Mirror Dance

“What?” Thorne snapped in a harried voice. “You got those girls rounded up yet?”

“Had to stun one. Taura can carry her. Look, did you get that head-count yet?”

“Yes, took it off a comconsole in a keeper’s room—thirty-eight boys and sixteen girls. We’re missing four boys who apparently went over the balcony. Trooper Philippi accounted for three of them but says she didn’t spot a fourth. How about you?”

“Sergeant Taura says two girls went down the back stairs. Watch for them.” He glanced up, peering out of his vid display, which was swirling like an aurora. “Captain Thorne says there should be sixteen bodies here.”

Taura stuck her head out into the corridor, lips moving, then returned and eyed the stu

“Right, Sergeant.” The Dendarii trooper ran to obey.

He followed her, Thorne’s voice urging in his ears, “Move it up there! This is a smash-and-grab, remember? We don’t have time to round up strays!”

“Wait, dammit.”

In the third room the trooper checked, she bent to look under a bed and said, “Ha! Got her, Sergeant!” She swooped, grabbed a couple of kicking ankles, and yanked. Her prize slid into the light, a short girl-woman in the pink crossover tunic and shorts. She emitted little helpless muted noises, distress with no hope of her cries bringing help. She had a cascade of platinum curls, but her most notable feature was a stu

Ten years old. Shit. She looked twenty. And such monstrous hypertrophy couldn’t be natural. The progenitor-customer must have ordered body-sculpture, prior to taking possession. That made sense, let the clone do the surgical and metabolic suffering. Tiny waist, flare of hip … from her exaggerated, physically mature femininity, he wondered if she might be one of the change-of-sex transfers. Almost certainly. She must have been slated for surgery very soon.

“No, go away,” she was whimpering. “Go away, leave me alone … my mother is coming for me. My mother is coming for me tomorrow. Go away, leave me alone, I’m going to meet my mother. …”

Her cries, and her heaving … chest, would shortly make him crazy, he thought. “Stun that one too,” he croaked. They’d have to carry her, but at least they wouldn’t have to listen to her.

The trooper’s face was flushed, as transfixed and embarrassed as he by the girl’s grotesque build. “Poor doll,” she whispered, and put her out of her misery with a light touch of stu

His helmet was calling him, he wasn’t sure which trooper’s voice. “Sir, we just drove back a crew of House Bharaputra fire-fighters with our stu

He keyed through helmet displays, trying to place the trooper on the map-grid. Before he could, the air-guard’s breathless voice cut in. “A Bharaputran heavy-weapons team is circling around your building to the south, sir. You’ve got to get the hell out of there. It’s about to turn real nasty out here.”

He waved the Dendarii trooper and her doll-woman burden out of the bedroom ahead of him. “Sergeant Taura,” he called. “Did you pick up those outside reports?”

“Yes, sir. Let’s move it.”

Sergeant Taura slung the Eurasian girl over one broad shoulder and the blonde over the other, apparently without noticing their weight, and they herded the mob of frightened girls down the end stairs. Taura made them walk two-by-two, holding hands, keeping them rather better organized than he would have expected. The girls’ hushed voices burbled in shock when they were directed into the boys’ dormitory section. “We’re not allowed down here,” one tried to protest, in tears. “We’ll get in trouble.”

Thorne had six stu

He looked with dismay at the pile of stu

“Have some carry the rest,” Taura said. “It leaves your hands free and ties up theirs.” She gently laid down her own burdens at the end of the row.

“Good,” said Thorne, jerking its gaze, with difficulty, from fascinated fixation on the doll-woman. “Worley, Kesterton, let’s—” its voice stopped, as the same static-laden emergency message over-rode cha

It was the bike-trooper, screaming, “Sonofabitch, the shuttle—watch out guys, on your left—” a hot wash of static, and “—oh holy fuckin’ shit—” Then a silence, filled only with the hum of an empty cha

He keyed frantically for a readout, any readout at all, from her helmet. The locator still functioned, plotting her on the ground between two buildings in back of the play-court where the shuttle was parked. Her medical readouts were flatline blanks. Dead? Surely not, there should at least still be blood chemistry … the static, empty view being transmitted, upward at an angle into the night fog, at last found him. Phillipi had lost her helmet. What else she’d lost, he couldn’t tell.

Thorne called the shuttle pilot, over and over, alternated with the outer-guards; no replies. It swore. “You try.”

He found empty cha

The shuttle was still there, apparently undamaged—surely no hand-weapon could penetrate its combat-hardened shell. The ramp was drawn up, the door closed. A dark shape—downed Dendarii, or enemy?—slumped in the shadow beneath its wing-flanges. Thorne, whispering curses, jabbed codes into a computer control plate bound to its left forearm. The hatch slid aside, and the ramp tongued outward with a whine of servos. Still no human response. “I’m going in,” said Thorne.

“Captain, standard procedure says that’s my job,” said the trooper Thorne had detailed to cover them, from his vantage behind a large concrete tree-tub.

“Not this time,” said Thorne grimly. Not continuing the argument, dashed forward in a zigzag, then straight up the ramp, hurtling aside, plasma arc drawn. After a moment its voice came over the mm. “Now, Sumner.”

Uninvited, he followed Trooper Sumner. The shuttle’s interior was pitch-dark. They all turned on their helmet lights, white fingers darting and touching. Nothing inside appeared disturbed, but the door to the pilot’s compartment was sealed.

Silently, Thorne motioned the trooper to take up a firing stance opposite him, bracketing the door in the bulkhead between fuselage and flight-deck. He stood behind Thorne. Thorne punched another code into its arm control-pad. The door slid open with a tortured groan, then shuddered and jammed.