JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

"More fell into it. I don't know that I ever had a dream occupation, just a dream to escape Tin Town. I was born there."

"Ohh, I see."

"I joined the military at eighteen, to get out."

"Really? And did you see action?"

"A full four-year stint in the Blue War."

"You lived through that hell, eh? Thank God for that. And did they take you in spite of your mutation, or because of it?"

"They were enthusiastic about it. They started training me straight off for deep penetration missions, behind enemy lines."

"You did that in the Blue War? Then, can your skin take on a blue color, too?"

"It tries. It gets. bluish. I ended up using a dye for that. But the dye didn't wash off too quickly, and it almost got me shot by my own people a couple of times even after my face had reverted to normal."

"You've had an interesting life."

"Think so?"

"Yes, very much so. Maybe not lucrative, but lucrative and interesting do not necessarily walk hand-in-hand."

"You sound like you have regrets."

Now it was Fukuda's turn to avert his eyes. "We all have regrets, Mr. Stake."

After lunch, the rich food and drink sitting in his guts like its weight in gold, Stake returned to his flat. This was on the top floor of a squat tenement building at the very end of Forma Street, one of the town's longest and most colorful avenues. Unfortunately, one of the presiding colors was red. But perhaps in some masochistic way, the street suited Stake's mood, though he could have afforded to live in a somewhat less raucous neighborhood. He joked to people that the gunfire at night reminded him of his soldier days.

He wasted no time in changing from his generic black business suit into something much more comfortable: a pair of jeans and an old T-shirt. This was in camouflaged shades of blue, from pastel to indigo. Barefoot, coffee in hand, he stood at his windows and watched the daily Mardi Gras for a few minutes before turning away to sit at the banged-up secondhand desk that was all he really had by way of an office, though the computer equipment arranged atop it was fairly state-of-the-art.

He was juggling a few other cases concurrently with John Fukuda's, though it was more conventional stuff. He checked his messages and did a little research into this or that ongoing investigation. One of these involved a runaway daughter, Yuki's age, but her scowling photo on one of Stake's array of screens suggested she was far less innocent. At this point Stake was pretty sure that the girl had run off with a thirty-four year-old boyfriend, down south toward the Outback Colony. This girl put him in mind again of Krimson Tableau, whom Yuki had said might also have run off with an older boyfriend. When Stake did a net search on her name, however, he found little that was useful. A missing persons report had been filed by her father, Adrian Tableau, over a week ago, apparently one day after she had failed to return home from school. But there was no mention of any boyfriend that the police had been asked to seek out and question. Maybe just schoolyard gossip? After all, if Yuki's story about Krimson speaking over a Ouija phone could be believed, the girl was not a runaway, but more likely a murder victim. Murder victim.

Stake's next net search had him looking into the death of Yuki's mother. John Fukuda's wife. Just out of nagging curiosity.

Again, he found little. Yuriko Fukuda had been murdered four years ago. (Janice had been right; she hadn't died when Yuki was a baby, as the girl had claimed.) Shot to death in her home by an unknown assailant, possibly in a bungled robbery of their high-class apartment. Attached to the news report was a holoportrait which Stake rotated on one of the other screens. A stunning woman. He could see where Yuki had got her looks.

Stake rolled back a bit in his chair, still staring at the revolving disembodied head of the beautiful woman, and yawned. He thought he might steal a nap, then get up and head down to LOV 69 for a dinner of burgers and brews. He wondered if the Legion of Veterans Post bought its cheap hamburger in bulk from Tableau Meats.

Beautiful head. Spinning and spinning. Beautiful face. Turning away from him, then turning his way again.

She had been so beautiful. As beautiful as the monastery, with its outer and inner walls tiled in mosaics that told the story of her faith in place of a holy text. (It's a comic book, joked one of his fellow soldiers as he followed the story. Then the soldier had gunned away the brightly glazed little tiles that composed the face of their prophet in one of the "comic book" panels.)

The monastery had been secreted away in the heart of a jungle where every frond and blade and leaf and vine was a vivid shade of blue. Blue lizards basked in the broken rays of twin blue-white suns. Lovely insects fanned their blue wings as they rested on blue flowers. Deceptively like butterflies, they were. But they drank blood, not pollen.

It was ironic that the monks themselves could not see the mosaics, but they spent hours each day reverently running their hands over the raised and contoured shapes as if reading a bible printed in Braille. It was the first time some of his fellow soldiers had seen the Ha Jiin's clerical caste, and they were horrified. Their horror made them angry and rough as they herded the monastery's ten monks together, prodding them where they wanted them to go with the muzzles of their guns.

They wore beautiful flowing robes of azure silk, embroidered with raised religious symbols also seen worked into the mosaics. On their heads, black three-cornered hats. And because the holy caste started smoking their incense as children, each of the ten monks had a whorl-like hole in place of a face. Like a huge knothole in leathery blue tree bark. The incense had cancerous properties that ate their features away over the years, obliterating their identities so that they were all identical servants of their faith. The cancer eventually reduced their fingers to nubs so that the hands they rubbed along the tiles were more like blunt flippers, fleshy mittens. They sacrificed their fingers by pinching the hot glowing incense out of the bowls of the pipes they smoked. Then, they pressed the ash to a point in the center of their chests until over time a smaller vortex wound opened there, like a window straight to their hearts. They humbled themselves this way day after day. Until they were fully transmogrified. Until they needed the incense no more.

"This is how hardcore these people are," marveled one of the soldiers, wagging his head in awe. In fear. "This is why they're so fucking tough to fight!"

Devoted to their faith. Devoted to win their war against the emerging Jin Haa nation. And the Earth Colonies' military forces that supported it.

It was because of this fierce devotion that Corporal Jeremy Stake was a little surprised that the two Ha Jiin fighters who had taken refuge in the monastery surrendered when the Earth soldiers surrounded it. Stake was in command by the time they captured the monastery, because their unit's lieutenant and sergeant had both been killed by sniper fire.

The captured fighters were a woman in her early twenties and a boy of maybe nineteen with a badly infected leg wound that had slowed them down and forced them to hide out in the monastery. Stake ordered their medic to see to the boy. Their guns were collected. From the woman they took a sniper rifle; a sophisticated Earth weapon she had no doubt taken off a corpse at some point.

"Let me shoot that bitch!" Private Cortez raged, aiming his own gun at the now unarmed woman, her fingers linked on top of her head. "She's the one who killed the lieutenant and Sergeant Lindy-has to be!"

"We don't execute prisoners unless they attempt escape," Stake intoned, quoting regulations.

"She looks like she's gonna make a run for it to me" remarked another unit member, leveling his bulky, multi-barreled assault engine.