Juliette can be a real trouper when she’s not plotting to kill you. If she weren’t my sister and rival, I could get to like her. She’s just watched her kid sister fuck a guy she’s head over heels in love over without stripping a gear, and she’s actually told the audience to look away and pay no attention to the animatronic rabbit sticking its pizzle out of the hat. If I didn’t know she hated me, I’d give her a big hug.

Instead, I hastily climb off Pete, get him to lie down under the metal shelf that supports the mattress, then lie down on it myself, artfully positioning the pad so that it overhangs the ledge, partially concealing him.

The hatch between the cell and the cargo pod closes quietly, cutting off the lemur’s quiet snores. Then there’s some more scraping, as the pod is hauled away by the Sleepless Cartel arbeiters who carried it in. Now all there is to do is sit and wait for rescue, and hope that the rescuers don’t decide to rescue their own asses by nuking the entire city into a smoking hole in the regolith…

BANG.

I sit bolt upright. It’s a deep thud, reverberating through the frame of the bunk. “What was that?” asks Petruchio.

“I don’t know—”

BANG. The lights outside flicker for an instant — then they go out. I hear shouting.

“Get down!” He reaches over the bed and grabs hold of my arm, pulls me on top of him. For a few confused seconds we roll around on the floor, trying to get under the mattress and the bed frame. There are more thudding bangs, and an ominous hissing sound of air, venting. Then there’s a loud whining screech as something stings the outside of the cell at high velocity and shatters.

I’d like to pretend that I can respond to this sort of situation heroically or bravely, but it’s not true. When you’re huddling in a corner of a locked cell with a near stranger for company, in the dark, with a pressure leak and shots being fired, and nowhere to run — it’s pretty bad. Stress reflexes kick in, making me shiver and lachrymate as I huddle against Pete, who is holding up better. He shelters me in his arms and talks to me. “Stay calm, love. Save your energy. Someone will let us out of here when the shooting stops.”

“Fuck saving my energy,” I gasp. “This wasn’t part of the plan!” But he doesn’t understand that this is all my fault. I told Reginald to call Daks, tell him what was going on: that Rhea was arranging to steal the Creator sample from under the noses of her associates. And I spilled the story to JeevesCo, letting them know that they’ve still got a security problem despite Juliette’s Machiavellian misdirection with Reginald, and that it’s all a family feud. Pete’s locked on and in love with me, or Katherine Sorico’s face, so he thinks, and he believes it’s mutual. He doesn’t even know I’m not Juliette: I haven’t told him. I shiver in the dark, leaning against him, wondering if I’m going to die—

Then there’s a noise so loud I don’t hear it — I feel it in my bones — and the room flips sideways and lands with a jolt, throwing me onto the one-way window, which is now starred and cracked. A faint light comes from the far end, where the hatch was. “Come out with your hands visible!” a harsh voice booms through my electrosense, painfully loud.

“Help!” I shout. I try to stand up, but there’s something on top of me. Pete groans, then rolls off my legs. I stand up.

“Come out with your hands visible!” I’ve heard that voice before, growling over the parasite feed on board the Pygmalion. Which means Reginald got through, of course, and identifies these raiders as friendly — if I can survive long enough to identify myself to them.

I stumble toward the dim light. “I’m coming!” I say.

“Juliette, don’t—” It’s Pete, behind me.

I keep going. I have to duck to get through the hatch, then I’m standing up, keeping my hands visible, trying to make sense of what’s going on around me. It’s dark, but not too dark to tell there’s a huge rip in the ceiling, debris on a corner, loud buzzing from spherical drones circling above head height. The light and smoke comes from combustion processes. Something is burning in the corrosively oxygenated atmosphere. Sinister mecha move through the shadows, multiple arms twitching. “Stop! Raise your hands!” I stop and stretch. “Stop!” It booms. But I have stopped, I think, confused.

“Juliette, don’t! They’ll—”

I begin to turn. “Get back!” I shout, but Petruchio is still moving, coming out of the shattered end wall of the capsule cell and looking around.

“Danger! Replicator Bloom!” All around the wreckage of the hall spherical drones spin their turrets toward the doorway behind me. “Clear and sterilize!”

“Wait!” I electroshout. “He’s not a—”

Everything lights up violet-white.

epilogue

Outward Bound

I AM BROKEN, and I am whole, and I am serializing this — writing it down in words, as a letter — because I do not want to inflict the direct experience of my emotions on you, and in any case, where I’m going is too far away to send back a soul chip, and bandwidth is scarce enough to make an imago this complex prohibitively expensive. You need to know what happened as a warning and a caution. But it would be wrong to make you live through it, sis.

One of the most important lessons life has taught me is that you should be careful what you wish for. I asked, and Reginald delivered. I didn’t ask for much — just that he pass my information on to Daks, who at that moment was already in Heinleingrad, along with a shipload of soldiers from the Replication Suppression Agency.

Granita — Juliette — is officially dead. Stone and three of his sibs and her bodyguard of scissor soldiers went down with her in a brief and bloody firefight that took out one wing of the Heinlein Excelsior. Which makes it all the more peculiar that Juliette is still alive and working for JeevesCo, with all her sins apparently forgiven. I’m not sure whether she’s the same Juliette, however — there certainly appear to be enough copies of her soul chip floating around, after all. And it occurs to me that agents capable of conveniently infiltrating the service of a mad, bad criminal mastermind like Rhea might well need to surround themselves with convincing cover stories and a cloud of plausible excuses and useful idiots like yours truly. But I’m not going to ask. That would be too humiliating for words.

What the RSA troops did to Petruchio is officially an “accident.” And who knows whether they’re lying? They’d gone in to try to suppress an auction of no ordinary pink goo, but a genuine synthetic Creator — a weapon of mass dominion — and Pete was good enough to fool Juliette on first acquaintance. To expect any better of their automatic weapon platforms would be foolish.

Daks is, of course, very sorry indeed. He’d better be. If he isn’t sorry enough to satisfy Juliette, then I can be sure that she’ll let him know about it. We’re all very sorry, to different extents, of course.

The elusive Dr. Sleepless, lynchpin of the whole criminal replicator program, is missing. Probably he was never on Eris to begin with. It’s even possible that the entire floor show was an elaborate fraud, and that while his cartel has gotten as far as fabricating a lemur, they’re nowhere near ready to raise and socialize a human infant. Hopefully, the violent response to this attempted auction has caused them to reconsider the wisdom of raising such dangerous ghosts and releasing them on the inner system.

Rhea, my mad, cannibal mother, is probably not dead, but is definitely missing. So is the Icarus Express, which is not merely annoying but alarming. There is an old maxim in space warfare that there are no horizons beyond the atmosphere. And it’s also true that Icarus’s nuclear propulsion system would be visible from Earth orbit if he’d fired it up for Eris departure. But there’s the small matter of some disturbing un-memory-chipped holes in the Erisian traffic control collective’s memory — possibly assisted by an unearthly large sum of Reals greasing the correct manipulators — and out here, the Pink Police don’t have the clout to shut down and inspect all traffic in and out of orbit. As likely as not, Icarus is taking a slow down-bound cruise inside the freight bay of a bulky hydrogen snowball supercarrier, his wings folded for the nonce. Of course, the Domina has had her assets frozen; equally certainly, the Domina herself has been slumbering in a shallow grave for many decades, and Rhea has other husks to reanimate once she migrates back to her old stomping grounds.