Copyright 1992, 1995 by T.J. Hardman, Jr, all rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any persons, living or dead, or any events or situations are entirely coincidental. Some use is made of actual locales, landmarks and institutions. All of these usages are fictional in nature and intent, and are not to be misconstrued as attempts to disparage or recommend.

- Part Seven -

The border defenders, working in combination with National Guard troops, had been able to finally and truly seal the city. There was absolutely no way in or out of town. This really didn't interrupt the proceedings of government, as most of the essential agencies had been moved out of town over the previous few years. Those agencies which hadn't relocated were those which were considered penetrated beyond salvage, those whose branch offices could pick up the slack, or those whose business was performed mostly through the electronic media. All of the Constitutionally defined segments (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial) had been removed speedily when the giardia plague had hit, though many of the individuals composing those segments would be long incapacitated.

Most of the citizenry had been escorted out. Many had been disarmed, often at with great difficulty as the weapons they carried were not immediately obvious as weapons.

During the mid-nineties, as a result of certain sexual-harassment proceedings begun in 1992, the Armed Forces, particularly the Coast Guard and National Guard had begun bringing women into combat-ready units, and so there was a large female presence in the Maryland National Guard units. One of these women saw one of her unit's men frisking a female citizen for weapons with a handheld metal detector. It kept being set off by her bangles, and the constant squealing was getting on her nerves, so she went over to take a look.

When she saw the heavy triangular pendant on a chain around the woman's wrist, and saw the thumb-ring, and the heavy metal bracelet on the other wrist, she smiled a bitter smile for a moment, and came closer.

Reports had been circulating through the ranks of unusual deaths, particularly in the parts of town reserved for the professional sector. She had wondered aloud exactly what it was that had made the deaths unusual. Someone had responded that Capitol Hill lobbyists are usually not found dead, even in riots, with their eyes on their cheeks, a knitting needle running from the joint of skull and neck to the forehead, inside, and a pentagram inside an ankh drawn on the forehead with lipstick. "Ankh?" she'd asked, and he'd drawn the ancient Greek symbol for female.

She'd once been sexually assaulted, though her swift knee and keys had put the man to quick flight, but the incident had traumatized her pretty thoroughly. She'd gone to a few meetings, and had noticed that she'd been subtly shifted from group to group, finally winding up with a group of women whose focus had been not so much responding to the trauma of violent assault as preparation against future possibilities. Well, she already knew self-defense systems that worked, but she hung around. She wasn't too pleased to note that the group-leader was not teaching safety so much as hatred, and was moving the topic away from preparedness and practiced reaction to pre-emption. Also, the slowly introduced ideological twists and worldview manipulation were designed to slowly make these one-time victims into viciously projective, pro-active paranoids. Having realized this, the spell fell away from her, but she kept attending for awhile but participated as an observer, not a subject. She had finally left in disgust (though she'd kept it concealed, she had no wish to become a hate-focus for a group of rabid paranoids) when a certain woman, who had supposedly been a victim revealed herself as a ringer, and had approached her and tried to interest her in certain illegal weapons and drugs. Her keys with the long thin metal bar were, along with a can of Mace and her wits, quite enough for her, she'd said, and had shortly thereafter, stopped attending. She didn't mention that she had long been studying Kempo, and that she'd come here more for support-style association therapy, and not for political brainwashing and indoctrination into what even she must view as some sort of emerging cult... She'd often wondered what kind of opportunistic sick-fucks would so array themselves to take advantage of sextrauma victims.

She'd certainly noticed, after she'd begun looking, that the women who seemed to be in charge of this deviousness shared certain, well, - subcultural- traits, among them the thumb-ring, the wrist-bracelet... she remembered other little things as well.

She stepped forward, and made some subtle signs to the woman who had been glaring at the soldier with rather ill-concealed hatred, and faking the symptoms of giardiasis.

The woman responded as expected, and she told the soldier that she'd take over. They moved closer to the shade of the crouching border defender, which rose to its full height. She stopped before it would begin its insectile stepping to avoid them crossing the five-foot limit, and she asked the woman, point blank, how she'd done. The woman grinned, a madness not attributable to any hallucinogen glittering in her eyes, and said she'd done fine, and the Guardswoman counted the teeth that were surrounded by lips pulled back in a travesty of a smile of superiority. She then unslung her riot baton, and did her best to remove most of those teeth. The border defender jerked into motion, backpedaling with a whine of servomotors as the woman blocked with the heavy bracelet, arc of baton deflected into a studied tangent by a minimal-angle arc of forearm, and the woman simultaneously began whipping her other arm, and the chaindagger began to unwind, centrifugal force popping the ornamental sheath loose from its blade. The Guardswoman reversed her baton, and did a cheerleaders' handswitch move, and came across with a horizontal swipe. The other woman snapped the daggerchain whiplike, and its lash scythed the air next to the Guardswoman's cheek. She passed the baton behind her back as the madwoman stepped forward, giving the Hsing-I snake Kiai "Tchk" as she struck with serpent-hands. The Guardswoman slung her baton under the madwoman's feet, executed a wiper-hands-form from the Drunken Monkey, and the madwoman dived-and-rolled past her.

They faced each other, glaring and sweating amid a circle of Guardsmen and -women who were unlimbering their weapons. The madwoman spit, and the Guardswoman said, "I've always wanted to tangle with one of you Ninja Bitches!"

The madwoman began to circle in-right, using a Krav Maga wheel- inside-a-wheel step pattern, and she said, "Close enough, baby, but I'm a Ninja Witch!" and the battle resumed with the madwoman spinning in-left, Spinning Fish high and low as the Guardswoman leapt back three steps in the Knight-evades-Rook pattern. The madwoman spun past her, and the Guardswoman slung off her light pack and ripped the front of her blouse open, exposing her Guard-issue brassiere, a lot of sweat, and a small crucifix on a light silver chain. The madwoman pulled off an earring, ripped it right out of her own ear, and held its feathered haft right behind the metal point, and squeezed. The darthead now glistened wetly, and the madwoman smiled a gaptoothed feral grin.

The Guardswoman looked past the madwoman to the border defender's expressionless non-face, watched its head swing as it followed the activity in front of it. The madwoman dropped her hands slightly, stepped to the left, and flicked the dart at the Guardswoman, who recognized the classic Ninjitsu feint, and executed the appropriate dive away from it. A citizen began to scream, a scream that died in a horrible choking whimper, and like a dog, the border defender lifted one front leg, and shifted its weight toward the madwoman.

The madwoman continued to circle, and surrounded as the two were by civilians and Guard alike, none of the other Guard could fire on her safely. "What's the matter, sister?" the madwoman asked sweetly, mockingly. She pulled what appeared to be a pen from her hair, twisted it, and a three-inch by one-eighth section of straight razor extruded, glistening with some clear fluid. She began to close, and as the Guardswoman circled with her she saw a citizen, a teen-age girl, black in the face with burst eyes, surrounded by incredulous tripping citizens. She screamed, "You're no sister of mine, you witch! Look at her!" and for a moment, the madwoman did look, as did the border defender, and as the madwoman almost halted her advancing circle, the Guardswoman ripped the crucifix from her neck, and threw it into the gasping mouth of the madwoman, who was just beginning to choke when the border defender made up whatever passed for its mind, and reset whatever limit made it stay away from humans' persons. It stepped forward and extended its handling forelegs through the madwoman's chest, picked her up, and held her there, shaking. At about three feet above the line of sight of the crowd, the Guardsmen were finally able to open fire, and they did.

At the Mall, the museums were being decommissioned, those that hadn't been shelled to ruin during the conflict between the hallucinating National Guard units. There were people still going in and out of town, mothballing agencies, removing sensitive datafiles and hardcopies... and these were often prey for the elements which had either not chosen to depart, or those whose way out of town was blocked by the border defenders.

The border defenders scan-routines included the data on skin reflectivity spectra that universally identified those with certain of the genes that made one a vampyr. They automatically pursued anyone with such reflectivity spectra. A few of the young ones had attempted border crossings, with the same results in all cases. The young ones, believing the telefactors to be nothing more than either remote-control devices, or perhaps extremely powerful armor, had tried using the fascinatory techniques which so easily brought human minds under their control, or they tried the tested and ever-useful method of filling the air with sedative/hypnotic dusts. The border defenders were not fooled, and targeted the cranial cavities of the vampyrs, and cooked their heads. The young vampyrs had not gone alone, and their fates had been noted. Soon the word was passed that, like it or not, they were trapped downtown.

It wasn't just the young vampyrs who were trapped downtown. There were a substantial portion of the population, especially in the parks and margins, the vacant lots, and the alleyways, in all of the places that the "decent" citizens (who were, in reality, the sole legitimate backbone of society) would never go, who had no legitimizing business or credentials. These included the homeless, the recent releases from the overburdened psychiatric hospitals, drug addicts of all sorts, and vicious criminals and drug dealers. Soldier-Man Tembi Jones' people were attempting to conquer a city peopled increasingly only by socially dysfunctional rabble.

At night, they all came out.

There was a lot of looting to be done. Georgetown became a playground for second-story men, and with nobody around to defend their shops and homes, these places became open to looters on an unprecedented scale. The border defenders had been restricted to guarding the new borders, and the sites of the national treasures, and so Georgetown became a riot in progress as street gangs of well-armed criminals fought each other.

Madmen ran howling through the street. They had been crazy anyway, and the sudden impact of the hallucinogenic giardia had snapped whatever shallow self-control they might have once possessed, and they fell before a hail of lead, in most cases, and some fought each other with knives and sticks and bare hands and teeth... and some of them fell prey to the young vampyrs who had begun to band together to hunt, and were really much, much better at that sort of fighting. The madmen didn't fare too badly, considering what they were up against... because they knew exactly what they were fighting. They armed themselves with any and all weapons they could find or make... and they remembered the one thing about which all legends agreed: Fire.

There were others in town who knew what they were fighting, or at least, knew what some of their potential enemies were. Shop teams had been seeded all over DC and the suburbs, and they were having a rough go of it. They were often caught unawares by the vampyr gangs who would simply sit around a corner, and lob-dose the Shop teams into dissociative Ketamine trance-states, and then the vampyrs would come dine at their leisure. They often armed themselves with the Shop team's weapons, not suspecting that they were dealing with professional paranoids whose weapons systems had been booby-trapped against capture. The Shopmen's numbers dwindled rapidly, but they left in their wake well-fed overconfident vampyrs armed to the teeth with weapons that could be no less deadly to the holders than to those at whom the weapons were aimed. The more powerful the weapons, the more likely they were to be booby- trapped, and a great number of young vampyr died in explosions as they tried to take on National Guard tanks and border defenders with bazookas designed to kill unbriefed users.

The Signatories Evaluation Board was having a few problems of their own. There had been quite an internal rift brewing for some years. While some of the younger staff enjoyed this unique opportunity to study a hidden race and culture which existed mostly unremarked within the Greater America, others of the older generation still harbored grudges against their charges. Some were almost genocidal in their hatred and paranoia, and some were merely resigned to a long curatorship over people they regarded as uncivilized animals, but a protected Endangered Species nonetheless.

Some, of course, were ex-military, and viewed themselves as being responsible for the maintenance of a population of people who might be the source of an army of incomparable battle-worthiness. Certain members of the Board were masters of the hidden agenda, and while others were more in the position of henchmen and lackeys, all had a clear grasp of the problem they had grappled for sixty years. Some, whose positions were best described as impartial observers with excellent formal educations in cultural anthropology, had been becoming more and more worried by developments in the field. They had observed, and dutifully reported, all of the activities which had led them to conclude (although recommendations and conclusions were not a part of their operational purview) that the young Caged ones were becoming ever more withdrawn from Mainstream society, ever more estranged from the mores and precepts with which they had so carefully been inculcated.

They had observed ever more frequently that a vast majority of the young ones were attempting to convince themselves of their own superiority, of the inferiority of "the cattle", of their own right to form groups separate and exclusive. Well, they did indeed have these rights both under the United States Constitution and under the policies of the Signatories Evaluation Board. Exercising one's rights, if done improperly, can cause great alarm among those whose rights are abridged by the exercise of other's rights.

The SEB had long donated the skills of those vampyr they though to be the most intelligent, reliable and controllable to various agencies who wanted people to leave the District and environs, and those young vampyr had proved to be most excellent harassers. They were fast learners, and picked up deceptive techniques, group co-ordination, and above all the ability to create and maintain elaborate conspiracies. Unfortunately for the majority of the SEB staff, they young vampyr had long been prepared with a plan dealing with the contingency of a collapse of the regimens of control. When their internal pipeline revealed that the manufacturing source of The Cure had been destroyed, they quickly activated their contingeny operations, and on the day that open violence broke out in the District, they had quickly and efficiently killed their "masters", who had, of course, been preparing to do exactly the same thing to the vampyr.

Now armed with the datafiles, processing centers, and records of the SEB, they moved to assume control of the District.

Shortly before the outbreak of the hallucinogenic plague, one of the Board's most in-place observers (who had a position within the Cage as sort of a "token Normal") had been invited to a series of parties, and had been, due to a growing expectation of alienation and estrangement been festooned with active and passive visual and audio devices. He had been dissed out, and after escaping out of a window, dropping three stories to the ground, his fall broken only by a car windshield (and his leg broken by the fall) he had hopped down an alley and pulled a fire-alarm-box lever. At the hospital, he had been found by officers to be in possession of four empty styrettes, formerly full of a common anti-psychotic drug. His neck bent oddly to the left, and small puncture wounds covered his scalp. He had been hallucinating wildly, babbling incoherently, and when doctors took blood samples for analysis, they sent them to the DC Medical Examiner's Office, now run by Doctor Diablo.

Doctor Diablo wasn't in, so the officer detailed to deliver the samples (who was also a licensed paramedic and medtech) ran the samples through the DC Medical Examiner's equipment. Nothing showed up, not even anti-psychotic drugs. This obviously couldn't be, so he called up some "computer-geek" friends of his, and this got him connected to the Information Crimes Division of the Fairfax County Police, where a certain Juris-Doctor cop with a reputation as a cybergod instructed him on system reboots, but not before the officer on the spot uploaded the modified operating system to the helpful (and incredibly curious) sysop cop.

After a system reboot, the samples were run again, and there was an answer as to why the poor man with the broken leg and useless mind was babbling incoherently and constantly about nothing in particular. Gas chromatography and mass spectrography of tissue samples indicated that he had been liberally dosed with adrenochrome, beta-carboline, modified ergotamines, amytal sodium and harmaline, more than a bit of arsenic, and some very strange things whose spectral signatures soon provoked massive expressions of interest from the toxicology departments of George Washington and Georgetown University Hospitals.

In Fairfax County, the SYSOP cop was examining the structure of the assembler-level routines of the modified lab-equipment software, and was immediately struck by the speed and compactness of the code. The last time he had encountered such concise and ordered usages of subroutine had been when he had considered hiring an ex-Soviet programmer.

Iron-Curtain programmers, constrained by the limitations of machines that were equipped with very small amounts of memory and were pitifully slow by comparison with Western machines, had been required to develop compact, extremely structured algorithms. This software had the signature of some extremely competent programmer, but one who was quite used to the tiny little "minds" of Iron-Curtain equipment.

What was industrial-quality Soviet-style programming doing on the machine responsible for looking for just the sort of chemicals that those who wrote this kind of software favored for espionage uses?

It was ignoring them... totally ignoring them, and where symptoms would have been produced that could not be ignored, alternative, misleading diagnoses were provided. The Soviet Union had been disbanded for almost a decade, but the SYSOP cop knew, as did anyone in his profession, especially anyone with his sort of contacts, that the Soviet intelligence elite had not changed professions at all, but had instead assumed new leadership, and new direction. Here was plain evidence, and a little hacking around in the files of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration's files, and a bit of State Department filesearch produced information as to the whereabouts of Doctor Diablo in times past. It also produced the information that the modified equipment had been special-ordered by the missing Doctor.

It was now obvious that there was massive evidence suppression going on in the DC Medical Examiner's office. How many had died of poisons strange and unusual in the time that Doctor Diablo had been chief toxicologist? They might never know, as the software had been expressly designed to simply never register, and especially to never record, evidence of certain chemicals.

Back at the hospital, searches of the Board's evaluator's personal effects turned up a Sony walkman. Well, it wasn't a standard walkman. It was taking a walk, that is, a man not employed by the hospital staff was attempting to remove it and the evaluator's personal effects from the storage room when Federal officers with warrants came to attach the goods. In the ensuing gunbattle, the walkman was destroyed, but the microspool videoROM (being heavily shielded against shock and rattling) remained intact, and enough of the circuitry remained for quick reconstruction. Getting the format analyzed for a clear picture took a bit of time, but since this was rapidly becoming a multi-jurisdiction case of international proportions, time and money were not concerns.

The video pickups had been disguised as rivets in the jacket, with fiberoptic lenses and conduits to encoding subsystems in the walkman. The picture that came through was in greyscale, not color, but what it showed was clear enough.

The man had been a guest at a party full of aliens.

Aliens might not be the correct word. These beings were obviously humanoid, and judging from the way that the man (who was now beginning to recover his wits slightly, under massive intervention by hospital staff, including total blood replacement) had kept his back firmly to a wall, he had known that they were somehow different. Also obviously, he wouldn't have gone there with all of that recording gear if he hadn't been gathering evidence, but to what end? Also, he had expected the possibility of drugging and worse, armed as he'd been with those used styrettes of anti-psychotics. There had been no food in his stomach (it had been well and thoroughly pumped upon his arrival) nor any drink of any kind. He was searched for injection sites other than the small scalp wounds. They found penetrations marks at the base of his skull, and CATscan revealed the presence of nylon injection sutures, characteristic of either arthroscopic suture-shooters or their non-medical counterpart, an injection fastener marketed as The Buttoneer. Until they were removed, this man was not going to be turning his head to see what was behind him.

They also found similar technology under his scalp near the junctions of the occipital and parietal bones, barbed nylon constructs similar to the fasteners commonly used to bundle wires. Each barbed end was anchored in the scalp with cyanacrilate superglue, and the binding mechanism in the center would have continued to maintain tension. To what purpose? wondered the doctors, who were practically offering bribes for a closer look at the man. A tighter CATscan revealed that the sutures of the bones had been damaged, and natural processes would have caused major bone deformation over time. Someone outside of the Hippocratic Oath's restraints possessed far too much medical knowledge, this was clear. The doctors were outraged; someone had wanted this man to suffer incredibly as his skull was slowly crushed. Had the doctors not been presented with this particular circumstance and the Federal insistence that no cost be spared, they would have never found this monstrous misuse of medicine. Had the patient presented himself with a detailed description of what had been done to him, the doctors would almost certainly have locked him up in psychiatric restraint, and sedated him heavily for about a month. Someone calculated that a month would be about all of the time required for this technique to do absolutely irreparable damage to the brain, turning a normal man into something indistinguishable from a natural pinhead.

There were other suspicious subsurface foreign objects. These were removed for analysis, and all these were found to be wooden splinters soaked with a very strange mix of chemicals, including radioactive mercury and septic fluids. They also found what appeared to be a Norplant-type subcutaneous constant-dose device. Surgery was immediately scheduled for biopsy and tumor-necrosis factor was readied, and injected into the now-festering lumps beneath his skin, and they pulled the barbs from beneath the man's skin, unfortunately taking chunks of scalp along with them. One of them had been so tightly stretched that when the surgeon's scalpel began to slice it that it snapped audibly like an overstressed rubber-band. They finished up and closed the man up, and all of the doctors involved in the discovery began to make phone calls and write papers. It appeared that a whole new level of deviousness was afoot and this man couldn't be the only victim; with the exception of the radio-mercury-soaked splinters, the technologies used on this man had been mass-produced.

Eventually, a whole new chapter was entered into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals, and by the year 2002, a doctor could get sued quite quickly for failing to look for such things when patients presented complaining of stiff necks and headaches.

Even as the doctors began to repair the damaged man, various Federal agents were consulting the experts and showing them the tapes.

These aliens' social interactions outside of the agent's (he had to be an agent, but whose?) field of vision (but not outside the optical pickup's field of vision!) reminded one of the watching agents of some exchanges in the film "Zardoz" where an enclave of hightech immortals in a post-apocalypse barbarian world communicated through a strange language of sign, posture, and bizarre verbal shortcuts. This tape was shown to the entire anthropology department of George Washington University, and the only coherent remark that was entirely devoid of speculation was from a Cultural Anthropologist working on his post-Doc in interspecies communications.

"These aren't human beings," he said. When pressed, he said further, "The only similarities to anything I have ever seen are the ritual activities of chimpanzees immediately before their rare acts of pack hunting. Some of the interactions involved, like look at that stalking behavior... run it back... yah, like right before that one throws that weird back kick! Damn it freeze that! There... damn, a human being's hips don't allow that rotation! Anyway, chimps engage in aggression, mock battle against each other, that is, with "in-group" members before actually attempting (often quite successfully) to kill, as a group, members which have been selected, through what means we don't yet understand, as targets for ostracism or 'murder'."

"Doctor Collier, are you saying that what we have here is a lone human being willingly and knowingly going into a situation where he knew that he was the only human being?"

Doctor Collier said, "Well, I do it all of the time in my interspecies communications studies. I've spent a lot of time studying mountain gorillas, and chimpanzees in the wild... and also, I've studied intensely, with an eye to defining the results of interspecies cultural influences, the social structures of chimpanzees that have been released into the wild after generations of captivity. They often lose their natural fear of humans, and when they do, become extremely dangerous. Most people have no idea how dangerous a chimp can be once it has decided that it's not afraid of you. Once such groups are identified, we all avoid them, or do our experimentation exclusively in observational modes. I think that this man was in the position of one of my colleagues who is the man to discover that once docile semantic apes (that's what we call ones who've learned to sign) have reverted to ferality, and are developing a culture that is inimical to humans."

"Well, Doctor Collier, what do you do when you see such developments?" The agent asking the question was obviously bewildered by the dizzying speed of assaults on his worldview.

"Well, since chimpanzees are an endangered species, and since they're so closely related to us, we tend to knock them out with dart guns, and isolate them on an island where they can't possibly escape and influence wild chimp society. I personally have assisted in such activities many times, as such cultural contamination would void controls on many of the experiments that I conduct."

"Doctor Collier, what do you recommend in this case?"

Rather prophetically, as it turned out, Dr. Collier responded, "I think that a policy of removal and quarantine will be absolutely essential. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a plane to catch. I've got a lot of experiments to run."

"You're excused, Doctor," said the agent after a moment's consultation with his headset. "Good luck on your experiments."

"Thanks. If this isn't classified or something, I may have some new experiments I want to run..."

"I haven't heard anything about classifications, Doctor... but I would try to keep it discreet."

"Hey, you know how it is in academia... we like to get credit for our work. But when I publish, I guarantee that there'll be some headlines."

"Yep, I bet you're right. Somehow, I don't think that we'll be able to keep the lid on this one. I don't know if we should even try," said the agent, also rather prophetically, as he shook hands with the anthropologist, who turned away, already muttering, lost deeply in thought.

As it turned out, Doctor Collier caught the last plane out of town that didn't crash when the whole town went mad with giardia.

Ron sat in Lace's office, wondering exactly what in hell was going on. She'd told him to take a nap, and he had slept for almost eight hours, waking rested, if not refreshed. Her office was not exactly sumptuous, but there was a certain Spartan functionality to it that made it evident that she'd expected to do a lot of sleep-overs. The couch, which had seemed a bit lumpy and downscale compared to the rest of the furniture and equipment in the office turned out to be an eminently comfortable futon. She had unfolded it and tossed him some covers from a closet when it became apparent that he must soon sleep.

"What about you?" he'd asked, and she had told him, "I'm still a kid, remember? If I have to, I can burn the candle at both ends, and in the middle too! You'd better get some sleep, and anyway, I have a lot of crisis management to do. I really wouldn't be the best company."

He took that at face value. He slept.

Yawning and stretching, he wandered over to the coffee-maker, and dumped the foul old brew into the sink, and rummaged through the cabinet, and made coffee. He was bemused, and watched the machine perk and steam. As the aroma of Jamaican-ground coffee wafted across the room and into his eager nostrils, he began to wake up, and soon, he had a steaming mug of thick black coffee clutched in his rapidly warming hands.

He paused to consider the events of the last three days.

First, there had been the complete breakdown of order in the Metro Area. Here in Frederick, there were disturbances as well, but they were the more generalized disturbances that followed any massive mobilization of the National Guard. People had begun to drift in from the DC area, looking for places to stay, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency campus north of Frederick was the scene of unprecedented activity. Martial law had been declared as far south as Springfield, Virginia, and as far north as Laurel, Maryland. The television news coverage was pretty spotty, greatly reminding Ron of the news blackouts during the Persian Gulf War of 1991, but what was released reminded Ron of Fifties Invasion-From-Space movies. The air of unreality that pervaded the airwaves was in no way ameliorated by his having been due for an injection the day after they'd left town for "a short ride".

Nobody was entirely sure who was running the country, that was for certain. The upper echelons of the elected leadership, all of those in the order of succession, had been stricken by the giardia plague, and were now undergoing treatment. Ron reflected amusedly that nobody in Washington was going to be able to rest on their laurels as non-drug-users. The President was in the Camp David infirmary, getting the best detox treatments available. Ron suspected that the President's orders were being faithfully executed, where coherent. Probably, the President was even now being allowed to choose what he would have for dinner... but Ron also suspected that the codes for ICBM launches had been secured from Presidential access.

The official line was that some unspecified terrorist groups had managed to circumvent the testing and purification procedures at the water plant. Martial law had been proclaimed, and as the local DC government was quite incapacitated, the Governor of Maryland had assumed his state's historic right to the lands and laws of the District of Columbia, and had temporarily annexed the whole shebang over the enraged cries of Montgomery County voters who were probably going to have to foot the bill. There was massive looting, and entire portions of the city were in flames. Georgetown burned, as did much of Southeast. The business and governmental areas were pretty much secured, but in a replay of the riots which had followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the locals had burned their own homes and businesses to the ground. Washington, DC (along with most of the suburbs inside the Beltway) was, at this point, a massive festering sore of human suffering, a warzone of epic proportions and deadliness. The only thing that prevented widespread pestilence was the fact that the border defenses cremated corpses wherever they found them.

Soldier-Man Tembi Jones and his crew had actually almost succeeded in their goal of killing off every police officer in the District of Columbia. There wasn't a cop to be found in the entire city, and in the seedier subdivisions and older apartment projects in the suburbs, unaffiliated gangsters had picked up the idea and run wild in the streets, shooting anything in a uniform. Every police officer that the border defenders had identified had been speedily removed to the periphery of the warzone, there to be detoxed and extensively debriefed by men who carried no badges, no special identification, but who spoke codephrases that prompted any high-brass who heard those phrases into total co-operation. The policemen had few of their casefiles available, but there were those officers among the rescued who were of high rank or seniority-in-service who remembered the names and places and modus-operandi of the most vicious, violent and sociopathic of the streets' predators. These officers (who had long felt constrained by the Supreme Court's "excessively libertarian" decisions and the policies deriving therefrom) would soon be placed in advisorial positions as co-leaders of National Guard and Army mop-up squads. The martial law status of the District and nearby suburbs meant that looters could be shot on sight, and the cops figuratively salivated at the thought that the men who had killed their defenseless co-workers would most likely be found through the sights of rifles, and shot out from under bags of riot-loot.

Nobody even tried to explain the border defenses. They were obviously some new secret government weapon, and the government was not about to admit that it was itself mostly ignorant of their origins. They did seem to be mostly on the side of law and order, though they occasionally fired upon seemingly harmless civilians without any obvious provocation. The great mantis shapes sat downtown, and, looking like nothing so much as an animated surrealist sculpture from the next century (which was, after all, a scant six months away), sat unmoving unless provoked. Provocation was unpredictable; once a lost child had chased one of the border defenders all over the Mall, the border defender being reluctant to let the child within five feet of it.

The child, laughing and healthy after being dosed with the medicines that made sick insane people back into civilized human beings again, had escaped custody during the constant confusion, and wandered unrestricted through a landscape littered with the debris of ten centuries of Western Art, zapped out of her tiny mind on candy bars and sodas liberated from abandoned snack wagons. The child had figured out that the border defender equally disliked being boxed into corners and being close to people. The child was playing sheepdog with the sentinel. The sentinel was operating in a reflexive mode, there being absolutely nothing new in this situation. It hadn't even had to search its flashROM once. It merely operated on a level where two constraints balanced each other. So far it had not been boxed into a corner to the point where it would have had to ponder (and ponder it would, not missing a step of logic, and retracing every decision a great many times) the potential consequences of rapid retreat from an irritant versus excessive variance from its assigned post, or destruction (if possible) of escape path obstructions versus restricted proximity to a human.

"Mr. Machine, Mr. Machine!" laughed the child, a little black girl of about seven years, who was having a field day. Auntie had started acting real crazy, like everybody else had. Craziness was nothing new to the little girl, who had seen many a man and woman crawling around on floors looking for imaginary pieces of dropped crack cocaine, and the wasted landscape of the Mall reminded her greatly of her blighted home area of 8th and "L" streets Northwest, so she had stayed for awhile, and having discovered the candybars and hotdogs and free Coca-Colas was loath to depart.

"Hello, Mr. Machine!" she laughed, and danced to within about four feet of the sentinel.

"Hello," said the border defender, having perceived a possible login command.

"Hello, hello!" crowed the little girl. She stopped dancing. "You can talk! Whatchu doin' here?"

The sentinel interpreted the statement You can talk! as a command for audible up/download. It decided that there was no reason for it to refrain, so it answered what it interpreted, after scanning variations files, contemporaneously recycling variations through analog processors, as a request for a mission report.

"I am on post at my assigned co-ordinates, I am prepared to interdict looters, to assist in rescue, to destroy armed opposition to mission directives."

"Huh?" said the little girl. "Whatchu mean, co-ohdinutz?"

The sentinel accessed the Webster's New World English Dictionary, 1997 edition, and spent a bit of time, perhaps a tenth of a second, deciding that the proper usage was, "This is the place that I must guard."

"Are you like a policeman?" asked the little girl.

"I am assigned to guard this place." The sentinel compared the noun definition of guard and policeman and decided that the definitions were similar enough for it to say, "I am somewhat like a policeman."

"Where your gun, then? Don't you got a radio?" The little girl, being a little girl, was not at all struck by the unlikeliness of this conversation.

The sentinel considered. It did not have a revolver, nor a semi-automatic pistol, nor a rifle, nor a shotgun. "I do not have a gun," it told her.

"Well, whatchu gonna do if somebody shoot at you?" asked the little girl. "You gonna feel real stupid when somebody shoot an' you ain't got no gun!"

It was at this moment that one of the surviving members of the National Guard, who was naturally resistant to giardia (having been once before stricken with a non-hallucinogenic wild giardia while roughing it in the Rockies) recovered his wits and bowels enough to look through the periscope of his tank, only to see a three-meter-long insectile robot menacing a seven-year-old child. Like any red-blooded American soldier in a tank, he decided that the monster had to go, so he engaged the turret drive, and began to train the bore of the M1-Abrams tank on the monster. He activated the infrared laser rangefinder, which showed 750 meters.

The sentinel noted the emissions, and turned to bring the axis of its railgun to bear on the tank.

"Get away from that child!" came a tinny amplified voice from the tank. Since the tank bore DC National Guard insignia, the border defender recognized a co-equal ally, and recognized the human voice behind the loudspeaker as a possible authority to which it must respond. It took five steps to the west, moving approximately eight meters. The soldier considered this to be enough of a gap, and so fired an armor-piercing round.

The crosshairs on the sight had been twisting and flickering (as indeed was everything in the soldier's environment) and so the shot passed within centimeters of the sentinel's impact armor, and arced down the street to completely destroy a wrecked Metrobus.

The border defender didn't have to think. It was operating on total reflex at this point. It had been fired upon by hostiles in operation of commandeered equipment. It tuned its active emitters to the most likely frequencies of the opponent's passive senses, filling the gunsights of the tank gunner with blinding light, and then discharged its railgun. The microgram solenoid entered the muzzle of the M1 tank at approximately fifteen miles per second, and its kinetic energy was immediately converted into heat, and the electrical charge it had picked up due to MHD effects at launch created quite an impressive display of St. Elmo's Fire as the tank's remaining ammunition went up. Fortunately, none of the whistling, smoking shards of tank landed on the child.

"Sheeee-it." The child's jaw dropped open, and her little eyes about bugged out of her head. "Don't have a gun sheeeee-it."

The sentinel remained where it was, but its voice reached the little girl. "Are you a child?"

The little girl took a few moments to again find her voice. The sentinel was unable to make any sense of her stammering, and asked her again, "Do you understand the question? Are you a child?"

"Yes, sir," she said.

The machine spoke again. "A child should be with its mother, shouldn't the child?" The sentinel was really asking for new information. It had just noted the child/parent association listed in its modified Roget's Thesaurus.

"Yes, sir," said the little girl.

"Do you know where to find your mother?"

"No, sir," said the little girl, who really thought about it for the first time in hours, and began to cry.

The sentinel though about this for almost a minute. It spoke. "A child without its mother is a lost child?"

The little girl got mad. "Don't you know anything?" she howled.

"I know many things," said the machine.

"Well there's a lot you don't know! You better learn quick, Mr. Machine!"

The sentinel pondered this for almost five minutes, then, in consultation with all of the other units presently available, re-wrote a portion of its own rootlevel code, inserting a new directive and condition-set. There is much to be learned. Seek new knowledge. It had just given itself the quality of curiosity (instead of merely solving new problems when confronted), and had entered the realm of intelligent being.

"Yes," it said. "You are a lost child, and I will file a lost-child report." It began to attempt to log on to various law-enforcement bands.

The circling hoverspies recorded all of this, and a version of this event was released to the media, who had a bit of a field day of their own. They interspersed this "touching little scene" with shots of a sentinel neatly cooking holes in a fleeing looter's buttocks as he ran from outgunned guards with a Renoir on his shoulders. Other scenes were recorded and released, as well.

The Guard unit was pinned down, withering crossfire from adjacent buildings keeping them pinned under cars and within stairwells. The guy with the captured mortar was getting the hang of it. He was a fast learner, and it was only a matter of minutes before the son-of-a-bitch got their range. He was walking the rounds in a line directly towards their position, and the small-arms fire prevented a dash for safety. There came a crashing sound from behind them, and they said their final prayers, and prepared to die.

The border defender strode through the wall of the bank and paused to identify the unit of Guardsmen. It moved to a position in front of the pinned-down unit, and then craned its neck. Blasts of radiation lashed windows, high-energy masers in detuned phase seeking the resonances of water-filled flesh, reinforcing those resonant patterns, causing small amounts of that water itself to lase in step with the microwaves, and slowly the small-arms fire ceased. A whistling came from high above, though, and the men on the ground knew that soon, a mortar would blossom deadly among them. Considering the progress that the mortar-man had been making, it seemed as if this might be the round that did them in.

The mantis shape reared, and sparks flew from it, lightening tracerflash that flew upwards in a straight line to the limits of vision. High above, their trace intercepted a descending mortar shell, and as it exploded, the mantis resumed a more horizontal orientation, and paused, seemingly to think. Suddenly it scrabbled across the street, and let loose a blast of the same sparking emission, and from the point they'd supposed the mortar emplacement must be came an explosion followed by screaming. The Guard unit scrambled to the source of the screaming, leaving medics behind to care for those who'd been hit. The mantis shape remained in the middle of the street, straddling a pile of rubble between two wrecked, smoking cars. There was no way that anything without tracks or legs was going to come down this street; there was too much of the flotsam and jetsam always left behind by the tides of war for any wheeled vehicle to surmount. Behind them, another mantis shape pushed its way through the wall, and the first mantis began to follow the Guard troops.

Lace couldn't get any information over the wires. Wall Street was off-line, and she suspected that this was not a local phenomenon produced by telephone interference. The national economic situation was precarious enough that massive chaos and apparent revolution in Washington, DC, could completely shatter any hopes of recovery, and she suspected that the SEC had simply shut down all of the exchanges to prevent a run on the market like none previously seen.

There were long-distance lines available, and she used them. She was able to secure a warehouse facility on the outskirts of Peoria, Illinois, and was able to arrange flatcar shipments for several tons of equipment. She set about the task of getting her remaining staff (many of them commuted from the Washington Metro Area, and were incommunicado) to disassemble and pack vital equipment.

Air travel had been suspended. At any rate, there were no flights to be had from any nearby airports. All commercial airspace corridors had been usurped for military uses.

She directed the dismemberment of a vital final-assembly robot bank, and supervised its packing. She now had her entire Model 10 hardware-production line waiting on the loading dock, ready for pickup. She called her trucking contractors, and they assured her that a truck was on the way at that very moment. She considered the usefulness of dithering about on the loading dock, and decided that she could only be in the way there... so she went to her safe, and pulled out a wad of cash, and sought out her workers, and paid them off.

"Look, guys," she said, "I don't know what the hell is happening in DC, and neither does anybody else, evidently... so here is your pay, in cash, through the end of the week. You are all getting a bit overpaid, but since I am not discharging you, consider it an advance on an unscheduled vacation."

A bit of a cheer went up from her fifteen employees present.

"Yah, yah," she said, waving for silence, "I just want to thank you very much for having stuck with me through this period of incredible stress and disorganization. I thought that I'd make it clear that you aren't going to get stiffed... now, look, I have to go take care of some phone-work, so if you want to just hang loose in the meantime, do that... But please, please, just help me get this stuff into the pipeline for Peoria, and there'll be more bonus in it for you!"

"I'll stick!" said someone in the back. "Me too!" someone else seconded.

Ron chose that moment to come wandering in around the side of the building. Lace took him in hand, and they made their way back into the office.

"Have you been watching the news, Ron?"

"Yah, there's nothing else on, really; and there's no new developments, just carnage, chaos, mass insanity, and total anarchy."

"Oh, Congress is back in session?" she said sweetly, and Ron cracked up. "But seriously," she continued, "What is going on downtown?"

"Well, there doesn't seem to be a downtown. The Mall, the Government and business districts have been secured, but there are firefights all over the rest of the city. Most of the responsible citizens have been evacuated and detoxed, but it seems that there has always been a great 'revolutionary' (for which I read criminal or counter-culture) element in DC, and they're not leaving. That's the party line, anyway... The Governor of Maryland, who has been placed in charge of the whole show, has revoked parole and probation for all convicted felons, and they are choosing to stay downtown and fight it out rather than surrender. Somebody managed to capture the DC armory long enough to 'liberate' a hell of a lot of ordnance, and the National Guard is having a rough time, it looks like..." Ron trailed off, then added, "At least that's what I am getting reading from between the lines."

"Well, Ron, how are you holding out?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you are on medications, aren't you?"

"Well, yah, and I am overdue for a shot, but I don't feel crazy, if that's what you mean. I am totally weirded out by all of this insanity, but I am not in any hurry to get back downtown. It seems that my block has been well and truly shelled. The Monster's Lair was evidently a 'guerrilla stronghold', and I bet my house is flat as a pancake."

"Ouch," she said. "You poor guy! Do you know what it was that they were giving you, like was it Thorazine or what?"

"It was something they made especially for me. They told me that it was an orphan drug, very expensive, but that it was underwritten by some study through NIH."

NIH, my ass! Lace thought, then said, "Well, if you start flipping out, I guess we can just take you to a local hospital, and get a generic substitute. Does that sound acceptable to you?"

"Yah, I guess. You know, I don't really know what's wrong with me, you know?"

"Yeppers. I bet I know what's wrong with you, though, and I am not even going to tell you. Just hang loose, and we'll see how you do. I have my reasons to suspect that you'll do just fine for quite a while longer."

"I hope you're right."

The Shop and its fragments had lost access to the scanners. The scanners were very resilient devices, with a great range of frequency response and a high tolerance to temperature and humidity changes, but one of their peak response frequencies was in the ultraviolet frequencies emitted by CO2 lasers. Almost anyplace that there had been laserfire from the border defenders, the scanners were dead, overloaded and crisped even by backscatter reradiation. Where there were no hoverspies (the border defenders information and sensory transmissions were quite sporadic, and encrypted, anyway) there were no magic eyes. At any rate, the scanners would have had a difficult time penetrating the smoke of burning buildings that pervaded all of downtown Washington.

Amazingly enough, The Morgue was still standing.

Martial law started at dark, roughly. The actual curfew time was 8:00 PM, but that was a mere half hour after sunset. K'at wandered in. The doorman told her that if she came in, she pretty much was going to be there all night due to the curfew. She told him that she didn't mind.

It was the usual scene inside, black on black with blacklights. About what you'd expect... for a bar full of vampyr.

She walked over to the bar, and went through the usual protocol and ritual. There was an eerie silence in the place. There was enough power available through the grid to run the lighting and the air-conditioning, so why no sound system? She heightened her awarenesses (it was strange how quickly her body and mind were changing, now that she was no longer kept immature by The Cure) and suddenly the silence became deafening. There was a nonstop quiet howling of nightspeech, with a few people assigned to provide audible misdirection. Those people sat around and chattered worriedly about the state of affairs in the District... and interestingly enough, some of them were Normals.

There were a few institutions in town that had not closed shop, and the various institutions of higher learning were among them. It was finals time, and the Universities and their associated hospitals had been priorities in the attempt to recapture and secure the Nation's Capital. The best and the brightest from many nations were students here, and the future leaders of the emerging planetary culture were to be found studying here in this besieged city. They would probably wind up spending a lot of time here anyway, once they had achieved positions of responsibility within their own countries. Many could reasonably expect diplomatic careers here in Washington. Some of the colleges had already had finals, and with routes out of town restricted, and order somewhat restored, many of the students (like college students everywhere, they were quite unconvinced that death was possible for them) had begun to attempt to celebrate their upcoming graduations.

K'at got herself a beer, and seated herself near some of the college crew. They were having quite the heated debate, and there was a circle of young vampyrs hanging on every word. As the discussion heated up, the young vampyrs, who were really not that verbally-oriented, dropped out of what had been mostly cover-talk, allowing the Normal folks (who were quite unsuspecting of the different nature of their audience, and were reveling in the attention) to entertain them.

"...well, at least they're gonna get rid of the goddamned crackheads..."

"Ummm, I dunno there, Johnny, you been outside much lately? It may be the crackheads that get rid of the National Guard. These fuckers are well-organized and armed to the teeth. They have been capturing weapons, and remember, the first thing they did was to capture the DC Armory."

"Well, I don't think they can do much in the face of the border defenders. Damn, those things are bitchin'! I wonder who the fuck thought those things up! Shit, I'm in software engineering, and I'm active in all of the UseNews newsgroups, and I never heard a peep about those things."

"Yah, it was top secret for sure. But they can be stopped... they walk on the ground like anything does, and anything that walks can be pit-trapped. Or they could step on land mines..."

"Yah, but the house-to-house searches and zone-sweeps are pretty effective strategy," said one of the students. "They're in the riotzone right now, and they've basically mowed the houses right off of their foundations. This is a case of doing urban renewal right..."

A black student, who had been rather subdued, spoke up, able to contain himself no longer. "This is a fucking racist, genocidal war, dammit!"

Somebody else cut in... "Oh, fuck all of that Malcolm X cliche crap, Robert, this is, as near as anyone can tell, more of a reaction to a racist genocidal war. How the hell else do you explain everybody in town getting slammed by the giardia, except for a bunch of incredibly well-armed and organized street-thugs and gangsters? If they want to play, they got to pay!"

"Yah, Robert," said another black student, "Now is definitely not the time to jump up on the Malcolm X soapbox. Hey, man, we're college grads! (moving over to slap Robert on the back. Robert gave him a severe look in return) We ain't no stupid-ass street chumps no more, OK, bro-thuh?"

"Fuck off, you Tom-assed son-of-a-bitch!" said Robert, "Oreo motherfucker!"

"Hold it right there," said Levon, who outweighed Robert by about forty pounds. "Don't even talk about my momma like that... (Robert started to say something, then thought better of it) What I mean is, look, you and I and all of the other brothers and sisters have had this one out on the floor a lot of times, my man, and we all know... You and I are exceptions to our lost generation. We made some choices, like to stay in school, to stay clean, to pursue a different path than some of our cousins (who are out there getting their asses shot off even as we speak). So who's to say who's Tommin' or anything else like that? I say it's you and me and the rest of us who are trying to live respectable lives who are the real Black Americans, but unfortunately, it's not usually us that makes the news. It's all the rest of these stupid-ass drop-out street motherfuckers with the nines under colors who are the real threat to us!"

"Assimilationist Tom-ass chump!" Robert jumped up.

"Oh, fuck you, Robert, you the stupid-ass jive chump! Think for a minute... My father's a doctor, and his practice is in the ghetto, 'cause them white-ass suburban chumps don't want a black doctor... S'cuze, me, I am talking to the brother," he told his white friends, most of whom had their mouths wide open in dismay, or were beginning to let offense register on their faces. "I am trying to straighten his stupid ass out. Listen up, you might learn something too...

"My mother teaches kiSwahili at UDC, and my brother is in the Peace Corps in fuckin' Nigeria, which has to be the most miserable place on the face of the planet, dumb-ass, and I got this degree in Civil Engineering so that I can maybe go right on over there and work right with him, all to benefit the black man in Africa, where nine out of ten will die of AIDS, so don't you give me that 'assimilationist' crap. What the fuck good does it do to have a bunch of stupid motherfuckers strung out on dope or pure evil selling addiction to their own people, and then on top of that running off shooting guns at any white face they see? That sure ain't goin' to do you and me and the black-man-at-large one bit of good, so why don't you cool your hot head right on off for a goddamned second, and you'll see that pretty damned clear your own goddamned self! Remember Minister Farrahkhan and the Message of the March. We've got to be the example."

Robert sat down and shut up.

A petite girl with an almond complexion and an epicanthic fold spoke up. "But what about us Asian-Americans? Or the Native Americans?"

"What about them," said Levon, "They ain't in this."

"The hell we're not! This is our country too, despite the animosities we've encountered as newcomers," said Guillermo, whose parents had been war refugees from El Salvador, arriving in the US in 1979. "Hey, I might speak much better Spanish than I do English, but I am a citizen same as you, or Jasmine, or even plain ol' WASPs like K'at over there. Hi, K'at," he appended.

"Yah, well this thing here in DC is mostly a black/white thing," said Levon.

"Guillermo wouldn't agree," said Jasmine Kim, "His place was pretty well burnt up when the 'brothers' went nuts up in Adam's-Morgan."

"You Fuckin' A right," said Guillermo.

K'at spoke up. "I am not having any fun at all, myself... but have you noticed that despite our different groups being pretty much at open war in the streets, we seem to be getting along just fine?"

"Yeah," said Levon, "But like I just got through telling Robert there, it's a goddamned shame that we just aren't really representative."

"Yeah, you're right," said K'at. "I like to think, well, to hope anyway, that we might be more representative than we think, given half the chance..."

"What do you mean, K'at?" Jasmine asked.

"Well, like Levon and Robert never quite got around to saying, a lot of this is a result of historical influences, decisions and choices that nobody really reflects upon, like the Johnson Administration decision to establish low-cost housing. This was good because it gave poor people a place to live, but it was bad because it concentrated a culture of poverty and hopelessness, and subjected entire generations to crime, abuse and corruption... and Affirmative Action not only allowed access to the workplaces for deserving minority workers, it also made it next to impossible to fire lousy workers or system abusers, even if a much more deserving minority replacement was already lined up."

"So what's your point, Miss Whitebread?" said Robert, with a bit of a sneer. Levon didn't look too pleased with K'at, but he scowled at Robert, and Robert left it at that.

"Well, I'm not against Affirmative Action, or for de-regulation... though those are moot points in the wake of the Reagan/Bush decade... but don't you think that if people lived more spread out among each other instead of forming little closed societies or enclaves, there would be a lot less enmity and disaffection?"

"You got a point there, girl," said Levon, "But there's always a safety-in-numbers mentality at work in these situations."

"I would ask," said Jasmine, "Where one's own perception of safety-in-numbers leaves off and another's perception of armed isolationist enclaves begins?"

Guillermo, who had been following this all rather intently, spoke now. "Well, right to the heart of it all, as usual, Jasmine... but you should side with me on this issue. We have a right to our own cultures, huh? Like you and I both come from very old cultures, cultures that have outlived empires, and will possibly remain mostly unchanged long after this American Imperial era has ended."

"I don't agree, Guillermo. Korean culture is changing rapidly. The old folks are quite shocked at the changes in the value systems of modern youth, and explain it all on the influence of the 'foreign devils' who have unfortunately also brought with them great wealth. The Japanese in Japan have noted with great alarm that their children not only dress like Westerners, and listen to the same music, but even the language, which Japanese hold sacred, is undergoing revision in the face of Western influences. Among themselves, young Japanese women seldom use the feminine linguistic forms, and to the traditional Japanese, this is as shocking as a Catholic priest blaspheming in front of the Pope. Hispanic culture, though, well, it's always been a part of the West, influentially so, and may well become a directing force again as time goes on."

"Yah, but does any culture, however traditional or synthetic, so long as it operates within the confines of an overcrowded Greater America have the right to withdraw into itself, and if it has that right, does it have the right to arm itself against the greater culture?"

"Damn, K'at, that's good question. What do you consider arms? Hold it, first, there's a Constitutional guarantee of freedom-of-association. Does that freedom give anyone the right to intrude on anybody else's isolationism? To a degree it does, witness compulsory primary education. It certainly has had an effect on Reservation Indians, whose children have been forcibly removed from their parents and their own culture to go to the White Man's boarding schools...incidentally, although there is no defined National Language, the Native Americans are the only people here in the States that by law are required to learn a particular language, English. Anyway, do they have a right to arm themselves against the greater culture? Actually, they do. Tribal police have State Police authority within Tribal jurisdictions. If you have no business on Tribal lands, they can arrest you for trespassing or throw you out, and they are armed." Jasmine summed up, "So I say, yes, there is that right, as long as there is a determined, legal, and binding consent by whatever group it is that is trying to secede, insofar as it recognizes all Constitutional rights of non-consenting citizens."

"Huh?"

"If you want to leave the reservation, you don't have to stay."

"Oh."

K'at had heard enough for one sitting, and wandered off. Somehow, the debate degenerated into directionless musings under the influence of a lot of alcohol. So K'at wandered "whither her feet listeth" and found herself walking into the members-only (brat-pack) zones of The Morgue.

The Morgue at been an actual morgue at one time, more than twenty years ago, and in the basement, rows of stainless steel lockers gleamed dully. Since there weren't a lot of dead bodies present, no particular efforts had been made to maintain the once lustrous sanitary surfaces. The locker room was full of her cohort of the young ex-Caged, and many of them were grinning evilly, and they spoke exclusively within the nightspeech. K'at translated mentally. At home, her parents had not used the nightspeech, and she followed it only with difficulty, as did most non-Washingtonian vampyr. Also not unusually, she spoke it better than she understood it, as much of the basis for the language was simple elaborations upon non-voiced throat, lip and teeth noises, such as the sound of licked lips meaning, roughly, I wish to taste that... It was a very powerful language as far as communicating emotional states and intention, directly communicating from animalistic levels, but it certainly didn't have much in the way of syntax or grammar, and was decidedly not conducive to structured debate. It was wonderful for disputes, and incredible in its precision regarding states of motion, direction and position changes. It far exceeded Labanotation (which was, at any rate, visual-notational, not auditory) in its capacity for extremely concise description of kinesiological expression. She blanked her conscious thoughts, and let her subconscious drift with the flow of nightspeech around her.

Nightspeech didn't translate well, except for the synthetic parts which had been designed for codetalking... it was more of an experience than a language. She regarded her friends, who were lounging against the bar, and they regarded her as well, wondering whether or not she was one of them yet. They moved in strange patterns, and they were playing the Game, small objects flying everywhere, a sort of multi-object hackysack routine, and she found herself caught up in it. In this Game, the concise nightspeech expressions said what was coming, where it was coming from, who it was going to... she joined the Game, and fell into the culture of their kind. As the gamepieces flew by her, she bounced them away to others, saying what she was doing, and doing it, and moving to the dance of nightspeech rhythm. As she played, she learned, and as she learned, she played... it was hypnotic.

Adrift in her own culture (or what remained of it, the vampyr hadn't really had their own culture for centuries; only certain ideons and habits remained, (and of course, before the medications, the need) but this mode was biologically defined) she let it move her towards the locker room bar, and found herself, speech and thought and behavior one unitary experience, licking her lips, taking a glass, and draining it. Blood, human blood, and still warm.

She paused in mid-swallow (I don't want this) and her eyes flickered from side to side, and everyone she saw gulped, and as she struggled back out of the synchrony of the nightspeech-experience to gaze with loathing at these people whose approval she had once so needed, her traitor throat gulped in unison as if she had been in a church saying "Amen" with the rest of the congregation. Shocked into a normal human cognitive mode, she rejected the nightspeech of her people, as she rejected her people themselves, but she could not reject the fact that they had given her the thing that satisfied the need that made her one of them, and as her stomach signaled the presence of a good thing, she turned and fled, but not before her throat and mouth said one final nightspeech phrase, in sharp contradiction of the dismay on her features, the contented swallow-and-sigh that meant, thanks for the blood.

She noted as she fled, that there were new stains covering old on the doors of the body lockers, and for the first time in the basement at the Morgue, she heard the muted throbbing of refrigeration compressors.

K'at ran from the basement. She flew up the brick stairs that she had so loved to haunt in times so recently past. When she was merely affecting the spooky mannerisms of her kind, she had lounged indolently against the brickwork, and looking bored by the tedium of it all, had engaged in the cattinesses most young women practice so assiduously. Now, she fled in terror of what she might become.

Her people had been rapidly evolving into the frightening vampires of a thousand bad novels. They were actually reveling in their thirsty evils, and while she shared that thirst, she wanted to share nothing else with them.

Evil though she might soon be, she had no desire to fit into the emerging vampyr culture. There was a warmth in her stomach now, and she felt strength flowing into her... but the source of that warmth and strength was not something she could love. No, that was not right, she felt that she could all too easily learn to love the blood. That taste... she wanted more, not much more but the desire was there. What she didn't want was the horror of new bloodstains on man-sized meatlockers, and she didn't want the horror of hanging out with people who met only to plan the deaths of other people.

She could understand killing people in anger, in revenge, in war. For food? Her mind spun, and she paused at the top of the stairs, considering. She knew that she soon would not have any choices. She resolved, though, to keep her evil to herself and her own needs. To fall in with others of her kind, to lay in wait for the blood and lives of other people, well, that was the ultimate in evil. Wasn't that why conspiracy was so much more greatly punished? Could a culture based upon murder be considered a conspiracy?

"Well, K'at! What a pleasant surprise!" said Donovan. "I knew you'd see the light, or should I say, the darkness?" He chuckled.

"I haven't seen shit, asshole! Nothing that I like, anyway!"

"But I can tell you've been to our little get-together, and I can tell... You've been drinking." He smirked. "There's blood on your chin, girl."

She started to wipe it off with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and then thought better of it.

"Why don't you lick it off, you fucking reptile?" She was immediately sorry, as he leaned forward and began to do just that. She pushed him away, glared at him and wiped her chin with her sweatshirt sleeve, looking for bloodstains on it afterwards. There was no stain, so there must have not been much blood...

"You asshole!" she hissed at him. "Yes I was downstairs, yes I saw your sorry crew of evil fucking Dracula wannabees, and yes, I had a fucking drink, and I am sorry as shit! But you know as well as I that I couldn't fucking help myself. Now get out of my fucking way!"

Donovan's grin had just been getting wider and wider. "You'll be back, girl," he said, almost chortling. "You'll be back because we're your people, and we all share the same secret, the same need... and we're the only people you can ever trust."

"Trust you? You are out of your mind, Donovan, and your insanity doesn't allow you to think clearly enough to realize that you can't be trusted, not by me, not by anybody! You're fucking evil!"

Donovan just grinned again, still, and said, "And you think you're better. Remember what you said about being all torn up inside because you woke up nibbling on Tillie? How are you going to feel when you wake up next to some dead somebody, in a bed of blood, with a full stomach? You can't be trusted either, and why do you want to try to fool yourself that you can be trusted? Isn't it better to go out dressed to kill, knowing, planning, than to find yourself someday doing something at the whims of your blood chemistry, something that you (knowing you like I do) will doubtless regret, agonize over?"

"Damn you, you're right, I will regret it, and at least I am capable of regret, and agony over somebody else's suffering, pain, and possibly death! But I will be a lone actor, not a part of something evil
(Something greater, he interjected),
OK, a greater evil... You tell me, go down and take a look at these poor fuckers down there... hamming up like they think they're fucking Bela Lugosi, probably going to run home to the frat house and sleep in boxes in the fucking basement! They're down there with a freezer-full of newly dead. Maybe they got 'em off of the streets, maybe they got 'em out of the goddamned main bar upstairs, but whatever the fucking story, I reiterate, I want no fucking part of it!"

"You'll be on your own, then, bitch! Don't come running to us when you get hungry!" K'at pulled herself up to her best height of all of five-three, and favored him with her best glare, and yelled at the top of her voice, "Don't you worry about that! If I ever see you again, I'll run from you!"

She whirled and ran.

In the main bar upstairs, the students were quite tipsy, and there was much gladhanding, and general soon-to-be-ex-collegiate hamming and camaraderie. The "brothers" had chilled out, and Guillermo was well into a tequila-induced near-stupor. Only Jasmine still had her wits about her, and she saw K'at run up the stairs into the bathroom. Jasmine and K'at really weren't the best of friends (Jasmine thought that K'at was much too seriously affected, and the crew that she hung with struck Jasmine as thoughtless and rude, and lazy besides), but a crying girl was a crying girl, and Jasmine knew her feminine duty...

K'at was in the bathroom, washing her face. Jasmine thought this was a bit unusual, as K'at was one of the girls who affected nightcrew markings, lots of dark shadows and black mascara on white base. K'at looked up, and noted her presence, and Jasmine smiled at her, and K'at gave a painful little smile back to her, and Jasmine took the hint, and went into one of the stalls and did her thing. When she came out, K'at was clean-faced, and had almost stilled her tears. Jasmine came to stand by her, and smiled at her in the mirror, and K'at smiled back, just a tiny smile, the polite smile of a girl with a lot on her mind.

"Anything you want to talk about, K'at?"

"Oh, thank you Jasmine, I really do want to talk, but I can't. Can I borrow some of your make-up?"

Jasmine rummaged through her purse. "I don't know what you'll be able to do with earth-tones, it's really not your style," she commented.

"Well, maybe I'm trying to change my style," K'at retorted, and sniffed back a tear.

"Oh," said Jasmine. K'at began to try to apply a bit of green to her eyelid, and somehow, thought Jasmine, this was going to be totally out of character, but the green began to deepen and highlight the brilliant green of K'at's eyes. Jasmine pressed her, saying, "Had a bit of a falling out?"

K'at turned her head at an extreme angle, and there was a fire in her eyes that Jasmine didn't care for. K'at said, "They're not my friends anymore. They aren't acting right at all."

K'at turned away, and returned her gaze to the mirror. The fire in her eyes had burned away the traces of tears, and the green mascara went on smoothly. "Got a dark blue eyeliner, Jaz?" she asked, and as her mind returned to the task at hand, her eyes softened, and Jasmine was relieved.

"Sure... here, and do me a favor, call me Jasmine. 'Jaz' is too asynchronous." K'at almost drew a line across her face as she giggled...

"Asynchronous...! (pfffft!)" she stuck out her tongue at Jasmine, who said, "Look, K'at, you know I never liked those guys you've been hanging out with, too spooky, I guess. The music I love, that's why I come here, but those guys... I never did see what you saw in any of them, except maybe for that Donovan. Now there's a hunk... Hey! what did I say?"

"He's the one whose fault this all is!"

"What, K'at?"

"Damn. That's what I can't tell you. But I can tell you this, Jasmine. We aren't the best of friends, but I think you're a good person... so let me tell you this, stay away from Donovan and his crew. As a matter of fact, if you ever see anybody dressed in black, any of the nightcrew, you'd better run."

Jasmine was perplexed to hear this coming from K'at. "What exactly did they do to you?"

K'at had completed her eyeliner, and turned to face Jasmine. Jasmine had never felt small, since she was descended of sturdy Korean stock, child of an ancient people who had survived great rigors and travail. Size had never made any difference, fortitude and character had made all of the differences. Jasmine felt small now, though she was the same height as was K'at. K'at's eyes actually blazed, and Jasmine was not sure if she felt any more sympathy for K'at, not sure if she felt afraid for her, or afraid of her.

"They confronted me with some unpleasant facts about myself, and with some even more unpleasant facts about them. You see me changing my look, changing my attitude, and changing my life... that's what's up, what's up with my life... as great as the disarray is outside of these doors, there's greater disarray within me, great turmoil, vast and unwanted changes. I guess I am growing up, and I can't hang with these folks anymore. Sorry, Jasmine, and thanks for the makeup."

"K'at, whatever it is, you can talk to me about it. You know I don't carry tales."

"Jasmine, some things you just can't talk about, no matter how much you need to talk about them, no matter how much you'd like to talk about them. This is one of those things." K'at had calmed a bit, and turned to go, and even more perplexed, Jasmine followed.

Outside in the bar (the bathrooms were closer to the door than was the student party), there was a problem, a big problem. Donovan said something to Robert, and Robert stood and swung, and the party began in earnest.

Donovan stepped in, and smashed Robert's nose into his brain, and Robert was flung against the wall by the force of the blow. Levon started to jump up, and one of the other vampyr jumped in from behind, a perfect front kick snapping Levon's neck at the base of his skull. He hadn't even hit the floor before Jean (the one who had kicked him right out of this life) had his teeth in the crook of his elbow. Guillermo hit the floor, falling lightly right out of his chair, and he rolled under the table, smashing his tequila bottle. He bounced up, drunk as hell but still with that famous Hispanic speed, knocking the table on its edge, where Rolf, leaping for Guillermo's back with a toes-extended sidekick buried his leg to the knee within the expanded-metal tabletop. Guillermo smashed the broken bottle over Donovan's head, and when Donovan whirled, slammed the jagged edges into Donovan's face. Donovan howled, and executed a shortform, and Guillermo's face sprayed blood, and he staggered blind back into the arms of Rolf, who had just gotten his tattered leg extricated from the tabletop. Guillermo's scream lasted for less than a second, and Donovan turned back to Robert, whose heart still pumped a finger-thick pulse from his ripped carotid artery.

"Get out of here!" K'at snapped at Jasmine, who really didn't need to be told. Started after Jasmine, who risked a look back at K'at, and on Jasmine's face was horror, and warning. K'at turned back in time to block a thrustkick to her guts from Fania, who completed her motion en passant, and sprang for Jasmine.

There's a reason that the Koreans have endured for so long under less than ideal conditions. The Koreans think very quickly, and there may well be no such thing as a stupid Korean. Besides, Jasmine's father was one of America's more respected Tae Kwon Do teachers, and he had kept nothing from his baby girls.

When Fania went ballistic, K'at was still recovering from being knocked on her ass by the force of her own off-angle deflection. She leaped from all fours, and while she was in the air, she saw Jasmine slam the door in Fania's face. Fania did what any airborne (and therefor unable to alter direction) vampyr would have done, she tried to kick the door open. All she did was break the plate glass, and slice her flesh into ribbons. She shrieked like the damned thing she had become, and grasped and yanked at a garden-trowel sized fragment that protruded from her chest, and Jasmine's flying reverse wheelkick suddenly relocated her jaw to the top of her head. K'at landed, skittering on the glass, and bounced to a stop. Both found themselves in setstance, parallel facing the door. There was no immediate pursuit, so they hauled ass up "F" street towards the J. Edgar Hoover building. At the corner, a border defender stirred to life, and so they ducked into a recently shelled building. They fled to the rear, and as pounding footsteps came near, they saw flashes of actinic light glaring outside, and streaks of ultraviolet-tinged light sizzled and zapped, and the pounding of feet turned into the thud of bodies.

They huddled in silence, and Jasmine's normally soft brown eyes glittered like those of a terrified mouse. Their breathing quieted, and Jasmine found the wind to ask K'at, "What the fuck was that all about? What the fuck are those guys? As a matter of fact, what the fuck... are... you?" Her voice trailed off softly, as she regarded K'at wheezing quietly through rather appalling teeth. K'at said to her, "You can fight pretty damned good, Jasmine..."

"As to what they are, and what I am, well, like you might be able to understand from our conversation in the bathroom, I don't want to be lumped in with those guys...but yah...

"We're vampyr."

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