Trang Page 3

  Chapter 3

  Philippe left the party as soon as he could—everyone knew he had a big day tomorrow, so aside from a few pitying looks shot his way by Shridar and Ming, no one acted like anything was amiss.

  He entered his temporary residence and relished the quiet.

  Solitude was what he needed now—solitude and time to prepare. He read farewell messages from his parents and several friends, and he deleted a message from Kathy without opening it. The staff had provided him with a packing box for any items he had brought to Beijing that were not approved for the mission, so he dutifully packed his personal belongings away and ordered them shipped to storage in Alberta with the rest of his things.

  The next morning a car was there to pick him up. Space Authority headquarters was located on the outskirts of the city, and Philippe sat in the back and watched the car’s controls as it drove itself through the city. Beijing was reasonably quiet at this hour of the morning, although not entirely so. There were still people puttering about the sidewalks, opening up the shops where they wore and sold their Space Authority merchandise.

  Looking at them, Philippe felt a pang of guilt. These people would be so happy to be going where he was going—it was every child’s dream. And yet he just felt numb.

  The car drove him out of the city to the walls of the SA compound. Philippe opened his window and looked out at the facial scanner. Everyone said you didn’t have to do that, but he always did anyway, just like he always kept an eye on the car when it drove.

  He arrived at the gate, which like always, read his transponder just fine despite the fact that he carried it in his pocket. Likewise the building knew who he was, and text lit up on the wall, directing him to Flight Preparation. He noted with amusement that he now ranked high enough to have personalized directions flash on the wall screens as he walked by, but not high enough to have an actual human being take him where he needed to go.

  He entered a booth at Flight Preparation, where his flight suit was waiting. He pulled the baggy jumpsuit off the wall, wondering if he could wear it over his clothing, or if he needed to strip down to his underclothes, or at least take his shoes off.

  “Hello! And welcome—” There was a short pause, just long enough for Philippe to recover from the shock of having a booming video of a person suddenly appear on the wall. “—Philippe Trang!” the video person continued, the mouth not matching the words and the voice a suddenly different pitch.

  The person was obviously computer-generated: She looked vaguely Asian and vaguely female, but not so much so as to alienate any secret racists or misogynists.

  Philippe watched the entire video, examining the jumpsuit’s hood as the video explained how to pull it over the head and create an airtight seal, and looking at the nozzle where he would be able to plug himself into an oxygen supply “in the unlikely event” that a meteor smashed into the ship or its engines exploded. There was a brief animation of the passenger and pilot pods ejecting from the ship and falling safely through Earth’s atmosphere to land with a gentle splash in the ocean. No animation explained what would happen if the pods fell right back onto Beijing.

  There was also no word on whether you could wear your clothes under the suit. Philippe asked the allegedly interactive wall, but it would only replay bits of the video that he had just seen, so he finally walked out of his booth to see if he could find a real person. Luckily there were some guys—construction workers for the Titan station—in the main changing room, who told him that he could just throw the suit on over whatever he was wearing, shoes included. He thanked them and returned to his booth to suit up.

  He came out and followed the construction workers to the ship. He lagged behind them because he was a little embarrassed—he’d gotten his own changing booth, and they had not. Worse, the arrows that lit up for them said “Ship this way,” while the ones that lit up for him said, “Welcome, Philippe Trang! This way to your ship.”

  The arrows were easy enough to follow, though, and Philippe walked down a long corridor that ended at the doorway to the ship. He walked onboard and felt a disappointing sense of familiarity—the passenger cabin was small, holding only about 20 people, but if it weren’t for the suits people were wearing and the handholds sticking out of the walls and ceiling, he never would have known that he wasn’t on an airplane.

  At least the seats looked big and comfortable. A light appeared above one of them as he passed by, and the words “Philippe Trang” popped up next to the light, so he stowed his bag in the overhead bin and sat down. Most of the passengers were burly young men, construction workers or maybe military. But in the chair next to him was a slim, middle-aged woman with straight black hair streaked with gray. She was reading, but she looked up from her scroll as he sat and gave him a warm smile.

  She started. “Oh, hello, I saw you on the news,” she said. “You’re the diplomat.”

  “Philippe Trang,” he said, putting out his hand. Hopefully anyone cleared to go to Titan wasn’t a stalker.

  “Yoli Quintana,” she said, shaking it. She had a Spanish accent—she must be just old enough that it hadn’t been expurgated in her childhood—but she seemed very comfortable with English, so Philippe didn’t switch.

  He buckled himself in—the restraints were definitely more substantial than you’d see on an airplane, with straps both over the shoulder and under the arms that attached across the chest and into the seat between his legs.

  “Are you with the SA?” he asked Yoli, more as a conversation-starter than anything else. She certainly didn’t look like she was military or in construction.

  “In a way,” she replied. “I am borrowed from Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago. I’m an astrophysicist.”

  “Oh really?” asked Philippe. He tried to turn his body toward her to talk, but his restraints wouldn’t let him. He turned his head instead. “So they’re finally letting you guys go up?”

  “Yes, finally. The SA has its own scientists on Titan, and I’m sure the military has people, too, but not a proper research team that can publish findings and the like. We received permission to send up people and equipment just six months ago—and I don’t mean just UC, I mean the whole consortium of astrophysics programs.” Yoli gave Philippe a sly look. “Of course, none of us get to go where you’re going to go.”

  He shrugged as much as his restraints would allow. “I think I’m the first person to go through the portal who’s not carrying a weapon. But my hope is that once we establish good, open relations with the aliens, and everyone feels safe, then scientists like yourself can come through and look around. Who knows what you might discover?”

  Yoli grinned, clearly delighted at the thought. “That would be amazing,” she said. “The Titan portal, you could work your whole life on that alone.”

  “Not to mention all the other portals on the other side,” said Philippe. She nodded.

  A couple of burly young men went past them and sat in the back of ship. It seemed like people were just being allowed to trickle on, which meant that it might be a while before the ship actually took off.

  Philippe decided to take advantage of the time, not to mention the presence of an astrophysicist. “I have a question for you, since you actually know something about science, which I don’t. What are those things? Those portals? I keep asking, and people keep trying to explain it, but it just never makes any sense to me.”

  Yoli’s smile became rueful. “It doesn’t make any sense to anybody,” she said. “We can’t even figure out how that camera works.”

  Philippe chuckled. “I guess it’s not just us. If you ask the aliens what the portals are, they tell you that they’re a great mystery of the universe, or an invitation to fulfill destiny.”

  “I’ve heard that they’re really religious.”

  “Oh, they are,” said Philippe, nodding vigorously. “Do you know their history of the station?”

  Yoli shook her head.

  “According to the Builders,
several hundred years ago there was this prophecy that a portal would open up that would take them someplace far, far away.”

  Yoli nodded. “You are going really far, you know—outside the Milky Way.”

  “Yeah, I was told that it’s not really in any galaxy.” Philippe paused. He hadn’t asked when he was briefed because he didn’t want to sound like an idiot, but chances were that Yoli worked with students, so she was probably used to stupid questions. And she seemed quite friendly.

  He decided to ask. “Is that even possible? To not be in a galaxy?”

  “Oh, yes, it is,” said Yoli. “There’s a lot of space between the galaxies. A galaxy is simply a gathering of stars and planets. You’re going into the space between the Milky Way and the Small Magellanic Cloud. It is like traveling to some isolated hotel between two cities—it’s not impossible, it’s just that there’s not much there other than the hotel. And it’s a really long way away.”

  “OK,” said Philippe, feeling relieved on two levels—if she thought he was stupid for asking, she hid it well. “Anyway, the prophecy goes on that once they get to that place, they should build this station, and then other aliens would come and they would all be friends.”

  Yoli looked surprised. “Really? It said all that? That was a good prophecy.”

  “Well, that’s the official story,” said Philippe. “I suspect that there’s some historical revisionism going on: You know, like maybe what actually happened was this thing opened up, and no one was sure what to do about it, and then some Builder who had strong opinions about the matter came along saying, ‘I very conveniently found this prophecy!’ And that gave them some direction, and things just grew from there.”

  The ship gave a lurch, and the same bland face and loud voice that startled Philippe in his changing booth popped up on the back of the chairs in front of them.

  “Welcome to the Titan shuttle,” the face said. “Please fasten your restraints in preparation for takeoff. Please keep your restraints fastened until the alpha drive is engaged.”

  “Have you done this before?” Yoli asked Philippe excitedly, stowing her scroll in her armrest.

  “No,” he said.

  “I haven’t, either. It’s fantastic!”

  Philippe tried to mirror her enthusiasm, hoping it would ease the paralyzing nervousness he suddenly felt. “Yeah.”

  “I know I sound like a little girl, but I can’t believe I’m finally going to Titan. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do—always, always. And I’m really excited about getting to meet someone like Wouter Hoopen. What vision he must have to do what he did five years ago! I really admire him.”

  Philippe smiled tightly as the ship gave another series of shudders. He felt himself being tipped backward.

  “We’re falling—what’s happening?” he yelped.

  “They tilt the ship back for a vertical takeoff,” said Yoli, patting his arm.

  They sat on their backs for several minutes, and then the deep rumbling and vibration started. Hearing it in Beijing was nothing compared to being on top of it. Philippe felt like his teeth were going to shatter to bits in his mouth.

  In a moment, they had taken off—the shaking hadn’t eased any, and given the pressure Philippe was feeling, his crushed teeth were going to wind up right down his throat. He peeked over Yoli’s head out the window, and saw that they were passing through a cloud. After a few minutes that seemed like an eternity, the rumbling ceased, and the sky outside the window gradually got dark.

  The ship seemed to stall, and all the pressure on Philippe’s body suddenly lifted. He felt his breakfast coming back up, but managed to remember the sick patch on his suit and slapped it in time. He tried not to think about meteors.

  “In a minute, we will have alpha drive!” said Yoli. Philippe looked over at her: She was beaming, clearly thrilled by the entire experience.

  There was another shudder, and then a high-pitched whine. “Alpha drive engaged,” said the bland video person. “Please feel free to move around the cabin and help yourself to the available refreshments or entertainment.”

  Some of the passengers immediately unbuckled themselves and pulled themselves over to the refreshment center, but Philippe was in no mood to eat and decided to stay put. Yoli was looking out the window.

  “So this alpha drive,” he said, reaching back in his mind to a long-forgotten science class. “Does it use alpha waves?”

  “You mean alpha particles?” she asked, turning away from the window. “I don’t think so. The name’s just sort of a marketing thing—like the alpha dog, the alpha drive. It’s very macho.”

  “It is an impressive engine, though. Didn’t it used to take months to get to Saturn?”

  “Years. It took the earliest satellites years to get there.”

  “And now it takes a day,” Philippe said.

  “We go fairly close to light speed,” said Yoli.

  Philippe became puzzled, dimly remembering something he had perhaps seen once in a virtual entertainment or heard about in a class. “If we’re going at light speed, won’t everybody be really old when we finish our journey?”

  Yoli smiled—at least she found his ignorance entertaining. “It’s not so fast. We will gain only a few minutes on people who haven’t made the trip. And if someone on Earth was observing us, we would look a little shorter right now than we did when we left, but we’ll get that back once we slow down.”

  They chatted a bit more, and eventually both went back to their reading. Yoli fell asleep—she was still on Santiago time, apparently—but Philippe got hungry and unfastened his restraints. Moving about in zero gravity was tricky, but he was able to haul himself to the refreshment area without kicking anybody in the face. He ate, discussed soccer with some of the construction guys, puzzled out the toilet, went back to his seat, watched a movie, ate again, and was thoroughly bored by the time the video half-woman reappeared and woke Yoli up by telling everyone to strap back in.

  Another sickening lurch and the high whine that Philippe had stopped hearing hours ago ceased, reclaiming his attention by its absence. The ship hit Titan’s thick atmosphere and shuddered its way through the orange haze. The pressure wasn’t nearly as bad this time, and of course there was nothing to see out the windows except for orange fog, so Philippe didn’t realize how close they were to landing until he felt a big thump and the video person told them they could remove their restraints.

  I didn’t even have time to get frightened, he thought.

  The other passengers started taking off their restraints and getting their things, so Philippe got up and got their bags out of the bin, handing Yoli’s to her. Then with a sudden pop! the door to the ship opened. Philippe went out, followed by Yoli, and walked down a long corridor that had attached itself to the side of their ship.

  It was newer and cleaner, but it looked just like the corridor in Beijing that Philippe had walked down to get on the ship. The air smelled slightly musty, but other than that and the noticeable difference in gravity there was no indication that they were on another planet, a moon of Saturn, hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth, in an atmosphere of pure poison.

  They reached the end of the corridor. Yoli saw some people she knew and went to greet them. Philippe was wondering where he should go when a young man approached him and said, “Philippe Trang? GM Hoopen is waiting. Follow me, sir.”

  “Sure,” Philippe replied. “Is it OK for me to remove the space suit first?”

  Philippe had not expected the question to be a stumper, but the man furrowed his brow and pondered it for a minute. “Yeah, OK,” he finally said. “I don’t think we’re going to be passing near any of the areas that are under construction.”

  There wasn’t a changing area, so Philippe stood off to the side and pulled off his protective suit, rolling it up and stuffing it into his bag. He did his best to smooth and straighten his clothing without a mirror, running his hands over his hair. Then he grabbed his bag and followed the man
.

  The Titan station was white and spare, but crammed with people—despite repeated expansions, overcrowding was a constant problem. Back on Earth, an SA staffer had told Philippe that, while at the station, he would be sleeping in a wall cubby. The staffer, apparently expecting some objection, had made a point of noting that the cubby’s regular resident would be sleeping on the floor.

  Even these finished sections of the station looked something like a construction zone—directional signs had been scrawled directly onto the walls. But there were also large, brass signs with arrows saying “General Manager’s Office,” and these they followed. Eventually they came to a door that bore another brass sign, “Wouter Hoopen: General Manager.”

  Philippe’s guide opened the door, and Philippe walked in to what apparently was an outer office, with a well-appointed receptionist’s desk and chairs. Standing in the middle of the room was a middle-aged, sandy-haired man in a space suit whom Philippe recognized immediately as Wouter Hoopen. He was facing a considerably larger black-haired man in camouflage and a woman, also in camouflage, who was almost as broad as the larger man and several centimeters taller.

  Philippe recognized her and stepped over. “Hi!” he said.

  She looked at him, polite but puzzled. “Hello,” she replied, as one would to a too-friendly stranger.

  Oh, crap, thought Philippe. Of course, her height and mahogany skin were identical. She had the same round nose and prominent cheekbones.

  But she wasn’t the person he knew. Her black, curly hair was cropped short, and her left earlobe was distorted, as his soon would be. She was leaner, giving her face a more-pronounced heart shape, and her shoulders and arms were more muscular.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “I-I think I know one of your sisters.”

  “Oh!” she said, unfazed. “Well, since you’re the ambassador, you probably know Kali—she’s a big peace activist, lives in Ottawa.”

  “I know a human-rights activist in Ottawa named Kelly Pax,” said Philippe.

  “Yeah, yeah, Kelly now. She was Kali when we were kids. The Pax names always confuse me.” She put out her hand. “I’m Shanti Pax. Mission commander.”

  “Yes, yes, this is MC Pax,” said Hoopen. “And you must be Philippe Trang.”

  Philippe nodded at the man while shaking Shanti’s hand.

  “Yes, Philippe Trang, DiploCorps,” he said, disengaging his hand from Shanti’s iron grip.

  Hoopen stuck out his hand, but Philippe was distracted by the logo stitched onto the front of Shanti’s camouflage shirt—a snarling jungle cat, with fangs bared. The detail of the mouth and teeth suggested blood. The large man next to her had the same logo on his shirt.

  A chill ran up Philippe’s back, but he remembered himself. He looked at the sandy-haired man, smiled, and shook the proffered hand.

  “I’m GM Hoopen,” said Hoopen. “I wanted to introduce you to your colleagues. MC Pax obviously will be in charge of your military escort and security. Her second, Pieter Strauss, would be here, but he’s overseeing the final outfitting of your living space on the alien station. And this is MO Dimas.”

  The larger man looked slightly amused. “That means medical officer,” he said as he engulfed Philippe’s hand in one of his own. The backs of his hands were covered in black hair that ran up his powerfully muscled forearms. “In other words, I’m your doctor. And please call me George.”

  “Yes, he’s your medical officer, a respected emergency-medicine specialist,” said Hoopen. “He also has a graduate degree in zoology.”

  “Well, it was nice meeting you both, and I look forward to working with you,” Philippe said, keeping the strain out of his voice, and he hoped, his face. He turned to Hoopen. “Do you mind if we have a brief chat, in there?” He pointed toward the inner office.

  “Not at all,” Hoopen said, and headed inside. Philippe waved at the other two with a smile, and then shut the door, leaving them in the outer office. He watched as Hoopen walked behind a sizable desk made of dark wood and laden with gadgets, and sat down. Behind him was an entire wall of large, expensive-looking monitors.

  “What’s going on here?” Philippe asked sharply.

  “What?” said Hoopen, raising an eyebrow. “You don’t want to work with a clone?”

  His blunt use of the term surprised Philippe. “I don’t care about that,” he replied. “And you shouldn’t call them clones. It’s offensive. I don’t care that she’s one of the Pax sisters. I care that she’s one of the Special Forces.”

  Hoopen gave him a surprised look and put his hands in the air. “You knew when you agreed to this assignment that you would be accompanied by an entourage of twenty soldiers—”

  “Soldiers. Not combat specialists. Not killers. I assumed that I would be working with soldiers. Peacekeepers.”

  Hoopen stared at him for a moment, and then gave a quick laugh. “The UP?” he asked. “You thought you were going through with the UP at your back? So if the aliens attack, you want the Yoopers to put them down with, what, sticky guns and poofballs?”

  “The DiploCorps always works with the Union Police—” said Trang.

  “Not this time—” said Hoopen.

  “We always work with the Union Police because we can trust them to not make a situation worse. If we fail, and the UP fails, then and only then do the Sister You-Know-What-ers get to come in and kill everybody.”

  “The SF has been on this from the beginning. They’ve been the ones outfitting your area of the station. They’ve been doing it for months.” Hoopen paused. “They haven’t killed anything or blown anything up yet.”

  “Not yet. It’s the Special Forces. Give them time,” Philippe spat.

  He was upset, and it was showing. He took a breath, willing himself to appear calm and logical.

  “What’s going on here, Hoopen?” he continued, in a more reasonable tone of voice. “I come here thinking that we’re going to try to make friends with these people—”

  “These aliens,” said Hoopen.

  “—and I find that I’m going through with twenty homicidal maniacs and, what, a vivisectionist?”

  “The Special Forces are the best-equipped, best-trained military force the Union has. Which means they are the best-equipped, best-trained military force the Earth has.”

  “If you want somebody dead, they are the best,” said Philippe. “They are very good indeed at making people dead. So what are they doing here?”

  Hoopen threw up his arms. “I didn’t ask!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t ask. It’s not my place to ask. I don’t understand why you’re asking.”

  “You don’t—?” Philippe stared disbelievingly at Hoopen for a moment, and then realized that the man was telling the truth.

  Hoopen genuinely did not understand why Philippe would object to taking a combat force on a diplomatic mission. Either he didn’t get the significance of it—which was possible, since he wasn’t DiploCorps, Union Police, or Special Forces—or he didn’t understand why Philippe should care.

  Maybe if I try a different tack.

  “Hoopen,” he said, confidentially. “Think about it. The Union knows what standard operating procedure is on a diplomatic mission. If they’re going to deviate from that—and trust me, this is a major deviation—they should have told me. Why didn’t they tell me? Why wasn’t I briefed on this?”

  “Why do you ask so many questions? Who do you think you are?” Hoopen snapped back, unmoved. “You’re just a junior diplomat, and people far more senior than you or me have made up their minds. I’m not going up against that. It’s simple for me—the SF is going through the Titan portal.”

  Philippe opened his mouth to reply.

  “No, no, no,” said Hoopen, shaking his head and wagging a finger at Philippe as if he were a child. “The Union decided: It’s the SF. Period. They are going to provide protection to whichever diplomat goes through that portal. They didn’t tell you because it’s none of your business. There is nothing you
can do about it; there is nothing I can do about it.”

  Philippe opened his mouth again.

  “Before you make a fuss,” Hoopen interrupted, “just remember that there are a thousand others just like you. Maybe they’re not as well-connected, but they are just as qualified and just as eager. They are all happy to take your place. So for you, the choice is simple: You can be the diplomat who goes through the portal with the SF and lives on the alien station, or you can be the diplomat who goes back to Ottawa, and somebody else goes through that portal with the SF. It’s entirely up to you.”

  Philippe stared at Hoopen. There would be no help here. Philippe could see right through the station manager: Hoopen was a fraud, fat and happy to be the little king of his little hill, and as long as his station was expanding and his budget was increasing, he would go along with anything the Union brass wanted.

  Philippe began to feel the fury rising in him. Hoopen had him over a barrel, he was compromising the mission, and he just didn’t care. He couldn’t care because all was right in his little corner of the world, and his little bureaucratic mind could encompass nothing beyond that.

  Yoli will be so disappointed, Philippe thought.

  He couldn’t even look at the little man. He needed to think and think fast, and Hoopen was making him so angry that he couldn’t think at all. Philippe looked down at the floor, calming himself.

  His eyes followed the elaborate pattern of the wood inlay there.

  Parquet floors? he thought for a moment. Damn, this is a nice office.

  He put it all out of his mind. He needed to think.

  Hoopen was right about one thing: Philippe had only two choices, stay or leave.

  Frame the problem that way, and Philippe knew immediately what he was going to do. He would be damned if he was going to leave this mission—Earth’s first diplomatic mission to the aliens—in the hands of hacks, fools, and maniacs. Shridar and Ming had been right—the Union was ambivalent, and there were probably strong forces who wanted to see the mission fail.

  But Philippe wasn’t one of them: This mission mattered to him, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to succeed without someone on it who gave a damn and who knew what to do.

  And he knew what to do. Hoopen was wrong about him: He wasn’t well-connected—his parents were farmers, for God’s sake. Whoever put him on the mission, it wasn’t someone who wanted it to fail. It was someone who knew damned well there weren’t a thousand others out there just like him.

  Philippe looked up and glared at the little station manager.

  “I’ll go. But you haven’t heard the last of this, Hoopen,” he said. He turned and walked out the door.

  Shanti was still standing—ramrod straight—in the outer office.

  “Hey,” she said. “George wants to give you your earplant.”

  Philippe nodded stiffly, and followed her out the door. They walked in silence down the hall.

  “So, ‘shanti’ means ‘peace,’ and ‘pax’ means ‘peace.’ What’s your real name?” he finally asked.

  “My true name is Shanti Pax!” she sing-songed, and then laughed. “But my original name is Surpanakha—you haven’t heard of her. Minor Hindu demon. Kind of a puss, actually. Not cool like Kali.”

  They walked along a little bit when Shanti suddenly opened a door and looked in. She waved Philippe in and shut the door behind him. Only then did he realize that she had led him into an empty office.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said. “Hoopen’s a dick. And he forgot to soundproof his door.”

  Philippe closed his eyes and touched his fingers to his forehead.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “How much did the doctor—”

  “Oh, George took off the minute you guys went in, don’t worry. And you know, I’m OK with it—at least you have an original reason for not wanting to work with me.”

  “I’m really, I’m so sorry,” stammered Philippe. “I just, I—”

  “You don’t want to be sandbagged, I understand.” Shanti paused for a minute, thinking. “I know you think maybe we’re not on the same page here, but let me tell you something: The SF has done everything we can possibly do to ensure our safety on this mission. Everything.

  “Even so, if the aliens turn out to be hostile, if they turn on us? There is no doubt in my mind that we are all dead. We built our area, but they built the station, and God only knows what they’ve built into it. Hoopen might tell you that your life depends on us, but the truth is, our lives depend on you and you doing your job. So we are not looking to start a fight.”

  Philippe stared at her.

  Shanti smiled and opened the door to the hall. “We’re not the Suicidal Fuckers, you know.”

  They walked out. Philippe felt suddenly ashamed.

  “I’m sorry I confused you with Kelly,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s nothing! This training buddy of mine, she spotted Muireartach in Bangalore, and walked right up to her and grabbed her tit, like that—” Shanti made a twisting gesture with her hand. “Luckily she shouted, ‘Protect your package!’ just before she did it, so Muireartach realized it had to be someone military. Which is good, because they’re both pretty tough, and I like them both and would hate to see them fuck each other up. But you know what will bother people? That Sister Fucker bullshit. You’ll hear us call ourselves that, but you’re not in the SF, and it’s not a good idea for you to do it. You can ‘you-know-what’ around it all you fucking want, but you’ll still wake up with a slit throat.”

  “OK,” said Philippe, thinking that there was not a phrase in that monologue that Kelly would have uttered, ever.

  “So this earplant you’re getting?” Shanti continued. “It’s fancier but it goes in just like a regular earplant.”

  “I’ve never had an earplant.”

  “You’ve never—what?” Shanti stopped and turned to him. “Did you just say that you’ve never had an earplant?”

  “Right.”

  “You’ve never had an earplant.”

  “I prefer not to have things implanted.”

  “So—I’m sorry, I’m just having trouble processing this—so when you were in Sudan, and Kurdistan, and—. Shit. When you were in Guantánamo—?”

  “They always recommend earplants, but this is the first assignment I’ve had where I’ve been required to get one,” Philippe explained. “I just carry a transponder on me.”

  Shanti gave a brief, shocked laugh. “You just carry it on you? So when they grab you, they can just take it off you?”

  “Sometimes they cut off ears, too,” Philippe said quietly.

  She grinned mischievously. “Oh, yeah, they do.”

  Philippe’s stomach roiled. They started walking again and finally reached the infirmary. Shanti pushed open the door.

  “But so you know? The earplant is just a communications device.” She slapped his shoulder as he walked through the doorway. “The transponder goes someplace else.”