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  To my parents, Paul Reed & Suzanne Gross, who with music and words and the ceaseless song of human history filled me that I might pour out for others . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  The second time I saw a Beast I was visiting Moira Ximenez, the wife of the governor of New Albuquerque.

  A Beast: BioEngineered ASsault Tactician. By Galactic Commonwealth law, subhuman. By my laws, not human at all.

  I had kicked up a lot of dust on the walk from the magrail station. Not all the glances people threw my way were friendly, and I knew I looked like an offworld thug, in my hunting kit, two rifles slung over my shoulder. I hadn’t washed and I had no words for anyone. Pain and exhaustion, my face said.

  Killer, their faces answered.

  In Moira’s apartment I ate and drank what she set in front of me. She remembered something of tact, thank God, and did not interrupt until I had finished scraping my plate clean. Draped in a lavender galabeya that skimmed her slim form from collarbone to ankles, she lounged in a low chair, ignoring the dust sifting from my clothes to the floor.

  I felt as silent as that dust. I needed a full night’s sleep, some pain-killers for my leg, and a hot shower with real water pressure, not a trickle from a sun-warmed bag.

  For a while I sat, belly full, content to enjoy the view from the long window overlooking the Big Tawny. Kilometer upon kilometer of grasslands undulated to a horizon where turbines marched in staggered rows, white as salt. The forty-meter blades spun in their endless rounds. High over the flat a few gliders soared, dipping their wings to each other playfully. In the torrential sunshine the bamboo silk frames blazed saffron, magenta, chartreuse against the dark clouds mounting the northern horizon.

  Moira took my plate and slid it under hers. That homey little movement caught my eye and I saw that her own breakfast remained untouched.

  People with Moira’s Enhancements didn’t eat much; they had that elegant racy line fostered by low-level genetic tinkering inspired by the demands of space life, but they didn’t want to tempt nature with additional calories. UnEnhanced, I ate like a prisoner on reprieve, and would pay for it. I myself was neither racy nor elegant. Thanks to Moira, all of Ubastis, Theta, and many of the mining colonies knew it too.

  Out of habit I glanced at the wall where Moira’s portrait of me had shone for years. A blatant nude taken late in pregnancy, it had caused some scandal when she had published it. She had always claimed the image to be a study in textures—my hair, the sheets, my skin, my eight-months belly against the fur of the cheetah I cuddled.

  I stuck my tongue out at it and helped myself to another piece of flatbread. Moira smiled at me. “Love to see you eat, especially when you’ve just come in from a hunt.”

  “I eat for those of you who won’t,” I said with my mouth full.

  She reached across the table to take my hand, fingerpads stroking my calluses. “I’ve got something to show you—you have to see this.”

  I pulled a comic face and withdrew my hand. With Moira ‘something to show you’ could be very good, or very bad.

  “Give me a hint—I hate surprises.”

  “So stuffy!” She pouted at me a little, her green eyes glimmering. “Are you going to be stuffy like that at my party, or do you have a good story for us? I have the holos all set up, and the cues work perfectly.”

  Another goddamn party. I made a noncommittal noise and ran my hands over my braids, massaging my scalp. “Tell me it’s not actually tonight?”

  “How cruel do you think I am? I haven’t seen you since Big Market Day two weeks ago, and you left for Out There the next day. You need time to finish your—” She flapped a hand. “Your notes, or whatever it is you do for science. And you need to turn into a proper citizen again.” She bestowed her familiar smile, warm with the heat of mischief. “Only not too completely a proper citizen, okay?”

  I laughed and nodded. “I do have a story for you. Blood, guts, a narrow escape—you and Numair will like it.”

  “You have been away a while. Numair’s upside at Lazarette 5. Another debate on the Decade Proviso—the campaign for the vote is heating up.”

  The Decade Proviso prevented mass immigration by promising members of the Commonwealth a scheduled vote, whether to allow an increase in immigrants to Ubastis, or to keep it at what the Party for the People called ‘massive insult disguised as meager charity.’ Every ten years the vote came up. Every ten years the people who had been sent to Ubastis to study the planet worried themselves sick about it. The other people who came to Ubastis came to convince us to relax the quota on immigrants—to not worry.

  It was not a topic I cared to discuss. Even with Moira, who, herself a daughter of two of the members of the First Wave, was firmly on the side of controlled settlement.

  “So it’s really going to be a hot time, huh?” I pulled a lugubrious face, then ducked her soft blow. “Guess I’ll come anyway.”

  “Grand! Now come on—let me show you.” Against my protests she pulled me to my feet. Even in the hall outside her apartment she kept my hand in hers, but had to match her pace to mine, limping as I did.

  Her grin was hectic as she drew me along. “You’ll never guess.”

  She wanted me to. Spilling the beans was a hobby of hers. “You had a zygote shipped in and you’re going to get pregnant?” No. “You’re going to serve meat to your guests?” No, how silly of me, she’d done that last year; didn’t I remember?

  The soles of her sandals smacked the tufa floor. My bare feet were silent.

  She stopped outside the medbay, the expression on her face one of uneasy defiance, like a child’s. “Are you ready for this?” she asked, her violet-nailed hand poised above the pad.

  “What have you done, Moira?”

  “I’ve acquired,” she said, “a Beast.”

  I froze. “That’s not even possible.” For a moment all of the edges of my vision shimmered. “Moira, that’s a horrible joke.”

  Yet I saw by her face, the defiance gone obdurate, that this was no joke. “You mean that we’ve got one of those things here?”

  “He’s a human being, Vashti, just like the other citizens—”

  “Like ‘the other citizens?’” Thoughtless in my dismay, I reached around for the pad and swore when it shocked me. “The other citizens rape and murder anyone recently?”

  She frowned at me and opened the door. It slid aside to reveal our quadrant’s medbay, all gleaming alloy surfaces, as sterile and efficient an environment as one could wish. It made me twitch. When we entered, the lighting increased to a pleasant dimness, not bright enough for actual work, but sufficient for casual examination.

  I did not want to examine the Beast casually.

  “He skipped upside quarantine at the Lazarette, didn’t he?” I said.

  She nodded, her frown gone as she gazed down at her new plaything, her eyes shining with both the pod’s aquamarine glow and the pride of possession.

  I should go. I should switch off all quarantine systems right now, and go find a member of Patrol & Rescue. Let Moira’s latest trinket suffocate. Let the dead be dead. By all I knew, his existence should not even be possible, not after the disaster of Mustaine—what, two, three?—years ago.

  I took a deep breath. I looked, and saw the monster of my imaginings. In that moment the hatred and horror that I had tried to bury over a span of years collapsed in on itself. A cold pinprick punctured me, revealing immeasurable density, immeasurable void.

  The male in the horizontal pod was completely naked, suspended in vectragel. Whoever had prepped him had a good grasp of the rigidity of Ubasti Quarantine regulations: the Beast was entirely hairless except for a faint stubble darkening his skull. Upright, he would stand roughly two meters. Spectacular muscle mass spoke of exacting endocr
inology resulting from genetic and chemical engineering.

  He was catheterized and his eyes sealed shut with silicone pads. Intubated, he now breathed the air of Ubastis instead of the recycled oxygen from the ship. The vectragel served as a nanoplatform to sneak RNA molecules deep into the layers of skin so they could start teaching the immune system to work with Ubastis, not against it.

  Would this . . . construct’s already genetically Enhanced system inhibit the process? I suppressed a twinge of curiosity and brought my focus down. Why? Why was he here? Had Moira been at all the scholarly sort, I might have suspected a strike at a research coup.

  I tried to joke. “Let me guess—you’ll keep him in light Q and display him at your parties?”

  “I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with it, to tell the truth. I closed the deal before the explosion, and I’d forgotten they were sending it to me.”

  “Forgot? How could you forget? You’ve studied the acclimatization strictures, haven’t you?”

  Moira tapped the plastic. “Isn’t he something? I got an invoice with him—they listed all his Enhancements—retinal for night vision, olfactory implants up to twenty K per centimeter. He’s also from the three-fifteen clutch.” She mistook my expression for ignorance. “The three-fifteen clutch. The first humans to break the three-twenty mile?”

  “You can’t keep him as a pet. There’s more involved than a little Q on the shady side.” Did I see him flinch when she tapped? I leaned in for a closer look. Sharp features and full lips gave the Beast an androgynous quality that contrasted with the hyper-masculine form. It was not the face I remembered, but that made no difference. The presence of any Beast here, no matter what kind, bewildered me.

  I glanced at Moira, and knew then that she’d never filled out any necessary applications, never been interviewed for her suitability for adoption. “How did you get him?”

  She shrugged, and I mouthed the answer as she said it, knowing full well what it would be. “Connections.”

  “Did you get him from the same people as you got the cheetah?”

  She pulled a face, avoiding my eyes. “No, not them.”

  The cheetah. Acinonyx jubatus. Gangly, with a spine like a titanium spring and a hard little head that fit exactly under my chin. I had named her Mumtaz and took her into my apartment when Moira tired of her.

  I waited, watching Moira.

  She looked down at the Beast, her palm flat against the plastic, drinking in the sight of him. “I wonder how long until the castration wears off . . . You think it’d respond to a shot of V-Blue?”

  A Beast, turgid with V-Blue, was the last thing we needed around here. I shot her a daggered look.

  “Fine! There was a Warden at Mustaine I’d been corresponding with a few years ago, before Lasse died. He let it drop that a termination was scheduled. I was so horrified that I told him to ship it here.” She shrugged. “And then of course the explosion . . . Looks like he might be the only Beast left alive in the Universe.”

  I backed away from the pod, rubbing my hands on my pants, even though I’d not touched anything. “What did he do? Did you ask that, along with what doll parts he came with?” The unsteadiness in my voice sounded like the whine of wind through high-tension wires. No court had handed down the death penalty since before my grandparents’ time; not on Ubastis, not on Theta, not on any of the stations the fifty years’ distance between here and Earth.

  “It’s got a burst implant at the base of its skull.” She nodded toward one of the counters, where a black disc half the size of my palm lay. “One wrong move, I press the button, and it collapses. Complete synapse disruption.”

  “You going to give everyone in New Albuquerque one of those? Does my daughter get one?” I turned and limped out of the lab. I heard Moira’s shod feet behind me.

  Her hand brushed my arm. I stopped to look at her, feeling the adrenaline whacking through me, sick to my stomach from it. She reached out to stroke my cheek. I ducked away from her hand. “Vashti . . . I wanted you to be here, to help with it. You’re the only person I know who’d be useful while I’m training it.”

  “Training him! What the hell for? I thought Mumtaz was too much, but this—this—”

  “That animal made you famous—”

  “Infamous.” Damned if I would talk about Mumtaz. “Moira, have you forgotten my husband already? Wadjet Valley? That thing sure as hell didn’t come in on an approved freighter, did he?”

  “You think I have the bank to pull something like that in through blackspace?”

  “I don’t know what to think.” Anywhere from five to twenty interlopers a year found a hole in the monitored envelope surrounding the planet and came downside. Most of them were smugglers, whom the UBI were lenient with, as they wanted only to dump their cargo, get paid, and get out. A very few were screwworms, digging in as far as they could to snatch up resources before they were caught. The sneakiest were miners. Miners thought about the long game, and would set up a small camp. If Patrol & Rescue caught them alive, smugglers and squatters were flown out to the nearest port, no appeal possible. Their cargo was taken immediately to the nearest Lazarette and analyzed with mind-numbing thoroughness. No future application for citizenship would ever be considered.

  No interlopers had survived Wadjet Valley.

  “You’re getting emotional, sweetie. Do you need a pill? A patch?”

  I hauled everything in. Be damned if I was going to take a pill. “No,” I said tightly. “I need Bibi.”

  “Of course . . .” Guiding me away from the lab, her voice soft, solicitous. “I thought you’d seen her this morning before you came in. Oh, and you haven’t bathed yet, have you? Came straight in from the bush . . . No wonder you’re a little touchy.”

  I threw her hand off. She backed away a step, the lovely emerald eyes grave. Last year they had been amethyst. “‘Touchy?’ That’s a killer, not a play toy! Has Numair launched some campaign I don’t know about? Black ops against the profiteers?” I turned again and hobbled down the hall. Let her follow me or not.

  We’d heard stories of Beasts acclimating to civilian society, over time; we’d read the case studies and seen the news clips—but the families taking them in went through months-long training. And we never heard of any family with small children ever gaining custody of a Beast. It was too risky. That vid that came out a couple of years ago, of the docile Beast being a friend to little kids, letting them clamber all over him, being a hero, was just that: a vid. Simply because parents downed it to watch contentedly with their families didn’t mean that anyone believed it.

  Anyone not living on a rock had seen the downs from the Kashmiri Offensive, Idaho Port, the colonists smeared in the bungle that was Salaam. Beast units out-marched, outsmarted, out-shot, out-slaughtered their Natch and Enhanced opponents in conditions that would reduce a Tilden robot to alloy jackstraws. And what good were they elsewhere? They had no place outside their artificial niche.

  Some had called the accident and subsequent explosion of Mustaine prison a tragedy. When the Source broadcast the news, I felt relief. A little compassion, certainly, for whatever actual humans had been on Mustaine, whether prisoners or wardens—but the thought of thousands of genetically engineered soldiers perishing? It was the touch of salve on my heart.

  I myself had suffered what a Beast was capable of. If it fell to me to kill the last one, I felt ready to shoulder that burden.

  Guilt and reason snarled half-heartedly at each other as I stamped back to my rooms. Guilt that I’d not stopped in to see Bibi when I came in; reason that it had been before dawn when I docked. I should see her immediately, I thought. Time enough to get clean.

  Irritably I scratched my scalp, then looked down at my hands. Blood caked beneath my nails.

  Natch, I thought.

  The shower won.

  In the bathroom, carefully unbraiding my hair, I listened to my field dictation. A distraction, an effort to push the fact of the Beast out of my head.
/>   I though of Zeeman Maes, the Eurocon client, polite and so worried about the legalities. He’d asked me to send a copy of all the documents, the licensing, the info on the prey to his agent. I’d happily obliged, and promised a copy of the post-hunt documentation to the same address.

  Perhaps his agent might know of another tall bank willing to pay for a little mayhem courtesy of a rogue scientist with a big gun.

  That part I left out.

  First came the rote stipulations of the Ubastis Bionomist Integral, UBI for short. Then the notes on the actual hunt itself.

  “Saurian, species skeggoxus cyanus,” my voice said, tinny, a little breathless. “Mexo Delta, 250 kliks from New Albuquerque. Two days out before objective spotted. Temperature eighty-six Fahrenheit. Wind three knots from the southeast.”

  As I listened I constructed the story Moira’s guests would hear tomorrow night.

  The Mexo Delta seeped over maybe a hundred square kliks where the Cassene River frayed into a myriad streams running down to the sea. Even after twenty years of downside study, no one was sure how many there were. Some dry months there might be fifteen—and yet if one returned in rainy season, one could count forty. It was a xenologist’s haven, and more than one I’d known had died there.

  Skeggoxus cyanus was crowned by a large bony protrusion that sloped up from the premaxilla to a height of anywhere from twenty centimeters in females to over forty in males. The blade, as some of us called it, leveled off to a straight edge and then hooked back to terminate just behind the skull.

  It was Lasse Undset, leader of the Second Wave explorers, who inadvertently named the species when he showed his team a palm of ancient weapons of Scandinavia. They called this axe a skeggox, he told us, pointing to the pic of a small, deadly-looking axe. A bearded axe.

  Straight top, sharp edge curving down to a wicked point, and then hooking back up to a narrow base. Just like the bony protrusions on the herbivores’ heads.

  I liked a medium amount of firepower for axeheads and had my good old Justin rifle. Zeeman had hunted the smaller saurians before, and was an excellent shot; I never regretted taking him. He brought with him a real sugar of a gun, a brand-new .675 Win, the stock made from real wood, the barrel gleaming blue under the sun. It was an American-made gun, a little heavier than what most of my clients were used to. I glanced at it dubiously, but said nothing. My experience with Zeeman dictated that there was no reason why he shouldn’t know what he was doing.