Galactic Adventures Collection

Chapter 5

The uterpod convulsed wildly, and somewhere, a muted alarm began to ping.

Even from a distance, Fred F4RB8C3 knew the mutaclone was in distress. Not another! he thought. That"ll be the fifth this year! Maneuvering his extensile to the uterpod, Fred shoved the catch basket beneath it, and then examined the figure inside the transparent membrane.

Arms and legs akimbo, a fem mutaclone stared back at him, eyes wide with terror. At the sight of her, five thousand copulation positions tried to crowd into his mind at once, his escoriant simumems intruding, nanostimmed into him during his gestation. He pushed aside the memories.

Where"d she come from? Fred wondered, only factory drudges growing in this sector. Mutaclone drudges, like himself. He pulled up her gestation history on his corn. She"d been recently moved from the escoriant sector, where escort variants were grown to order, this perfect-looking specimen flagged as defective.

Doesn"t look defective to me, he thought, in spite of her contortions. Even limbs akimbo, she looked perfectly proportioned, her anatomy visible in all its detail.

Fred considered a sedative. Her flailing jostled the mutaclones all around her. The tough uterpod membrane gave at every jab of her limb, the derma designed to contain but not restrict. He had to do something, the uterpod derma too tough, too resilient, and too elastic to escape from the inside.

Fred F4RB8C3 looked both ways. To the right and left, uterpods extended for hundreds of feet, two walls of glistening pods facing each other with just enough room between them for his extensile lift. Above and below, more pods, his sector nearly two hundred yards tall.

Glad no one was near, Fred pulled out his injectile. The needle looked deadly, its fat, menacing barrel ending in a sharp, shiny point.

Her eyes went wide, and she kicked at him violently.

He pulled the injectile back and took the kick on the shoulder. Without backing or force, she couldn"t hurt him. He grabbed a handful of derma and stretched it toward him, then put the injectile point to it and tore.

The uterpod retracted as if in pain and peeled away from the mutaclone, dumping her into the catch basket. A spray of amniofluid fell toward the waste sluice a hundred feet below.

She lay there a moment, gasping and glistening. “Thank you,” she said breathily, venturing a glance his direction.

“You"re welcome,” Fred said. He tore his gaze away, desire and embarrassment sending blood rushing into his face. The front of his allsuit tented from the bulge underneath.

The specimen in front of him looked just as delectable and healthy as any he"d seen when he"d worked the escoriant sector. Escort variants sold for thousands of galacti on the open market, sometimes tens of thousands. And this one was fully formed, all her anatomical features visible through the transparent derma as she"d struggled to escape the uterpod. He knew what some of his coworkers did in the escoriant sector when they thought no one was looking. Product-testing, they sometimes joked.

Trying his best to keep his eyes off her, he maneuvered the extensile back toward his workstation. “Let"s get you an allsuit. Got a spare over here.”

“Nice of you.”

He threw her a grin but tried not to glance. And failed.

“Awful young to be doing this kind of work, aren"t you?”

“Born here on the asteroid five years ago. I"m Fred Eff Four Are Bee Eight Cee Three,” he said, spelling out his clone designation. She sounds far too alert to have just aborted from a uterpod, Fred thought, bewildered. He docked the extensile, silenced the alarm at his workstation, and stepped to the locker. He handed her the allsuit, averting his gaze.

She took the allsuit and began to dress. “I"m—”

He waited until the rustling ceased and looked at her.

Fear and bewilderment rippled across her face. The allsuit couldn"t disguise her alluring curves. She stood five-eight and was generously endowed, possessing a figure that would turn the heads of either s*x. She had wheat-blond hair cascading straight past her shoulders, sported a V-shaped face that took the breath away, had a small smile that was warm and inviting, and had large, wide-set, intelligent eyes, their color as blue as amethyst.

Eyes that searched inside for a name. “I don"t know who I am.”

She has a lot of ease and confidence for not knowing who she is, he thought, admiring her composure. “Your designation is KTX552Y, so your name probably starts with Kay. Why don"t you know your name?”

“I don"t know.” She shook her head. “I know I had one, back when I lived on—” She stared at him.

She"s not seeing me, he thought. Her confusion was fairly common, even if her awareness wasn"t. “—on Tantalus?” he asked. “I don"t think so. You were just aborted from a uterpod. You"ve never lived anywhere.”

“But I—”

“You see that chute?” he interrupted, pointing toward the floor. A narrow strip of concave sluice drained amniofluid and other detritus that sloughed off the twelve hundred mutaclones in this sector. “I"m supposed to send you down that chute. All aborted mutaclones go down the chute. You think you"ve lived "cause the uterpods infuse pseudo-sensory simumems through nanostim tendrils into your brain. But it isn"t real.” Although she does seem remarkably alert, he thought, keeping it to himself.

“And the simumems give the mutaclones a sense of past,” she added, “each memory tailored to the environment where they"ll be serving. I know because I"m a doctor of—” she stared at him, that bewildered look taking hold of her face again.

“What, rocket science?” He snorted at his own joke. “Look, just have a seat, and when my shift ends, I"ll take you over to the escoriant sector. They"ll know what to do with you.”

“Escoriant? An escort variant? Do I look like an escoriant?”

The equivalent of calling her a w***e. She did have the face and body of a goddess and would fetch a steep price at open auction. What was he supposed to say? “Your gestation history tells me that"s where you were transferred from.”

“Oh, I see.” Her ardor deflated, and she glanced around.

“You"ll stay put for another hour?”

“Of course,” she said matter-of-factly. “Oh, uh, thanks, Fred.”

He smiled. “You"re welcome. All right if I call you Kate?”

“Sure,” she said, giving him a brief smile.

“Pleased to meet you.” He gave her a bow and a grin. “Got to clean up,” he said, gesturing up toward the uterpod where she"d been hanging. He engaged the extensile, lifting himself back to the now-limp and -empty uterpod, the derma hanging slack.

He maneuvered the extensile in between the full uterpods to get at the placental stem. The collar came away easily, and he inspected the nanostim base for damage. None visible, but just to make sure, he ran a bioscan. Some contusions from the abrupt withdrawal, the nanostim filaments having infiltrated the mutaclone"s nervous system. Usually, a struggling mutaclone triggered the uterpod to withdraw the filaments to avoid such damage. When they didn"t, placental stems were damaged and had to be replaced. Under the placental stem was the sector wall, ribbed with conduit. Soft slurping accompanied the peristalsis as the conduits pumped nutrients to the uterpods. Other conduits pumped waste out to the recycler. Silvery bundles of nanostim filaments crossed conduits like filigree.

The collar and empty uterpod derma went down the chute, the biomatter recycler reconstituting every bit of waste. Fred pulled back to look over his handiwork. On his corn, he scanned the vitals of the surrounding uterpods. The neighboring mutaclones hadn"t been damaged by the aborted mutaclone"s struggle, other than some slight bruising.

Most were factory drones, in a variety of shapes and sizes, tailored for specific tasks. The one beside him was a hulking male with six arms sprouting from his back. Two short, squat legs could hold him in place for twenty hours at a stretch. The vestigial p***s and scrotum would remain infantile, his gonadotropin output genetically restricted.

Fred maneuvered the extensile away from the wall, checking his corn for any latent vitals out of range. No signs of distress. He breathed a sigh, the number of aborted mutaclones far higher in his sector than normal, especially this late in gestation. Inviability was far more common at the zygote stage, just after fertilization. The gene jockeys bragged in the lunchroom about colony extermination, propagation across cell lines, mutavariant anomalies, and RNA reticular recombinants. Fred didn"t need to know all that. They hadn"t even trained him in cardio. Either the mutaclone lived or died, and this late in gestation, heroic resuscitation wasn"t a priority. A glorified mutaclone sitter in all I am, he thought.

Peering toward his workstation, he didn"t see Kate.

Where"d she go? he wondered, sending his extensile that way.

He could just imagine the recriminations, seeing the newsvid headlines: “Escaped escoriant rampages through asteroid mutaclone facility.” He"d surely be fired. There"d been talk about him, of course. He was a rarity, one of the few aborted mutaclones working in the sectors, nearly all the other workers having been successfully extruded from their uterpods or having emigrated from Tantalus. Most of his peers who"d lived through their gestation could be sold on open market. Aborted mutaclones might be sold thus, but only as refurbished or reconditioned, and the company barely recouped its costs. It was unusual for workers to intervene and take abortivariants home to rear as their own.

Fred was one such abortivariant. Five years ago, he"d wriggled out of his uterpod prematurely and had fallen toward the chute for recycling. A swift extensile maneuver by Greg, the sector monitor, had stopped his slow, asteroid-gravity fall with the catch basket.

Maneuvering the extensile back to his workstation, Fred leapt to the platform and peered out the door to see which way she"d gone, but to no avail.

No trace.

He sighed, wondering what he"d tell his father, Greg.

Dr. Sarina Karinova blinked the fatigue from her eyes and looked again at the genalysis.

I hope this is some sort of mistake, she thought. A primary care physician who"d originally specialized in recombinant development and propagation, Sarina knew what she was seeing.

But didn"t believe it, even after checking a third time.

The genalysis before her exhibited the allele smoothing common to mutaclone gengineering.

Dr. Karinova didn"t want to see what she was seeing. Premier Colima Satsanova had asked her to examine her twenty-eight year old daughter, Tatiana, because she"d recently looked listless and detached. So, as a matter of course, Dr. Karinova had run a full panel of tests, including a genalysis. Which she was looking at now.

The lab must have mixed up the samples, the Doctor thought.

Long stretches of genetic ribbon exhibited the kind of smoothing that mutaclone cells lines had been subjected to rid them of recessive genetic traits. As the human genome had developed, it had incorporated multivariate sequences to encode responses to plagues, diet, disease, climate, and numerous other environmental hazards. All species encoded their survival strategies into their genes. The oldest chromosomes from the loblolly pine on old Earth were seven times longer than the human genome sequence. A species that had survived for three hundred million years, the loblolly pine bore in its labyrinthine genome how it had survived thousands of pestilences, including insects, molds, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and lichens. For each, the loblolly pine had articulated in its genes just what countermeasures the pine had taken to combat these herbicides, encoding those responses to help future generations fight off similar infestations.

Just as the human genome had. In addition, in doing so, the human DNA had incorporated weak recessives whose cumulative expressive potential sometimes manifested in maladaptive syndromes, such as schizophrenia, autism, Down syndrome, or fragile-x. Some conditions were actually incorporated into the mutaclone cell lines, such as hypogonadotropism, resulting in restricted gonad development. Small testes and ovaries helped to increase docility and compliance.

When mutaclone production had started, gengineers had pinpointed genes known to be problematic and had either resected that gene—removed the offending sequence and tied the two ends together—or had replaced that gene with its healthy recombinant. This “smoothing,” as it was known generally, had sharply reduced the incidence of abortivariants. With the advent of nanostim neuraplants, which inculcated protective coping factors such as antianxiolysis, the viability and integration rates easily topped ninety-nine percent.

In the final years of her doctoral program, Dr. Sarina Karinova had taken a year"s residency at a Genie-All asteroid clone production facility, to see if that field was what she wanted to specialize in. She"d been revolted at their treatment, and had elected to pursue general practitioner. But the yearlong exposure to mutaclone production had given her enough background to say definitively that the genalysis in front of her was a mutaclone genome, not a normavariant.

She glanced at the clock. Eight twenty-five. The lab was certainly closed by now, and she"d have to get them to retest the sample in the morning. I"ll send them a trake-mail, she thought. “Trake message to Natalia Filipova, Statlab Kaspi. Natalia, I"ve got some anomalous results on the sample I sent you this morning, specimen OLGS562. Can you verify the sample and rerun the genalysis? Thanks much for doing so.” She set the delivery for Natalia"s arrival at work, not wanting to disturb her at home.

“Log off,” she traked to her office computer, and she watched as it closed its feed to her corn. She sighed at how late it was.

Sarina then traked her wife, knowing she was supposed to have left her clinic an hour ago. I"ll have to apologize again, she thought to herself, staying over at work far too often.

I"ll order her a dozen mutaroses, Sarina thought.

She ordered up a bouquet on her corn, and then tidied her desk. Grabbing her valise, she stepped from her office and headed toward the rear entrance. She was sure to be accosted by waiting patients if she didn"t take the back entrance, the clinic a busy place during normal hours. The waiting room was dark and empty now, the doors closing at seventeen hundred.

At the rear entrance, she traked up a hovertaxi, the sky a deep indigo, the two moons of Tantalus hovering full just above the Premier"s palace to the east. Sarina"s wife, Anya, an astrophysicist at the Royal Ukraine Observatory atop Mount Mithridat, had often smirked at humanity"s ingrained inclination to designate the direction the sun rose as east and where it set as west, no matter what world they colonized. But that too was as inculcated into the human psyche as the desire to reproduce. I"ll wager we"ll someday find an allele where that"s articulated, Sarina thought.

The hovertaxi hissed to a stop in front of her, and she stepped inside. “Home,” she traked. The taxi biometricked her face to obtain her address. It lifted and swung into traffic, its autonav guiding it surely and swiftly to its destination.

Sarina glanced into the hovertaxi beside hers. People went about their lives in taxis as if they were at home, with little if any regard for what others might see. A gentleman in a psychedelisuit with hair to match belted out a raucous song, if his wild gyrations and wide-open mouth were any indication. The pulsating thump from that direction confirmed her suspicion. A couple on her other side were coupling vigorously, if the shapes beyond the frosted frames were doing what she thought. She was surprised they"d frosted the panes, some passengers not bothering.

A sleek personal hover pulled alongside momentarily. None but the very wealthy owned their own hovers. Her hovertaxi careened away just as she got a glimpse of the face. Premier Colima Satsanova herself, Sarina saw, the hawkish, elegant face recognizable throughout the galaxy, far beyond the boundaries of Ukraine-held constellations along the Norman Arm.

Sarina"s hovertaxi zoomed between two towers and circled a third as it homed in on her flat on the thirty-fourth floor of her forty-floor apartment building. She felt privileged to live so near the top, able to afford such steep rents, prices going up exponentially as they neared the penthouses.

A hoverpark extended itself from her balcony and fixed itself to the taxi"s side. Sarina stepped onto her balcony as if it weren"t four hundred feet above the ground. She couldn"t remember the last time she"d used the elevators, when she"d last taken a walk on the street.

The door biometricked her face and slid aside and a gust of wind from behind pushed her in. “Anya? I"m home.” She set down her valise and shrugged out of her smock. The clock remonstrated her for not arriving home until 8:45 pm.

Then the silence struck her.

“Anya? Honey?” She peeked into the kitchen.

Multiple things instantly struck her as odd. The bouquet of mutaroses was in the sink, and beside it was a quarter-full vase. The mutarose stems had been partially trimmed, a pair of shears also in the sink. The oven ticked away as though heating or cooling, and inside a casserole bubbled merrily. The apron that Anya always wore in the kitchen, and always hung beside the sink when not in use, was gone.

“Anya?” Sarina called again. She heard that slight edge of panic in her voice. Must be in the sanistall, she thought, turning off the oven as she went past.

The sanistall was empty, its door wide open.

She poked her head into the bedroom. “Anya?”

Silence. Emptiness.

Was she so disgusted with me that she left? Sarina wondered. Her late nights at the clinic were one of the few things they argued about, Anya jealous of any time Sarina spent outside of her presence. If we"d met while I was in residency, Sarina thought, our relationship wouldn"t have survived.

She returned to the kitchen, telling herself Anya would return after she"d cooled off.

The oven tick-tick-ticked as it cooled off.

Sarina stepped to the sink to finish cutting the mutaroses. There, beside the faucet, was Anya"s wedding ring. Sarina fingered her own ring, identical to Anya"s.

Unfinished cutting, casserole still cooking, wedding ring off.

None of those was like Anya at all.

Sarina stepped back from the sink without touching anything, frightened. Then she looked toward the apartment door, the one she hadn"t used in months, coming and going almost exclusively by hovertaxi. It stood ajar about an inch.

She gasped, her heart thundering in her chest, cold creeping up her legs, her arms tingling.

“City police,” she traked.

At first they refused to send anyone out, and it wasn"t until she insisted that they acceded to doing so. Then it took them forever to get there, each moment an eternity, the silence and horror weighing on her. All her efforts to calm herself failed miserably. Visions of her wife Anya in some basement boiler room, bound and blindfolded, wouldn"t leave Sarina"s mind.

The officer was sympathetic, taking assiduous notes, which appeared on Sarina"s corn. He didn"t have to share his corneal images with her, and she thought him kind to do so. Seeing the information helped calm her frayed nerves. He took note of the mutaroses, the casserole, the wedding ring, the missing apron, the door ajar, imaging everything. He also bioscanned the front door and hallway just outside. And of course he asked her about her relationship with Anya.

He handed her his comcard when he was done. “Call me anytime if you think of anything else, and if anything changes, of course.”

“Of course.” She saw it had both a desk contact and a personal contact. “What now?” she gave him her own comcard.

“Well, we wait.” The officer grimaced. “If she doesn"t go to work tomorrow, then there"s cause to worry. Right now, we don"t know. I agree, all this seems out of character, especially for an astrophysicist, but people do things out of character from time to time. What people rarely do is miss work or fail to trake-mail to say they won"t be in. It"d be useless for me to encourage you to relax and try to get some sleep, because you"re probably not going to. But relax and try to get some sleep, anyway.”

She managed a small smile. “Thank you, officer.” She watched him leave. As the police hover pulled away from her balcony, she stepped to the sink. The mutaroses went into the vase and the casserole into the thermafreeze. Sarina couldn"t even think about eating.

Her wife"s absence gnawed at her.

She picked up the ring and slid it onto her pinky, Anya"s ring one size smaller than hers. The two rings glittered beside each other, as they had on the day Sarina and Anya had married, five years ago.

The Capital of Tantalus, Kiev, sat on a high plateau above rough seas, the planet four-fifths water. Out on a promontory above roiling breakers, Sarina and Anya had exchanged vows, and the Orthodox Priestess had declared them wife and wife before the sight of God. Why they"d elected to have a religious wedding was something of a conundrum. Neither was particularly religious, Sarina having been reared a devout Orthodox Christian but having drifted away from the church in college, and Anya Jewish by extraction but non-practicing throughout her life. As an astrophysicist, however, Anya had always said, “There are mysteries to the universe that defy theory and science, and can only be explained within the cosmology of religion.” Perhaps it"d been their immersions into their respective fields of study that had led them to ask God to officiate at their nuptials.

As Sarina looked out the dining room window at the glowing city below, hovers streaming along in dwindling rivers of traffic, she remembered how they had both wept with joy as the Priestess had declared them married in the sight of God, and how their family, friends, and colleagues had told them for months afterward how moving and uplifting the ceremony had been.

She dropped her gaze to the extra ring on her pinky, which immediately blurred, and Sarina began to weep.

Admiral Zenaida Andropova, Commander of the Ukraine Navy, thrice decorated for valor in combat against those Rusky interlopers but more famous for the pitched battles she"s won in the halls of parliament, stood in the living room of her own house, feeling powerless.

Across from her, her son, Captain Fadeyka Andropovich, hung his head at the tirade she"d just delivered.

“What in God"s name is it going to take?!” she roared, staring at him balefully.

He"d been such a perfect son, and Zenaida couldn"t fathom what might have possessed him these last five years. All through elementary and secondary school, so prim and proper that even his classmates had called him Admiral. The Naval Academy had been a breeze for him, his grades as pristine as his dress had been punctilious. Valedictorian and class president, captain of the football, fencing, and hand-to-hand combat teams, and of course instantly accepted at the Naval Post Graduate School in dual Master"s programs of Cryptology and Interstellar Relations.

But he hadn"t shown up at the Naval Post Graduate School—not under his own power. During summer break, he"d gone on vacation in the Pleiades, had disconnected his neuralink, and had dropped out of sight.

A day before his first class at Post-Graduate, after two months of silence, nary a word from the boy, she had found him on the beaches of Marseilles, selling his Apollo-like face and Olympian body to vacationing socialites, fornicating with them for money, male and female both, much of his clientele his mother"s age or older, the boy twenty-one years old.

Zenaida had physically dragged him from some wealthy boy"s bed, n***d, and had hauled him to the spaceport and had personally escorted him to his chair in the first class of his first semester at the Post Graduate School.

She hadn"t asked him for an explanation and hadn"t wanted one. Neither had he offered one.

The first month seemed to go well. Zenaida had returned to Kiev but had kept in touch with his professors, checking daily that he was in class, where he was supposed to be, dressed the way he was supposed to dress. All reports indicated he participated at Post Graduate as he had at the Naval Academy.

And she began to breathe again, relieved that it seemed to be over, that the episode of dissipation was behind him. Fadeyka even managed to secure a berth on the football team, despite having missed pre-semester practice. “He just needed to sow some wild oats,” a female underling had consoled her. “Every boy needs a little of that.” The Post Graduate Dean had said something similar, he and his wife agreeing to keep a close if unobtrusive eye on him.

Zenaida got to know the Dean"s wife well during this time, the Admiral not wanting to bother the Dean himself with her daily trakes. Galina, the Dean"s wife, told Zenaida she wasn"t the only mother whose student at Post-Graduate wasn"t behaving with quite the decorum expected of them. “I"ll know if he deviates even the slightest,” Galina had said.

So the first time Fadeyka left the Post-Graduate grounds and didn"t return in time for lights out, Galina was the one to go and find him.

Stranded in town without the means to get back to campus, shoeless, shirtless, and without a galacti, he"d gambled away everything, all but his on-post dress slacks. Further, he owed thousands of galacti more.

Zenaida instantly commed him enough money to cover his debts and replace his clothes, expressing her frustration with him to Galina. “Ginny, he was selling himself on the beaches of Marseilles to old women and young men!” Zenaida said. “Who knows where he"ll end up if he keeps gambling!?”

“We"ll find him some other diversions on campus, Zinny,” Galina had assured her. “Don"t you worry.”

And then, across the next two months, not a single report of aberrant behavior. Perhaps Fadeyka has put it behind him, Zenaida thought, and she scaled back her trakes to Galina to once or twice per week, enjoying her conversations with the Dean"s wife, her manner urbane and sophisticated, the kind of wife a Post-Graduate Dean would need.

Zenaida had frequently wished for a husband of similar caliber, but none of her paramours seemed to have the social standing or the parlor skills to match someone of her distinction. Fadeyka"s father had been significantly older than Zenaida, rear Admiral of the Fifth Fleet. She"d married him on the eve of her graduation, an appointment to battleship command nearly guaranteed her. Fadeyka had been born a year later.

In Ukraine"s long-running battle with their hated Rusky neighbors, skirmishes erupted periodically, and in Zenaida"s first pitched battle, she had conducted her command flawlessly and had beaten back the Rusky incursion with minimal losses. Shortly afterward, another skirmish had erupted along the Fifth Fleet"s segment of the contested border, a skirmish that had soon escalated. Although able to hold its own under her husband"s command, the Fifth Fleet had called for reinforcements, and her battleship, the Nikopol, was among them.

On the outskirts of Oleksandrivka, a cloaked destroyer penetrated the Fleet"s outer defenses and attacked its flagship, while a full frontal attack on the Fleet was launched.

Zenaida brought the Nikopol around to engage the destroyer just as the first defensive line failed against the frontal attack. Defend the Fleet or defend the flagship? she wondered.

“Reinforced the front line,” her husband ordered, and Zenaida brought her guns to bear on the attacking Rusky invaders. While the Nikopol and other ships fended off the attack, the cloaked destroyer pummeled the flagship into oblivion.

And her husband along with it.

For her part in the battle, she claimed her first medal of valor, and accepted another on behalf of her husband, awarded posthumously.

By then, Fadeyka was five, and throughout his father"s obsequies, the personal and the public rituals long and elaborate, and throughout the medal award ceremonies, one for her and one for her husband, he stood at attention for hours, his face impassive, the recipient of multiple comments about how much he resembled his father, the marbled Roman face atop the ramrod-straight posture.

Destined for command, they"d all said.

And throughout his upbringing, Zenaida had little time for a personal life, working her way relentlessly up through the naval hierarchy, and when he was on the verge of attending the Naval Academy on his own merits, she was promoted to Admiral, taking command of the entire Ukraine Navy at the phenomenally young age of forty-five.

In four years at the Academy, he"d earned double degrees in cryptology and interstellar relations, captain of the football, fencing, and hand-to-hand combat teams, his physical prowess equivalent to his mental prowess, graduating Summa c*m Laude, class president and valedictorian.

Destined for command, they"d all said.

Perhaps Marseilles was just a phase, Zenaida told herself at the end of his first semester at the Post Graduate School, his grades as perfect as they"d always been, his football team taking the sector championship, his hand-to-hand combat and fencing as superlative as they"d always been, his physical condition seeming to be completely recovered from his summer of dissipation.

On his visit home during break, Fadeyka seemed reticent to her, his responses cursory, his manner unforthcoming. She attributed it to the stress of a new school whose demands far exceeded those of the Naval Academy, Post Graduate lauded for its rigorous courses.

Across the next semester, Zenaida"s contact with her son became more sporadic, decreasing to weekly and then fortnightly, with intermittent trake messages in between. Complemented with weekly conversations with her new friend, the Dean"s wife Galina, who regularly assured her that Fadeyka was not only excelling in his studies but was dominating the intramural hand-to-hand combat leagues as well, carrying the Post Graduate team toward a galactic championship.

Intermittently, Zenaida began to hear disturbing rumors from colleagues whose parallel correspondence brought them into contact with other enrollees at the Post Graduate School, or who traveled there for weekend seminars. If the rumors were to be believed, the Post Graduate School was developing a reputation for licentious parties and wild, fraternity-style pranksterism. When Zenaida asked, Galina immediately discounted the naysayers as disgruntled maligners jealous of the Post Graduate"s academic and athletic reputations.

Then, near the end of the semester, Zenaida"s Chief of Cryptology returned from a conference on ciphering and said to her unbidden, “If I were the mother of a student there, I"d instantly yank him or her out of that den of iniquity.” And he"d refused to elaborate further.

Despite Galina"s and Fadeyka"s denials of anything untoward, Zenaida boarded her yacht at the earliest opportunity. En route, before she arrived, the bombshell blew the scandal into galaxy-wide headlines.

The police raided what was purported to be a full casino and brothel, illicit nanomutadrugs of every type available, where the wealthy were lured, their identities stolen, their activities recorded, and their families extorted. Galina and Fadeyka had been caught in flagrante delicto, fornicating vigorously with each other at the Dean"s on-campus residence. Bank accounts with astronomical balances were confiscated, barrels full of nanomutadrugs were impounded, and several students and administrators were arrested, including the main perpetrators, Galina and Fadeyka.

in flagrante delictoZenaida arrived at the spaceport just as her son and newfound friend were being escorted in restraints from the Dean"s on-campus residence, and she rushed immediately to bail him out just as the Dean vehemently denounced his wife and proclaimed his disavowal of his wife"s activities from the stoop of his off-campus mansion.

As heads began to roll with the naval chain of command, Zenaida forced her son into a full-scope rehabilitation program, one with an interstellar reputation for discretion in helping the glitterati overcome their most egregious of vices, claiming that her son was the victim of exploitation by the Dean"s wife, and that Galina had attempted to extort money from her by threatening to go public with her son"s gambling and carousing.

Zenaida barely escaped having to resign.

She looked across the room at Fadeyka, wondering what to do with him now, after this latest fiasco. “What in God"s name is it going to take?!” she roared at him.

“Karl, get your plucky a*s over here! I need 0.5 cc"s of HCL stat!” Yulia Glushenko looked across the crime lab, which buzzed with activity, the cases in Kiev nonstop. Six technicians like her worked at evacuhoods that siphoned off noxious gasses. Between the six technicians, there was but one titraclone.

Karl looked up from a culture he was leaning over. He tucked an ampoule—looking like nothing more than a perky female breast—back into his shirt. “Here I come, Yulia!” He lumbered over toward her, barely able to fit between workstations.

She was analyzing tissue samples from a crime scene, and may have isolated a fragment of metal that looked like flakes from a rusty old hatchet. A literal hatchet job on the victim. Yulia shook her head, having seen the perfectly triangular punctures in the skull.

Karl walked over. “HCL, 0.5 cc"s,” he repeated, as per protocol. The titraclone wore a slotted allsuit, and between slits, soft round breasts were visible, nearly twenty of them covering Karl"s chest from chin to navel. Stitched into the fabric beside each slit was the name of the chemical compound in that mammary. Karl reached into the slit labeled HCL and pulled out a breast, leaned into the hood and squeezed. Glowing numbers near the teat crept up to point-five, and he pulled back, wiping the n****e and tucking it back into the slit. “There you go.”

“You took god damn forever. Hustle, man, hustle!” She slapped his behind to send him over to her colleague, who was calling for a mil of ammonium nitrate. “Can"t get a decent titraclone these days, I swear!”