"Koval Moore. Director, Intelligence Bureau."


    The man had sharp features, his skin tanned to Saltillan standards. He was dressed from head to toe in yellowish khaki and heeled in rugged brown moccasins and balding in a wide and conspicuous strip starting from the crown down the middle of his head.


    "Well met," Jirani said, accepting the extended hand with his own powerful grip and affording a grim smile.


    "Well met… to you too, Commander Mzeeka," Koval nodded emotionlessly. His face looked frozen into ennui, and when his mouth moved none of the other muscles in his face moved with it, and the look was uncanny and unnatural enough for Marja to wonder if Koval suffered from some paralysis of the maxillofacial muscles.


    The spymasterLebensraum His ace doesn''t fit anyone I know,


    "And to you, Deputy Marshall ma''am," Koval said, taking her limp hand in his.


    "The pleasure is all mine," she said, pressing her lips together. Handshakes had never been her strong suit.


    "Please," Koval motioned for them to take their seats, and even before their weight could settle completely into the canvas chairs the carriage doors closed with a resounding boom and a high-powered hum crescendoed and then melted away into the background.


    s the balance of one or two of the corporals was suddenly compromised


    yes, sir!


    "I am meant to courier you to the Vines up in the southern quadrant," Koval said, turning back to regard Jirani beside him once the carriage door had closed. As he said this he looked straight into Jirani''s eyes and never once wavered in his intonation, and there was such a regular canter to his speech that Marja wondered if the earphone he wore was relaying the tick of a metronome.


    person


    Marja glanced at Jirani, making sure to keep her expression straight but all the while worrying if Jirani was perhaps not committing a social gaffe by being so forward.


    But Koval seemed not to have taken offense (not that it was possible to discern anything from the man''s barren countenance), instead suggesting that "you can make your thanks known to the host of the meeting you will be attending shortly. Such secure measures are necessary anyway. You will by now have heard of the terrorist group."


    Gimma Ashby—


    "That is not surprising. They have been a small group until some of their recent posts gained traction on the Protectorate-Intraweb, so I will doubt if there has been adequate time to prepare a comprehensive Infomentary; but I will say that their terroristic quality is quite evident," Koval said, leaning forward so that he could lock down Marja''s gaze with his own.


    "How so?" Marja inquired, matching Koval staredown for staredown.


    Gimma Ashby


    "You''ve made your point," Jirani returned, shifting his weight. Marja stared out the small windowpane, thinking suddenly that the train ride felt smooth as butter—she supposed it utilized maglev technology.


    "But are they popular at all? Every society has its fringe group," Marja remarked, unwilling to break eye contact. "Even in population-centers like Saltilla which rely heavily on mass-compulsion-matrices to smooth out tensions… that has been the experience, that such fringe groups exist, but I imagine such groups are cut off from any real uptake."


    Why do you have to do this?


    precisely


    "Director Moore couldn''t be more right," Jirani felt it necessary to add, taking on the tone of a teacher, a tone of voice she recognized from her youth. Marja rolled her eyes.


    "You''d do well to listen, Marja. I should add that, in a place as filled with tension as Saltilla—what with the conflict between Jegorich and Saltilla and the internal unhappiness surrounding the ''wealth gap'' between rich and poor Saltillans—the liberal use of mass-compulsion-matrices are unavoidable. Saltilla is between a rock and a hard place," Jirani explained. "Can''t live without a ton of compulsion, can''t live with too much of it."


    Koval turned to look at Jirani, finally breaking eye contact with Marja, and she took the opportunity to blink. She had won the staredown, but suddenly she felt how foolish it was to make a competition out of such trifling things.


    Gimma Ashby


    "What is that, the Agave?" Marja asked, shooting a glance at Jirani. That old man scrunched up his fatless cheeks like he had just stifled a yawn and seemed to be melting lazily into his chair, and otherwise continued staring blankly into the windowed dark before them.


    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    "It is what we call our shopping district. The Agave protests took us by surprise and you can be sure it made some waves. We''ve had to use plainclothes Jegorichians to monitor that place ever since, since we couldn''t confirm the mental profiles of the Saltillan Police''s troopers within the appropriate margin of error."


    "That''s fine then. It''s clear they are a problem," Marja nodded, unsure of how to continue. Koval stared at her but otherwise did not reply.


    She observed Jirani''s slump and, though his expression betrayed nothing, knew he was already barely listening. She thought of raising the issue of high rates of insubordination amongst the Saltillan Division, but, finding that it would amount to airing her grievances in an inappropriate forum, thought better of it.


    As such, she settled on staring out the front window, watching the occasional light shoot by on the outside and hearing the rush of wind cut against their transport from out of dark nothings. And she was glad that Koval remained silent and sphinx-like through all that, even as he made a point of watching her closely throughout that journey.


    <hr>


    They alighted and once they bid a terse farewell to Director Koval Moore they were led by a tiny, uniformed man through a lobby whose only similarity with Hydrax Station was the fact that it was deserted. Terumpet Station was expansive and garishly colored for all that, and its lobby space was hung with parti-colored pennants and carpeted in navy and beige finery. And as they funneled into a long tunnel-like chamber, they found every inch of the place covered in advertisements—not the dry, facetious touts which took up wallspace in the shopping district, but tasteful advertisements that stood out for artistry and effort and luxury and eye-catching opulence.


    SESCaturdharaperfect feelings, perfect formsaltered-consciousness-on-demand


    LLE''sreflectingCheetra AI-TableauxCheetrais the companion to tide you over bad times and to share in your good times. A True Friend, a True Companion, a Lover for You. Special.


    Along the portside wall leading up to the entrance was a wood-colored bas-relief depicting a snippet of harmonious Saltillan life shuttered between its glorious obelisks: thickly muscled babushkas with smiles on their face, helmeted with hardhats bearing the ''N'' of Ninsei and pushing trolleys brimming with Ninsei survival paraphernalia; lines of women, young because they were lithe, their heads bound in kerchiefs and their sleeves rolled up suggestively and their hands bearing knives and other artifacts of war, their lineaments scrunching together N-like; young men with turgid faces frozen mid-mirth and armed with biceps of incredible size, the ranks of men overlapping and straining agains their clothes amidst cross-sections of Ninsei munitions factories; Saltillan men of war leaving the warmth of the city and fording out into the Desert darkness in sleeveless vests, their striated forearms tangled up in straps and slings of weapons hidden behind their girthy forms.


    Exquisite make. There are stylistic details to make a master weep.


    The bas-relief was protected behind a panel of tempered glass and, as Marja tramped past—scrutinizing it, admiring it—she found the material reminiscent of fine oak. As she ran her eyes across its lacquered surface she found discoloration where she supposed a knot had been and speculated absentmindedly at the prohibitive cost of importing such a marvelous piece of wood across half the galaxy.


    They reached the end of the bas-relief where the soldiers were leaving the gate, and there Marja found a copper-colored attribution panel fitted into the wall. On it was stamped the following words: ''NINSEI DESERT INDUSTRIES LLE'', as if it weren''t clear enough who the sponsor of the piece was. And under it a separate line read: ''Hand-carved by Basset Morning-Hughes''.


    As the three of them—Jirani, Marja, and their diminutive guide—pushed out Terumpet Station''s revolving door, they saw in that tunnel-space, furnished with holograms and suffused by warm, orange light, orderly rows of well-heeled citizens bedecked in fine clothes and idling on their floating holo-scooters, the affluents mumbling amongst themselves and casting side-long glances at them.


    ... South loop shuttle services will resume shortly. The train bound for Noon Quadrangle will arrive in three minutes. The train bound for Shukrich Airport will arrive in two minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience caused. …


    At the foot of the staircase they turned rightwise into a solid face of rock, a rectangular portion of which outlined and then opened with a swipe of the guide''s matte-black access card across a hidden terminal; then it was down a long and meandering hallway beaten down by white OLEDs hanging two meters above their heads, the hallway bending left and right and ending in a circular lift lobby.


    beauty


    "That is being the Underground Bazaar," was what the guide told them, pointing with two fingers at the scene, explaining that it usually wasn''t so crowded before the dinner hour, speculating airily that the temporary suspension of the south loop train service had, most likely, contributed to this flash of premature consumption.


    "Isn''t there a war happening?" Marja asked out loud, her brows squeezing together and her tone implying disparagement. She brought her face close to the elevator''s transparent siding to better continue her voyeuristic expedition.


    "It is not the place," Jirani interjected, clasping his hands behind him and cutting short the conversation. Fighting the urge to let fly a snarky comment, Marja settled back coolly onto her heels.


    They watched in silence as the lift accelerated upward, and Marja felt her quadriceps tense against her body''s inertia. Then the Underground Bazaar fell away and disappeared underneath a sheet of rock and layer upon layer of sediment flitting past in a blur of gray and brown.


    And suddenly they were aboveground and gaining height so quickly a single blink was all it took for them to traverse ten stories. The blanket of artificial light making the Saltillan day had become orange-yellow in the late afternoon and their vision was mostly obscured by the other Saltillan columns. Below them were more people, faceless people, moving, jostling, moiling about in microcosms of confusion that aggregated to make macrocosmic purpose.


    The Market. Human competition. Grand purpose.


    It was a full minute of travel before the elevator came to a complete stop, its deceleration calibrated to barely be noticeable to its occupants. The doors slid open smoothly and without sound.


    More people,many kilometers away.


    "This is being the second highest level of the Vines," their guide explained, pointing with two fingers toward the end of the hall. "The apartment is at the end there."


    The long hallway that they were in led to a vestibular space where a chandelier was hung by a crystalline stalactite affixed to the high ceiling. Their feet found the cerise carpeting give way to marble, and before them was a single set of large double-doors perched atop a flight of stairs consisting of four steps, the steps themselves carved out of a slab of marble protruding from the floor. A titanium plate hung by the lintel with the letters ''A.G.'' embossed into it.


    Marja breathed in deep, and detected in the air faint notes of cardamom and lemon.


    The soft and padded silence had been substituted for discordant sounds in her ear. There was music. Ysa?e Sonata No. 4, she recognized, a great favorite of the Hollow violinists she had so loved to associate with in her childhood. Double-stops, triple-stops, masterful legato. It had been almost forgotten…