Benjamin Mumford-Zisk: Mediocre American Novelist

The Origami Man [Benjamin Mumford-Zisk] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <h1>The Origami Man</h1> Yesterday, Greg Samson died. But that didn't stop him... Shipkiller seeds aren’t supposed to leave Cabernicia without a host. So how did one end up on Earth? And stuck inside a human

The Origami Man begins with the death of the protagonist, Greg Samson... Read the review on SFBook.

OH MAN MY BOOK GOT REVIEWED! 

I'm so floored. And it's a good review, too! Not like the 'three thumbs down' Aunt Kelly gave it on my birthday. I don't even think a big toe COUNTS as a thumb, and I don't think it was nice of her at all to point out that if she hadn't lost her other big toe in that candy corn thresher accident back in aught-six, that one would have been pointing down. I also don't think it's MY fault that I "didn't take into account the needs and wants of a grown woman with a grown woman's need for robot-centric anarcho-primitive cock-heavy bondage-themed steampunk porn," because first of all GROSS Aunt Kelly and second GROSS, AUNT KELLY! NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT QUIVERING FUTURE DONGS COVERED IN CYBORG ARMOR!

Anyway, long story short, my birthday was ruined.

HEAR MY WORDS! 

“Guns,” I barked as I twisted through the crossfire. “Guns on my shoulders.” The turrets clattered into place and I fired blind in either direction. The man on my right caught three in his head and collapsed in a wet heap. The one on the left ducked, twisted, and rolled into a second barrage as I brought both turrets to bear. He fell to the floor in pieces. I swallowed hard, turned back to the leader and found myself staring down the barrel of a gun. The world erupted in green pain...

"Lots of wit and humor, an engaging read. The intergalactic adventures of Samson and Cab provides a platform for exploration into the real price of immortality, beautifully written with thought provoking passages that will make you laugh and cry." -Goodreads review

"One of the first books in a while that I got through in under a week. Great story and descriptive scenery. Can't wait for the sequel and the continuing adventures of Samson, Cab and the Krr!" Goodreads review

The Origami Man

                --Captain--

            --we’re being hailed--

            --shall I open a channel--

            I’d been sitting still for a long time, trying not to think and thinking about the future. Hailed? That was a radio term, right? A naval phrase or something, basically meant getting shouted at. Something wanted my attention. “You mean someone wants to talk to us, right?”

            --to you--

            --range approximately five hundred twenty thousand kilometers and closing--

            I blinked. That was a lot closer than I would have expected. I did some quick and dirty math. That was just a little ways outside the orbit of the moon. And closing. I cleared my throat. “Open a hailing channel.”

            --but we’re already being hailed--

            “Just let me talk to him, Cab,” I sighed. “I’m new at this, remember?”

            --how could I forget--

            I heard a click between my brain cheeks, and then words in my head.

            “...you filthy animal! You damn well stay put until I get there, and if you put so much as a scratch on my shipkiller I’ll blow you away!”

            “Is that a British accent?” Apparently I was transmitting.

            “Ah! It’s speaks! Listen here, you little thief, you give me any trouble and I’ll vaporize your planet! Don’t even move.”

            I muted the channel with a thought. “Cab, can he really do that?”

            --nah, you’d need something really big to burn up a whole planet--

            --his ship is solid, but it’s nothing to write home about--

            “Fair enough,” I said. “What’s the deal with his accent?”

            --coincidence--

            --vabling mouths mute the R sounds and round out the Os--

            --does sound a bit like the queen’s english doesn’t it--

            --never noticed the similarity--

            --then again I’m only a half-hour old....now--

            “Congratulations.” I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Should I attempt to negotiate? Strike up a conversation? “How come he’s speaking English?”

            --translation machine--

            --range one hundred thousand kilometers--

            Perhaps, I thought, I should go outside. I stood up and hurried to the back yard.

            “Cab, let me talk to him again.” The crickets stopped chirping when I hopped off the porch. The lawn needed mowing.

            --you don’t have to say it out loud--

            --sub vocalize--

            “Dammit Uhura, just do it!”

            --I should have aimed for the moon--

            Another click in my head.

            “I said don’t move you acrophobic beast! Don’t make me exterminate your species!”

            “Wait a minute,” I laughed without meaning to. “Acrophobic? Isn’t that fear of heights?”

            “What are you going to do about it you bald freak, die at me?” The Vabling’s voice was high, almost screechy, but it rumbled as if it was coming from a big chest. I realized I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

            --fifty thousand kilometers--

            --he’s slowing--

            “Cab? What should I do?”

            --on his planet you’d be kicking his ass for the insults--

--although I think bald freak is pretty accurate--

            --his weapons are warming up--

            Fear grabbed me like a hungry animal. I looked around for a place to hide, thinking dumbly that the grass wouldn’t need mowing, after all. Where could I run? The shed? The lawn mower would blow up. The house? Dylan and Iris would kill me.

            “Cab, what’s he armed with?”

            --a pair of thermal blasters--

             “I don’t know what to do,” I whimpered. ”I don’t know what to do!”

            Cab’s disgust twisted in my gut.

            --it’s just a pair of thermal blasters--

            “I don’t know what that means!” I yelled. At least the high hedges would keep me hidden from the neighbors. “I hate getting burned!”

            --you are so backward--

            --first: ship--

            Cab reared up and engulfed me in the same dozen pairs of symmetrical wings as before. I yelped.

            --you better not piss yourself--

            --go kick his ass--

            “Cab!” I shouted. “I! Don’t! Know! How!”

            --well, you’re a grown man and I don’t have training wheels--

            --you’ve got freem drives built into your back and body, with boosters on your hands and feet--

            --and there are weapons on your arms--

            --start with the drive on your back--

            The plates over my shoulders shook themselves and began to crackle with golden energy. The rings on my palms did the same.

            --just think at ‘em and you’ll go--

            Think at them. Think what, please? I stared at my palm and thought, Go!

            Golden energy flashed out of the ring. If I had used both hands, and had them pointed at the ground, and been balanced correctly, I would have risen dramatically into the air. As it was, my right hand was out as if to shake. The golden energy flashed, and I spun about seventeen times in place. After a second, I fell over.

            “I’m going to throw up,” I grunted. “Oh god. I’m going to throw up in you.”

            --if you puke I will fly us into the sun--

            --no lie--

            “I hate my life,” I said as I stood up. “I hate my life.” Think at them. Hell.

            I thought at the engines on my back and hurtled into the sky trailing the screamingest scream I have ever screamed. This wasn’t flying, this was being hauled into space by a missile.

            At least puking wouldn’t be a problem; I was sure I had left my stomach on the lawn.

            --you’re at a thousand miles--

            --level off and try to use your hands and feet--

            My wings cut out and I started to fall. I screamed calmly and pushed at my feet, and bounced back towards the edge of the atmosphere. Cut out with the feet, pushed with my hands, and bounced higher, screaming all the while. I pushed less with my hands and put a little pressure on my feet. The clouds were beneath me and it was hard to tell from the distant curve of the horizon, but I thought I was slowing down.

            I tried to hover, and found I could do so without using my hands. My scalp itched, and I told the helmet to take a hike.

            --nope--

            --I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re in space--

            I turned around on angled feet. Now that I was getting used to it, flight was pretty intuitive. Like swimming. I could see the edge of the atmosphere beneath me, a scant haze that distinguished where I had been from where I was. This was space. I was in space.

            I was in space, wearing an alien spaceship, about to do battle with an alien. In space. My eyes lost their focus and my chest started to heave. An alien. I was in space to meet an alien.

            --I think our friend has given up on diplomacy--

            --oops, there we go--

            --heads up--

            A bar of shimmering energy shot past me and caught fire as it lanced through the atmosphere. I watched it pass with an idle expression. Another zipped by, and then the world lit up in shimmering blue light. I screamed some more.

            --shields, those are your shields, good lord, shut up--

            --just stop screaming--

            “I have shields?” I said. The shields continued to flicker.

            --I would have been better off in a turkey vulture--

            “Cut me a break, Cab. It’s not like you came with instructions.”

            --listen, I’m sick of getting shot--

            --point your arm where I tell you and shoot the sonovabitch--

            A red crosshairs flashed in my vision, while a green one began to follow my right hand. I pointed, and when the crosshairs overlapped, Cab gave me the go-ahead.

            “Hey,” I said, “this isn’t going to kill him, is it? I don’t want to start a war.”

            --god forbid I do what I was made to do--

            --no--

            --I targeted his power plant--

            --his auxiliaries won’t power his weapons--

            --or anything other than life support, actually--

            --but it’s cool, you can help him--

            --you’re a bleeding heart--

Netherlands: Excuseer me

Mexico: Perdon

Italy: Permesso

France: Pardon

Canada: Sorry

America: Get the fuck out of my way douchedick

  Chapter 15

              The Commons is a two-block pedestrian mall plopped in the center of downtown, boxed in between four main roads, all of which are one way. It takes a special kind of psychopath to create a quarter mile roundabout at the base of two hills, but Ithaca has boasted some pretty interesting people over the years.

            There are trees, and pavilions, and public art and plenty of places to sit, and if you don’t pay close attention it’s a very pleasant place. Twenty-five years ago it was a vibrant economic bright spot in the heart of the city, but these days it’s mostly a hub for nickel and dime drug deals and other minor criminal acts. Head shops, pizza joints and bars do well here; everything else withers and dies. There’s talk of a renaissance but I’m not holding my breath.

            Last year there were five murders here, two in broad daylight. I covered the fourth and fifth, after my predecessor got himself fired. He’d referred to the murders as ‘shine killings’ and hinted that they had been committed as part of some gangland initiation rite without anything that remotely resembled proof, so I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for him.

            I parked next to a hydrant half a block down from the garage. There were a lot of cops, but they weren’t doing much. They were bulky with all the gear they made cops wear in those days, and the bulletproof vests under their uniforms made them all look barrel-chested. I leaned against my car and got my professional apparatus settled. Tablet, camera, phone. Pad of paper in my hip pocket, the unbreakable backup.

            One of the cops stopped me when I tried to get inside the garage. It didn’t matter much, the garage was an open structure and I could see fine. The body was sprawled in front of a concrete support column. There was a big spray of blood on the column, and a lot of blood on the dead guy’s chest, but not a lot of obvious damage, which probably meant he’d been shot with a big handgun, if only because it was unlikely the shooter would carry a rifle and a shotgun would have made more of a mess.

            “I’m a journalist,” I said. The cop was young, no older than me, big and muscular but smooth of skin. Neither of us had been weathered much yet. There was a mostly-healed pimple on his cheekbone.

            “Press ain’t been notified, yet,” the cop drawled at me. “How’d you know to come here?”

            I looked around. There were four squad cars, lights flashing, one of them blocking half a lane. Traffic bottlenecked as people contended with the obstacle and their own curiosity.

            “It wasn’t easy,” I said. “You guys are so subtle. Listen, I’m just trying to do my job, ok?” I showed him my ID and credentials.

            “Homicide Captain don’t want anybody past the perimeter without his say-so.” The drawl got deeper. The cooler you wanted to be, the harder you had to pretend you were a disaffected southern surfer dude. My generation sucked.

            “Connelly is here?” I said. I found myself enunciating very carefully. “Go get his say-so. He’ll vouch for me.”

            “Yeah, right.” It came out as one word. “I bet you play bridge with him Sundays.”

            The man in question walked around the corner with a few other cops and stood still about ten feet away from the body.

            “It was poker, actually,” I said. “And it was just the once. Captain Connelly! You mind if I break your perimeter?”

            Connelly turned and looked at me for two beats, then nodded once at the young cop. He was a middleweight black man, fiftyish, about six one, built solid but light on his feet. He dressed well, but casually. He was irritatingly hard to read, but I think I amused him.

            “I’ll put in a good word for you.” I patted the young cop on his shoulder and walked past him. He muttered something I decided not to pursue.

            “Your editor doesn’t miss a trick,” Connelly said. “You get five minutes.” His accent was hard to place, and mostly gone. Caribbean, maybe, or Australian. He’d been in Ithaca since nineteen seventy-four. I liked him. He was honest and straightforward, even with me, and I’d written a lot of articles about his successes, even before I got on the homicide desk.

            I took a minute to watch the crime scene. I’d been around the cops enough to know that no one saw anything special. A routine murder. There was a guy taking photos of a pair of big brass casings. .45s, I guessed. I stood to the left and looked at the body, then the bloody column. There were two sprays, overlapping. One about four feet off the ground, and the other about six inches higher.

            The dead guy was younger than me by maybe five years. Dark skin, folds at the corners of his eyes. Southeast Asian, maybe Burmese. He had tattoos on his neck and arms, and more across his chest. Short hair, a little stubble, tight shirt, skinny jeans. One hand was flung out the side, the other was pressed up against his body. People do odd things as they die. There was a hole in his solar plexus the size of a nickel, and another four inches up and to the left.

            I straightened up and took a deep breath. The privilege of the living.

            “See anything?” Connelly asked.

            “I’m supposed to ask the questions.” My voice sounded funny in my head.

            “See anything?” Connelly repeated. I sighed.

            “Big handgun, right? .45?”

            Connelly nodded.

            “Shooter was about ten feet away, fired twice, quick and accurate. He’s good, and he wasn’t nervous.” I thought about it. “Kid has gang tats, but nothing on him, no accessories. Shooter took them?”

            “We think it was a mugging,” Connelly said. “Wallet’s gone, there’s a mark on his neck where someone might have yanked a chain off him. Socks are turned down.”

            “Pretty extreme for a mugging,” I said. “Two shots at three in the afternoon on a Saturday? And he strips the body before he leaves? And gets away?”

            Connelly turned and looked at me. He was a champion starer, capable of making even a jaded hipster like myself feel just a little uncomfortable.

            “You asked what I saw,” I said. “I see something that looks like a mugging, but features some professional-level violence. It’s just an observation. “

            Connelly turned up the stare and I cleared my throat.

            “I write facts, Captain. This is just conjecture. I don’t write fiction.”

            After a second, Connelly nodded. “Good.” He turned back to the body. “Two shots were reported at two thirty-four. The first officers were on the scene at two thirty-six. They found the scene as you see it. No witnesses, no one got a look at the shooter. No idea where he went. And a professional would have taken his brass.”

            --captain--

            I shook my head, once.

            “Off the record, I see what you see,” Connelly said. “This took some skill, and balls. But I don’t want another panic, understand?”

            I nodded.

            --captain--

            --hey--

            “Just the facts, sir.” I forced a grin.

            “The facts are what I told you and what you see.” Connelly took a deep breath. “Call me later. If we have more, I’ll give you more.”

            --captain we have a visitor--

            --he wants to speak with you--

            I clenched my jaw. “My five minutes are up,” I said. I tried not to grate. Connelly nodded.

            “Call me in six hours,” he said. He was watching the body carefully. I don’t think he took the murder personally. I just knew he would give it personal attention.

            “Godspeed,” I said, and walked away. There were fewer cops already. Traffic was moving a little more smoothly. The young cop was waving people along, and when he saw me, he glared a little. I waved, dug my phone out of my pocket and held it up to my ear.

            “What, dammit!” I snapped. “I am working!” I walked into the parking garage across the street. There’s a lot of parking around the Commons. Nothing wrong with a little optimism. The garage was mostly empty.

            --you know that thing isn’t on--

            “I’m talking to you Cab. What the hell do you want? We have a visitor?”

            --we are being hailed by a core law enforcement agent--

            “What’s a Core Law Enforcement Agent?”

            --the core law enforcement agency is a pan-galactic police force--

            --the man--

            --I imagine that we are to be interrogated--

            --shall I patch him through--

            “Yeah,” I said. I took the elevator to the roof level and walked out into the heat. I didn’t have my sunglasses, and the sunlight pressed at me. I lifted my face and closed my eyes. The warmth felt good. Something clicked in my brain.

            “Samson here,” I said.

            “Captain Samson, this is Agent Frewdin with the Core Law Enforcement Agency. I’m parked up in orbit and I would appreciate it if you would join me for a moment. I have some questions for you.”

            “What about?” I asked. I opened my eyes and squinted against the sun. No way I could see him, but it seemed right to look skyward. Keep your eyes on your opponent and all that.

            “Your illegal possession of restricted military technology and contact with a known criminal.” The menace came over the airwaves clear as a bell.

            “Oh,” I said. “That.”

            “Yes,” Frewdin said. “That. I’ll see you in a few minutes, then?”

            “What if I say no, you gonna come get me?”

            Frewdin laughed. “Gross. No, I’ll just shoot you and take the rest of the day off.”

            --woah--

            --hey, he just armed a fusion bomb--

            “So much for the prime directive,” I said. “Cool your jets, I’m on my way.”

            “Wonderful,” Frewdin said. “I’ll leave the light on.”

            I stared at the sky. If he were human, I’d be sure he was bluffing, but the rules were different now. I couldn’t expect my version of normal. For all I knew bombing me from orbit was the rational choice for Frewdin, if I didn’t cooperate. Which meant that I was either utterly inconsequential or far more powerful than I knew.

            I shrugged the ship around me and rolled my shoulders.

            “Cab,” I said. “In the future, when you need my attention, I want you to say ‘excuse me’ and then clam up. Ok? I do not want to be the guy walking around hearing voices all the time.”

            --yes sir--

            I used the rocket on my back and shot into the sky, too fast to be seen. I took a deep breath, and by the time I exhaled, I was in space again. It was very quiet, and all of a sudden I yawned, hard.

            My days were not normally this exciting.

              Chapter 16

              I found Frewdin’s ship fifteen thousand miles over the Pacific, zipping north at about ten thousand miles an hour. It was smaller than Rell’s, about a hundred meters wide and colored almost entirely iridescent gunmetal grey. It looked like a lens made out of greased steel, a flattened circle that came to a razor edge. An honest to god flying saucer, featureless as a marble floor and utterly perfect. Micro meteors and space junk thudded into powder against its hull at odd intervals.

            The center of the lens was a dimly lit translucent circle made out of some kind of crystal. I hovered over top of it, grinning. From an orbital standpoint I was flying upside down and backwards at the same speed as the ship, but from my point of view I was motionless, with the saucer above me like a low ceiling.

            Free fall was a lot of fun.

            I reached out and touched the glass, and it sparked at me. Nothing painful, but it was bright enough to leave a spot in my vision.

            “Are you trying to break into a CLE vehicle?” Frewdin’s voice in my ear was as featureless as the ship.

            “Just looking for the doorbell,” I said.

            “There isn’t one,” Frewdin snapped, and I fell, suddenly distinctly upside-down, onto a smooth ceramic floor. I made a sound like three hundred pounds of chain hitting a manhole cover, and looked maybe half as graceful.

            After a suitable moment of reflection, I rolled onto my back and rearranged my limbs.

            “You know, Louis,” I muttered, “This could be the start of a wonderful friendship.”

            “Quit griping, kid.” Frewdin’s voice was suddenly more gravelly, less refined than it had been a minute ago. Higher pitched, too. More of a staccato baritone than a sonorous bass. “I’m in my office. Follow the hallway.”

            I stood up slowly. According to the information on my screen, the air was fine, but I opted to keep the helmet. I was ill at ease. This was an alien situation. Rell’s ship had been pretty mundane and Phelan had come to meet me; Frewdin was already outside my comfort zone. A door appeared in the wall next to me, which did nothing to help my anxiety.

            “Come on, kid, I’m not going to hurt you. I need to ask you some questions and then you can go home.” He hadn’t had an accent the last time he’d spoken. What was that, the Bronx? What the hell was going on?

            “Yeah, all right,” I grumbled, shuffling to the door. To top it all off, the sudden return of gravity had me feeling like I had to use the bathroom. That transition deserved a little more caution, in my opinion. Or at least a warning.

            The hall outside led to the left. There was no right, and the hall was only thirty feet long, and tight, the same dimensions as the door at the far end. I felt like I was walking into a very deep closet. Maybe these aliens were very small. I doubted it. There was something weird going on. That is, I suddenly had an additional weird something to keep track of and add to my growing collection of weird somethings going on. If I wasn’t careful with it the word ‘weird’ was going to lose all value before nightfall.

            Frewdin was reading a file at his desk. He didn’t look up, so he didn’t see me stare, but he smiled just a little when I came into the room, so he must have known. For the most part, I saw what I was meant to see: the craggy face with the narrow features set in an expression of cynical amusement, the little scar on his upper lip, the dark blue double-breasted wool suit with the fine white pinstripe, the slight softness of his body and how it did nothing to soften his masculinity. Part of me noticed other details, though. The slight transparency of the file in his hand, the picture frames on his desk without any photos. Things that were easy to fix, that had been left wrong intentionally. None of this was real, and I was supposed to notice.

            The voice, I thought. The voice will be perfect but the words will be wrong.

            Frewdin glanced at me and nodded once. “Hello, Samson. Come in and have a seat.” The accent was subtle, one-size-fits-all New York City, but each word was spoken individually, as if it had been chosen from a list. I sat down in the single straight-backed chair in front of the desk. It looked like oak but felt like rubber through the hull on my back.

            The helmet broke apart and crouched at the back of my neck. I had seen The African Queen too many times to see him as a threat, although I kept reminding myself it wasn’t really Bogart. None of this was real, none of what I could see, anyway.

            Frewdin nodded to himself and closed the file folder, which disappeared when he put it down on the desk. He leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs and arranged his pants so that he wouldn’t ruin the crease in the material. He folded his hands in his lap and studied my face and smiled very quickly.

            “You look tired,” he said.

            “It’s been a long day.” I got rid of the right gauntlet and rubbed my eyes. Frewdin’s mouth opened and I cut him off. “Why do you look like Humphrey Bogart?”

            The cop’s face got hard for a second. “Well,” he said at length, “I don’t, normally. What you see is a mimetic organ that houses my central nervous system. My species has been evolving steadily for a little less than nine billion years. In that time, we’ve become rather streamlined.”

            “Humphrey Bogart is evolutionary perfection?” My body had that heavy feeling, the first sensation of serious fatigue.

            “I can change my shape,” Frewdin said. His face was pleasant enough, but his tone contained a good measure of scorn. I decided not to care. “You mentioned Casablanca, so...” he waved his hand.

            “You’ve seen Casablanca?”

            “I’ve seen Casablanca,” he said simply. “Life is extremely varied in form and thought. Technologies conceptually similar to my mimetic organ permeate every level of society, in order to facilitate­­–­­­­­­­­no, allow cross-species interaction. If you travel the galaxy, most of what you experience will be, on some level, artificial. My advice is, try to accept what you see as real, without thinking about it too much. Otherwise you and I will drown in your asinine questions. Would you like coffee?” The friendly question had an edge to it.

            “Can I drink it?” I paused a beat. “Sorry, was that an asinine question?”

            “Nothing more charming than a sarcastic animal,” Frewdin said. “The coffee shouldn’t hurt you, unless you have an ulcer.”

            Two steaming mugs appeared on a tray at the left edge of the table. Frewdin gave one to me and cupped his own in two hands on his belly. The mug felt substantial enough. I took a sip. Real or not, Frewdin’s coffee was some of the best I’ve ever had.

            Frewdin sighed contentedly, then drained the scalding liquid and placed the mug on a coaster on his desk. As soon as he let go, both coaster and mug disappeared.

            “How did you come to be in possession of a Cabernician shipkiller?” He asked. A pen appeared in his hand, and a yellow legal pad popped up on the desk. There were deep lines carved from his nose to the corners of his mouth.

            I swished some coffee around in my mouth, swallowed, and smiled. “That’s good,” I said. “Good question. Open ended, so I feel compelled to fill it in with a lot of information. Get a lot of mileage out of a question like that.”

            Frewdin waved his hand before I was finished speaking. “I’ve been a cop for eighty million years, Samson,” he said. “I know I’m good at what I do. I don’t need you to tell me that. I need you to tell me how you got hold of that ship.”

            I looked him over. Eighty million years? He looked like he was pushing forty. Accept what you see as real, he had said. Keep moving. Don’t drown in asinine questions.

            “Well, you know what they say about reporting, it’s all about being in the right place at the right time.” I patted my right shoulder. “Cab hit me, here. It was an accident. I was in the way.”

            “Cab?” He asked.

            “The ship,” I said. “I call him Cab. His serial number is too long for polite conversation.”

            “You talk to it,” he said.

I nodded.

            “And it talks back.” Frewdin leaned back in his chair and considered. “And you said it hit you?”

            I nodded again. “I was in a field, walking to my car, and he fell on me. I was in the right place at the right time. Like a good little reporter.” I sighed.

            “I’m surprised you survived,” Frewdin said after a minute.

            “I didn’t,” I said. “The impact killed me, but Cab fixed me.” I smiled with a lot of teeth.

            “And this would have happened yesterday sometime?” Frewdin read from another suddenly present file. “The seed was supposed to make contact with Earth approximately twenty-four hours ago.”

            “Sounds about right,” I said. What a difference a day makes, I thought, and laughed inwardly.

            “The seed was allegedly stolen from the Cabernician shipyards by a Vabling named Rell Quizops. We’re trying to work out how he lost control of it.”

            “You have any idea how he made it into Cabernician space?” I asked. Frewdin looked at me over the edge of the folder and didn’t say anything, although he shook his head slowly.

            “How’d you track the seed?” I asked. “You do the trajectory yourself?”

            Frewdin frowned. “No, the Cabernicians provided us with a trajectory. They got the data out of their security systems. Why?”

            “I talked to Quizops,” I said. Frewdin sat up a little straighter.

            “Did you,” he said. I was probably an accessory now, but it was hard to take the legal threat very seriously. Probably had something to do with the fact that I was talking to Humphrey Bogart aboard a flying saucer...surreality diminishes menace more than you’d think.

            “Yeah, he showed up this morning. And no, I don’t know where he went. But he said he made a grab for the seed when it was a long way out of Cabernician space, not when it was in the shipyards.”

            Frewdin shook his head. “Seeds don’t leave the system without a host.”

            “Yeah,” I said. “I keep hearing that, but here I am. Rell said he caught a Cabernician trying to sell the seed to the Krr.”

            Frewdin froze, then let go of his pen and looked up at the ceiling. The pen reoriented itself above the pad of paper and waited patiently. Frewdin sighed. Was the sound real? Did he even breathe?

            “The Cabernicians would not sell a seed to the Krr,” he said in the same tone one might use to explain to a stupid child that the moon is not, in fact, made of cheese. “No rational person of any species would aid the Krr, but the Cabernicians in particular would never aid the Krr. The Vabling was lying.”

            “Well, I spoke to him face to face,” I said. “And for what it’s worth, I think he was telling the truth.”

            “It’s not worth much, Samson,” Frewdin said.

            I counted to ten in my head. “Listen, I’ve been talking to Cab about this, and it sounds like there’s no way Rell could have fought his way into Cabernician space without getting burned.”

            “He could have had help on the inside.”

            “From a Cabernician?”

            “They’d be more likely to help a Vabling than the Krr,” Frewdin snapped.

            “A Cabernician came to see me this morning,” I said. “He was asking all kinds of questions about Cab, how I found him, whether Cab remembered the theft. He seemed nervous, and when I told him Cab didn’t remember a thing, he looked relieved.”

“A Vabling, a Cabernician and a Bekht, all in the same day,” Frewdin said. “You’re getting to be quite the little space-man, all of a sudden.”

            Patronizing dick. “He tried to take remote control of Cab, but couldn’t, because Cab is atypical. He said the average shipkiller has a built-in command circuit, which seems to mean the Cabernicians have a back door into every shipkiller ever manufactured.”

            Frewdin leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He might have been counting to ten, too. “You must have misunderstood, Samson,” he said finally. “That’s the sort of thing we would have noticed sometime in the last fifty or so million years we’ve been using the shipkillers to fight the Krr.”

            “Not if it hasn’t been used yet,” I snapped.

Frewdin took another deep breath.

            “Ok,” he said, “I’ll concede the point. And that’s a serious allegation, and unlike the allegation that the Cabernicians are selling weapons to the Krr, it’s at least slightly plausible. I’ll look into it. What was the name of the cabber that came to see you?”

            “Phelan Eight,” I said.

            Frewdin tipped his head back and laughed. It sounded pretty genuine, and lasted a while. When he was finished, he said, “You think Phelan Eight is in league with the Krr? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is?” His eyes were wet.

            “No,” I said.

            “Of course not,” Frewdin said. “Of course not. You don’t know anything.”

            “I know what I saw,” I said.

            “Do you?” Frewdin leaned forward and gestured at his face. “Are you really having a conversation with Humphrey Bogart right now? But if I hadn’t told you I was a shape-shifter, if I had lied, you would believe that you were speaking to a dead actor.” He relaxed, settled down in his chair. It was leather, or at least it was meant to look like leather. The swivel mount seemed real enough. He leaned back and put his feet up on his desk.

            “Phelan Eight is Gardenmaster of the Cabernician Shipyards. That makes him third in command of the company, which is the de facto ruling power for the Cabernician species. His progenitor, Phelan Seven, developed the first shipkiller. Hell, Phelan One invented the reproductive cloning process that allows there to be a Cabernician species, period. You’re talking about one of the oldest and most revered lineages in Cabernician history. And you think Phelan Eight, the Phelan from whom almost all other Phelans are descended, might be in league with the Krr?”

            “I don’t think,” I said. “I’m just telling a cop what I saw and what I heard.”

            Frewdin looked at me for several seconds.

            “The Krr razed the Cabernician system a long time ago, Samson. They killed almost the whole species, didn’t leave a breeding population. They would have died out if it weren’t for reproductive cloning. A process invented by a Phelan, remember. Even that didn’t work perfectly for a while. Billions more died, on top of the billions already dead.” Frewdin shrugged. “Nature, red in tooth and claw. But, you see, there’s no way a Cabernician would ever be in league with the Krr.”

            “How sure are you?” I asked. I was sitting up straight, almost at attention. This was all so far over my head I could have been drowning.

            “Sure enough.”

            I picked up the empty photo frame and looked at the blank glass. It wasn’t real, and I didn’t understand it...but it was really there. I could feel it in my hand. That was all I needed. I tossed it on the desk.

            “But you’re a cop,” I said. “So you’ll check up on this. Because that’s what you do.”

            “Sure,” Frewdin said. He sipped his suddenly present cup of coffee. “Been a while since I’ve seen Eight. And it’s harvest time. Always fun, harvest time.” He looked me up and down. “You should see a harvest, someday. Give you some perspective. You’d do well to get yourself a sense of the sacrifices we make to keep this place running.” He took a deep breath and opened up a new file. I don’t think it was related to my case.

            “You should know, this is a waste of my time,” Frewdin said after a second. “The Vabling lied. He came looking for the seed, and there you were, and he spun you a line to keep you entertained. Did you meet him face to face?” He smiled.

            “Yeah,” I said. “How’d you know he came here?”

            “How else would you have talked to him, where else would he have gone,” Frewdin waved his hand. “He lied. He picked the scariest thing he could think of, and spun you an easy story that made him look like the good guy. Right?”

            I nodded.

            “That’s the sort of lie people tell. But no one would willingly help the Krr. No one is that self-destructive.”

            “How bad would it be,” I said, “if the Krr broke the front? If they got their own shipkillers, or found a way to take them off the board. How bad would it be?”

            Frewdin’s hand crept out from his body and tapped an empty space on his blotter like it was tapping keys. “Bad,” he said.

            A spidery, lobstery thing with dozens of spindly legs appeared in midair to the left of his desk. I fell over to the right and backwards, yelping and growing weapons. By the time I hit the floor the helmet was in place and I could see that the creature wasn’t moving, nor was it even there. It was just an image. Just a picture. But that barely mattered.

            The Krr had so many legs I couldn’t see its body. They grew out of whatever was in the center at odd angles, as if gravity or the word ‘down’ had not been a factor in their placement. But the legs themselves, and the four long arms, were more than enough of a hint at what lay in the middle of the confusion of limbs. A complicated skeletal structure, strung through with black, rubbery tendons packed into every available space. Hog bristles obscured fine detail. This was a mammalian insect, or a corpse nearly rotted away in the desert. The hands and feet were just collections of long clawed thumbs.

            “If the Krr were to raze Earth, then one of these things would either vaporize you from orbit or come down to the planet’s surface and eat you.” Frewdin sounded bored. I hoped it was an act. How awful was his life, that he could be inured to such a vision?

            There was a head, barely visible, obscured by bristles and tiny mandibular arms. A flattened disk, like the head of an ant, with twin clouds of glass threads thrusting out the front. They looked sharp.

            “If you were not vaporized, and not eaten, then you would be sterilized via a tailored plague that would result in a genetic alteration to your reproductive systems, and left alive to spread fear.” Frewdin tapped his desk and the Krr disappeared. I stayed on the floor.

            “If they break the front,” he said quietly, “they will have no further need for survivors. They will go from system to system, bombing every planet to glass and murdering the remains of the populace for sport.”

            “Sounds awful,” I said, trying hard to iron the tremor out of my voice. “I guess you’ll be checking up on every lead, then?” I lurched to my feet.

            “Of course,” Frewdin said. His desk dinged and changed color, and he grimaced. “I have to go, Samson, there’s another case that needs my attention. But I’ll answer a quick question.”

            I narrowed my eyes underneath the helmet. Was this not important enough to keep his interest? Part of me was insulted. The rest of me was worried.

            “Do I have to stay on Earth?” I asked. “Phelan Eight said it was against the law for me to leave. Is that true?”

            Frewdin half shrugged. “There are a few laws that could be interpreted to mean that, but overall, no, not now that you’ve been cleaned up and have your own transport. But I want you to stay on Earth regardless, for the time being. I want you where I can find you. I also want you to stay alive, and I don’t want you to kill anyone. I sincerely doubt your ability to do either of those things, if you don’t stay put.”

            “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. “Maybe I’ll surprise you.”

            “The galaxy isn’t the beatific utopia you people are hoping for,” Frewdin said. He pointed at me. “These are just people out here, for better or worse, and it wouldn’t even take the worst of them to carve that thing off your back and leave you for dead.”

            “But Cab would die, too.” I grinned nervously. Actually, it was kind of nice wearing a mask. I bet I looked real stoic.

            “He’s still worth a lot of money, dead,” Frewdin said. His desk flashed again, and a screen popped up in front of him.

            “Damn,” he muttered. “I have to go, Samson. You can reach me at this number.” Something dinged in my brain.

            --got it--

            “Free fall in two, one,” Frewdin said.

            “Nice meeting you,” I said, and was suddenly out in space. My stomach lurched. Frewdin’s ship spun in place and disappeared before my organs settled. I felt, briefly, like I had to pee.

            “Did I just get blown off?” I asked when the feeling faded.

            --he didn’t take you very seriously, that’s for sure--

            “You think Rell was lying?” I turned back to Earth. We were over the Pacific, still, near the west coast of North America.

            --his blood pressure, respiration, perspiration, heart rate, and each of his pupils stayed steady when he told us about the krr--

            --if he was lying, he’s damn good at it--