My bravado was wearing kind of thin at the moment, so I just shrugged.

'Through no fault of your own, you've become involved in matters much too weighty for you," the austere face told me. (No drek, Sherlock, I managed not to say.) "A longstanding conflict is coming to a head in Hawai'i. Forces are marshaling."

"ALOHA and the corps. No drek."

"Yes, those too," Mr. Parchment-Face paused. "Even when one fully understands the dynamics of a conflict, it's often difficult to keep from getting overwhelmed by it… overwhelmed and crushed. When one is unaware of what the conflict is truly about, it's usually impossible."

"So tell me."

This time the amusement-cold, distant, but unmistakable-was clear in his voice. "I think not, not at this time. I merely suggest you take my words to heart. Terminate your involvement in matters beyond your control and comprehension. In more familiar terms… stay out of it, Mr. Montgomery. Right out."

"I would if I had the opportunity," I told him honestly.

"Then make the opportunity."

"Who the frag are you anyway?"

"As I said, a friend," the man repeated softly.

"And you're telling me you know what's going down?" He nodded. "Yeah, right," I snorted. "Prove it if you want me to pay any attention to you." It was only after the words were out of my mouth that I remembered the last "proof anyone had provided me. Out of reflex, I glanced at the bullet hole in the window.

And so I missed the first instants of the change. By the time my eyes were back on the screen, the man's outlines were flowing, shifting-morphing. Nothing I saw on that screen was beyond the capabilities of a hot-shot kid with a Cray-Amiga submicro running FX Oven… but, deep down, I knew what I was watching wasn't any kind of special effect. The man's skull expanded, elongated. Those icy eyes swelled, shifting apart, migrating toward the sides of me skull. His mouth opened, showing dagger teem. Beyond the serried rows of teeth, something moved-a black tongue, forked like a snake's.

"Is this sufficient proof?" asked the dragon.

14

The big worm. The fragging bakeware.

That's who it had to be, didn't it? Ryumyo the fragging Great Dragon. Great fragging Christ on a crutch. Whatever happened to a low fragging profile?

My hands were shaking, making it harder to hot-wire the car I was boosting-a nice, nondescript Volkswagen Elektro, rusted out here and there. I wiped the sweat from my eyes with the back of my hand and tried not to drek myself.

A nice, relaxing sojourn in the islands. Just deliver a message, soak up a few rays, get wasted on mai-tais, then it's all over. That's how Barnard had pitched it to me.

Yeah, right. Ryumyo, the fragging dragon, had it chipped, didn't he? "You've become involved in matters much too weighty for you," that's what he'd told me. No drek. Corps and yaks and terrorists, oh my. And now kings and fragging dragons… Oh yes, and we can't forget the insect spirits, can we? My dance card was already full, and more guests kept showing up at the cotillion. Frag it to hell and back. I must have been something real nasty in a past life- nun-rapist, maybe, mass murderer, or perhaps tax collector-to warrant this kind of drekky karma.

I finally managed to get the Elektro to admit that I did have the right keycode, and me little flywheel deep in me car's guts spun up to speed. I tried to burn rubber, but me mobile coffin just whined at me accusingly and pulled away from the curb at a slow walk. (According to some Volkswagen propaganda I'd scanned a while back, the Electro is supposed to have a top end of 75 klicks. Sure, chummer. The Volkswagen engineers must have dropped the fragging thing off a bridge to get that figure.) I pointed the Elektro east, and cruised through the noontime traffic.

Spirits… I would purely loooove to take me nice dragon's friendly advice and just butt me hell out of all this. It hadn't been my choice to stick my nose into anyone's biz. Now, if I made one wrong step, my nose was probably the largest fragment of my anatomy anyone would find left in one piece. Maybe after I'd talked to King Kamehameha V. Yeah, right.

I was ten minutes early for my appointment-audience?- when I pulled into the public parking facility a block from the Iolani Palace. I bid a less-than-fond farewell to the Elektro-Volkswagen's ergonomic gurus must have left it up to a band of munchkins to spec out the headroom-and took the elevator up to street level.

And that's where I stopped and listened for a minute or two to my pulse beating a wild tattoo in my ears. Logic fought with instinct. It was instinct that told me to use all the tradecraft I knew, to look for shadows and tails, to watch my hoop, to approach my target without being spotted. Logic told me that was a load of bollocks. I was going to be jandering into a fragging palace. Lot of good tradecraft was going to do me there. And anyway, I recalled, looking down at the nicks the window composite had left in my finger, Gordon Ho's sniper had given me convincing evidence that the Ali'i didn't want me dead yet. Still, it took a good two minutes for logic to suppress the whimperings of reflex. Finally, I strode across the road-almost getting greased by a courier on a pedal-bike, despite the fact that I had the light- and toward the Iolani Palace.

The building itself sat in the middle of more than half a hectare of grassy turf, almost indecently green and vibrant. It didn't look big enough to be the capitol of a sovereign nation. Frag, you couldn't fit more than a hundred bureaucrats and datapushers into the place. But then I glanced across the road at the Haleaka-something, the big, ferrocrete Government House. I supposed it made sense; separate the day-to-day biz of the government from the symbolic, ritualistic drek. The wrought iron gate leading onto the grounds was open, flanked by four guards-all big boys, trolls or orks dressed in white uniforms that were almost blinding in the brilliant sun. (Stupid, I thought at first, but then I realized these guys were just symbolic. If you're going to stand at attention out in the beating tropical sun, white gear makes a lot more sense than dark camo. The real hard-men would be out of sight, somewhere in the shade, but able to respond to trouble in an instant.) I jandered on through. One of the trolls gave me my daily dose of stink-eye, and I saw his big, horny knuckles whiten on the forestock of his H K assault rifle. Chummer, I just smiled. At the moment trolls with assault rifles were low on my priority list of things to drek myself over.

Up the driveway I jandered, up the low steps, in the front door. And into the blissful cool of a lobby/reception area. Scott had told me the Iolani Palace was about a hundred and fifty years old, and now I could really feel it Not that the place looked rundown. Far from it, it was perfectly maintained. But the very feel of me air hinted at the history that had passed through its doors, up its stairways, across its dark wood floors.

There were four more white-clad ceremonial guards-trolls, again-one in each corner of the room. More stink-eye. In front of me was a huge reception desk made from the same dark wood as the floor. Behind it sat a young Polynesian woman, her attractiveness undiminished by the fact that she was an ork. No stink-eye here. She was watching me with a welcoming smile that, under other circumstances, might have had me running around in circles, dragging a wing and whimpering. I walked up to the desk. "My name's Dirk Montgomery," I told her.

"Yes?" Then she blinked and looked down at a 'puter flatscreen set into the desktop. "Oh, yes," she said brightly, "I'm sorry, Mr. Montgomery, you are expected, of course. If you'll just wait a moment…" Her eyes rolled up in her head, and for me first time I noticed that a fiber-optic line connected her to the desktop system. In a couple of heartbeats her dark eyes were smiling up into mine again. "Mr. Ortega will be with you momentarily," she told me.