to buy hab with last week. That
1 8 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
was stupid. Might need the fone again. Like, y’know, now to
call the bank and ask them what the flick’s goin’ on. Stupid
junkie.
Standing unsteadily on her feet, not bothering to
shut down the computer even though it ate up power
she couldn’t afford to pay for, she shuffled into the
kitchen. She didn’t trust the world not to tip over to
the side if she actually picked a foot up.
Pix was out in the kitchen drinking a mug of tea—
at least Kehl figured it was tea, since that was all Pix
ever drank—along with Mai, who was yelling. “How
come there ain’t no damn coffee? How’m I supposed
to get up in the damn morning and face the damn day
if I ain’t got no damn coffee?”
Mai’s voice was drowning out the UNN anchor talk-
ing about the alien invaders on the flatscreen above the
stove. Kehl shook her head. She’d let her subscription
to UNN lapse in part because of this kind of “news”
reporting. Aliens—really. Trying to fog us with that crap.
Of course, she also used the money that would’ve
paid for the UNN feed to her room to buy more hab.
She figured the hallucinations she sometimes got
when she was high made about as much sense as the
average UNN “news” report.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Pix was saying in
response to Mai’s ranting and raving. “I don’t drink that
crap. Talk to Cisseta, it’s her turn to buy the groceries.”
Then Pix looked over at Kehl. “You gonna have your
share o’ last month’s rent ’fore next month’s rent’s due,
Kehl?”
N O V A 1 8 9
“I should,” Kehl said in a ragged whisper. Stupid
junkie. Get it together. She cleared her throat. “I need to
call the bank and check something.”
Pix looked at her with disdain. “So what’s stoppin’
you?”
“You have my fone.”
Snorting, Pix said, “Had your fone. Sold that piece
o’ crap to Ayrie for some turk. All he gave me was one
shot for that crap fone you had.”
“What about my damn coffee?” Mai asked.
“Will you shut up about your coffee?” Pix winced
as she asked, waving her hands back and forth like
Mai was just a fly in front of her face. “Go out and buy
some.”
Mai put her hands on her wide hips. “We supposed
to have some damn coffee in the house. I shouldn’t
need to be buyin’ no damn coffee.”
“Didn’t I just tell you to talk to Cisseta?”
Stomping toward the door, Mai said, “The hell I
wanna talk to that curve for? She ain’t gonna get me
no damn coffee, ’cause she always forgets. She’s a
damn panbrain, that’s what her problem is.” With
that, Mai left the kitchen through the front door—
presumably, Kehl thought, to get some of her damn
coffee.
Kehl stood in the kitchen for several seconds. The
UNN reporter was babbling about something else
now. “—six months after the death of most of the Terra
family in a terrorist attack, the last survivor, Clara Terra,
married Milo Kusinis in a beautiful ceremony held at
1 9 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Cortlandt Meadow in Ewen Park just outside Grange
Village. Andrea Tygore was among the guests, making her
first public appearance since her heart attack three months
ago. The bride wore—”
Pix sipped her tea and then gave Kehl a look as if
wondering why she still existed, much less was in the
same room with her, still. “The hell you want?”
“I need to call—”
Rolling her eyes, Pix stood up and said, “Flick you,
curve, you sold your flickin’ fone, so don’t come
cryin’ to me ’cause you didn’t think nothin’ through. I
told you not to sell the fone, didn’t I?”
In fact, Pix didn’t, but Kehl didn’t think it was such
a good idea to tell her that right now.
Pix let out a real long breath, and then grabbed her
fone off the kitchen table all theatrical-like, as if it was
the biggest sacrifice any human being ever made to let
Kehl use her flicking fone. “Yeah, okay, fine, you can
use my fone—but you’d better just call the bank, you
scan me? I find out you called anyone else, I’ll tell
Rowan who really took her brooch.”
Kehl nodded nervously, sweat beading on her fore-
head. Rowan never even liked the brooch, so Kehl fig-
ured there wasn’t any harm in stealing it—especially
given how bad she needed the hab at the time. To this
day, Kehl still didn’t know how Pix found out.
Taking the fone, she sat down at the table. It’d take
a while to navigate through all the menus before
they’d let her talk to a person.
“—erate Army have been forced to abandon Antiga
N O V A 1 9 1
Prime and regroup at Halcyon. Following the retreat, the
Sons of Korhal leader and current self-proclaimed ruler of
Antiga Prime, Arcturus Mengsk, sent out a message to all
Terran worlds.”
Kehl muted the feed before it could switch to that
Mengsk guy. He scared Kehl, and she was scared
enough by real life without having to listen to
boogeymen on other planets.
She called the bank, first verifying that no credit
had been made to her account by Getreu in the last
three weeks. As she figured, the last credit from
Getreu was last month, and that was for the job she
did two months ago. But she knew she’d be paid late
for that one, and as a make-good, they said they’d pay
her this month right on time.
When she had finally gone through enough auto-
mated systems that she was permitted to talk to a per-
son, she explained the problem. “Getreu said they’d
give me the money within three days of when I fin-
ished the job, and I finished it four days ago, and I still
don’t have the money, you gotta help me.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said the bored woman on the
other end, “but no credits from Getreu have been
made to your account. We can’t make money appear
by magic, ma’am.”
“Yeah, I know that, but you don’t understand, I
gotta get my ha—”
She cut herself off. Don’t tell them you need a hab fix.
Stupid junkie.
“Ma’am?”
1 9 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Uh, nothing.”
“Ma’am, your best option is to call Getreu directly
and find out from them what the delay is.”
Kehl blinked. She hadn’t even thought of that. It
was always the bank’s fault when money wasn’t
where it was supposed to be, but maybe it was just
that Molina lied and they weren’t going to pay as fast
as they said they would. “Yeah, okay, I’ll call Getreu.”
She disconnected before the bored woman could
say anything else, and called Molina’s number.
Molina’s voice said, “Hello.”
“Look, Molina, the money did’n—”
“This is Louis Molina. I’m on vacation until the
twentieth. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to
you on the twenty-first—or later.”
A computerized voice then asked if she’d like to
leave a message.
Kehl almost threw the fone across the room, but
she managed to stop herself from doing it. Her body
was shaking so badly, she almost did it anyhow. She
had to have her hab fix! Molina probably never got
around to putting the payment through before he
went on vacation, and he wouldn’t be back for
another three days.
Three days!
Worse, now Pix was gonna be cracked at her
because she called someone else besides the bank.
She dropped the fone on the kitchen table. Her
intention had been to place it gently, but her arms
were practically vibrating.
N O V A 1 9 3
I gotta get me some hab. I don’t get some hab, that’s it
for me.
But she had nothing left to sell. All her jewelry had
long since been exchanged for money that paid for
hab, as had every other useful possession. Every bit of
income she scraped together went straight to one of
Fagin’s dealers for her hab fix.
The fone she’d sold to Pix was the last material pos-
session of any value she’d had left.
It would be at least three days before Molina could
straighten out her payment. By that time, she’d be
dead, she just knew it, she’d be dead and then every-
thing would be over.
She couldn’t bear the thought.
There was only one thing to do. It was the one
thing she’d sworn she wouldn’t do. Kehl had always
insisted on paying money up front for anything she
bought. Never in her life had she taken loans or
credit. Both her parents did that, mortgaging away
their future to pay for their present—except that the
future was when they really paid for it. They died in
debt, miserable and starving.
Kehl wasn’t gonna be like that. No way. She paid
up front no matter what.
Except she didn’t have any up-front. Not a flicking
thing.
Fagin was always willing to extend junkies credit.
Kehl had never taken him up on it.
Today, though, she had to. The alternative—well,
there wasn’t an alternative. She had to have her fix,
1 9 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
and if that meant selling her soul to Fagin—well, it
was the only thing she had left to sell.
Still afraid to pick her feet up, she shuffled out the
door and headed down Juniper Way to talk to
Francee.
Francee was a good person. Kehl had always liked
her. Francee’d understand. She’d help.
First, though, she had to talk to Harold. You didn’t
talk to Francee unless you talked to Harold first. Kehl
hated this part, because Harold knew he was the only
way to get to Francee, so he held it over folks like his
crap didn’t smell.
This time of day—early in the morning—Harold
was always in the Kenshi Kafé, a Japanese bistro that
served really good tea that Kehl had never liked.
Harold lived on the stuff, though—he was as bad with
his tea as Mai was with her coffee—so he always
spent his mornings here. Besides, he liked for people
to be able to find him.
When Kehl finally shuffled over to the Kenshi,
Harold was sitting at one of the outside tables by him-
self, talking on his fone, giving Kehl a pang of envy.
What were you thinking selling your fone, anyhow? How’re
you supposed to function without one? Stupid junkie.
Even though damn little sunlight ever made it
down here, Harold always wore huge mirrorshades
that seemed to cover half his face. They were all the
rage uptown about five years ago when solar flares
meant people needed more protection for their eyes.
Kehl remembered seeing a retrospective story about it
N O V A 1 9 5
on UNN before she let her subscription lapse. Most
folks stopped wearing them, but Harold didn’t. His
sandy hair flopped over his forehead, resting on top of
the glasses, and the bottoms of the glasses rested on
his round cheeks.
He gestured for Kehl to sit in the chair opposite.
The Kenshi had a dozen small, circular tables outside
the café with four chairs at each—at least they were
supposed to. Harold’s only had two, and two other
tables had five.
Trying desperately to keep her shaking from being
visible, and only partly succeeding, Kehl sat down.
“Yeah, I know that. Yeah. Yeah. Look, Andres, I
sympathize, really I do, but ‘sorry’ ain’t gonna feed
the Protoss, you scan me? Protoss—you know, the
aliens that are kicking our asses out in space. Watch a
damn UNN feed, willya, Andres? All right, look, if the
shipment was damaged, the shipment was damaged,
but getting that package to us is your problem, not
mine. That means you gotta fix it. Whaddaya mean,
when? I don’t get that turk by tomorrow, it comes
outta your ass, Andres. I told you, you gotta fix it. We
don’t make our count, I gotta tell Francee why, and
I’m gonna. And then she’s gotta tell Fagin why, and
you know what he’s gonna do? Damn right, he’ll sic
the Blonde on you. No, she’s not a myth, you pan-
brain, I met her. Fine, don’t believe me, but I’m tellin’
you, you crack Fagin off, and you get the Blonde
fryin’ you worse than any brain-pan the army’s got,
you scan me?”
1 9 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Kehl had been hearing rumors about the Blonde
for the last six months, but she didn’t believe it any
more than she believed that crap on UNN. Harold was
obviously stupid if he thought that was real. The idea
that Fagin had some kind of brain-fryer on the payroll
was just as ridiculous as aliens.
“Look, Andres, you want proof? Don’t get a new
shipment tomorrow. Then you’ll get the real story
when Fagin hauls your ass up in front of him.” With
that, Harold disconnected, muttering, “Panbrained
jackass.” He then looked at Kehl. At least Kehl
assumed he looked—it was hard to tell with the mir-
rorshades. “Chaneed, Kehl?”
“I ain’t been paid yet and I gotta get some hab I
need some credit from Fagin so I can get some.” The
words all came out in a rush, and Kehl wished she
could have taken them back so she could say it
slower. Stupid junkie.
Harold was rocking back and forth in his chair now,
which was making Kehl nauseous. “ ’Fraid that’s
gonna be a little bit of a problem, Kehl. See, Fagin
ain’t just givin’ credit no more. He got kinda tired o’
people taking credit and then dyin’ on him—or just
never payin’ back ’cause they ain’t got nothin’. So,
since he’s gotten the Blonde, he’s got a new system in
place.”
Panic literally shook Kehl. This was terrible. How
could Fagin do this to her now? She’d been good,
she’d paid up front for everything, now he was gonna
bring her to the Blonde.
N O V A 1 9 7
No. Stop. The Blonde is just a myth. Harold’s just fogging
you. Stupid junkie.
“Damn, curve, you got it bad, don’tcha?”
Kehl gave up all pretense of hiding the shakes.
Besides, if Harold saw how desperate she was . . .
And she was desperate. It was like her own brain
was screaming at her: WHERE’S MY HAB, DAMMIT? If
she didn’t get some soon, she was half-convinced her
entire body would just explode right there.
“Look, I’d like to help, I really would—”
Kehl didn’t believe that for a second.
“—but rules is rules is rules is rules, and Fagin’s
been insisting that anybody wants credit, they gotta
go through the Blonde.”
He’s just trying to scare me. Make me do something.
“Harold, if I had the money, I’d—”
Shaking his head quickly, Harold said, “I told you,
you gotta go to Fagin. Look, I gotta go over there any-
how, why don’t you come with me?”
Kehl shook her head. “I told you, no money; I can’t
take no bus.”
“I’ll take you on my hoverbike.”
At that, Kehl looked up sharply. Harold didn’t let
anybody ride on his bike.
“Look, Kehl,” he said, “you been one of our best
customers, and you always pay up front. That’s good
faith, and Francee an’ me, we like that. If it was up to
me, I’d give you credit right here and now, wouldn’t
even bother checkin’ with Francee—that’s how much
we trust you.”
1 9 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Harold then leaned back in his chair and let out a
really long breath that smelled like the tea he was
drinking. “But it ain’t up to me, and it ain’t up to
Francee, it’s up to Fagin, and what he says he says,
you scan me? Rules is rules is rules is rules, so we
gotta get the okay from him—and from the Blonde.”
Deciding enough was enough, Kehl said, “C’mon,
Harold, there ain’t no Blonde. Stop fogging me and—”
Slamming a hand down on the table so hard that
Kehl almost jumped out of her skin, Harold yelled,
“I’m not fogging you, you stupid curve! Now I’m tryin’
to be nice here, but if you don’t want it, then go die of
withdrawal somewhere. See if I give a rat.”
Realizing her only chance of getting hab was slip-
ping through her fingers, she grabbed his wrist with
her clammy hand and said, “No, no, it’s okay, really,
I’ll go with, I just—” Get ahold of yourself! Stupid junkie.
“I’m sorry, I just didn’t believe—”
“Believe,” Harold said emphatically. “I’ve met the
Blonde. Not only that, I been on the receiving end.
She’s not only real, she’s flickin’ scary.”
Kehl nodded. “O-o-okay. I’ll go with.” It wasn’t like
she had a choice or anything.
Harold picked up his fone. “I gotta make some calls.
Meet me back here in a hour, all right?”
“An hour?” Kehl blurted out before she could stop
herself. Stupid junkie.
“Yeah, an hour. I gotta make some calls first.”
Quickly, she said, “Okay, fine,” hoping that Harold
wouldn’t change his mind.
N O V A 1 9 9
What the hell am I supposed to do for an hour? As she
got up and shuffled down the street, she wondered if
anybody was hanging out in VRcade. Sometimes she
was able to score some free turk there—especially if
Kenn was there, and especially if she was wearing a
shirt that showed some cleavage. Wasn’t the same as a
hab fix, but it’d do.
She grabbed the neckline of her shirt and ripped
about half a foot of material from it. There, now I got
some cleavage showing. Satisfied that she would be able
to trick Kenn out of some turk, she actually managed
to pick her feet up to walk to the VRcade.
“Congratulations, Mal. It’s now been six months.”
Agent Malcolm Kelerchian had been dreading this
meeting with Director Killiany for a week now. The
only thing that had in any way ameliorated his dread
was the hope, slim though it might have been, that he
would actually find Nova during that week.
Which, of course, didn’t happen. Hence his sum-
mons to the director’s office.
“You look like absolute hell.”
Mal found this hilarious, since Killiany wasn’t
exactly looking her best, either. Although he didn’t
know the specifics—mainly because he was too busy
trying and failing to track Nova down to pay much
attention to dispatches—he knew that the Ghost
Program was heavily involved in the fight against the
Zerg. The director had bags under her eyes, she’d let
her close-cropped brown hair grow out to the point
2 0 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
where it looked especially shaggy, and she no longer
even bothered with the spectacles. It was as if she was
too busy to look menacing.
Not that Mal was in any position to critique how
someone looked. He had most, but not all, of a beard, and
his own hair was uncombed and hadn’t been cleaned in
days. His eyes had bags of their own, and he was sure
they were bloodshot as well. The latter condition was pri-
marily due to his consumption of alcohol, which had
increased exponentially over the last three months.
“Thank you, ma’am. Is that all you wanted to say
to me?”
“Very funny.” She shook her head. “What the hell
are you doing down there, Kelerchian?”
“My job. Ma’am, I’m starting to seriously consider
the possibility that Nova isn’t in the Gutter—isn’t
even on Tarsonis.”
Nodding, Killiany said, “We’ve been keeping an eye out
on all the worlds we can. Sadly, that number’s getting
lower.”
“Ma’am, I think—”
“I don’t give a good goddamn what you ‘think,’
Kelerchian!”
Mal was taken aback. He’d never heard Director
Killiany yell before. Speak softly and menacingly, yes.
Snap, sure. Talk in a tight voice, once or twice. But
yell? That didn’t happen.
Things’re worse than I thought.
The director continued. “Do you know how many
PI8s we have in the program, Kelerchian?”
N O V A 2 0 1
“Counting the guy in the basement? One.”
“Actually, Agent X81505M died last week, so the
answer is none.” She stood up and started pacing
behind her ultraclean desk—that, at least, hadn’t
changed. “Do you know how we’re holding our own
against the Zerg, Kelerchian? With Ghosts.”
“With respect, ma’am, they don’t seem to be doing
that hot a job.”
Tightly, she said, “I don’t need you to tell me that,
believe me.” She peered at him in a way that would’ve
carried more weight if she’d been wearing the specta-
cles. “We need more people in the program. We espe-
cially need good people. Right now, I’ve only got two
people higher than a six.”
“I understand, ma’am, but every lead has petered
out. Nobody’s seen her, there’s no record of her on
the traffic sensors, and no bodies’ve been found
bleeding out the eyes.”
“And nothing on the scans.”
Mal nodded. “And nothing on the scans.”
Still standing, Killiany leaned over to touch a con-
trol on her desk computer. She started reading off
what she called up on the screen. “Six months ago—”
“Here it comes,” Mal muttered.
“—you said you had a solid lead on Agent
X41822N.”
A complaint that she wasn’t an agent yet died on
Mal’s lips: he saw no reason to put himself in worse
trouble. Besides, Nova Terra had been declared dead.
Her sister had even held an elaborate funeral for her
2 0 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
and the rest of her family (nobody looked inside the
coffin for Nova to see that it was empty, and Mal was
sure the funeral staff were sufficiently compensated
not to comment on how light the coffin was).
The director went on. “Had her sighted at a news
vendor’s where she blew up an AAI. What happened
after that?”
“After that, I questioned all the neighboring shop-
keepers and pedestrians, and nobody saw or heard
anything, including the AAI exploding.” Mal shifted
in the uncomfortable chair. “Ma’am, this is the
Gutter—the largest collection of blind, deaf, and mute
people on Tarsonis. Unless she walks in front of a traf-
fic sensor—which she hasn’t done for six months—or
drops a body—which, if she has done it, it’s been off
the grid—I’m not gonna find her without an army.”
“Fine, you’ll have an army.”
Mal blinked. “I was speaking figuratively, ma’am.”
“I wasn’t.” Killiany retrieved a fone from her
pocket and pressed a single key on it. “Get me Ndoci.”
Standing up, Mal said, “Ma’am, that’s a little pre-
mature.” He’d heard about Major Ndoci, and the last
thing he needed was having to ride herd on that
psychopath.
Killiany said, “Good, thanks.” After disconnecting,
she fixed Mal with her nastiest glower. “Premature?
You’ve had six months, Kelerchian. The TPF’s been
useless—”
“Officer Fonseca’s been passing on all the useful
intel he’s gotten, and the traffic cops’ve been checking
N O V A 2 0 3
every day. I’ve also checked out all the usual places
fifteen-year-olds wind up in the Gutter, but—”
“All of this has given you nothing. Dammit,
Kelerchian, we’re losing the war out there! Whoever isn’t
being mauled by the Zerg or disintegrated by the
Protoss is being suborned by Mengsk. The Con-
federacy’s falling apart at the seams, and the only way
it’s gonna stop is if we fight back with every weapon
we’ve got. Agent X41822N is a weapon we should
have, but we don’t because you can’t find her.”
Killiany’s intercom buzzed. “Director, Major Ndoci is
here to see you.”
Nodding, the director touched a control on her
desk, and the door slid open.
Esmerelda Ndoci walked in. She was shorter than
Mal was expecting, and less intimidating while wear-
ing fatigues instead of the combat armor she was usu-
ally sporting in UNN reports about one of her victories
in the field. Her dark hair was cut close to her scalp,
her olive-skinned face drawn into a scowl that Mal
knew had intimidated many a new recruit.
Ndoci was the CO of a ground unit officially known
as the 22nd Confederate Marine Division, unofficially
referred to as the Annihilators. They had the highest
success rate of any division in the armed forces. In
fact, Mal was rather surprised she wasn’t off-planet
blowing Zerg all to hell.
Her story was an odd one. She was an upper-
middle-class girl, always good at sports, and consid-
ered a lock to become a pro soccer player, when she
2 0 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
caught the eye of Gregory Duke, a scion of the Old
Families.
Their marriage was an impressive affair, but Gregory
died a year later, reportedly of a brain aneurysm.
Scuttlebutt around the Detective Squad—which Mal
had just joined at the time—was that she really killed
him. After his death, she enlisted in the Marines, but
she was made an officer. After all, she was still a mem-
ber of the Duke family—though she had gone back to
her maiden name after her husband’s death, which was
considered both scandalous and impractical, given how
much trouble people had both spelling and pronounc-
ing “Ndoci.” (Rumor had it that new recruits to the
Annihilators were forced to do sixty push-ups every
time they mispronounced her last name.)
She quickly rose through the ranks, forging an
impressive reputation—though Mal found it appalling,
since carnage tended to follow in her wake—and even-
tually being promoted to major and taking over the
22nd.
Saluting, Ndoci said, “Major Ndoci reporting as
ordered, ma’am.”
Killiany returned the salute. “At ease, Major.”
Ndoci shifted position slightly, but gave no indi-
cation that she was in any way at ease. In fact, to
Mal’s eye—long honed by his years in the TPF, not
to mention his constant exposure over the last six
months to the desperate residents of the Gutter—
she looked ready to kill anything that moved the
wrong way.
N O V A 2 0 5
“This is Agent Malcolm Kelerchian, one of our
Wranglers. You’re assigned to him.”
Giving Mal the same look one would give a diseased
rat in one’s dinner, Ndoci asked, “For how long?”
Turning the screen on her desk around so Mal and
Ndoci could both see it, she said, “Until you find this
girl.” It was a picture of Nova Terra, a portrait pro-
vided by Clara Terra to UNN for the girl’s obituary,
taken only a few days before her fifteenth birthday.
“Ma’am, with all due respect, this is a waste of
resources. We were rotated back here because of
reports that the Sons of Korhal are mounting an
offensive against Tarsonis.”
At those words, Mal shot Ndoci a look. He hadn’t
heard anything about that. Then again, I’ve been a little
busy the last six months. . . .
Ndoci was still ranting. “We need to be ready to—”
Killiany cut Ndoci off. “Major, I want you to keep
three things in mind. The first is that this girl is a
teep/teek, a PI8 or higher—something you should’ve
known the minute you were summoned into this
office and detached to a Wrangler—and is therefore a
lot more dangerous than she looks.”
“She’d have to be, ma’am,” Ndoci muttered.
“My point is, she’s a Class-A target.”
That seemed to get Ndoci’s attention. Class-A tar-
gets were to be apprehended totally unharmed, and if
those tasked with the apprehension did the target
even the tiniest harm, they were dishonorably dis-
charged and jailed.
2 0 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
The director went on. “The second is that the
Korhal attack on the planet will be made from space.
The 22nd, the last I checked, was a ground unit. If
Mengsk is able, by some miracle, to penetrate our
defenses, then you’ll be diverted to provide ground
support, but unless and until that happens, I need you
on this assignment.” Putting her palms flat on her
clean desk, Killiany leaned forward and said, “And the
third thing is that if you talk back to me again, I’ll bust
you down to private and you’ll be scrubbing waste
extractors with your tongue on a freighter, do I make
myself clear?”
Ndoci looked wholly unintimidated—which may
have been a first for someone on the other end of one
of Killiany’s tongue-lashings—but she did stand at
attention. “What’s the mission profile, ma’am?”
“She’s somewhere in the Gutter. You’re to find her
by whatever means are necessary.”
At that, Ndoci smiled, which prompted Mal to
frown. “My kind of mission, ma’am.”
“That’s what I thought, too.”
“Ma’am,” Mal started to say, “this is—”
Then he cut himself off. What the hell am I objecting
to? He’d spent the last six months getting nowhere, as
much because the residents of the Gutter had no
interest in helping an agent of the government as
anything. The cops down there were functionally use-
less, aside from Fonseca and the traffic cops, and they
weren’t nearly as helpful as Mal had thought they’d
be at first.
N O V A 2 0 7
Yeah, but the reason they’re not helping is because the
government hasn’t done crap for them. Most of the people
down there have gotten the short end of every stick the
Confederacy’s offered them. Hell, if Mengsk succeeds in tak-
ing Tarsonis, I bet it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference
down there.
They don’t deserve this psycho.
But Mal no more had a choice now than he did
when he was turned from a detective into a Wrangler.
Mal was suddenly startled by the beeping of his
earpiece, with his computer informing him that it was
Officer Fonseca. “Excuse me, ma’am, I need to take
this.” Without waiting for Killiany to acknowledge
this, he said, “Go ahead, Larry.”
“I got somethin’—probably shoulda brought it to you
sooner, but I figured it was crap like most—”
Mal didn’t have the patience for this—not today.
“Spit it out, Larry.”
“Big talk on the street these days is someone workin’ with
Fagin—calls herself the Blonde. Some kinda enforcer.”
“Fagin?” The name didn’t ring any bells with Mal.
“Who’s that?”
“You don’t know who Fagin is?” Larry sounded
incredulous. “He runs everything down here.”
Mal couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What
do you mean?”
“He runs all the crap down here: the drugs, the protec-
tion rackets, the booze—it all flows through Fagin. I
thought you knew that, Mal—how the flick could you not
know that?”
2 0 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Larry, I never worked the Gutter, I don’t know the
players—that’s what I came to you for.”
“Crap, I’m sorry, Mal, I just figured you knew all that
already.”
“Tell me about this blonde.”
That got Killiany’s attention. “What blonde?”
Mal waved her off as Larry replied. “At first I figured
it was the usual fogging you get—some stud’s been killing all
the habheads who don’t pay their bills, some curve’s been
sleeping with Fagin for hab, the usual crap. My favorite was
a guy called the Pitcher who worked as Fagin’s personal
enforcer. But they’re all usually crap, and they’re all gone in
a few weeks. Hell, I haven’t heard about that Pitcher guy in
almost a year.”
“But this blonde hasn’t gone away?”
“Nope. And the latest I heard was that she was a teep. I
still think it’s probably crap, but you may wanna check it
out. But be careful—Fagin’s nobody to flick around with.”
Mal looked over at Major Esmerelda Ndoci. “I don’t
think that’s gonna be a problem. Can I come talk to
you in person?”
“All right, but not in the usual spot. Fagin’s got most of
the Southwest firmly lodged up his ass, and I think they got
the diner bugged.”
“Come to my place. I’ll reimburse the bus fare,” he
added before Fonseca could object to how much the
fare to Mal’s apartment in the Heights would be from
the Southwestern.
“Yeah, okay. I get off in two hours. I gotta get back, before
N O V A 2 0 9
they notice I’m gone. Look, Mal, you’d better find this curve
already—I’m gettin’ tired o’ this spy crap. That’s for you
confeds, not civil servants like myself.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Mal disconnected, then turned to
Killiany. “I’ve got a lead. I need a couple of buscards
for fares to and from the Southwestern to my place to
give to Officer Fonseca.”
“Sounded like you got everything we need,” Ndoci
said tersely.
Shaking his head, Mal said, “Not yet. I’ve got a
name of someone who might be harboring her, but
nothing beyond that—and I need to get it all from
him, and not over an open line that the TPF can bug.”
Before Killiany could point out that her department’s
lines were secure, he said quickly, “They can listen to
what he says, even if they can’t get what I’m saying.
The cops down there are corrupt, and from what
Larry told me, it’s the main supplier of the graft
money that’s got Nova.”
Ndoci snorted. “Not for long he doesn’t.”
Mal glared at her for a moment, then turned to
Killiany. “I’ll meet him in three hours, work out a
game plan, and report back.”
“Fine.” Killiany then turned to Ndoci. “Major,
you’re on call until Agent Kelerchian reports in.
Dismissed.”
Saluting, Ndoci turned and left Killiany’s office.
As soon as the door shut behind her, Killiany said,
“This better be a good lead.”
2 1 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Officer Fonseca hasn’t let me down yet, ma’am.”
Mal knew that was a lie. He couldn’t believe Larry
had left out so important a piece of intel as this Fagin
character.
And maybe I can come up with a game plan that won’t
require Major Disaster to wipe out the entire Gutter.
chapter 13
MARKUS RALIAN WAS MORE AND MORE COMING
around to the idea that he should’ve put a bullet in
Nova’s head as soon as she told him she knew what
Dad did. Never told Fagin about her, just shot her and
had Wolfgang and his girls take care of the body.
The last six months would’ve been much more
pleasant if he had done that.
He was standing in Fagin’s main room now. Also
present were Jo-Jo and two of the dealers who worked
for Markus in Pyke Lane, Jewel and Matt. As far as
Markus knew, the pair had done nothing wrong—but
that didn’t matter much to Fagin these days.
“There’s somethin’ the Council does every once in
a while, okay?” Fagin was saying. “Called a random
audit. See, sometimes they just pick someone, any-
one, and check ’em out. Make sure they’ve been
payin’ taxes, keeping their faces clean, not hidin’ no
bodies in the basement, that kinda thing, okay? Could
2 1 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
be anybody. Every once in a while, they find some-
thin’ they wasn’t exactly lookin’ for.”
Fagin was pacing back and forth while he talked.
Sweat beaded on his bald head—stubbled head, really,
as Fagin had forgotten to take his follicle stunter
again—and in his too-scraggly beard. His left hand
kept going to his left ear, which was where he kept
that weird gadget he got from his army contact.
As far as Markus was concerned, that gadget was as
much part of the problem as Nova. Because that was
what Fagin used to keep Nova in line, and he wore it
all the time.
“Me, I like that idea, okay? I like it a lot. So you
two are here not because I know you’ve done nothin’
wrong. You’re here so I can prove you’ve done nothin’
wrong.” He turned around. “Get out here!”
As bad as Fagin looked, Nova looked worse. When
the curve first showed up on his doorstep six months
ago, along with a seriously fogged-up Billy and
Freddie, he thought she was pretty. A little young for
Markus, but he could definitely see why Billy and
Freddie had gone after her in the first place—good fig-
ure, nice features, lovely eyes, excellent hair.
That opinion no longer held. Her long blond hair
only got washed periodically, and it had been a
while, so it was hanging off her head like yellow
strings. Her green eyes were bloodshot, her cheeks
sallow, her lips cracked and chapped. She had lost so
much weight that Markus suspected he could easily
make out her rib cage if he saw her bare chest.
N O V A 2 1 3
Certainly her wrists and hands—the only thing visi-
ble in the voluminous sweatshirt Fagin had given
her to wear along with a pair of oversized denims—
were thin and bony, to a degree that frightened
Markus.
She walked slowly out of the side room from
which Fagin had summoned her. “Please, Fagin, not
today, I need—”
Fagin touched his arm.
“Eeeee-yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
Markus closed his eyes, unable to watch.
After a few seconds, Nova stopped screaming, but
she was breathing heavily. Markus opened his eyes
to see that Nova was looking at him, not with the
defiance she’d occasionally show at first, but with a
pathetic pleading expression.
Jerking a thumb at Jewel and Matt, he said, “Talk
to me.”
Nova stared at the two dealers blankly. “They’re in
love with each other.”
Markus snorted. That wasn’t exactly a secret.
“They like what they do. They think that UNN is
telling the truth about the Sons of Korhal, but is lying
about the aliens. They’re scared that you’re going to
shoot them for no good reason, because they haven’t
done anything wrong. They were talking about whose
place to sleep at tonight, hers or his.”
Fagin held up a hand. “That’s enough.”
Then he pulled out his P220 and put three rounds
into Jewel’s chest.
2 1 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Nooooo!” Markus couldn’t tell if that was Matt or
Nova, then realized it was both of them.
Now aiming his gun at Matt, Fagin said, “Don’t
sleep with coworkers. Means you’re spendin’ all your
time thinkin’ ’bout flickin’ and not enough time
thinkin’ ’bout workin’, you scan me?”
Matt nodded quickly. “Yeah, sure, no problem,
Fagin, no problem.”
“Get your ass outta here.”
“Sure, boss.” Matt almost tripped over himself run-
ning out of the room.
“He’s more scared now,” Nova said, “and relieved
that it was her and not him.”
“Good.”
Without another word, Fagin turned and went into
the back room. Markus wondered which of the
twelve would be unlucky enough to be on the receiv-
ing end tonight.
Jo-Jo and Nova were the only ones left besides
Markus—and Jewel’s bloody corpse. Markus looked
down to see an expression of total shock on Jewel’s
round face.
She didn’t deserve that.
To Jo-Jo, he said, “Dump the body.”
Nodding, Jo-Jo said, “I’ll call Wolfgang.”
A thought suddenly fell into Markus’s head, and
before he could stop himself, he said, “No. Just
dump it.”
Jo-Jo blinked. “But—”
Now that his mind was on this track, Markus found
N O V A 2 1 5
he couldn’t stop it. “You hear Fagin tell you to call
Wolfgang?”
“N-no.” Jo-Jo seemed unsure.
“You really wanna take the chance on doin’ some-
thin’ he didn’t say to do?” For emphasis, he looked
down at Jewel’s body.
Following his gaze, Jo-Jo let out a long breath.
“Yeah, I scan. I’ll dump her out in that alley.”
Markus had no idea which alley “that alley” was,
nor did he care. He just wanted Jewel’s body gone
from here. Her blood stained the floor as Jo-Jo hauled
her out. Hope he ain’t attached to that shirt, ’cause it ain’t
gonna be fit to wear much longer.
“You want the cops to find the body.”
Looking over at Nova, Markus said, “What do
you—?”
“You think that if the cops find Jewel’s body and
they pull out the bullets, they’ll be able to match it
against Fagin’s P220 and they’ll have to arrest him.”
“That’s crazy,” Markus said, looking away from
Nova, knowing that he was lying, because that was
exactly what he was thinking. “First of all, the cops
ain’t got Fagin’s gun. Second of all, no cop’s gonna
arrest him, even if they find her body.”
Yeah, right. So why’d you tell Jo-Jo not to call Wolfgang?
he asked himself.
It was Nova who answered, having heard the ques-
tion as clearly as if he’d said it out loud. “Because you
want him to get caught. You want him to go away.
But this way isn’t going to work, Markus. You have to
2 1 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
do to him what your father did to your mother—your
real mother.”
“Shut up!” Markus pulled out his own P220.
“I know all about what happened, Markus.” Nova’s
voice was a croaked whisper. “And I know how much
you want Fagin gone.”
Markus lowered the weapon. “Yeah, well, nothin’ I
can do.”
“Yes there is.”
He raised the gun again. “No, there ain’t! He’s the
boss, you scan me, curve? And I ain’t doin’ nothin’ to
change that!”
“Then more people are going to die. The ones he
doesn’t shoot, he’ll make me kill for him. I’ve already
killed seventy-four people for him, Markus.”
Eyes widening, gun dropping again, Markus whis-
pered, “What?”
“Seventy-four. The first one was a cop who’d been
skimming. His name was Lonnie Ursitti, he was assigned
to the Southwestern District, and he was keeping five
percent for himself for the last two years. The second one
was—”
“Stop it.” The last thing Markus needed right now
was a list of all seventy-four.
But Nova was on a roll. “—a habhead named
Ariana Manning who kept promising to pay off her
debts, but never did it. Then there was Vic Cox, who
said something Fagin didn’t like when he was drunk
and regretted it, but Fagin didn’t care and told me to
kill him. Then there was Dion—”
N O V A 2 1 7
“Stop it!” Markus raised the gun again, and took the
safety off. “I swear, if you don’t shut up, I will shoot
you in the face!” He didn’t want to hear any more,
especially after hearing about Vic. He had thought—
“No, Vic didn’t die in a bus accident,” Nova said.
“That was what Wolfgang’s girls set up so Fagin had
something to tell Vic’s daughter.”
The entire time, Nova hadn’t moved from where
she had been standing when she told Fagin what
Jewel and Matt were thinking. Her voice was a ragged
whisper, and Markus had to wonder how long it had
been since the last time she—
“He fed me this morning, and there’s a water tap in
the room. I just didn’t feel like having anything.”
Markus shook his head. “You ain’t—”
“I know he won’t let me starve myself. I won’t let
me starve to death. I tried that once.”
Putting the safety back on and returning the P220
to his jacket pocket, Markus shook his head, thinking
everybody would’ve been better off if she had starved
to death—and he didn’t care that she heard him think
that.
“There’s a way to stop all this, you know,” Nova
whispered.
“Yeah, I put a bullet in your skull.” He let out a
long breath. “ ’Cept that’ll just mean I get knocked,
too.”
The door slid open to reveal one of Fagin’s kids—
Markus couldn’t remember which one. He supposed
Nova knew, but he didn’t feel like asking.
2 1 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“It’s Orvy,” she whispered.
Six months, and that still creeped the crap out of
him. “Chaneed, Orvy?”
“Harold’s here. He’s got some junkie curve with
’im. Says he got an appointment.”
Markus put his head in his hands and started rub-
bing his forehead. Harold wouldn’t have come all the
way from Kitsios if he didn’t have an appointment.
Hell, you practically needed laser surgery to get
Harold’s ass out of that chair he liked so much at that
café with the stupid name.
“Yeah, okay, let him in.”
Orvy nodded, and then Harold came in, with the
saddest-looking curve Markus had ever seen. She was
skinny as hell, with stringy brown hair, sunken eyes,
and clothes that hadn’t been washed since before
Korhal was nuked. Markus suddenly felt the need to
breathe through his mouth.
“The hell she doin’ here, stud?”
“She wants credit,” Harold said with a shrug. Even
though they were inside, he was still wearing those
shades—which you’d also have to laser-cut off his
damn face. “I hadda come here to talk about the party
tomorrow night, so I figured I’d bring her along, since
she’s gotta go to the Blonde.”
“Fine, I’ll—”
“Get out.”
That was Nova. “Shut up,” Markus said, “you’ll
just—”
“Get out now!” Nova got to her feet, her green eyes
N O V A 2 1 9
fixed on the junkie. “If you stay, I’ll have to tell him
what I see in your mind, Kehl, and he’ll know that
you’ll never pay him back because you’ll just buy
more hab with whatever money you get and you only
need the credit because you sold everything you have
and a few things you didn’t have but took money for
anyhow and you won’t ever pay and he’ll kill you
right now and he’ll make me do it and why are you
standing there, get out! Get out! GET OUT!”
The junkie turned around and ran out faster than
Markus had ever seen anybody move.
“What the flick is this crap, Markus?” Harold asked.
“This is—”
“You leave, too.” Now Nova looked at Harold.
“Trust me.”
Harold stared at her through his shades. “I got an
appointment.”
“Fagin’s busy. If you interrupt him now, he’ll shoot
you—or he’ll make me kill you. I don’t want you to
be number seventy-five.”
“Sevent—” Harold turned his gaze on Markus.
“What the flick is she talkin’ ’bout, Markus? This is—”
Guiding Harold toward the door, Markus said, “Just
listen to her, Harold. You know how he’s been.”
“Don’t be touchin’!” Then Harold seemed to
deflate. “Yeah, okay, fine. I’ll be gone. But we got to
talk about the party. I can’t be—”
“Wait outside till Jo-Jo gets back. He’ll set you up.”
Harold looked over at Nova. Then he shook his
head. “Yeah, okay, fine. Damn.”
2 2 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
He walked slowly out.
Markus looked at her. “You’re panbrained, you
know that, right?”
“You have to kill Fagin, Markus. It’s the only way
you’ll live. Because otherwise, he’s gonna make me
scan you and I’ll have to tell him.” Tears welled up in
her green eyes. “I’ll have to tell him, because I can’t do
anything else, he makes my brain hurt!”
Unable to stand hearing her anymore, Markus got
out of the room almost as fast as that junkie had.
What’d she say her name was? Kehl? Flick it, I’m goin’
home.
He barreled past Fagin’s assorted kids and went
outside, only to find the junkie seated on the front
step.
“Harold just walked out,” she said. “Got on his
hoverbike without me. Left me here. Guess I should
just sit here until I die.”
Markus was seriously considering joining her.
Instead he said, “Get up.”
Kehl stared up at him with her bloodshot eyes. Her
pupils were dilating. If she didn’t get a hab fix soon,
she was gonna deet out right there on Fagin’s step.
That was no good.
“I said get up, curve! Come with me, I’ll take care
of you.”
Not saying anything, Kehl got unsteadily to her
feet and grabbed Markus’s left arm like it was a life-
line.
Crap, it is a lifeline for her. Crap.
N O V A 2 2 1
He led her to his hoverbike, guided her into the
sidecar.
As he drove back to Pyke Lane, he wondered what
he was going to do with this habhead.
It beat thinking about what Nova said to him.
chapter 14
“WOULD YOU MIND TELLING ME WHY THE
flick you never mentioned this Fagin guy?”
Larry Fonseca stood in the doorway of Mal
Kelerchian’s apartment, greeted not by a hello, nor by
a query as to his health, but with this question. Under
other circumstances, Mal would have apologized for
the rudeness, but just at the moment, he didn’t give a
good goddamn about politeness.
“I told you, Mal, I thought you knew—”
“Well, I didn’t. Never heard of the panbrain
before.” He shook his head. “Come in. Don’t mind the
mess.”
Mal stepped over the readers, music, and food con-
tainers that lined the floor. Larry did likewise. Mal
threw some clothes onto the floor to clear a spot on
the chair for Larry to sit, though he remained stand-
ing. If not for the mess, he would’ve paced.
“Dammit, Larry, who is this guy?”
“He’s—he’s Fagin.”
N O V A 2 2 3
“Please tell me that isn’t his given name.”
Larry shook his head. “Nah, he started callin’ him-
self that after he took over from Grin.”
Starting to feel lost, Mal asked, “Who the hell’s
Grin?”
Now Larry rolled his eyes, as if Mal was the idiot in
this conversation. “I told you—he’s the guy Fagin
took over from.”
“So besides having a Dickens fetish, who is this guy?”
“What’s a Dickens?”
Waving his hand across his face, Mal said, “Never
mind. Just answer—”
“I told you on the fone. Fagin runs all of it in the
Gutter. Drugs, booze, sex—you name it, it goes
through him. You got anything to drink?”
“No.” Mal leaned against the wall, seeing no reason
to let Larry have any of his precious Scotch supply.
That was, at present, the only libation he had in the
place, and he didn’t have much of it left. “Go on.”
Larry shrugged. “What more you want?”
“I wanna know who this guy is, I wanna know
where he lives, I wanna know who his pets are, and I
wanna know why the flick you didn’t tell me about
this guy sooner!” Without giving Larry a chance to
respond, Mal swept his arm around the room. “Look
at this place! I used to be a neat-freak. Everything in
its place and put away and organized. Six months of
wandering around the Gutter like an idiot, and I’ve
turned this place into a biochemical experiment, and
now you’re tellin’ me—”
2 2 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Standing up, Larry pointed an accusatory finger at
Mal. “I’m tellin’ you somethin’ I thought you already
knew. Don’t give me this crap about how this is my
fault, Kelerchian. All you asked me to do was keep an
ear out for blond teep/teeks hurtin’ people. I brought
you every tip I heard, just like you asked. You wanna
be cracked at me, go right ahead, but this ain’t on me,
it’s on you for not doin’ your police work.”
Mal recoiled as if he’d been slapped. “What’re
you—”
Larry shook his head. “Dammit, Mal, you used to
be a good cop. A good cop knows his territory.”
In a weak voice, and knowing it was foggy as the
words came out of his mouth, Mal said, “I never
worked the Gutter.”
“Then you shoulda learned. Dammit, Mal, you used
to be good police, and good police know how to work
a neighborhood. Here’s a clue: You don’t do it by
talkin’ to people with a big sign on your flickin’ fore-
head that says you’re a confed.”
“You’re right.” Mal put his head in his hands and
started rubbing them up and down his face. “Dammit,
Larry, you’re right. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have blamed
you.” He started pacing, kicking food containers and
readers aside. “It’s this damn job, y’know? Got me
chasing down teeps like I’m some kind of dog-catcher.
Just bringin’ ’em—” He stopped. The specifics of the
Ghost Program were classified, not that Mal gave that
much of a crap about that—still, telling Larry could
get the officer in trouble, and Mal had done badly
N O V A 2 2 5
enough by him today. “Anyhow—now I am asking.
Where can I find this Fagin guy?”
Larry unhesitatingly gave an address in the
Duckworth section. “That’s where he runs his whole
operation. He owns the whole building, rents out
some of the squares—but the ground floor’s all his.
Word is he keeps some boys and girls in the back
room for his own use, if you know what I mean—and
he’s apparently got the Blonde back there.”
“And you think the Blonde is my target?”
Shrugging, Larry said, “The hell should I know?
But she fits the profile you gave me. You remember—
the part you actually asked me for.”
“All right, all right.” Obviously Larry intended to
get his entire pound of flesh out of Mal. “So he just
operates out in the open?”
“Why the hell not? Nobody’s gonna bust him. Most
of the cops that work the Gutter are on his payroll—
and that’ll keep up, long as he pays ’em better’n the
Council does. Especially now with the freeze.”
Mal frowned. “What freeze?”
“You ain’t hooked up to crap anymore, are you?”
Larry gave Mal a disdainful look.
Tightly, Mal said, “I’ve been busy.”
“They froze all our salaries. They even gave the
bosses a pay cut—all to fund the alien war, they said.”
Larry shook his head. “Not that they give a crap about
us down there anyhow. It just means studs like Fagin
got it easier, ’cause the payoffs he gives keeps ’em
happy.”
2 2 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Finally, Mal sat down, not even bothering to
remove the laundry from the coffee table, just plunk-
ing down on it. It wasn’t as if he cared how his body-
suit looked—that was why he wore the duster
outdoors. “Now it all makes a sick sort of sense.”
“What does?” Larry sounded genuinely confused.
“Why I couldn’t get anywhere. It wasn’t just that
I’m a confed—that didn’t help, but it wasn’t just that.
If Nova’s with Fagin, and has been this whole time,
nobody was gonna tell me. They like him down
there—he provides all the good stuff that the Council
and the Old Families won’t give ’em.”
Mal was startled by a staccato sound. He looked up
to see Larry giving him slow, sardonic applause.
“Congrats, Mal. Took you half a year, but you finally
figured out the Gutter.” He stopped clapping. “Know
what else that means? You ain’t gonna get no help
from nobody down there. Including me—I can’t be
seen helpin’ you out, or I lose what little cred I got.”
For the first time, Mal was grateful for the director’s
saddling him with the psychopath. “That won’t be a
problem. I’ve already got an army.”
Larry’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“I said I got an army. When you called me earlier, I
was in my boss’s office, where she was giving me an
entire Marine division to use whatever way I see fit to
bring in my target.” He smiled. “I’m gonna use them
on this Fagin guy.”
That just made Larry’s eyes go even wider. “Are
you outta your mind? Mal, that ain’t gonna help.”
N O V A 2 2 7
Standing up, Mal said, “I’m not trying to ‘help.’
Dammit, Larry, if people wanted my ‘help,’ they
shoulda told me where Nova was six months ago. But
I’ve gotten fogged up to my ass. Well, I’ve had it. I’ve
got the Annihilators, and I’ll use ’em if I gotta to get
the job done.”
Larry put a hand on Mal’s arm. “Look, Fagin’s a
slike, no question. Worst of the worst. But he keeps a
lid on things—keeps the order that the Council won’t
let the cops keep. You knock him, and we got a war
on our hands while everyone tries to take what was
his.”
“We already have a war on our hands,” Mal said
with a discontented sigh. “What’s another one?”
“Yeah.” Larry let out a low rumble. “Whatever.
Look, you need anything else?”
Mal shook his head. “I’d say we’re done, Officer
Fonseca.” He held out a hand.
Larry glanced at it for a second before accepting the
handshake. “Glad to be of help, Agent Kelerchian.”
After breaking the handshake, Larry headed
toward the door, then stopped. “Hey, what about my
bus fare?”
Chuckling, Mal walked over to the chair where
he’d draped his duster. Reaching into the pocket, he
pulled out an envelope that contained two buscards.
“Here you go,” he said as he handed them over.
“Thanks.”
The officer turned and the door slid open.
“Larry?”
2 2 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
He stopped and turned back around. “Yeah?”
“I’ll try to do it without bloodshed. But at this
point, I can’t promise anything. I don’t bring this girl
in, they’ll level the Gutter to get at her. I know my
boss—giving me the Marines was the first step to tak-
ing me off this.” He shook his head. “As it is, I’ll prob-
ably get chained to a desk for a year for screwing this
one up.”
“You could just quit.”
“So could you.”
Shrugging again, Larry said, “I took an oath.”
“Yeah.” Mal let out a long breath. “Me too.”
Markus Ralian watched the girl from Kitsios take
her hab. Kehl, that was her name. She was sitting on
the sofa in his living room. A transformation came
over her face, as her nervous expression became a
beatific smile, her nervous twitching became a relaxed
slump, and her muscles, which had been wound
tighter than a spacesuit, loosened right up.
She looked over at Markus with bleary eyes.
“Thaaaaaank you. I really needed that.”
“Yeah.” He sat down on the sofa next to her. “Was
it true, what the Blonde said?”
“Whaaaaaa’d she say? Don’t ’member.”
“She said you sold everything you owned to get
hab, and you don’t got nothin’ left—s’why you were
goin’ to him for credit.”
“Yeaaaaaaaah, that sounds right. I don’t got nothin’
N O V A 2 2 9
left ’cept the clothes on my back.” She looked heavily
down at her clothes. “And they ain’t much.”
“Got that right.” Markus got up, as much to get
away from the stink of Kehl’s unlaundered clothes as
anything. “You realize that the Blonde would’ve told
Fagin that, and he woulda killed you, right?”
Sounding unconcerned, Kehl said, “I dunno.”
He moved over to stand in front of her. “He
would’ve. Guaranteed. Hell, even if she didn’t tell
him, he probably woulda killed you.” Walking off, he
muttered, “S’all he does anymore. Ever since he put
that damn thing in his head to control her . . .”
“So why don’t he take it off?”
Before Markus could give that stupid question the
answer it deserved, his fone beeped. He pulled it out
of his pocket, and saw that it was Jo-Jo. The hell he
calling me for?
“Chaneed, Jo-Jo?”
“Markus, you gotta help me. Fagin, he gone crazy.
He come runnin’ out the back room, yellin’ and crap,
an’ he asked me where Harold was, that he was sup-
posed to talk about the party. I told him Harold left
’cause you weren’t around and didn’t wanna be dis-
turbed, an’ he made me bring Harold back here, so I
did, an’ Harold said it was my fault that he left.”
“You weren’t even in the room.” Markus wasn’t
surprised—Harold was always a backstabbing little
panbrain.
“I know that. I told Fagin that, and then he just
2 3 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
went and shot up Harold, and then he told me to go to
Kitsios to tell Francee.”
“So?”
“So how the hell’m I supposed to tell Francee what
happened?”
Markus was about to point out that it was a pretty
straightforward exercise, when he remembered the
history between Francee and Jo-Jo. “You still think
she’s cracked off about that?”
“Flick, yeah, she’s still cracked off about that. I tell
her that Harold’s dead, I swear she’ll knock me right
there, stud!”
“Where you right now?”
Jo-Jo hesitated. “Outside your square, man.”
Markus rolled his eyes and disconnected. He went
to the front door to see Jo-Jo yelling into his fone.
“Markus, you there? You—” He looked up. “Oh.”
“I’ll go with you.” He turned around. “Geena!”
Back to Jo-Jo. “Give me a second.” Turning back
around to see no sign of his sister, he yelled louder,
“Geena!”
From the kitchen, the muffled voice of his sister
cried back, “What?”
“I gotta go do somethin’. Keep an eye on the junkie
in the living room.”
“What?”
“I said—”
The kitchen door slid open to reveal a very
cracked-off-looking Geena. “The hell’s a junkie doin’
in the living room?”
N O V A 2 3 1
“Same thing all junkies do, Sis—gettin’ high. Make
sure she don’t throw up or steal or nothin’. When she
comes down, give her another batch and send her on
her way.” He hesitated. “She’s on credit from Fagin.”
Geena held up a hand. “Fine.” She looked past her
brother. “Chaneed, Jo-Jo?”
“Markus here, he helpin’ me out with somethin’.”
“Great.” Geena fixed Markus with a look. “Don’t
forget to be back here by—”
“I know when I need to be back here! I know how
to deal with things, so don’t you start lecturin’ me! I
was doin’ this when you were a junkie just like her!”
He pointed to Kehl, who was intently studying the
living room ceiling. “So don’t go tellin’ me what to do!
I already know!”
Geena looked like he’d slapped her, but Markus
frankly didn’t give a crap. He was sick of all of this
today, and he just wanted it all to end—Fagin, Nova,
Jewel and Matt, Harold, Kehl, everything.
Without another word, he turned and stomped out
of the square, not waiting to see if Jo-Jo was following
him.
chapter 15
“WELCOME TO TARSONIS AND YOU, THE SHOW
that gets behind the news to tell you what’s really happening
in the Confederacy. I’m your host, E.B. James. The latest
reports coming out of Antiga Prime indicate that the alien
Protoss have engaged the alien Zerg in ground combat, with
Terrans, as ever, stuck in the middle. Here to discuss these
latest developments with me are Edward Heddle, aide to
Councillor Shannon, and Jennifer Schlesinger, who covered
Antiga Prime for UNN before being forced to evacuate fol-
lowing the Sons of Korhal’s takeover of that world.”
Fagin paced quickly in the back room. He’d grown
weary of Number Six. He simply wouldn’t do what
Fagin said to do, which meant he had to go. Fagin
decided he was better alone anyhow. But he still had
a ton of nervous energy, so he put on UNN, hoping it
would give him a distraction. Unfortunately, they
were showing one of those stupid talk shows. Fagin
hated those. They didn’t talk about anything that
mattered to Fagin—especially right now. For all Fagin
N O V A 2 3 3
knew—or cared—Antiga Prime didn’t even exist. Hell,
sometimes he wasn’t entirely sure anything existed
outside Tarsonis City.
But he left the holograph running in the middle of
the room anyhow. He wasn’t sure why.
“Ed, what’s the Council’s position on this latest revela-
tion? They had previously announced that the Zerg were
allied with the Sons of Korhal, yet the Zerg have been attack-
ing the planet indiscriminately.”
Heddle jumped up and down in his chair, a bundle
of nervous energy—something Fagin could relate to.
A pudgy, brown-haired man with a thin goatee,
Heddle gestured wildly as he spoke. “Obviously, the
Korhallians have learned the lesson that should’ve been self-
evident: Aliens aren’t to be trusted. I mean, they’re aliens!
Sure, what they’re doing to Antiga is inhuman, but let’s face
it—so are they.”
“This is assuming you buy all this,” Schlesinger, a
pretty woman with dark hair and thin-rimmed spec-
tacles, said. “Personally, I didn’t see any evidence that the
Zerg were allied with anyone on Antiga Prime. They’re just
a bunch of killing machines. Arcturus Megnsk is simply tak-
ing advantage of their attacks to further his own cause.”
Heddle smirked. “And that’s exactly the kind of trea-
sonous actions that show Mengsk to be the reprobate we’ve
always said he was.”
Fagin laughed. He’d never heard anybody use the
word “reprobate” in real life before. “Now that’s some
funny crap, stud. Funny, funny stuff, ain’t that right?”
Nobody answered. That confused him.
2 3 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
He turned around and looked at the bed. Number
Six was right where Fagin had left him.
Except for the large bullet wound in his chest.
Funny, I don’t remember shooting him. “Jo-Jo!”
“Mengsk may be a reprobate,” Schlesinger was saying,
“but that doesn’t make him wrong.”
“Are you out of what passes for your mind?” Heddle
looked ready to jump out of his chair and attack
Schlesinger, which Fagin was actually rooting for, as it
would spice things up. “Everything he does is wrong—he
stands against everything we hold dear.”
Getting annoyed at the lack of response, Fagin
yelled louder, “Jo-Jo! Where the flick are you?”
“What Mengsk stands against is the Council’s inability to
help its own people and to defend them against the alien
attacks, and its actions on Korhal IV. So you’re saying that
the Council stands for murder?”
Heddle made a sound like a bursting pipe. “That’s a
sensationalistic oversimplification—but then, I’d expect no
less from a so-called journalist.”
Fagin was starting to get seriously cracked off. He
walked over to the door, which slid open at his
approach. “Jo-Jo, where the flick you at?”
One of his kids—he couldn’t remember which one
it was, but was pretty sure it was Sam—ran down the
hall to him. “Jo-Jo ain’t here, Fagin. You told him to
go tell Francee about Harold.”
“What the flick he do that for?”
The kid blinked. “Uh, like I said, Fagin, you told
him to.”
N O V A 2 3 5
“Flick that, okay?” He took his P220 out of his
jacket pocket and pointed it at the kid’s nose. “You get
his ass back here right now, okay? Or I will shoot you
in the face, you scan me?”
Nervously, the kid said, “No problem, Fagin.” She
backed off slowly while taking her fone out of her
pocket. She called a number, waited a second, then:
“Hey, Jo-Jo, it’s Dani.”
Eyes widening, Fagin started muttering to himself.
Coulda sworn it was Sam.
“Yeah,” Dani was saying into the fone, “Fagin says
to come back to the square. Yeah, I know that, but
now he wants you back. Okay.” She disconnected and
looked up at Fagin. “He’s comin’ back.”
“Good.” Fagin then fired seven shots into Dani’s
chest. She fell to the floor, dead. “That’s for pretend-
ing to be Sam.”
He went back into the room, where Heddle was
saying, “Mengsk’s actions are treasonous. In light of these
alien attacks on our soil, we need to come together as confed-
erates. Instead, he’s weakening us by not throwing his sup-
port behind the rightful leaders of humanity.”
Fagin was really getting tired of the way everyone
was acting. He didn’t get it; it was like they all went
crazy all at once. He never used to have to kill people
before. Sure, having Nova around made part of the
difference—thanks to her, he knew what people were
really thinking.
Schlesinger laughed. “Rightful? By what right, exactly?
The Council doesn’t work with any kind of mandate from
2 3 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
the people. Like it or not, plenty of confederates like what
Mengsk has to offer a helluva lot more than the Council’s
been able to manage. Mengsk has promised freedom and
liberty—”
Snorting, Heddle said, “Like he’d be able to provide
that.”
“Doesn’t matter if he can, he’s simply got to convince
people that he’ll do a better job than the Confederacy has.
Right now, that’s a pretty convincing argument, since all the
Confederacy’s provided people is poverty, death, destruction,
and invasion.”
That, Fagin realized, was the problem. People
weren’t able to keep their thoughts to themselves,
and they hated that, so they got all crazy—so crazy
that Fagin just had to kill them. Wasn’t nothing to be
done about it.
“If it weren’t for the Confederacy,” Heddle was saying,
“the human race would be dead now. When we crash-
landed—”
Fagin aimed his P220 at the holograph. He kept fir-
ing after it exploded into a fiery shower of sparks that
made spots dance in front of his eyes. He stopped fir-
ing only when the weapon dry-clicked. How’d I run
out of ammo so fast?
“Dani!” No, that’s right, I just killed Dani for pretending
to be Sam. Stupid curve. “Sam! Sam, get your ass in
here, okay?”
A few seconds later, Sam came running in. “What
happened to Dani?”
“Flick Dani, okay? Find the Blonde, get her in here.”
N O V A 2 3 7
“O-okay.” Sam sounded nervous.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! Honest, Fagin, nothin’s wrong, not a
damn thing, really, don’t worry.”
“Good.” As Sam turned around to go fetch Nova,
Fagin called out, “And get me some more ammo!”
Dropping his P220 on the floor, Fagin started rub-
bing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and
forefinger. The headaches had been getting worse
lately. The ’jections he was taking weren’t doing crap.
Time to find me a new pharmacist, this keeps up.
When Nova came in, Fagin laughed. Most of her
pretty was gone, which was how Fagin liked it. When
it came to sex, he wanted pretty, but when it came to
his kids, he just wanted them to do what they was
told. As far as he was concerned, Nova—or, rather,
the Blonde, since he liked the idea that her ID had
been wiped away—was one of his kids, and she
looked like hell. Bags under her green eyes, her skin
all pale, her hair a mess. Perfect.
“It won’t work, you know,” she said without pre-
amble.
“What won’t work?”
“Any of this. Everything you’ve done since you
forced me to become your teep has just made your
position worse. And it’s going to end badly for you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know everything, Julius Dale.”
He pulled out his P220. “Shut up! That ain’t my
name!”
2 3 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
She smiled. “Your gun’s empty.”
Oh crap. A shiver of fear ran through Fagin’s body,
as he thought that Morwood’s device had stopped
working and she could read his thoughts, and that
meant he had no protection—
“Calm down,” she said. “Sam said you needed
ammo.”
Fagin breathed a sigh of relief. Then he touched a
control on the wrist of the device.
Nova was good enough to scream really really
loudly and collapse to her knees. Fagin never got tired
of seeing that.
Through clenched teeth, sweat beading on her
brow, her face turning red, Nova said, “It’s going to
end soon.”
He stopped the pain. “What makes you say that?”
After taking a moment to catch her breath, Nova
stared up at him with tear-streaked green eyes. “I
can’t read your thoughts, but I can read everyone
else’s. Remember six months ago when we first met? I
told you that one of your most trusted lieutenants is
going to kill you. That’s going to happen soon.”
Barking a laugh, Fagin said, “Don’t go foggin’ me,
curve. You’re a teep. I been readin’ up on you. You
can read minds and stuff, but you can’t see the future.
Nobody can do that. Future’s what we make it.”
“I know that. And I know what future you’ve
made for yourself.”
Giving her a dismissive wave, Fagin said, “Get the
hell outta here.”
N O V A 2 3 9
Nova slowly got to her feet and left without a
word.
She’s been useful, but damn, she makes me crazy.
Markus stared as his fone for a long time before he
finally decided to connect to the person he wasn’t
supposed to call.
“Sergeant Morwood,” said the voice on the other
end.
“Morwood, this is Markus Ralian.”
Sounding irritated, the sergeant said, “Look, I don’t
know who—”
“I work for Fagin.”
A pause. “What the flick do you want?”
“Look, I need to know about a piece of equipment
you supplied him about six months back. Specifically
side effects if you keep it on too long.”
“I really can’t talk about this over the—” He sighed.
“Look, as long as he doesn’t wear it more than the
recommended seven hours at a time, he’ll be fine.”
Markus hoped like hell he was hearing the ser-
geant wrong. “Seven hours?”
“Yeah. Why, how long does he keep the thing on?”
Biting his lip, Markus said, “Sergeant—he ain’t
taken the damn thing off since he opened your pack-
age.”
“What?” Morwood muttered something Markus
couldn’t hear. “He hasn’t taken it off at all?”
“Not that nobody’s seen.”
“Oh, no.” Now Morwood sounded scared. “You
2 4 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
gotta get him to take it off. The warning on that
thing—which I gave him, by the way, so don’t go say-
ing this is my fault—it says you shouldn’t wear it for
more than seven hours at a time. I don’t know of any-
body who’s worn it more than twelve, and she suf-
fered some memory loss. For six months . . .”
Suddenly, a lot was making sense to Markus. He’d
had a feeling that thing he used to keep Nova in line
was eating away at Fagin’s brain something crazy, but
he had no idea it was this bad.
Morwood started talking again. “Look, I’m amazed
he isn’t a vegetable by now. Seriously, I don’t see him
being able to stand upright for much longer. You gotta
do something.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” Markus
asked defensively, mainly because he’d been asking
himself the same question for months now.
“I don’t know, but you’d better flicking well do
something. Listen, you low-life panbrain, I’ve done
good work for you people. This ain’t my fault, and I
ain’t lettin’ you cut Diane off to—”
Markus disconnected. He didn’t care about Mor-
wood’s wife or the sergeant’s deal with Fagin. Hell, it
was looking pretty likely that Fagin wasn’t going to
remember who Morwood was for much longer.
If he hadn’t forgotten already.
He had just returned from talking to Francee—
alone, since Fagin had called Jo-Jo back for whatever
reason—when Geena, aghast, said that Dani was
dead. How many did Nova say it was? Seventy-five now?
N O V A 2 4 1
He wasn’t even sure anymore. And Dani had been
dedicated to Fagin; no way she was disloyal, Fagin’s
usual excuse for a pointless death these days. Markus
could barely reconcile the Fagin who’d made a long
speech about killing not being a deterrent with the
one he now worked for.
And then he found out that the hab supply was
critically low. Nobody seemed to know when the next
re-up was coming. In the years since Fagin took over
from Grin—hell, in the years since Grin took over
with Fagin as his right hand—the hab supply had
never gotten this low.
Which was why he called Morwood. Because there
were only two things that changed six months ago,
and one of them was Morwood’s little toy taking up
permanent residence on Fagin’s head.
Now that he’d gotten the truth, he knew what he
had to do.
Walking out into the hallway toward the front
door, he passed Geena, who was talking to that junkie
Markus had rescued.
“Hey, Markus, Kehl here wants a job.”
Markus frowned. “What?”
The girl looked up at him. She had gone through
her hab high, and was relatively straight for the time
being. “I wanna work for you. I need a job, and I—”
“Fine,” Markus said quickly. “Don’t we need a new
barker for Greene?”
Geena looked at him funny. “I thought we got
Andy for that.”
2 4 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“We did—and Billy, Freddie, Ryon, and Elizabeth
all been complainin’ about him nonstop. Let her take
over.”
Kehl ran up to him and embraced him fiercely in a
bear hug. “Thank you, Markus. You’re the best! Thank
you!”
Pulling her out of the hug, Markus looked harshly
down at her. “Listen to me—you do what the dealers
tell you to do, you scan me? No matter what it is, you
do it when they tell you to do it, and you do it right.
Think you can program that?”
“Definitely,” Kehl said with an enthusiastic nod.
“You do that, you’ll be able to have all the hab you
need, and maybe buy some of your crap back.”
Assuming we ever get the damn re-up, anyhow . . .
Nodding so emphatically that Markus thought her
head would fall off, she said, “I won’t let you down.”
Markus said, “Good.” Then he looked at Geena. “Set
her up. I gotta go take care of something with Fagin.”
That prompted a look of concern from his sister.
“Be careful, Markus. Fagin, he’s—” She hesitated.
“I know,” Markus said quietly. “That’s part of what
I gotta take care of.”
Nova lay curled up in a fetal position in the corner
of one of Fagin’s rooms. She wasn’t sure which one,
and didn’t care all that much.
She didn’t want to die, but she didn’t want to live,
either. In school, a lifetime ago, she learned about dif-
N O V A 2 4 3
ferent myths from Old Earth, including several beliefs
in an afterlife where bad people suffered for all eter-
nity after they died. Tartarus, Hell, Sheol—whatever
they called it, it was a place of endless pain.
Nova was in Tartarus now, she felt.
There were two things she’d learned over the
past six months. One was the ability to screen out
the white noise. If someone was in the room with
her—and wasn’t Fagin, with his flicking mental
screen—it was impossible for her not to know what
the person was thinking, but otherwise, she’d toned
it down.
The other was a confirmation of a belief: that she
was not alone.
She had managed to sneak some time on Fagin’s
computer when he was asleep here and there, and
had done some research. There were lots of telepaths
around, but only people with a Psi Index of eight or
more also had her ability to move things with their
mind, which was called telekinesis.
Nova had no idea what her PI was—she’d never
been tested, which, in retrospect, was odd, since most
kids, even scions of the Old Families, were tested at a
young age. In practical terms that meant that while
Fagin was protected against her doing anything to his
mind, he wasn’t protected from her doing anything to
his body.
The problem was, she had to pick her moment. If
she failed, he would cause her pain again. Every single
2 4 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
time he used the device that way, it was worse. She
feared that sometime soon, it would outright kill her.
But she would find that moment. That was why
she repeated what she had told him.
The trusted lieutenant who was going to kill Fagin
was Nova herself.
chapter 16
THE FIRST THING THAT MAL KELERCHIAN
noticed about the Annihilators is that not a single one
of them had a neck.
The 22nd Confederate Marine Division numbered,
ironically enough, twenty-two: Major Ndoci, a cap-
tain who served as her second-in-command, five ser-
geants, and a mixture of corporals and privates
rounding out the remaining fifteen. The division was
broken into five companies, each led by one of the
sergeants. Formally given the prosaic designations of
A, B, C, D, and E company, they had each taken on
nicknames of their own. Mal hadn’t learned them yet,
and after meeting the 22nd—the smallest of whom
was Mal’s height and twice his weight in shoulders
alone—he didn’t want to know. Probably named after
rabid animals, he thought with a shudder.
They were in a Confederate air base in Holyktown,
standing outside a Valkyrie that would take them to
the Gutter. The Valkyrie—which was used as both an
2 4 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
air combat vehicle and a troop transport—sat thirty in
the rear section, which was currently unoccupied.
The various members of the Annihilators were milling
about in groups of five or fewer, occasionally shooting
disdainful looks at Mal. He overheard one private
making a remark about the “confed asshead.” Mal
had to bite back a retort about how a Marine would
know all about people with their heads in their asses,
which he was mainly able to do out of an intense
desire not to talk to any of them. The Marines were a
tool to help him finally finish the damn mission,
nothing more, nothing less.
Esmerelda Ndoci walked up to Mal. In Killiany’s
office, she was wearing fatigues, but now she, like the
rest of her people, was in full combat armor, minus
only the helmet. Mal knew that the helmets weren’t
usually affixed until it was absolutely necessary—to
wit, just before insertion—in order to preserve the
suit’s power and air supplies.
“Director Killiany said we had a plan.”
“I have a plan, yes. We’ve got a probable location
on where the target is. This plan has two parts. The
first part is where I go in and ask for her.”
Ndoci actually laughed at that. “That’s funny, Agent
Kelerchian. Very funny. Now what’s the real plan?”
Dead serious, Mal said, “That is the plan—or,
rather, the first part.”
“Dammit, Kelerchian, the director said we’re sup-
posed to be part of this.” As Ndoci spoke, the holster
embedded in the right thigh of her armor extended
N O V A 2 4 7
sideways with a whir to provide the major with access
to her firearm—a P500, military issue, and which Mal
had thought hadn’t been cleared for field use yet.
The action was meant to intimidate, but while Mal’s
bodysuit wasn’t as impressive-looking as the Marines’
combat armor, it had considerably more toys, includ-
ing a force field that would protect him from anything
short of a nuke. It was the main reason why he could
walk around the Gutter with impunity for six months.
The major could shoot him until her fancy-shmancy
weapon ran dry and Mal wouldn’t feel a thing.
“You are part of this,” he explained only semi-
patiently. “Specifically, as far as the first part of the
plan goes, you’re the threat. I’m gonna walk into the
house of this guy—who is, by the way, the major
crime lord in the Gutter, a position he couldn’t have
gotten by being stupid—and explain to him that the
Marines are going to drop the entire Gutter on his
head if he doesn’t hand the target over.”
Mal wasn’t sure why he was calling her “the tar-
get.” He couldn’t bring himself to go Killiany’s route
and refer to her by her designation, but for some rea-
son he refused to use her real name in front of the
Marines. Like I’m betraying her somehow. He shook his
head. What a ridiculous notion.
Ndoci’s holster reembedded itself in the suit, put-
ting the P500 out of immediate reach. “And when this
panbrain tells you to go flick yourself?”
At that, Mal smiled. “We go to the second part of
the plan.”
2 4 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Which is?”
“You drop the Gutter on his head.”
Rubbing her chin with a gloved hand, Ndoci asked,
“Any reason why we can’t do the second part first?”
Mal had expected this question, and had prepared
an entire argument about how real people not
involved in this might get hurt, but at the last minute
he realized that it would be wasted on Ndoci. She’s a
major; you’re in charge. Act like it. “Because I said so,
Major. You have a problem with it, take it up with
Director Killiany. I’m sure she’ll be happy to replace
you as CO of the 22nd.”
That caused the major to roll her eyes. “Don’t push
me, Wrangler. You really think your little teep squad
can do anything to me?”
“You really think Ilsa Killiany can’t bend the uni-
verse to her will?”
Ndoci just stared at Mal for a second. Then she
turned around. “Captain Spaulding!”
The captain, a young man with a large nose and a
small mustache, snapped to attention. All the other
Marines stopped talking.
“Yes, ma’am,” Spaulding said.
“Let’s get a move on, Captain.”
Spaulding smiled. “Yes, ma’am. Ten-hut!”
All the Marines snapped to attention.
“Fall in!”
With the exception of the two in charge, each Marine
entered the Valkyrie through the rear hatch in rank order:
first the sergeants, then the corporals, then the privates.
N O V A 2 4 9
Ndoci looked at Mal. “It’s your mission, Agent
Kelerchian.”
“Then let’s get to it, Major.” Mal climbed into the
Valkyrie and took a seat on one of the two benches,
each of which sat fifteen, on either side of the rear
compartment. Mal took the seat on the right side clos-
est to the front, which required him to walk past
twenty Marines who refused to make eye contact
with him.
As Ndoci and Spaulding followed him in and took
up the seats facing each other at the rear end of the
Valkyrie close to the hatch, Mal subvocalized to tell
his computer to patch him in to the pilot.
“Yes, sir,” came the voice of the pilot, an older
woman with the appropriate name of Fleet. She was
up in the cockpit, along with the copilot and the
Valkyrie’s medic.
“Lieutenant Commander Fleet, this is Agent
Kelerchian. We’re ready to go at your discretion.”
“Roger that, sir.” At Fleet’s command, the hatch
closed. “Prepare for takeoff.”
Spaulding then barked out, “Who’s the best?”
As one, the twenty soldiers of the 22nd said, “The
Annihilators, sir!”
“Who’s the best?”
“The Annihilators, sir!”
“Who’s the best?”
“The Annihilators, sir!”
“Who’s not the best?”
“Everybody else, sir!”
2 5 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Let’s do it.”
“Yes, sir!”
With that, the Marines put on their helmets and
started running their final systems and weapons
check, as the Valkyrie took off with sufficient smooth-
ness that Mal barely felt it—just a mild amount of
pressure against his feet and rear end. He made a
mental note to commend Fleet on her piloting skills
when this was over.
Figuring it couldn’t hurt, Mal told his computer to
do a check on his bodysuit—particuarly the psi-
screen, which he’d activate as soon as they arrived. In
particular, he wanted to make sure the force field
worked properly.
He had a bad feeling that bullets were going to fly
before this day was over.
Markus almost gagged when he went to the back
room. Dani’s body was still lying there in the hallway.
Dammit, he couldn’t even call Wolfgang? Deciding it was
best to call him, he pulled out his fone before he went
into the back room and did so himself.
But Wolfgang didn’t answer. That was weird—
Wolfgang always answered his fone. Markus left a
message, then went on back to see Fagin.
The man in question was pacing back and forth in his
back room, occasionally kicking the charred remains of
his holograph. To Markus, destroying that was one of
the few things Fagin had done that made sense. UNN
wasn’t talking about nothing that wasn’t the damn alien
N O V A 2 5 1
invasion—which Markus didn’t even think was real—
and he’d come pretty close to blowing up his own holo
this morning.
Fagin was also muttering to himself. Markus
couldn’t make out what he was saying, and all things
considered, he figured he was better off not knowing.
Finally, when he’d been standing in the doorway
for half a minute without his boss’s noticing, Markus
said, “Fagin.”
Whipping out his P220, Fagin stopped pacing and
pointed the muzzle right at Markus’s head. “What?”
Holding up his hands defensively, Markus said,
“Take it easy, Fagin. Listen, I gotta talk to you.” He
decided to cover the business first, figuring it would
be better to ease into the other thing. “We almost out
of hab. When’s the re-up coming from Halcyon?”
“Ain’t no re-up comin’.” Fagin lowered the gun
and started pacing again. “Flickers on Halcyon cut us
off last month. The Blonde read that one of their
couriers was planning something, okay? I shot the
guy as a favor to them, and what do they do? They cut
us off. I’m this damn close to renting a shuttle and
killing the whole flicking bunch.”
Slowly, Markus said, “So, we find a new supply
yet?”
That got Fagin to stop pacing again. “What?”
“A new supply.”
“New supply of what? Stop sounding like a pan-
brain, Markus, I ain’t in the damn mood, okay?”
“We need a new supply of hab, Fagin, or—”
2 5 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“We got Halcyon, we don’t need nothin’ else.”
Damn, damn, damn, it’s worse than I thought. “Fagin,
listen to me—you gotta take that thing off your head.
You got to!”
Fagin started laughing. “You are a panbrain! I take
this off, the Blonde’ll fry my brains like an egg. Nah,
stud, I got to keep this on, or—”
“I talked to Morwood—you’re only supposed to
wear that thing for seven hours at a time, or it causes—”
The P220 came back out. “What the flick were you
doin’ talkin’ to Morwood?”
“I wanted to ask him about the thing you wearin’.
Fagin, listen to me, it’s done something to your head.
You been killin’ people for no reason. The hab supply’s
gonna run out. Profits are down all over ’cause people
are scared you gonna be shootin’ ’em. Everybody’s
convinced you’re gonna do something else all pan-
brained. I’m not even sure it’s gonna work, but you
gotta take the thing off!”
“I ain’t takin’ nothin’ off, okay? And you ain’t
answered my flickin’ question yet. What the flick—”
“Hey, Fagin!”
Moving the P220 over to the door, Fagin yelled,
“What?”
Out of the corner of his eye—he refused to take his
eyes completely off Fagin—Markus saw Jo-Jo stand-
ing there.
“There’s some stud at the door with the gummint.
Least, that’s what he said.”
“No, that’s what I meant.” Another figure came up
N O V A 2 5 3
behind Jo-Jo, a tall man dressed in a leather duster
over a pristine white thing that covered his entire
body, and a holographic badge.
Whirling around, Jo-Jo said, “Crap, stud, I told you
to wait—”
“You don’t tell me a damn thing, kid. I’m a
Wrangler—Agent Malcolm Kelerchian—and I’m here
to remove Nova Terra from these premises.”
“Flick you!” Fagin fired his P220 at the doorway,
bullets hitting both Jo-Jo and the confed.
Jo-Jo fell as bullets ripped into his chest and arms
and head.
The confed just stood there, bullets stopping right
before they would have hit him, then falling to the
floor.
As if Markus needed more proof, this indicated that
Fagin was seriously fogged. The confeds had the best
toys, everybody knew that—especially Fagin, whose
mantra had always been never to get on the confeds’
sensors.
Calmly, the agent said, “You finished?”
“Get the flick out of my square, you flickin’ slike!”
Markus shivered as he saw the look in Fagin’s eyes.
He’s lost it. He’s completely lost it.
Fagin emptied the rest of his ammo into the con-
fed’s force field. The bullets collected at Kelerchian’s
feet.
After he’d dry-clicked a few times, Kelerchian
asked, “Now you finished? Nova’s been tagged for the
Ghost Program. That means the government wants
2 5 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
her, and that means you don’t get to keep her. Don’t
try to deny that she’s here—I’ve had a pounding
headache since I walked in the door, so I know she’s in
the building. There are two ways this can go. The first
is that you turn her over to me like I asked. The other
is that I bring the Marines down on your head.”
“What?” Fagin was just staring blankly at the
confed.
“I got a division of Marines waiting to take this
place down. Only thing holdin’ ’em back is me. So—
you gonna give me Nova Terra?”
“What do you want with me?”
Markus whirled around to see that Nova was
standing in the door.
Kelerchian turned around. “Ms. Terra, I’m Agent
Mal Kelerchian. I’m a Wrangler—my job is to find
telepaths and bring them to the Ghost Program. I’ve
been searching for you for six months.” He turned to
look at Fagin. “But you’ve been pretty hard to find.”
To Markus’s surprise, he started to reach into his
jacket pocket for his own P220. What the hell—?
“She’s mine,” Fagin said. “She’s mine, you flickin’
confed slike, and you ain’t takin’ her from me, okay?”
Of its own accord, the P220 raised. Markus tried to
stop it, but his arms were no longer under his own
control.
“You have only two choices, Fagin,” Kelerchian
said with a hard stare at him. “You give us to her or
we take her from your corpse.”
“What is the Ghost Program?” Nova asked.
N O V A 2 5 5
“Shut up, curve!” Fagin shouted, his eyes wild, his
arms gesticulating crazily.
His thumb hitting the safety button, Markus started
to pull the trigger.
He could have shouted out. He could’ve warned his
target. But he realized that he was under Nova’s con-
trol. She never could do this before.
Besides, he found he didn’t want to stop her.
A snarl started to form on Fagin’s lips. “Flick you!”
Then Fagin convulsed from the seven bullets that
slammed into his back.
Nova stared down at Fagin’s corpse. “Six months
ago, I told him that one of his trusted lieutenants
would kill him.”
“Then you lied,” Markus said, lowering his arms
and grateful for having the ability to do so again. “Two
of ’em did.”
“I was just doing what you’ve wanted to do for
months now, Markus,” Nova said. “Every time we were
in the same room together, I couldn’t feel anything
else, because your desire to kill him was so strong. But I
knew you would never do it on your own.”
The confed had just been standing there watching
this. “I see you’ve been busy since you killed the
people who killed your family.”
Nova’s eyes went wide. So did Markus’s, both at
what Kelerchian said and at Nova’s surprise. Nova had
never been surprised by anything anyone said—
except for Fagin, of course.
Shaking his head, Markus thought, Of course, he’s a
2 5 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
confed. He’s got the same toys they all do. Probably wearin’
one of them things that made Fagin fogged.
“How did you know that?” Nova asked in a small
voice. “I saw my sister on UNN, she said—”
“She said what we told her to say.” Agent Keler-
chian’s voice got surprisingly gentle as he went on.
“You’ve got nothing left, Nova. I can’t believe that liv-
ing here is something you want, given what you just
made this young man here do. And your family’s all
gone. We’re your best bet.” He took a breath. “I’m
wearing a psi-screen. It’s—”
“I know what it is,” she said quickly. Pointing at
Fagin’s corpse, she said, “He wore one.”
Kelerchian looked in surprise at where she pointed.
“Where the hell’d he get one?”
“Fagin’s contacts go all over Tarsonis, stud,” Markus
said. “Or they did ’fore that thing made him fogged. He
got it from a guy in the army to keep Nova in line.”
“He had people in the army?”
Markus nodded, amused at the agent’s surprise.
“No wonder I couldn’t find crap for six months.”
“Problem was, he didn’t never take it off.”
Now Kelerchian’s eyes widened. “Never? For six
months?”
“Nope.”
“I was wondering how a panbrain like that could
be as powerful as he’s supposed to be.”
“He wasn’t always that panbrained.” Markus
looked down at the man who had once been such a
good boss. “He got greedy, I guess.”
N O V A 2 5 7
“They always do,” Kelerchian said. Then he turned
back to Nova. “Look, I’m gonna turn my psi-screen
off. You can read me, learn everything there is to
know about the Ghost Program. You’ll see it’s the best
thing for you.”
Unlike Fagin’s screen, Kelerchian’s didn’t require
him to touch anything. He just nodded, and Nova
stared at him.
Then she straightened up. Whenever Nova stood
these days, she was all slumped over, like she was try-
ing to protect herself. But when she’d first showed up,
Markus had noticed that her posture was damn near
perfect. With her background, that would figure, he had
thought at the time, but six months with Fagin had
fogged that posture right up.
Until now. Tears welling in her green eyes, she
smiled. Markus hadn’t seen her smile since the last
time she’d stood up straight.
“Is it true?” she whispered.
Kelerchian frowned. “What was that?”
“Is it true? At the end of the training program,
you’ll take my memories away? Please tell me.”
“That’s become SOP lately.” Kelerchian looked con-
cerned now. “Is that a probl—”
The confed’s words were cut off by Nova’s running
up to him and wrapping her arms around his chest.
“Thank you thank you thank you thank you, Agent
Kelerchian, you don’t know what this means, thank
you so much!”
Awkwardly, the confed patted Nova on the back. “Uh,
2 5 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
that’s fine, really. Didn’t figure that to be the big recruit-
ing incentive. Hell, usually that’s the biggest drawback.”
“Why the flick not?” Markus asked with a certain
heat. “Ain’t nothin’ down here but crap flowin’ down
from on high. Only folks that get anythin’ here get it
for themselves, and most of ’em can’t. S’why they all
take hab and turk and the rest. They’re tryin’ to forget.
Crap, if there was some way you could give me a brain-
pan, I’d take it in a flash, it means I can forget this life.”
Nova pulled out of the hug; Markus figured the
agent was relieved. After sniffling, she said, “Agent
Kelerchian, I’ve killed three hundred and eighty-two
people, and felt thirty-two more, including my family,
die in my head. I can tell you everything about every
single one of those people—all four hundred and four-
teen of them—including what they were thinking at
the moment they died.” Her voice was getting louder
with each sentence, but then it broke. “What makes
you think I want to remember any of that?”
A shiver went down Markus’s spine, and not just
from Nova’s words. He tried to imagine what might’ve
been going through the mind of his mother—his birth
mother, not the woman his father married later—when
his father killed her. He wondered if his father’s being
able to know that would’ve changed what the man did.
Probably not. Crap, he probably would’ve enjoyed it more.
Kelerchian nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll call—”
Nova suddenly slumped again. “Something’s wrong.”
She put her hands to her head. “No!”
Then the world exploded around Markus.
chapter 17
MAJOR ESMERELDA NDOCI HATED MAL
Kelerchian from the moment she set eyes on him.
This had nothing to do with Kelerchian. Esmerelda
hated everyone the moment she set eyes on them. It
saved time.
She had read Kelerchian’s file, and knew he was a
former cop. Esmerelda hated cops. The bad ones were
corrupt leeches who eroded the system of justice from
within, and the good ones were arrogant asses who
thought they were better than everyone else because
of their stupid calling. They were also the most terri-
torial slikes in the whole damn Confederacy.
Kelerchian was one of the good ones, which meant
he treated Esmerelda and the Annihilators like some-
thing he’d accidentally stepped in. He wasn’t going to
use them as his Plan A.
Under the right circumstances, Esmerelda could
admit that Kelerchian’s plan was a good one—if one
wanted to avoid bloodshed. But this was not a situa-
2 6 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
tion where bloodshed was to be avoided. If it were,
Esmerelda would never have been summoned to
Director Killiany’s office in the first place.
Obviously Kelerchian was trying to cut the
Annihilators out of his op, even though he’d been
ordered to make them part of it.
That really cracked Esmerelda off.
As a general rule, Esmerelda tried to kill anyone
who cracked her off. That option didn’t always pre-
sent itself, especially after she joined the Marines, as
she was bound by her orders. In the old days, things
were different. She was always grateful that nobody
had ever traced any of the bodies back to her.
Amusingly, the only death people actually suspected
her of—her late, unlamented husband Gregory—
was one she was not truly responsible for. Had the
brain aneurysm not claimed him when it did, it was
perfectly possible that she would have eventually
engineered his demise, but his sudden death relieved
her of that burden, and freed her to find a better
channel for her aggression than either soccer or
being a wife in an Old Family was ever likely to pro-
vide.
Right now, though, her orders bound her to be
under Kelerchian’s command. He was a Wrangler, so
killing him would probably cause difficulties she
couldn’t work her way out of. The Council took the
Ghost Program way too seriously for that to be as eas-
ily brushed under the rug as, say, Colonel Tabakin.
The comm unit in her helmet crackled. She was
N O V A 2 6 1
still sitting in the Valkyrie’s rear section, waiting for a
signal from Kelerchian.
She’d given the Annihilators leave to remove their
helmets. The Wildebeests—A Company—were con-
tinuing their perpetual poker game, with the biggest
pile of chips remaining in their usual spot in front of
Corporal Deaton, though Private Carver had just
taken a big hand from Sergeant Vincent, to the
sergeant’s irritation. Carver would, Esmerelda sus-
pected, be doing early-morning calisthenics for a
week. The Bengals—B Company—were doing their
usual arm-wrestling competition with D Company,
better known as the Dragons. Reigning champion
Private O’Neill was going one-on-one with the newest
recruit, Corporal Mitchell, with neither of them gain-
ing ground, though the betting had two-to-one odds
on O’Neill. The Razorbacks—C Company—were
silently cleaning their weapons for the nine thou-
sandth time, as Sergeant Mack was a stickler for
cleanliness. As for the Wolverines, most of E
Company was hitting Corporal Flanigan with pop-
quiz questions, as the corporal was studying for the
sergeant’s exam. The exception was Sergeant
McGillion, who was chatting with Captain Spaulding
about sports.
Activating her comm, Esmerelda said, “Ndoci, go.”
She noticed that Spaulding cut off his conversation
with McGillion in the middle of one of the sergeant’s
tired rants about the Tarsonis Tigers’ defensive line, so
the comm was going into his headset as well.
2 6 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“Major, this is General Ledbetter. Your orders have been
changed, effective immediately. The Sons of Korhal have
penetrated our orbital defenses, and we need you to defend
the city.”
That got Esmerelda’s blood boiling. She never liked
the Slikes of Korhal, as she preferred to call them, and
the way they were using the deaths of good
Confederate soldiers to further their treasonous
agenda. “We’re to return to base immediately, sir?”
“No.” Ledbetter sounded pretty cracked off about
that, which meant it wasn’t his order, but that of
someone over his head. Since the number of people
over Ledbetter’s head could be counted on the fingers
of one hand, that was going some. “However, you are to
complete your current mission with dispatch, Major. Agent
Kelerchian is no longer in charge of the op.”
Ndoci grinned. Spaulding never smiled, but he did
give a satisfied nod.
“You’re to retrieve Nova Terra by whatever means are
necessary, and bring her back to Holyktown within thirty
minutes.”
Ilsa Killiany was one of the people you could count
on that hand. They obviously wanted this Terra girl
pretty bad, enough to temporarily hold back their best
ground unit to defend an invasion at the heart of the
Confederacy. Esmerelda could understand why—the
Confederates were losing their two-front war against
the Zerg and the Protoss, and the only reason they
were keeping any ground was because of what the
Ghosts were doing. But they were also dying—or, in
N O V A 2 6 3
the case of that treasonous slike Sarah Kerrigan,
defecting—at a great rate, so new recruits were vital.
“Roger, sir. You’ll have her. Ndoci out.”
Spaulding immediately got to his feet. “Ten-hut!”
The poker game, pop quizzes, weapon cleaning,
and arm-wrestling all ceased and the twenty Anni-
hilators stood at attention.
“Boys and girls, we’re going in in two. The bosses
want the Terra girl back in Holyktown in half an
hour—we’re gonna do it in twenty. Suit up.” Opening
a line to the cockpit, she said, “Fleet, prepare for
insertion. Head for the roof.”
“Roger that.”
Two minutes after she gave the order, they were all
helmeted and standing at attention, ready to go in.
Spaulding yelled: “Who’s the best?”
“The Annihilators, sir!”
“Who’s the best?”
“The Annihilators, sir!”
“Who’s not the best?”
“Everybody else, sir!”
“Let’s do it. Plan Bravo.”
“Yes, sir!”
Esmerelda and Spaulding had put together a
series of plans for hard-target searches. Bravo was
the one where a) the target was in a multistory
building and b) collateral damage was very much
not an issue.
Certainly nobody was going to give a damn if they
trashed the Gutter. Hell, if they didn’t have to retrieve
2 6 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
the target alive, Esmerelda would’ve let the Anni-
hilators stay at camp and nuked the whole Gutter
from orbit, and made Tarsonis a better place.
Fleet put down on the roof of the building, and the
back bulkhead of the Valkyrie opened into a ramp
with a whir.
Esmerelda looked at her troops. “You all have the
target’s profile. I remind you that Nova Terra is a
Class-A target. Anybody here gives her so much as a
paper cut, they’ll be in the stockade by nightfall. Am I
clear?”
All the Annihilators said, “Yes, ma’am!”
“Anybody else you encounter is expendable. These
people are Gutter trash—they contribute nothing of
value to the Confederacy, except for a cheap labor
force, and that’s a resource that’s infinitely replace-
able.”
Sergeant Mack raised a hand.
Esmerelda nodded. “Sergeant?”
“Ma’am, what about Agent Kelerchian?”
“What part of ‘anybody else’ wasn’t clear, Sergeant?”
Nodding, Mack said, “Yes, ma’am. Question with-
drawn, ma’am.”
“Good. Wildebeests, go.”
Sergeant Vincent led A Company down the ramp,
their armored boots clanging on the metal of the ramp
in perfect time. They would secure the roof and upper
floors.
“Fleet, bring us to the middle floors.”
“Roger that.”
N O V A 2 6 5
Moments later, the rear of the Valkyrie was facing
the side windows. “Bengals, go.”
Sergeant Hammond didn’t lead B Company
down—Mitchell went first, firing on the windows
with his wrist cannons, blowing them inward to clear
the way. The rest of the Bengals followed, with
Hammond taking up the rear.
Moments later, C Company did the same on the
other side, Mack leading the way with his incredibly
clean wrist cannon.
The Valkyrie—which was a stealth craft, and so
would be unseen and unheard by those inside,
though the breaking glass and armored troops were
creating something of a ruckus—landed silently out-
side.
“Spaulding, you and the Dragons secure the
perimeter, ten meters around the building. Anyone
crosses it, shoot ’em.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Spaulding said.
“Fleet, get back on the roof, be ready to go at a
moment.”
“Roger that.”
Spaulding took D Company out to secure the
street. Esmerelda saw some people running away,
others milling around, others staring blankly.
“Wolverines, with me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said McGillion.
As Esmerelda led E Company toward the front door,
she caught in her peripheral vision someone walking
toward O’Neill. “Hey, what the flick you people—?”
2 6 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
O’Neill raised an arm.
The man held up his hands, but kept walking for-
ward. “Hey, look, I don’t want no trouble, just want to
know what the flick—”
As soon as he got within ten meters of this Fagin
person’s building, O’Neill fired a dozen rounds from
his wrist cannon into the intruder, who fell to the
ground in a bloody heap.
People started running away after that. Esmerelda
smiled. Although she had a thing for carnage, some-
times just one death did the trick properly. Luckily for
her, the Marines had provided her with opportunities
for both.
Unholstering her P500—which she’d used to kill
quite a number of Zerg these past few weeks—
Esmerelda shot a hole into the front door control, and
then kicked the now-useless door in with her
armored boot.
Four people in a small receiving area of some kind
jumped up. Two were armed. The others were count-
ing money. Esmerelda put a bullet in each of their
heads. Actually, the power of the P500 was such that
the shots destroyed their entire heads north of the
jawline, with the exception of the third person she
shot. He moved a bit, so the round took only about
half his head off. One dead eye looked up at her as
brains oozed out of the halved skull.
She looked around at the sound of gunfire.
Apparently B and C Companies were getting resis-
tance.
N O V A 2 6 7
Then the ground shook and plaster started falling
from the ceiling. Just the fact that it was plaster made
Esmerelda realize that she had made a tactical error.
Dammit. Forgot these buildings were put together on the
cheap. The structure can’t handle—
The rest of the thought was cut off by the ceiling
collapsing on her head.
When he saw the ceiling collapse, the first thing
Mal did was tell the computer to put his force field on
full.
The second thing he did was dive for Nova to pro-
tect her. She was a Class-A target, after all.
Besides, leaving aside the consequences of letting a
Class-A come to harm, it would just be embarrassing
after six months of chasing to let her die now that
he’d finally found her.
That Ndoci and her merry band of demolition
experts surprised Nova with their attack was to be
expected, since their helmets were equipped with the
same psi-screens that Mal was using—and, for that
matter, that the late Fagin had been using. However,
it was also a surprise to Mal, by virtue of the fact that
he didn’t order it.
If I live through this, Major, I am definitely getting
Killiany to crawl right up your ass. I don’t care who you
used to be married to, this is crap, and you’re gonna pay
for it.
Nova was already on the floor, having collapsed to
her knees just before the ceiling buckled, so it was
2 6 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
easy enough for Mal to blanket her with his body,
using the force field to protect them.
“Creatures coming everywhere, can’t stop them,
everywhere you go, they consume it all . . .”
Mal’s back started to hurt as much as his head was.
The head was a lost cause—five doses of analgesic
didn’t even begin to slow it down while he was in the
same room as Nova—but the back might be a prob-
lem. The force field could withstand most any force in
theory, but it was as subject to gravity as anything
else. It felt like the entire ten-story building was
weighing down on Mal’s back. The advantage armor
had over a force field was that the former enhanced
one’s own strength, allowing one to, for example, get
up from a prone position with a ton of plaster and
wood and steel on one’s back by simply pushing it off.
Sadly, the force field did nothing to provide Mal with
the ability to do that. Had he been standing, he might
have been able to force his way through, but being
stomach-down on all fours like this provided him
with no leverage whatsoever.
“. . . death and destruction, they’re everywhere,
swarming all over the place, oh no, Markus, he’s
dead, he died hating me and wishing I would die and
wishing he could’ve killed his father . . .”
Mal remembered that Markus was the young man
whom Nova had telekinetically manipulated into
shooting Fagin. A pity Markus was dead, as he had
seemed a more reasonable person to deal with, and
might have been able to bring the stability to Fagin’s
N O V A 2 6 9
organization that Larry Fonseca had been afraid to
lose.
That, however, was the least of Mal’s problems.
Nova was becoming rapidly more incoherent, and
now the computer was telling him that the force field
was starting to show indications of failure, and recom-
mended that it be shut off for maintenance.
That’s not gonna happen.
Since his mouth was right next to her right ear,
Mal said, “Nova, I need you to focus.”
“. . . dying everyone, all around me, nobody living,
everybody falling apart . . .”
This time he shouted. “Nova! Listen to me!”
The sudden loudness got her to at least stop talking.
“You need to get us out of here.” He thought as
loud as he could, in the way that they’d trained him
to do when dealing with teeps, Nova, focus on me and
on getting us out of this predicament.
The computer warned him that force field collapse
was imminent, and to shut it down to avoid irrepara-
ble damage to the suit.
Mal was a lot more concerned about irreparable
damage to the suit’s wearer. Nova, listen to me, you have
to get this debris off of us before—
“I understand,” she whispered. “Be quiet, please,
I’m concentrating.”
“Good.”
Then the force field failed, and pain smashed into
Mal’s back and crushed his rib cage against his spine
and something hit the back of his head so hard that
2 7 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
his head swam and he couldn’t feel his legs, and then
he mercifully blacked out.
Malcolm Kelerchian’s pain sliced through Nova’s
mind, and almost stopped her from lifting the debris
of ten stories’ worth of building off her. But then she
moved past it and pushed with everything she had.
It didn’t work.
So she pushed harder. She thought about Fagin
and what he did to her, and Markus and how he
always was nice to her and killed Fagin for her, and
Pip and her worry about what happened to the poor
cat that she was never allowed to return to find
(though Nova had asked, begged Fagin to let her), and
Clara and how much she hated her for lying on UNN,
about Nova dying, and all four hundred and twenty-
eight people whose deaths she felt, from her family
and Gustavo McBain on down to Markus and thirteen
others who had just been knocked by a group of
Confederate Marines, and the Marines themselves
and Nova’s fury at them for almost getting her killed.
All of that helped her focus her energy on getting
the debris off.
She stood up to find herself in a disaster area. Most
of the building’s superstructure jutted into the air like
the bones on an animal carcass, the steel beams were
charred and pitted in spots, and the plaster-and-wood
meat for those bones was piled in jagged pieces all
around her.
The minds of the Marines were not entirely clear—
N O V A 2 7 1
they had psi-screens, but they weren’t as good as the
ones Agent Kelerchian or Fagin had, so Nova could
hear bits and pieces. She did know that the leader of
this group was Major Esmerelda Ndoci and that she
hated Agent Kelerchian.
An armored form was stomping through the debris,
moving awkwardly. “I found her!” the Marine said. After
a second, Nova figured out that this was Corporal
Flanigan; he was part of E Company, which was nick-
named the Wolverines after a wild animal from Old
Earth, he was studying for his sergeant’s exam, he was
convinced he would fail it, he hated his younger brother
because the corporal’s childhood sweetheart married his
brother instead, and he regularly had sexual fantasies
involving Major Ndoci and chocolate sauce.
Two more armored figures approached a minute
later. One was Sergeant McGillion, who always
wanted to be a doctor, but washed out of medical
school and joined the Marines to avoid the ridicule of
his family. His psi-screen was better than Flanigan’s,
probably because of his superior rank, so while she
knew all that, she didn’t know McGillion’s first name.
The other armored figure was Major Ndoci. The
only thoughts of hers Nova could detect were relief
that Nova seemed unharmed and glee that Agent
Kelerchian was a bleeding mess sprawled across the
only part of the floor that wasn’t covered in debris.
“You’re Major Ndoci,” she said. For the first time in
over six months, she managed to summon up the tat-
tered remains of her highborn station, and tried to
2 7 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
channel as much of Andrea Tygore into her voice as she
could. “My name is Nova Terra. Agent Kelerchian just
saved my life from your people destroying this building.
I know from Agent Kelerchian’s thoughts that violation
of my person is a criminal offense, and also that, as at
least a PI8, my reading of those thoughts will be consid-
ered in evidence at your court-martial. I also know that
you can’t do a thing to me, because if you don’t bring
me back intact, it’ll be as good as violating the Class-A
directive. I’m telling you this because if you make sure
that Agent Kelerchian gets medical attention and if he
survives and recovers, I won’t provide that testimony.”
Major Ndoci said nothing at first, and Nova
couldn’t read her thoughts through the screen.
Finally, she spoke: “Not bad for a little girl. It’s a deal.”
“I stopped being a little girl when I became the
slave of a crime lord down here. The only reason why
I haven’t torn the armor you’re wearing apart is
because I want to go into the Ghost Program. In fact, if
you had just waited another five seconds, Agent
Kelerchian would’ve told you that himself. That is
something else I will withhold from the authorities,
unless Agent Kelerchian dies.”
“Fine. Fleet, get the Valkyrie down to my position,
and have Scheeler standing by.”
Lieutenant Commander Fleet was the pilot of the
conveyance that had brought Agent Kelerchian and
the Marines to the Gutter; Sergeant Scheeler was the
conveyance’s medic. Moments later, the air vehicle
silently came down to hover about three meters above
N O V A 2 7 3
the debris line, expertly weaving between the beams of
the superstructure. A ramp folded out of the back to
hover one meter above the debris line. As soon as it fin-
ished unfolding, a woman in armor—Scheeler—came
down. Her armor was similar to that of the Marines,
except that it was all white, with the traditional red
cross of the medical community on the shoulders.
While Scheeler put Agent Kelerchian on her
stretcher, Nova turned to Major Ndoci. “Thank you.”
“You’re not welcome. If it was up to me—”
“If it was up to you, Major, you would just have
nuked the Gutter from orbit, and you’re right now
thinking of ways to do it anyhow.” Before the major
could say what was on her mind in response to that,
Nova said it for her: “And you hate telepaths.”
“Get on the Valkyrie before I shoot you, and flick
the consequences.”
Nova came within a hairsbreadth of killing the
major herself, but she had seen more than enough
death, and she suspected she’d see more.
Because what made her collapse on the floor right
before the Marines attacked wasn’t the Marines.
It was the Zerg. They were on Tarsonis.
Nova had known of the Zerg only from the incom-
plete and misleading reports on UNN, but now that
they’d arrived on her homeworld, she knew every-
thing she needed to know about them.
Right now, humanity needed people like Major
Ndoci—and, if it came to that, Nova herself—to kill
the Zerg before they destroyed the entire human race.
chapter 18
WHEN MAL WOKE UP, THE FACE OF A SURLY-
looking nurse was gazing down on him.
“You’re awake,” the woman said in a dull mono-
tone. “Doctor’ll want to talk to you.”
With that, the nurse walked off. Mal realized he
felt funny, as if his body were trying to float up off the
bed, which was about when he realized as well that
he was lying on a bed—which only made sense, given
that he was being looked down on by a nurse.
Then he remembered why he would be in a hospital.
What he didn’t know was why this hospital was fly-
ing through space. At least, that was his assumption,
based on the slightly lighter gravity and the way the
bed was vibrating ever-so-slightly. It wasn’t something
easy to notice, but Mal had always been prone to
space-sickness, which was one of about a thousand
reasons why he stuck with a job that kept him dirtside.
A man in a uniform Mal didn’t recognize came into
his view. He held a status board in one hand and a cup
N O V A 2 7 5
in the other. Tall, with sandy hair and blue eyes, the
man looked like a recruitment poster model. “Good to
see you’re awake, Agent Kelerchian. I’m Commander
Hunnicutt of the Dominion Navy Medical Corps.
You’re on the Pasteur.”
That was an organization Mal didn’t recognize, but
he did know the ship—it was a hospital ship assigned
to the Confederate Army. He tried to speak, but his
throat was dry.
Hunnicutt handed him the cup. Weakly—his arms
felt like they were made of rubber—Mal reached for
it. The cup was cold to the touch.
“Ice chips,” Hunnicutt said. “Should help lubricate
you.”
Mal nodded in response and started gulping down
the ice chips. His teeth ached with the chill, but his
throat felt better.
“I’m sure you have many questions.”
“Yeah, I do.” Mal didn’t recognize his own voice, so
scratchy was it. “What the flick is the Dominion Navy
Medical Corps, and how’d you guys get the Pasteur?”
Hunnicutt smiled, showing perfect teeth. “I’m
afraid there’ve been some changes over the weeks
you’ve been unconscious. The Confederacy of Man is
no more—it’s been replaced by the Terran Dominion.
Director Bick will fill you in on the rest when he
arrives.”
“Director Bick?”
“Your boss.” Hunnicutt took a stylus and made
some notes on the status board. “He’s been alerted
2 7 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
that you’re finally conscious, so he’s shuttling over
from the Scimitar.”
The Scimitar was another Confederate Army vessel.
“What the hell’re you—?”
Holding up a hand, Hunnicutt said, “I’m afraid I’m
not authorized to answer anything nonmedical,
Agent Kelerchian.”
Mal sighed. “Fine, then, what’s wrong with me?”
“Not much anymore. You should count your bless-
ings, Agent Kelerchian. Your spine was fractured, and
you had dozens of broken bones. If the Marines
hadn’t gotten you to the medical facility on Osborne
when they did, you might’ve been paralyzed for life
even if you survived. However, you’ll be happy to
know that I foresee a full recovery, with some spinal
treatments, a few new bones, and a few months of
physical therapy.”
This, like everything that had come out of
Hunnicutt’s mouth, confused Mal, particularly the
notion that he owed his life to Ndoci’s goons. “Why
was I brought to Osborne?”
“It was the only orbital facility that was still secure,
and it was the flash point for the evacuation.”
Hunnicutt paused, seeming to weigh his words, then
stopped. “I’ve said too much.”
In fact, he hadn’t said nearly enough as far as Mal
was concerned, and Mal fully intended to get the truth
out of him. “When’ll we be returning to Tarsonis?”
Hunnicutt suddenly became intent on his status board.
“Director Bick will be able to answer those questions.”
N O V A 2 7 7
Mal had conducted enough interrogations in his
time to read the doctor’s expression—going back to
Tarsonis was not on the agenda. Mengsk must’ve gotten
through.
The doctor whispered some instructions to the
nurse, who had rematerialized without Mal’s notic-
ing—or caring that much—and then looked toward
the bed. “I’ll be back to check on you later.”
“I’ll be counting the nanoseconds.”
Smiling insincerely, Hunnicutt said, “So nice to see
you’re regaining your sense of humor.” Then he left,
the nurse following behind.
Mal looked around. It was a pretty standard-looking
hospital room—no windows, but that wasn’t surpris-
ing if they were on a ship. Usually only generals—or
admirals, he guessed—got the use of plasteel in their
cabins, and maybe their offices. Otherwise, he was
hooked up to a monitor the display of which was fac-
ing away from him—perish forbid he should actually
know aspects of his own health before a doctor does.
He also had the room to himself. There were no
other beds, and Kelerchian wondered what he had
done to deserve the VIP treatment.
The vibration in the bed changed, and Mal got a
little queasy. Then, after about a minute, the vibration
went back to what it was. Mal figured that was this
Director Bick person’s shuttle docking.
I wonder what happened to Killiany. He suspected he
wouldn’t like the answer one bit.
A moment later, the door slid open to reveal a
2 7 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
bulky man in a suit. He had shaved his head, and the
stubble on his head indicated that, if he hadn’t, he’d
be mostly bald anyhow. He had a round head bal-
anced on a round body, and piercing blue eyes.
“Agent Kelerchian, good to see you up and about,”
he said in a scratchy voice. “My name is Kevin Bick. I
run the Ghost Program.”
“What happened to Director Killiany?”
“There’ve been a few changes since—”
“So Commander Hunnicutt said.”
Bick turned to glare at the door. “He wasn’t sup-
posed to tell you anything.”
“He didn’t reveal the nature of those changes, just
that there were some—which, frankly, I would’ve
worked out on my own by his rank, his uniform, and
the name of the service he’s in.”
“Fair point.” He took a breath. “The Confederacy of
Man is no more, Agent Kelerchian. Tarsonis fell to the
Zerg—”
“To the Zerg?” That shocked Mal. He thought that it
was Mengsk who was threatening the homeworld,
not the aliens.
“Yes. With the Council destroyed, the human race
has been united under a new leader, who will bring
us to salvation from the alien hordes that are trying to
destroy us.”
Mal rolled his eyes. “Let me guess—King Arcturus I?”
“Emperor Mengsk is not someone to trifle with,
Agent Kelerchian,” Bick said frostily. “You’d do well
to remember that. In any case, the emperor saw no
N O V A 2 7 9
reason to dissolve the Ghost Program, though it has
moved its headquarters to the Ghost Academy on
Ursa. That’s where we’re headed.”
“Who’s ‘we’ in this case?”
“We’ve picked up some refugees from a few worlds
that have been overrun by the Zerg who’ve asked for
Dominion help. We’ve also got some new Ghost
recruits for the program.”
“What about Nova?”
At that, Bick smiled. Mal hadn’t thought it was
possible for Bick to be any uglier, but the smile went
and proved him wrong. “She’s our star pupil. I’ve
never seen anyone so determined to make it through
this program.”
“Director, I’ve been a Wrangler for over a year,
and I have no recollection of you having anything to
do with the Ghosts in any of that time, so I’m curi-
ous how many people you’ve seen in this program at
all.”
The smile fell. “Get some rest, Agent Kelerchian.
You’ve got a long recovery ahead of you.” He turned
to leave.
“You haven’t answered all my questions, Director.”
Bick stopped and turned around. “What question
haven’t I answered, Agent Kelerchian?”
“What happened to Director Killiany?”
A pause. Then: “If the human race is to survive,
Agent Kelerchian, it needs unity. Old rivalries must be
set aside. People who can’t do that—”
“Are expendable.”
2 8 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
“We understand each other,” Bick said with a nod.
With that, he left.
So Killiany refused to play ball with the new emperor.
Either Mengsk had her arrested, or she ate her gun. Figures.
He still had many questions, but he wasn’t so sure
he wanted the answers to them. If Tarsonis really had
been overrun by the Zerg, right after Mengsk was
rumored to be attacking Tarsonis’s defenses, it meant
that the Confederacy’s seat of government was set up
by the new monarch in order to facilitate his takeover.
Funny—he never once said he wanted power, merely
wanted to stop the Confederacy’s abuses. Probably refused
the crown twice before accepting it, too. That lousy slike.
He wondered what happened to the Gutter.
Whatever the evacuation plan was, he doubted any-
one down there was part of it. Whoever the
Annihilators left alive were probably killed by the
Zerg. Fagin’s people, Martina Dharma, Sergeant
Volmer, Larry Fonseca . . . Are any of them still alive?
Probably not.
Mal stared at the ceiling for a long time before the
nurse came in and pressed a few buttons, and then
Mal found himself involuntarily drifting off to sleep.
Weeks later, Mal found himself on Ursa, under-
going grueling physical therapy sessions in order to
make his legs remember all the things they used to do
naturally. Mal had never realized just how much work
walking actually entailed.
When he wasn’t in physical therapy sessions, he
N O V A 2 8 1
floated around in a convalchair, which not only kept
him off his weakened legs, but had nanoprobes that
monitored and repaired and maintained his battered
body parts.
He’d been thoroughly debriefed by Bick, who also
filled him in on the specifics of what had gone on in
the weeks he was unconscious. To Mal’s regret, Major
Ndoci and her Annihilators were still going strong,
now part of the Dominion Marines, and boasting the
best Zerg kill rate among all the Marine divisions.
Mal also checked up on Nova, though he never
spoke to her. He would spend time in the observation
rooms that were located above the training center,
watching her learn various martial arts skills each
morning, practicing her psionic skills in the afternoons,
and working on weapons training in the evenings.
One day, while he was watching Nova and four
other trainees running an obstacle course under the
watchful eye of Sergeant Hartley, Mal was joined by
an imposing figure with a thick mustache. Looking up
at the man from his convalchair, Mal recognized the
face instantly. “Mr. Mengsk. Or should that be ‘Your
Holiness’ now?”
A smile peeked out from under the mustache.
“ ‘Mr. Mengsk’ will do for now, Agent Kelerchian, as
long as it’s the two of us in the room. In public, I pre-
fer ‘Mr. Emperor.’ ”
Mal nodded. “That’s good—you don’t insist on a
title like ‘Your Highness’ that elevates you too high.
‘Mister’ is a common honorific, the same one used by
2 8 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
democratic governments for their politicians. Keeps
your man-of-the-people image intact, despite being
an absolute monarch.”
Mengsk chuckled. “I’m impressed, Agent Keler-
chian. None of the Wranglers I’ve met—the ones who
survived the Zerg attack on Tarsonis, anyhow—are
especially intuitive. They simply use the tools at
hand.” Another chuckle. “Which raises the question
of why it took you six months to find that young girl.”
Turning away to watch the five trainees doing
twenty push-ups on their fists, Mal shrugged as best
he could in the convalchair. “Maybe I’m not as smart
as you think I am.”
“I suppose anything’s possible.”
“Anyhow, you know the answer to that. When
authority doesn’t help the people, the people don’t
help them. Nobody in the Gutter wanted to help me
find a little girl, especially after she became the tool of
someone the people in the Gutter liked and respected.”
Smiling wryly, he added, “You understand that—it’s
why people are calling you ‘Mr. Emperor’ now. The
Council and the Old Families only cared about them-
selves and only did things for themselves, so when the
Zerg and the Protoss showed up, the people in charge
were completely unequipped to do anything for the
people they were supposed to serve. They were so busy
improving their own position, they forgot about what
the position was. In the end, it killed both them and the
people. Paving the way for you.”
“A remarkably canny observation for someone who
N O V A 2 8 3
was on a hunt or unconscious when most of this hap-
pened.”
Mal snorted. “Been catching up on UNN a lot the
past week or two. Nice of you to keep it intact.”
“The people deserve to know the truth.”
That prompted a bark of derisive laughter from
Mal. “The next time UNN gets anywhere near the
truth will also be the first time.”
To Mal’s surprise, Mengsk came back with a more
genuine laugh of his own. “Perhaps.”
“No ‘perhaps’ about it.” He turned to watch the
trainees. They had switched to a different type of push-up,
with their fists together on the floor, their legs spread a bit
wider, and pushing up and down so their chests landed on
their wrists. “I see you kept the program intact.”
“There were a few elements of the Confederacy that
were worth keeping. The Ghost Program was one of
them. I know firsthand how effective the Ghosts are.”
“I’m sure you do. It’s ’cause of you that trainees
have their memories wiped when they graduate.”
Putting his hand over his heart, Mengsk said, “I
had nothing to do with Sarah Kerrigan’s defection to
my cause, Agent Kelerchian. She did that of her own
free will. I merely took advantage of your own inabil-
ity to hang on to her.”
The trainees were now doing the push-ups on one fist,
the left one. Their right hands were gripping their left
wrists. All but one of the trainees were struggling might-
ily with this configuration, the exception being Nova.
No, that wasn’t fair—she was struggling, but she
2 8 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
wasn’t letting it stop her. The others were collapsing
onto the floor, getting themselves yelled at by Hartley
or simply unable to rise, which resulted in a similar
outcome, but Nova refused to give in to her own
body’s frailty.
“Of course, not everything’s the same,” Mal said, as
much to see how Mengsk reacted as anything. “New
person in charge, for a start.”
“I can assure you, Director Bick believes in the pro-
gram as much as his predecessor.”
More of the party line from the man who drew it. “No he
doesn’t. Believe me, I’m the first person to list Ilsa
Killiany’s faults, but she viewed her role as head of this
program as a calling, because she believed in the
Confederacy and wanted to protect it from those that
would destroy it. That’s probably why she didn’t fit
into your new world order. Bick, though, he only
believes in whatever his superiors tell him. He couldn’t
care less about protecting the Terran Dominion, he just
wants to keep you happy so he’ll stay employed.”
Raising a hand to cut off Mengsk’s likely rebuttal of
this, Mal quickly added, “Hey, I’m not complaining.
Bick’s type is a lot easier to work for.” Then he looked
up at Mengsk. “Assuming I am working for him.”
Smiling enigmatically, Mengsk said, “We’ll see.”
Then he left the observation room, leaving Mal
alone to watch Nova train.
chapter 19
THE PART OF THE GHOST ACADEMY THAT NOVA
found herself looking forward to the most was the
physical training in the morning.
Well, no, that wasn’t entirely true. The part she
really was looking forward to was the end of it, when
she would be relieved of having to remember her past
life.
But until that time, what she was anticipating most
eagerly every day was the physical training.
The other stuff was certainly useful. The afternoon
training in her psionic skills was something she
wished someone in her family had the foresight to
give her years ago. So much of her childhood made
more sense now—especially why she always seemed
to know how other people felt when nobody else did.
She had gone through her youth thinking Zeb in par-
ticular to be horribly insensitive—which he was, at
least by her standards, but she now knew it wasn’t by
choice. Mommy had always called her ability to see
2 8 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
the servants’ points-of-view ‘’empathic,” but Nova
had always assumed her use of the word to be figura-
tive. Being taught by other telepaths and telekinetics
was very useful. The latter were more scarce, as one
needed a PI8 or higher to be telekinetic. Nova was not
a PI8. The Wrangler had simply guessed she was at
least that because of her telekinesis, just as she herself
had when she’d done her surreptitious research into
her abilities. In truth, she was a PI10, the highest in
the program. That made her afternoon studies all the
more important.
The evening work with weapons and target prac-
tice was all fine, though Nova was very bad at it. She
rarely hit the targets she was supposed to hit, and had
trouble holding the bulky hand weapons properly.
Sergeant Hartley yelled at her a lot. The other trainees
were terrified of Hartley, but after six months with an
ever-more-fogged Julius Antoine Dale, it was impossi-
ble for her to be at all intimidated by Hartley. Of
course, that just made him yell at her more and push
her harder, but that didn’t bother her, either, since she
wanted to be pushed hard—especially during the
morning training.
It wasn’t because she was especially good at it. In
fact, she was as bad at the martial arts as she was the
weapons work. Exercise had never been a concern
when she was a scion of the Old Families—they had
other people to do things for them, after all, so indo-
lence was very much the order of the day—and it was
even less of a concern in the Gutter, where she spent
N O V A 2 8 7
most of her time curled up in a corner being afraid of
Fagin.
As a result, on her first day at the Academy, she
couldn’t even do one push-up on her palms, much
less the twenty on her fists that Hartley demanded.
Hartley had explained that the push-ups were to build
upper-arm strength and to toughen the knuckles so
that, as he put it, “you only need to punch someone
the once.”
When one of the trainees pointed out that Ghost
uniforms had gloves, so that the toughness of the
knuckles was irrelevant to their training, he was
forced to do an additional forty push-ups.
But Nova hated the fact that she couldn’t do those
push-ups, and not because Hartley yelled at her or
because he prodded her to go beyond what she was
physically capable of doing as a malnourished fifteen-
and-a-half-year-old, but because she didn’t want any-
thing getting in her way.
For the first time in her life, Nova was able to
choose her own future. Malcolm Kelerchian had told
her of a way she could finally live with the telepathy
that had become her curse, could live a life that had
the positive aspects of the luxurious life she’d lived as
a daughter of the Terra family—such as regular meals
and access to the best technology the Confederacy (or,
rather, the Dominion) had to offer—without the
polite-society expectations that being a scion of the
Old Families entailed.
Besides, if she couldn’t do the physical elements,
2 8 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
she couldn’t graduate, and she couldn’t be brain-
panned.
So she pushed herself. When Hartley taught her a
sequence of punch combinations that she needed to
know, she did not rest until she got it right. When
Hartley told her to do forty push-ups on one fist, she
forced herself to do them, no matter how much her
shoulders and biceps burned with fatigue and how
much her muscles refused to cooperate.
Of course, she had to accomplish the other things,
too, but she wasn’t concerned about that. Time and
practice would show her how to hone her telepathy
and telekinesis—a process she’d already started in the
Gutter, where she had taught herself, under awful
conditions, how to manipulate Markus’s arms so he’d
shoot Fagin—as well as how to handle the weapons.
Those were disciplines of the mind, at which Nova
had always succeeded in the past.
No, it was her body she wanted more than
anything else to be in proper shape for what she
was to do.
Besides, she got to wear a psi-screen during the
physical training.
She wore it during some of the weapons training,
too. The first year, all trainees wore psi-screens when
they were training in groups, to avoid distractions.
Many of the weapons sessions were one-on-one, so
she didn’t wear it then, but the physical workouts
were always in groups, so they were protected from
each other’s thoughts.
N O V A 2 8 9
Her fellow trainees had complained about it, but
she loved the peace and quiet it gave her.
After six months at the Academy, she was already
farther along than the ones who’d been doing it for a
year. She could do forty push-ups on one fist without
being too out of breath, could fieldstrip a Torrent
shotgun in under a minute, had scored above ten
with the Lockdown gun (only the trainees in their
final year ever scored as high as ten), was able to
effectively screen out the thoughts of anybody in the
room (the hardest trick for as powerful a telepath as
her wasn’t reading minds, but not reading them), and
had a decimeter’s precision with her telekinesis.
Hartley had even let her start training on a Vulture,
even though that wasn’t supposed to come until the
second year.
She knew what the other trainees thought of her.
Every once in a while, at night in her bunk—trainees
slept alone, as it was felt that roommates would be
distractions—she would open up her mind and listen
to everyone around her. Teacher’s pet, always (I bet she’s
sleeping with Hartley) sucking up to Hartley, that kinda
(how else would she rate this treatment?) thing just makes
me sick. (Nobody’s really that good, she’s just) I so want her,
that (faking it with her teek powers, probably) supple body,
especially now that (moving around the psi-screen some-
how,) she’s all toned, mmm, that’s (probably working with
that confed) nice. Maybe if I can get up the courage to talk to
her, (who brought her in, the lousy slike.) something will
happen.
2 9 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
But it didn’t matter. All this was a means to an
end—specifically, the end of her memories. Because,
while she had mastered the art of closing off her mind
to the thoughts around her, the thoughts in her head
wouldn’t go away that easily.
. . . Mommy and Daddy and Zeb and Eleftheria
dying at the hands of the rebel group . . .
. . . Edward, Adam, Tisch, McBain, Geoffrey, Paul,
Walter, Derek, and all the other rebels she killed . . .
. . . Maia, Natale, Rebeka, Marco, Doris, Yvonne,
and all the other servants she killed in her grief . . .
. . . Ursitti, Manning, Cox, Dion, and the other sev-
enty people Fagin ordered her to kill . . .
. . . Jewel, Jo-Jo, and all the other people Fagin
killed in front of her . . .
. . . Markus dying when the Marines destroyed
Fagin’s building . . .
She needed the voices to stop. Brain-panning was
the only way it was going to happen, and the only
way she’d get that brain-panning was to finish her
training.
One morning, on her way to breakfast, she saw
Agent Kelerchian.
Nova had heard that he had been in a conval-
chair, but apparently he had moved onto the next
stage of healing, as he was now walking with bracers
on his thighs. It made his steps awkward, but she
knew that they were an aid to making his legs work
again.
“Agent Kelerchian. It’s good to see you well.” She
N O V A 2 9 1
couldn’t read his thoughts, as she had already turned
on her psi-screen.
“Same here,” the confed said with a nod. He joined
her on the way to the mess hall. She was kind enough
to slow down to keep pace with his slower gait. “I
wanted to talk to you before I shipped out.”
That surprised her, given that he hadn’t made a full
recovery. “You’re leaving?”
“There’s a report of a teep on the Sakrysta Mining
Base—it’s low-G, so my legs can handle it a little bet-
ter.” He chuckled. “And I have got to get out of here. I
spent six months spinning my wheels looking for you,
then another six months sitting in that damn chair. I
need to get my ass back out in the field, and appar-
ently His Holiness has decided that I’m still worthy of
being a Wrangler.”
“What would you have done if Emperor Mengsk
had decided not to keep you?”
A clouded look came over Kelerchian’s face, and
Nova found herself switching off the psi-screen for a
second.
I sure as hell (This coffee tastes like crap) hope they don’t
have waffles (Why won’t she look at me?) again, I
(Mengsk wants me dead.) swear I will murder (One of
these days, Hartley is just gonna have to die, I mean, die
really.) somebody if I have (really slowly.) to eat another
waffle.
Kelerchian recovered and lied: “I’d just get a job as
a cop somewhere. I was a good detective on Tarsonis,
I can be one somewhere else.”
2 9 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Nova understood. This was a dangerous mission,
one the emperor didn’t expect Kelerchian to return
from. If he did, by some miracle, then Mengsk might
reconsider his decision.
I’m never going to see him again, she thought as she
turned the psi-screen back on. He deserved his pri-
vacy, and he obviously wanted to keep up a brave face
for her. But even if he survived this mission, when
she was brain-panned after this was all over, she
wouldn’t remember him.
“Thank you for everything, Agent Kelerchian.”
He smiled. “It’s Mal.”
She smiled back. “But you hate the name Malcolm.”
That got a chuckle. “Hence my preference for Mal.
In any case, I didn’t really do anything for you.”
“You saved me, Mal. I’ll always be grateful to you
for that.” She hesitated. “Well, okay, I’ll be grateful to
you until my training’s done.”
“Fair enough.” He held out a hand.
She grabbed the hand and pulled him into a hug.
“Thank you, Mal. I mean it—you did save me.”
“Glad I could do it for somebody.”
Nova wondered what he meant by that. Then she
remembered Tarsonis, and just nodded into his
shoulder.
Suddenly she broke the hug and looked into his
scared brown eyes. “You wanna join me for break-
fast?”
He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it
again to say, “Yeah, okay, sure.”
N O V A 2 9 3
They went into the mess hall together.
It was the one and only time in all her two and a
half years at the Academy that Nova was ever late for
her morning session. Sergeant Hartley said, “Arrive
late and you’ll be late,” one of his infamous apho-
risms, before making her do fifty push-ups as punish-
ment.
But it was worth it.
EPILOGUE
The darkness drops again. . . .
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
The average Ghost Academy trainee graduated after
four years. Attempts to accelerate the program had
proven disastrous, as rushing training of this nature
simply resulted in bad Ghosts, which did the
Dominion no good.
However, the program was such that an above-
average trainee could graduate sooner, maybe in as
few as three years. (A below-average trainee simply
was removed from the Academy permanently.)
In the entire history of the Academy, under two
different human governments, only one trainee had
made it out in as few as two and a half years: Nova
Terra.
Not that she was out yet. As she stood in the jun-
gles of Tyrador VIII trying to figure out the best way to
kill Cliff Nadaner, she found herself wishing this was
over, and that she was brain-panned already.
But first she had to kill Nadaner.
She had almost laughed in Emperor Mengsk’s face
N O V A 2 9 5
when he summoned her to his office. He had been
wearing a psi-screen, of course—it wouldn’t do for his
thoughts to get out—and had said to her: “You’ve
done quite well for yourself, Ms. Terra.”
As if she hadn’t already known that.
“One thing we’ve added to the Ghost Academy
training since we took it over from the late, unla-
mented Confederacy is a graduation exercise. A field
mission, as it were, that shows you’re able to apply
the classroom to the real world. This is especially an
issue with you, who went through the program so
fast.”
Nova had said nothing. This was the emperor, after
all, the one who wanted Mal dead, the one who’d
stopped the Confederacy all by himself. If she was
honest with herself, she knew he was also indirectly
responsible for her family’s death, since the Sons of
Korhal had inspired a huge number of copycat rebel
groups, including the one run by Cliff Nadaner.
So she had been rather surprised by Mengsk’s next
words.
“Your assignment is to kill Cliff Nadaner. We’ve
tracked his location to Tyrador VIII. He’s been agitat-
ing against the Terran Dominion, and it has to stop.”
He had said more things, but Nova had barely paid
any attention to them. Besides, she had known that
everything he said would be in a file prepared for her
perusal. Nadaner. The man who ordered my family killed.
Interestingly enough, Mengsk had not mentioned
her family at all. She still wondered if he knew or not.
2 9 6 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
Not that she cared all that much. Whatever the rea-
son, Nova had found it fitting that the last mission
she’d undergo as herself, so to speak, was to kill the
man who’d been responsible for destroying her life.
“Good luck, Ms. Terra.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said with all the politeness
her tutors had taught her during her first fifteen
years, skills that she was surprised hadn’t atrophied in
the three years since she’d used them last.
Then they brought her to Tyrador VIII.
Nadaner had started telling another story. It was an
even bigger lie than the previous two.
Nova came to a decision.
The exact location of Nadaner and his people was a
few meters below a metal hatch that was hidden by
the overgrowth of the jungle, as well as the damping
field that had led her here. Reaching out with her
mind, she ripped out the overgrowth and tossed it
aside. Then, using the techniques they’d taught her at
the Academy, she looked for teek traps—defenses
against telekinetic tampering, booby traps that would
go off right in Nova’s face if she wasn’t careful.
After a moment, she realized she needn’t have
bothered. Nadaner hadn’t anticipated a telekinetic.
More fool him.
She ripped the hatch off its hinges and tossed it
aside. It was heavy, so it took some effort, but she
managed it.
Cocking her assault rifle—which she had brought
as backup in case she encountered unexpected oppo-
N O V A 2 9 7
sition or wild animals—she leapt down into the hatch,
having telepathically determined that Nadaner and
his people weren’t right under it.
They were about ten meters to the right of the
hatch, and they were very surprised to see a young
blonde in a white-with-navy-blue-trim bodysuit,
holding a very large gun, leap in through the hole
where their hatch used to be.
Twelve people leapt to their feet, some less steadily
than others. All of them had had something to
drink—except for Cephme, who was allergic to alco-
hol—and many were very drunk.
A second later, they were all dead. Steve, who was
looking forward to another opportunity to kill many
people at once. Pratikh, who joined up because
Arcturus Mengsk killed his cousin, and he wanted
Mengsk dead in revenge. Cephme, who hated not
being able to drink with the others. Yvenna, who
loved hearing Nadaner’s stories, even though she
knew they were lies. Ray, who wanted to be back
home on Halcyon with his girlfriend. Geraddo, who
wished Nadaner had some real drinks tonight instead
of his usual swill. Alexandra, who was starting to get
hungry. Thom and Joan, who’d just gotten married.
Joel, who’d just gotten divorced. Alessio and Peter-
Michael, the twins who secretly hated each other, but
never did anything apart. And David, who hated
everybody and everything, and joined Nadaner’s
cause so he could have a focus for that rage.
She killed all of them in a second. The first time she
2 9 8 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
deliberately killed someone—the Pitcher—it had
taken a supreme effort. Ursitti, the cop who’d been
skimming, had been even more difficult. Now,
though, killing thirteen people was easier than snap-
ping fingers.
Nova hadn’t wanted to kill anymore, but she knew
there was no choice.
Besides, these slikes targeted my family.
The only one who hadn’t risen was also the only
one she didn’t kill. This was Cliff Nadaner. A tall,
broad-shouldered man with receding dark brown hair
and a hook nose, Nadaner didn’t look like all that
much.
But she knew better. She felt his hatred for the
governments of humanity, making no real distinc-
tion between the Confederacy and the Dominion. He
was a self-proclaimed anarchist, though he didn’t
believe in the true chaos that was required for proper
anarchy.
Most of all, though, she felt his fear. He looked
around at the corpses suddenly at his feet, blood ooz-
ing out of every orifice in their heads, then looked
frantically up at her.
“What are you?”
She smiled, and started walking slowly toward
where he sat. “I’m what you made me, Cliff Nadaner.
I’m the product of your psychosis. You hate the idea
of anybody being more successful than you, so you
take it out on them. Koji at the factory wins
employee-of-the-month more than you, so you
N O V A 2 9 9
arranged for the accident that crippled him. But it
didn’t work, they just gave the award to Mika instead.
So you joined the Marines. But you couldn’t succeed
there, either—passed over for promotion six times,
then they drummed you out. With nowhere left to go,
you formed your own little band of rebels—but never
got Mengsk’s press. There were the Sons of Korhal,
and then the other guys. Then Mengsk actually did
what you wanted to do—he took over.”
Again, Nadaner asked, “What are you?”
“You ordered the destruction of the Terra family.
You managed to turn Edward Peters against them.
But you made one mistake, Cliff. You left one of them
alive.”
Realization dawned on Nadaner’s face. “Oh no. Oh
no no no. You’re the one who—”
“Yes, Cliff.” She had walked to within a meter of
him now, and Nadaner was eyeing her assault rifle
warily. “I’m the one who killed all your people. I
killed Edward and Gustavo and Adam and Tisch and
all the other ones you sent to kill my family. Because
you did that, I eventually became the very Ghost that
the Dominion has assigned to finally put an end to
your pathetic existence.”
Falling out of his chair, Nadaner got down on his
knees and clasped his fists together. Tears were
streaming down his cheeks. “Please, no, I’m begging
you, don’t kill me. I’ll do anything, please, I’ll do it,
just ask, it’s yours!”
Nova stared at the man who’d ruined her life. She
3 0 0 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
had been looking forward to this moment, in many
ways, for three years, but now that it was here, she
was disgusted. This brilliant mastermind who had
plotted the utter destruction of the entire Terra family
was just another bully, no better than the people
she’d met in the Gutter every day.
She had walked over to him intending to blow
Nadaner’s head off with the assault rifle, but now she
decided he wasn’t worth the bullets.
“Can you give me my life back?”
“Huh? No, I mean, I can get you money, or—”
Nova killed him.
Before his bleeding-through-the-eyes body could
even hit the floor of this underground bunker, Nova
had turned around and walked back to the hatch.
Telekinetically lifting herself up to the surface, she
then paused to catch her breath. Carrying her own
weight was always tricky, and she couldn’t do it for
very long, as it required a high level of focus. It was
certainly nothing she’d try in a fight. . . .
She activated the comm unit that had lain dormant
since she got in the drop-pod, and said only two
words: “It’s finished.”
Now, it’s really over. Nadaner’s dead—and soon, for all
intents and purposes, I will be, too.
Six days ago, people claiming to be working with
the Korprulu Liberation Front—an organization dedi-
cated to the overthrow of Emperor Mengsk—had
taken over a munitions factory on New Sydney. With
N O V A 3 0 1
the deadliest new prototype weapons sitting there for
the taking, with the entire staff of the factory their
hostages, and with the factory itself a maze of tunnels,
catwalks, and twisted corridors, the KLF fully believed
that it had the place secured.
Valley Johanssen knew she just had to wait it out.
Sooner or later, the rest of her KLF reinforcements
would arrive. They were en route now, taking care to
follow a circuitous route to avoid Dominion detection.
Once they got there, they’d go beyond this lousy fac-
tory, and take over all of New Sydney. It would be the
KLF’s greatest victory.
She had guards at every entry point, each wearing
a helmet with state-of-the-art detection equipment.
Nobody could get anywhere near them without their
knowing it.
That, at least, was what Johanssen believed.
The guard at the north entrance didn’t see the lithe
form that snuck past him with consummate ease.
Neither his incredibly sophisticated equipment nor his
rather ordinary eyes were capable of penetrating the
baffling fields generated by the white-with-navy-
blue-trim suit she wore.
None of the other guards saw the Ghost, either,
until and unless she wanted them to.
Her mission was to limit casualties. This takeover
indicated a flaw in Dominion intelligence, and so they
needed as many alive as possible so they could be
questioned.
Of course, she could shut down their brains with-
3 0 2 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
out killing them. She only did that to a few, though—
the ones who weren’t due to check in for a little
while.
Johanssen was talking to a Dominion negotiator
over a screen. The negotiator was pretending to do his
job; Johanssen didn’t believe that any of his offers
were legitimate. And she was right, they weren’t, but
not because the negotiator was trying to lead her on.
He was simply stalling while the Ghost made her
move.
The best defense they had was the force field. It
didn’t stop her—the force field only reacted to some-
thing it could detect, and with the suit activated, the
Ghost couldn’t be detected—but it prevented assault
vehicles from attacking the factory. Johanssen was
standing right next to the control for the force field,
which she had given a new code so that only she
could deactivate it.
On a whim, the Ghost went visible. Johanssen
whirled around, whipping up a P1000 she’d taken out
of this very factory. “How the hell’d you get in here?
Who are you?”
“You have two choices, Valley. You can surrender,
or I can take down the force field and let in the
Grizzly that’s standing by over the ridge to rain fire
down on you and what’s left of your people. I’d take
the surrender. It’s not like you’re ever going to get
your brother back anyhow, so there’s no point in—”
“Flick you.” Johanssen fired the P1000.
The bullets didn’t leave the chamber, thanks to the
N O V A 3 0 3
Ghost’s keeping them there telekinetically, so the
P1000 exploded in Johanssen’s face. She fell to the
floor, clutching her burned and bleeding head.
Walking over to the force field control, the Ghost
reached down and grabbed one of Johanssen’s hands
away from her face with her mind. Johanssen fought
the Ghost with what willpower she had left after hav-
ing had a gun blow up in her face, but it was no use.
She typed in the code to lower the force field. It
was coded to Johanssen’s DNA, so it had to be her
hand that did it, which the Ghost had thought to be a
nice touch.
“You gonna surrender now?”
Pulling a knife out of her boot with her other hand,
Johanssen said, “Long live the KLF!”
Before Johanssen could stab herself in the heart,
the Ghost telekinetically removed the knife from her
hand. “Sorry, you don’t get off that easily. That Grizzly
will be here any minute to take you away.”
Minutes later, the large metal door to this room—
which the Ghost had moved through effortlessly,
thanks to her suit—was blown off by a Grizzly, a five-
person tank that could take on a small army all by
itself.
However, there was no army to take on, and
Johanssen finally realized she was defeated, and sur-
rendered.
Major Esmerelda Ndoci of the Annihilators and
four of her troops were on the Grizzly. “Why the flick
3 0 4 K E I T H R . A . D E C A N D I D O
did you even call us in if you took care of it?” she
asked angrily.
The Ghost shrugged. “I knew you wanted to break
something.”
Ndoci shook her head. “You’re still a stupid slike,
you know that?”
Frowning, the Ghost asked, “Have we met before
this mission?”
The major started to say something, then stopped.
“Never mind.”
Nova Terra shrugged. Nothing mattered prior to
when she’d become a Ghost. Maybe in her previous
life she and Ndoci had crossed paths. She couldn’t
imagine it, but she didn’t try very hard, either.
Turning on her suit’s stealth mode again, she
departed the factory without another word. Ndoci
could handle the cleanup, and she had to report back
to base for her next mission. After all, the enemies of
the Terran Dominion were everywhere, and the
Ghosts were the best line of defense against them.
It was all Nova ever thought about.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEITH R.A. DECANDIDO is the author of over two
dozen novels, plus whole bunches of novellas, short
stories, eBooks, comic books, and nonfiction, all in a
wide variety of media universes. This is his second
foray into the world of Blizzard Games, following the
recent World of Warcraft novel Cycle of Hatred. He’s also
written in the milieus of Star Trek (in all its incarna-
tions, plus some new ones), Spider-Man, the X-Men,
Resident Evil, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Serenity, Farscape,
Andromeda, Xena, and a whole lot more. He is also the
author of the high-fantasy police procedural Dragon
Precinct, and the editor of many anthologies, most
recently the award-nominated Imaginings and the Star
Trek anthologies Tales of the Dominion War and Tales
from the Captain’s Table. His work has journeyed to sev-
eral bestseller lists, and has received critical acclaim
from Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, TV Zone,
Starburst, Dreamwatch, Library Journal, and Cinescape,
among others. When he isn’t writing or editing, he
can be seen playing percussion in a Manhattan club
or at a science fiction convention, or practicing ken-
shikai karate. He lives in New York City with his girl-
friend and two lunatic cats. Find out too much about
Keith at his official Web site at DeCandido.net, keep
up with his ramblings on LiveJournal under the
rather goofy user name of “kradical,” or just send him
silly e-mails at keith@decandido.net. |
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发表于 2013-8-30 22:35:56
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