The Proteus Manuscript

Calle Dybedahl

Chapter One: Library

"You mean you actually, physically go to a workplace?" the annoying git said.
Elena speared another piece of bacon on her fork. It was cooked too soft. Elena liked her bacon fried so hard that it crumbled rather than bent when one pressed on it. This one didn't. The fork just went through it, and the bacon stayed in one piece. Elena sighed. This was what happened when your usual breakfast place was closed for redecoration and you had to eat somewhere else. You didn't get the food like you wanted it and annoying gits tried to talk to you before you'd got properly caffeinated.
"Yeah," she said. "I go to an actual workplace."
Elena had taken a seat by the greasy counter, and the annoying git had taken the one next to her. Like most people, he looked like he was in his early thirties. In this part of town maybe he actually was. Not everybody could afford proper antiagathics, after all. His skin was almost as pale as Elena's, and his crew-cut hair was blonde.
"Amazing," he said. "I thought nobody did that any more. Doesn't it get dull, going to the same place every day?"
"I like predictable," she said.
"I don't think I could ever do that," the git said.
"Really," Elena said. "So where do you go?"
Suddenly he looked embarrassed. Elena sipped her coffee.
"Well, you know, it's kind of hard to choose..."
"Local sports bar to watch the games with your mates?" she suggested.
He turned away from her and suddenly got very interested in the spot of wall behind the counter where the menu was projected.
"Why don't they have any naan?" he said. "This place never has any naan!"
Elena looked at him.
"It's a traditional American place," she said. "Naan is English."
He mumbled something she couldn't hear, but that she doubted was very polite. Feeling a bit more cheerful than before, she quickly finished off her bacon and drank the coffee. It tasted foul, just like it should. She touched her card to the counter and authorized payment with a decent tip, then nodded towards the woman behind the counter and left the diner.

Elena worked at the North Atlantis University Library. It wasn't high-paying or glamorous work, and unlike most jobs it required her to actually show up in an office at least three days a week. She usually went there every day. As she'd told the annoying git, she liked predictable. She liked stable. Safe. The NAU Library qualified for all three. Situated on an artificial island in the middle of the north Atlantic, it still after a century and a half hadn't managed to breed any noticeable domestic trouble. It was a well-known haven for information storage and processing, and its one university was famous for its infotech contributions.
Which mostly made their library quite redundant. What use is a dedicated information storage and retrieval department in an entire institution dedicated to it? All the fast-paced, important stuff happened out in the institutions. The library got to handle the stuff that wasn't interesting enough for anybody else to want it. Keeping up database subscriptions. Handling details of mutual access agreements with other institutions. Making sure old stuff stayed accessible to modern equipment.
And sometimes very occasionally, they got too handle actual physical books.
"Inter-library loan?" Elena said. "What the hell is an inter-library loan?"
"Some sad librarian you are," Jocelyn said. "It's a loan from another library to someone here via us."
"A loan of what?"
Jocelyn was a striking woman on her early sixties, with deep black hair and olive skin. She'd worked at the NAU Library longer than anyone else still there, and for all the Elena knew she might have worked there since it was founded. She fit into the place like a fish into water, moving among its stacks of memory banks in a way that made it look like she wouldn't really notice if she suddenly went blind. She'd still navigate among them just as easily. Elena had never seen her go into the carefully environment-controlled paper storage, but she guessed Jocelyn knew her way around in there just as well.
"A book, of course," Jocelyn said.
"No shit?" Elena said. "Somebody sent an actual book around?"
"Yeah. It's for someone in the crypto department."
They were sitting in what passed for a reception area, which was just the part of the office closest to the outside door. Jocelyn's desk faced outwards, so she could see and deal with the few people who came to visit them. It almost happened every month that they had a visitor.
"Crypto department," Elena said. "That's in Heraklion Street, isn't it? It's only a couple of blocks from where I live, I can drop it off there on my way home."
"Fine by me," Jocelyn said. "Don't forget to have them sign for it."
She handed the package over to Elena. It was quite heavy, roughly square with a side as long as Elena's lower arm, a full handspan thick and well wrapped in impact-protection plastic. The plastic was thoroughly scratched and looked like it really had made a difference to the contents.
"What happened to this thing?" Elena said. "And where does is come from anyway?"
"Didn't ask," Jocelyn said. "Wait a moment..."
She looked briefly at her projection screen. Her eyebrows rose in surprise.
"Neptune," she said. "It's from some kind of corporate research station orbiting Neptune."
She frowned. "Why the hell are we doing inter-library loans with a corporation?" she asked.
"Beats me," Elena said. "Who brought a book to sodding Neptune anyway? It must have cost a fortune to get it there. Or is it some kind of modern replica thing?"
"Don't ask me, ask the crypto geeks who loaned it," Jocelyn said. "They should know."
"I think I will," Elena said. She headed for her own desk.
"Let me know what you find?"
"Sure," Elena said. "As soon as I find something."

"Hi there," the letter began. "Sorry for not being in touch for so long. Things got kind of crazy by the end there, you know."
Jeraldine read the opening lines over and over again. They still didn't make any kind of sense. She looked down towards the end of the letter, where it said "with endless love, Rose."
She ran a finger along the screen, as if the feel of its rough polymer would make things make more sense. But it didn't. It just looked like a dark-skinned finger against a white projection surface.
She checked the signature again, even though she'd already done so several times. It still checked out OK. The letter really was signed with Rose's key. Sure, it was possible to fake a signature, but you pretty much had to be a government or multinational in order to afford the equipment for it. And why would any of them fake a letter to a lowly freelance investigator? If they wanted her to do anything it'd be much easier and cheaper just to hire her!
But the letter must be fake. It couldn't be from Rose, because Rose was eight years dead. Of that, Jeraldine was very sure. They'd been together, late in the war, outside their ship repairing an antenna when they got attacked by a Baseline autonomous drone. The thing went for the ship's hull, of course. People in non-combat spacesuits ranked very low to its target selection algorithms. Such a human wouldn't be a threat to it, and pretty much dead anyway once their ship was disabled. So the drone went for the ship. It was just plain bad luck for Rose that one of the drone's kinetic kill missiles took the way to the hull through her chest.
Seeing that from an arm's length away left very little doubt. Rose was dead, no question about it.
So what the heck was she doing suddenly sending letters eight years after she died? A letter asking for help, too. Help that didn't particularly make sense, on top of it all.
Jeraldine got up from her chair and started to pace. Ten steps from the desk to the door, across the expensive hand-knit Persian rug and past the reproduction if Battino's painting of the Mars landing. Kind of trite, but she liked it. Turn left, and twelve steps from the door to the window. Like many others on North Atlantis, she had a sea view. In fact, all of her view was sea. She'd have to lean out the window to be able to see the wall of the building she lived in, or the walls of the ones next to it. There was a five-meter or so strip of land between the house and the sea, but from up on the twenty-second floor it was kind of hard to tell. Occasionally, seagulls would land on her windowsill.
Even more occasionally, she'd leave the window open and use the gulls for target practice when they landed. Or just flew past.
Turn left, another ten paces and she was back at the desk. The screen was thumbtacked to the wall. She'd been meaning to get a proper frame for it ever since she moved in, but somehow she never got around to it. She knew it wasn't good for the circuits, and you could see some stress distortion near the corners, but she'd got used to it. In a way she even liked it. It made it her screen rather than just a screen.
And right now it had an impossible letter on it.
An upload, perhaps? An infospace copy of her old lover's mind. Rose had intended to get one made, and there had been opportunities for her to do it. But if there was an infomorph of Rose around, why hadn't it made itself known to Jeraldine? Sure, infomorphs weren't exactly popular since the war, but there were plenty of places where they were legal and could live in peace. Even if she'd been hiding, it didn't seem reasonable that it'd take her eight years to get a simple message out. Although the message now hinted that she was somehow trapped...
Jeraldine sighed. She wished she could forget this. That she could just leave it be and get on with the life she'd built for herself after the war. But she couldn't. Particularly not if it involved Rose. Sure, they hadn't been lovers for some time when Rose died, but they'd still been good friends and important to each other. She couldn't just leave this without at least finding out what was going on.
She downloaded the letter to her wearables and put her leather coat on. It was a bit too warm for a coat, really, but she felt much too naked without all the equipment hidden in it. The North Atlantis University was some way away, so she'd probably want to take a taxi. Once she got to the campus, the University's systems should guide her to the library. She'd been on campus many times before, but never to the library, so that'd be a first. She hoped it'd be obvious what she needed to do once she got there. "Get the book," the letter said. "You must get the book. The book can set us free."

The black truck floated silently along the street behind the NAU campus. It crept forward at less than walking pace, badly annoying the cars that wanted to travel the street at a more normal vehicle speed. It travel all along the rear edge of the University, turned the corner and kept moving just as slowly down the next edge. A keen observer who tagged along might have noticed that it was accompanied by three vans, also black, that moved around more rapidly and quite randomly, but never strayed more than a block away from the truck. Eventually, the large vehicle pulled in to the side of the road and settled on the ground.
Inside the truck, three people were sitting in front of equipment racks. A handful more were sitting in seats near the rear doors, waiting. They as well as the ones by the equipment were safely strapped to their seats. A stern-looking woman were pacing up and down the length of the truck. All of the people in the truck wore black uniforms. The ones waiting near the door also wore black face-covering helmets and held assault rifles.
"Any sign yet?" the stern-looking woman said.
"Yes, sir," a young man said. He had a number of wires leading from the rack in front of him to a socket in his neck. "We have definite sign of quantum-construct interference in building seven."
"Can you be a little more precise? That's a fucking office block, it'd take days to search."
"We're working on it, major," the woman at the rack next to the young man's said.
"Can't you work on it faster?" the major said.
"No," the third technician said. Like the other two, she was jacked into her equipment.
"We're trying to trace very subtle signals," she continued. "The object has to be more or less stationary for several hours to give us anything detectable, and even then we can't get much closer than thirty meters within a reasonable time."
The major sighed.
"Just let me know the moment you have something," she said.
"Certainly, sir," the first technician said.

Usually, the library staff had plenty of work to do. The actual research staff never thought so, of course, since they were convinced that they did the only worthwhile work in the University. But if not for the people arranging access for them to the material and resources they needed, they wouldn't be doing much. Occasionally, it bothered Elena that her colleagues didn't get the kind of appreciation they deserved. But only occasionally. Most days, she just didn't care, and neither did the colleagues.
And some days there just wasn't anything much to do. All the subscriptions ran smoothly, nobody made any last-minute requests, nothing unusual came in. On those days, they'd take turns leaving early. Somebody had to be there just in case something after all did happen, but not all of them. So it came as no great surprise to Elena when Jocelyn yelled at her to piss off for the rest of the day, nor did she have to shout it twice. Elena took the book package under her arm and left.
She liked the NAU campus. It was modern enough to be comfortable at the same time as it was old enough to feel settled. The people who designed it had known that humans require some variety in their environment, so in spite of the fact that the entire university rested on ground that floated on top of Elena didn't know how many kilometers of water the ground she walked on looked quite natural. It had hills, lawns, trees, flower-beds and all the other kinds of things proper ground should have. There were even a few large rocks sticking out of the soil. On a sunny and warm late afternoon like this they made perfect things to lean against and sit in the shadow of for tired students. Of which there was plenty. There was also plenty of more energetic student, who spent their energy running around the lawns throwing things to each other. The majority of them weren't dressed in much at all, only shorts or bikinis.
Elena considered this an unofficial perk of the job. Even though all the students she'd met so far, though nice and intelligent people, were painfully naïve and immature and really not what she'd consider relationship material, just ogling their toned young bodies made her feel happier and kept her libido active.
She left the campus area and walked out into the city proper. It, too, was nice, for a city of several million people. Which wasn't saying much, really. It had dirty streets, heavy crowds, homeless people, crime and all those other things all cities seemed to be perpetually fighting. Of course, it also had nice people, theaters, shops, restaurants, nightclubs and bars.
Particularly bars. North Atlantis was mildly famous for having more bars per inhabitant than any other place north of the equator and inside the Earth's atmosphere. And in only a few more blocks Elena would be walking past one of her favourite ones. She woke her wearables and messaged Sona.
"Out and about at this time of day?" Sona said when she answered. "Did they finally fire you, or have you just escaped their nefarious clutches?"
"Once again, I have escaped them," Elena said. "Care to join me for a celebratory drink or nine?"
"Got one more patient to see before I can leave," Sona said. "I'll be down in about an hour."
"I'll be at Ramon's Loss," Elena said. "The nice table in the rear corner, if I can get it."
"Ramon'll let you have it just so that he won't have to have your ugly mug near the windows," Sona said.
"Fine by me," Elena said. "I'm not afraid to use the talents nature gave me. See you there."
"Sure thing," Sona said and closed the connection. Elena walked on towards the bar.

"Which part of the university?" the taxi said when they got close enough for it to matter.
"Not sure, really," Jeraldine said. "Do you know where the university library is?"
"Of course I do," the taxi said. "It's towards the back, near Plato Park."
The thing sounded almost offended that she'd questioned its professional skills.
"Sorry," she said. "I don't use taxis very much. I meant no offense."
"Well, you know, it might not help that much if you did ride a lot," it said. "Some other taxi companies that I could mention just don't bother to buy more than the basic street-map databases for their cars. So no apology needed, ma'am. Just pointing out a fact."
"So you've got a heftier database?" she asked, just to make conversation. Outside the window, the city kept passing by.
"Sure do," the taxi said. "With live updates direct from the North Atlantis planning office, so I know about map changes before they happen!"
"Does it cover the university?"
"Sure does."
"Could I have a copy of just that bit? It'd be really useful. I need to get somewhere there quickly and I don't know my way around."
The taxi fell silent for a while. It even seemed to slow down a bit, although that might just as well have been a simple request from Traffic Control.
"Well, you know," the taxi said after a while. "That ain't quite kosher."
"I can pay," Jeraldine said.
"Now that would definitely be illegal," the taxi said. "No way I can do that. I'd lose my license, and then what would I do?"
There seemed to be some kind of traffic problem a bit up the street, because they were slowing down even more and she could hear cars honking in the distance.
"Never mind then," she said. "But maybe if I give you a generous tip you could help me find my way in some other fashion?"
"Maybe I could," the taxi said. "You never know."
Slowly, they made their way past a large black truck parked at the side of the road. Jeraldine frowned.
"That's weird," she said.
"What's weird?" the taxi said.
She point back the way they'd just come.
"That truck," she said. "It looked like a military urban assault vehicle with the external gun mounts removed and the entire thing painted black."
"Eh," the taxi said. "Just leftovers from the war. I see a lot of that around. People buy them cheap and rebuild them just enough to get them approved for road use. Stupid thing was probably standing there because it had broken down."
"Maybe you're right," Jeraldine said. And maybe you're really not, she thought. That wasn't war surplus, that was way newer than that. But what would something like that be doing here?
"How far are we from the library?" she said. It didn't feel like much of a stretch to think that the unusual thing might be connected to the impossible thing.
"Very close," the taxi said. "Just next block, on the left side."
In an alley to the right a black van with no brand name on it was parked. A couple of blocks ahead, another one just like it made a U-turn and headed back towards the truck. Jeraldine turned around and looked back the way they'd come. A couple of blocks behind the truck she saw a third black van.
Right. Her long-dead girlfriend suddenly send her a letter asking her to pick a book at the library, and when she gets to the library it's being watched by an urban assault team. Somehow, she couldn't bring herself to think that it was coincidence.
"I'll get off right here, if you don't mind," she said.
"You sure?" the taxi said. "It's just one more block."
"I'm sure," she said. "Although I'd appreciated it if you could give me directions to the library reception desk."
"Riiight," the taxi said. "I see. Of course I can do that. If you'll just authorize payment for the trip and set a suitable system to receive, please."
She set her wearable to take and quarantine whatever the taxi wanted to send her.
"How much is it?" she asked.
"Didn't I say?" the taxi said. "Sorry 'bout that. 5 pounds fifty, please."
"Five fifty! That's daylight robbery!"
"I can see how it might look that way, true. But I'd like to point out that I took you here along the time-optimal route with an absolute minimum of delay and discomfort."
"Those database updates aren't cheap, you know," it added as an afterthought.
She couldn't help laughing. At least the thing did its fleecing with style. She beamed it fifty quid, in the hope that it'd remember their earlier conversation about a copy of the database.
"Thanks muchly, ma'am," the taxi said. "Here's the instructions she asked for."
She watched in silence as a major amount of data transfered to her wearable. A brief look showed that it indeed was a three-dimensional map of North Atlantis, of a level of detail that she'd never seen before. A level of detail that would be very useful to a private investigator like herself, and that would become outdated relatively quickly.
"That looks excellent," she said. "I'll remember you address, in case I want to make use of your fabulous service again."
"Happy to have been of service, ma'am," it said. "Have a nice day."
Jeraldine stepped out of the taxi, and it slowly moved away down the street. So what now? The assault team, whoever they were, seemed to be waiting for something. Possibly for someone to show up and try to fetch something, like a book. In which case it would be unwise for her to do so. Or they might be waiting for something to happen at a certain time, in which case it would be wise to get the book before that something happened. Jeraldine sighed. Choices...
She'd never been any good at waiting.
She looked through the taxi's map for an alternative entrance to the library, just in case the assault team was waiting for a six-foot-plus black woman with long active multicolored hair to walk in the door. It was hard to find one, since the university wasn't exactly built with security in mind. Doing her best impression of someone who knew exactly where she was going, she walked in through the nearest door. Like most buildings at this end of the university, it was an office block more than a hundred years old. Which was kind of nice, since that meant that the rooms mostly stayed put. Made it far easier to make a useful passive map. Like the one Jeraldine now had.
She followed the map through several underground walkways, turning at the crossings as the map indicated. She probably could've made it even without the map if she'd known about the entrance, since there were signs pointing towards the library at several places. But it would almost certainly have taken longer, and in any case it was nice to know that the map seemed to be accurate. She'd really have to do business with that taxi again, if it really could keep providing up-to-date maps like this. Hell, who knew? Selling those might be what it really made a living out of.

"Sir?"
The major turned to the soldier who had spoke. It was the woman at the closest electronics rack.
"Yes?"
"Building seven, tenth floor, most probably in the room just north of the central stairwell. 90% probability that the object has spent more than nine of the past ten hours there. Building map data mark the location as the university library's reception area."
The major nodded. She touched a little stud fastened to her collar.
"All teams, status report," she said.
"Bravo team standing by," a voice said from nowhere in particular.
"Bravo team, you enter building seven through its front entrance and secure the stairwell and lifts from there to level ten."
"Understood."
"Charlie team standing by," another voice said.
"Charlie team, you go in via the roof and secure the stairwell and lifts from there down to level ten."
"Understood."
"Delta team standing by and monitoring," a third voice said.
"How are we doing for police interference?" the major asked.
"None so far," the voice replied. "We have signal breakers in place, and the local police isn't very efficient. We should have at least fifteen minutes from when we break contact with Traffic Control until somebody shows up to investigate. Might be less if we do something highly noticeable, but probably not much less even then."
"Delta team, stay where you are and keep monitoring. If the police shows up before we're done, slow them down to give us time to extract."
"Understood."
She touched the stud again.
"Driver, take us in ass-end first through the tenth-floor wall right in front of the stairwell. Team, be ready to get out and secure that library the moment we're standing still."
A short chorus of "Understood" came from the people in the truck. The major sat down in a free seat and strapped herself in. She touched the stud on her collar.
"Go," she said.

Elena was well into her third drink when Sona finally showed up.
"Sorry I'm late," she said. "Complication. Took longer than planned.
Elena shrugged.
"That happens," she said. "Nice to see you."
Ramon's Loss was a smallish place in a back alley that served basic food and decent alcohol. It had little to recommend to the casual observer. It just happened to be the place where Elena had met with her friends for almost as long as they'd lived on North Atlantis.
"Nice to see you too," Sona said. She and Elena had been lovers for a couple of years, and somehow had managed to stay friends after the relationship died. Elena had no idea how, so she suspected it must be Sona's doing. Sona always was the wiser of them.
Ramon came by and placed a pint of ale and a plate of fries in front of Sona. She smiled thanks at him.
"What's that?" she said, nodding at the package lying on the table next to Elena.
"Book," Elena said. "Going to deliver it to an off-campus university department tomorrow."
"A book?" Sona said. "You mean an actual real-life paper and stuff book?"
"Yeah," Elena said. "It's not that extraordinary, we have a whole bunch of them at the library."
"I've never seen one," Sona said. "Can I have a look?"
Elena thought about it. There didn't seem to be any harm in it. The seals on the package were all intact, so it probably hadn't been opened on its way here, which was an argument for letting it be. On the other hand, she worked for the university library. It was her job to properly catalogue and keep track of all books that got sent to them. Particularly physical ones. And who said she couldn't do the inspecting and making sure in her favourite bar?
"Sure," she said. "In fact, I want to see it too."
"Where does it come from?" Sona asked.
"Right now or originally?"
"Well, both, I guess."
"Right now, from Neptune," Elena said. "Originally, I have no idea."
She carefully broke the seal on the impact plastic and unwrapped it. Inside was, as advertised, a book. It was almost as large as the package had been, and every bit as heavy. It seemed to be bound in old, worn leather, and it had nothing printed on either the cover or the spine. It looked very old.
"Wow," Sona said. "That looks like it belongs in a museum."
"I guess that's kind of what we are," Elena said. "Although I wonder what someone in the crypto department wants with this. They usually just get stuff with high-level maths and shit like that in it. This looks more like state of seventeen hundred than state of the art."
"Open it and see," Sona said. "Can't stop now, can you?"
Elena laid the book carefully in front of herself, and opened the front cover. It was heavy, even heavier than it looked. Whatever it was that the leather was glued on to, it wasn't ordinary wood or cardboard.
The front page only had a few words on it. They were in large letters, printed with a narrow and old-fashioned font. "THE PROTEUS MANUSCRIPT," it said. Under that, in smaller print, it said "A Detailed Guide to Some of the Secrets of the Universe."
"Almost full points for ego," Sona said. She'd got up from her chair and was reading over Elena's shoulder. "They lose some for the 'some'. Any decent egomaniac would've claimed that it contained all the secrets to the universe."
Elena frowned. "Does this look old to you?" she said.
"Well, yeah," Sona said. "Way old. But I don't know much about antiques, so that doesn't really mean much."
"I wonder why somebody thought it was important enough to physically drag it all they way out to Neptune," Elena said.
Sona sat back down and ate a couple of fries.
"Sentimental value?" she suggested between bites.
"I guess," Elena said. She turned the page, and suddenly her entire world turned brilliant white.

The central stairwell of the library building was spacious and well-lit. There as a staircase winding its way around a big central shaft, in the middle of which two lifts were placed. On every story, a kind of bridge reached from the lifts to the staircase and the entrances to the various levels. The architect, whoever it was, had chosen to make the bridges out of near-invisible transparent material. Which certainly added to the well-lit and the spacious, but it also gave everybody using the lifts for the first time a good scare when they were just about to step out of the lift and looked down at many, many stories of nothing but air. Not that Jeraldine had any problems with heights, born and raised in an O'Neill colony as she was, but it did startle her at first. She thought dark thoughts about architects trying to make a name for themselves as she walked over it and through the library door.
The library, or at least its reception room, looked just like your average office. Desks, chairs, food maker, faded old prints on the walls. The room was empty of people, but for one desk that had a middle-aged or so woman sitting behind it. She looked up when Jeraldine entered.
"Good afternoon," she said. "Can I help you with something?"
"I don't know," Jeraldine said. "I think I'm here to pick up a book, but I don't know what it looks like, where it came from, who it was sent to or anything else about it."
The woman looked at her silence for a few moments.
"Tall order," she eventually said. She gestured towards the chair on the visitor side of her desk.
"I'm Jocelyn Hunnings," she said. "Sit down and tell me what little you do know and we'll see if we can't help you."
"Thanks," Jeraldine said. She sat down without taking her coat off.
"My name's Jeraldine Kuzia," she said. "Usually, I'm a private investigator."
"Usually?" Jocelyn said. "What are you when you're not?"
"Depends on how badly I need money," Jeraldine said. "Investigating isn't a very lucrative business. Although it's mostly bodyguard work."
"And in which capacity is it you think you're here to pick up a book?"
"Neither of those," Jeraldine said. "This morning I suddenly got a message from an old friend I thought dead. It says that she needs my help, and the way to help her is to go to the North Atlantis university library and get 'the book'."
"The book?"
"Just 'the book', yes."
"That doesn't give me much to go on," Jocelyn said. "And even if I do find something I may not be able to help you. Are you a student or employee of the university?"
"I'm aware of that," Jeraldine said. "And no, I'm not. But I thought I could at least ask, even if you're going to say no. Have you had something out of the ordinary arrive lately? Anything at all?"
Jocelyn hesitated. "Actually, there did appear an unusual book today," she said. "Where..."
Her voice was drowned by a terrible noise from outside. It sounded like a wall had come crashing down, and it didn't stop.
Jeraldine got up from her chair.
"Do you have a rear exit?" she shouted, to make herself heard over the din.
Jocelyn nodded, and Jeraldine gestured at her to lead the way. The library employee briefly looked towards the front door, from which direction the noise came, and then apparently decided that getting out was a good idea. She rose and ran towards the rear of the room. Jeraldine followed. As she ran, she pulled a small handgun from an inside pocket.
Just before they reached the rear door, the front door came crashing in. Several black-clad people wielding assault rifles came immediately after it. While Jocelyn opened their escape door, Jeraldine turned around and fired at the intruders. It was quite obvious that they were neither the police nor friendly, so she felt quite justified in trying to hurt them as much as possible.
It seemed they hadn't been quite prepared for armed resistance. Jeraldine got in a few good shots before they reacted to her, and the first two intruders fell to the floor. The one behind them started firing, wildly spraying bullets all over the room. Behind her, Jeraldine heard a grunting sound and then a creak as the door opened. She turned and ran, pushing Jocelyn ahead of her into the narrow stairwell behind the now-open door. As soon as she was through it, she pushed the door shut behind her. She hoped it was the kind that locked by itself, and with any luck it might be a fire door solid enough to stop bullets.
"I...," Jocelyn said. She fell to her knees and would've tumbled down the stairs if Jeraldine had caught her.
"Are you all right?" she asked. Before any answer came, she saw blood trickling down the steps. She felt Jocelyn shiver, and heard her breathing come fast and shallow. She looked down and saw a wet, raw hole in the woman's back.
"Shit," she said. "Hang on, let me have a look."
While still holding the wounded woman up, Jeraldine moved around to her front. If the bullet had gone through her cleanly and left a not too messy exit wound, chances were good that she'd be all right.
But it hadn't.
The exit wound was easily large enough for Jeraldine's fist to fit inside, and she could see bits of a badly ruptured lung move as Jocelyn fought for breath. Very bad. She concentrated on her wearable for a moment, getting it to send a set message and her current location to the city's emergency center. With a bit of luck, an ambulance would be waiting when she reached the bottom of the stairs. With even more luck, Jocelyn would still be alive. Jeraldine picked her up as carefully as she could.
"Just hold on," she said. "Don't try to do anything, just stay alive."
She heard gunfire from the other side of the door, and dull thuds as something solid hit it. It seemed that they didn't get through it that easily. Which gave her and Jocelyn a chance to survive. Trying not to jolt Jocelyn too badly, Jeraldine started running down the stairs. Ten stories. If the ambulance really was waiting when she got down she'd have to make up a good lie to explain how she could get down that fast while carrying a grown woman, but that was a later problem.
Jocelyn weakly grabbed her coat and tried to say something.
"Hush," Jeraldine said. "Don't talk. We'll be down and safe soon."
"Book," Jocelyn gasped. Her chest wound made nauseating bubbling sounds when she talked. "Elena... has... book."
"Right," Jeraldine said. "Elena. I hear you."
She ran down the stairs two steps at a time, concentrating on not stumbling and falling. When Jocelyn stopped breathing, it took a while before she noticed.

The major walked out of the black truck, across the debris and wreckage of the stairwell. A couple of her soldiers stood there, on guard in case someone showed up. She nodded at them as she walked past. They'd done well enough, she supposed. It was the point crew that had got sloppy, and they had paid for their mistake with their lives. She guessed that the rest of the people had now learned that just because a place sounded really safe, it might not be. Even in a place like a university library, there could be armed opposition.
The reception room was slightly less messy than the stairwell, but mostly because there was less glass in there to shatter. The corpses had been body-bagged and dragged out, but there was still plenty of blood on the floor. The major frowned. There would be more than enough forensic evidence in that to trace them down, and they didn't have anything to clean it up thoroughly enough with. They'd have to blow the place up. Sloppy.
"Well?" she said to the nearest soldier. "Do we have it?"
"No, major," she replied. "As far as we can tell, it's not here."
She sighed and touched her communicator stud.
"Science team? Tell me if it's here or not."
"It's not," the reply came.
"You're sure?"
"As sure as it's possible to be with this kind of object. They may have sent it on somewhere else. We're interrogating their systems."
"Let me now the instant you've got something."
"Yes, sir."
The major looked up and frowned. This was turning into a nice little fuckup. She didn't like fuckups. They needed hiding, and when you were in a hurry that got messy.
"Listen up," she said, and all the soldiers in the room turned towards her. "The mission is a failure. We go to coverup. I want there to be enough charges to demolish this entire floor and three more above and below it, and I want them to be placed and ready to blow when Science are through sifting through the library computers. Questions?"
"Are we trying not to collapse the building?" a soldier said.
"No time," she replied. "Just place the charges for maximum damage. Anything else?"
There was nothing else.
"All right, then," she said. "Get to work."
She paced the room while they set the place up to be destroyed. Behind the librarians' desks, there were rows and rows of carefully sealed and environment-controlled storage containers for old paper books. The major didn't see the point of keeping them like that. Surely it must be easier, cheaper and more convenient just to scan them and keep them online? Come to think of it, they probably were scanned and online, and all this was just a sign of either redundancy gone too far or nostalgia bordering on the insane. No matter which, she wouldn't lose any sleep over having destroyed them. They were obsolete, a useless relic from times gone past.
"Major, this is Science," a voice said in her ear.
"Go ahead," she said.
"The package was scheduled for delivery to an off-campus university site," the voice said. "It left here a couple of hours ago. Most likely it arrived at the other location quite shortly after that, but that information is not logged in the library system."
"Should it be?"
"Yes. Judging from past entries, it's not uncommon for deliveries not to be properly entered until the day after they arrive."
"Right. Do we have the location of this other site?"
"We do."
The major turned her stud to all-points.
"All groups, return to vehicles immediately," she said. "We proceed to secondary target."
A minute later, the black truck flew out of the hole in the tenth-floor wall. After a little while three black vans joined it from different directions. Flying in formation, they sped across the city. Behind them, gouts of flame suddenly sprouted from the seventh to thirteenth floors of the university library building. It didn't take long for the higher floors to collapse and take the lower ones with them.

"Elena? Can you hear me?"
Someone was saying strange things to her. Not only that, someone was also prying her eyelid open and shining a bright light straight into her eyes. She tried to push the light away.
"Oh, good," someone said. "Welcome back."
The someone was Sona, she realized. She herself was Elena. And she was lying down on something hard and uncomfortable. The great-grandmother of all headaches was threatening to split her head into a gazillion pieces.
"What the hell happened?" she asked.
"The book flashed, you screamed and then you passed out," Sona said. "How are you feeling? Your pupils are reacting a bit weird."
Elena tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea brought her back down.
"Not so good," she said. "My head is killing me, and my back hurts. And I want to throw up."
Sona turned her lamp off and put it back in her pocket.
"Your back hurts how?" she asked.
"Like someone hit me with a bat all along my spine," Elena said. She frowned. "How did I manage to fall like that?"
"You didn't," Sona said. "You fell forward over the book. I and Ramon moved you to the floor so I could get a better look at you."
"Then why is my back hurting?"
"I'm not a neuro specialist," she said, "but my patients tend to be the more well-off kind, so I see a lot. And I've seen before what your eyes are doing right now. Your vision is kind of fuzzy, right?"
"Yeah," Elena said. "Like one of my eyes was drunk."
"And along the inside of your spine is where the military surgeons put your implants, isn't it? Nice and protected, nothing much else in the way and plenty of access to the central nervous system."
Elena looked at Sona. "You think it fucked up my implants," she said.
"Fucked up implants are where I've seen that thing with the eyes before," Sona said. "Although to be honest, that was implants that got fucked up by drugs, mostly."
"How could an old book possibly do that?" Elena said.
"Not my department," Sona said. "Is the pain decreasing, increasing or staying the same?"
Elena did another attempt at sitting up. This time she made it with only minor nausea.
"Decreasing," she said. "If it keeps up like this I'll be fine in five minutes. Vision's better too."
Sona brought out her lamp again and shone it into Elena's eyes.
"Be still!" she barked when Elena tried to look away from the bright light.
"It does seem to be getting better," she said. "Maybe it just did something temporary to your nervous system. Although I couldn't even begin to guess what."
Elena started to get up, but it became obvious that it wasn't a good idea even before she'd got her ass off the floor, so she sank back down. The floor was hard and none too clean. At least it wasn't sticky, the way it could get late Saturday nights.
"Hey, Elena!" Ramon shouted from over by the bar. "Don't you work at the university library?"
"Yeah," she shouted back. She winced as something invisible and intangible drove an ice pick through her head. Or at least it felt like something did.
"News says it just blowed up," Ramon said.
"What do you mean blew up?" Sona said.
"Just that, toots," Ramon said. "Blowed up. Went boom. Fell down. Check for yourselves if you don't believe me."
Elena concentrated for a moment, to activate her implanted transceiver and point it at her favourite news site. Sona turned on her wearable.
"About half an hour ago, a terrible explosion destroyed seven floors of the North Atlantis university library," the site's speaker voice said. Along with the voice came pictures showing the smoking ruins of the library building. There wasn't much left but a huge pile of rubble. Fire engines hovered around it, spraying still smoking places with water and, presumably, looking for survivors.
"Jocelyn," Elena said. "Jocelyn was in there."
"I'll ask the hospital system if they have anything on her," Sona said.
"Thanks."
"So far there are no firm reports on the number of killed and wounded," the speaker said. "But preliminary reports indicate at least fifty wounded and ten dead at this site. We will..."
"Stop," Elena thought at her implant. "Search for other site."
The speaker's voice came on again. "Fifteen minutes after the explosion at the North Atlantis university library, another university department suffered an almost identical fate. A devastating explosion on the ground floor of the cryptography department's building in Heraklion Street caused that building too to collapse. Fortunately this building is much smaller, and was at the time almost empty of people. Emergency services currently estimate only two dead and one wounded here."
The picture showed another smoking pile of rubble, smaller and in the middle of a residential street. Here too fire engines hovered about.
"Search for cause," Elena thought.
"As yet the cause of the explosions isn't known," the speaker said. "Initial speculations about some kind of drastic equipment failure were dropped when the second detonation was reported, and the police are now treating this as a deliberate attack on the university by persons unknown. Rumors of a black truck and several black vans being seen flagrantly violating traffic control in the area shortly before the explosions reinforce this view, although those observations have not yet been confirmed."
"Damn," Sona said. "Who would do something like that? And why?"
"I don't know," Elena said. "But the crypto department was were I was supposed to take the book. Did the hospital have anything on Jocelyn?"
Sona looked at Elena, then at the book. It lay there on the counter, closed again, looking as solid and normal as could be.
"It must be a coincidence," she said. "They can't have blown up two buildings just because of that book. And the hospital system says that Jocelyn Hunnings is currently in an ambulance on its way to the emergency ICU."
Elena visibly relaxed at the news.
"So why did somebody blow them up?" she said. "And what did that book just do to me?"
"Maybe it was two accidents that just happened to happen at the same time."
"Yeah," Elena said. "Because we keep so much explosive stuff at the library."
She grabbed the book and wrapped it up in the impact plastic again.
"I want Karri to take a look at my implants," she said. "You coming?"
Sona nodded.

Jeraldine sat on the curb near the collapsed building, looking at it. It brought back bad memories, and the blood on her didn't make it any better. She shook her head and tried to force the memories away. That was long ago, that was wartime. This was...
Well, she wasn't at all sure what this was. Somebody had blown the hell out of that building. Somebody in a pretty new urban assault vehicle. And somebody had wanted something from the library, or they'd never have bothered to send in the people with the guns. They'd just have bombed it from a distance.
"Excuse me?" somebody said.
Jeraldine looked up. An guy in a dirty and bloodied EMT uniform was standing a few steps from her.
"Are you the one who carried that wounded woman out?" he said.
She nodded.
"How is she?" she asked.
"Really bad," he said. "There may be enough intact brain left to do something, but we don't know yet. I just wanted to ask, do you know what caused that chest wound?"
"No," she lied. "Why?"
"Well, it doesn't look like anything that could be caused by a collapsing building. In fact, it looks quite a bit like a gunshot wound."
"Really?" Jeraldine said. "That's strange, isn't it?"
"Sure is," he said. "Look, the police may want to talk to you about it, so please stay around, will you?"
She nodded. "Sure thing," she said. "I'll be right here."
Just to be on the safe side she waited until he was well out of sight before she got up and vanished into the nearest alley. She had no intention of talking to any police if she could avoid it, and she'd go to considerable length to manage the avoiding. They'd probably figure out the thing about the soldiers and the assault vehicle anyway, from forensics and camera data.
As soon as she could, she went into a low-class bar and borrowed their dirty and evil-smelling bathroom. In front of the cracked mirror, she washed away the blood as well as she could. Jocelyn had bled copiously while she carried her, and her arms were drenched in blood up to her elbows. The coat was self-cleaning and would be as good as new in half an hour, but her blouse was another mother. Thankfully, it was red to begin with, so the stains on the front didn't show much. The arms, though, were a complete loss. She'd never be able to get enough of the half-dried blood out for them to either be comfortable or look even halfway decent. Rather than try, she fished a knife out of a coat pocket and converted the blouse to short-sleeved.
That would have to do. If the police started asking people about here, she'd be remembered no matter how clean she was. Her combination of height, near-black skin, oriental features and long, variably multicolored hair made her kind of hard to forget. The long leather coat didn't make her any more forgettable, but at least she could change the color of that one as she wished. The hair, on the other hand, just reacted to her moods.
She sighed. The hair had seemed like a good idea at the time. It was still better than keeping her natural color, but she wished she'd had the sense to get something more controllable. At the moment, streaks of electric blue chased each other on a deep-black background. A sure sign that she was upset, if she hadn't already figured that out.
Deciding that she wasn't going to get any cleaner, and that being wet was better than touching the towel that hung from a nail driven into the wall, she put her coat back on and left the bar. As she walked aimlessly down the street, she tried to think.
She couldn't for a moment believe that what had happened at the library was unrelated to the letter from Rose. Sure coincidences sometimes did happen -- but two so incredibly unlikely events on the same day and relating to the same place? That was something other than coincidence, and she wanted very badly to find out what. People had been shooting at her, and that always made her cranky.
Near the end, Jocelyn had said something about a book. It seemed safe to assume that she wouldn't have said it unless it somehow related to what she and Jeraldine had been talking about before they got so violently interrupted. So that was a lead. She'd said that Elena had the book. But which Elena? Probably someone familiar to Jocelyn, since she only mentioned the first name. Jeraldine activated her wearable and contacted the university's public information bank. It didn't take long to find a public contact list for the library, with names and pictures. One of them was a very attractive blonde woman by the name of Elena Arden.
Bingo.
She found a park bench and sat down on it. Walking around while concentrating on finding information over the net was a sure recipe for banging into things, which would look silly and probably be painful. Safely not moving, she brought out all her investigator's tools and tried to find out everything she could about Elena Arden.

The truck that had until recently been black sped down the highway to Port Critias, just one of many vehicles heading there. It moved along safely guided by Traffic Control, carefully not doing anything that might look unusual or out of the ordinary. Occasionally, police cruisers flew by over them.
"No, sir, it was a complete failure," the major said. A lead went from the one remaining equipment rack to the communicator stud on her collar.
"I'm aware of that, sir," she said. "We're extracting now. The city is too hot to keep the vehicles there at the moment. We'd be spotted and apprehended within hours."
She sat in a seat bolted to the wall next to the rack, well strapped in. In front the rack sat the woman who'd sat there before. At the moment, she wasn't plugged in. She was holding a pack of cards, with which she was practicing sleights of hand.
"Of course we're not giving up," the major said. "I've left a team in the city with enough equipment to trace the object. Before sunrise they should be able to say if the object is still in the city and, if it's being reasonably stationary, where."
At the back of the truck, by the exit doors, the ground team sat. Two of their seats were empty, and black ribbons had been tied across them. The surviving team members were passing a bottle and a joint back and forth.
"I know it's very important, sir," the major said. "But you must realize that with an object of this nature incredible coincidences and other probabilistic anomalies are entirely to be expected."
The major rolled her eyes as the person on the other end of the connection spoke.
"Yes, sir," she said. "Of course, sir."
She pulled the lead free from the communicator stud.
"I really don't like this," she said to nobody in particular. The science team member raised an eyebrow at her.
"Truck?" the major said.
"Yes?" the truck said. The voice came from the dashboard.
"We're skipping the ferry," she said. "As soon as convenient, turn off the road and head for Rotterdam."
"Yes, sir," the truck said.
A little while later, the truck turned off the highway onto a smaller road. A kilometer later the small road reached the coast and turned south.
The truck kept going straight, speeding east towards the Netherlands.

Chapter 2: Book

Karri Bozych's apartment tried to look like it was a converted loft. It was a loft, in that it was highest up under the roof of the building. But it had never been converted from anything. The very high ceiling and visible roof beams had been put there by the architect for aesthetic reasons alone. Karri liked it because she could hang equipment from the beams.
"Wow," Sona said when she and Elena entered. "I've never seen so many machines in a home before."
She thought about what she'd just said. There was a bed in a corner and something like a kitchen in another, but the entire place looked like no other apartment she'd ever been to.
"This is your home, right?" she said. "Elena said we were going to your place, so I assumed."
Karri herself was a short, wiry and sharp-faced woman. She was dressed in worn old combat fatigue pants and a t-shirt with "EGOTECH" printed on the front. Her dark hair was cut short in a way that left no doubt that she kept it that way to keep it out of the way rather than for style reasons.
"Yeah, it's my home," she said.
"Wow," Sona said. "You sure have a lot of... stuff."
Elena was leaning against a big machine of some indeterminate kind. Her hair, which unlike Karri's was cut for style, glinted in the rays of the setting sun that shone in the large windows. The book leaned against the same machine, still wrapped in its impact plastic.
"Karri likes to fix stuff," she said. "Most of the things here she got free for carting them away."
Karri was clearing a table from clutter and placing various machines and devices around it.
"Why?" Sona said. "What are they all for?"
Karri shrugged. "Like to keep my skills up," she said.
"She was my weapons tech during the war," Elena said. "She's branched out since then and, from what I understand, makes a more than decent living from consulting as a very, very good electronics troubleshooter."
"People pay for the damnedest stuff," Karri said. "Get your shirt off and lie down."
Elena unbuttoned her blouse and hung it from the corner of the machine she'd been leaning against. Her bra soon joined it there, leaving Elena bare from the waist up. She laid down on the just-cleared table, face-down to give Karri access to her back. Karri started putting skin connectors at the gaps between her vertebrae. Sona looked on.
"I thought she had lots of fancy wireless stuff?" she asked.
"No good for diagnostics," Karri said. "Got filters."
Sona moved a stack of circuit wafers from a chair to the floor and sat down.
"Shouldn't we tell you what happened before you start grotting around?" Sona asked.
"No," Karri said. "Later."
She fastened the last connector to Elena's back and turned to the machine where all the leads joined. She took another lead from it and attached it to her own neck. A data projection flickered into life in the air before her, showing some kind of schematics that Sona didn't recognize.
"You know," Sona said. "In all our time together Elena never actually told me what it is she's got in there. I know about the wireless connection and the enormous data storage and the indexing stuff, but none of that seems like it'd be very interesting to the military."
"Interesting stuff was sealed off," Karri said.
"Sealed off?"
"There's lots more stuff in there," Elena said. "Codebreaking and intrusion stuff, mostly. Stuff they don't want ordinary civilians having easy access to. So when I got my discharge they put in blocks so I can't get at most of it any more. I can only use the data storage parts of it, which as you say aren't that interesting. Gives me a freakishly good memory if I concentrate on it, but that's about it."
"Why didn't they just take it out?" Sona said. "I mean, as long as it's still inside you there's always a risk that you'll figure out how to break the blocks, right?"
"Resource-inefficient," Karri said. She was looking intently at the projection, where columns of numbers, diagrams and drawings flew past.
"It'd take a team of surgeons a week to dig the crap out without leaving me quadriplegic," Elena said. "Putting the blocks in took one medtech an afternoon. And it was just after the war. Everybody was tired and mostly wanted to forget about it all. And most of the really good doctors had been on the Transhumanist side anyway, so there was a bit of a shortage of competent surgeons."
"I see," Sona said. Silence fell, and for a time all that could be heard was the occasional grunt or snort from Karri and the soft whirring of the air conditioner.
"So, Karri," Sona said when she couldn't stand the quiet any longer, "do you also have a lot of blocked implants?"
"No," Karri said.
"All right," Sona said, and the silence returned.
Eventually, Karri shut off the display.
"Now you tell me what happened," she said.
Elena started to get up from the table, but before she got anywhere Karri put a hand on her back and pushed her back down.
"Stay," she said. "There's weird shit here. May want to look more, or do something."
Elena grimaced.
"Great," she said. "Just what I wanted. Weird shit all along my fucking spinal column. Is it going to kill me or just leave me paralyzed?"
"Don't know," Karri said. "Might figure something out if I knew what happened."
"She got this book," Sona said. "That one over there."
She pointed at the package leaning against the machine near the door.
"She opened it to have a look," she went on, "and suddenly there was this flash. Elena screamed, although she doesn't remember that bit, and then she fell down unconscious. When she woke up, she showed clear signs of implant-related neural trauma. That's when she decided to come see you."
"How long did the flash last?" Karri asked.
Sona frowned. "How long? How should I know that? It was a flash. A fraction of a second, at most."
Karri brought up her projection display again. She looked closely at a certain diagram and the numbers surrounding it.
"Is a shitload of data in you," she said. "More than I've ever seen. About four fifths full."
Elena raised her head from the table and looked at Karri.
"What?" she said. "When did that happen? This morning it was a couple of percent!"
"Interesting, no?" Karri said. "Seems to be inert, fortunately."
She closed the display down again and started removing the connectors from Elena's back.
"But how did it get there?" Elena said. "Getting that much data in takes days."
"Guessing the flash," Karri said. "No idea how. I'll have a look at the book."
Sona, who had been silently listening to them, got up from her chair and fetched the book for Karri.
"Maybe this is a stupid question," she said as she handed it over, "but can we see what the data is? I mean, it seems reasonable that there would be plenty of hints there."
"Yes," Karri said. "Elena can do that."

There turned out to be a whole lot to find out about the good Elena Arden, so after a while Jeraldine got up from the bench and walked over to sit in a café instead. She thought better on a bellyful of coffee in any case. Coffee and something laden with sugar and fat.
Safely ensconced in a huge overstuffed chair and with an equally huge mug of steaming black liquid within arm's reach, she sank back into the less physical world. Her tools had been chugging along while she was gone, probing more and more obscure sources for data about Elena Arden. They had long since reached the point of diminishing returns, but you never knew. Sometimes interesting stuff showed up long after any reasonable person would've given up.
To a first look, the good Elena was a perfectly normal librarian. No, strike that. She wasn't a librarian. She didn't have the information management degree for that. She was simply a library assistant. It got a bit more interesting when a couple of public logs mentioned her knowing the entire library catalog by heart. That's what made Jeraldine keep looking after she'd found what she was originally looking for, which was just where she could find this Elena and, consequently, the mysterious book. But having the entire catalog memorized? That was too far out of the ordinary to let lie. So she kept looking.
Elena had lived in North Atlantis for seven years. Before that, she had sixteen different addresses in one year. And before that her location was given as "UNHDF active service".
UNHDF.
Eight years since the war, and the mere name still made her blood boil. United Nations Humanity Defense Force. As if they'd been fighting something that wasn't human. If anybody in the whole mess had been inhuman, it was the UNHDF leaders who had the arrogance to unilaterally decided who was a proper human and who wasn't, and then try to kill anybody they'd branded "not human". Like Jeraldine, and Rose, and all their sisters.
The records about what Elena had done during the war were spotty and partly non-public. But the fact that she had been an officer, a lieutenant, was open, and there were a few places mentioned where she'd been in action. The rank, the places and her phenomenal memory made Jeraldine feel sure that she'd been an infocommando. A special operations soldier, part of a small team that got sent into places to infiltrate, subvert and possibly destroy the information infrastructure of the enemy.
The station were Jeraldine grew up had got its climate control subverted by infocommandos. She wasn't there at the time, but some of her sisters had been, and they'd told her about it. Over the course of a night, the temperature had fallen so low that if you spat your spit would hit the ground frozen. All the vegetation had died, including the algae in the hydroponic tanks. There was no way to get the temperature back to livable and the ecosystem restored in the little time there was before the air went stale. The station had been hastily abandoned, and the many refugees from it became one more strain on the ecologies of other stations. As far as Jeraldine knew, her old home still orbited cold and dead around Ganymede. She supposed it would keep doing so until someone decided to do something with it. Or until the systems managing the orbit or the station's Casimir engines failed, and it succumbed to all the stresses of the Jovian system, lost orbit and crashed into Ganymede.
At least Elena hadn't, according to the records, been anywhere near Jupiter during the war. She'd mostly been stationed the other way, sunwards of Earth's orbit. Probably fighting the Transhumanist research stations on Mercury.
And now, eight years after the Transhumanists lost the war, Elena was working as an assistant in a library, using her amazing implants for nothing more than keeping track of the library catalog. How the mighty does fall.
It disturbed Jeraldine very much that an ex-infocommando had possession of an object that, as far as she could tell, had been sent to herself. No matter what was in that book, it shouldn't be in the hands of the former enemy. Not if she could help it. She put the wearables to sleep, checked that her weapons were where they should be and set off for Elena's apartment.

Elena was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a large projection display, which showed what looked very much like rapidly scrolling random garbage. The sun had set behind the buildings on the other side of the street from Karri's place, and lamps now provided light. Karri had put the book inside a large machine of some kind, a machine where she had now unscrewed the covers from and was messing about with its innards. For lack of something better to do, Sona was online checking news about the explosions.
"Karri," Elena said. "You wouldn't happen to have an old crypto database, would you?"
"Box under the bed, labeled porn," Karri said.
"Sona? Please get it for me? I don't want to move unless I have to."
"Sure," Sona said. She walked over to the bed, knelt next to it and took out a box clearly labeled "pr0n" from under it.
"Way to not spell," she said. "Where do you want it?"
"There should be a silvery disk inside," Elena said. "Put that in the slot in the box next to you."
Sona did as she was told.
"Offline data storage?" she asked.
A progress bar appeared in the corner of Elena's display and began to fill up.
"That stuff is kind of illegal for civilians to own," Elena said. "So Karri's being careful."
"Illegal? But you said it was crypto stuff?"
"It is. Transhumanist crypto stuff from the war."
"Oh."
The progress bar reached its end, and Elena concentrated again. Sona put the box back under the bed.
She'd known that Elena had fought in the war almost from the first time they met. But it had been a long time before Elena was willing to talk about her wartime experiences at all, and she still avoided details. When she first talked about it at all, it was only as an explanation for her recurring nightmares. Sona knew that she'd been some sort of special operations soldier and an officer. She knew that she'd received many implants of some rare and special kind, only the most basic of which she still had the use of. And she knew that Karri Bozych and Nolan Polselli were the only two surviving members of Elena's old team. She didn't know how large the team had been originally, only that it had been larger than three. Over time, she'd also realized that all of the three still suffered from the war. Elena had her nightmares. Karri had more or less retreated into isolation among her machines. It had been almost three years before she initiated a conversation with Sona. Nolan was addicted to romantic VR games, a vice that had cost him his pilot's license. He now made a pretty poor living singing and dancing in nondescript nightclubs.
Keeping old Transhumanist crypto stuff under the bed was the kind of thing none of the three had ever talked to her about, and it did make her feel left out. Which she guessed she was. Whatever they'd been through during the war, it had forged bonds stronger than friendship or love. In the beginning, she was jealous. Karri and Nolan had a closer relationship with her lover than she had, and that wasn't how it should be in her world. But as time wore on and she kept seeing Elena wake up drenched in sweat and screaming in the middle of the night, jealousy passed. Whatever it was that had brought them their close bonds, it just wasn't worth it. She was happy to get what she got, and that was that.
Except in the end she couldn't deal with Elena's nightmares and regular bouts of depression, and they separated. She was glad that they remained friends, but she was also glad that she no longer felt obliged to shore Elena up during her bad times. Karri and Nolan could do that better anyway, so let them do it.
"It's encrypted," Elena said. In front of her, the projected screen winked out of existence. "Transhumanist crypto Carabid-8. The whole thing is so much noise unless we can get the key."
"I thought you broke that kind of thing during the war?" Sona asked.
"I did," Elena said. "But then I had all my tools. Today I have a good memory."
On the other side of the room, Karri swore and slammed a panel shut on the machine she'd been working on. Elena and Sona looked at her in surprise. Emotional outbursts were very much not Karri's sort of thing.
"Problem?" Elena asked.
"Doesn't work, but nothing's wrong," Karri said, frustration permeating her voice.
"Doesn't work how?" Elena said.
"What is it?" Sona said.
"Molecular imager," Karri said. "Can't get an image of the book."
"Can you get an image of something else?" Elena said.
Karri looked condescendingly at her.
"It's molecules," she said. "Everything's molecules."
"Just trying to help," Elena said. "Sorry."
"So it's vacuum in there?" Sona said. "Or does it filter out the air?"
"Filters."
"So maybe you should turn those off? I mean, if the book could do weird-ass things to Elena's implants it might do weird-ass things to scanner things as well."
Karri shrugged, reached into the machine and pulled something out. The display turned into a misty cube hanging in the air next to her. A misty cube with a book-shaped empty impression at the bottom. Karri frowned.
"The hell?" she said. She pulled a wire from the machine and attached it to her neck socket. The display started changing colors, and numbers and smaller pictures sprang into being hovering around the central cube.
"It's not there," she said. Her voice sounded strange, full of a mixture of disbelief and wonder. "It's just not there."
The display died and Karri disconnected from the machine. She opened it, took the book out and carried it over to another machine. She put it in a compartment just barely large enough for it, and closed a heavy lid with airtight seals around the edges. A vacuum pump started chugging along as soon as the lid was closed.
"Er, Karri, what's happening?" Elena said. She'd turned off the display she'd been working at and got up from the floor. Sona was still sitting on the bed, looking at Karri.
"Wait," she said. Another display winked into being, as usual showing lots of data that looked like gibberish to the non-initiated. In the middle was a kind of diagram, where a bar was rapidly rising from the bottom towards the top. It started out green, passed through yellow, reached red and a little while after that the entire diagram was replaced with the words "Sensor Malfunction" blinking brilliant red.
"That's no fucking book," Karri said. "Don't know what the hell it is, but it sure isn't natural."
"Explain please?" Elena said. Sona had mostly given up on understanding.
"ZPE calibrator," Karri said and pointed at the machine the book was still hidden inside.
"For fixing Casimir engines. Measures lots of quantum-level stuff. At that level, book doesn't even register as matter. Looks like nothing I've ever heard of. Nothing the machine's ever heard of either, by the look of that," she said, nodding towards the blinking malfunction sign.
"Does that mean anything, in practical terms?" Sona asked.
"It means that that book is much, much stranger than anything has any right to be," Elena said. "And suddenly it seems less far-fetched that someone would blow up a couple of buildings to get at it."
"Don't think this was made by humans," Karri said. "Is way to far out for us."
"It filled me with Transhumanist-encrypted stuff," Elena said. "Seems human enough."
Karri shrugged. "Maybe they sent out probe," she said. "Maybe something picked up transmissions. But no way Transhumanists made this, even if any are still around."
"Are you sure?" Sona said. "They were mightily fond of far-out science and risky experimentation."
"In eight years, with no labs and while hiding from everybody? Yeah, am sure."
Elena leaned against a wall. "So what do we do with it?"
"Want to know where it came from," Karri said. "Really want to know."
"Jocelyn said Neptune," Elena said. "And yeah, I wouldn't mind knowing that either. Also, I guess I'm out of a job, what with the library getting blown up and all."
"Correct me if I'm wrong," Sona said, "but I get the impression here that if somebody could get control of whatever made this thing they could end up very seriously rich. Like, Casimir Corporation rich."
"Quite likely," Karri said.
"So if you're going gallivanting off to Neptune, I'm coming along. I've got loads of vacation days to spend anyway."
"Maybe not Neptune straight away," Elena said. "I want to try to find out what the data in me is, and that's easier done hereish. But in any case it's probably a good idea to get moving pretty soon. The people who blew up those buildings almost certainly won't stop until they have the book."
Sona got up off the bed. "Fair enough," she said. "I want to fetch some clothes and stuff first, if that's all right."
"Me too," Elena said. "Let's do my place first and we can drop by your place on the way back. Will you be all right by yourself, Karri?"
Karri nodded. She had started fiddling with the ZPE calibrator, and wasn't paying much attention to the other two.
"We'll be back in a couple of hours," Elena said.

For an ex-commando, Elena Arden had surprisingly bad security on her apartment. It only took Jeraldine about five minutes to disable the alarms, open the lock and enter.
She couldn't help suspecting that the alarms she found were decoys, and the real ones were busy calling for help even as she walked through the door. But, well, she'd know about that soon enough, if it was the case. So no point in worrying about it.
The apartment itself was common enough. A hallway, with some cheap animated prints on the walls. A kitchen, with a stack of old takeout boxes on the counter and a leaky faucet. A living room, where the absence of a VR station surprised her until she remembered that anything one of those could do Elena's still-working implants could do much better. A bedroom, with a double bed but only signs of single occupancy. Also, an impressively large stack of dirty washing. Through the windows she could only see across the street into the face of the building on the other side. She wondered if any of the people on the other side used to try to peep at Elena while she dressed. Or if Elena tried to peep on someone on the other side.
Never mind.
She dragged one of the two armchairs in the living room around so it faced the entrance to the room. She sat down in it, with her pistol in her hand and all the lights off. She wanted Elena to be well inside the apartment and not suspecting anything by the time she noticed that she had an intruder.

The taxi crawled along the streets of the city. Elena looked out the window, wishing that she could be soaring ahead above it all. The suggestion that traffic be layered, so that one set of cars would fly over the other, was frequently put forward but always failed for safety reasons. Nobody wanted a truck suddenly dropping on them, once they thought about it a little. So only emergency services were allowed to really fly.
"The hospital systems say that Jocelyn is still critical and unstable," Sona said. "Which is really not good, considering that she's been in the ICU for hours now. Also, she's being treated for a gunshot wound, not for burns or crush damage."
"Gunshot?" Elena said. "Where did that come from?"
"Unknown, as far as I can figure out. And the woman who carried her out of the library building vanished before she could be questioned."
Jocelyn in hospital. Elena supposed that was really for the best, but she still didn't like hospitals. Not since that time when Setsuko just fell apart in her arms. Eight years later, and the terrible sense of powerlessness still haunted her.
"What are you thinking about?" Sona said. "You fell all silent there."
"Nothing," Elena said. It wasn't a lie, exactly. There was a whole lot of nothing in between Mercury and Venus. One little hospital ship didn't make much difference to the vacuum, when you averaged it out.
"Do you think we're doing the right thing?" Sona said. "Going after this ourselves. Maybe we should just turn it all over to the authorities."
"Can't see how that would make anything any better," Elena said. "I wouldn't trust those fuckers with firecrackers, much less something that might be important."
"I know," Sona said. "Just checking."
She had trusted those fuckers, once upon a time. There'd been a recruitment drive in her school, and she'd taken their aptitude test because all her friends did. She was astonished when they told her that her nervous system was unusually suited for receiving implants, and if chose to join the military they'd pay for a first-rate education. Among other things. It had seemed like a safe bet. Nobody thought there would be a war only a few years later. But there was, and Elena found herself not only on the front lines but working behind them, deep in enemy territory. She didn't like it, but she did as she was told. There was a war on, and she was a soldier. She followed orders. She destroyed things. She killed people. She did her best to survive. She did her best to protect her squad.
When the war was over she tried to learn how it had started. They hadn't got told that, when she was a soldier. They'd only been told who, where and how to kill. What she found was a mess of misdirection, half-truths and hate. Groups of outer-system colonists and isolated communes on Earth had been trying to create better humans, in a way that would be passed on from parent to child. Other groups, mostly on Earth, saw this as blasphemy, the end of the human race or just as revolting and scary. Tension increased, until one day somebody released what was supposed to be an intelligence-enhancing self-replicating plague at Orly spaceport in France. It worked, too, in almost ten percent of the infected. In the rest, the effects ranged from a bad flu to brain death. Fortunately for humanity, the self-replicator wasn't any better than the enhancement function. In the end, only about two hundred people were affected. Seven ended up with brain damage, three died. Twenty-one ended up with significantly enhanced mental faculties. Which, according to some, messed up their lives worse than brain damage would have done.
After that, things exploded. Soldiers were sent after the communes on Earth, navy ships after the space colonists. The initial aim was to detain them, to get a good look at what they were really doing.
It turned out that some of the Transhumanists' augmentation programmes had worked better than anybody had suspected. The first soldiers to enter a commune got completely thrashed. What was worse, from their point of view, it was hard or impossible to tell the augmented humans and the normals apart. The transhumanists scattered into the normal population, aided by the infomorph part of their population, the AIs and the uploaded. A very dirty and unpleasant war started.
In space, where Elena had fought, the war was somewhat cleaner. The sides were more obviously separated -- this station was Transhumanist, this navy ship was Baseline. It's almost impossible to sneak unnoticed onto a ship in space. It's hard to do it to a station, but Elena, her squad and those like them were trained to do it.
The war went on for nine months. The Transhumanists fought well, far better than anybody had suspected in advance, but in the end the Baselines' far greater industrial capacity decided the matter. Every ship on the Transhumanist side was an almost irreplaceable resource, for every ship that got destroyed on the Baseline side they built three new ones. The Baseline side won, and after a couple of years the random terrorist strikes by remaining Transhumanist cells and operatives petered out. Humanity remained as it has always been.
Elena came out of the military disillusioned. The few times she'd got to actually meet people from the Transhumanist side, she'd found them to be pretty much like herself. Sure, some of them had stuff in their bodies that Mother Nature hadn't put there -- but so she. The only difference was that theirs had grown in their bodies and Elena's had been grown in tanks of nanoconstructor sludge and surgically implanted. After the war was over, she wanted reassurance that she had been doing the right thing. That she had been fighting on the right side.
She didn't find it.
When she began looking, she naturally started with the Orly incident, and almost at once she found things that didn't fit in very well with the official version. There were no signs, then or after, that any Transhumanist enclave had ever been working on a self-replicator like the one that had been released. Right after the incident, there were statements from all the major Transhumanist enclaves condemning the action, and offering help, both to cure the victims and to find the culprits.
Those statements never reached the mainstream media outlets. As Elena read the reports and assembled the facts, it became apparent to her that some people in powerful positions had wanted the war to happen. That it furthered their interests, economic or political, and that they didn't care about all the people who died or had their lives destroyed.
She tried to bring this to the public's attention.
She failed. No media outlet was interested in talking about it, except the lunatic fringe ones that already were. Nobody wants to hear that, she was told. The war is over. Let it rest. Nobody cares how it started. The good guys won. The forces of evil were defeated. All is well. Do not rock the boat. Do not think. Watch your personalized VR soap.
Unsurprisingly, she lost faith in her leaders. When she was asked to rejoin the military, she declined. Karri and Nolan, the only surviving members of her squad, went with her. They all ended up on North Atlantis, mostly just getting by and trying to forget.
"We have arrived," the taxi said. "That will be four dollars twenty, please."

One could tell that the room had been chosen and set up in a hurry. The equipment racks stood in the middle of the floor, with no attempt to position them conveniently. The walls were bare concrete. A coffee maker and microwave oven stood in a corner, connected to a the same barely portable Casimir engine that provided electricity for the racks. A black-uniformed man sat on a rickety office chair, a bunch of cables leading from the rack to his neck. A similarly uniformed woman lay on an inflatable mattress nearby. The room was lit by a portable floodlight connected to the Casimir engine and aimed at a wall.
"Can't sleep?" the man said.
The woman sighed.
"No," she said. "Too tense, I guess. You getting anything yet?"
"A little," he said. "Vague, but something. The object is still in the city. Which is something, I guess."
"I almost wish it wasn't," the woman said. "Then we could get out of here soon."
"Well, if we find it we can get out of here at once."
"We're not going to find it," she said. "We can't find it. You know that, even if the major won't admit it."
"That's just a theory," he said. "We can't prove anything."
"No, we only have about a gazillion coincidences to support it," she said. "But, as you say, no proof that the blasted thing warps probabilities around it."
"It could be just a WOAH!" the man said. The last word came out a shout.
"A what?" the woman said.
"Something just happened," he said. "I got the mother of all spikes. I think..."
His voice trailed off. The woman got up from the mattress and jacked herself into her rack.
"Holy fuck," she said. "What is that?"
"Tapering off fast, that's what it is," the man said. "It was about ten times as strong a few second ago. But I think I got a pretty good set of coordinates."
"What do you think happened?" she said. "Is this why it was sent here? What did it just do?"
"Honestly?" the man said. "I'd rather not think about it. The mere thought of where that thing comes from makes me nervous."
"Yeah," she said. "Let's hope we're still us in the morning, eh?"
"55 Democratus Road, top floor," he said. "Will you contact the major or shall I?"
"You found it, you tell it."
He closed his eyes and concentrated.

When she heard the front door open, Jeraldine got up from the armchair. It wouldn't do to be sitting down if it came to fighting. Also, she'd look a lot less impressive if she was.
"I'll just throw a few things in a bag," a voice said. "It won't take more than a few moments. Get something from the fridge, if you want. There should be some beer in there."
"Beer sounds good," another voice said. "Do you want one?"
"Actually, yes," the first voice said.
"I'll bring a couple to the bedroom," the second voice said.
Steps closed in on the living room. Jeraldine raised her gun and aimed it at the door to the hallway.
She recognized Elena Arden from the pictures, of course. But somehow she looked more imposing in real life. Part of it was that she was not a small woman. She was almost as tall as Jeraldine, and more muscular. Certainly not stronger, but bigger. Even though it was many years since she was an active soldier, Elena had obviously not let herself go.
"Lights," Elena said, and several soft lamps around the room came to life. Elena froze as she saw Jeraldine.
"Give me the book and I'll go away and leave you to your packing," Jeraldine said.
Elena looked at her for a few very long moments.
"What book?" she finally said. "And who the fuck are you?"
"You know which book I mean," Jeraldine said. "Don't pretend to be stupid. I know you're not."
"It's not yours," Elena said. Jeraldine heard the other person approach from the kitchen.
"It's not yours either," she said. "And tell your friend to stand still."
"What do you want it for?" Elena said. Her friend's steps stopped.
"Never you mind," Jeraldine said. While not exactly a good answer, it certainly beat admitting that she had no idea. "Just give it over."
"It's not here," Elena said.
Of course. It couldn't ever go smoothly.
"All right," Jeraldine said. "Where is it, then?"
"At a friend's place," Elena said. "She's investigating it."
Investigating? A book? Sounded odd. She wanted to ask about it, but it probably wasn't a good idea to admit her lack of knowledge.
"The friend who's standing right behind you," she said, "who is she?"
"Her name is Sona Quon," Elena said. "She's an endocrinology specialist at Hippocrates Medical Institute. She's no threat to you."
"I'm sure she's not," Jeraldine said. "She'll come in here where I can see her. Then you'll walk towards the door, and she'll walk after you. If I think that you're doing something suspicious, I'll shoot her. Clear?"
Elena looked daggers at her. "Oh yes," she said.
Jeraldine put her hand in her pocket, turned her wearable on and called for the cab she'd got the map from. It felt like there was a better chance that it could be bribed into not seeing what was going than that any random taxi could.
"So," she said. "Get moving."

At two different points in the city, black vans suddenly broke out of the traffic pattern and took to the air. Alarms immediately went off at Traffic Control and police were soon dispatched to take a look. It wasn't too unusual that kids disabled the monitors in their cars and went for less than legal joyrides, so neither the Traffic Control overseers nor the police officers were particularly bothered. They took their time.
The vans, in their respective places, rose to just above rooftop height and set off at high speed for the same destination. The hurried along, dodging antennas, extra high buildings and occasionally birds, until they finally reached an apartment block on the east side of the city. One of them kept hovering over the building, with two black-uniformed people leaning out open windows with rifles. The other one landed on the street in front of the building, squeezing in between the wall and the line of parked cars at the side of the road. Its side door slid open, and four armed persons in black uniforms ran out and headed for the building's door.

Elena kept staring at the woman with the gun. There was something familiar about her, although Elena was almost sure that she'd never met her before. She had very dark skin, almost black. She had high cheekbones and slightly slanted dark-brown eyes. Her hair was long, reaching well down her back, and had been treated to be able to change color. When Elena first saw her in the flat, the hair had been deep black. Now it was a clear electric blue with an irregular net-like red pattern. Her coat also changed colors. It too had been black in the dark of the flat, it was now a deep maroon red.
"Why are you doing this?" Sona said. She was sitting next to Elena in the taxi's rear back seat. The woman with the gun was sitting in the seat facing them, so she could see them clearly. Her gun didn't waver, and she held it like she knew how to use it. It was not a new gun. It looked like it was war surplus, and it had quite clearly seen use. If by this woman or some previous owner was impossible to tell.
"I was asked to get the book," she said. "I intend to do so."
"Asked?" Sona said. "By who?"
"My dead girlfriend," the woman said.
Elena winced internally. Great. They were being held at gunpoint not just by a violent criminal, but an insane violent criminal.
"You know, that doesn't really make sense," Sona said.
"Agreed," the woman said. "So I'm kind of eager to get the book, so I can find out what the whole thing is about."
All right, so maybe she wasn't entirely off her rocker, then.
Sona was about to say something more when the woman spoke again.
"Why do you want the book?" she said. "You're with the library, right? So it's just part of the job for you. Nothing to be particularly upset about, really. The library is insured for things like this, isn't it?"
"It is... curious," Elena said.
"Right," the woman said. "Curious enough to risk being shot for?"
The taxi slowed to a gentle stop.
"Sorry for butting in on your conversation, boss lady," the taxi said. "But a van is parked on the sidewalk outside the place you asked me to take you to, and a bunch of armed people just ran from the van into the building. Thought you might want to know."
The woman with the gun turned around and looked out the front of the taxi moment.
"Oh my god," Sona said. "Karri!"
The woman turned back to them.
"That's your friend with the book?" she said. "Call her and tell her to get out or hide or something. Those are the same people who blew up the library."
It was an effort for Elena to sit still. She wanted to get out, to run after them and try to help Karri. Wanted to badly.
"I don't think there is a back exit," she said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Sona activate her wearables. Calling Karri, almost certainly. Hopefully, she was smart enough not to call the cops.
"No fire escape?" the woman said. "Bad planning, that."
Elena didn't say anything. The woman looked like she was trying to make up her mind.
"Well, fuck this," she said after a couple of seconds. "This is probably a mistake, but I just don't like those guys."
She reached inside her coat and took out a second pistol.
"You know how to handle this," she said to Elena. It wasn't a question, but Elena nodded anyway.
"After we've saved your friend and the book, do you promise to give it back to me?"
Elena nodded again. The woman handed the pistol to her.
"Let's go," she said.

Jeraldine kicked open the cab door and ran out. It wouldn't surprise her if they had snipers placed, so she wanted to be out in the open for as little time as possible.
"Hey! You're paying for that!" she heard the taxi yell, and then Elena's steps were right behind her. She kept running, not really caring of the ex-commando kept up with her or not. There was a chance she might get a few shots in on the guys with the guns from behind, if she was fast enough. Things would get much more difficult if they actually reached the destination and could spread out properly before she reached them.
And suddenly, as she ran through the door, it occured to her that she didn't know where she was going. She stopped. Elena was still right behind her.
"Where to?" she asked.
"Are these guys pros?" Elena asked. Jeraldine nodded.
"They'll go for the stairs, then. Second door on the left."
"Right."
It was a non-automatic door. A sure sign that it wasn't meant for casual use. Jeraldine opened the door with some care, to avoid unnecessary noise. Once it was open, she could hear running steps from above.
"How many floors?" she asked.
"Twelve," Elena said.
"Some exercise."
"So get going."
Jeraldine couldn't help smiling. She turned away from Elena so she shouldn't see it, and then set off up the stairs at a pace she knew she could keep up all the way to the top but that any normal human would find very difficult to match. Of course, an ex-commando didn't really count as a normal human. Unless, of course, they'd ripped out all her implants and augmentations after the war. Which was entirely possible.
Those running above were normal humans, though. After only four flights of steps she could hear them getting closer. She tried to run as lightly and noiselessly as possible, and hoped that they'd be too focused upwards to care about noise from below. A couple of steps behind her, Elena was breathing very heavily but actually keeping up.
When it sounded like they were only one flight of stairs from seeing their targets, Jeraldine slowed down a little.
"Legs or arms," she said. "You take right, I take left."
Elena nodded. She was drenched in sweat and obviously fighting very hard to keep up. Jeraldine was breathing a little heavy, and her heart had speeded up a lot, but she could still keep this pace up for a lot longer. She hoped that the people above wouldn't be in much better shape than Elena, and hopefully worse. Augmentations weren't very common since the war, not even among those whose work included occasional violence. And with some luck, these people still believed that they were going after unarmed civilians.
They were almost at the top. Jeraldine put on a burst of speed to get her quarry in sight. She saw the back of two men running up the staircase. They were dressed in black combat uniforms, with obvious armor plates covering their torsos. They were also wearing helmets. She aimed for the thigh of the left one and fired.
The shot echoed deafeningly through the stairwell. She saw a small hole appear in the back of his thigh, just under the hip, and a cloud of blood, muscle and bone fragments explode out in front of him. His leg bent at a place it was never intended to bend, and he fell down, too surprised and shocked to scream. His assault rifle clattered as it bounced down the steps. A second shot rang out from next to Jeraldine, but as far as she saw it didn't hit anything. The still-standing guy turned around. He started firing long before his rifle was aimed in the direction of Jeraldine and Elena. Ricochets clanged and whirred between the walls. Jeraldine felt one pass far too close to her arm for comfort. She took an invaluable split second to aim, and shot the second man in the head. His right eye vanished in a splash of blood, and all of a sudden the wall behind him was splattered with generous amounts of red and grey.
Suddenly, strangely, the only things to be heard were the clatter as the second man's rifle fell down and Elena's heavy breathing.
"Hey!" a woman shouted from above. "What's happening down there?"
Jeraldine looked at Elena and put a finger across her lips. Elena nodded. Jeraldine stalked up the staircase, carefully stepping over the fallen men. The one she'd shot in the leg seemed to have passed out, which suited her just fine. There was a growing pool of blood under his leg. He might very well have bled to death before she and Elena had handled the remaining two attackers, but, well, that was the kind of risk that came with the job.
"Antony! Stephan!" the voice shouted from above. "Talk to me, damn it!"
"Something's fucking wrong," another, male, voice said. "You want to go down and check?"
"Hell no," the first voice said. "Just get that door open so we can finish and get out of here."
Jeraldine stopped. One of those up there almost certainly was looking down for something to shoot at, which made things kind of tricky. If she could only somehow get them to turn their attention elsewhere...
"Ah, there," the mail voice said. "Now, let's..."
There was a crackling sound, followed by two heavy thuds in rapid succession. Jeraldine frowned. What the fuck?
Lighter steps moved around up there. After a few moments they headed down the staircase. Jeraldine raised her pistol. The cold ceramic of a pistol muzzle touched her neck.
"That'll be my friend Karri," Elena said. "So lower you gun."
"You promised to give me my gun back after we took care of these bastard," Jeraldine said. Something heavy and gun-shaped was put into one of her coat's outer pockets. The muzzle against her neck didn't move a millimeter.
"Sure did," Elena said. "Nice of the bastards to give me a replacement for it."
A short, wiry woman carrying a large and obviously home-built weapon came into view. She lowered the weapon when she saw Elena and Jeraldine.
"One of them?" she asked.
"Given that she just killed one of them and badly wounded another, I really doubt that," Elena said.
"But not friend," Karri said.
As fast as she could, Jeraldine reached up, grabbed the barrel of Elena's assault rifle and pulled it forward as hard as she could. The muzzle was well past her neck when a shot rang out, narrowly missing Karri. Elena lost her balance from the sudden tug and fell against Jeraldine's back. Jeraldine spun around, grabbing her on the way and ended up with their positions reversed. Holding Elena in front of her as a shield, she quickly put her pistol to her hostage's head.
"I just want my book," she said. "What kind of library are you anyway, to make a thing like that this hard?"
She lowered her pistol and took a step back.
"Truce?" she said.

Sona patched up the leg of the one still-living attacker as best she could with only Karri's first-aid kit to use.
"We should get him to a hospital," she said. "He needs replacing all the blood he lost."
They had all moved into Karri's flat. Elena had sat down on Karri's bed, suffering from post-combat shakes. Karri was kneeling by the bodies of the two she'd killed outside her door, carefully examining them. Jeraldine was watching Karri. Sona was kneeling next to the wounded man, and Nolan sat slumped in a chair, deeply sunk into VR.
"I don't think any of us want to talk to the police," Jeraldine said. "So let's do that very carefully, if at all."
"How long can he wait before we have to call an ambulance?" Elena asked.
"A couple of hours, at most," she said. "Although that'll be cutting it might fine. I can live with waiting one hour, if we have to. Considering he probably came here to kill Karri and all."
"His friends damn near killed the woman at the library," Jeraldine said.
Elena looked up.
"You were there?"
"Yeah," Jeraldine said. "The mail I got said to get the book from the library, so that's where I went. I was talking to this Jocelyn person when these jokers came crashing in with guns blazing. She got hit while I tried to get her out of there."
Sona taped the last piece of traumaflesh to the man's leg. She looked critically at her work, and while she didn't like the way it looked it was the best she could do under the circumstances.
"You still haven't told us your name," she said.
"I don't think he's going to answer you," Jeraldine said.
"I meant you."
"Oh. Of course. I'm Jeraldine Kuzia. Private investigator."
"And your dead girlfriend asked you to get this particular book at the North Atlantis university library."
"Yes."
"You know that that sounds a bit insane, right?" Sona said.
"She may have been uploaded before she died," Jeraldine said.
Karri abruptly stopped her examination and stood up. She looked hard at Jeraldine.
"Amazon," she said after a little while.
"What?" Sona said.
"Of course!" Elena said, looking annoyed with herself. "I should've known you weren't human, the way you fought!"
"That's a matter of definition," Jeraldine said. "We were brought up to consider ourselves human. It was you guys who said otherwise."
Suddenly Sona understood what they were talking about.
"Oh!" she said. "You're a parahuman! Cool! I never met one before!"
Jeraldine looked strangely at her.
"If your friend here and her colleagues had done their job just a little bit better back in the war, you never would have," she said.
The enthusiasm left Sona just as quickly as it had arrived.
"Right," she said. "Of course."
Silence fell. Nobody seemed to know what to say. Finally, Sona couldn't stand it any longer.
"So," she said, "did your dead girlfriend say what you were supposed to do with the book? Where you supposed to take it somewhere, or give it to someone, or whatever?"
Jeraldine looked a little sheepish.
"No, actually she didn't. The only thing she said is that the book can set her free. And she's more of a dead ex-girlfriend, really."
Sona and Elena looked at each other.
"So you have no idea what the book is about?" Elena said.
"No," Jeraldine admitted.
"But you're determined to the point of using violence to get hold of it?"
She hesitated a little.
"I wasn't at first," she said. "But now people have shot at me for it, they've blown up buildings and killed people for it, and I've had to kill people for it, so by now I really want to know what's going on."
She looked from Sona to Karri to Elena.
"So I guess the answer to your question is, no, I won't fight to get it. I wouldn't know what to do with it! But I will stay around it, to find out what the fuck is going on."
"Well," Elena said, "given what's happened so far, I'll be glad to have a really good fighter around. What do you guys say?"
"Hey, no problem," Sona said.
Karri looked intently at Jeraldine.
"Her kind killed a lot of us, back then," she said.
"Well, your kind killed just about all of us," Jeraldine replied. "So I really don't think you got the bad end of the deal."
"So maybe you want revenge."
Jeraldine looked at her, obviously both surprised and angry at the accusation.
"Yeah," she said, "because that would be such an efficient way to go about it."
"Yes or no, Karri?" Elena said.
"Yes," Karri said. "But I'll be watching."
"Right," Elena said. She grabbed a loose circuit board from a shelf near Karri's bed and threw it at Nolan. He started and looked up in surprise.
"Er," he said. "What?"
"Is she in or not?" Elena said.
"Who?" Nolan said.
Elena pointed at Jeraldine.
"Oh," he said. "Well, if you think it's all right that's good enough for me."
His eyes glazed over again as he sank back into his virtual world.
Jeraldine looked around at the people surrounding her.
"Are you all total space cases?" she said.
Karri pointed at Sona.
"Not her," she said.

"Let me get this straight," Jeraldine said some time later, after pizza and beer had been brought in, Karri had cleared a table for them to eat from and dug out a bunch of chairs from somewhere. The corpses had been covered up for later disposal, and the wounded man had been but in the not-so-honest taxi and, for an extortionate amount of money, driven to a hospital that wasn't the one where Sona worked.
"The book does not really exist. It's some kind of quantum-mechanical trickery that's been made to look like a book. When Elena tried to read it, it filled her storage implants with huge amounts of data, that just happened to be encrypted with one of our side's best cryptosystems. Meanwhile, there's a group of people with large enough resources to hire mercenaries who want to get the book-thing really, really badly. Badly enough to kill indiscriminately and engage in wanton property destruction. Did I miss anything?"
"Not that I can think of," Sona said.
"We knew that it was sent here from Neptune," Elena said. "Unless somebody did a really good fake job on the shipping logs, which I doubt. Too many different systems and companies involved for that."
"Neptune?" Jeraldine said. "Where around there?"
"The first logged station was a gathering terminal on Astropolis Station," Elena said. "Which doesn't make sense. It should've been dropped off at a collection point first."
Jeraldine frowned.
"Interesting," she said. "But in any case, I think we should get out of here as soon as we've finished eating."
"But it's the middle of the night," Sona protested. "I've been up all day, and I want to sleep. What's the hurry?"
"The hurry is that they were coming here," Jeraldine said. "And I can't see how they could possibly have found this place. The only co