The Andromeda Reception Center

• Chapter 1 The Bureaucrat at Gate Four
• Chapter 2 Red Dust and Red Tape
• Chapter 3 The Body in Sector Nine
• Chapter 4 Interrogating the Star-Born
• Chapter 5 Cold War, Colder Clues
• Chapter 6 The Wiretapped Alien
• Chapter 7 Protocol for a Dying Visitor
• Chapter 8 Shadow over the Quonset Huts
• Chapter 9 The Contraband Engine
• Chapter 10 A Dossier Full of Starlight
• Chapter 11 Midnight in the Refugee Barracks
• Chapter 12 The Finger on the Trigger
• Chapter 13 Case Closed, Vault Opened
• Chapter 14 The June Accords
• Chapter 15 Leaks in the State Department
• Chapter 16 The Kremlin's Telescope
• Chapter 17 Brinkmanship in the Mesosphere
• Chapter 18 The Geneva Sub-Committee
• Chapter 19 Ashen Skies over New Mexico
• Chapter 20 The Ambassador in Chains
• Chapter 21 Proxy War in Parsec Four
• Chapter 22 Redacted Constellations
• Chapter 23 The Doomsday Telemetry
• Chapter 24 Emergency Session at the Pentagon
• Chapter 25 The Bureaucrat's Gambit
• Chapter 26 Terms of Coexistence

Arthur Pendelton adjusted his thin horn-rimmed glasses, took a slow drag from his Lucky Strike, and watched a seven-foot tall, chitinous tripod attempt to navigate a standard United States Department of State customs questionnaire.

The wind blowing across the white sands of the Alamogordo desert did little to cool the corrugated tin interior of Gate Four. It was June 1954, and the desert heat baked the quonset huts of the Andromeda Reception Center into sulfurous ovens. Arthur’s linen suit, bought off the rack in Baltimore three years ago, was thoroughly ruined by a permanent glaze of sweat and fine gypsum dust.

"Under section 4-B, 'Country of Origin,' you’ve typed three distinct pitch-bends and a symbol that looks like a crushed pretzel," Arthur said, tapping his yellow Dixon Ticonderoga pencil against the clipboard. "I need an English transliteration, Mr... well, I need something I can file with the regional director in Albuquerque."

The entity across the plywood desk shifted its weight. A series of dry, clicking noises echoed from its thoracic cavity, followed by the metallic rasp of its mechanical translator unit—a crude, tube-driven contraption suspended around its neck by thick leather straps.

"System-Name: Gliese-832-Prime," the translator rasped, emitting a faint puff of ozone and a low hum that set Arthur's dental fillings throbbing. "Local Designation: The High Weave of the Unbroken Spire. Refugee Classification: Class-Three Non-Bipedal Political Exile."

"Gliese-832-Prime," Arthur repeated aloud, carefully writing the letters in precise cursive across the triplicate carbon form. "Thank you. Now, moving on to item nine: 'Do you currently possess, or have you ever possessed, materials advocating for the violent overthrow of the United States Government, or any friendly planetary sovereign entity?'"

The alien’s compound eyes glittered under the buzzing fluorescent tubes. "We do not know your government. We know only the Dread-Fleet of the Red Maw, which has pulverized our homeworld into glassy silt."

"That’s a no for the United States, then," Arthur muttered, checking the small box marked NO. "I’ll leave the second part blank until the State Department issues a formal ruling on the legal status of the Red Maw."

Arthur was thirty-eight years old, possessed an accounting degree from Johns Hopkins, and had spent the Second World War auditing wool inventories for the Quartermaster Corps in Philadelphia. When the sky opened up over southern New Mexico eighteen months ago, raining down twenty-four sub-light transport hulls filled with forty thousand exhausted, terrified, and utterly bizarre galactic refugees, the Eisenhower administration had reacted in the only way it knew how: it created a brand-new sub-bureau within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, handed it a stack of filing cabinets, and told it to keep order.

The Soviet Union had screamed bloody murder from the floor of the United Nations, claiming the Americans were harboring a clandestine space-armada. The Pentagon was terrified the extraterrestrials were secretly communist infiltrators sent to undermine the Monroe Doctrine. The State Department was paralyzed by the legal impossibility of granting green cards to beings who breathed methane and didn't possess thumbs.

In the middle of this geopolitical nightmare stood Arthur Pendelton, Chief Processing Officer for Processing Zone C.

"Sign at the bottom of page three," Arthur said, pushing the clipboard across the desk. "If you cannot produce an ink mark, a thermal thumbprint or chemical secretion will suffice, provided it doesn't dissolve the paper."

The alien extended a jointed appendage tipped with a horn-like stylus, leaving a small, charcoal-colored smudge in the signature box. Arthur blew on it lightly, satisfied, and detached the yellow carbon copy.

"Welcome to the United States of America, sir," Arthur said, his tone as flat and professional as if he were registering a milk truck in Peoria. "Proceed through Gate Four to the staging area. You’ll be assigned a bunk in Sector Seven. Meal tokens are issued at eight morning and six evening. Do not touch the perimeter fences, do not approach the military personnel near the radar towers, and under no circumstances are you to attempt to trade advanced interstellar technology for Coca-Cola or cigarettes. It ruins the local economy and gives the Army boys ideas."

The alien bowed its thoracic segment with a dry rustle of chitin and lumbered out the rear flap of the tent, heading into the blinding glare of the New Mexico sun. Beyond the tent lay the sprawled, dusty city of the Andromeda Reception Center—a vast grid of olive-drab army canvas, corrugated steel quonset huts, and chain-link fencing that stretched for three miles across the desert floor.

Arthur rubbed his temples, feeling a familiar migraine brewing right behind his left eye. He reached into his desk drawer for his bottle of Bayer aspirin, but before he could unscrew the cap, the heavy canvas flap at the front of Gate Four pulled back with a sharp snapping sound.

Captain Richard Vance stepped into the tent. Vance was thirty-two, wore a starched Army khaki uniform with jump wings on the chest, and carried himself with the razor-sharp arrogance of a man who believed the entire universe could be subdued if you hit it hard enough with a stick.

"Pendelton," Vance said, not bothering to remove his aviator sunglasses. "You’re still chatting up the bugs?"

"I am executing standard entry clearance under Departmental Directive 104-A, Captain," Arthur said, placing two aspirin on his tongue and washing them down with lukewarm tap water from a paper cup. "If I don't process their landing permits, the General Accounting Office will withhold the camp's plumbing allocation for the third quarter."

"Well, put down your pencil," Vance said, slapping a heavy leather riding crop against his thigh. "We’ve got a situation in Sector Nine. A big one."

Arthur sighed, capping his fountain pen with an audible click. "Sector Nine is the high-density enclosure for the humanoid refugees from the Perseus Arm. Did someone start another riot over the synthetic protein mash?"

"No," Vance said, leaning over the desk until his face was six inches from Arthur’s. The captain lowered his voice, though the tent was empty. "We’ve got a corpse, Arthur. A dead one. And it’s not one of the chitin-heads or the jelly-blobs."

Arthur blinked behind his glasses. "Death among the camp population is handled by the medical corps, Captain. You fill out Form DD-1300, cross-reference it with the quarantine manifest, and notify the local coroner if there's any suspicion of infectious disease."

"The coroner isn't going to touch this," Vance said grimly. "And neither is the Medical Corps. The stiff in Sector Nine is Lord Kaelen of the House of Sunken Stars. The head of the royal diplomat cadre."

Arthur paused. He knew the name. Kaelen was one of the few refugees who spoke pristine English—having picked up the language from monitoring AM radio broadcasts during his ship's long sub-light approach to Earth. He was an aristocrat, an imposing figure seven feet tall with skin like polished alabaster and hair like spun silver, who spent his days parleying with State Department envoys and looking down his straight, regal nose at the United States government.

"Heart failure?" Arthur asked tentatively. "Their circulatory systems are under immense strain from Earth's gravity—"

"He’s got four inches of high-carbon titanium alloy sticking out of his spine," Vance interrupted coldly. "It was driven through his chest from behind, right through his secondary heart. Clean, professional, and done inside a locked storage locker."

Arthur sat very still in his metal folding chair. The desert heat suddenly felt cold against the back of his neck.

"A homicide," Arthur said softly.

"A high-stakes homicide," Vance corrected. "Kaelen’s faction is currently negotiating a bilateral defense agreement with Washington. Half the Senate wants to give them homesteading rights in Arizona in exchange for their sub-warp drive schematics. The other half thinks they’re a Trojan horse for the Kremlin."

"And the Soviet observers?" Arthur asked.

Vance smiled, though his eyes remained dead behind his dark lenses. "The Soviet delegation at the perimeter wire heard about it ten minutes ago through their own channels. Ambassador Malenkov is already demanding access to the site, claiming this is an imperialist cover-up to secure alien weapons technology. If this leaks to the press, or if the alien council thinks we murdered their representative, we’re going to have a war on our hands before the month is out. And I don't mean a cold one."

"So call the Federal Bureau of Investigation," Arthur said, reaching for his briefcase. "J. Edgar Hoover’s men love this sort of thing."

"Hoover’s men are currently banned from the camp by presidential order," Vance snapped. "The White House wants this kept strictly under the hat of the Reception Center Administration. That means you, Arthur."

Arthur stopped packing his briefcase and looked at the captain in mild disbelief. "Me? Captain, I am an administrative auditor. I check invoices for mess-hall turnips and audit grease-trap maintenance logs."

"You were a legal investigator for the Maryland Department of Revenue before the war," Vance said, pulling a memo from his breast pocket and slapping it onto the blotter. "And more importantly, you’re the only man in this godforsaken desert who doesn't report to the Pentagon or the CIA. The White House just signed the authorization. You have temporary investigative authority over all civilian, military, and extraterrestrial personnel within the ARC boundaries."

Arthur picked up the memo. It bore the heavy embossed seal of the Executive Office of the President and a crisp signature from Dwight D. Eisenhower.

"They want this solved quickly, Pendelton," Vance said softly. "Quietly, neatly, and before the mid-year diplomatic summit in Geneva. You find out who put that knife in Kaelen's back, write up a nice, tidy report that exonerates the United States military, and we can all go back to pretending this desert is just full of sand."

Arthur looked down at his yellow legal pad, then at the empty chair where the three-legged alien from Gliese-832-Prime had sat just minutes before. Outside, the low, thrumming roar of an alien transport engine vibrated through the floorboards, mixing with the distant sound of an Army bugle playing mess call.

"My authority is absolute regarding access to evidence and witnesses?" Arthur asked plain-facedly.

"Absolute," Vance said. "Within the wire, you’re the king of the world."

"Then bring me my hat, Captain," Arthur said, standing up and smoothing out his rumpled linen jacket. "And call the motor pool. I want to see Sector Nine before the sun melts the evidence."

The motor pool’s idea of luxury was a 1951 Dodge M37 three-quarter-ton power wagon with a suspension that transferred every pebble on the dirt track directly into the small of Arthur’s back. Captain Vance drove with one hand resting on the wheel and the other hanging out the window, his sleeve rolled up to reveal a faded tattoo of an anchor wrapped in a blue dragon.

"The army calls this place Sector Nine," Vance said over the roar of the Dodge’s inline-six engine, kicking up a cloud of fine, rust-colored powder that drifted back into the open cab. "The locals call it the Spire. Don't ask me why. There isn't a building in the place taller than a two-story barracks."

Arthur held onto his briefcase with both knees and adjusted his glasses, which were slowly sliding down his slick nose. "Who has jurisdiction inside the compound walls?"

"Officially? You do, as of ten minutes ago," Vance barked a laugh that was entirely devoid of mirth. "Unofficially? It’s a three-way tug-of-war between the civilian refugee committee, the Military Police, and whatever council of elders the aliens put together to keep their own people from tearing each other apart. The refugees from the Perseus Arm are different from the ones you process at Gate Four, Pendelton. They look human enough from twenty feet away, if you ignore the silver hair and the eyes that look like smoked glass. But they don't think like us. They don't care about the Constitution, they don't care about the Geneva Convention, and they sure as hell don't care about the New Mexico State Police."

They passed through a secondary checkpoint guarded by four Military Policemen armed with M1 carbines and wearing heavy leather aprons over their khakis—a precaution against the static electrical discharges that occasionally arced off the refugees’ personal environmental gear. The MP sergeant on duty gave Vance a perfunctory salute, cast a wary glance at Arthur’s salt-and-pepper hair and civilian necktie, and waved the truck through the chain-link gates.

Inside Sector Nine, the grid system of the main camp broke down into a maze of improvised shelters, heavy canvas tents, and prefabricated steel huts. The earth here wasn't white sand like the rest of the facility; it was stained a dull, iron-heavy crimson from years of industrial testing by the Air Force before the land was turned over to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Red dust hung in the air like a bloody mist, settling over everything: the military-issue cots set out in the sun, the aluminum mess tables, and the long lines of tall, pale figures moving between the rows of housing with a slow, hypnotic grace that made Arthur's spine tingle.

"Look at 'em," Vance muttered, slowing the Dodge to a crawl as a group of three high-born Persean exiles crossed the dirt lane. They were clad in flowing tunics made of a shimmery, lead-weighted weave that seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it. "They treat us like we’re the natives, and they’re the British Navy coming ashore to trade brass buttons for ivory."

"They're refugees, Captain," Arthur said, opening his leather notebook and making a small notation about the dust accumulation on the ventilation louvers of the nearby barracks. "They left a dead world behind in sub-light transports that took three generations to get here. If they act like aristocrats, it’s probably because they haven't realized yet that their money isn't good at the post exchange."

"Money isn't the problem," Vance snapped, pulling the truck up beside a long, double-wide corrugated steel building that bore the painted stencil STOREHOUSE 9-B. "It’s what they brought with them in their pockets. You tell a man he can't have a rifle, he gets angry. You tell an alien he can't have his personal star-mapper, he starts making phone calls to the State Department through channels we don't even know exist."

Two MPs stood guard at the double doors of Storehouse 9-B, their faces pale despite the dry heat. Beside them stood a third figure, dressed not in khaki or canvas, but in a tailored navy blue tropical suit, complete with a crisp silk pocket square and polished brown wingtips that looked entirely out of place in the red dirt.

"Pendelton," the man in the blue suit said, stepping forward as Arthur climbed out of the Dodge. He had slicked-back dark hair, thin lips, and the smooth, untroubled skin of a man who had never done a day's manual labor in his life. "They told me Washington sent an auditor. I was hoping for someone from the Central Intelligence Group, or at least a man with a gun."

Arthur smoothed his trousers and extended a hand. "Arthur Pendelton, Chief Processing Officer. And you are?"

"Julian Thorne," the man said, taking Arthur’s hand with a brief, dry squeeze before dropping it like a dead fish. "Special Envoy from the Office of Inter-System Relations. State Department."

"State," Arthur repeated, pulling out his Dixon pencil. "I didn't know State had established a permanent bureau here. Your budget line doesn't appear in the Q2 regional summary."

Thorne gave Arthur a look reserved for light intelligence officers encountering a misplaced clerk. "My bureau doesn't appear in public ledgers, Mr. Pendelton. I’ve been here three weeks negotiating the status of the High Diplomatic Cadre. Or rather, I was negotiating, until someone decided to perform an unauthorized thoracic surgical procedure on Lord Kaelen."

"Who found the body?" Arthur asked, moving past Thorne toward the double doors of the storehouse.

"A maintenance worker," Vance spoke up, pointing his riding crop toward a young corporal sitting on an empty oil drum twenty yards away, his head in his hands. "Corporal Miller. He came in at seven this morning to tally the distribution of water purification filters. Found Kaelen lying behind a stack of supply crates."

"Has the site been secured?" Arthur asked, looking between the two men.

"Secured?" Thorne sneered. "If you mean have we kept the military’s boots from trampling the area, yes. But if you mean have we kept the aliens from finding out, absolutely not. Kaelen’s personal security retinue—what’s left of them after three hundred years in deep space—is currently holding a vigil in the adjacent alleyway. They’re armed with high-frequency acoustic rods that could liquify your inner ear through six inches of concrete, and they’re waiting for an explanation."

Arthur nodded once, took a deep breath of the hot, ozone-tainted air, and pushed open the heavy steel door.

The interior of Storehouse 9-B was significantly cooler than the outside, though it smelled strongly of warm hydraulic oil, copper, and something sharp and sweet that reminded Arthur of dried raspberries. The storehouse was packed to the rafters with wooden crates stamped with the crest of the US Army Quartermaster Corps, interspersed with strangely shaped, seamless metal containers that belonged to the Persean fleet.

In the center of the concrete floor, half-hidden behind a stack of crate pallets containing standard-issue wool blankets, lay the body.

Lord Kaelen was massive, even lying down. He was easily seven feet three inches long, his long limbs sprawled out like a fallen statue. His skin, normally an unblemished, marble-like white, had taken on a faint, bluish translucency around his fingernails and jaw. He wore a high-collared tunic of dark blue velvet-like material, heavy with silver embroidery that formed complex geometric patterns down the front.

Projecting from the center of his chest, precisely through the silver emblem embroidered over his left rib cage, was five inches of narrow, polished metal. It looked like a cross between a surveyor's spike and a narrow bayonet, crafted from a dull gray alloy that seemed to swallow the dim overhead yellow bulb light.

"Titanium-carbide matrix," Vance said, leaning over Arthur’s shoulder. "Not American military issue. Not Soviet, either. We don't have the foundry capacity to extrude metal that thin without it warping under heat."

Arthur dropped into a crouch beside the corpse, being careful not to touch the metal floor with his knees. He took off his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, and leaned in close to examine the wound.

There was remarkably little blood. What liquid had escaped the chest cavity was not red, but a deep, iridescent purple that had pooled on the gray concrete and dried into a brittle, resinous skin.

"The victim was struck from behind," Arthur noted aloud, tracing his finger an inch above the entry point near the spine. "The tip came out through the front chest wall. It was a single, high-force thrust. Captain, could a human drive a blade through a chest cavity like this with manual strength alone?"

Vance spat onto the concrete to his left. "A heavy-weight boxer might get it through the muscle, but not through the back plate they've got for a spine. These Persean nobles have double-articulated vertebrae backed by cartilage as hard as hickory. You’d need a mechanical driver, or someone with three times the arm strength of a regular soldier."

"Or an alien," Thorne chimed in from the doorway, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. "Which makes this a purely internal matter for the refugee council, Mr. Pendelton. Which is precisely why my office believes we should turn the body over to their elders, close the door, and let them settle it according to their own custom."

Arthur didn't answer right away. He reached out and lightly tapped the protruding end of the metal spike with the wooden end of his pencil. The metal produced no sound—no ring, no metallic resonance, just a flat, dead thud.

"If this were an internal matter, Mr. Thorne," Arthur said calmly, "Lord Kaelen would have been killed in his own quarters within Sector Nine, where his security retinue guards the perimeter day and night. But he wasn't. He was killed inside a locked United States government storehouse."

Arthur stood up, his knees making a dry popping sound. He walked a slow circle around the body, his eyes scanning the surrounding floor.

"The storehouse has two entrances," Arthur said, pointing his pencil at the heavy double doors they had entered through, and then toward a smaller, single door at the rear of the building. "The front door is secured by an Army-issue Master Lock, key held only by Corporal Miller and the quartermaster sergeant. The rear door..." He walked toward the back of the building, stopping three feet from the exit. "...is secured from the inside by a heavy iron drop-latch."

He looked at the iron latch. It was firmly in place, sitting deep within its notch.

"The rear door was latched from the inside," Arthur said, turning back to Vance and Thorne. "The front door was locked from the outside. When Corporal Miller arrived this morning, the front lock was intact. He had to use his key to open it."

"So the killer was locked inside with him?" Vance asked, his brow furrowing under his brown officer's cap.

"Or the killer left through a door that was locked behind him," Arthur replied. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out his small leather-bound notebook, and flicked it open. "Captain Vance, who has access to the master keys for the storehouse grid?"

"The Quartermaster’s office," Vance said immediately. "And the MP detail on duty at Gate Nine."

"And the State Department delegation," Arthur added, looking squarely at Thorne.

Thorne’s eyes narrowed. "Now see here, Pendelton. Are you implying that an American diplomatic official walked into a dry-goods shed and impaled an alien prince with a piece of space-garbage?"

"I'm not implying anything yet, Mr. Thorne," Arthur said, his voice dropping into the flat, rhythmic cadence of an auditor reading off an unpaid freight ledger. "I am simply taking inventory. Lord Kaelen was six minutes away from a scheduled nine o'clock meeting with the regional representative from the Atomic Energy Commission. I have the master log for Sector Nine right here in my notes. He left his private tent at eight-forty-five. He was unaccompanied."

"Unaccompanied?" Vance looked surprised. "He never went anywhere without those two big silver-armored goons following him around like guard dogs."

"His retinue was dismissed at eight-forty," Arthur said, tapping the page. "According to the perimeter log kept by MP Guard Station Four. Kaelen explicitly ordered them to remain in the residential compound. He stated he was meeting an associate for a private matter prior to his formal briefing with the AEC."

"He was coming to meet me," Thorne said, his voice dropping an octave as he stepped further into the shadow of the storehouse roof.

Arthur turned slowly to face the diplomat. "You didn't mention that outside, Mr. Thorne."

"Because it’s classified, you bloody clerk," Thorne hissed, glancing back toward the door as if he expected the red desert dust itself to be listening. "Kaelen wasn't just negotiating land rights in Arizona. He was offering us something else. Something his own people didn't want him to trade away."

"What something?" Vance demanded, stepping forward until his boots were inches from Thorne’s polished shoes.

"Telemetry," Thorne said, leaning in. "Navigation charts for the outer rim of the Perseus arm. Charts that detail the sub-light staging areas used by the Soviet Union’s high-altitude surveillance program. The Russians have been using alien radio-reflections off the upper mesosphere to track our Strategic Air Command flights out of Maine. Kaelen had the frequencies. He was selling them to us in exchange for permanent diplomatic immunity and a three-story house in Georgetown."

Arthur looked down at the dead alien, then back at Thorne. "And where are those charts now, Mr. Thorne?"

Thorne gestured vaguely toward Kaelen’s corpse. "He carried them on a small silver data-spool. It was hung around his neck on a steel wire. I don't see it."

Arthur knelt back down near Kaelen’s head. He carefully lifted the dead lord's long, silver hair away from his neck. The skin was smooth, cold as slate, and entirely bare. But right at the base of the throat, small indentations showed where a thin, heavy wire had been pulled tight enough to bruise the pale flesh before being snapped or cut.

"The spool is gone," Arthur said quietly. "Which leaves us with three distinct possibilities. First: a Persean nationalist killed him to stop the trade. Second: an American agent killed him to take the charts without paying the price. Or third..."

"The Soviets," Vance finished the thought, his jaw setting hard. "Malenkov's people found out he was turning over the telemetry and sent someone over the wire to shut his mouth."

"The perimeter wire is electrified, double-patrolled, and monitored by two searchlight towers," Arthur said dryly. "If a Soviet observer crossed three miles of open sand in broad daylight without being spotted, I suggest we fire the entire 8th MP Battalion and hire the Red Army to guard our borders instead."

He stood up, dusted off his trousers, and closed his notebook with a sharp snap.

"Captain Vance, I want this storehouse sealed. No one comes in, no one goes out—not the MPs, not the State Department, and especially not the medical examiners—until I’ve had three hours to inspect the dust patterns around the rear exit."

"Dust patterns?" Thorne laughed bitterly. "Pendelton, a foreign diplomat is dead, an interstellar intelligence leak is currently walking around this camp, and you’re talking about looking at dirt?"

"Dirt is the only thing in this desert that doesn't lie, Mr. Thorne," Arthur said, placing his pencil back into his breast pocket. "Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go speak with the victim's guard detail. I believe they're currently standing in the sun with high-frequency sound weapons, and I’d prefer to talk to them before someone’s ears start bleeding."

Arthur picked up his briefcase, tipped his straw hat to the two men, and walked out into the blinding, red light of Sector Nine.

The alleyway behind Storehouse 9-B was narrow, choked with empty shipping crates and framed by the high, corrugated walls of the surrounding barracks. The heat here was intense, trapped between the metal surfaces until the air felt like hot grease.

Standing in the shadow of a water tower at the end of the lane were two figures. They were built like the dead man—tall, impossibly lean, with silver-white hair tied back in intricate braided knots that fell down between their shoulder blades. They wore heavy plates of dark gray armor across their shoulders and chests, and each held a long, tapered metallic rod that hummed with a low, bone-shattering vibration that Arthur could feel in his kneecaps twenty yards away.

As Arthur approached, the two guards shifted their weight in unison, their dark, solid-black eyes tracking his movement with an unnatural, unblinking stillness.

Arthur stopped ten feet short of them, dropped his briefcase onto a clean crate, and took out his white handkerchief to wipe his brow.

"Good morning," Arthur said, his voice steady. "I am Arthur Pendelton. I have been assigned by the civilian administration to investigate the death of Lord Kaelen."

The guard on the left raised his weapon three inches. The humming tone grew louder, high and sharp enough to make Arthur’s teeth ache behind his lips.

"The short-lived one speaks of investigation," the guard said. His voice was surprising—not mechanical like the translator unit at Gate Four, but deep, resonance-rich, and carrying an accent that sounded vaguely like an old English scholar who had learned the language entirely from books. "You bring small papers and lead sticks to a place of blood. You think your law touches the House of Sunken Stars?"

"My law touches everything within the perimeter fence, sir," Arthur said politely. "Because if my law doesn't touch it, Captain Vance’s machine guns do, and I think we can both agree that would be an incredibly inefficient way to spend an afternoon."

The second guard lowered his rod slightly, looking Arthur up and down with something resembling cold curiosity. "You are not an officer of their military. You carry no metal on your hip."

"I am an auditor," Arthur said. "Which means I am far more dangerous. I am the man who counts the things that are missing. And right now, what’s missing is an explanation for why your lord was left unescorted fifteen minutes before his death."

The first guard’s face remained stone-like, but his fingers twitched on the silver rod. "Our Lord commanded us to remain at the high hearth. He said the short-lived diplomat from the city of Washington requested a meeting without arms or armor present."

"Julian Thorne," Arthur noted. "Did Kaelen leave the compound alone?"

"He left through the northern gate," the guard said. "He was met by one of your kind. But it was not the blue-clad diplomat."

Arthur paused, his pencil hovering an inch above his notebook. "Not Thorne?"

"No," the guard said, his dark eyes fixing Arthur with a glare that felt like cold iron. "It was a woman. She wore a coat of yellow wool, and her hair was the color of burnt straw. She carried a small black box that hummed like our own engines."

Arthur felt his stomach drop slightly. He knew every civilian contractor, every nurse, and every administrative clerk assigned to the Andromeda Reception Center. There were forty-two women employed within the perimeter wire. Only three of them had hair the color of burnt straw. And only one of them worked for the Department of State's communications unit in Sector One.

"Her name?" Arthur asked softly, though he already knew the answer he didn't want to hear.

"She gave no name to us," the guard said. "She gave only a word of greeting in our own tongue—a word that only those who lived through the Burning of the Spire should know."

Arthur slowly closed his notebook. The red dust of Sector Nine was blowing across his shoes again, kicked up by a sudden gust of dry wind from the north. Beyond the outer fences, two miles across the white flats, he could see the gray, towering superstructure of the Soviet observation post sitting just outside the international border line, its long optical lenses glittering like predator eyes in the mid-day sun.

"Thank you, gentlemen," Arthur said, taking a small step back and tipping his hat. "You’ve been remarkably helpful. I suggest you stay in the shadow of the water tank. The sun out here does terrible things to silver braid."

He picked up his briefcase and headed back toward the dodge power wagon, his mind already recalculating the numbers, the names, and the mountain of paperwork that was about to turn a simple desert murder into a very noisy, very dangerous war.