Ghosts and Ghosts

Maria

"I'm home," the Ghost said softly.

The sky above was black shot through with red streamers of nebular gas, lit with blue-white stars, some many times brighter than Sirius had been as viewed from Earth. The splatter of light from a nearby open cluster glittered to the east, surrounded by the blue haze of a reflection nebula behind it.

But she didn't care. These lights were not of her home world, just of the neighbors.

To the west, the setting sun was a half-dome rested on the horizon, with a band of blinding white light stretched out below it as the light reflected off the seared rock. The sun was spotted with black speckles: the ranks of sunspots visible during this, the peak of its sixteen-year solar cycle.

The sun was as Sol was: A G-two-V main sequence star, with the more or less the same output as old Sol, perhaps a tiny bit less hard radiation due to the thicker zodiacal dust cloud. Close enough, though: Mercury was always the planet of light. Perhaps the light was not quite so deadly as it once was, but then laying outside on the equator at high noon would do the trick to most people, hard radiation or no.

The Caloris Basin was now the home to a city, whose domes and towers defied the sun and the near-vacuum and brought life to the surface of the planet again. Most of Mercury's fifty million people lived in the Core, a hollowed-out section of the interior of the planet, right at the interface between the mantle and the core. The Earthlike habitat down there was well crafted, hospitable, and beautiful, but some preferred the different, more dangerous beauty of the surface.

Some, such as the Ghost who watched the city, and the gold-and-violet lights of the aurora dancing over the city.

The city below was lit mostly by sodium vapor fluorescence; sodium as the principle gas in the planet's sorry excuse for an atmosphere had been seized immediately as the New Mercury's favorite scheme. The golden-yellow lights, set in a radial spider web, looked like a totem to the sun, and formed the skeleton of the city. The city grew slowly, in a spiral pattern, as metal spiders drew a web of life slowly over the barren rock. The Ghost smiled as the dancing aurora overhead briefly took on a similar spider web shape: the natural versus the constructed. The battle had been won three hundred years ago...or at least no major meteor had smashed the city flat just yet.

The Ghost checked her suit's temperature gauge and sighed: EXT:460K INT:300K. She was overheating, though not badly. She'd leaned against a hot rock for too long, and probably would have some minor burns when she took her suit off.

She took long, last look at the city nestled against the base of the mountains, nodded in satisfaction, and set off toward the mountain entrance to the city.

-----

A speeding tank shot past her as she walked down the road to the mountain entrance, which was a wide-mouthed tunnel set against a tall cliff, pointing into the transportation center's translucent gold dome. The last rays of the sun brushed the dome, and before the Ghost reached it, disappeared to leave only the city lights reflecting off the curved surface.

Another tank swerved as it passed her, and she jumped. It would have struck her but for the collision-avoidance computer's fine-tuned radar. She smiled faintly: the golden-red vehicle was very similar to her old, old Predator tank. She'd not seen the vehicle in centuries: she'd left it in Fantasma Colony's vehicle bay when she left Mercury. Her Apocalypse, she had driven out into intercrater plains of Michelangelo Quadrangle and left in some crater for safekeeping, far enough south that the sunlight would not hull the thing too badly.

Perhaps someday she would go retrieve it, for now she had other tasks to accomplish.

The outer gate was open and she entered the twenty-story dome, waited for a few seconds until the outer gate closed and the inner gate opened. Cool air hissed into her suit as she popped the seals and removed her helmet. Her lungs labored for a few breaths as she grew accustomed to the higher air pressure inside the city, which was about seven hundred millibars to her suit's four hundred. It smelled better too; and the oxygen was mixed with nitrogen and argon rather than weird mixtures of "filler" gases.

She stripped her suit off and folded the thin material into a tiny package and stuffed it into the pocket of her white blouse. She frowned slightly as she studied the clothing of the city residents around her. She saw no one not dressed in some shade of brown, yellow, gold, or orange. But no one paid her white clothing any particular attention. She shook her head, puzzled.

As she walked briskly to the tunnel to the city core, she studied the architecture and interior design: all black and gold plastics and metals, roughened to a rocklike texture. Actual stone was used in many places, and she noted that the lighting came from below rather than above. As she took a few stone stairways, she realized that a large percentage of the city's volume was indeed underground.

So, the new Mercurians still remembered Fantasma, the underground colony that had saved them so long ago... she was willing to bet that the city's command centers and main resources were located underground as well, protected by multiple redundancies as Fantasma had always been, under the shadow of the Cybrids.

"Do I know you?" a young man asked her, and she turned around to study him. He was dressed as the other residents, with a gold-and-red shirt and jeans, with the hood of a soft helmet hanging down his back.

"You have never met me," she said softly, and hurried on.

He was following her, she realized a moment later as she heard quick footsteps matching her own. "I know I have seen you somewhere. I came from Fantasma. Didn't you live there?"

Not in six hundred years, she couldn't say. "You have never met me," she repeated, and ducked into a side tunnel. The man did not follow.

She shook her head sadly, and continued down the tunnel to one of the main radial spokes, toward the city center.

-----

The heart of the city was a sphere, half above ground, and half below. There were three decks to this dome, each a hundred meters above the previous. Each was transparent, and the various buildings (mostly governmental offices) were visible as big blocks sitting on these decks.

The Ghost looked up to the central and widest deck. At the very center of the city was a small sphere, about ten meters in diameter, composed of transparisteel like the rest of the dome. Squinting, she saw a smaller sphere inside the dome, rotating slowly. That would be the city's dedication plaque.

She walked over the bottom deck until she reached a (transparent) staircase that led to the middle deck next to the sphere. When she got there, she read the gold text wrapped around the sphere: "Caliente City, 25 April 2996. Dedicated to the memory of those who saved us."

She watched as a holo of Altas flashed into being above the sphere, paused for a few minutes, then disappeared to be replaced by Razorback.

She turned away when her own face appeared, and hurried on her way.

-----

"No, sir, you will not!" Maria said, leaning forward in her chair to emphasize her words. Opposite her, the city's mayor was reaching for a communications device, all excited and breathless.

"Ghost, the people of this city will want to know you're here! None of you have visited this city in centuries. No one currently alive has seen one of you, nor their parents, nor their grandparents! You've faded into legends!"

"I am sorry," she said softly. "But that isn't the reason I came."

The mayor put the commlink down and turned to stare at her. "Have you come to save us?"

Maria frowned, puzzled. "Save you?"

"From the ghosts!"

Maria felt like liquid nitrogen had been poured down her back. "The ghosts?" she whispered.

"The ghosts have been killing us for fifty years!"

-----

Maria ran her finger down the stone wall and held it up to the light. It glistened with a sickening wetness, and smelled horribly of iron. She walked slowly down the corridor, her heart sinking lower with each step as she approached the crumpled form several meters away, crushed against the wall.

When she got to it, she discovered it had been a young woman, mid-twenties, with light brown hair.

At least there was some brown peeking through; most of it was the dark red of dried blood.

"What... did this?"

The city's security chief shook his head angrily, as though furious at her ignorance. "The ghosts. As always."

"Clarify," she snapped as she bent to examine the body more closely.

"Some damned creatures have been doing things like this all over Mercury for the last fifty years. It's the same in Fantasma, Juliet, Fur Elise, all the major cities on the surface and many of those in the Core."

"Mmm. Continue." She knelt beside the body. There was sign of a struggle: the woman's hands were covered with scratches and tiny blisters. Radiation burns? She had been lifted from the ground and hurled with great force into the wall, though the impact had not been what killed her. Nor was it the blood loss: while there was a large amount of blood on the stone beneath her, she had died quickly, judging by the angle of her broken neck.

She examined the array of slashes on the body's chest and face. They looked to have been cut by a knife... but no. Looking more closely, she saw they were jagged, not smooth like a blade would have caused. The sec chief continued. "People hear screams at night a lot, and the security speakers never pick them up--"

"Male or female?"

The sec chief blinked. "Female, usually. Sometimes others." Maria nodded, running a finger over the body's shredded clothing. Strange. There were cuts on the body visible through the torn shirt, cuts that did not match any cuts on the clothing but that could not have been inflicted without cutting the brownish durafiber. "Anyway, the speakers sometimes pick up human screams... which is usually how we find the bodies."

"I see. Are their regions in the city where this happens more frequently than others?"

"Underground, it seems to happen more. Maybe twice as much. The other cities are all different. You can check the maps if you like."

Maria's brows arched. "You have sufficient deaths that you can plot their distribution on maps?"

"Madam Ghost, there have been over a ten thousand deaths in this city alone in the last fifty years."

Maria nodded. "I see."

"You don't know what's causing it," the sec chief muttered.

"Not yet."

"Records indicate such a thing happened in Fantasma Colony for several months, around the time that you... uh..."

"Died?"

"Yeah."

"Mmm. Yes, this was happening then. We believed it was caused unintentionally by one of the Ghosts, before she learned to control her abilities. But there are no Ghosts here, latent or otherwise."

"Are you certain?"

Maria looked back at him with an astonished expression.

-----

Maria bolted awake with a choked scream. Damned nightmares again, for the third night in a row. She waved a hand to turn on the lights and then covered her face with her hands. "Damnit," she said, taking a long, shuddering breath as she fought to dismiss the nightmare.

She rose, slowly, and motion startled a quick yelp out of her. She cursed viciously: the window was programmed to morph into a mirror when she passed by it in a certain direction, and she had been scared of her own reflection.

She froze suddenly. When she had screamed, someone else had as well. "Computer. Access: room logs, t-p-minus one minute." The mirror changed again, to a computer screen, and she watched her image startled awake with a scream. But there were no sounds beside her own.

She dressed quickly, throwing a stark black-and-white robe around herself and tying it with a yellow belt. She sat in the chair opposite the bed, a short, cubical chunk of polished anorthosite like most furniture on Mercury these days. She leaned on the similarly-themed desk in front of her and sighed, fiddling with the black computer screen set into the desk.

She brought up the city news. In the headlines was "Amanda Oceanus, 26." She shook her head. They did not even feel it necessary to say what had happened to her. The article gave no details: it was just a biography of the unfortunate woman's life. Maria touched link for [MORE INFO] and absently noted that the FLT format was the same as Fantasma Colony used to use.

Document [MERC][CALI/PA37][uALLNEWS/aPUB][3500/1006][OCEA/POET] linked to a collection of the deceased's poetry. It seemed that she was an award-winning poetess and had published a number of works on MercNet. Maria read one of them, entitled "Help!"

Help!
Don't leave us alone to die
Don't leave our children to cry
You have abandoned us; why?

Maria could not read the rest of it. She had failed these people. She'd left them too long and--

What? She had not been able to stop the deaths the last time, why now?

Somehow, she had to try.

She closed the computer terminal down, but then paused. Something was nagging at the back of her mind, but she could not reach it. Something about the poetess's death...

-----

Later, as she searched through the archives, she discovered that after the first few years, no one ever bothered to report the screams or the phantoms they saw. They had accepted it as part of life and just gave up fighting it or even trying to understand it. Now and then, a new scientist would try to study the phenomena, fail, and be gently laughed at until he decided to pursue a more worthwhile field of study. But what surprised Maria was how few tried.

Only four scientists in the last twenty years had done any kind of studies, and those four gave up after less than five years each. Indeed, they recorded very little about the phenomena, or at least Maria could find little about it on MercNet, even playing around with some database hacking and administrative access powers.

Fifty years, and there was less than half a gigabyte of text on a worldwide problem of such proportions?

"I think not," she said quietly, cracked her knuckles, and set to work.

An hour later she scowled. Nothing further turned up in her search, not of the archives, nor the databases, nor even of the data transfer logs that MercNet used to keep track of information flowing from point to point.

She examined the stats on MercNet's log system. The databases for those were located in the cliff behind Fantasma Colony, and were backed up in several other locations including Caliente and the Core. Each time a message was sent from any server to any other server, a copy was sent to each of the log servers with pertinent tracing information, and stored permanently. A similar system had been used in Fantasma's original network, and it was used as a hard backup in case a subserver fell or there were transmission errors.

But calling up the logs, she could find no data stacks relevant to the ghosts that were not already extant in one or another of the main city servers. This was impossible: files were all being transferred, and extraneous data was always deleted... except from the log servers. To say that no files existed there except copies of current files meant something was very wrong.

It meant, most likely, that a lot of files were deleted from the city servers, and that, further, a worm infected the log computers and deleted anything incompatible with the remaining files.

It had to have been a damned big worm to take out all those files, and Maria was at a loss to think of a way to do such a thing.

Maria recited the quadrangles of Mercury and ordered the computer to correlate any relevant data from one that was not duplicated in the others.

"Borealis. Apollonia. Liguria. Shakespeare. Victoria."

She shook her head as the map remained stubbornly unchanged. The white lights of Mercury's northern cities blinked slowly on and off, on and off.

"Pieria. Criophori. Tolstoj." At Tolstoj, Caliente City blinked red and yellow. She nodded and continued. "Beethoven. Kuiper."

Nothing else for the equatorial belt. "Cyllene. Persephones. Michelangelo. Discovery."

Red and yellow dots flashed all over Discovery Quadrangle. The Antipode.

"Bach," she said, naming the south polar quadrangle. A few more dots flashed.

She called up Caliente's matches, scanned them quickly. They were nothing but recent news articles that had not yet been fully distributed to the other parts of the planet. Brandenburg, the south polar city, had some files in a personal database, whose presence the log computers had noted recently in a city-wide data transfer to the Core, but that she was not able to access remotely.

Fantasma's computers, though, held a lot of data... right in the Ops main server, locked out from transfer by a firewall.

"Mercurial to Transcenter," she said, holding down the flashing light that indicated the computer's communications program.

"Transcenter here, how may I assist you?"

"I wish to purchase a fast ground transport, long-range. Maybe one of those Predator variants."

"Excuse me? You mean the Ghostwolf model?"

Maria held back a laugh. "As you say," she said blandly. "How much?"

"Standard, expanded, or enhanced?"

"Enhanced." There was a silence, presumably as the other tried to imagine how she got so rich.

"Your credit balance seems... adequate. That'll be ninety-seven thousand scarps." An exact figure, S/97355.7617, popped up on the monitor, and she authorized the transfer. She smiled. Investing and not touching one's funds for six hundred years gave one plenty of dough to toss around.

"I'll be down to pick it up in an hour."

"We won't have the time for full customization then."

"I'll customize it," she said, and closed the channel with a quick tap of the comm indicator.

Her door opened and she scowled fiercely as she turned around. "Madam," the security chief said, gesturing to her and then glancing behind himself.

Two burly guards with laser rifles trained on her stepped forward, while a third threw a coil of monofilament around her. Maria didn't fight: to do so would have cut her arms clean off. "What is the meaning of this?" she demanded.

"I must place you under arrest--"

Monofilament or no, she straightened, infuriated. The thin line cut deep, bloody lines in her upper arms. "Under what charge?" she demanded.

"Approximately ten thousand counts of murder."

Maria shook her head. "No..." she said softly.

"Maria Wolfe, your rights are as follows: Right of silence. Right of statement. Right to legal assistance. Right to humane and courteous treatment. Right to assumption of innocence. Right to--"

"Oh, spare me," she said in a low, frustrated voice, and allowed the security officers to lead her away.

-----

They were not lying when they promised humane treatment: after being booked, they placed her under house arrest in her own apartments under guard. She even had (restricted) MercNet access.

A day later she was informed of her trial date. Maria shrugged as the attorney suggested requesting a later date to give him time to prepare her case. "I do not require time," she told him. "Nor your services. Thank you."

She nodded sharply when he asked if she really wanted to waive her right to attorney, and refused to listen to his pleading. Eventually he and the guard left, and she shook her head sadly.

Her case was simple: she had been nowhere near Mercury in the time the deaths had taken place. Unfortunately, no one believed that or no one cared, else they could not have arrested her in the first place.

"I know you are listening," Maria said to the ceiling. "You are required to inform me of the evidence against me." She should have asked that at her arrest, but had not seen it as important at the time.

The computer lit up and the communications light popped on. "Open channel," Maria said from where she sat on the bed.

"The evidence against you is as follows," the security chief's assistant said from the screen. "One. That the murders would have required paranormal abilities. You are known to possess said abilities. Two. You were present while a similar series of unexplained deaths occurred in Fantasma Colony. Three. That you are capable of changing your physical form and thus would have been able to--"

"Understood. That is opportunity and I suppose method. What is the motive?"

"We are still analyzing that. It is assumed that you have some form of mental defects that instill in you a desire to commit violent acts. Our records site instances--"

"Sufficient. Thank you for your assistance. Close channel."

Maria shook her head and leaned back against the cushion on the bed's headboard. Closing her eyes, she tried to still her frustrated thoughts.

"I am at peace," she told herself, intending to make the statement true rather than suffer the lie. "I am at peace." Slowly, resisting the mantra fiercely, the turmoil faded and she felt a calm descend.

"I am at peace," she whispered again, and raised a disinterested eyebrow as the door burst open and she felt more than saw the gaze of a number of laser rifles.

"What's going on in here?" someone demanded. "We're getting energy readings in here--"

Maria shrugged. She smiled faintly as she felt rough hands on her shoulder, and heard the whirr of a portable scanner. "What the hell? Sir, you might want to take a look at this?"

Maria did not open her eyes. "Madam, I'm gonna have to ask you to--"

"I have no brain," she informed him. "I have an energy matrix. The scanner at your med center will not tell you much more than this one."

"We didn't see this when we scanned you before!"

"I was not meditating before," she said with a faintly irritated tone. I am at peace, she told herself. "Is brain activity now a crime?" You must be very law-abiding citizens, she wanted to add.

The officer was saved from response by his commlink. After holding a one-way conversation with the device for a moment, he snapped, "There's been another death."

I am at peace. I am at peace.

It was futile. She opened tearing eyes to see the officer pointing a damning finger at her. "And you're the one responsible!"

-----

"You are mistaken," Maria said softly, hoping she was telling the truth. Frustration warred with confusion inside her: who was to say she wasn't responsible? She didn't know; she knew she would never commit such... such horrible acts, not knowingly. But perhaps she was doing it unknowingly?

"You must come with us," the officer said, and numbly, Maria obeyed. "You must be subjected to chemical incarceration, since your confinement here is not assuring the safety of this city's citizens."

Maria did not respond. She did not know what to say. She knew her artificial body would be immune to most of the drugs the law enforcement would choose, and that she would be required to tell them of one that it wasn't immune to, if she could even think of any.

She didn't want to contemplate the more drastic measure the officers might take to ensure the city's safety...

Green light filled the chamber and Maria backed away as a swarm of dancing motes coalesced into a human form, or at least a humanoid form. "Altas!"

The security officers were taken aback by this development, but recovered quickly. "Freeze!" the assistant chief snapped, his gray eyes narrowed with an angry determination... and fear.

Altas gazed at the man for a moment, then turned away, as if he didn't exist. "Maria," he said quietly. "This is a nice mess you have here." Maria merely sighed. "You are capable of escaping this place," he said with typical bluntness. "Do you intend to do so?"

Flaunt the due process of law merely because she could? Maria closed her eyes, and shook her head. "No."

"Then I must assist these officers and render you unconscious."

Maria gazed at him bleakly. "Understood."

Altas flicked a green speck of light at her. It struck her in the forehead, and she slowly collapsed to the ground.

The security officer said, "You are... Altas, right?"

"Yes."

"You are also a suspect in this investigation. I'm afraid you'll have to come with me."

Altas did not even bother to turn, merely stood gazing as Maria's still form. "Do not press your luck," he said in a voice that even the acting police chief of the largest city on Mercury refused to challenge.

-----

"You will only awaken with my permission," the Altas-mote informed her for the hundredth time. Maria stared at the green dot that lit up her black void of a universe, and sighed.

"I know, I know," she said. "And you'll only let me wake up when the situation is resolved."

"Correct."

"You know I could just destroy you and do what I like anyway."

"But you will not."

Another sigh. "You know me too well."

"I have known you for six hundred sixty-six years."

Maria paced some more, wondering what exactly she was pacing on in this featureless blackness. "What is going on?" she demanded, once again.

"I am correlating your findings on MercNet," Altas said. "Your narrowing of the search greatly simplified matters."

"Good to know," Maria muttered.

"Apparently, all records relating to the study of the ghosts were wormed thirty-nine years ago."

"By whom?"

"That I cannot tell, however, the hacker used a deep-level programming base that indicated an intimate knowledge of the original foundation codes of MercNet."

Maria did not reply: she knew what Altas was implying.

"Delithita, Xenogears, Izabella, Carrot, myself, and you are the only living people I know to be capable of this," he pointed out unnecessarily. "Together we rebuilt the Fantasma computer systems after the Wipe, and those systems form the core of MercNet."

Maria grimaced. The Wipe occurred in late 2837, the result of a very messy solar flare and series of power surges. Most of Fantasma's databases were lost, except for the backups Altas had downloaded to Ajax and Gyl. Thereafter, the more computer-literate of the Ghosts had rebuilt the network from essentially the ground up, and reorganized the basic data structures for enhanced backup capability.

The system consisted of strings of trinary data. Chits were the basic unit, and consisted of strings of six data points, each of which equaled either zero, one, or negative one. The 729 possible chits represented characters or code modifiers. The chits were in turn arranged into chains, which consisted of sequences of seven, eleven, fifteen, or nineteen chits. These chains were the main structure of MercNet data. The next step in the hierarchy was the chunk, which consisted of 49 to 361 chains. Lastly came chapters, which each contained like numbers of chunks.

"So a Ghost is suspect. But why would a Ghost do such a thing?"

Maria knew better than to ask a rhetorical question of a Cybrid. "To cover his tracks."

-----

Altas examined the latest body sadly. It carried a number of scrapes on the knuckles and balls of the fingers. Altas zoomed in on these with his telescopic lens as the security chief spoke. "This is not right, bringing a suspect to the murder scene--"

"Calm yourself sir. Who is the deceased?"

There was a sigh. "Thirty-one year old Marcus Sav. A language arts teacher at the Fur Elise Academy in Beethoven Quadrangle, here on a visit to his family. No known enemies, except perhaps the students he'd failed."

Altas absorbed the gallows humor impassively. "Curious. What were the professions of the last, say, ten victims?"

The sec chief called it up on his portable. "Language arts teacher. Writer. Historical scholar. Computer systems analyst. Architect. Writer. Forensics analyst. Writer. Graphics designer. Visual arts student."

Altas gave no outward sign of having heard, but his processors went into overdrive, correlating the common elements. "These people, were they skilled in their fields?"

"Yes, it seems so. They demonstrated high aptitude, dedication, and were not afraid to use creative thought when necessary."

"Creative thought," Altas echoed. He extended his index finger to the man and extended his fiber optic lead a centimeter. "Download the biographies of the victims to me," he said.

"I'm afraid I cannot--"

Altas turned to him.

"Alright." He handed Altas the portable and the Cybrid inserted the lead in the proper port, absorbing the data.

"Creative thought," Altas said again. "Every one of the victims who was employed belonged to some field requiring creative thought... Writers. Designers. Theoretical scientists. Artists. Those not employed demonstrated high aptitude for creative and artistic thinking in school... those who survived to their testing days, that is..."

"The youngest victim to date was twelve," the officer noted.

"And he was a child prodigy, a musical composer. With a very high psi rating, according to..." Altas's voice cut off as though a switch had been flicked.

"What is it?"

Altas stared down at the battered and bloodied corpse that was impaled on a broken support beam. "Compile a list of the ten people on Mercury with the highest psi ratings."

"That's hard to do," the chief said, accepting the portable and messing with it for a minute. "The tests are very ambiguous, and many people don't even take paranormal abilities seriously..."

"Humor me."

There was a pause. "Hmm... seems there were a couple that scored abnormally high on their last tests. Psi ratings of over a thousand." The logarithmic scale was based so that a score of one hundred was about average; five hundred or greater indicated strong unconscious telepathic or clairvoyant abilities. (The Ghosts ranged from Carrot's estimated fifteen thousand to Maria, Del, and Eidolon's unestimateable score, probably well over a billion.)

"And correlate the top ten scores over the past five years."

"Yeah..."

"How many of them were victims of ghosts?"

The answer was a long, echoing silence.

-----

"Residents of the Tarazed system were known to have psi ratings averaging about four hundred on our scale, and many of them had ratings well over the two thousand range indicating conscious realization of their abilities. While most of the Tarazedi left this system in the late 2900s, about two hundred stayed, and about thirty of them were indeed native Tarazedi descendants. Their descendants have the highest percentage of ghost deaths of any group."

The security chief's demographics specialist gestured to the numbers and graphs on the chart. Altas and the other occupants of the room (including the mayor of Caliente and the security chiefs of Fur Elise, Orchard, Paradise, and Iliad, nodded in apparent understanding. The expert continued. "Of the twelve thousand six hundred nine deaths over the last fifty-six years, over ninety percent of them had occupied a slot in the top one hundred Mercurian residents as measured by the basic psi tests administered in junior high and with the graduation battery of tests. All these, furthermore, were employed in fields requiring regular creative thought, except those who were not employed, and these were mostly known to be writers or artists on their free time."

"So something is killing off our best minds," the mayor said angrily. "Why?"

The demographics expert shrugged, and the security chief of Iliad stood. Like the Homer Crater his city inhabited, he was big, grizzled, and rough, though his voice was surprisingly schooled and precise. "Suggest two possibilities," he said in a cool Core accent. "One. That the deaths are a natural phenomenon generated unconsciously by the victims themselves, as a manifestation of their own abilities."

A growl of disagreement sounded in the stone-faced room, but the chief continued, unfazed. "Two, that an agency is attempting to prevent the victims from attaining greater paranormal abilities, such as those possessed by the Ghosts."

All eyes turned to Altas, who did not so much as blink.

"What do you have to say to that?" Fur Elise's chief, an attractive brunette with blue-gray eyes and a fiery temper snapped. Altas stared stonily back at her before replying.

"Both are valid hypotheses," he said blandly.

The chief rose to her feet and approached Altas, pointing a finger at him. "I think you Ghosts are doing this, trying to maintain your power over us by destroying the competition."

"Interesting, considering no Ghost has been within a hundred light years of the Heartworlds, much less Mercury itself, in over a hundred years."

The woman poked Altas in the chest, or tried to. She blinked as her finger sank a few centimeters deep into Altas's chest, but recovered quickly. "So you say," she snapped, withdrawing her hand.

"You should read your city's dedication plaque again," Altas said quietly, and turned to the city's mayor. He seemed rather upset by that comment, and indecision was apparent on his face. "Sir. I notice that all references to the ghost phenomena were wormed from MercNet thirty-nine years ago. Were you aware of this?"

"No, I was not. The data were deliberately deleted?"

"Indeed. However, there are chapters still extant in Fantasma and Brandenburg that missed the worm. It was these data that Maria was attempting to access when she was arrested."

"And you want permission to mess with it yourself?" the female security chief demanded. "Not likely!"

The mayor regarded her calmly. "This is not your city, Madam," he said. "If Altas wishes to access those records, he needs permission from the security divisions of Fantasma and Brandenburg."

"And you're just gonna let him go?"

"Why not? If he is innocent and trying to help, his insight would be invaluable." The mayor regarded Altas with a hooded look. "And if he is guilty and trying to cover his tracks, then we'll catch him as he does."

-----

Altas was limited to manual and audio input, which was frustrating, but there was nothing he could do about it. The security chief would not allow him direct access to the systems, which he supposed was a logical precaution, but it was frustrating nevertheless. He could scan a chapter in a millisecond, true, but he could analyze a hundred thousand chapters with a direct link.

"Inefficiency," he muttered, and the security chief snorted.

"Be glad we allow you any access," she said.

"Well. These data are interesting from a historical perspective, but not very enlightening to the current situation."

"What did you get out of it?"

"That my findings mirror those of a scientist who studied the events about forty-one years ago. His study was completed just before the worm that deleted the references from the rest of MercNet, suggesting that the worm was specifically intended to prevent this discovery from becoming general knowledge."

Brandenburg's city council leader grunted. "We aren't making this general knowledge. Everyone with a high psi rating would panic."

Altas dipped a single nod. "I need to inform Maria of this."

"You can't wake her--"

"Who said anything about waking her?"

-----

"What must be done to prove Maria's innocence?" Altas asked of the Caliente security chief over the commlink. The yellow-and-red blinking light in the corner of the screen drew his eyes while he waited for the other to look up from his work and respond to his question. The light was hypnotic. Blink. Blink. Blink.

"Well..." Blink. Blink. Blink. Altas grimaced. "It must be proven that she is guilty. Innocence is assumed."

"Indeed," Altas said blandly.

"It must be proven that she has opportunity, method, and motive. You have provided us with a viable motive, which was the piece we did not have before."

"Pardon?"

"She may have been intending to prevent another Ghost from gaining his powers, thereby assuring her own position."

Emotion filtered through Altas's processors, calmly, regularly. Blink. Blink. Blink. The light turned red. "It is apparent you do not know Maria."

"Perhaps not. But she has power, and she would reasonably be expected to desire to maintain that power."

Blink. Blink. Blink. Altas watched the light changing colors. "You have not answered my question."

"For her to be convicted, it must be proven that she is able to use her abilities in a manner resulting in the observed effects. It must be proved that she was able to use her abilities to institute the murders. And it must be proved that she had a real or perceived reason to do it."

"I see."

"We have a case. But I am sure you could cast reasonable doubt on it..."

"You do not seem eager to see her convicted." Blink. Blink. Blink. The light turned a cool green.

"Would you be eager to accuse someone who built your world of such crimes?"

"I suppose not."

"Even worse, though, is that if she was proven to be guilty, the only sentence that would ensure the safety of this world's residents would be her execution."

The light blinked red again, and then went black.

-----

The next murder was in Overlook, a city in the southernmost reaches of the Antipode. Overlook was built into the Discovery Scarp, and bore the dubious honor of being the only sideways city on Mercury. Its domes and towers projected horizontally out of the scarp, with an array of spotlights on the valley floor shining up on the city like a hundred upside-down suns. Altas was amused: once he had designed such a city concept for the Vostock Scarp.

The Transmercurian Highway, also known as Highway 86, passed under the city. Altas arrived in a Ghostwolf-class skimmer, flying down the mounds of rock surrounding the fifty-meter-wide road. The city came into view as the Highway cut through a crater rim, looming over him like a gigantic hand protruding from the walls. He drove into the main entrance, set into the cliff, and entered the city's network of roads and lift shafts.

The interior of Overlook was as strangely designed as the outside: it consisted of numerous cylindrical shafts with windows set into them. Spiral staircases wound around the shafts and the central cores. Walkways and vehicle paths poked out of the central cores at strange angles, spiderlike. To make traffic even more interesting, the cores were filled with various dangling cables, and figures flew back and forth through the city with the grace-- and stupidity-- the low gravity made possible.

Altas shot a cord out of his wrist and it lashed out to wrap around an overhanging beam. He lifted himself into the air with a quick tensing of his wrist servos, setting a trajectory that would take him to the security office on the fifteenth floor.

"We've been expecting you," the constable of this city said. "You have been granted limited access to--"

Altas stared at him, unseeing. A scream sounded.

The constable raised an eyebrow. "What is it?"

"You do not hear it."

The constable frowned. "Hear what?"

Altas wandered away, toward the open mouth of the tunnel opening, and without even paying attention, he stepped off it.

He fell through the air about thirty meters before reaching out and grabbing a staircase. He used this purchase to slingshot into a tunnel several dozen meters below. This tunnel was empty, unlike most. The flickering of failing lights was nothing noteworthy, except that more were off than on.

He took the tunnel to the first branch, wondering where he was going. His question was answered when another scream sounded, farther down the tunnel, around a bend.

He processed the memory of the scream, running the voiceprint through every other voiceprint record he had catalogued. There were no matches. There were not even any close correlations among his vast collection of female voice clips.

But it did sound human.

"Uplink," he told himself, activating his comm, which he had attached to the main communications system of his Ghostwolf. The flow of data answered him immediately, and he ran through MercNet, pushing past firewalls, snobanks, and aer-lox with impunity. He accessed the main population databases, searching for audio clips.

He was shocked to actually discover something.

Ranona Dixi, aged thirty-one. Deceased 3477, ghost death. Altas looked around, finding himself in an empty, dark tunnel with flickering lights.

The scream was repeated. The voiceprint did not match this time.

Altas examined the voiceprint in his mind, as a simple multiphase oscilloscope diagram. He frowned. Some elements were...

He compared the voiceprint with one in his own database, and his not-quite blood did a good simulation of running cold.

There was a spike at fifty-nine hertz, and resonance patterns at one-eighteen, two-thirty-six, and four-seventy-two. He knew that this pattern contributed a slight, barely-audible huskiness to the voice in question. The other voice in his record had the same pattern, not just the strong resonance, but the exact same frequency.

The voice was Maria's.

But it wasn't. Maria did not have a high-range inconsistency at three-point-nine kilohertz, nor did her voice peak at nine hundred hertz. In fact, the voiceprint he read was all wrong: no voiceprint he'd ever seen was such a mixture of different vocal profiles.

Feeling a horrible suspicion, he ran another voiceprint. This one did indeed have a slight "catch" in the upper ranges, and a staticky, off-key sound through the midranges.

It was Delithita.

And one by one, he factored in all the other Ghosts. All were featured, except Razorback, Xenogears, and himself.

Disturbed, he subtracted the contributions of all the Ghosts, and found there was another, distinct voiceprint left behind.

This was a female voice, one that was not recorded anywhere in MercNet. It superficially matched the one found earlier... suggesting that it was one of the deceased's relatives. A daughter or granddaughter perhaps.

Someone in grave danger, unless Altas missed his guess.

-----

Somewhere deep in the lowest levels of Caliente City, a little girl screamed. Maria fought at the blackness the guarding Altas-mote held over her, but could not defeat it.

"Let me go, damn you!"

"I cannot."

"She'll die!" Maria raged, as the girl screamed again. The wail was a piteous, wrenching cry of sheer terror.

The Altas-mote was not Altas, and only knew one purpose. Maria fought, battering at the fierce green light with her own black-and-gold, ripping at it, punishing it mercilessly, slashing, wounding, killing.

-----

In the tunnel in Overlook, Altas saw a copper sword appear from one of the flickering ceiling lights, and come sailing at him. It struck squarely between his green eyes.

He collapsed into blackness.

-----

Maria ran though the tunnels of Caliente, searching for the little girl, hoping against hope she was not too late...

She slipped into a corner, hiding in the shadows, as a group of police, pulse rifles at the ready, came into the tunnel. "She's in here somewhere!" one of them said quietly, though Maria's hypersensitive hearing easily caught the words. "Seal this level."

Maria crouched deeper into the corner as the officers went by, projecting an illusion of invisibility. To the officers' eyes, she was just another patch of the stone tunnel.

"Energy readings, right on top of us!" the officer said. Maria slipped past them, back to the main nexus for the tunnel. She could hide from eyes but not sensors: when she tried to screen herself, she released energy. She wished for her incorporeal form back, with which she could have just melted through the rock, as visible or invisible as she pleased.

There was another scream, this time very close. Maria ran, not bothering to conceal herself. She knew someone would come through the nexus very shortly, but she didn't have the time.

Maria ran headlong into a phantom, and she gasped as the black form towered over her. It screamed, baring what looked like a heavy, iron sword. Maria ducked the vicious slash the phantom threw at her, and drove a punch with all her strength into the hooded head of the creature.

Her hand froze in space, caught. Maria pulled back, but she was trapped.

"You will not have her!" she said in a deadly whisper. The only response was a horrible laugh.

When she looked again, the creature was gone.

Maria looked down to see a child, of perhaps twelve years, sobbing. She was rolled up in a fetal ball, covering her head with her arms, shivering.

Maria knelt beside the girl and pulled her close. There was blood on her arms, and when she finally lifted her traumatized face to Maria, she saw a deep slash in her forehead, dripping scarlet into one of her beautiful brown eyes.

Anger filled her as she comforted the child as best she could. The monster that did this would pay, she vowed.

"You! Get away from her at once!"

Maria turned to look down the focusing elements of several pulse rifles, fury consuming her. "If you can believe for an instant that I did this," she said in a deadly voice. "Shoot me here and now. Otherwise, stay out of my way or I will show you what I can do."

With that, she helped the girl to her feet, gazed into her eyes for a moment. "Perhaps one day you will be a Ghost," she said softly. The child gifted her with the faintest of smiles, then turned and walked through the security officers and away down the tunnel.

Maria looked deliberately into the eyes of the leader of the security detachment, raised an eyebrow, turned, and walked away in the opposite direction.

/ < / << /