This is the city: New Avalon, Zeta Cygni. The City in the Sphere is home to twenty million sentient beings. Most of them are decent, law-abiding citizens. New Avalon is a compassionate city, and one that knows how to have fun. People from almost all sentient species can be found here, as well as mechanoids and engineered lifeforms of many type. For the most part, they get along peacefully, even happily. As in any city with an open political spectrum, of course, there are those with differing opinions. Some prefer to associate only with members of their own species. Others would be more comfortable if everyone did so. Some think it's their place in the cosmos to -make- everyone do so. MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2410 2:47 PM SALUTOWN Morgan deKalb liked being assigned to Salutown. She wasn't Salusian herself - born and raised on New Detroit - but she liked them. Oh, sure, they had their crooks and lowlifes like any other species, but by and large they were nice folks, and they kept a pleasant and mostly peaceful district. In the sphere of police work, there was little to compare with walking the Arconian Square beat on a spring afternoon, with the arcla trees in blossom and the coeds from NAU breaking out their warm-weather gear. It was still a couple weeks shy of that halcyon time of year, though, and deKalb, like all her fellow patrolmen based out of the 17th Precinct house on Crown Street, was feeling a little extra tension this year. Salutown was a district that didn't see a lot of violent crime, nowhere near the amount the cops in Hell's Kitchen or the Docklands had to deal with. So when the first dead body had turned up in early January with its head all but smashed to pieces, it was safe to say the cops of the 17th hadn't quite been expecting to find anything like that. If the first one was an unwelcome surprise, the second two weeks later was a downright nasty shock, and the third... ... well, deKalb and her brother and sister officers were feeling a bit on edge, especially because they knew something about the crimes that hadn't been shared with the press. It was customary for details to be held back from the news media in criminal investigations, even in free and open societies with an unrestricted press. For the most part, crime reporters themselves recognized the necessity. Holding back a detail or two gave the cops something to validate intelligence against. If someone said he had information about a crime, and proved to know a detail that hadn't been shared with the public, that helped to differentiate him from the army of cranks that always plague the cops during any high-profile investigation. Thus, it was generally unknown that the victims in these cases, all four of them so far, had something in common besides living in Salutown and being found with their heads violently disorganized. DeKalb turned the corner of the big brick apartment house at the corner of Orimo and Metavis, automatically checking her watch as she did so. School had let out seven minutes before at the district high school over on Berdana. At this time of day, it wasn't uncommon for her to encounter kids making out in the alley behind the apartment house - even in the winter, which said something for the motivational power of adolescent lust - and she chuckled to herself at the thought as she neared the building's back corner. Telling a couple of red-faced kids to zip it up and get on home beat rousting a belligerent drunk any day of the week. She'd almost reached the corner of the building, amusing herself by playing a what-will-I-find game in her mind, when the pleasant afternoon was split by a shrill shriek of terror. Officer deKalb rounded the corner at a run, her hand on her service blaster, to find exactly what every beat cop in her precinct prayed daily wouldn't appear. 3:05 PM Gil Grissom ducked under the yellow tape with the unconscious ease of someone who did it for a living, straightened, and crossed to the tall, black-haired man in the dark blue trenchcoat who stood talking to two uniformed cops. A middle-aged, greying but boyish man dressed in plain, dark clothes, Grissom didn't look like the popular conception of a crimefighter. A person seeing him on the street would have taken him for a librarian, maybe, or perhaps a high school chemistry teacher. In truth, his job as night-shift supervisor of the International Police Organization's crime lab meant he was a bit of both of those, and quite a few other things besides. He was also a humanized Salusian, but that didn't make much difference most of the time. Detective Inspector Dick Grayson of the New Avalon Police finished consulting with the uniforms and turned to see Grissom approaching. The veteran cop looked past him to see if any of the rest of his crew were along, but there was no one there, and no one coming down the alley. "Afternoon, Dr. Grissom," he said. "Flying solo today?" "The rest of my crew doesn't come on until 5:30, Richard," Grissom replied. "Neither do I, for that matter. Ordinarily, Ecklie's shift would catch a call at 3 PM, but you asked specifically for me. Why?" Grissom's tone wasn't confrontational, nor was he complaining about having to come into work early. He was simply curious. That was one of the defining traits of the man, that curiosity. "See for yourself," Grayson said, gesturing behind him. Grissom cocked an eyebrow at him, then walked around him and took a look. The body lay on the pavement at an angle to the back wall of the apartment building, sprawled on its back with arms outflung. There was a distinct scarlet arc slashed across the darker red of the bricks making up that wall, roughly at the head level of a person standing in the alley. Where the head of the person lying on the ground belonged, there was... well, not much worth describing. "I know you don't like to make snap judgments, Gil," Grayson said, "but I have to say, this looks familiar." Grissom nodded, got the camera out of his field kit, and started taking pictures. "The force necessary to cause this kind of damage is terrific," Grayson went on, crouching near but not touching the body. "If it was done with a hand weapon, the perpetrator's strength must be incredible. Superhuman." "A lot of life forms are stronger than humans," Grissom observed noncommittally. "Who found her?" "Kid taking a shortcut home from school," Grayson said. "DeKalb there," he added, nodding toward one of the uniformed cops standing by the tape, "was on foot patrol in the area, heard the kid scream, and came running. She secured the scene immediately and called in." Grissom nodded, still examining the body. Then he paused, noticing something. Focusing his camera, he photographed the small item where it was from several different angles, then carefully reached with one gloved hand and pulled it gently out for a better look at it. It was a small pasteboard card that had been trapped under the victim's right hand. Printed on it in black ink was a small quantity of an angular script - not Standard, but a language almost as well-known in many places, including anywhere called Salutown. "Cheltarese," Grayson said, bending nearer for a better look. "Just like the others." Grissom picked up the card, turned it over, then slipped it into a plastic envelope and looked at what was written on it again. "'Traitors die,'" he translated. Then, meeting Grayson's thoughtful eyes, he asked rhetorically, "Question is: Traitors to what?" /* The Who "Who Are You" _The Ultimate Collection_ */ I have a message from another time... Eyrie Productions, Unlimited and Avalon 17 Television present UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT CSI: NEW AVALON Parallel Lines Benjamin D. Hutchins Chad Collier (c) 2004 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited 4:54 PM INTERNATIONAL POLICE HEADQUARTERS Chief Inspector Jim Brass of the New Avalon Police Department was just climbing the marble steps to the front entrance of the International Police Headquarters building on Allard Avenue, across the street from the Entire State Building, when he heard the roar of a very distinctive engine. Brass wasn't really a "car guy" as such, but he was a trained observer who had a lot of experience with the sounds and sights of the city, and this wasn't a kind of engine he heard often. Its powerful, full-throated note cut through the generic hum of the downtown traffic, instantly commanding attention. He paused on the steps and turned, his eyes searching the visible streets. The car wasn't hard to spot, either. Bright yellow, low and sleek, it threaded through the boxy minivans and metrocars with quick, precise movements, rounded the corner from Morgan Boulevard with just a hint of a power slide, and halted at the foot of the steps with a chirp of rubber on pavement. The right-hand door swung open and, to Brass's moderate surprise, someone he knew emerged. Catherine Willows climbed out of the low-slung car and onto the sidewalk with a quick, effortless grace that reminded him a bit of a cat. It brought a little smile to his weatherbeaten face. He knew -he- sure as hell wouldn't look smooth climbing out of a car that low. "Thanks for the lift, hotshot," a smiling Catherine said - or at least that's what Brass thought she said - as she shut the door behind her. "No problem, Cath," a man's voice replied from inside the car. It sounded a little odd to Brass - slightly metallic, as if the speaker were talking through a commset. "Pick you up at 4?" "Sounds good," she said. She ran a hand through her blonde hair - she'd been wearing it shortish lately, parted in the middle, which Brass thought made her look a little too much of a tomboy, but nobody ever asked his opinion of these things - and added, "I'll call you if I get held up." "OK," the voice replied. "Seeya 'round!" "Bye," said Catherine with a smile. She thumped the car on the roof in a way that Brass could only think of as affectionate, turned, and trotted up the steps as the yellow car swung back out into traffic. Brass automatically glanced away from the approaching investigator to watch it go, scanning for a glimpse of the driver. He wasn't suspicious, or even particularly nosy - it was just that he was a 30-year cop and that was the kind of thing 30-year cops did. There was no one driving the car. Unless the other occupant or occupants were hiding, Catherine had been the only person aboard. That made the metallic timbre to the voice make sense, at least. "New boyfriend?" he asked as Catherine drew even with him on the stairs. Catherine took off her sunglasses, tucked them by one earpiece into the V-neck of her sweater, and grinned at him. "I never kiss and tell, Jim," she said, and Brass laughed as they went into the building together. IPO CRIME LAB TENTH FLOOR "Good evening, my children," said Gil Grissom playfully as the members of his graveyard shift gathered before his desk. "Don't crowd, now. I've got a present for each of you." He took an assignment sheet from the small stack on his desk and handed it to burly Nick Stokes. "Nick, you get your very own dead body." Stokes beamed. He hadn't been senior enough to take a solo DB for all that long, and he still got a thrill every time Grissom handed him one. Catherine leaned over and murmured to Warrick Brown, "(I hate it when he's playful.)" "(I heard that,)" Warrick replied under his breath. "(Makes me nervous.)" "Warrick, you and I are working with Brass and Grayson," Grissom went on, handing a similar sheet to the dark-skinned, deceptively sleepy-looking investigator. "The Salutown Slugger again?" Warrick inquired. "Too early to tell," Grissom said automatically. Press nicknames for criminals annoyed him, although he had to confess that this particular one seemed apt, if macabre. "Catherine, I need you and Sara to - " He looked up from his perusal of the next slip as if suddenly realizing something. "Where's Sara?" "Here!" a breathless Sara Sidle exclaimed, almost bursting through Grissom's office door. "I'm right here. Sorry. I was, uh, I was upstairs. In the records office. Doing research. Lost track of time," she panted. "Get anything interesting?" Warrick inquired with a very slight smile. Sara shot him a microsecond glare before returning her earnest attention to Grissom. "Next time, just call," Grissom told her gently. "No need to run. I need you and Catherine to investigate a mysterious occurrence in the Badlands." "The Badlands?!" Catherine blurted. "But nobody lives out there!" Grissom gave her the little smirk that always made her want, just a little, to smack him. "That's why it's a mystery," he said. "Sgt. O'Riley will fly you out. It should only take a couple of hours." "A couple of HOURS?" said Sara, incredulous. Grissom arched an eyebrow at her. "Why? You have a lunch date or something?" "What? Uh, no! No, nothing like that," she said hurriedly. "I just - what can possibly be of any interest to us out there?" Grissom's little smirk widened into a proper smile. The man did enjoy his mysteries. "Two hours ago," he told her, "a Wedge Defense Force training aircraft reported spotting the wreckage of an airship in the rockfield southwest of Roswell Gap." "By a strange coincidence, one happens to be missing from New Avalon," Sgt. Ray O'Riley of the IPO's Criminal Investigations Division said. O'Riley - beefy, buzzcut, and dressed as always in a sport coat that looked like he'd hunted some piece of out-of-date living room furniture for its pelt - was at the controls of a Pelican aerodyne dropship he'd borrowed from his old cohorts in the Tactical Division for the trip. The part of the pseudocontinent where their mystery blimp wreck was located was too remote and hostile an environment for them to drive. "Company called VenTek's missing a delivery blimp and its pilot, Roy Jenson," O'Riley went on. He flew a Pelican the same way he drove a car - with his oversize frame sprawled casually in the seat, one hand on the wheel (or, in this case, yoke), steering with a couple of fingers and not really seeming to pay attention to where he was going. In a car, that made Catherine mildly nervous. In the air, it made her reconsider her standard pleased reaction to working with him. She tried to make herself pay attention as he continued. "We know Jenson refilled the snack machines on the 75th floor of the Mutual Indemnity Tower at 11:15 this morning. He didn't make it to his next scheduled stop, the 30th through 45th floors of the Lakeshore Hotel." "Why didn't Avalon ATC notice he was leaving the city?" Sara inquired. "In-city traffic is monitored to make sure it doesn't jump lanes or what have you, but once an aircraft leaves the city control zone, it's not tracked," O'Riley told her. "It's your own business what you do out here. Apparently Jenson left the CCZ by one of the approved airship routes, so no flags went up." "Hum," said Sara, and the Salusian investigator lapsed into one of her customary pensive silences. 718 BAKER STREET CRESCENT HEIGHTS, NEW AVALON The engineering marvel that allowed the City in the Sphere to have day and night worked its unseen magic into the coming afternoon, working the shadows into long lines down this particular residential street. It was still quiet, the lull before the storm of friends and neighbors making their way home from their daily routine. This suited Nick Stokes just fine. Not just because the quiet on a scene helped him concentrate (it did), but also because it kept the number of onlookers down to a minimum. From the report Grissom had given him, this had all the earmarks of an accidental death - not that he could say that in front of his inscrutable Salusian boss; reading into the evidence was a big no-no in Gil Grissom's book. Of course they all still did it, they just learned to keep it to themselves. It tempered his excitement of getting his own case, but being simple and boring also meant he should be done with it soon. And then he could go back to to the big case Warrick and Gris were working on. It all evened out. Nick stood near the body, keeping a little distance so as not to disturb anything. A large digital camera hung about his neck but remained untouched. He was taking in what he could with his own eyes first. Human male, caucasian, about 5'10". Casual dress. Face up on the west side of the house, about five feet from the wall. Slight bluish cast to the skin, but nothing severe enough to be noteworthy. It had been raining the night before, a large thunderstorm had rolled through. It had dried partially since then, but Nick could see where the sodden earth had given way when his victim had hit the ground. He looked up to the overhanging roof above the scene and contemplated it for a moment, then started snapping pictures. That task completed, he was walking back around the front of the house, his attention focused on the sloped roof, when a grey and nondescript vehicle joined the two NAPD cruisers that were parked out front. The young CSI held back a chuckle for a moment as he imagined 'CAR' in big white letters on the door, and maybe a bar code. The generic nature of the car was balanced by the redheaded woman in the sharp suit who swung out of it. At the sight of Barbara Gordon, the setting of Nick's face automatically slipped to Smile, Disarmingly Boyish. "Someone must really like me upstairs today. Not only do I pull my own case, but I get the best backup. Nice to see you, Sgt. Gordon." Barbara smiled back, a little indulgently. "Hello, Nick. Sorry I'm late." Nick waved it off. "Not a problem, this is pretty low-impact so far. You know, I always imagined you driving something more... exciting," he added, angling his head toward her car. She grinned. "It's free. On duty, I'm not picky." Nick laughed. "Gotcha. I'm surprised to see you at a case like this. Special Crimes get boring?" Barbara chuckled. "Dick asked me to pick this one up while he and Brass work the Salutown serial. Figures you and I can wrap this up quick and go back to real police work." Nick put a little more juice back into his smile. "I'll try not to let you down." "So - what have you got?" Nick turned to the house and motioned to the roof with his head. "Right now? Looks like our guy tried to mess with his HoloNet connection during the storm last night." He turned back with a half- smile that held no humor. "Not very smart in the best of conditions. Something made him slip, fall, and roll off the roof by the side of the house. Just far enough to be out of plain sight, but the mailman found him while cutting across yards on his route. He's the one that called it in." Nick pointed to the blue-uniformed postal employee who stood next to one of the police cruisers. "OK, sounds good. I'll get a statement from him and then knock on a few doors, see if the neighbors saw or heard anything. Not likely, given the storm, but worth a shot. Coroner's about ten minutes behind me, figure we can wrap up here in about an hour or so." "It's a plan. Thanks again for helping us out, Barbara." "Don't mention it," she said over her shoulder as she walked back to her car to get her notebook. "All part of the service." Sara stayed quietly thoughtful throughout the rest of the trip out to the wreck site. Catherine didn't really mind that; she had O'Riley to talk to, and though that was sometimes an adventure, it was always at least interesting. She wondered, though, what was on her dark-haired colleague's mind. Sara wasn't a boisterous person by nature, but normally she'd have had -something- to offer at some point during the two-hour discussion. Instead, she remained in her seat, arms folded across her chest, frowning, her primary ears drooping slightly. It was obvious that something was bothering her besides having pulled this long, very probably tedious mission. "Well, ladies, there it is," O'Riley announced as the Pelican cleared a craggy rise and dropped down into the rock-strewn two-mile gully south of the Roswell Gap. The wash was strewn with rocks big and small. It was also strewn with other items, most of which manifestly didn't belong there. Most obvious among them were the long, slack husk of a blimp's gasbag and a battered object that was still clearly recognizable as the vehicle's gondola. The latter was near the top of a small ridge, wedged between a pair of boulders the size of buses, at the end of an intermittent line of scraped earth and cast-off bits of metal and plastic. "Circle the site once, so we can get an overview; then put us down near that big rock over there," Catherine told their pilot. "Which one?" O'Riley asked as he started to obey the first instruction. "The one shaped like Brass's head," Catherine said, pointing. "Huh - oh, yeah," O'Riley said, nodding. "And use the taxi repulsors," Catherine added. "Why?" O'Riley asked, even as he switched them on and killed the jet thrusters. He knew perfectly well why, he just wanted to hear Catherine explain it. "You blow away my crime scene, I break your face," Catherine said with a crooked grin and a mock punch to the detective's shoulder. O'Riley grinned. "You're the boss, ma'am," he said. The heat slapped them in the faces as they climbed down from the Pelican's cabin. Even in early March, it got hot out here in the desert at this time of day. The afternoon sun was waning, though, and in a couple of hours it would get cool - and dark, of course, but they could deal with that when they got there. In the meantime, they had work to do. Sara set her field kit on the Pelican's boarding step, popped it open, and climbed into a paper coverall, then clipped her sidearm holster to the loop provided on the coverall's hip before pulling on a pair of gloves. Then she put her hands on her hips and surveyed the scene. Her face took on a look of mounting distaste, bordering on distress, as she realized what most of the small debris strewn in the crashed blimp's wake was. "Sara?" Catherine asked as she zipped up her own coverall. "You OK?" "... snacks," Sara muttered, looking like she might throw up. "What?" Catherine said, confused. Then she looked where Sara was looking and saw that the rocky ground of the wash was littered with snack foods - bagged potato chips, pork rinds, various snack cakes, all baking in the desert sun. For a second, Catherine was still confused. She knew Sara made occasional attempts to give up eating meat, for muddled reasons to do with some experiment she and Grissom had once conducted, but never with any particular success. Sometimes she got that look when she was in the middle of one of those and encountered a co-worker having a burger from MacCready's up in Crescent Heights - a combination of self-conscious disgust and poorly-suppressed longing. But there were no burgers out here in the desert, so, huh? Then she remembered Sara's nightmarish trip to Zardon, on which the Salusian had spent four days surviving on nothing but the fare available from the vending machines in the Mega-City One Hall of Justice's records office. Vending machine food wasn't particularly good (or good for you) anywhere, but on Zardon, where the whole concept of food was hopelessly skewed by any other people's standards, it was positively abhorrent. Sara Sidle had been permanently scarred by the experience. Since returning from Zardon, she had been known to go two floors out of her way to avoid passing the Snacktron near the Psionics lab. Sara gazed at the scattered snacks for a moment more, then shook her head and said, "These things are evil." "Yeah, well, if it helps, remember that they're evidence," said Catherine half-jokingly. "You know, that does help," Sara mused after a moment's consideration. Catherine turned and surveyed the scene again. Now that she knew what they were, she was struck by the number and dispersal of the winking little Mylar snack packets. "What the hell? Was he keeping all of this in the gasbag?" she wondered. "It's like a Frito-Lay pinata." Sara suppressed a snort of laughter, then went back to her field kit and got out the big digital camera. "OK, where do we start?" "Let's walk the perimeter and mark it." Sara nodded and got to work with the camera. Warrick Brown sat at his desk in the bullpen, where all the non-supervisory night-shifters had their office space. While he and Grissom waited for Doc Robbins to call about their newest corpse, he was going over the files for the four similar cases that had happened so far this year. In cases like this - indeed, in any murder case - the victims are themselves evidence, not only in the physical sense, but also in terms of who they were and what they were doing, why they were where they were. It was this that Warrick was considering now. Four victims, all killed a few weeks apart. Two women, two men; three Salusian, one, a man, human. A grocer, a schoolteacher, a waiter, and a college student who worked part time as a parking attendant. As far as Dick Grayson had been able to find out, none of them had known any of others, at least not beyond the casual know- them-to-wave-to way that most people in New Avalon's neighborhoods knew each other. All lived and died in Salutown, one of the city's least violent districts. All the Salusians were humanized. All had been walking in out-of-the-way but not particularly dubious places - taking shortcuts through alleys, cutting across a loading dock, taking the air on the roof of her apartment building. All had been bludgeoned to death with startling violence, their heads smashed like melons, apparently by a single vicious blow from some heavy object. All had been found with a pasteboard card near the body, a card on which someone had written "traitors die" in Cheltarese with a black ballpoint pen. Questioned Documents confirmed in each case that the cards had been written by the same person. The press didn't know about the cards, but even without that connecting factor, the gross (no pun intended) details of the crimes were enough to make them assume the killings were related. After the third one, the Cornet-Scientifer had dubbed the unknown killer "the Salutown Slugger" - a name apparently inspired by a street cop's offhanded comment that one of the victims looked like he'd been hit with a baseball bat. Warrick re-read the files again, looking for anything that might help him get an idea of why these people in particular had been chosen. There was something there, something that tickled at the back of his mind, but he couldn't put a conscious finger on it, and it was beginning to bug him a great deal. He cleared his terminal display, ran a hand down his face, and sighed. He disliked serial cases. Most cops and criminalists did. There was always that unpleasant feeling that if you could just work it a little harder, the next victim wouldn't have to die. The phone on his desk beeped, and then the voice of Dr. Al Robbins, chief medical examiner for the IPO, spoke. "Warrick? We're ready." "Be right there," Warrick said, and he got up and headed for the elevator. After spending an hour defining the scene, Sara and Catherine regrouped near the Pelican and decided to essay the gondola next. The structure was more or less intact, but crushed enough that they weren't going to be able to get inside without heavier tools. That was all right; this was just an overview. Sara examined the main door, looking for signs that the craft might have been abandoned. Indeed, it didn't appear that the door had been closed when the blimp hit the ground. She was about to report this finding to Catherine when she heard the blonde's voice from the front of the gondola. "Well, here's Mr. Jenson," Catherine called. "Still at the controls." Sara turned and stepped away from the gondola. "Wha - ow!" she said as her sidearm snagged on a mangled strut protruding from the wreck. The treated paper coverall tore, ripping off the holster loop, and the holster fell to the ground. With a sharp clatter, her sidearm sprang free and tumbled a few yards down the rocky slope before fetching up against one of the many big rocks dotting the area. "You OK?" Catherine called. "Yeah, I'm fine," Sara replied, irritated with herself. She picked up her holster, went down and retrieved her pistol, and was looking at it critically as she rounded the front of the gondola to find Catherine leaning through one of the now-absent side windows of the cockpit. Catherine pulled herself back out of the window and said, "What happened? Drop your gun?" "Caught it on a piece of the wreck," Sara replied. "Ripped the loop off my coverall." Sara turned the gun over and eyed its flat side. It had a few bright scars carved in its dark finish from its roll down the hill. Frowning, she ejected the magazine, looked it over, put it back, pulled back the slide a little to check the chambered round, rattled it a bit on its rails, and then shrugged. "Seems OK." "Not much we can do about it now, either way," Catherine said. "Better draw a new one from QM when we get back, just in case." Sara nodded, surveyed the torn holster loop for a second, then stuck the gun in her hip pocket. "Not like I'm going to need it way the hell out here, anyway," she said. "You found the pilot?" "Uh-huh," Catherine said, leaning back into the window. Sara stepped closer to the hull and looked. A dark-haired figure was, as Catherine had said, still strapped to the pilot's seat, slumped over the steering yoke. "Controls are locked for cruise," Catherine noted, shining her flashlight around the shadowy interior. "Looks like he headed southwest and just kept flying at a very slight down-angle until he ran out of sky." "What could make a guy do that?" Sara wondered. "Heart attack? Stroke?" "Yeah... a stroke," Catherine said thoughtfully, playing the beam of her light on the back of the pilot's head. "I'd say about the nine-millimeter kind." "You're kidding," Sara said, leaning for a better look. "I found the main door open." "So somebody shot the pilot and then bailed out?" Catherine wondered. "We have to get a better look inside," Sara said. "And you know what that means," Catherine said, a smile stealing onto her face. She turned and grinned at Sara. "We take the gondola back to the garage," Sara said with a slow smile. Catherine nodded. "You got it." "Awright," Sara said, and the two women exchanged a high-five. There was little either enjoyed more than getting a vehicle back to the shop and tearing it apart to find out what had happened inside. You could put the music on and do your work in air-conditioned comfort with a bathroom right handy. It beat the hell out of crawling around under a smashed Buick in a half-flooded roadside ditch during a heavy rainstorm. The spark of good humor this realization produced in Sara didn't last long, though. As she and Catherine returned to working the scene around the gondola, the Salusian investigator got quiet and frowny again - not the mild frown of concentration that was her normal expression, but a deeper, darker look that spoke of something more than just the job at hand bothering her. "Hey," Catherine asked her after a protracted silence. "Yeah?" Sara replied. "You doing anything this weekend?" "Going to the lake," Sara replied abstractedly, most of her attention occupied by the gondola's drag pattern. "Why?" "Just curious," Catherine said companionably. "I think it's nice you're getting out more." O'Riley, no fool, saw where this conversation was headed and prudently absented himself, heading over to give the Pelican a once-over. "You sound like Warrick," Sara said. Then she stopped examining the track, straightened, and went on, "Look, I like you guys, OK? But I don't really appreciate having my private life poked into." "Who's poking?" Catherine asked. "I asked, you answered me. No big deal." "Like Warrick earlier," Sara went on, not paying any attention to Catherine's protest. "'Get anything interesting?' He doesn't believe I was in the records office." She threw up her hands in exasperation and added, "We're not even -dating- any more." "... You and Warrick?" Catherine asked, confused. "You know who I'm talking about. Don't even start with me," Sara grumped. "Oh," said Catherine. She knew she should probably tread carefully here - or, more advisably still, just turn away from the topic - but she couldn't stop herself from asking, "So you and the Chief aren't seeing each other any more?" Sara scowled, clearly unwilling to go down this path, but resigned to it if it would get the conversation over with. "No," she said, "we're not. It didn't work out." "I -see-." Catherine's face adopted an affectedly thoughtful now-lemme-see-if-I've-got-this-straight expression. "So... you're just... having dinner with him three or four times a week. And watching movies over at his place on your day off. Oh, and going to the lake with him this weekend." Sara had seen Catherine use this routine on too many suspects to buy it herself. "Now you're poking," she said in a warning tone of voice. Catherine sighed, abandoning the tactic, which she'd been using more or less out of habit anyway. "You have to understand, Sara, I wouldn't -be here- if it wasn't for him," she said. Then, gesturing vaguely to their surroundings, she went on, "OK, well, not -here- exactly, but doing this job. I'm just as worried about him." "What I -understand- is that I just told you I don't like having my life pried into and you're still doing it," Sara snapped. "Look, you want to know what's going on, ask him. I mean, you obviously don't believe me." "Sara - " Catherine said, trying to be conciliatory, but Sara had her own ideas for defusing the situation before it got out of hand. "I'm going to shoot the gondola," she said, more or less body-slamming the conversation back to a professional level. Catherine gave her a helplessly frustrated look for a second, then bowed her head, admitting defeat. "... OK," she said. "I'll, uh... measure the crash track." In silent agreement, the two women separated, going to either end of the scar the gondola had left in the ground. Grissom, Warrick, and Al Robbins stood around one of the autopsy tables in the ground-floor morgue. This was a dark, open room of stainless steel, chilled air, and pools of light that leaned toward blue, especially when seen after the more natural lighting of the upper floors. A stainless steel counter ran the length of one wall, festooned with microscopes, computer monitors, sinks, and various medical and surgical equipment and supplies. The opposite wall contained a bank of what looked like three-foot-square freezer doors of the same steel construction. The center of the room was occupied by two autopsy tables of the same cold steel, recessed like giant pans with a drain at the foot. Mechanical arms containing lights and various implements, cameras, and recording devices hung over each. The dark textured concrete floor with inset drains completed the warehouse-meets-science aura of the place. The body on the table around which the three men stood was covered decorously with a blue sheet, except for the head - what was left of it. "Well, it's the same as the last time," Robbins said. He was a grizzled, bald, avuncular man just edging past middle age, a former Wedge Defense Force naval surgeon and the best pathologist any of the IPO's investigators had ever seen in action. "Cause of death was our old friend blunt force trauma, on a scale I've rarely seen outside of industrial accidents," Robbins went on. "Death must have been all but instantaneous. Other than that... " He shrugged. "I'm still waiting for an ID. Dental records are all but useless, so we have to hope she's in COGENT or AFIS." "What species is she?" Grissom wondered. "Salusian, humanized. I'm expecting a COGENT hit because of that." Grissom nodded. As a humanized Salusian himself, he knew that the Salusian government recorded a complete geneprint for every citizen who underwent the modification process before leaving the homeworld. Since the Royal Salusian Information Bureau's geneprint banks were connected to the Co-Operative GENetic Tracking system, that meant there was every chance their victim would turn up on a record search, assuming she hadn't been illegally humanized. Since emigration to Zeta Cygni was not only legal but routine, there wasn't any real reason to suspect that. "Anything else?" "One thing," Robbins said. He pointed to the leading edge of the principal remaining skull fragment. "See those round cutouts?" Grissom and Warrick looked. Indeed, the broken edge of the bone had a series of semicircular marks, almost like little crenelations, along it. Grissom looked up, meeting Robbins's eyes. "The weapon was studded," he said. Robbins nodded. "Looks like it. I found similar markings in the other four cases, if you recall. Looks like the papers might be right." Grissom looked thoughtfully at the strange indentations for a second, then said, "Thanks. Let me know if anything else turns up," and left the morgue. "He knows something he's not saying," Robbins observed. "Film at 11," Warrick said sarcastically. Then he blinked and looked as if something had just struck him. Something had - the common thread he'd seen in the files on the previous victims had just bubbled up into his conscious awareness. "Thanks, Doc," he said, and jogged after Grissom. "All part of the service," Robbins said equably as the second investigator left his lair. Warrick caught up to Grissom in the hall. "Gris," he said. "What?" Grissom glanced at him, then smiled slightly. "I don't like hunches," he said. "Even when they're mine." "Yeah, well, that means you'll like mine even less. I was going over the files on the previous victims, and I noticed something." Grissom stopped walking and turned to him, looking interested. "So far that's victimology, not a hunch," he said. "Go on." "We have five victims, four Salusian, one human. In the four previous cases, each victim was dating somebody from the other species. One gets you ten we find out the same in this case when we get an ID on the vic." Grissom raised an eyebrow. "Traitors die," he said. Warrick nodded. "I think we're looking at a series of racial hate crimes." Grissom frowned, an expression at odds with his words: "Good work, Warrick." Then he turned and walked off down the hall, not sharing whatever was on his mind in return. The sun was setting behind the ridge to the west, bathing the crash scene in orange light and the long, sharp shadows of rocks, when Catherine suddenly realized that something wasn't right. She straightened up, feeling a mild crick in her back from having bent down for so long, and did a slow, careful lookaround. Sara was still up by the gondola; having finished photographing it, she had her Alternate Light Source out now and was shining it through the window holes, presumably looking for blood spatter on the interior. All the bags of snacks and bits of debris were still where they'd landed, the flaccid gasbag was still draped over the boulders to the south, the Pelican was still parked over by the big round rock... "Hey Sara?" Catherine called. Sara straightened and turned. "What?" she shouted back. "Where's O'Riley?" Catherine asked. Sara looked around. She was too far away for Catherine to see her face in this light, but her body language spelled surprise. "I thought he was with you!" Sara called after a moment. The funny, foreboding feeling that had roused her from her reverie of evidence collecting spiked in Catherine's head. Without really knowing why, she threw herself forward and down. As she did so, she felt a jarring impact and an explosion of pain in the back of her head. She hit the ground more unconscious than conscious, not completely out but certainly unable to do anything for the moment. /* Juno Reactor & Gocoo "Teahouse" _The Matrix Reloaded_ */ Sara Sidle watched with some confusion as Catherine suddenly dove for the ground, wondering what the hell she was doing. Then something behind the blonde criminalist -flickered-, like a holographic communicator with a bad connection. A humanoid shape, almost but not quite visible, appeared behind Catherine - swinging some kind of weapon - whatever it was hit her on the head and she went the rest of the way down and stayed there - Sara dropped her hand to where her holster should have been, but found only the torn plasticized paper of the holster loop. Cursing, she reached further, into that side pocket, and hauled her sidearm out. She let the ALS unit hang from its wrist strap while she stripped the conformal plastic holster from her weapon with her free hand. "International Police!" she cried. "Stop where you are!" The flickering shape, almost impossible to see in the poor light, bounded up the rocky slope toward her. Some part of her mind which remained detached and scientific even under the circumstances informed her that her attacker was wearing thermoptic camouflage. Without thinking, she caught the ALS back up in her free hand and aimed it along the side of her pistol, just like they'd taught her to do with a taclight at the Academy. The ultraviolet-rich blue beam of light stabbed down the slope, but revealed nothing. Sara's thumb automatically rolled the little wheel at the end of the ALS unit, shifting the wavelength of the beam as if she were scanning for unknown trace evidence - - and inside the specially treated goggles she wore, the beam suddenly picked out the glowing outline of a man wielding what looked like a baseball bat, running up the broken, rock-strewn slope toward her with startling speed. Sara had been trained in the application of deadly force when she became a criminalist, and again when she joined the International Police. She knew that this man had just clobbered, possibly killed, her partner, and now he was headed for her just as fast as his legs could carry him, his weapon still at the ready. There was no doubt in her mind that her life was in imminent danger. She'd always wondered, in an academic sort of way, what would happen if she ever found herself in this position. Once she'd tried to ask Grissom about it, but he'd just given her a sad look and told her no one ever really knew until the moment arrived. Not long ago, she'd had a gun in her face during an arrest gone bad, and been absolutely convinced that she was about to die, but she hadn't had an opportunity to draw, let alone fire, her weapon. Her attacker's thermoptic camo noticed that it had been painted by a UV source and started to compensate, and his outline began to vanish again. He was getting closer, and she was about to lose her shot. She took it. The first round went wide, the trigger pulled too forcefully - an amateur's mistake. She corrected, surprised at how cool she felt now that the moment was here, and fired again at his rapidly-vanishing center of mass. That one was a hit, but she couldn't tell how bad. His thermoptics coruscated, the imaging system confused by the hit. He checked slightly, but he kept coming, drawing his weapon back to strike. The protocol Sara had been taught said that you kept firing until you ran out of ammo or your assailant hit the dirt and didn't offer to get up. Following her training, she recovered from the recoil and pressed the trigger again. Nothing happened. Grissom was in Greg Sanders's lab, not for any really practical purpose, but just to show some interest in an effort to buck up the Dantrovian's flagging spirits a little. Serial cases were always hard on everyone, but Greg was taking this one especially hard because of the importance his native culture placed on tolerance and harmony. By now everyone on the tenth floor had heard that Warrick's victim study had given them a lead on a possible motive for the crimes. To Greg, murder was bad enough, but killing someone just for the company he kept was worse than a crime, it was an abomination. Before Grissom could try to lift the tech's spirits, his pager went off - but not with its usual assertive beep. The tone it made now was a strident howl, a sound that reached into the humanoid unconscious and whispered "Danger!" on a level that couldn't be ignored. Grissom snatched the device from his belt and watched with mounting dismay as the message scrolled across the holographic display: 24100322 17:10:19 WPN39581 (SIDLE, S. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE He didn't even have time to react before the pager screamed again and another message crowded onto the display: 24100322 17:10:20 WPN39581 (SIDLE, S. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE Greg raised his eyebrows, unaware of the intelligence the display was sending Grissom. "Never heard a pager do -that- before," he said. "What's going on?" Grissom didn't hear him; all the supervisor's attention was focused on the gleaming green gem affixed to his wrist. Catherine Willows hauled herself up onto one elbow, fighting down a powerful urge to vomit - mustn't soil the crime scene, some part of her mind laughed irreverently - and looked up the slope. She couldn't see whatever had hit her, but there was a flicker of movement heading upward, flitting from rock to rock. Thermoptic camouflage! she realized; her thoughts were clearing faster than command of her body was returning. She looked to the top of the slope. Sara was standing up there, her weapon drawn, the black cylinder of an ALS held alongside it like a tactical flashlight. Smart girl, Sara, thought Catherine as she struggled to pull herself upright. She couldn't see it because she wasn't wearing filter goggles, but Catherine knew that the ALS would pick up the attacker's thermoptics for a couple of seconds, before the image processor could adapt - if Sara had it set to the right wavelength. Catherine got herself up to one knee and drew her own weapon. She had no target, but - Sara fired once; clean miss, the bullet whanging musically off a rock and sailing off into the gathering evening someplace. Her second shot was a hit, making the attacker's camo strobe crazily. There was no third shot. Catherine saw her squeeze the trigger again, then look down at the gun, dismay written all over her posture. The guy was still charging, barely slowed by the single hit, his flickering weapon cocking for a blow that could all but take Sara's head off. Catherine didn't think about her training or her philosophy toward deadly force. There was no time. She just opened fire. 24100322 17:10:23 WPN24919 (WILLOWS, C. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE 24100322 17:10:23 WPN24919 (WILLOWS, C. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE 24100322 17:10:24 WPN24919 (WILLOWS, C. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE 24100322 17:10:24 WPN24919 (WILLOWS, C. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE 24100322 17:10:25 WPN24919 (WILLOWS, C. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE 24100322 17:10:25 WPN24919 (WILLOWS, C. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE 24100322 17:10:26 WPN24919 (WILLOWS, C. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE 24100322 17:10:26 WPN24919 (WILLOWS, C. CSI3) WEAPON DISCHARGE Greg Sanders got his second big surprise of the night, after the awful sound Grissom's pager made, when the shadow of the old GCMS machine in the corner of his lab suddenly rippled and gave forth a pair of -people-. For a second he thought it was the damnedest intrusion he'd ever seen, until he realized they were the Chief and his creepy-cute friend in the blue cloak. For a moment Greg couldn't remember her name, only that he'd asked her out once and still felt a vague chill when he thought about it. The pager screamed again and again - clearly something very bad was unfolding out there somewhere. Grissom stared at it for a couple more seconds, then shoved it back in its holster and said, "Now Catherine's opened fire." "Catherine's WHAT?!" Greg squeaked. "What's going on?" Gryphon tabbed a control on his wrist computer. "Tactical Command, this is the Chief. I'm on 10 and I want a tac team in Transporter A by the time I get down there." The computer made a metallic click and replied in a tinny voice, "Roger that, Chief." "Gris, you're with me," Gryphon said briskly. As the three - Gryphon, Grissom, and Raven - emerged from the lab with Greg trotting after them, the commotion caught the attention of the other members of Grissom's shift, who were in the Trace Evidence lab. They came out into the hall, wanting to know what was happening; being ignored like Greg, they fell in behind with him. "What's going on, man?" Nick Stokes asked Greg. "Damned if I know," Greg replied. "Gris's pager started -wailing-, and then the Chief and his, uh, friend showed up, and Gris said Catherine's shooting at someone." "She's what?" Warrick Brown demanded. "That's all I know!" Greg said. Not until the lot of them were crammed into the elevator and on the way down to the transporter rooms in Subbasement D did Grissom notice that the two criminalists and Greg had joined the train. "What are you guys doing?" he demanded. "We're coming with you," Nick replied, in the tone of a man surprised to have been asked. Grissom shook his head. "We are -criminalists-," he said. "Not the cavalry." "You're going," Warrick pointed out. "I'm their supervisor. I'm responsible," Grissom said grimly. "You two stay here. You too, Greg," he added with a sharp glance at the tech. As one the three men shook their heads. "No way, sir," Greg replied flatly. Grissom looked moderately taken aback. "Are you refusing a direct order?" he asked - not indignantly, but more as if he found it an interesting phenomenon. "Yes, sir," Nick said firmly. Warrick and Greg nodded with him. Grissom looked from one to the other as if considering whether to lay into them. Then, despite the terrible stress and uncertainty he felt, he smiled his disarming little neon-sign smile and said, "Well, then I guess you'd better come along. Warrick, look after Greg. He's not field-rated." Warrick grinned through his own tension. "Yes, sir," he said. They came out of the elevator and turned left into the transporter room, to find an eight-man Tactical Division bluesuiter squad already ranked and ready to go on the pad, their weapons at port arms, their faces grim. "Do you have a transporter lock yet?" Gryphon asked the curly-haired woman at the console. She shook her head. "WDF Sensor Command has to re-task an array to get us a hi-res scan of the target area. Estimate 52 seconds until we can energize." "Not soon enough," Gryphon said. He turned to his cloaked companion. "Raven?" Raven nodded very slightly, her dark eyes glinting clear and determined from the shadows of her hood. "yes," she said in a soft but unequivocal voice. In response, Gryphon rapped out a single word, like a gunshot: "Go!" Raven closed her eyes and made ancient shapes with her hands. "azarath. metrion. ZINTHOS!" she said. With a suddenness that made Greg Sanders gasp, the disk of shadow she cast on the floor beneath her expanded and seemed to swallow her up. In an instant, she was gone as if she'd never been there. Once he took a second to recover from -that-, Greg turned to Warrick, curiosity overwhelming shock. "(If we can lock onto where they are, why don't we just beam them here?)" he asked, sotto voce. "(Transporting someone with an unstabilized injury can kill them,)" Warrick murmured back. "(We don't know if they're hurt. So we go to them.)" "(Oh,)" said Greg, nodding. Then he settled in with the rest of them to wait through the interminable minute. The task Gryphon had set for his apprentice was a difficult one, even for a witch of her power and skill. Teleportation was no simple matter when you knew exactly where you were going. Throw in a long overland distance and an unfamiliar destination, and it got harder. Do it without a solid beacon at the other end and the difficulty spiked again. A Lens made a very good teleport beacon; Raven had once homed in on Gryphon's across several hundred light-years. Even with the Lens involved, though, that feat was only possible because of the strange mystic resonance that linked her - deeply and specifically - to him. Here she had no such lever. She knew the people she was going out to help, but only casually, and neither was a Lensman. She had only fragmentary echoes of their auras to go on, and most of that drawn indirectly, from the impressions they left on the Chief. In short, it was a tough job. Pulling it off required a damned fine bit of spellcraft, if Raven said so herself - which of course she didn't, for Raven never boasted of her skill, preferring to let it speak for itself. Alas, there was no one at her destination who had the background to appreciate her achievement; but -she- could, and for her, that was enough. Besides, she had a job to do. She emerged from the shadows to find herself standing on sloping ground among scattered rocks in a fast-cooling desert twilight. To her left was the crumpled wreck of some kind of vehicle. A woman stood next to it, holding a pistol in one hand and a flashlight emitting a weird blue beam in the other. To Raven's right was another woman, this one just in the process of edging up the slope, her weapon held at the ready in both hands. Sprawled on the ground a few feet short of the woman with the flashlight was a humanoid form, indistinct in the gathering night, with a gleaming pool of something dark and liquid slowly growing underneath him. The woman with the readied gun was holding it on this form, clearly ready to resume hostilities if the need arose. Judging by the size of that blood pool and the distinctive stillness of the body atop it, Raven didn't think that was likely. Catherine saw the movement out of the corner of her eye and pivoted, ready to fire. The figure who had suddenly appeared partway up the slope held up both hands. "Easy," she said in a low, husky voice. "It's me - Raven. Gryphon sent me to help you." Catherine visibly (though not entirely) relaxed. "-Raven-, thank God," she said. "What happened here?" Raven asked. "I'm not sure," Catherine said. "This guy, whoever he is, came out of nowhere, clobbered me, and went for Sara. She winged him and I brought him down." "Are there more?" asked Raven, her eyes sweeping the scene. "We don't know," Sara said. "There was a CID detective with us," Catherine added, a note of concern coming into her voice. "He's missing." "Gryphon and a tac team are 45 seconds behind me," Raven told them. "Just stay sharp until they get here." Sara stood regarding her for a second, then asked, "How did you -get- here?" "Magic," Raven replied, in the sort of tone a normal person would use to say, "Hitched." Sara opened her mouth to make some response, closed it again when she realized there wasn't really an adequate one, then felt silly for not acknowledging the statement at all and settled for a slightly hollow, "Oh." When the cavalry arrived, it was a bit of an anticlimax. The bluesuiters fanned out, careful to avoid the scene of the shooting itself, and began establishing a secured perimeter. Gryphon got on the com back to Headquarters and had a support team beamed out once the site was secure. Within the hour, the crime scene turned battlefield had become a crime scene again, this time one with a high priority. Catherine sat on a metal supply crate, feeling fretful and impotent, while Dr. David Phillips examined the wound on her head. "Nasty," he observed. David was an assistant coroner, a familiar sight at death scenes Catherine worked, but he was generally not patching up his own co-workers. Now he sounded like he was examining the smashed-in head of a vic - which, Catherine noted with a little shudder, was damn near what she and Sara had both ended up becoming. If he noted the shudder, David was tactful enough not to say so. Instead, he deftly patched her up, applying some antiseptic gel and synthetic skin to the cut the blow had left on her scalp, then winding a gauze bandage around her head to hold the patch in place until the synthskin had a chance to cure. Catherine sat quietly and let him work. She only winced once, when he first put on the antiseptic - it stung a bit, but mostly it was the sudden cold that made her react. "Sorry," David said with an apologetic smile. "I'm not used to working on patients who -need- antiseptics." She smiled and told him that was all right. He was a big, bookish man who had a kind of nerdy charm; Catherine was fond of him in an abstract, almost motherly kind of way. "So what's the word, David?" she asked. "Am I going to live?" "Well," David said clinically, "there's no damage to your skull, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows you. And I don't think there's anything wrong with what's inside either." He rummaged in his bag and handed her a paper packet with a couple of pills in it. "Take these, and if you start to feel dizzy or drowsy, let me know immediately. That skinpatch needs to cure, so keep the bandage on and your head dry for at least four hours. I think you're going to be fine." Catherine tore open the packet, swallowed the gel-coated tablets dry, and then gave David a look. "Did you just make a crack about my head?" David looked dignified. "It was a compliment, Catherine," he said. Catherine smiled. "Oh. Well. That's different," she replied. Then, unable to resist the urge to tease him a little, she added, "I thought you were into Sara." David automatically glanced across the floodlit operations area to the spot where Sara was giving her report to Grissom. "Oh, well, he said, "I am, but... " He made an indeterminate gesture that summed up a variety of different things, then grinned boyishly. "You know." Catherine laughed, though it made her head throb a little. "David Phillips," she said. "Who knew you were such a smooth operator?" David chuckled and might have responded - he was in unusually fine form tonight - but for the cry that came from one of the bluesuiters searching the perimeter. "Sir!" the trooper cried. "Chief! I've found Sgt. O'Riley." David grabbed his bag and hustled; Catherine was right behind him, followed by Gryphon, Grissom, and Sara. The big detective was sprawled behind another of the innumerable rocks that were strewn around this area. He was face-down and stretched out, and for one awful second Catherine thought he was dead. David knelt down, felt at O'Riley's fleshy throat for a second, played a diagnostic sensor over him, and observed the readings. Then he straightened and said in a sharp, businesslike tone that was startling coming from the normally shy, quiet coroner, "He's alive, and he'll stay that way if we get him to a proper facility. I'll stabilize him for transport. Chief, I need you to set us up a crossbeam straight to Boyce Memorial." Gryphon nodded. "Done," he said, and got on the com to arrange it. David set to work, taking various stabilizing devices out of his bag and applying them to the injured detective. That was only the work of a few seconds; then he sat back on his haunches and looked up at the small crowd watching him work. "OK, he's all set," he said. "Catherine - remember what I told you. If you start to feel dizzy, drowsy, nauseous - tell the Chief and he'll take care of you." He turned his eyes to Gryphon. "Right?" Gryphon grinned. "You got it. Ready for transport?" "Roger that." "Transport Control, this is the Chief. Energize." The doctor and his patient glimmered and vanished. "(Wow,)" Catherine remarked to Sara out of the side of her mouth. "(I've never seen David do brisk before.)" "(Yeah,)" Sara replied, nodding. A few minutes later, another aircraft arrived from the northeast. It was an aerodyne of a smaller class than the Pelican utility transport - an example of the type the general public called, a trifle inaccurately, a "flying car". As it set down outside the perimeter, two bluesuiters moved to cover it, catching it in the beams of their shoulder lamps. The vehicle was green and gold; as the passenger door swung open, one of the bluesuiters' searchlights flashed from the reflective gold star of the Avalon County Sheriff's Department. "County mounties?" Nick Stokes wondered from halfway across the scene. "What're they doing here?" "Their jurisdiction," Warrick pointed out with a shrug. "Everything outside the city." "Yeah, but it's all over now," Nick said. Then, as a man climbed out of the aerodyne, the burly investigator's shoulders slumped. "Oh, man, it's Mobley." Warrick looked; sure enough, the man who had just emerged from the passenger side of the county aero was the sheriff of Avalon County himself, a balding, vaguely severe-looking man named Brian Mobley. Mobley was the closest thing Gil Grissom had to a nemesis, day-shift CSI supervisor Conrad Ecklie notwithstanding. The sheriff's political ambitions didn't end at his current office, and though Grissom knew that, he also didn't care, so it didn't influence the speed or tractability with which he handled county cases. He and Mobley cordially despised each other, and all of Grissom's techs dreaded running into the sheriff as a result. "Nice of him to show up now that nobody needs help," Warrick grumbled, then bent to resume examining the trail of deeply indented footprints leading roughly from Catherine's shell casings to Sara's. "Gil, I asked you to have your people investigate a possible crime scene, not create a definite one," Mobley said as he picked his way up the rocky slope. Grissom wasn't in the mood to fence with the sheriff. "My people were -attacked-, Brian," he said. "They didn't come out here looking for a fight, they came to investigate a blimp crash." Mobley ignored Grissom, which was his usual tactic when he was losing an argument based on logic or facts. Instead he addressed Catherine in a sharp, critical tone. "Well, Ms. Willows. This is, what, your second kill in four years? That's quite a record for a criminalist. I've been in law enforcement proper for almost 30 years and I've never even fired at anyone." He smiled thinly. "You must be very proud." Catherine gave him a look that didn't bother concealing her disdain and said nothing. "Well, let's have a look at your latest victim, shall we?" Mobley said. He crossed to the body, hunkered down, and played a flashlight over it. Then, rising and dusting the tails of his expensive overcoat, he turned a grim face to Catherine. "Ms. Willows," he said, "would you care to explain to me how even a woman of your obvious talent manages to shoot a man eight times in the -back- in self-defense?" "How about when he's ten feet from killing my -partner-, asshole?" Catherine shot back. Fists balled, she took a half-step toward Mobley, her normally lovely face hard with fury. "Or is that why you've never fired in 30 years, because you've never bothered to back up anyone but yourself?" Gryphon seemed to appear out of nowhere as he interposed himself, his hands on her shoulders, steering her away. "Whoa, Cath, whoa, time out," he said. After he'd managed to herd her out of earshot of the sheriff, he added in a low, confidential voice, "You can't kill Sheriff Mobley. We need him for another week." The statement - one of his common figures of speech - had its desired effect: It broke through her anger and even drew a small, pained snort of laughter as she stopped trying to get past him. "I'm sorry," she said, raising her hands in a combination of exasperation and surrender. "I just - that smug son of a bitch! He comes out from behind his desk three times a year and he's giving me shit for doing what I'm supposed to do?" Gryphon half-smiled. "You did right," he said. He led her further away from the middle of the scene, out to the edge of the lighted perimeter, and left Grissom to deal with the sheriff. Once they were more or less alone among the rocks, off in the quiet away from the rumble of the Pelican's generator and the noises of the ongoing scene survey, he asked her, "Are you OK?" Catherine sighed in exasperation. She was rumpled, grubby, and sweat-streaked; her normally neat blonde hair was in disarray, mussed further by the bandage that encircled her head, and decorated by a dark streak of dried blood. "No," she said, "I'm not OK. I'm hungry, I'm jumpy, I'm filthy, my head hurts, my hair's a mess, I've got -blood- in my -ear-, I killed a man a couple hours ago, the sheriff's on my ass, and Sara's pissed off at me. None of that is OK!" By this time, Gryphon was holding the fingertips of one hand to his bowed forehead, and for a second Catherine thought he'd been struck by a headache, until she realized that he was giggling almost uncontrollably. That just made her madder. It really got her goat when men found her anger entertaining, and she'd have thought if she knew -anyone- she could count on not to pull out that kind of patronizing, paternalistic horseshit, it'd be Gryphon, which made it still worse. "What the HELL is so funny?" she demanded. Gryphon raised blue eyes twinkling with merriment to her wrathful gaze and said, "I was just remembering the last time I saw you this riled up." Catherine gathered herself to rip into him for patronizing her, but then her memory sparked and she realized what he must be talking about. "Wait. Was that when I rented a truck and dumped all of Eddie's stuff in the lake?" she asked. "Yup," Gryphon replied, grinning. /-- JULY 16, 2397 "Well? Are you just going to stand there grinning at me, -First Lensman-, or are you going to help me -dump- this shit?" --/ Catherine stared him in the eye now, trying to remain irritated, but with that memory running through her head, she couldn't do it. She snorted painfully, then gave up and let herself laugh, holding herself up with her hands on his shoulders. "So, uh, anyway," Gryphon said after a moment's silence. "Why is Sara pissed off at you?" Catherine sighed and started to run a hand through her tousled hair before she remembered the bandage and stopped herself. "It's nothing," she said unconvincingly. He gave her a skeptical look; she smiled ruefully. "No, listen, I need to talk to her some more before I get into it with anyone else. We'd sort of left things hanging, and then all... this... happened." Gryphon nodded. "OK," he said. "Consider it dropped." "Thank you," said Catherine, looking relieved. Grissom called Catherine and Sara together as soon as he'd finished explaining to Sheriff Mobley that no, in fact, calling the sheriff an asshole wasn't against IPO policy, and as such no disciplinary action would be taken against CSI3 Willows in that regard. "I want you two to go back to town with the Chief," he told them. "You can't help process this scene anyway." "What do you want us to do?" Sara asked. "Work the lab side of your case?" Grissom shook his head. "I don't want you to do anything. Go back to town and take the rest of the night off." Sara gave him an angrily incredulous look. "I don't believe this," she said. "This is about me, isn't it? I thought it was when you sent us way the hell out here on this -blimp crash-, and now I'm sure of it. You don't want me working the serial case because... why? Because I'm Salusian? I don't know if you've noticed lately, but so are you!" "Sara, this isn't the time or place - " Grissom began, but Sara had a full head of steam now, and she wasn't about to be put off. "I think it is!" she snapped. "You sent me out here to get me out of the way of your investigation, and you sent Catherine along to, what, to baby-sit me? This is -bullshit-, Gris. I'm a grown woman and a trained investigator. I won't let my nationality interfere with a case any more than you would!" "That's not what this is about, Sara," Grissom said in a quiet, almost pleading tone. "Then what -is- it about?" she demanded, challenging him with her tone and her eyes. "You tell me what it -is- about." "I can't," he said, and when she opened her mouth to tell him that wasn't NEAR good enough, he raised a hand and interjected, "Not here and not right now. Sara, you've had a bad experience and you're still keyed up from it. I want you to go back to New Avalon and relax tonight. We'll talk about this tomorrow. I promise." Sara stared hard at him for a moment, clearly unwilling to leave it at that; but what he'd said at the end seemed to sink in after a moment. Grissom didn't make promises lightly, and he didn't go back on them once he'd made them. He wasn't just brushing her off. If he said they'd talk about it tomorrow, they would. She relented with a nod that fell just short of sullen. "There's another thing," Grissom said. "This attack may have been deliberate. Until we know for sure what's going on, I don't want you going anywhere by yourselves - especially not to your homes." Both women looked like they might object to that, but Grissom held up his hands again. "Please. The Chief and I agree on this. The department will get you a safe, comfortable place to stay tonight, and tomorrow we'll see if we can get this mess sorted out. It's probably nothing, but it would make both of us feel better." He gave them his most disarming smile. "Think of it as a little vacation. After tonight, you've earned it." Catherine sighed - at least Lindsey was away at school, she didn't have to worry about THAT - and pulled out her mobile phone. "Hey, it's me. I'm not going to need that ride home tonight. No, I'm OK, but - yeah - work stuff. Call you tomorrow. OK. Bye." She snapped the phone shut, and as she was putting it back on her belt she noticed Grissom giving her a faintly quizzical smile. "Don't even start with me, Gil," she said. "I didn't say anything," he said in a tone of mild protest. Catherine and Sara beamed back to Headquarters with Gryphon, Raven, Grissom, and Greg, then went to the CSI locker room on the tenth floor to shower and change. Pulling off the shower cap she'd had to wear to protect her curing skinpatch, Catherine surveyed herself glumly in the mirror - her hair was still bloody and dirty, and that American Revolution head-bandage hairstyle just didn't work for her. Then she sighed resignedly, got dressed, and went to see what sort of safehouse plan the powers that be had cooked up. Grissom returned to the crime scene without any of the people he'd left with, but with someone Warrick and Nick were a little surprised to see. As chief medical examiner for the International Police, Al Robbins didn't go into the field much anymore; but since David had left the scene with O'Riley before he had a chance to pronounce the victim dead, well, -someone- had to do it. Grissom pointed the doctor at the body. Then, ignoring the sheriff, his uniformed deputy, and the bluesuiters, he strode across the lighted area and crouched down next to Warrick. "What've you got, Warrick?" he asked. "Well, I haven't quite finished," Warrick replied, "but so far it plays just like Cath and Sara said. Our guy nailed O'Riley behind the Pelican, then cut behind that rock - " (he pointed) " - came out from behind it, hit Cath, and then made straight for Sara up the slope. Sara fired twice. Cath fired eight times." "This guy's got nine holes in him," Doc Robbins interjected from the body's side. "Sara said she missed once," Nick told him. "It's important that you guys get everything," Grissom said. "We can't have anyone saying we're covering for our own. Sheriff Mobley already tried to bully the Chief into giving this case to Ecklie." Warrick snorted. "Yeah, picture -that-," he said. "Don't worry, boss," Nick agreed, nodding. "If anything out here doesn't match up, we'll find it." Grissom gave a mildly distracted nod and went to take a look at the body. "Your victim's a Salusian male, non-humanized, I'd say about fifty," Robbins said. "No big mystery about what killed him." "It's unusual for you to be so definite before the autopsy, Albert," Grissom remarked with a raised eyebrow. Robbins chuckled. "Don't worry, Gil. I heard what you said to your boys. I won't cut any corners - but when I find a dead man with eight bullets in his back and one in his chest, I tend to form a suspicion that he probably wasn't strangled." Grissom half-smiled. "We have to be sure," he said. "Oh, certainly. And when I'm done, we will be. Anyway, one thing I -can- tell you is that he is absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent dead, and that means if Nick's through taking his picture, we can have my guys get him out of your way." The coroner straightened up with a grunt and paddled dust from the knees of his pants. Then he looked around the clearing with a judicious expression. "Oof," he said. "I don't get out of the basement enough these days." "How are your legs?" Grissom asked. "Oh, fine, fine," Robbins replied. "Just went in for my 50,000-mile service. I've been thinking of trying out a set of the new sport feet. They've got retractable wheels, you know." Grissom nodded, but didn't respond. Instead, he stood looking thoughtfully at the body as two coroner's orderlies muscled it onto a gurney. Robbins watched along with him, then blinked in puzzlement at the object that had been hidden under the dead man. "-What-," Robbins inquired rhetorically, "is -that-?" Nick crouched down and examined the object which had been under the body. "Looks like a baseball bat with an attitude problem," he opined. "It's called a cijowska. It's an ancient Salusian weapon," Grissom said, a grim look on his face. Nick gave him a puzzled look. Grissom sensed it, turned to him, and gave him a wry little smile. "Didn't you ever see 'Cheltaria', Nick?" he asked. There was a part of the First Lensman which remained perpetually 12 years old, and, as such, got a great thrill out of doing things the way people did them in the movies. Thus, it was with a broad and boyish grin that he flung the double doors wide and barged into the room beyond without breaking stride, the tails of his trenchcoat flapping cinematically behind him. Catherine Willows knew him well enough to have an amused little grin of her own as she followed him in. Sara Sidle was too preoccupied - she was busy gawping at the room. She'd been inside the Hotel Monolith before; one of her first cases in New Avalon had been the death of a guest who, as it turned out, had checked out from natural causes. That had been in one of the regular guest rooms, and it had impressed her - not particularly large as hotel rooms went, but nicely appointed, beautifully decorated in the hotel's signature Art Deco style, and almost fanatically clean. (Hotel rooms were normally places whose hygiene inspired a combination of black amusement and dread in criminalists.) She'd never seen -this- room, though, and between the view out the wall of windows, the vastness of the black-silk-covered bed two steps up on a dais in the corner, the richness of the carpet, and the sheer -size- of the place, she had to just stop and take it in for a minute. "Wow," she said. "They call this the Lensman Room," Gryphon told the two investigators. Then, looking a bit sheepish, he added, "Bit silly, really, given that I live right here in town, but the management insists on keeping it handy in case I need a place to crash." "You don't own the Monolith, do you?" Catherine asked. "No," Gryphon replied. "If I did, this room would be a lot smaller. I always feel a bit ridiculous when I stay here," he said with a chuckle. "Anyway, I hope it suits you ladies for the evening. I'm sorry about the inconvenience, and it's probably for nothing, but until the investigation into tonight's incident is complete I'll feel better knowing you're somewhere safe." "How safe is safe?" Catherine wondered. "Well," Gryphon said, "the Monolith's in-house security force is very good for a hotel's, and I've reinforced them with some bluesuiters for the evening; nobody's getting onto this floor without a fight. The building's shielding prevents anything really crazy, like a missile attack from outside. And if worst comes to worst, Raven - " He inclined his head toward his cloaked apprentice, who nodded from her place near the door. " - will be right outside." "Well, ah... like you say, there's probably no need, but thanks for thinking of us," Catherine said. "Right? Sara?" Sara turned from where she'd been gazing thoughtfully out the window; it was clear from her expression that she had no idea what had been said. "Uh... right!" she said. "Sure." Gryphon smiled - just a little sadly, Catherine thought - crossed to the Salusian investigator's side, leaned close to her, and murmured something Catherine couldn't hear. Sara said something back in the same low tone. Gryphon put his hand on her shoulder for a second, hesitated, then turned and went to the door. "Good night, Sara, Catherine," he said. "Call if you need anything. Everything's paid for." Catherine smiled. "Thanks, Ben. Good night." Gryphon looked from one criminalist to the other for a second, smiled again, and left the room, preceded by Raven. When the door closed, Sara stood looking at it for a moment as if still seeing the man who'd just left by it; then she blinked, returning from wherever she'd gone, and turned to Catherine. For a second, Catherine thought Sara was about to resume their hanging conversation. She was mildly put off her stride by that, since she'd been mentally preparing her side of it based on the assumption that she'd have to be the one to bring it up again. But what Sara actually said was, "Are you hungry?" Catherine confined her amusement to an internal smile, anxious not to have any misunderstanding. "Well, you heard the man," she replied. "It's paid for." So saying, Catherine looked around for a moment with a judicious expression - the kind of expression, Sara noticed with faint amusement, she would have worn had she been sizing up a crime scene - before going to the desk in the far corner and opening the wide drawer. "Holy cow," she said, pulling out a thickish leather-bound volume. "Is this the room-service menu or the Gideon Codex?" She flipped the volume open, thumbed through its heavy faux-parchment pages for a moment, then said, "Menu. Know what you want? I think pretty much everything is in here." Sara considered for a microsecond and then said, "Belgad shyam with extra klor." Catherine looked puzzled. "I thought you were a vegetarian," she said. "I was," Sara replied casually. "I was also blonde once. Things change." "OK, just asking," Catherine said. "... You were blonde once?" "For a couple days. High school experiment," Sara said, shrugging. "Ah," said Catherine with an all-is-explained nod. She thumbed through the book, found the page she was looking for, and said, "They have a belgad-and-chicken-shyam combo plate. 'Serves four.'" "It's good cold," Sara observed in a speculative tone. Catherine glanced up from the book, caught her eye, and smiled, then picked up the phone and started ordering more food than an entire shift of criminalists could realistically expect to eat. While her blonde colleague took care of that, Sara wandered aimlessly around the room for a minute, idly touching this and that, as if trying to think what to do with herself. When Catherine got off the phone and turned to report that their food would be up in half an hour, she was taken aback to find Sara opening up her field kit on the coffee table. "Why did you bring your kit?" Catherine wondered. "Are you kidding?" Sara replied with a broad smile, broad enough to show the little gap between her front teeth. "It's got all my favorite toys in it! You know, when I got my first one of these, back on Salusia? I took it home with me that night and processed my whole -house-. Here - check this out." She picked her ALS out of the kit, put on her filter goggles, climbed the two steps onto the bed dais, and whipped the coverlet off the bed with a dramatic air. Then she flipped the light source into her hand, thumbed it on, tilted it to read the setting on the dial, and gave a snort of laughter. "Well," she said. "This is another one of those little forensic facts I'll carry to my grave: Thermoptic camouflage membrane fluoresces at the same wavelength as human seminal fluid." "... Really," Catherine observed with raised eyebrows. "Mm-hmm," Sara replied, turning the device so her blonde colleague could read the dial. "That's... fascinating," Catherine said, in a tone of voice that said she really thought it was, but found it a bit disturbing that she did. "Anyway," Sara said, handing her a second filter visor. "Take a look here." Catherine smiled indulgently. She was glad to see that Sara was bouncing back from the stress of the evening, but she didn't really need to see -this- show again; it was one of the first really jarring experiences of any criminalist's career, and she'd had hers a long time ago. "I already know what nests of horrors hotel beds are, Sara," she said. "You don't need to rub it - ... would you look at that!" "Isn't this amazing?" Sara said enthusiastically. "I was here last August for a suspicious-circs. Couldn't believe my eyes. I thought my ALS was malfunctioning." "You've got to be kidding. Let me see the setting you're using." Sara gave her a smug little grin and showed her the dial again. "It's no trick. There isn't a stain on these sheets." "That is incredible," Catherine mused, running a hand over the sheet. "You saw this in a regular guest room? It's not just this room? Because I could almost see that here - this room practically never gets used." "Nope. All rooms." "How do they do it?" "No one knows. Trade secret." Sara handed her the ALS. "Knock yourself out. I'm off to print the bathroom." Catherine examined the bed for a moment more, then got a "wait a second" look on her face and turned. "Why?" she asked. "Because it's fun!" Sara replied, and vanished into the bathroom with her kit. Nick backed through one of the crash doors leading into the IPO morgue. The CSI carried two plastifoam cups, steam rising in the conditioned air through the little holes in the covers, across the room to the figure hunched over the desk at the far end of the room. Both examination tables were occupied, the first one with the victim from Nick's case. A large 'Y' shape was cut into his chest and sewn together with large yet even sutures. (Nick could never shake the immediate thoughts of Frankenstein when he saw a body like that.) The second table contained the just-delivered Salusian corpse. Nick supposed that autopsy would be even easier than his had been, given the circumstances. But the why was less important than the who in that case... "Oh, hey there, Nick. That for me?" Al Robbins motioned to the cups Nick was carrying. "You bet, Doc. From Greg's secret brewery in Chem. Grissom hates the stuff, so he has to hide his rig under the mass-spec." Nick handed one of the containers over. Robbins cradled it almost reverently as he took a sip, causing the criminalist to chuckle. "We're all having that kind of night, aren't we?" Nick asked. "You could say that," Robbins replied. Enough time at the job mixed with the right personality gave most coroners a singular, dark wit. Robbins had the personality in spades, combined with a favorite- weird-uncle quality that only enhanced the effect. "Remind me never to get into a gunfight with Catherine," he observed dryly, nodding at the dead Salusian. "Eight shots, eight hits, all within the 8-ring, all potentially fatal. Any one of five would have been sufficient to cause instant death. It was over before he hit the ground." Nick snorted and voiced his previous thought. "No kidding. That post ought to be even easier than my vic's was." Robbins stopped in mid-pull from his coffee and looked over the cup at Nick for a moment. Nick caught it, and the smile melted from his face. "What. What's that look for? That look always makes me nervous, Doc." Robbins cleared his throat. "Well, Nick... hell. I should be thanking you, really. This is one of the most fascinating posts I've ever run." The coroner walked over to the body in question and rezzed up a free-floating holographic display. "You've already met Mr. Jason Walker of 718 Baker Street, Crescent Heights. Caucasian male human, thirty-six years old. It certainly looked like a fall from a roof could have killed him. Broken neck at the fourth cervical vertebra, broken back at the seventh thoracic vertebra - " "That neck injury could have been fatal," Nick interrupted. He did not like where this was headed. "Certainly, if it had occurred before death. Tissue damage in the area of the break says the injury was post-mortem." "He was dead when he hit the ground? What about his back?" "He was alive when that injury occurred. I also should note that he was in the early stages of a rare form of osteoporosis. His bones were slightly atrophied. That probably played a part in his back injury, but I'm not sure how yet, and... well. Lets just say I haven't put it together with the other evidence yet." Nick looked up. "Other evidence?" Robbins tapped the "screen" with a fingertip, causing a series of images to flicker in the air. "When I turned him over, I found this on his back." Nick leaned in to look. "Is that a burn?" "It is. Electrical burn, running down the top portion of his back. There are similar burns around his feet. Big thunderstorm over Crescent Heights last night... " Nick leaned back and nodded, smile slowly growing across his face again. "Lightning. Certainly would explain why he fell, wouldn't it. Up on the roof in a thunderstorm? What was this guy... think... ing." Doc Robbins still had his blank I'm-not-done-yet face on. "No?" "Oh, indeed, he was most likely struck by lightning. I can't say exactly when, but the neck injury does fit in with a fall from that height. If the lightning caused him to fall, though, the events would have been close enough together that the neck injury wouldn't have been so clearly post-mortem." Nick looked crestfallen again. "Besides, I do have a definite cause of death that assures me the lightning strike was post-mortem." Robbins walked over to the counter next to the table and picked up a glass container. He brought it back and handed it to Nick. It contained a small amount of frothy, pinkish tinged liquid. Nick looked at it and looked back at the coroner. "This is... ?" "That is the contents of his lungs. Approximately 300 ccs of water. Your vic drowned." Nick furrowed his brow in concentration. "Well, big rainstorm, if he was stuck on the roof with a busted back... I've seen people drown in less. Maybe he died up there from that and the lightning blew him off... wait." Robbins was grinning the humorless grin of an impatient teacher. "What's all that foam in the water?" "When a humanoid aspirates fresh water, like rainwater, the water gets absorbed into the bloodstream in an effort to dilute the blood's salt content," Robbins said. "Right, yeah. Equilibrium," Nick said. Robbins nodded, satisfied that his pupil was keeping up with him so far. "The blood thins, red blood cells are destroyed - the victim loses the ability to efficiently process oxygen, leading to asphyxiation. "When someone aspirates -salt- water," Robbins went on, "water in the bloodstream is pulled into the lungs for the exact same reason, just in reverse. The blood thickens, increasing the workload on the heart. The extra water being drawn into the lungs mixes with air being drawn in - " " - creating a foam which also decreases the ability of the lungs to take in air." Nick nodded, getting the gist of what the doctor was saying. He stopped in mid-nod as the rest of its meaning hit him. "Wait. Are you saying that - " "Your vic drowned in salt water, Nick. Last time I checked, that doesn't fall from the sky. Not in Avalon County, anyway." "No." Nick was dazed. "No, it doesn't." Robbins gestured, dismissing the holodisplay. "I'm still waiting for the bloodwork and tox screen. That might sort out a few more details." The CSI shook his head and smiled. "How does somebody break his own back, drown in -salt water- in the middle of a -thunderstorm-, then get on his own roof, get struck by lightning... " At this point, Nick had to laugh. "... and then fall off?" Robbins, sympathetic but still smiling, picked up his coffee again and took a sip. "That's your job, Nick. But make sure you tell me when you find out. This case might just get me published." Catherine automatically glanced at the clock when the knock at the door came, which is how she knew twenty-four minutes had elapsed since she'd called for room service. Even with all the security they had in place, she still felt vaguely nervous about opening the door. She wished Grissom hadn't taken her sidearm away from her, even if she did recognize the need. She went to the security panel, switched it on, and saw in the fisheye view of the hallway outside that Raven was still standing next to the double doors. The liveried guy with the cart of food seemed to have passed her inspection, so Catherine opened the door. "Good evening, Catherine!" said the room-service waiter brightly as he wheeled in the cart. "And how are we this evening?" Catherine turned to give him a look and ask him if it was the Monolith's policy for the waiters to be quite so familiar with the guests, when she suddenly recognized him. "Greg!" she blurted, astonished. "What are you doing here?!" "Delivering your dinner," Greg Sanders replied with a cheerful grin. "Tonight my name is... " He glanced at the nametag attached to his snow-white uniform jacket. "... Billy del Toro." Catherine gave him a look that combined amusement and skepticism. "Uh-huh," she said. "Well, you're certainly full of bull. I hope you didn't stuff that outfit's owner in a laundry basket or something." Greg looked hurt. "I am a man of peace and refinement, Catherine," he said. "Mr. del Toro is enjoying his night off at the Cobalt Club, courtesy of the Avalon County Sheriff's Department." Skepticism trumped amusement in Catherine's look. "You got Mobley to pay off a hotel waiter?" she said. Greg grinned again. "Gris is billing it to the department as part of the investigation expenses for the blimp crash," he said. "-Grissom- put you up to this?" Catherine asked. "I thought he was trying to discourage your secret-agent fetish." "It's a special occasion," he said. "You think he's willing to let anyone we don't know in this room tonight? He's nervous enough about having Raven out there, and she's a -Lensman-." He leaned confidentally toward her and added with a smug nod, "I had to convince him she's OK." Catherine arched an eyebrow, the skeptical look completely overtaking her face now. "-You- did," she said. "Uh-huh," said Greg, nodding. Catherine studied his face for a second, trying to figure out if he was bullshitting her. Greg was a good kid, but sometimes he had a tendency to tell tales taller than a strict interpretation of reality would allow - like the time he told Nick Stokes that he'd been scuba diving on Earth's Great Barrier Reef, when it was widely known that he'd never been to the Centaurus Sector, let alone Earth. He looked sincere this time, though - when Greg was giving you a line of shit, you could usually tell it from his eyes - so rather than just tell him she thought he was lying, she opted for the less confrontational, "And you know Raven from where?" Greg shrugged nonchalantly. "We hooked up at a goth club in Claremont one time. She likes my poetry." Catherine weighed that for a second and decided she'd buy it. "OK," she said, smiling. "What've you got for us?" "Well," said Greg, rubbing his hands together and warming to his role, "first we - hey, where's Sara?" Catherine gave him a you're-not-gonna-believe-this look and said, "She's printing the bathroom." Greg raised his eyebrows. "No kidding?" "No kidding." "Just for practice?" Catherine rolled her eyes. "She says it's fun." Greg closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose. "Ohhh, that is inTOLerably sexy," he said. Catherine gave him a blank look. "What?" he asked, opening his eyes and seeing her staring at him. "I admire dedication. Initiative. The drive always to better oneself." He grinned, eyes twinkling. "And that cute little space between her teeth." Catherine shook her head with an indulgent smile. "Greg," she said, "you're wading in the deep end of the pool." "I know it," Greg replied beatifically. "Can I help it if I must constantly strive for excellence?" he asked rhetorically as he crossed the entryway and passed through the open door of the bathroom. The bathroom was, as befit the rest of the suite, enormous. Greg's apartment could have fit in it. It was full of chrome, marble, white porcelain, and more chrome. In short, it was a fingerprinter's paradise - and Sara Sidle was a fiend for fingerprints. For a second, the bathroom looked to Greg like a furious paintball battle had been waged in it. There were splotches of a dozen bright colors splashed around it, here and there - on the mirror, around the sink, all over the counter, on the floor, on the toilet tank, spilling over the edges of the huge porcelain bathtub. Then he realized it wasn't paint, it was fingerprint powder. Sara was kneeling in the tub (which was big enough to accommodate three or four of her, and wasn't -that- a mental image worth savoring, Greg mused), happily dusting the fill spout with the fluorescent blue powder that went under the brand name "Moon Dust". Unnoticed, Greg grinned and slipped back out to borrow something he'd seen Catherine holding. Sara was in the process of printing the temperature control knob - always good prints to be had on the temperature control knob - when the lights suddenly went out. She had just enough time to stand up, turn toward the door, and utter a querulous noise before the room suddenly filled with an eerie blue glow that made all of the splotches, streaks, and clouds of the different fluorescent powders she'd used flash into brilliantly colorful light. Then the light started blinking on and off, to the accompaniment of a meaty, thumpy beat, turning the bathroom into a very bizarre impromptu nightclub. In such disorienting conditions, it took Sara a few seconds to realize that, among the patches of color dancing around the room with each flick of the light, there was a face that kept appearing and disappearing near the light source - a face with eyes that caught the bluish light and flared like beacons every time it flashed. That put it all together for her - she recognized the face, and she only knew one person whose eyes did that when exposed to an ALS. The situation was so incongruously weird, and she was so punchy from stress backlash and emotional exhaustion, that she started laughing uncontrollably. That was bad, since she was standing in a bathtub, which although dry was still rather slippery. Before she could fall, Greg quit making the beatbox noise with his mouth, trotted across the room, and interposed his shoulder under her balance-seeking hand. Standing in the tub, she was several inches taller than he was. "Greg!" she sputtered, still trying to get herself under control. "What the hell?" Greg grinned, his teeth flashing in the weirdly-lit darkness - all the illumination in the room came from the glow of the ALS in his hand, the powders, the reflection off his Dantrovian eyes, and the bright glow of Sara's white shirt - and said, "I saw all the fluorescent powder strewn around and I -had- to know what it'd look like," he said. "Besides, I figured you'd think it was funny." Sara's laughter wound down to a few fitful giggles, then ceased with a sigh as she wiped at her face. "Hee hee hee... hah. Yeah," she admitted, nodding. Then she stretched, trying to work the I've-been-looking-down-too-long crick out of her shoulders. Greg was still holding the ALS, its beam aimed at the ceiling, and as she tilted her head back, Sara noticed something odd. Odder than herself and Greg standing around in a darkened bathroom, surrounded by Day-Glo patterns. "Greg?" she said. "Who puts their hand there?" Greg looked, and sure enough, brilliantly revealed by the fluorescent red powder she'd applied to the ceiling, there was a perfect humanoid handprint. Right dead-center over the tub, a -handprint-. "Not me, that's for sure," Greg said. "Too many fingers, and besides, I'd have to go get something to stand on." He grinned again. "Anyway, Dr. Science, your food's getting cold." "Well, go turn on the lights then, DJ DNA," she replied, "so I can get out of this tub without breaking my neck." Catherine Willows stood in the "living room" part of the massive studio suite, frowning quizzically at the bathroom door. Greg had closed it behind him after he'd come out, grinningly relieved her of the ALS, and tiptoed back inside, and now Catherine was wondering what the hell all the thumpy noises and laughing were about. A moment later the door opened and Greg and Sara came out, looking deeply amused about something. Sara had smudges of various-colored fingerprint powders on her hands and face, and Greg had a single smear of bright blue on his nose. "Moon Dust. It's very you," Catherine observed dryly. "I believe you were about to show us what's for dinner?" Greg nodded. "Indeed I was." The lab tech smilingly returned the ALS to its previous holder, who looked as if she didn't quite know what to do with it before putting it down on an end table. Then he set about briskly removing plates of food from the room-service cart and arranging them on the dining table over by the windows. He did this with the grace of experience, albeit somewhat out-of-practice experience - he'd been a waiter for three summers in college, and the skills, he noticed with a bit of perverse pride, were still with him. Once everything was arranged, he started whipping the covers from the various dishes, releasing clouds of flavorful steam and revealing a quantity of food that could only be described as immoderate. "Wow. We are -never- going to eat all this," Sara observed, suddenly serious. Greg grinned - he loved the way she could turn that off and on like a switch - and said, "I'd be happy to help." "Don't you have a job to do?" Catherine wondered. "This -is- my job tonight." "Grissom shut down the chem lab so you could babysit us? With everybody Gryphon already got to watch this place?" Sara said. "He wanted someone from the lab over here. Maybe he didn't show it," Greg said, taking a page from Sara's book and becoming serious in an instant, "but he's really upset about you guys getting ambushed. I think he blames himself." Catherine raised an eyebrow - Greg's little flashes of insight never failed to intrigue her - but said nothing. "So," Greg said, returning to his cheery self, "you're stuck with me, at least until you're done eating." "We're -still- never going to eat all this stuff," Sara said. "Not unless we get some more... " Suddenly she turned and looked at the doors, a smile starting to play at her lips again. "... help." The door opened a few inches, and Greg Sanders's voice said, "Psst. Raven. Come help us eat." "No, thanks," Raven replied, maintaining her best I'm-on-duty face. "C'mon. We've got plenty," Greg's voice whispered. "Cath and Sara want you to join us." "Really," Raven said, "I'm fi - " Greg's hand shot through the gap in the doors, grabbed her arm, and hauled her into the room. Of course she let him do it - had she wanted to prevent it, she could have done anything from slip out of his grasp like smoke to dislocate his arm - but it was all part of the game. Object for form's sake, then go along - that was Raven's usual strategy when it came to being invited into social situations. Old habits... Across the block at HQ, Nick Stokes wandered the halls on the tenth floor, killing time with menial tasks while mulling over the information Robbins had given him. He had enough experience to work this case by himself, but was still fresh enough to be knocked back a little bit when a case went sideways like this. Not thinking about it for a time helped... most of the time. What he really needed to do was to find - "Whoa! Hey, Nick." Barbara Gordon stopped Nick from running her over with an outstretched palm and a half-smile. "You need a hyperspace vector back to this system or what?" Nick registered nothing but surprise for a moment, then shook his head. "No - sorry, Barbara. I was just about to go looking for you, in fact." "Well, you found me." The detective held out an accordion folder of paperwork. "Here's all the info from your vic's neighbors and that postal employee - he was -no- help, let me tell you." "That's good, we're going to need that." Nick scrunched his face up sympathetically at her puzzled expression and caught her up on what had been learned from the post-mortem. She frowned when he was done and started rifling through the paperwork in her hand. "Salt water? Wait a second... " She pulled one of the interview sheets out and handed it to Nick, who scanned it over. "Vasseck Kelshar? What about him?" "Check his species." Nick looked down the page. "Selkath? OK, so... he's a fish guy." Nick grinned. Barbara rolled her eyes. "Selkath are from the planet Manaan. It's an ocean world and, yes, they are an aquatic species. 'Fish guy' isn't going to win you any sensitivity points." Nick chuckled. "More importantly, while they can go for extended periods of time just making sure they have a little moisture for their skin, most of them can't stand to be away from their native environment. And if this guy," she thwapped the sheet with a finger, "has a house here, he's probably got a pool. And if he has a pool... " " ...it's filled with salt water." Nick finished, grinning. "I knew there was a reason I liked you." He looked at his wristwatch. "It's not -too- too late. Shall we pay Mr. Kelshar a visit?" "Only if you can stand riding in my boring car." Warrick came out from behind a boulder and went to Grissom's side. An observer familiar with his manner would have noted a slight hint of urgency in the investigator's always-easy stride, but there weren't any around, since Grissom wasn't looking at him but in a general sort of way at the crime scene. The supervisor stirred from his reverie as Warrick neared him. "Yes?" "How's it going over here?" "Fine," Grissom said. "I think we're about done here. You?" "Got something over here I want you to see." Grissom followed him down the slope and off to one side, past the rough line of rocks marking the edge of the wash and up over a little ridge. On the back side of the ridge were some marks in the sandy soil - scuffs, mostly, and a couple of pressed indentations with the ridges of fabric still clearly visible in them. "Did you get photos?" Grissom asked. Warrick nodded. "Everything's recorded, measured, the works." Grissom looked at the marks on the ground, then slowly, carefully lowered himself. His knees fit neatly into the two lower indentations; then his elbows matched the upper ones. He was looking right at the blimp gondola, and had only to turn his head a bit to the left to see the rock where Catherine had been temporarily felled. The range was too far for him to see either clearly, but - He got out his flashlight and trained it on the ridgetop in front of him. There was a small lateral indentation there, as of something with a hard corner that had been rested against the ground. "Did you get this?" he asked Warrick. "Yup. And I figure it the same way you do. Someone was kneeling here with a pair of electrobinoculars... enjoying the show." Grissom got up and dusted himself off. "Maybe. Or maybe he was birdwatching last week." Warrick shook his head. "The knee indentations were fresh. You could see the wrinkles where his pants bunched up. Wind would've ruined that kind of detail in a day or so. And there's something else." He dug in his pocket and handed Grissom a small paper evidence envelope. "I wouldn't normally have come this far out," Warrick said, "but I was shining my light around the perimeter and something flashed." He smiled wryly. "You don't find that many reflective things in the desert." Grissom nodded. "Good catch." He tipped the envelope's contents into his hand and looked at it. It was a small piece of metal. He turned it over in his fingertips a couple of times, examining it from different angles. "Curved... chrome-plated, but only on the inside surface... and corroded around the edge." He looked over the object at Warrick. "Piece of an exhaust pipe?" "That's what it looks like to me," Warrick replied. "I had a dirt bike one time, the exhaust pipe was perforated. It rusted out between the holes on the underside of the pipe, and pieces like that would fall off whenever I started the thing." Grissom shined his light around. "No tire marks... " Then he bent closer to the dusty ground. "... but this looks familiar." He turned to Warrick. "Do you have your gravitometer?" Warrick went to his field kit, rummaged through it, and came up with a small wand-shaped device with a cable on one end. A little more rummaging produced a tricorder, that multi-sensory device most beloved of space explorers. CSIs liked them too, though they often had to use creative attachments like this one to get maximum value out of them. The wand was a gravitometer, an attachment which would enable the tricorder to better resolve local gravitic disturbances. He plugged it into the tricorder, set the device to AUX IN, switched on, and aimed the wand in the direction of the marks Grissom had just noticed on the ground. On the tricorder's little holographic display, a false-color image of the area, not unlike that of a thermal imager, appeared - and floating in the air above the ground was a ghostly green line, feathery and indistinct. It started out just above the marks Grissom was pointing to, and then headed away northeast - to the horizon, or at least the edge of the gravitometer's range. Grissom came up alongside Warrick and looked at the display. "Gravity trace," he said. "Those marks are from a swoop's parking skids." "And it's fresh," Warrick pointed out. "This little meter wouldn't be able to pick it up if it was more than, say, four hours old." Grissom nodded, then turned to his younger associate with a judicious look. "Call it." /-- The figure knelt behind the ridge, elbows propped on the dirt, binoculars in hand. The sun was setting off to the right, casting long shadows from the rocks strewn in the wash. He watched the two women in the white paper coveralls work. When they reached maximum separation - the blonde all the way at the bottom of the wash, the brunette up at the top poking in the windows of the blimp gondola - his camouflaged colleague struck. The blonde went down with a disappointingly modest display of blood. The brunette did something with the flashlight-like thing she was holding, then started shooting. The camouflaged attacker hesitated, his camo strobing, as the brunette's second shot tagged him; then something went wrong with her gun and he kept coming. Until the blonde - shit! When had she gotten part-way upright again? - cut him down in a hail of well-placed gunfire from behind. He hit the dirt and skidded to a halt a few yards short of the brunette's feet. The observer lowered his binoculars until the front edge of their rectangular casing lightly touched the sand. He remained where he was, frozen, as the blonde edged her way up the slope toward the dead attacker, her weapon still held at the ready. He lowered a hand to his own holstered sidearm - he could probably take them both out from here, but - - another person appeared down in the wash, midway between the blonde and the brunette: an indistinct, shadowy figure in a blue cloak. She was almost invisible in the gathering evening, and she'd appeared out of nowhere with a strange, twisting thickening of the shadows. That meant she was one of the IPO chief's special agents, and that meant more wouldn't be far behind. No fool, the observer got to his feet, turned, climbed aboard the waiting swoop, and beat it, leaving behind a flake from the rusty exhaust pipe that was blown free when he started the turbine. --/ Grissom pursed his lips thoughtfully, looking at the ghostly gravity trace on the display of Warrick's tricorder. "We're going to have to follow this trace," he said, "and do it fast, before it fades." Warrick glanced up sharply from the display. "It's a thousand miles to New Avalon from here. He can't have been going anywhere else." "Probably not, but we have to be sure," Grissom said. "Lot of ground to cover," Warrick pointed out. Grissom shrugged with a boyish grin. "Somebody's got to fly that Pelican home," he pointed out. Warrick watched his boss walk off toward the parked aerodyne, then grabbed up his field kit and trotted after him. "Wait a minute, you know how to fly a Pelican?" "So," Nick said as they turned onto Baker Street and came to a stop, "I thought Selkath were peaceful and detested physical violence." Barbara put the car in park and shut it off. "Well, they are, for the most part. But that's the funny thing about broad statements. There's always some joker that doesn't play by the rules." Nick laughed as they got out of the car and started up the walkway. "Besides, you never heard of the Hrakert Rift incident?" "The Hrakert what? I must have skipped that day in Galactic History." Barbara shook her head. "Never studied. Ask Grissom sometime, he knows everything." Nick snorked and Barbara knocked on the door, putting the brakes on any more conversation. She looked to Nick quickly. "Let me do the talking. I'll try to work it out so you can get a sample from the pool, but it might take a few minutes. Selkath are... interesting to deal with." The CSI nodded and put his 'game face' on. It was standard for the detective to take point in a situation like this anyway, but it was nice to have a plan ahead of time. The door opened, revealing a humanoid shape in something that looked to be a cross between a leather riding suit and one of the vacuum getups Nick had seen on people floating around the hulls of starships in spacedock, only without the helmet. Probably a light-duty encounter suit used to keep the bulk of the body happy in what, to a Selkath, was an alien atmosphere. The head that topped the suit was the real difference, however. Long and squat with a smooth, plated top surface, the back of which ended in a rounded horizontal cone shape. The front was blunted, carrying the mouth which was the full width of the skull, the jaw running a quarter of the way back in and set with a row of wide, flat teeth. A single nostril was mounted above that, and a long, fleshy cheek flap hung down either side of the jaw, reminding Nick of the mouth flaps on a manta ray. A large black eye was set in a bony structure on each side of the head. The Selkath was a little shorter than the two humans who stood before him, and the way that made him look up at them, head swinging back and forth, gave Nick the momentary impression of a grumpy old man about to tell him and Gordon to get the hell off his lawn. Nick held his expression despite himself. "Hello, Mr. Kelshar. I'm sure you remember me from yesterday, and this is Nick Stokes from the IPO crime lab." Nick nodded, keeping silent. "I'm sorry to be a bother, but I was wondering if we could come in and ask you a few more questions about the unfortunate death of your neighbor." Kelshar fixed his (unblinking, Nick realized, forcing down an small shudder) stare on Barbara and held it there just long enough to be uncomfortable, then did the same to Nick. Nick did his best to keep his expression even, but even that got difficult after about 10 seconds or so. Gordon seemed to know what she was doing, though, so he fought the urge to say anything. Finally he looked back to Barbara, nodded his head down once, and uttered a grudgingly aloof, "All right." With that, Kelshar turned back inside, leaving them standing at the open door. Barbara glanced over to Nick and let out a quiet breath. He shook his head a little and let her take the lead inside, closing the door behind them. As they went into the house, the first thing that struck Nick was how bare the place was. There were basic furnishings and such, the guy could cook a meal if he needed to, but that was about it. It reminded Nick of the model houses you saw in new housing developments (of which New Avalon, being a very young city, had its share, though this neighborhood wasn't one of them) - furnished but unlived-in. There were places for Kelshar and Barbara to sit, but not Nick. He didn't mind that much. It gave him a reason to stand back and look around a little. The criminalist half-listened to Gordon as she went through what seemed like a rather complicated series of questions and answers. It struck him as similar to some of the more formal Japanese conversations he'd heard elsewhere - lots of honorifics and such - only without the formality. Kelshar seemed awfully curt, but he wasn't kicking them out so Nick just assumed it was part of the show. Nick shifted position a little so he could see into the back yard through the kitchen window. He could see the edge of a swimming pool, the water a deep blue-green that looked odd to Nick's eyes. Not the normal clear blue of a standard treated fresh-water pool. He grinned a little and turned back to the conversation. "... so it would be a great help if you could assist in helping us discern the cause of this tragedy. All we need is to look around your back yard and patio for a little bit, take a sample from your pool, and - " Kelshar's mood flickered from grumpy to outright angry. "So you think you can just come in here and tromp around looking for whatever you like. Typical rude primate!" Being the chivalrous sort, Nick took offense at someone treating Barbara like that, and forgot the plan for a moment. "Hey now, there's no need to be like that, sir," he said. "We're just trying to do our jobs." The Selkath seemed to remember suddenly that there was another lifeform in the room. He turned to focus his indignation on Nick. "Oh, -excuse- me. On my planet we have no one whose job it is to rummage through other people's living space!" Nick bristled. "Look, buddy," he said, "maybe they don't have murder investigations on your planet, but - " Nick was interrupted by Kelshar jumping to his feet and emitting a rather unpleasant hiss. Barbara stood and turned to Nick, whispering, "(Nick. Ixnay.)" She turned back to Kelshar and turned on all the charm she could muster (which was considerable). "Please forgive my associate, Mr. Kelshar, he is very passionate about his work." Kelshar turned back to Gordon, still perturbed. "I do not appreciate being accused in my own home. I was not even here the night that human died." "Well, also understand that any evidence we collect goes just as far to clear you as accuse you. We have to rule you out as a suspect to be one hundred percent sure of who did indeed commit this crime." The Selkath considered this, and then waved in Nick's general direction. "Fine. Go do your work, but be quick about it." Nick set his jaw, swallowed any other remarks he might have wanted to make, and left Barbara to smooth things over further. The CSI was kneeling next to his open kit at the side of the pool when Barbara came out about ten minutes later. As she approached, he was carefully taking a sample of the pool water with gloved hands and a sterile plastic container. He sealed the little cup, jotted some notes on the side of it, and looked up at the detective. "I think you pissed him off, Nick," Barbara joked. "I'm not an accredited xenosociologist, but that was not a happy noise." "Sorry about that, Barbara," he apologized. "Guy got to me." Barbara smiled. "I figured it was better to jump in -before- you called the guy 'fishstick' or something." "Hey, I'm not a racist. I'm just anti-asshole." "I know. So, find anything?" "Well, the walkthrough was a bust. Rain washed away anything outside like footprints. No fingerprints on anything either. Everything inside the pool enclosure here has been cleaned recently. So all we've got is this pool water, which is definitely salt water, but I'll need Greg to compare it to the sample from the vic's lungs to see if it's a match. Can we hold this guy?" Barbara thought that over. "Well, this is probably the most reasonable place for Walker to have died. But... if that's all we've got? Kelshar's just barely cooperative now. If we drag him to HQ and then don't have enough to go with from there right away, he's going to be a pain in the ass to deal with later." Nick nodded. "Think he's a flight risk?" "Hell, anyone is under the right circumstances. I don't think we have to worry about that yet, but I'm going to have a cruiser on this street for the next 24 hours just in case. Even if he doesn't try to take off, having somebody follow him around might tell us something." "Cool." Nick stowed his gear and snapped off his gloves. "I'm done here. Let's get this stuff back." The table in the Lensman Room carried nothing but the stripped ruins of what had been a sumptuous meal when Greg Sanders sat back from it and tossed a mint into his mouth. "The food's not half-bad here," he remarked. The meal had been a convivial enough occasion, under the circumstances, but as it went on it had become more and more subdued, with the food and the advancing lateness serving to quash Sara's punchiness. Greg was actually rather glad for that; the effect had started to vaguely disturb him. There'd been a strange, manic edge to it. The bathroom had been fun, but she hadn't come -down- from that for an unhealthy length of time. Sensing that the mood in the room was changing, he got up and dusted his hands theatrically. "Well, ladies," he said, "I've had a delightful time, but I suppose I should probably go and do at least a -little- work tonight. If you need anything, and everybody else who's above me on your list is in the bathroom or something, you know my extension... " Catherine gave him a little smile and got up to see him out. "Thanks, Greg," she told him quietly at the door. "If you tell anyone I said it I'll deny it, but... I'm glad you came," she said with a wry grin. Greg chuckled. "G'night, Catherine. Glad I could help." She patted him on the shoulder and shut the door. Greg stood in the hall for a moment with a pleased look on his face, then looked around and noticed that Raven was standing next to the door again. He hadn't noticed her leave the table, but there she was. Seeing him look her way, she nodded once, her eyes grave and unreadable in the shadow of her hood. He nodded back, took two steps toward the elevator, then paused and turned back. "Say, uh... Raven," he said. "Listen, I'm, uh, I'm off Saturday... " Raven tilted her head slightly, giving him a look that said, "Oh yes?" "And, uh, you want to go to Coffee Kingdom?" Greg asked. Then he smiled ingratiatingly and said, "It's open mic... " Raven gazed silently back at him for a moment, then said, "Sure." Greg shrugged. "Oh, OK, well, if you change your mind - wait. Did you just say 'sure'?" "Yes." "As in, sure you'll go to CK with me Saturday?" "Yes." Greg raised his eyebrows. "... Were you being sarcastic?" "Astonishingly enough," Raven replied dryly, "no." "Oh! Well, uh, OK, cool! Where do you want to meet?" "You know where Strangefate Books is?" The Dantrovian grinned. "I can guess." Raven produced the faintest trace of a smile for that. "OK! Well," Greg said. "See you Saturday, then, at... 4ish?" "Sounds good." Greg made sure to restrain his whoop of triumph and victory dance until he was safely in the elevator and at least two floors down. Catherine shut the door behind Greg, turned around, and leaned against it, surveying the room. The events of the last few hours were starting to blur surreally in her mind. She was tired, hurt, frazzled, her nerve endings tingling while the rest of her felt hollow and weird. It wasn't a good time to be having a serious conversation. And so, of course, it was exactly the time when she most needed to have one. Sara was standing at the window - well, inasmuch as the entire north wall of the room was window. She had one hand flat against the transpex and was looking out through her reflection at the lights of the city, stretching away to the glittering arc of Crescent Heights with the black slash of the lakeshore to the right. The Monolith had the best sightlines in the city; every guidebook said so, and now Catherine could see that it was true. She crossed the room to stand at the window herself, a respectful distance away from Sara. Her gaze swept over the near city, moved along the radiating boulevards and out to the distant, semi-orderly grid of the Heights, when something amusing occurred to her. Before she could stop herself, she'd said it out loud: "I can see my house from here." Sara snorted softly, a little smile stealing onto her face for a millisecond. The Salusian folded her arms and returned to grave contemplation of the streets for a few minutes. Then, "Catherine?" "Mm?" "Can I ask you something?" "Sure." Sara turned to face Catherine, her expression unusually solemn even for her. "How long have you known... the Chief?" Catherine smiled slightly. "Well, hm, let me see. Twenty... seven years?" She raised an eyebrow at her own calculation. "Can that possibly be right? I guess it is. Why?" Sara turned away, walked around the table and back to the living-room part of the studio suite, and sat down in one of the armchairs, looking pensive. Catherine followed, sat at the end of the couch, and pulled her tired legs up under her, giving the Salusian time to mull over whatever it was. Finally Sara asked, "Is the way he's acting lately... normal?" A-ha, thought Catherine; but she put the reaction aside and considered the question on its merits. "Ah. Hm," she said. "Well, normal is kind of a relative concept for a guy like Ben. He's a man working through a lot of grief - more grief than you or I have the perspective to really appreciate. So no, he's not entirely normal. But that doesn't mean he's not really feeling what he's feeling." Sara glanced sharply up - she hadn't been prepared for Catherine to cut to the heart of the matter quite that quickly, though in retrospect she should have been. She squashed her instinctive reaction, which was to get prickly again like she had in the desert that afternoon. The reaction was so ingrained, so reflexive, that she had to consciously remind herself that she -wanted- to have this conversation, wanted to get Catherine's perspective on what was happening. She smiled wearily. "That transparent, huh." Catherine shrugged. "You get to be my age," she said, "you've been by that bus stop a few times." Then she sat back, regarded Sara for a few seconds, and said, "Let me tell you a little story about Ben Hutchins that might give all this some perspective. "When I first moved to this town, downtown was a skeleton, half the roads weren't even -paved- yet, but there were already three-quarters of a million people. It was like a... a giant version of a gold-rush town in a history vid. I was 18, I'd never been away from home before, I didn't know anybody - hell, I barely knew anyTHING. We both know too well what happens to girls like that in towns like that." Sara nodded silently. She'd seen the results way too often. Everyone in urban police work had. Over the next few minutes, Catherine explained in broad strokes how that unfortunate fate -hadn't- befallen her younger self in boomtown New Avalon - largely thanks to the efforts (some subtle, some blatant) of one man. "I'm not saying he was my fairy godfather or anything," Catherine said. "He missed spots. Hell," she added with a wry snort, "he let me marry Eddie, not that I suppose even -he- could've talked me out of it at the time." She paused, hopeful that the remark might at least draw a smile, but Sara just sat there, hands folded on her chest, looking back with big, dark, somber eyes, so Catherine gathered her thoughts and plunged on. "My point is," she said, "he's -not- a god or anything. Take away all the things he's built and done and made, reduce him down to the bare essence that makes him who he is, and he's still just a man. But - he's a damn good one. He'll let you walk away, but he'll never turn his back on you. If you count on him, he'll never let you down." Catherine paused again. Sara looked at her as if trying unsuccessfully to think of something to say. "Oh," Catherine added, "and... " Sara waited a second, then gave her a "Yes?" look. Catherine smiled and said, "-Huge- tipper." Sara blinked at her, then let out a small snort of laughter. "I wouldn't know," she said. Catherine laughed. "Anyway, what I'm saying? Don't worry so much." She grinned. "He doesn't know what the hell he's doing either." "No?" "Nope. Not a clue in the world. He's just making it up as he goes along. He doesn't have a choice." Sara looked puzzled. "Why not?" "You're not like anyone else he's known," Catherine replied. For a second, Sara thought she was being sarcastic, but then she saw that the smile on the blonde's face was far from being edged with sardony - rather a little wistful. So instead of flaring up again, Sara just looked at her, entirely uncertain of what to say. "Look, I'm sorry I got so nosy," Catherine said, surprising her further. "I can't help but worry a little about both of you." She chuckled. "Sometimes I feel like I'm watching a couple of kids playing hopscotch in a minefield." Sara arched an eyebrow at her - a very Vulcan-like gesture all of her co-workers were fondly familiar with by now - and said, "I'm not sure how to take that." Catherine waved it off. "Take it that I'm tired and punchy, and I think you'll work it out, one way or another. Just - if it doesn't work out... you'll still have a friend. I know, it sounds corny, but that's the kind of cat you're dealing with." Sara half-smiled (another expression very familiar to her co-workers). "Well," she said, "I'm tired too, but I'm past punchy. And... " She hesitated; she was bad at this kind of thing, almost as bad as the infinitely exasperating Grissom. "... I'm... sorry too. For snapping at you." Catherine smiled. "Thanks." Then, rising, she said briskly, "So. Tomorrow we go back to work on the blimp... partner?" Sara grinned. "Absolutely," she said. "You know, I think we're going to have to fume it?" "The whole thing?" Catherine asked, looking at her askance. "Sure, why not?" Sara got to her feet and shrugged. "We paid for the tent." Catherine laughed. "Sara, you're a fingerprinting fool," she said. "In high school they called me Bertillon," Sara said proudly. Then, looking around, she frowned. "Hey." "What?" "I just realized something about this room." "What?" Catherine asked again, looking faintly alarmed. "What's missing?" Sara asked rhetorically. Catherine looked slowly around - at the bathroom, the couch, the chair, the table, the window, the bed, the nightstand, the... ... the bed. Singular. Huge, but singular. "Oh, you're kidding," she said. "Flip a coin?" Sara asked with a crooked half-smile. Catherine put her hands on her hips and considered the situation for a second, then blew her bangs out of her eyes and said, "Ah, screw it. Today's already been like the school trip from hell. Might as well cap it accordingly. You want to be by the window or the wall?" Sara gave her a blank look, and for a second Catherine thought she was going to get grumpy again. Then the Salusian shrugged and said, "Window." TUESDAY, MARCH 23, 2410 5:17 PM Greg Sanders sat at the workbench in the trace lab in front of an array of test tubes, beakers, and other oddly-shaped bits of glassware. Each was filled with a particular amount of what appeared to be water, and the Dantrovian was happily tapping away at them with the wooden ends of two collection swabs. He was doing a fairly reasonable job of keeping up with the music emanating from the mini-stereo in the corner; the containers in front of him were more or less tuned to different notes by the amount of water they contained. Nick swung into the lab and stopped to watch this for a few moments, shaking his head and laughing. With his hair in its usual untamed state, Greg looked like a cross between mad scientist and insane composer in his lab coat. Nick walked up behind him and cleared his throat. "Hey, Ludwig von, I hate to interrupt... " Greg stopped and spun around on his stool in one fluid motion, gigantic grin on his face. "Mister Stokes, just the man I wanted to see." He pointed one of his mini-drumsticks at Nick's face. "You owe me twenty creds, my good man." Nick furrowed his brow, his train of thought derailed. He was just opening his mouth to respond when Greg continued on. "I can tell by that familiar blank look that you do not remember a certain bet you made about a certain... numinous work of feminine art in a blue cape, and my subsequent chances with her on the field of romantic battle. I believe the exact phrase you used was 'out of your league'? Any of this jarring your memory banks?" Nick's look of confusion turned to surprise, which he quickly covered. "You're full of it, lab rat. No way." Greg affected a look of deep hurt. "You wound me! I'm sorry, but 'tis true. I asked her out for coffee while I was over at the Monolith last night." Greg closed his eyes in a look of bliss. "You missed a fabulous meal, by the way. I would have saved you something, but we made absolute -pigs- of ourselves." He looked around to make sure they weren't being overheard, then leaned toward Nick and said in a confidential whisper, "(Catherine can really put it away. I don't know -how- she stays so thin. Not with any help from me, alas,)" he added sadly. "I'm sure. So Raven said yes, huh?" Greg nodded smugly. "Well," Nick admitted, "I'm impressed." "As I knew you would be. So, about my winnings?" "Sure, after the date. Have to protect my investment, you know. You make it through the night without her dumping her coffee in your lap, I'll make it 30. Deal?" "I can live with that. Motivation is always a bonus. I guess you're looking for the results on that pool water." Nick nodded, and Greg pushed off and rolled over to the printer, pulling a bit of paper from it and rolling back. "Here you go. This is preliminary - I still have to get the concentrations from the spec - but right now I'd say it's about 90% the sample was a match to the water in your vic's lungs. Same mineral content. I should have a final report for you in a couple hours." Nick took the sheet and looked it over. "Ok, thanks, Greg. Doesn't help me figure out what the hell he was doing back there in the first place, but maybe this will let us at least get our prime suspect in here." "Dunno about that," Barbara Gordon interrupted as she came through the door. "Hi. Kelshar's alibi checks out. He wasn't home that night." Nick frowned. "Wonderful. So much for our simple little case, huh." "Well, it means something else, too. If Kelshar wasn't there, somebody else was... " Greg, having watched this quietly, suddenly spun around and tapped out a dramatic series of notes on his impromptu instrument while adding a deep vocal "dumm dummm DUMMMMM!" He finished the roll and spun around in a 'ta-daaa!' pose... ... right in front of Grissom, who had also just walked in and was a wearing the standard do-I-know-you? look that he gave Greg at moments like this. Greg recoiled in surprise, recovered, and groused, "It's a shame what this neighborhood has come to. Anyone can just waltz right in here as-they-please. I need to change the locks." Grissom held the look on Greg for a few beats, then turned to Nick without acknowledging the Dantrovian's presence further. "How's your case coming, Nick?" Nick wrestled with how to answer for a moment, found a nice middle ground, and forged ahead. "It's a little more convoluted than we first thought, but it's early yet. Still have some stuff to process." Grissom nodded. "Good. I think Doc Robbins has some more information. I was just down there and he asked me to send you his way if I saw you." "Oh, OK, that's great - since I've got Barbara here, we can both go see him." Grissom nodded to the detective. "Nice to see you again, Sgt. Gordon. Thanks again for helping us out." "Don't mention it, it's an interesting case." "Indeed. Nick, I hate to do this, but while you're down there, Albert's got another body that just came in. Everyone's kind of got their hands full. Can you check it out, please? It looks like another accidental death, so your current case is the priority, but while you're down there... " "Sure thing, Gris, don't worry about it." The extra work was the last thing he needed, but there was no way Nick was going to be slack now with the serial case going on. Grissom nodded again and turned to leave. As he did he looked over at Greg's musical arrangement, then paused. After surveying the instrument for a moment, Grissom picked up a micropipette, plugged it into a fresh tip, went to the carboy of distilled water on the main table, dialed the micropipette to a specific amount, loaded it, and dropped the contents into the third test tube from the left. Then he trashed the tip, hung the micropipette back into its rack, and said casually, "That one was off a bit." With that he turned and walked away. Greg watched him go, then turned back and tapped on the tube Grissom had adjusted. " ...I'll be damned," he said in a voice that was both impressed and, perhaps, just a little frightened. Nick chuckled and patted him on the back as they left as well. "Good luck, Greg." As he passed Grissom's office, Nick saw that the boss was on the phone. He waved through the glass wall, trying to put all the confidence he wasn't feeling on his face. After all the previous night's excitement, he sensed this wasn't a good time to be fessing up to his own difficulties. Instead, he planned to swing by the breakroom, get his mail, and then suck it up and handle the extra body. Somehow. Grissom nodded acknowledgement to Nick's wave, then turned his attention to the phone as the party he was calling came on the line. "Adam? This is Gil Grissom. Fine, and you? Good. Listen, I need one of your special models. Mm-hmm. Humanized, yes." Grissom paused, listening, his eyebrows rising slightly. Then he replied, "If you can get it to do that, so much the better. Otherwise I'll have to do two tests." Pause. "Just come by the lab. I'll tell the guy out front you're coming." Pause. "Of course you can watch. OK. Thanks. Bye." Grissom cradled the phone, then looked around his office as if trying to remember what he was doing there before picking up a file and settling in to wait for Warrick. Warrick Brown entered the breakroom to find Sara and Catherine priming themselves with cups of the department's unspeakably foul coffee. He found that moderately puzzling, since they'd just come from the Monolith, where, presumably, there was good coffee. "Hey," he said. "Hey, Warrick," Catherine replied. Sara raised a hand, but kept her attention mostly on the pile of mail in front of her. "You guys have a nice campout?" Warrick asked. He grabbed himself a cup of coffee, sat down, and steeled himself to drink it. "It beat working," Sara said with wry abstraction from behind her copy of the Galactic Forensic Society's newsletter. Nick Stokes laughed as he came in and vectored for the mailboxes himself. "C'mon. You hate missing work. You must've been going nuts, cooped up in that hotel room with your blimp case getting cold." "You guys didn't work it, did you?" Catherine asked. "Course not," Warrick said. "We cleared your overlay scene and left the original for you to follow up." Catherine chuckled ruefully. "Thanks for cleaning up my mess, boys," she said, which was as close as she could get to apologizing for dragging them away from their own work. "All part of the service," said Nick with his most beaming grin. "It wasn't a total waste of time," Sara mused, still buried in the newsletter. "Yeah?" Warrick said, intrigued. "Yeah," she replied. "I learned a bunch of things." "Like?" Sara put down the newsletter and looked from one co-worker to another as she ran down the list. "One," she said, "the Monolith is the best hotel in the universe. Two, people put their hands in the -damnedest- places. Three, Greg's an OK guy for a complete weirdo. Four, David Phillips is cooler than any of us have ever suspected. And five," she said with a sly little glance across the table, "Catherine hogs the covers." A wadded-up sheet of note paper bounced off the Salusian investigator's forehead a moment later, but the person who threw it was laughing - mainly at the look on Nick's face as his brain processed Sara's last statement. "Yeah, well, color me surprised," Warrick said dryly. "I'm gonna go see what Gris is up to before it gets too weird in here. Later." Catherine threw a piece of paper at him, too, but he was already gone. "Well, you guys," Sara said, shuffling her mail into a pile and standing, "I guess Warrick's right - time to get to work. Cath, you want to get started tenting the blimp? I have to go see the Armorer about my gun, and then I'll join you." "Sure. Sounds good." Barbara Gordon entered the morgue and crossed over to table two, where Doc Robbins was standing over a body. She assumed that was the new case Grissom had mentioned. She still hadn't gotten used to being in morgues, and had a feeling she never would. Part of her was disappointed by that thought. She liked the idea of being the tougher-than-nails badass cop. She knew that was really just window dressing, though, and the real purpose of the feeling was to remind her why she really did the job. If she could keep a few good people from winding up in here... Robbins looked up and smiled. "Sergeant Gordon, what a nice surprise. Haven't seen you in a while." Barbara returned the smile, genuinely pleased to see him. "Hello, Albert. Yeah, things have been busy up on the surface." She tsk'd playfully. "I see they still keep you down here with the mushrooms. We ought to at least get you a holo-window down here or something." The doctor laughed. "Hey, you're working with Nick this week, right? Have you seen him?" "Yeah, in fact we were - " She was cut off by the doors opening behind them. Nick was again backing through the doors with a cup of coffee in each hand. He walked over to them, smiled at the coroner, and joked, "Hey Doc. Deja vu." Robbins chuckled. "Tell me about it. You're going to spoil me with all this five-star service." "Well, actually, the sergeant here was going to commit ritual suicide on the coffee in the breakroom." Robbins winced at the thought. "Being the gentleman I am, I naturally threw myself in her path and told her I'd get her some of the good stuff." The criminalist handed Barbara one of the cups, who thanked him with a semi-sarcastic "My hero." He then turned to Robbins and handed over the second cup. "And since I'm such a nice guy, you can have this one. I think I'll survive without for the time being." Barbara smiled over her cup. "I'll make it up to you." Nick fixed her with a raised-eyebrow 'oh?' smile for a second, then got back to business. "So, first things first. Gris said you have some more info on our drowning vic." "Sure do." Robbins tapped his holodisplays into life. "Two things. First, his bloodwork came back with elevated serum creatin kinase levels. I checked his medical records; Jason Walker was epileptic. Now normally there's a drug regimen that's combined with a nano-surgical process that can, for all intents, cure that in humans, but he was allergic to the drugs and had to live with it. Those levels indicate that he had a seizure very close to the time of death." Nick nodded. "Ok... so. Did... that kill him, then? Are we back to accidental death here?" "I thought so at first, but as I went through his records I learned that his particular case wasn't all that severe. He had his seizures more or less under control. That means the most likely candidate for a trigger would be stress. So I went back to the body." Robbins tapped a few more 'buttons' in the air and the charts hanging in front of him dissolved into photographs. "Remember that burn mark on his back? I went over that area with the camera tuned to several different wavelengths - " Barbara stepped into the conversation, intent on the pictures. "Yeah... infrared especially can pick up bruising underneath the skin that the eye can't see." The two men just stared at her. "What? I took a photography class when I was getting my criminology degree." She smirked. "Sue me." Robbins made an impressed sort of chuckle and went on. "Right, so I went over the burn area like that and found this," he pointed to the edge of the burn mark. "That fringing you see is a bruise that's been hidden underneath the post-mortem burn from the lightning strike." "So he was hit in the back. Would that have triggered the seizure? Would that have broken his back, for that matter?" Robbins waved away the display. "Just the strike? No, that probably didn't trigger the seizure. It might have been able to hurt his back, but it's in the wrong spot. I would say it would take a higher level of stress than that to induce a seizure." Nick's eyes defocused as he rolled the problem around. "A higher level of stress... like... trying not to drown?" Robbins thought about it. "Yeah, a life-threatening situation would be enough." Gordon picked up where they were going and added, "Would the seizure have been strong enough to break his back?" "Grand mal seizures are strong enough to make the victim fracture the skull if left unprotected. With the weakened condition of his bones to begin with? That could have done it." The picture of what had happened started to fall in place for Nick. /-- Walker stood next to Kelshar's pool. Suddenly, something struck him a heavy blow to the back, sending him face-first and very unexpectedly into the water. After the initial surprise, most people would be able to right themselves and at least get their head above water. But something - maybe some of the water being forced into his mouth or sinuses, the stinging shock of the unexpected salt water - made him panic. The rush of stress through his system sent confusing signals through his already slightly abnormal nervous system and triggered a seizure, probably the worst one he'd ever had. His brain sent all the wrong signals down all the wrong nerves. Muscles spasmed and contracted violently, causing him to writhe uncontrollably in the water. The weakened bones in his back couldn't take it and gave out under the attack, adding a debilitating injury to his crisis. Walker wouldn't have been able to save himself even if he could regain his wits by that point, and if he was able to get his head above the water at all, it wouldn't have been for long... --/ "Man, what a way to go," Nick remarked. "Well, we know how. Now we need to find out who. Thanks, Doc. Grissom said you had another body for us to look at?" Robbins gestured to the body they had been talking over. "Yeah. Looks like an accidental death - another lightning strike, probably from the storm." "We're just finding it now?" Barbara asked. Nick picked up the chart on the bench next to the table and started reading through it. "That's the funny thing about lightning and electrocutions in general," Robbins said. "They don't always kill you right away. Family member found him in bed after he missed a lunch date yesterday. Apparently he was struck in the back and it traveled down his arm and out his hand. Never crossed his heart, but the heat damage produced delayed thrombosis and bleeding in the major arteries along the strike path. Blood clot found its way to his lungs... he thought he was OK, made it into bed, and died in his sleep." "Wait a minute." Nick blurted. He handed the chart over to Gordon. "Look at his address." Barbara scanned over it, reading aloud. "John Peterson... age 42... of 713... -Baker Street-? That's right across from our crime scene!" Robbins frowned. "Things have been so haywire here this week, I only just finished the post on him. Haven't even started the report, so didn't read that far." He looked at Nick. "You think this is your perp?" "It would explain why the lightning went down his arm. Up on the roof, trying to cover up the drowning, winds up grounding himself through Walker's body. Probably how Walker ended up falling off of the roof - he was blown off. This guy probably thought he got lucky." Nick smirked. "To paraphrase, lightning only strikes once." "But we still don't know why they were in Kelshar's back yard," Barbara groused. "He might not have had anything to do with Walker's death, but something stinks about Kelshar." She turned to Nick. "I ran a background check on him this afternoon before you got in? His record is -spotless-. I mean like clean-room clean. And thin, too. It would pass cursory inspections, like what a traffic cop might run, but I've dug through enough planted files to know one when I see one. The guy's dirty." "Yeah, I think so too, and I think he's got the answer to what's going on here as well. We just need to find a way to get it out of him." Nick set the file back down. "I need to go take a look at Mr. Peterson's house. If we can connect Kelshar to him, maybe that'll lever the rest." Nick grinned. "To the Generic-Mobile?" Gordon rolled her eyes at him and turned to leave. Nick shrugged at Robbins. "Thanks Doc, we'll let you know what we find," he said, and followed Barbara out the doors. Major Thomas Boothroyd, the International Police Armorer, took the weapon and examined it critically, then cast a jaundiced eye on Sara Sidle. "Whatever have you been doing with this, young lady?" he inquired archly. "Throwing it down a fire escape?" Sara contained a sigh. Major Boothroyd was notoriously touchy about damage to weapons, especially standard-issue ones. With the special gear often requisitioned by Experts of Justice he expected a certain amount of loss, but he'd once famously declared that any agent who needed a replacement service weapon had in some way failed. "Accidental drop," she said. "It fired twice after that, then nothing." "Hmph. Well, I shouldn't wonder," Boothroyd grumped. "You've destroyed the trigger mechanism. Have you filed a casualty report?" "Of course." Boothroyd gave her a cold stare. "There's no 'of course' about it, young lady. Frankly, I'm surprised. Agents on your level generally don't. They see my office as a sort of... inexhaustible toybox," he said, and rather undermined his point by gesturing to the racks of gleaming weapons behind him. It looked like the "guns" section of the Library of Congress in there. Sara did her Vulcan eyebrow arch, suppressing the desire to say, "Well, isn't it?" What she said instead was, "... CSIs lose their weapons often?" Boothroyd looked confused. "You're a crime scene investigator?" he said. Then he bent to check her issue paperwork and raised his eyebrows. "Oh. So you are. Well, I owe you an apology, then. I got this memo from the Chief's office and assumed that you were one of his erinyes." Sara had no ready answer for that, so she just stood there wishing she could be elsewhere while Boothroyd stripped the weapon of its magazine, dismantled it, and checked it into the "damaged" bin, then logged it out of the master ammunition control database and disassociated its ID number from her employee record. "All right, you can go," he said when he noticed her still standing there. "I need a replacement," she told him, wondering if, perhaps, that wasn't obvious. Boothroyd glanced at the display on his workbench and shook his head. "Not from me, you don't. Your file is flagged." "Flagged for what?" "That's none of my affair. It simply says 'no replacement required'." Sara frowned. "Well, that must be a mistake. I can't go into the field without a sidearm, it's against regulations." "Mm, yes, you look like a woman with a high regard for regulations," said Boothroyd offhandedly. "At any rate, if there is a mistake, it's not my mistake, so there's no sense in pestering me about it. Off you go." Sara stood scowling at him for a second, then realized that he was, in his way, right. Boothroyd had a natural talent for bureaucracy and a certain impenetrable adherence to rules, and that made him annoying, but it was invaluable to his job. Someone had to be very careful and particular about checking the weapons in and out of the ammo-control system, associating weapon IDs with agents, and so forth. After all, any time an IPO agent discharged a weapon, the provenance of the weapon and its ammunition became part of the chain of evidence. Sara had worked enough officer-involved shootings to know how important that was. It wasn't an arena in which the usual informality would work, which was why Boothroyd's personality seemed so at odds with the corporate culture. So he was right - there was really no percentage in standing there arguing with him. Instead, she went downstairs and got started helping Catherine process the blimp gondola. There had been a lot of peculiar things in the CSI garage over the years, but the buzz in the hallways agreed that the gondola took some kind of prize - and the fact that Sara and Catherine were planning to fume it for latents rather than climb around printing for a couple of days only added to the festive atmosphere. Sara arrived in the garage zipping up her blue denim coverall (no more of those flimsy paper jobs for her, thank you, at least not in the air-conditioned comfort of the garage), her shoulder-length brown hair gathered into a ponytail and tucked through the hole in the back of a department-logo ballcap. She found Catherine similarly attired (though the blonde had stuffed all of her shorter hair under her cap), up on a scaffold, draping plastic sheeting around the bus-sized, bashed-up gondola. "Hey," Catherine called down to her. "How was Boothroyd?" "Cranky, as usual," Sara replied. "He took me for SA11." Catherine shrugged. "Understandable mistake," she said. Sara gave her the look, but it just made her laugh and add, "Especially when you've got that look. C'mon and help me tent this puppy." Gil Grissom made sure his gloves were on right, snugged his goggles over his eyes, smoothed his apron, and otherwise took a moment to compose himself. Then he wound up, twirled his right wrist once, took two loping steps, and - SMASH! With a distinctly unpleasant sound, the skull inside the model head mounted on a stand in front of him shattered - almost exploded. Fragments of bone, gobbets of ballistic gel, and a small tsunami of synthetic blood splattered against a canvas sheet hung behind the dummy. A considerable amount of it splashed back at Grissom, too, decorating his apron and goggles, dripping from the metal-studded, bat-like weapon he held. Near the entrance to the room, behind the safety of a Lexan blast shield, three men stood watching. "-Wow!-" one of them blurted just after impact. Wracked with giggles of delight, Adam Savage crossed the room to stand just to the correct side of the do-not-cross line painted on the floor. A pace or two behind him, Jamie Hyneman looked more bemused than amused, but then, he usually did. Warrick brought up the rear; his expression was weighted toward "impressed". Savage and Hyneman weren't criminalists; rather, they were here as consultants. They were special effects technicians by trade. Their normal job, the one for which most people in Avalon County would've recognized them, was as the hosts of a popular television show in which they set up elaborate and often spectacular experiments designed to debunk or replicate urban legends. Exactly where Grissom had gotten to know them, Warrick wasn't sure, but he knew that they went back some way with his boss. Wiry, bald and bereted Hyneman was one of those people who seemed to have done every job in the galaxy, and that background brought with it the appearance of knowing everyone at least a little. It was the same sort of effect Catherine Willows sometimes had when her path crossed that of some unlikely acquaintance in some unlikely place, which happened about eight times a year. (That thought combined with Warrick's knowledge of one of Jamie Hyneman's many jobs to give him the brief but entertaining image of Cath as a Jedi Knight, which set him back about 20 seconds in following what was being said about the experiment.) Adam ran a hand over his short ruff of ginger hair and surveyed the smashed dummy with undisguised glee. "Great Rao, Gris," he said. "What a -horror show-!" Grissom glanced at him with a mixture of indulgent amusement and mild reproach. Adam was a good guy, and nobody made better forensic models; but he had a tendency sometimes, when working a call-in from Grissom, to be so pleased by the mess that he forgot why they were making it. Still, black humor was hardly unknown or unwelcome among criminalists - it was the way they survived their grim trade, most of the time. Grissom didn't rebuke him, just gave him the look and said solemnly, "Yes. It -is- a horror show." Adam nodded, sobering. "Someone's doing this to actual people?" he inquired, businesslike now. "Yes," Grissom said. Adam surveyed the ruins of his dummy - almost unrecognizable now as a mock-up of a humanoid head - and the great arcing splatter of blood on the canvas behind it. "Well," he said, "I hope this helps you catch them." Grissom nodded. "I think it will," he said. Jamie frowned at the canvas. "That's a lot of spatter for a single blow. With most blunt weapons, you don't get anything like that until the second. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it." "I know," Grissom said. "That's why I did it. Neither would a jury." Warrick moved in and started photographing the wreckage. "We won't know for sure until we can compare these fragments with the victims'," he said to Grissom, "but the punchouts from those studs look -real- familiar." Grissom hefted the cijowska and looked at the round metal studs, then at the feature Warrick was pointing out - a spot along the broken edge of one of the skull fragments that had a line of neat rounded crenelations on it. Then he pointed to the arc of blood on the canvas. "That spatter looks consistent with what we found on the walls behind the first and most recent victims, too," he agreed. "A human wouldn't be able to swing that thing hard enough to do this kind of damage," Warrick said, surveying the smashed skull with a critical eye. "Most wouldn't know how to use it correctly, either," Grissom concurred. Warrick turned from his examination to meet his boss's eye. "Which means we've probably got our guy already - in the freezer." Grissom raised an eyebrow. "Unless there's more than one," he said. They were leaving the test room, and Grissom was thanking Adam and Jamie for their help, when Adam suddenly froze. Puzzled, Grissom and Warrick looked and saw Greg Sanders standing at the other end of the short hallway between the mailroom and Greg's chem lab. He was similarly frozen in place, staring hard at Adam as Adam was staring at him, a pair of mailing tubes tucked under his arm. "Graig tz'An Daarst," Adam said, mildly surprising Warrick by pronouncing the Dantrovian tech's real name exactly right. Even Greg didn't usually bother doing that. It said "Greg Sanders" on his driver's license. "Adam-Ven Savage," Greg replied in a dark, foreboding tone. "We meet again." "It will be different this time, my former student," Adam said, moving cautiously closer. Almost ceremoniously, Greg tossed Adam one of the mailing tubes, then and took up a ready stance with the other. "You should not have come back," he intoned, and then battle was joined. Warrick and Jamie gave each other "well, what can you do? They're not worth anything for parts" looks as Adam and Greg fenced their way into and across the chem lab. "When you're done with that, Darth Greg," Grissom announced, leaning into the lab doorway, "Nick's still waiting on that mineral concentration analysis." Greg disengaged from his mock swordfight, turned to face Grissom, and said, "The spec's chewing on it now." "Well, see if you can expedite it," Grissom said. Greg dropped to one knee, crossed a fist in front of his chest, and bowed his head. "It will join us, my Master," he promised gravely, "or die." Adam handed Greg back the second mailing tube as the tech rose from the floor. "You get GT7 yet?" he asked. "Friday's payday. Correct me if I'm wrong," Greg went on with mock casualness, "but are you asking for a challenge?" Adam laughed. "Depends on how ready you are to lose," he replied. Greg gave that remark the hollow laugh it merited. "I will see you Friday, Mr. Savage," he said, "and then I will kick your Kryptonian butt." He grinned. "Now go on," he said, making a shooing gesture toward the door. "They do expect me to work around here sometimes." "You know, Gil," Jamie Hyneman was saying as they moved off toward the reception area, "I -did- run the trace lab on Alderaan for a couple years. If you ever have an opening... " "Don't tempt me," Grissom replied wryly. /* Groove Armada "Inside My Mind (Blue Skies)" _Vertigo_ */ The rest of 713 Baker Street had been rather boring, which is why Nick had saved the room he'd just stepped into for last. He hated finding the big, case-breaking piece of evidence only to have half the scene left to go over. He smiled to himself at the notion as he gave the main bedroom of the house its first look. It was kind of a silly way to look at things, but he also knew that the possibility of finding something kept him sharp, and the little mental games helped him make sure he kept his focus. He turned that focus completely back over to the task at hand. The room was a little on the small side for a master bedroom, but it wasn't a huge house and Peterson had apparently lived alone. Decent- sized bed, covers still rumpled where the coroner had removed the body. Dresser, night table, lamp, clothes hamper. Medium-nap carpet on the floor, sliding glass door along one wall, door to a bathroom on the opposite wall. Nick walked over to the bathroom and looked in. Clean. Nothing unusual in the trash. Nothing on the floor. Bust. He came back out into the room and put his hands on his hips. He turned and looked at the hamper. There was the corner of a bath towel hanging out of it. He walked over and carefully lifted the lid by the edge with a single finger, bringing it up and letting it rest against the wall. The towel was on top of other clothes. Nick reached in and grabbed it; it was cool to the touch through his latex gloves, probably still damp. Underneath appeared to be a set of clothes. Dark gray shirt, black jeans, boxer shorts, all with the dark cast of wetness. He went to his kit on the floor in the doorway and pulled a couple of large clear plastic bags. He bagged the towel and the wet clothes separately, marked them, and set them aside. The dresser yielded nothing of interest, and neither did the bed. Nick went back over by the bathroom, pulled his flashlight out and got on hands and knees. He alternated between looking down on the bit of carpet that was right in front of him and bending his head down to get a bug's-eye view, looking for anything that might be useful. He prowled the whole room this way, finally ending up on the glass door side. He looked into the grooves of the jam where the door traveled for anything that may have fallen into them, and along the edge of the carpet where the door opened to the outside. He stopped suddenly. "Hello." There was a dark depression, perhaps only a quarter inch in, on the edge of the carpet. Nick looked up at the door handle and the glass. The glass was clean; with the handle it was harder to tell. "Sergeant. Can you give me a hand in here for a second, please?" Barbara came in from the living room where she had been waiting. "Find something?" "Not sure yet. Can you grab me the print kit from the top of my case there?" She handed it to him. "Thanks." Barbara nodded and smiled as she watched him work. It was a dark wood, so he pulled out his white powder and gently dabbed his brush in it, and then proceeded to twist it around the handle. He frowned as he worked. "Nothing but smudges." Sure he wouldn't ruin anything now, he pushed the door open slowly and applied the same treatment to the outside handle. "And nothing there either." He put the dusting materials back and got back to his knees to look at the depression in the carpet again. He put his head down to the floor played his flashlight over the area until he seemed to find an angle that suited him. "Thought so..." He played the beam further out along the back patio, and then quickly stood back up. Barbara looked mildly confused. "See how the roof overhangs? It left about two feet of dry space outside. Everything else past it was wet. The dry spot was just enough to catch a couple of footprints." Gordon looked out while Nick bent down to dig through his kit. "I don't see them." Nick smiled as he moved past her with a handful of gear and his tricorder. "You will." He knelt down just outside the door and started setting up. When he was finished, four metal posts marked off a rectangular space on the concrete deck. They were held upright by thin strips of wire stretched around them, giving the impression of a little holding pen for small animals (some of Grissom's less frightening beetles, perhaps). Another wire led out from one of the posts, and Nick was in the process of plugging it into the tricorder. That done, he tapped at the control surface a few times and the space inside the mini-fence glowed a deep blue. Nick fiddled with a few of the slider controls visible on his tricorder's screen until the image of a footprint floated on the top layer of energy. Barbara let out an appreciative whistle. "Coooool." "Well, Miss Gordon. What humanoid race has a large foot with three toes, one of which points to the rear and is about half the size of the primary front toes?" Barbara smirked. "First one off the top of my head is Selkath. And that weird smooth depression in the arch certainly looks like the pad of the leggings of a Selkath encounter suit to me." Nick nodded, picked up a bit of black plastic film about the size of a sheet of copier paper, and carefully held it over the imager he'd set up over the footprint. Happy with the position, he let it go. It remained in place, floating atop the blue energy underneath. Nick tapped a green button on the tricorder and a pulse, much like the illumination bar of a photocopier, moved across the inside of the little pen with a *fzzzzrxtzzt!* sound of not-quite-right electricity. As it did, the image etched itself into the top surface of the black plastic. Looking over his shoulder, Barbara could see the same scan being read digitally into the tricorder. That done, Nick broke everything down and packed his case. "I think that was what we were looking for." He turned to Gordon. "I think it's time we had an official talk with Mr. Kelshar. Can we bring him in?" "I think so," she said, a bit of worry on her face. "We may still be a little thin here, don't you think?" "Maybe, but I've been thinking about what you said about his public file. I need to run back to the lab and sort this stuff out, and then I need to call in a favor about that." Nick turned up the charm. "Since you're already here, do you mind if I take the car back? I'll send it back with a few bluesuiters so you can have them back you up across the street." Barbara pretended to look hurt. "Nick Stokes, you're just going to strand me out here? I thought you were better than that." She smiled as she handed him the keys. "I'll make it up to you, I promise. Just get our fish guy into one of the interrogation rooms and lean on him for a while. If my hunch is right and I get what I'm looking for, we can close this up before lunch." It took Catherine and Sara the better part of an hour to tent the blimp gondola. They were just about ready to declare the job done and get started fuming when the door at the back of the garage opened and a tallish man in the black and gold day uniform of a Zardon Judge came in. He looked a little like Nick, if Nick'd had a ruthless buzzcut and a fondness for jackboots. Sara decided she didn't want to pursue that line of thought further. "Sara Sidle?" he said. "Sara looked up from preparing the fume generator. "Yes?" "Judge Balzar Olmeyer," said the Judge, and indeed his badge did say OLMEYER in the usual blocky type. "I have a delivery for you from the Chief Justice," he continued. "The Justice Department's using full Judges as deliverymen nowadays?" Catherine remarked, impressed. "Special occasion," Olmeyer replied with a wry smile. He hefted a silver case, not entirely unlike the triluminum toolboxes the CSIs used as field kits, in one hand. "Someplace I can show you this?" he asked Sara. "What is it?" Sara asked. Olmeyer just grinned, his face suddenly boyish. "Wow." Sara wasn't really a gun person. She knew how to handle one because it was part of her job, and she took a certain enjoyment in scoring well on her annual qualification test, but shooting wasn't a hobby of hers. She knew quite a bit about different types of guns, their operation, and their effects, again because of work, but she left the heavy lifting in that arena to Bobby Dawson in Ballistics. That said, she was impressed by what lay in the bed of form-cut foam within Olmeyer's silver case. It was a handgun a little smaller than the one she was accustomed to carrying, a nice, flat, compact automatic that would fit neatly in a number of convenient carry locations and hide easily under even a light jacket or vest. Despite its small size, though, it had a brawny, no-nonsense look to its lines, with a heavy barrel shroud and a chunky, comfortable- looking grip. "What is it?" Sara asked. "Lawgiver Mark V, also known as the Lawgiver-C," Olmeyer replied. "Introduced last year. It's standard issue for Detective-Judges. Uses the same multi-mode ammunition types as the standard Lawgiver." "With a frame that small, that must make it tough to control," Sara mused. "Not so much, thanks to the vent-compensation system," said Olmeyer, pointing. "Of course, you lose some muzzle velocity and a lot of sight radius with the shorter barrel, so you don't have the full-size Lawgiver's range or accuracy, but then, it's not exactly a sniper's weapon." The Judge looked her up and down, his gaze clinical. "Anyway," he continued, "you're Salusian - Cheltari?" She nodded. "Mm. So that makes you about 60% stronger than a human woman your size, and you look like you keep in pretty good shape for a desk jockey, so - " "Excuse me, I am -not- a desk jockey," Sara cut in, feeling her primary ears twitch back. Olmeyer grinned his boyish grin again - an expression unexpected and a little startling on the face of a man in the severe uniform of a Judge. At least he wasn't wearing that hood-ornament armor they wore on the street; that grin under one of those brooding visors would just have been mind-jarring. "Sorry," the Judge said, and he seemed to mean it. "Beau warned me you didn't like being sprocked around with. Anyway, Investigator Sidle, this is your new weapon, and if you've got a few minutes, I've been assigned to show you how to use it." Sara blinked. "Wait a minute, this is a -Lawgiver-," she said. "I'm not a Judge. I'm not even a Zardon." Olmeyer's grin flashed back on. "The Supreme Judiciary has awarded nine Lawgivers to non-Judges for special services since the Department's founding. You're number ten." That only made Sara more confused. "What did I do?" Olmeyer gave her a disbelieving look. "Nobody told you?!" he demanded. Then he shook his head and told her, "You broke Big Fire's Zardon cell. Your investigation in the Depew case smashed open their whole operation." "... How?" "Depew's confession combined with the record you dug up on him cracked their kidnap operation, and from there it was just a matter of following the slime trails. Five days after you left Zardon, we raided 17 sites in four Mega-Cities. 178 arrests, 306 killed resisting arrest. A red-letter day. If you'd been a Judge, you'd've earned your eagle. As it is - you get this." Sara wasn't sure she felt entirely comfortable with being hailed as the root cause of 306 deaths, but that was the way they played the police game on Zardon - fast and rough. On the other hand, it was certainly pleasing to know that her efforts had paid off so handsomely for the Zardons as well as her own investigation. Big Fire's grip on a whole planet broken? Not many CSIs could say they'd done -that-. Even -Grissom- couldn't say he'd done that. She wasn't going to let it go to her head - well, not much - but still, it made the rest of the week seem a lot better than it had 10 minutes ago. And, damn, that was a nice-looking little gun. /* Marty O'Donnell & Michael Salvatori "A Walk in the Woods" _Halo_ */ Catherine got on with the fuming without Sara, since she didn't know how long her Salusian colleague would be occupied with the Judge. On pre-Contact Earth, they'd used superglue - cyanoacrylate - for this, and it had worked pretty well at raising human fingerprints. Nowadays the principle was the same, but the chemical compound was a lot more exotic, with a name Catherine couldn't pronounce without looking it up in a reference text. Nobody ever called it by its full name anyway - it was always just SLFG. Like the old superglue fumes, it would raise good humanoid fingerprints on materials that couldn't usefully be dusted, like the seat covers and floor mats of a blimp. Unlike the old superglue fumes, SLFG also did some interesting things with improving contrast between surfaces and deposited materials under certain lighting, which had been known to reveal all sorts of interesting things. For instance, the strange, flower-shaped smudge on the floor by the main doorway. The floor was black rubber, and the smudge appeared to be some kind of scorch mark; if not for the fume residue bringing up the miniscule difference in elevation, Catherine might have missed it. She didn't think she would have - she was thorough - but at the very least she wouldn't have noticed it nearly so soon. Of course, she didn't have the faintest idea what it -was-, but at least she'd spotted it. She took some photos, then carefully skirted around it and started the painstaking process of crawling around the inside of the gondola looking for anything else of interest. Some fingerprints, smudgy, not useful for comparison, probably the pilot's or some VenTek warehouse worker's anyway. Jenson's boot prints. And... "Hello," she murmured, and carefully tweezered away a small tuft of black fibers from the sharp metal corner of the trim on one of the rear seats. Nick ducked into one of the secondary audiovisual analysis labs. He wasn't trying to hide anything from any of his co-workers, but he had an inkling of how his errand was going to go, and it would just be easier in private. He carefully closed the door, his thumb hovering over the push-button lock for a moment. He chuckled to himself and left it unlocked; someone finding him locked alone in the AV lab would probably not be any better. Nick Stokes had been The Jock in college. On the football team, in one of the inevitable fraternities. Unlike many of his peers in that area, though, Nick had a large, if well camouflaged, streak of science nerd in him. How else does does the quarterback wind up a CSI? His ability to balance the two sides was part of what had made him so successful. Even though he had plenty of jockly activities to occupy his free time, he had still indulged in other distractions. It was well hidden, cosmetically, but his neuroprocessor jack had seen just as much use as his throwing arm in school. (He'd missed having the all-too-common joy of almost washing out over the course of a semester because of net diving, but only just, a feat he attributed to the fact that he was never really a hardcore hacker.) Even - perhaps especially - when used recreationally, the net works in strange ways, and the damnedest connections can be made that would otherwise never have been. It was with that in mind that he thumbed on one of the screens and punched in an address from well-worn memory. There was a pause, a burst of transmission symbols, and then a face appeared on the screen - the face of a beautiful, slightly mischievous-looking woman with a green streak in her brown hair. "I know what I'm seeing," she said in mock astonishment, "but I can't believe it. Duke? Is that you?" Nick grinned at his old gaming name. "Hello, Vision. Long time no see." Vision's expression flipped from surprised to pouting, and her outfit and hairstyle went from fairly modern to Red Sonja. "Awwww, not Crimson Queen? And here I thought my faithful barbarian was calling me out on another dungeon crawl for old time's sake." Nick snorted a laugh as her icon toggled back to something like normal. "But I can see you're calling from work," she went on, "so I guess not, huh. Congrats, by the way. I know I'm biased, but you knocked it out of the park to land a spot at that lab right out of school." "Thanks. It's been all that and then some. I'm sure you of all people have kept up." He flashed his smile. Vision interlocked her fingers and rested her chin on them, a dreamy look crossing her face. "Of course I have (unlike -some- people). You look -great- in uniform." Nick silently blessed his choice of venue. Greg would never have let him live this down. She continued in the same languid, just- shy-of-sultry voice. "So, you're at work, I'm guessing this is business." "It is. I hate to call you up after so long to ask for a favor, but I'm on a case and I've kind of hit a wall. I need some more information on someone." Nick leaned towards the screen. "The kind of information that you are so very good at getting." Vision smiled. "You little devil." She sat up, becoming serious. "You do know, however, and anything I find like that isn't admissible as evidence. Well, OK, I could -make- it admissible, but I know you and, more importantly, I know who you work for, and they don't play like that. Not with their allies, anyway." "I don't need admissible, I just need... ammunition." Nick leaned back. "You've checked over my case by now, right?" "Of course." "Then you know what I'm talking about. There's something seriously wrong with Kelshar's public records. The kind of wrong that makes me think this might ultimately be an EoJ matter instead of an NAPD one." Nick grinned again. "I wouldn't have bothered you if it was anything less." Vision nodded. "So, you're playing your hunch through me." Nick looked faintly worried, but was too far to buckle now. He covered it and smiled. "Hunch is such an ugly word. Look, I understand if you say no, I realize I'm asking for a lot, and - " "Relax, I'll do it. You're right, his public file looks very weird. One condition, though." Uh oh, Nick thought, here it comes. "Yes?" Vision leaned in, a smoky, predatory look falling over her face, the stylized red armor reforming over her. "You're free Saturday night, right?" Sara walked into the assistant coroner's office looking a bit distracted, which wasn't all that unusual, and carrying a small cup, which was. David Phillips, who was still feeling lightheaded from the previous day's adventure with live patients, glanced up at her entrance and smiled. He always smiled when Sara came in, even when he wasn't feeling a little lightheaded. "Hey, David?" she asked, frowning at the cup in her hand. "Yes?" he replied. "Taste this?" Sara said, lifting a spoon with some white, pasty material in it from the cup and extending it toward him. David eyed the spoon dubiously, but then again, this was -Sara- asking. "Go ahead, you won't hurt my feelings," she said, "just - yeah. What? Too sweet?" David swallowed, trying to place the flavor, and asked, "What is it?" Sara stirred the remaining goop in the cup and replied thoughtfully, "I dunno, I found it in one of the labs... " David recoiled, his eyes going wide with alarm, and then made for the sink in the corner of the office, but Sara's laughter stopped him. "Relax," she said, and took a spoonful of the stuff herself. "It's just yogurt." The assistant coroner stopped in mid-lunge, turned, and gave her a look that combined amusement and reproach. "You're in a funny mood today," he observed. Sara shrugged. "I'm having such a weird week, my choices are basically 'get a little silly' or 'brood'," she said. "Silly doesn't get me hassled as much." She didn't add that she'd seen that joke in an ancient movie she'd watched with the Chief and had been wanting to try it ever since, though her original intended target was Greg. "What've you got on our dead pilot?" she asked. David sat down at his desk again, smiled as she perched on the arm of his chair, and punched up the holography on the blimp pilot. "Roy Jenson, delivery pilot for VenTek," David said. "Cause of death was pretty straightforward - shot once in the back of the head at close range. Post-mortem lividity indicates that he most likely died right where Catherine found him sitting." "Recover the bullet?" Sara asked between spoonfuls of yogurt. David didn't even think it odd that she could eat while looking at a three-dimensional, 200% blowup of a gunshot wound to the head; he did that kind of thing all the time. If he didn't, he'd never get lunch. He nodded. "Dawson has it." "Anything else?" David shrugged. "He had an ulcer." "Probably ate his cargo," Sara said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. "Bleh." Then she got down from his chair arm, patted him on the shoulder, and said, "Thanks, David." "Any time," he replied. Sara paused in his office doorway, turned back with a serious expression, and said, "Hey, I just wanted to tell you, you were cool out there in the desert. Real... you know... go-to guy." David raised his eyebrows. "Really?" She nodded. "Uh... well, thanks!" Sara smiled. "You're welcome," she said. "Thanks for patching Cath up. Hey, how's O'Riley?" "He's not happy, but he'll live," David replied with a chuckle. "They've got him in one of those head-only bacta cylinders. He looks like a water cooler." Sara laughed at the image, said goodbye again, and headed for the ballistics lab. David watched her walk off down the glass hallway, then got up and went the other way, to the elevator and down to the autopsy room. "Good evening, Dr. Robbins." "Good evening, David. How are you tonight?" "Tonight, Dr. Robbins, 'C' is for cool." "Is it indeed. Well, get a face shield on, Dr. Cool. We've got a brain to extract." "Bobby," said Catherine as she and Sara entered the ballistics lab. "What've you got for us?" Bobby Dawson, firearms examiner extraordinaire, gave the two women an apologetic smile. "Nothing too exciting this time," he admitted. "Take a look." Catherine and Sara looked into the twin heads of the comparison scope. Dawson stood back, arms folded, watching with a smile - a smile that melted into a look of incredulity as his eyes fell on the holstered weapon clipped to the back of Sara's belt. Dawson wasn't just an expert on firearms, he was a fan of them, and he kept himself scrupulously up to date on all the latest developments in personal weapons for both criminals -and- law enforcement. He'd just read a glowing review of the weapon in front of him by a Mega-City Two Detective-Judge, but he hadn't expected to encounter one in person - at least not right away. "Holy - !" he blurted. "Is that a Lawgiver-C?" Sara looked back over her shoulder, tried (automatically and futilely) to glance down at her weapon, then grinned at him. "Sure is," she said. "Aw, -damn-," said Dawson appreciatively. "Somebody over there must really like you, I'll tell you that. Wish I could hit you up for some range time with that baby." Sara shrugged. "I'll see if I can get you chipped in," she said. "The rest of Grissom's squad already is, just in case." Dawson nodded, trying not to let his eyes gleam too greedily. "I'd sure be obliged," he said. Sara smiled at his eagerness and bent to the microscope again. "Mm-hmm. Looks like a match to me," she said, then looked to Dawson for confirmation. He nodded. "Your blimp pilot was shot with the gun your dead Salusian was wearing." Sara looked across the top of the microscope at Catherine. "So that means... " /-- The assassin stole silently aboard the VenTek blimp as it stood moored at the Mutual Indemnity Tower's 75th-floor loading dock. It was easy - the dock attendant always nipped out for coffee after seeing to the VenTek ship's docking, and the one man who comprised its crew was down on 68 stocking the Snacktrons. It would take him half an hour or so to complete his rounds and return to the blimp, but the assassin was patient. He crouched at the back of the gondola, neatly concealed by shadows and packing cases of Crunchos. Jenson returned right on time at 11:15, said goodbye to the tower's dock attendant, closed the hatch, buckled in, and unmoored the blimp, moving out into the traffic pattern. The assassin reached to his belt and drew his pistol, then emerged quietly from his cover and moved forward. As he went, he snagged his arm on the corner trim of one of the rear seats, leaving behind a half-dozen short black hairs, but he was too focused on his task to notice it. He stepped up behind Jenson, leveled the weapon, and fired, then slipped behind the secondary controls and carefully flew the blimp out of the city without rousing ATC. Set course for the Roswell Gap, bail out... and wait. Wait behind one of the innumerable big rocks. Wait for the investigators to come... --/ Catherine and Sara stared at each other, their faces wearing matching looks of slightly alarmed astonishment. "Grissom was right," Sara said. "It was a -trap-," Catherine agreed. "You knew, didn't you?" Sara asked from the doorway to Grissom's office. Grissom looked up from the report he was reading, sat back in his chair, and regarded her solemnly for a moment. Then he took off his glasses, dropped them on his desk, rubbed at the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, and said, "I suspected." Grissom could occasionally be distracted to the point of startling insensitivity, but he knew Sara, and he knew she wouldn't react well to what was in retrospect a rather clumsy attempt to protect her. Some part of him had been dreading this since he'd put it off the day before. Now he braced himself internally for the fury. Instead she stood looking pensively at him for a few long seconds - and then, to his surprise, cracked a wry little smile. "Well," she said, "so much for that. Now what?" Grissom favored her with his cocked-head beg-pardon look for a second while he rearranged his mental Rubik's cube, then smiled very slightly. "Now," he said, "we find out who's missing a cijowska." It wasn't really Sara's case, but Dawson's findings and the presence of a cijowska on the guy Catherine had shot had more or less combined the two cases anyway, so she took the research job upon herself. She liked research, and she was good at it. Besides, she didn't figure this job would be too challenging. There couldn't be that many ancient Salusian melee weapons around, could there? Two hours later, she was reaching the conclusion that yes, in fact, there could. Warrick came into the bullpen to find her sitting back from the console and rubbing the wrist of her mousing hand. "Any luck?" he asked. "Turns out," Sara replied with a trace of exasperation, "the cijowska is a popular curio. -I've- never seen one before, outside the Royal Arms Museum in Saenar, but there you are. There's a company in Elstree, of all places, that -makes- the things, just in case we really need to re-enact the Battle of Cheltar Hold sometime." She sighed, flopping back in her chair. Warrick looked skeptical. "I don't think a cheap decorative knockoff could've done the killings in Salutown," he said. "Would've broken, and we'd have found wood fragments. It had to be the real thing, like the one we found on the guy Cath shot." Sara nodded. "The prop company in Elstree custom-makes a few real ones here and there, too, for collectors, but they don't recognize ours." "Anybody else?" Sara shrugged. "The Little Sisters of the Sword might have a few. I can't see Althenian nuns going around killing random citizens, though - and anyway, the convent's in Claremont, not Salutown." Warrick nodded. "Well, maybe I'll take a drive over and ask the sisters. I don't think they're doing it either, but they might know something. You in?" Before Sara could reply, the phone on her desk rang. That was reasonably unusual - the criminalists of Grissom's unit were at their desks seldom enough that most people who knew them automatically called their mobilecoms first. Sara glanced a "hang on a sec" at Warrick and picked up the phone. "Criminalistics, Sidle." "Sara?" the voice at the other end said. She didn't recognize it, quite, but it seemed oddly familiar - and it sounded like its owner was desperate, or terrified, or both. "Is that you?" "Who is this?" she asked. Warrick, picking up on the tension in her voice, sat down. "Are you the Sara Sidle who graduated from the Royal Saenar Science Institute in 2404?" the man on the other end of the phone demanded in an urgent voice. "Yes," she said. "Who are you? What do you want?" "Sara, it's -me-. Vincent." Her eyebrows shot up. "Vincent?!" she blurted. /-- SEPTEMBER 17, 2402 "Vincent? That's a funny name for a traditionalist." The handsome young man smiled, a little sheepishly, and ran a hand back through his unruly sheaf of straw-blond hair. "It's the one my parents gave me," he said with a shrug. "They don't share my views. My mom thinks I should've gotten humanized, gone to school on Earth." "Not for you, huh." "Nah. I mean, Earth's got some good schools, but Salusia's my home. And I don't have anything against humans, but I wouldn't want to look like one. Would you?" Sara considered that, then shrugged. "Maybe. I'd have to see how I'd look. I can't quite picture it." --/ Sara transferred the phone to her other shoulder. "What's going on?" she asked. "You sound upset. And why are you calling me now? The last I knew you'd joined the army." "I got out. Sara, I need your help," Vincent said, still a bit breathless. "I'm in big trouble. There's nobody else in this town I can trust." "In this - you're in New Avalon? Right now?" "Yes. Can you meet me? I don't want to talk too long on the phone." "I don't think - " "-Please-, Sara," he said, his voice coming near to cracking. "I don't have anywhere else to turn." Sara sat silently for a moment, her mind racing, until his voice came to her ear again, quieter but even more urgent: "Please!" She sighed. "OK," she said. "You can't come to Headquarters, I suppose." "If I'm seen there, they'll kill me," he replied. "OK. Fine. Go to the coffee shop at the Pinnacle. I'll be there in ten minutes." "Thank you," he said. Relief filled his voice, but it couldn't wash away the fear. He was still scared, and good. "Ten minutes. How will I know you?" "Are you humanized?" "What? No." "Then I'll know you," Sara said. She hung up, then looked nowhere in particular with a deeply pensive expression for a moment. "What was that about?" Warrick wondered. "I'm not sure," Sara replied, still gazing at nothing. Then she pulled herself back, stood up, and said, "Up for a coffee break?" Warrick gave her a skeptical look, but got up and grabbed his jacket, all the same. "I haven't seen this guy in six years," Sara said as they walked through the tunnel linking the headquarters building with the Entire State Building across the street. "I don't know what he wants, but he sounds scared, and I don't want to drive him off until I find out what the deal is." Warrick grunted. "So you want to play this cool." "Very cool. Wait and come up on the next elevator after me, sit someplace where you can see me, but you don't know me. If he's on the level, no problem, but if he pulls anything... " Warrick nodded, his hand straying automatically to check his sidearm. "I got your back," he said. "This is an OUTRAGE! I demand to speak to the Selkath ambassador at ONCE! You have no right to keep me here when I have DONE NOTHING WRONG!" Nick Stokes smiled at the scene before him as he walked in. Barbara Gordon really had worked Kelshar into an almighty furor with her questions. The CSI could afford the grin right then, as he was standing in the little observation room next to the primary interrogation room, behind the one-way transpex. (Nick was pretty sure this current window was a leftover bit of transparent alloy from the shipyards above the city. One too many chairs thrown at the last one... ) Chief Inspector Brass nodded to Nick as he came in. "She's something else, isn't she?" he whispered. Something about being in this room made people whisper even though it was utterly soundproof. "I'd have lost my temper with this creep two, three times by now. Artwork, man." "I asked her to stall while I worked some evidence and a few other... channels. I think this guy's more slippery than he looks." The screen next to him flickered to life. "And then some, champ." Vision winked. "Your hunch was right. Way right. You should be getting some paperwork in the printer in here... now." The document printer in the room buzzed to life. "That should be all you need to know right there. I'll have everything on my end waiting for him when you're done." Nick's smile went wide as he read over the paperwork Vision had produced for him. "Vision, you are truly a wonder." "It was a good catch, Nick. No matter what you get from him, it's a win for our side." She smirked. "Not that I won't take the compliment, mind you. Now go play Good Cop." Nick chuckled. "Yes, ma'am." The screen went dark. He turned to Brass, took a deep breath, and said, "Showtime." By the time Nick opened the door to the interrogation room, Vasseck Kelshar had gone silent from his previous ranting. Barbara gave the investigator a look that fell somewhere in between 'thank god you're here' and 'where the hell have you been'. The combination struck Nick as highly amusing. He had to fight to keep from laughing, but she caught enough of it to briefly roll her eyes at him. Kelshar, who for his part had missed this brief bit of byplay, looked up at Nick and let out an exasperated sigh. "Oh, thank goodness, the squarejaw is back," he said with more than a little sarcasm. "My favorite human of them all. What indignities have -you- brought for me, hmmm?" Nick smiled his best friendly smile. "You'll be pleased to know, Mr. Kelshar, that I have come to expedite your release." Kelshar canted his head downward in the Selkath equivalent of 'looking down his nose' at Nick, but the criminalist held up a hand to forstall any comment. "I know, I know, you can't believe it. But it's the truth. All I need from you is to perform on simple test for us and then answer a question. Answer it honestly and you're free to walk out that door." "And why, exactly, should I trust you to do anything but frame me for the death of my neighbor?" Nick's face went serious as he looked the Selkath in the eye. "Because I know you didn't kill him." Kelshar still looked dubious, but the blunt force of that simple admission deflated a large portion of his anger. "What is this 'test'?" Nick pulled a flat device the size of a decent coffee table book out from under his arm and set it on the floor at Vasseck's feet. "I simply need you to place your left foot on this pad so that I may scan it." The Selkath looked between Nick and the door, seeming to contemplate the deal that had just been made to him. Slowly he stood up and lifted his foot, setting it on the center of the device Nick had placed on the floor. As soon as it was in place and still, a band of blue energy quickly scanned back and forth across the black surface with a low 'vwurrnn' sound. Kelshar started and removed his foot, looking up angrily at the criminalist but still keeping his peace. Nick retrieved the device and placed it on the table. He removed his tricorder from his belt and set up an interface cable between the two. A scan of a Selkath footprint appeared on the tricorder screen as before, at the crime scene. Nick smiled a little smugly and hit the button that linked his data device into the local network, triggering the room's holographic displays. "On the right, Mr. Kelshar, is the scan of your footprint that was just made." As he said the words, the greenish-blue scan data appeared in the floating display. "On the left is a footprint I pulled from the patio in the back yard of 713 Baker Street, the residence of one Franklin Peterson and, coincidentally, across the street from your own house. And as you can see here - " Nick tapped another button and a mass of data points appeared on both prints. The two images then merged over each other and, as each point matched up perfectly, blinked from green to red. " - both prints are a perfect match." Kelshar was very still. "So?" "So, Mr. Kelshar, Mr. Peterson was found dead earlier today. Died in his sleep. In the very room into which the person who left that footprint was walking." Kelshar's anger rose to the surface again. "So now you are saying I killed HIM?!" Nick remained calm. "No, no I know you didn't kill him either. See, you also left behind some DNA in that print - from the surfactant your body produces to protect the parts of your skin that remain exposed to air for long periods of time, like your feet. From that material I could roughly figure out when you had been there, and I know you were there several hours after Mr. Peterson died." Nick leaned back in his chair. "While I'm at it, I may as well tell you what else I know. I know Mr. Walker drowned in your pool, and I know that, for whatever reason, Mr. Peterson is responsible for making that happen. "Maybe it was an accident, maybe not, but he obviously felt guilty for it, because he tried to cover it up and make it look like an accident. And in the process of doing that he managed to suffer an injury that caused his own death. Not a very good night for anyone involved." "That's all very interesting, Mr. Stokes, but there was going to be a question, correct? I would very much like to -leave- this place." Nick nodded. "Of course. What were you doing in Peterson's bedroom?" The Selkath sighed. "Fine. I knew someone had been on my patio, possibly even tried to break into my house. After your people had questioned me I had my suspicions about my neighbors, and I wanted to ask some of them a few questions. I went to his house and knocked, but there was no answer. We... have had arguments in the past, and so I admit that I went behind his house to see if I could find any proof of it. When I got back there I saw him... asleep. I thought he was asleep." Kelshar shifted nervously. "I realized what he would do to me if he caught me back there and I panicked got out as fast as I could." "And that's all?" "If I had known he was dead I would have called the police. I didn't like the man, but I am not... cruel." Nick stared at him for a long time, then looked at Gordon, who shrugged a 'that's it then' shrug. Spreading his hands, Nick seemed to concede. "Well, I guess that's it, then. You're free to go - " Kelshar was already up and to the door by this point, very eager to be gone, when Nick added, " - Lieutenant." The Selkath froze in place for a long moment, and then opened the door anyway. Four armed IPO Tac Div officers lined the hall; at the point of their formation stood a tall, powerfully built man in a black suit, a man with greying blond hair and a jaw even squarer than Nick's. Kelshar hurriedly closed the door again and spun on Nick, more scared now than angry. "What is the meaning of this?!" Nick finally allowed himself to show his smug smile. "I shouldn't have to tell you, Lieutenant Vasseck Kelshar of the Manaan Information Acquisition Service. You're a spy, Mr. Kelshar, and not a very good one. And after you spend a little quality time with that nice Mr. Rogers, you're going to be on the first ship back to Manaan." Kelshar's lower jaw hung in disbelief. He walked back over and slumped into the chair he'd just left, leaving Nick a little puzzled. Finally, after a long silence, he muttered, "Stupid -humans-." Nick blinked. "Excuse me?" "Shouldn't have ever trusted airbreathers in the first place." Nick was just about to say what he thought of that when Kelshar continued. "I tried to get the information my masters wanted, but the security was too tight. I never got in. I told those two -idiots- that I was going to claim insurance on what they took and then cut them in on the money, but all I really wanted was something to blame my failure on, to tell my handlers the data had been stolen from me. But not only could they not carry out the simplest of tasks, they managed to get themselves -killed- in the process?" Nick's expression stood somewhere between disbelief and amazement. Kelshar looked up at him, expression almost hopeful suddenly. "There, I've admitted it. That's a crime, right? Arrest me, hold me here, just don't send me back to Manaan. Anything but that." Nick looked at the Selkath evenly. "Are you claiming asylum, Mr. Kelshar, or are you just trying to save face?" The Selkath's expression fell. "We've been assured by your government that you will not be harmed, even for all the unintentional damage you've caused here. Personally I think you're getting off light, but it gets you out of my sphere, so I'll take that as a win." Nick stood and, with one last look at Kelshar, gathered his gear and paperwork and left, Sergeant Gordon right behind him. Steve Rogers filled the doorway as soon as it was vacant, rumbling, "Will you come with us, Lt. Kelshar?" Sara did know Vincent as soon as she saw him. He wasn't the only naturaform Salusian in the place, but he didn't look very different from the last time she'd seen him. Even if she hadn't recognized the structure of his face, the pattern of the white markings on his black facial fur and his long, windblown-looking blond hair were the same as they'd always been. He didn't recognize her, though, until she was almost seated opposite him in the booth he'd picked out along the middle of the east wall. He glanced sharply up as she started to sit down, looked about ready to tell her to shove off, before recognition sparked in his blue eyes and he gave her a wide-eyed stare. "Sara?!" he blurted. "I... I wouldn't have recognized you. I mean, I suppose I should have figured you would be - well... it's not important. I'm just so glad to see you." "What's going on, Vincent?" she asked him. "What kind of trouble are you in? Who's going to kill you?" Vincent looked nervously around, lowered his voice, and said, "The Sword." Sara looked confused. "The Little Sisters of Althena?" she asked. Vincent shook his head, looking exasperated. "The Sword of Salusia. The political party." Sara frowned. "I think you misspelled 'terrorist group'," she said, "and how did you ever end up mixed up with -them-?" Then, shaking her head, she went on, "No, forget I asked that. Just tell me what you think I can do." "I have... information," Vincent said, still looking furtively around. His nervousness was starting to infect Sara. The small of her back itched under her Lawgiver-C, and she caught herself scanning the room, albeit less spastically than he was, for any sign of an approaching assassin. "OK, so, you have information," Sara said equably. "And?" "And I want to pass it along to someone who can make good use of it," he said, "but if I give it straight to the cops they'll make me stay. I'm getting out of town tonight. There's a cargo ship leaving Mathews Memorial, and I know how I can stow away aboard. It's easy. It's how I got here in the first place." "So... you want to give -me- your information, and then you want me to... what? Forget where I got it? Carelessly leave it in my desk until you're safely out of the sphere?" "Something like that." Sara laughed mirthlessly. "You've got a lot of nerve, Vincent, asking me to do something like that. I could lose my job for pulling a stunt like that." "You won't lose your job," Vincent said. A faint echo of his old easy smile crept onto his face. "You work for Grissom, right? You were always his favorite. Besides, why would you get into trouble? You're not required to make informants stick around. I give you the data and I'm gone. Nothing illegal about that. I've done nothing wrong." He had a point there, but even so she hesitated, on the verge of telling him to get stuffed. She hadn't seen the guy in six years, hadn't known him all that well to begin with, and now he was turning up in the middle of the most stressful week of her -life- (arguably) and asking her to do him a favor that would at the very least mean answering some awkward questions. Vincent saw her hesitation. The smile vanished instantly from his face, replaced with a look of such abject dismay that she sighed and shook her head. "All right," she said, "I'll figure something out. Give me what you've got." "I don't have it with me. Can you come out to Mathews Memorial later tonight? I've got it stashed in a container in the light cargo terminal. I'm sneaking out through there - you can just take it and watch me go." Sara searched his face for a few seconds and saw only earnest entreaty looking back at her. "Give me specifics," she said. Vincent slumped in his side of the booth, relief bringing color to his face. He took one of her hands in both of hers - surprised, she almost jerked it away before she stopped herself - and said, "Thank you, Sara. Thank you." "It's OK," she said awkwardly, wishing he'd let go of her hand. People were starting to look. "Just... it's OK." He let her go, reached into his inside pocket, and took out a small pasteboard card and a ballpoint pen. Quickly, he scribbled down a few words and numbers, then slid the card across to her and pocketed the pen. "Meet me then and there," he told her. "The stuff I have - some of it's documents, some crystals - fits into a suitcase. Don't be late, and make sure you're not followed. And Sara?" "What?" He gave her something more like his old grin. "I owe you," he said. He flicked a fingertip over the point of one of her primary ears (an unxpectedly familiar gesture, vaguely equivalent to a kiss on the cheek, that made her flinch), then disappeared into the crowd. She looked at the card, which had a set of directions and a time jotted on it, then tucked it away in a pocket, got up, and left the coffee shop without looking at Warrick's table. Warrick came through the door into the tunnel to IPO HQ to find Sara leaning against the tiled wall waiting for him. "That didn't seem to go too bad," he remarked as she fell into step beside him. "What'd he want?" "Oh, uh... nothing much. He's leaving town tonight, wanted to look me up." "Old boyfriend?" Warrick asked. She glanced at him, but the expression on his face was mild, a look that said he was just asking to make conversation, didn't really care if she told him or not. "Not really," she said. "We went out for shyam over anatomy notes a couple of times. Nothing serious." "You sure he doesn't see it differently?" Warrick wondered. "Guy was looking at you pretty hard." Sara made a dismissive gesture. "Nah. That's just the way Vincent is. Kind of... intense." She chuckled darkly. "Listen, thanks for coming, anyway. I must just be rattled from last night. Sorry to drag you out for nothing." "'sOK." "Well... back to work." "Yup." They split up at the end of the tunnel, Warrick heading for Grissom's office, Sara bound first for the bullpen, then the secondary AV lab, where Catherine was looking over the holography in their case file again, looking for anything they might have missed. An hour later, Sara said, "Well, I'm gonna go grab some lunch. I'm so hungry I'm starting to think about the snack machines." "We wouldn't want that," Catherine said, laughing. "I'll keep looking here for a while longer. I feel like there's something I'm just not seeing." Sara nodded. "I know that feeling. OK, I'll be back in an hour." As she left, she passed Nick Stokes coming in, checking to see if he'd left his pen on the desk when he'd been there earlier. (He hadn't. Where the hell... ?) "Hey, Cath," he said. The blonde criminalist looked up and smiled a slightly weary smile. "Hey, Nicky," she said. "You look happy." "Cracked my case," he told her, trying not to sound like he was bragging. "Tell you about it sometime. What's the matter? You look like you can't remember someone's phone number." Catherine chuckled tiredly. "More like I've forgotten the last digit," she said. "Sara and I think we have our blimp case pretty well tied up, but something about it bothers me." She explained their theory - that the Salusian killer (Devax Carleg by name, according to the Royal Salusian Information Bureau's citizen identification department) had stowed aboard the VenTek blimp when it stopped at the insurance building, killed the pilot, set course for the Roswell Gap, and then bailed out and waited for the CSIs to arrive. "Sounds logical, and it fits the evidence you've told me about," Nick agreed. "So why the Sara face?" Cath looked puzzled, then realized that she -had- been frowning pensively at the screen in a manner reminiscent of her young colleague. "Turn around so's I can hit'cha innaback'ada head," she told Nick, raising a hand. He laughed - he didn't watch the TV show she was imitating, but just Cath doing the voice was funny - and said, "No, seriously. What doesn't fit?" "This," she said, turning the display panel to show him a picture of the odd smudge the SLFG fumes had raised on the floor of the blimp. Nick bent to look more closely at it, then smiled. "Is the real thing still here?" he asked. "Sure. What've you got?" Catherine asked, interest piqued. "I'll tell you when I'm sure," he said, leading the way out of the lab. Following him, Catherine said, "You're getting to be a little more like Grissom every day." Nick couldn't tell if it was a compliment. Once in the garage, Nick took only a few seconds to say, "Uh-huh. I thought so." "What?" "Your guy bailed out," Nick said. "Did you find a parachute?" She shook her head. "He probably buried it someplace. He had plenty of time." Nick grinned. "Nope. He didn't have one." He pointed to the smudge. "That's the takeoff scorch from a thrusterpack, like the ones the rocket cops wear." Catherine looked at the pattern, looked at Nick, looked at the pattern again, and smacked herself in the forehead with the heel of one hand. "Of -course-," she said. New Avalon's flying police officers were famous, as much a symbol of the city as its airship traffic and the Entire State Building. In their jaunty blue leather cavalry jackets, black jodhpurs, and gleaming silver finned helmets that made them look like old-fashioned radios, the "rocket cops" enforced the city's aerial traffic laws fearlessly and stylishly, carried aloft by sleek back-mounted thruster units that earned them their universal nickname. Catherine felt silly for not having thought of the possibility that Carleg had used a similar device to escape the falling blimp. It made a lot of sense, actually. The airship would have gone down slowly enough that he'd have come down miles from its final resting place if he'd used a parachute, and though he had lots of spare time, nobody -wants- to take a long walk across a featureless desert. Catherine looked at the smudge again. "Why wouldn't someone jump out of the blimp, freefall clear, and then hit the switch?" "An experienced pilot would," Nick said. "Newbies, though - they like to be standing on something when they fire it up. When the pack kicks in, it's a pretty big jolt - if you're in freefall and you don't know what you're doing, it can kick you clean out of control." "So this guy wasn't an experienced rocket jock." "Doubt it," said Nick. "He might've picked the thing up specifically for this occasion... Hmmm," he went on, leaning closer. "Did you ever find any sign of the other guy?" Catherine blinked. "What other guy?" "There are two launch blooms here. Look." He pointed at part of the feathery outer edge of the soot pattern. "See how the streaks overlap a little? It's almost like an interference pattern. One guy launches, the next one steps up to the door, only he's not quite standing in the same place." "How do you know so much about thrusterpacks?" Cath wondered. "I have one," Nick told her. At her startled-impressed look, he grinned and said, "I picked it up after that case we had last year - remember, with the two rocket jockeys who hated each other? Anyway, I've got marks like this all over my back deck. Have to scrub 'em off every couple months." "Wait a minute, so there were -two- guys in the blimp besides Jenson?" "That's the way it looks to me. You'd have to see about maybe getting a molecular discriminator to separate the soot layers to tell for sure. Could just be that the guy had a twin-nozzle pack that wasn't properly synchronized, but I don't think so. I've got a twin, and it doesn't look like this when it screws up." Warrick sat looking across Grissom's desk at his boss. The two men had just spent the better part of a half-hour talking over the victimology, quasi-military level of organization, and method of their serial killings and the attack on Catherine and Sara, and it had all led them to, if not a conclusion, at least a solid line of inquiry. "I'll call Grayson and see if Special Crimes has any information on possible operations in this system," Grissom said. "You go pull the BPGD file and familiarize yourself." "Right," said Warrick. He rose, sighed, and went down the hall to the bullpen. At his desk, he linked across to the Babylon Project Galactic Database and pulled the file on the Sword of Salusia. Founded in 2001, a year after Salusia's official First Contact with Earth and all that brought with it, the Sword had begun life as a radical political party. In 2015 its leader, Alois Greub, used his powerful charisma to subvert some of the planet's military high command and the Order of Knights-Defenders of the Crown, arranged for the assassination of King Jerka, then seized the throne for himself. Princess Asrial struck back, killing Greub in a duel and taking her dead father's crown for herself. The Sword's remaining resistance had broken with his death and the mop-up following Asrial's coronation was swift. The party faded into obscurity, and there it had remained until 2345. That was the year a supposedly-new party by the same name was registered with the Royal Salusian Registry of Political Parties. The "new" party's leadership claimed that it was a legitimate political party whose platform espoused the restoration of traditional Salusian culture and the separation of the Salusian and human species, but not the revolutionary aims and race hatred of its predecessor. That lasted until 2397, when a group of militant anti-human Salusians took over the Earth Alliance embassy in Saenar and killed 15 human diplomats, including the ambassador. The party leadership disclaimed the attack, claiming that the terrorists were splinter radicals, but no one really believed them. In the next election, they lost all their seats in Salusia's Parliament and seemed fated to vanish into obscurity again. Instead, the "party" reinvented itself as a "people's action army" modeled after - ironically enough - the Irish Republican Army of 20th-century Earth. They maintained a polite fiction of division, but most everyone knew the supposed schism between the "law-abiding" Sword and the terrorist arm of the organization was just lip service. They had cells in every important settlement that had a significant Salusian minority, and claimed support from 10 percent of the total Salusian population, a figure most authorities disputed. And every now and again, one of the cells would erupt into spasms of violence. Like this one. Warrick sat back and rubbed his eyes, then looked at his watch. Another half-hour down, and he was no closer to anything solid... but his gut told him they had what they were looking for. His gut wouldn't sell anything to a jury, but it was a place to start. Unfortunately, he had no idea that the guy Sara had just met in the coffee shop was involved with the Sword. If he had, he would have been significantly more excited, albeit not in a good way. He got up and went to leave the office, then paused as he caught sight of a small object on one of the other desks. Hm, he thought. Why does Sara have one of the "traitors die" cards on her desk? They should all be checked into evidence. It's not like her to be so sloppy. He went and looked, and saw that it wasn't one of the "traitors die" cards after all. But... Warrick looked closer, his brow furrowing. It was the same kind of card, a rectangular piece of pasteboard about three inches by one and a half, an unusual dull yellowy cream color. It had similar- looking black ink markings on it. The -handwriting- even looked the same. He stared hard at it, trying to remember enough of his high school Cheltarese to decipher it. Finally he figured out that it was an address - looked like an outbuilding at Mathews Memorial Spaceport, maybe? - and a time... ... five minutes ago. Warrick didn't know what any of this meant, but he knew one thing: He didn't like it. He stepped out of the bullpen and went to find Catherine. Catherine and Nick emerged from the garage into the hallway to see Warrick heading toward them. He looked preoccupied, but when didn't he? "Hey, Warrick," Catherine said. "Did you and Gris find - " She was about to ask, " - any sign of anybody else out at Roswell besides us and Carleg?" but she didn't get the chance - Greg Sanders popped out of a side office and, not realizing that she was talking, interrupted her. "Oh, hey, Cath. Sara around?" Cath noticed he was holding a file folder and gave Warrick a "one second please" gesture. "She just went to lunch," she said to Greg. "What've you got?" "Kickback on those hairs you found in the blimp. They're Salusian, all right." "So our guy Carleg caught himself on the seat on his way up to shoot the pilot. Like I figured." Greg grinned the grin of a Greg about to throw a wrench into someone's hypothesis. "Nope." "'Nope'?" Catherine responded skeptically. "They're not his," Greg said. Catherine glanced at Nick, who shrugged, his expression saying, I -told- you... "They're NOT HIS?" she demanded. "Is there an echo in here?" Greg wondered, looking around. "GREG." "OK! I got a hit in COGENT." Greg opened his folder with a flourish and consulted the documents within. "Your hairs, and the skin tags attached to them, came from one Vincent Hayg'n. He's in COGENT because he used to be a soldier. Got kicked out of the Royal Army two years ago for associating with a racial purity hate group called the Sword of... " Greg trailed off because he'd lost one of his audience. Warrick Brown had just uttered an oath under his breath and was now running for the elevator. "... Warrick?" Greg said. Turning to Nick and Catherine, he asked, "Where's he going in such a hurry?" "I don't know," Catherine said, mystified. Nick just shrugged. Before any of them could get around to doing anything about it, Gil Grissom came around the corner with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking pensive. He paused at the sight of the little cluster in the hall. "You know," he said mildly, "we do have conference rooms." "There were two Salusians in the blimp with Jenson," Catherine told him. He nodded. "That makes sense." "It does?!" "Warrick found a spot where someone hid and watched Carleg attack you, O'Riley, and Sara," Grissom told her. "Whoever it was, he made his getaway on a swoop, probably when Raven arrived. We couldn't find any gravity traces from the swoop's arrival, which means it must have been there for hours, probably since at least the previous day, but there wasn't any evidence that our mysterious observer had been there that long." /-- The repulsorlift utility vehicle whined to a halt behind the ridge. The driver kept it stationary with the maneuver repulsors but didn't touch down while the man in back operated the cargo lift. They dropped off the swoop, making sure it couldn't be seen from the Gap or the air approach thereto, just as instructed. "OK, let's go," the liftman said as soon as the swoop was parked and cast off. The driver hit the main drives, and they were off. Long damn drive for such a short time's work, but it beat hanging around out there all night and most of the next day waiting for the operation to come off. --/ "So somebody dropped it off out there ahead of time," Nick said in his I-get-it-now voice, "so that Carleg and Hayg'n would have a way to get back from the desert after springing the trap." "Who's Hayg'n?" Grissom asked. Catherine threw up her hands. "I don't believe this! We've been working opposite ends of the same case and -Nicky- knows more about it than -we- do now." Grissom blinked at her. "It's all in Warrick's report." "Oh, like I have time to read Warrick's reports," Catherine grumped. "-Somebody- didn't let Sara and me come back to -work- last night, -remember-? We've spent all of today playing catch-up on our -own- case." Grissom nodded calmly. "Well," he said in his most soothing voice, "we're all on the same page now." Then he looked around as if just noticing something. "Where are Warrick and Sara?" Catherine let out a huffing sigh. "Good goddamn question," she said. A second later all the field agents' pagers went off, causing the exasperated blonde to add, "Oh, -now- what the hell?" Warrick burst into Gryphon's office, having unconsciously flashed his CSI identification at the girl in the outer office on his way through. The Chief was at his desk in civvies, talking to a big, imposing man Warrick recognized, after a moment, as the guy who'd been going around killing all the Big Fire types in town a few months before. He'd heard the Chief recruited that guy after they bagged him; looked like it was true. Gryphon looked up to see the normally laid-back investigator barging into his office, and knew instinctively that something was wrong. "What's up, Warrick?" he asked. Warrick laid the situation out, doing his best to make it quick and concise. A few years of reporting to Grissom had made his best in that respect pretty damn good. Gryphon deliberated for 6 seconds, then said, "Go. Take the lobby exit - your ride will be waiting. Don't try to apprehend Hayg'n, just get Sara the hell out of there." Warrick nodded, turned, and hustled out. Gryphon got up, plucked his green trenchcoat from the coatrack by his desk, and shrugged it on, then strapped his twin swords on over it. While he did that, he had three brief but urgent conversations via his Lens. By the time his swords were settled in place, several things were starting to happen elsewhere. "You're with me, Geoff," he said. Geoff Depew hesitated. They'd just been discussing his readiness to begin limited field operations a moment ago, and no decision had been made. Now the Chief was going into the field and taking him -with-? It was a bit faster-paced than the decision processes Depew was used to. He wasn't yet accustomed to the way they did things in the International Police. "Well?" Gryphon asked as he settled his Knights cap onto his head. "Are you an SA7 agent or aren't you?" Faced with that bald query, Geoff fell back, as he often did, on his quasi-military training. He straightened to attention. "Sir!" he said, grabbed his own coat, and moved out. Sara got out of her company car and stood looking at the building for a second. It was one of Mathews Memorial's light cargo centers, part hangar, part warehouse - a big corrugated-metal building with a large rolling steel door on the front and a man-sized door next to it. At this time of night, it was deserted, like the rest of the spaceport; unlike New Avalon International, Mathews didn't have commercial traffic 24-7. She went to the man-door, tried the knob, and found it unlocked. Pushing the door open, she stepped through. Inside, the hangar was dim and cold, only about one in four of the big basket-shaped light fixtures on the ceiling in use. Shadowy piles of metal crates were stacked haphazardly here and there. In the biggest open space, just behind the rolling door, stood a folding table with a suitcase sitting on it. Vincent Hayg'n stood by the table, dressed in the same long brown coat he'd been wearing at the coffee shop. He still looked tired and rumpled, but less haunted than he had at the Pinnacle, and he looked further relieved as Sara entered. "You came," he said. "I was beginning to wonder." "Sorry," she said. "It took me longer to find the building than I thought. I'm not all that familiar with this spaceport." "Well, you're here now. That's the important thing." Sara crossed the open space, gesturing to the suitcase on the table. "Is this the stuff you wanted me to have?" "No," Vincent said with a little smile, "this is my clothes. The information's still hidden." "Oh. Well... I get an hour for lunch, and I burned 20 minutes finding this place, so... " Vincent nodded. "And I've got a flight to catch. There's something I need to ask you first, though." "What?" He looked at her for a moment, his expression changing from harried relief to a curious, strangely intense stare that gave Sara an unpleasant tingling sensation in the back of her head. When he spoke again, it wasn't in Standard but Cheltarese. he asked her. "... Excuse me?" Sara replied, baffled. Vincent asked. he said with cold dismissal. Sara said, switching to her native language herself. The words felt strange in her mouth. She hadn't spoken Cheltarese regularly in months, not since she left Salusia back in July. She put the feeling aside and listened to Vincent's reply. he said with sudden heat. Vincent shook his head, his expression darkening. Sara felt her face flush. she demanded. Vincent's ears - only one set, since he wasn't humanized - flattened against his head in annoyance. he said. Sara stared at him in disbelief, momentarily unable to speak. Vincent had just used her private name, the most personal of the two or three names most Cheltari Salusians owned. A private name was restricted by long custom to the owner's immediate family and closest friends. It wasn't even -known- by most others. Even some siblings didn't use them, and they were never used in front of anyone who wasn't also welcome to use them. No one had called Sara by her private name in -years-, since before her time on Vulcan, and there was no reason Vincent Hayg'n should even know it. When she did at last find her voice, anger came with it. "You are -way- out of line, Vincent," she snapped, lapsing back to Standard. Vincent shot back. Speechlessness wasn't a problem for Sara this time. The response came to her lips easily, instinctively: "Fuck you, Hayg'n." Vincent raised his eyebrows. he said, loading the word "humans" with as much distaste as he could pack into it. he went on thoughtfully, His presumptuousness and insolence finally broke through the frank astonishment that had held her in place, making her try to answer his accusations instead of doing what she should have done when he started down this line of inquiry. "I don't have to listen to this," Sara snarled. She made to turn and leave - - and suddenly Vincent's right hand held a nasty little chrome pistol, leveled straight at her, and the air filled with the hackles-raising whine of a charging phased-plasma weapon. he said, She stared at him, her eyes going wide, not quite able to believe that he'd just pulled a weapon on her. The part of her that remained always analytical ran back the tape of the encounter, trying to figure out exactly where it had gone wrong. At first she thought he was crazy, the kind of psycho she'd heard of, and whose "work" she occasionally ended up processing, in her job - the fixated ex-boyfriend (or, in this case, ex-acquaintance) who can't let go. Six years was an awfully long time for a guy like that to simmer, though, and what the hell was he doing in New Avalon anyway? Then she looked at his eyes and saw that, whatever was going on, it wasn't that. He was calm, his eyes almost icy, and though there was a strange light in them, it wasn't the look of a stalker. It was something larger, something in its way more chilling, something Sara's experience hadn't prepared her to identify. he said, his voice suddenly gentle, With that he started speaking, and then she understood. The strange light in his eyes wasn't the feral glint of possessive lust; it was the fire of ideology. He spoke for ten minutes in a low, calm, but urgent voice, outlining his view of the universe. It was a view in which the Salusian people, once the rightful masters of the galaxy, had been toppled from within by an illegitimate ruler who was nothing but a pawn of humanity - an unsavory upstart race of dubious antecedents and neligible accomplishments who had exploited the weak-willed scion of vile King Jerka to make the Salusians their unwitting slaves. He told his story with such calm, such utter conviction, and such empathy that Sara almost found herself wondering at times whether he might have a point. Salusia -had- declined from her position of galactic primacy in the centuries since Asrial's ascension, and the queen had never made any secret of her fondness for humanity. Salusia had given Earthmen their entree into galactic civilization at the end of the twentieth century. She had adopted Earth's own system of weight, measure, and nomenclature as the Galactic Standard. She had even changed the Standard calendar to match Earth's bizarrely arbitrary numbering system, which Sara seemed to recall was based on the incorrectly estimated birthdate of some ancient religious figure. And when the Salusian-controlled United Galactica had collapsed in the 24th century, the Federation that replaced it was dominated by, and took as its capital, Earth, not Salusia. All that was true... but to say that the Salusian people had been -enslaved-? Every decade or so since taking the throne, Asrial offered them democracy, under which they could have chosen their own path, away from the influences of Earth if they so desired. They turned it down - resoundingly, with a minimum of debate and almost no public disturbance. The simple fact, as far as Sara had ever thought about it, was that most Salusians liked Earthly things and adopted them cheerfully. She herself had never given it a lot of thought. She was humanized when she left Salusia because that was what you did when you left for a place not occupied by a Salusian majority. It wasn't as if she was trying to -hide- her species identity; it would take a pretty dimwitted human not to notice her primary ears. She did it out of custom and for the sake of convenience. She hadn't worried about her identity. It had taken her a few weeks to get entirely used to the idea of not having fur, the sight of a different face in the mirror, but at the end of the day it was still her face. The hybrid form even had certain advantages - greater aural acuity, for one. But then, Sara was a scientist, not an ideologue. She looked at things as a question of cause and effect, action and reaction, cost and benefit. Even though she worked in law enforcement, right and wrong was not usually a determination she had to bother herself with. For Vincent (it was becoming apparent as he spoke), it was -everything-, and he had no doubt about who had wronged whom or what the redress would be. he told her, his eyes boring into hers. His speech apparently made, Vincent relaxed his intensity a bit, bringing the conversation back down to a more personal level. He said, Sara looked back at him, arms folded, silent. Her face had gone still and unreadable while he spoke. Only her primary ears, tilted slightly forward, betrayed her curiosity. he said. He sniffed lightly at the air. He shook his head, a great sadness on his face. Still she said nothing, only waited. Vincent said, holding out his free hand. Sara shook her head. she said. Vincent's face screwed up in disdain. He glanced at his watch. Ice touched Sara's heart. she asked warily. Vincent replied, He chuckled humorlessly. While she absorbed that, a look of dawning horror on her face, he held out his free hand again. he entreated her. His words seemed to shock her out of her horrified reverie. Her primaries flicked back as anger flushed her face again. she demanded hotly. Resettling his grip on his PPG, he made eye contact again and said, Sara spat, her words falling to the floor between them like drops of acid. Vincent said. Vincent made a dismissive noise. he said mockingly. Sara said, pausing to let out a bitter little laugh, Vincent stared hard at her for a couple of seconds, his hand trembling slightly on the PPG's grip. Then he flexed his fingers again, curling them one by one around the weapon, and leveled it at her forehead. he said, his voice soft and charged with intensity. A few months before, Sara had been involved in an arrest that went wrong. The subject - a desperate man named Geoffrey Depew, who had once been a Big Fire assassin until he'd turned on his masters and gone on a rampage of destruction and death against them - had incapacitated three police officers and drawn down on both Grissom and her, one weapon for each of them. Staring down the barrel of Geoff Depew's revolver, Sara had frozen in terror, her knees like rubber, her eyes wide. She'd kept control of herself by only the thinnest of margins and fallen apart completely when the danger was past, after Grissom talked the man into surrendering. Afterward, she'd felt ashamed of herself for folding up like that, wondered if it would always be that way when her job confronted her with danger. It had been different in the desert. Then everything had been happening fast; there was no time to consider, only react. Anyway, she hadn't been looking down the barrel of an aimed and cocked weapon, staring death in the eye. She hadn't considered that a suitable test. The conditions were too different. Now, though, here she was: eye to eye with a dangerous maniac, his weapon charged, ready, and aimed straight at her forehead. The range was only a couple of yards, and Vincent had been a soldier. There was no way he could miss. All he had to do was tighten the tendons of his index finger a little, move a piece of metal a fraction of an inch, and pow. Superheated plasma would vaporize flesh, bone, brain - basically everything north and aft of her eyebrows. It wouldn't be a dignified way to go, and it wouldn't be fun for whoever had to process the scene - and who would that be, exactly, if Vincent was telling the truth? - but she expected it would be pretty much painless. A flash of light, maybe the first pulse of heat, and then - nothing. The book said, if there's a way to stay alive, take it. You can always try to figure out a way out as long as you're still alive, but once you're dead, that's it. Sara knew that, but then and there she decided that there are limits. Giving up and going with him would be putting her tacit approval to his arranging the murder of her friends. It was a compromise she wasn't willing to make. But that didn't mean she planned to go without a fight. When she replied, it was in Standard, to make her opposition utterly clear. "Go to hell," she told him. He gave her a deeply saddened look. "Hell is for humans," he told her. She steeled herself to lunge, use the unarmed combat training she'd received and try to take the weapon away from him, or at least break his grip on it. He was bigger, stronger, and probably better trained than she was, but she was fit and tough and she'd taken four years of the Vulcan equivalent of tai chi. She gave herself bad but not completely impossible odds. She knew she might well be trading the instant, painless end of a plasma burst for the slow agony of manual strangulation, or worse - but at least they wouldn't say she just stood there and got shot. /* Grand Theft Audio "We Luv You" _CSI: Crime Scene Investigation_ */ Then the dimly lit room abruptly filled with brilliant white light. It poured through the row of chest-high windows along the corrugated metal wall to Sara's right, about 30 feet away. Vincent and Sara both turned instinctively to look, then recoiled from the glare. The snarl of a powerful engine split the night - - the lights exploded through the windows, and after them came the car to which they were attached, a sleek yellow machine whose lines said "speed". The car, engine still roaring, made a graceful arc through the air, trailing a glittering, twirling constellation of glass fragments and bits of torn metal. It crashed down on the concrete floor with a bark of rubber and a burst of sparks. Before Vincent or Sara could consciously react, it was between them, shrieking to a halt in a cloud of tire smoke. The passenger door - the car was a twenty-first-century British sports car, an Aston Martin Vanquish, and the driver's seat was on the right - swung open, and a familiar voice called, "Sara! Get in!" Sara didn't argue. As Vincent recovered from his shock and opened fire, she all but dove through the open door into the passenger seat. The door slammed shut of its own accord. Plasma pulses bounced from the car's driver's side window, windshield, and bright yellow skin as if they were gumballs. Warrick Brown rammed the gearshift lever into first and laid twin black stripes on the concrete, accelerating straight for the opposite wall. Sara turned to see him, both hands on the wheel now, a look of intense concentration on his face. He didn't spare the time to glance at her. "Hot Shot!" he snapped. "We need an exit!" The viewcom monitor in the middle of the Vanquish's dash rezzed to life, showing a standard head-and-shoulders shot of a grey-faced robot with glowing blue optics and a blue and scarlet "helmet". Everything fell into place with that, her impressions as the car smashed through the wall of the hangar and crashed down onto the concrete falling into order - the lines, the scarlet shield on the hood. This wasn't a car, it was an Autobot. He'd been one of the instructors at the tactical driver course they'd all taken on Cybertron back in January. "I'm on it," Hot Shot replied, his tone just as businesslike as Warrick's. There was a ratcheting click from above and behind Sara, and she saw the muzzle of a weapon suddenly jut forward above the top of the windshield. An instant later that weapon spat a sphere of red-edged white energy that blew a hole the size of a car in the wall toward which they were accelerating. With a teeth-gritting shriek of bent tin on armor, Hot Shot bashed through the slightly-too-small hole and out into the night, Vincent's plasma fire still bouncing uselessly from his armor. Warrick corrected the slight skid they'd gone into when they hit the wall, aimed Hot Shot down the access road toward the spaceport's main gate, and then finally took the time to turn and grin tightly at Sara. "Told you I had your back," he said. "Thanks," she said, almost reflexively. Then, turning in her seat, she asked, "Are we just going to leave him running around loose?" "Chief's orders," Hot Shot said from the viewcom. Warrick nodded. "Our job was to get you out of there, period." "Besides, there are busloads of bluesuiters descending on this place from all sides," Hot Shot told her. "They'll get him." Sara let it go - there was something more important on her mind, now that she'd had a second to catch back up to her own train of thought. "Grissom's walking into a trap," she said, but Warrick just nodded. "We figured that," he said. "The Chief's throwing a little party for the rest of your boy Vincent's crew." His tight, almost humorless little smile came back. "If we step on it, we might just get there in time for the drinks," he said as he slung Hot Shot at dizzying speed onto Highway 29. Some part of Sara wondered if her colleague was really the one doing the driving. "You want a donut?" Hot Shot asked. A cargo compartment in the dash in front of her opened up to reveal a Krispy Kreme box. "They're fresh," the Autobot said with a virtual shrug when Sara gave him the incredulous look that question deserved. Grissom climbed down from his Tahoe, field kit in hand, and went to talk to Brass. "It's a mess," Brass said. "Same as the others. Right on the center line of the basketball court." Grissom looked up at the facade of the building in front of them - the gymnasium of Queen Asrial High School, Salutown's public secondary school. "Think somebody's trying to tell us something?" Brass went on cynically. Grissom's lips tightened. He had no other response. Brass leaned closer to him. "Gil - you sure you want to do this?" Grissom gave him a puzzled look. "I have to," he replied. Then he jerked his head toward the building and said to the crew assembling behind him, "Let's go." Karn Helard was getting bored. How long was it going to take these people to show up, anyway? Some response time. Then again, it wasn't like the person lying in the center of the court was going anywhere. Karn had seen to that. Too bad about Baliy, but there'd been no time to round up somebody from the community - and anyway, he did fit the standard criteria. How long had he expected to keep his human girlfriend a secret, anyway? Idiot. Karn had done him a favor; he might not like being dead, but he'd have liked what Vincent would've done to him a lot less. Ah! Here they came now, walking in through the main doors like they owned the place. Karn looked them over and ran them against what Vincent had told him to expect. The greying furless traitor in the lead was Gil Grissom, which meant the three anonymous coveralled figures behind him, two men and one woman, were the rest of his team. Vincent was handling the other traitor himself, these three were all human... check. He thumbed off the safety on his ExoSal MC-12 submachinegun, clicked the push-to-talk key built into its pistol grip twice, and got ready. Arrayed in a semicircle from either side of him, the eleven others who remained of their cell did likewise. And Grissom and his people kept coming, straight toward Baliy's corpse, all unknowing. The weird night shadows in the empty gym, and the thermoptic camo worn by Karn and his troops, meant the investigators had no idea they were walking right into a cone of murderous crossfire. Wait... Wait... "FIRE!" Karn yelled, and all around him his troops seemed to materialize as they cut power to their camo. (How else were they going to see their own weapon sights? They didn't have the budget for the virtual imaging systems that would have enabled them to see themselves and each other; that stuff cost more, and required more technical expertise to set up, than the camo systems themselves.) Appearing, they opened fire - - but in the split-second between, while they were acquiring their sight pictures, something very odd happened. Grissom and his three subordinates disappeared under a dome of weird black light that appeared out of nowhere. The fusillade of bullets that followed got as far as the dome and disappeared - whether passing through it to wreak havoc within, or disintegrated, or shunted to somewhere else, Karn had no idea, though he wouldn't guess option A. It wouldn't be there if it didn't have -some- function. He and the rest kept shooting, teeth gritted, but nothing happened. One by one, all at about the same time, they ran out of ammunition, the cacophony of gunfire tapering off and then stopping altogether. The sudden echoing silence after the last magazine ran dry was broken only by the quiet jingling of shell casings and the soft pinging of hot metal... ... until someone laughed at them. It was a woman's voice, low-pitched, dark, coldly amused. The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere in the gym, welling up from the shadows in the corners, dripping down from the rafters, everywhere and nowhere. "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit," the voice chuckled, setting the troops to looking nervously around and scrambling in near-panic to reload their weapons. Then the hemisphere of darkness that had covered the CSIs dissipated as if unraveling in a stiff wind, revealing... "... oh, -shit-," one of the Sword troopers breathed - Karn thought it was Jesla, but he couldn't be sure. The man standing at the point of the formation of four in front of them now wasn't Grissom. He was still there, but now he was in the back, and the other three were arrayed in a chevron formation between him and the semicircle of Swordsmen. On the left was a big, brawny-looking man in a three-quarter- length black leather coat. He had an oversized handgun in each hand and was surrounded by an eerie blue-purple glow, the kind of glow a person's subconscious mind associated with unhealthy things like improperly exposed reactor cores. On the right was a small, slim figure draped in a dark blue cloak, her face hidden by the shadow of her hood except for two cold dark eyes and a thin, expressionless line of a mouth. The line quirked up at one end into just the faintest hint of a smile as she said, in the voice that had echoed mockingly from everywhere a moment before, "Crime does not pay." At the point of the chevron stood an unimpressive sort of figure - a shortish, stocky, bearded man dressed in red Martian Army fatigue pants, an Art of Noise T-shirt, a Knights cap, and a rumpled old green trenchcoat. He had a sword in each hand and a wry little half-smile on his face. "Hello, boys!" said Gryphon. "I trust you all have permits for those weapons." "The op's blown!" Karn shouted. "(Gee, you think?)" Jesla - he knew it was Jesla this time, damn her! - muttered sardonically. "Camo up - scatter!" Karn barked, his hand flying to the belt control for his camouflage system. "Reload weapons!" The Swordsmen were well-trained, Gryphon had to give them that. Their formation broke apart even as they started to flicker and vanish back into the shadows. "Starfire!" he commanded. "Now!" From the skylight in the middle of the gym ceiling dropped another figure, this one tall and slim with eyes that glowed bright green in the shadows of the rafters. Raven gestured, covering herself and her three comrades with darkness again, as Starfire paused hovering above them, crossed her arms in front of her, and concentrated. For a tenth of a second, in complete silence, brilliant green light filled the gymnasium. Had Starfire produced such a pulse on the surface of Earth's moon, it would have been visible from the planet's surface. Contained by the gym, it was somewhat less impressive, but it did suffice to knock the Swordsmen's camouflage image processors completely offline. The flare compensators in their combat visors saved their vision, but even with that protection they were staggered and blinded for a moment. Fortunately, Karn had been reloading his weapon and so not looking directly at the source of the pulse. His vision cleared first. He realized he was visible, hit the floor rolling in case the guy with the guns opened fire, and came up sighting on Grissom. There might still be a chance to nail the primary target and get the hell out of here - - the girl (Raven, he recalled her name was, one of the Chief's coterie of dangerous females) seemed to appear out of nowhere in front of him, her blue cloak flying around her as she smacked his weapon out of line with the open palm of one hand. She hit hard for such a petite creature, and a human to boot; the blow ruined his shot, damn near broke his grip on the weapon. Snarling, he let the subgun fall on its sling, pulled the cijowska from his belt, and sent its studded length hissing through the air toward her head. She flowed back out of the way like the shadow she resembled, throwing her cloak back over her shoulders. Karn struck again, bringing the club straight down this time. With a sparking clang, she caught it against the blade of a short black sword she'd drawn from somewhere in her cloak. They went back and forth a couple of times, her speed and agility outmatching his power and fury, and then her blade laid his forearm open and the cijowska clattered to the floor. Raven turned the follow-through from the cut into a sweeping kick to the side of his head that sent him tumbling to the floor. As he rolled and came up on his knees, she pivoted, took one step, and presented the tip of her sword to his throat. "Yield," she advised him in a voice like slate. Karn clutched his wounded forearm with his good hand, glared at her with hate in his eyes, and then, grudgingly, nodded once. Catching his breath now that his fight was over, he looked around to see how the others were doing. He saw that the big gunman and the girl with the glowing green eyes had rounded them all up and relieved them of their weapons. Gryphon and Grissom hadn't even had to move. Hell, Grissom hadn't even drawn his weapon; he was just standing there watching it all unfold as if he were at a baseball game. Then, with a slightly aggrieved expression, he turned to Gryphon and said, "Benjamin. Look at the mess you've made of my crime scene." Gryphon stared at him for a second as if he'd gone mad, then laughed when the Salusian investigator winked. Hot Shot screeched to a halt by Grissom's parked Tahoe. Before he'd even stopped skidding, Warrick and Sara had piled out and started running for the cluster of uniformed people standing near the truck's nose. With his passengers having abandoned ship, the Autobot transformed and walked after them - no need to run with his much longer legs. "Cath! Nick! What's going on? Where's Gris?" Warrick asked. "Inside," a grinning Catherine said. "You guys missed it!" "What are you grinning ab - " Sara started to ask, but then she saw movement and turned to see Grissom and the Chief coming out of the gym, followed by Raven, Starfire, and - Geoff Depew?! After a few confused moments in which everyone determined that yes, in fact, everyone else was OK, Grissom told his team about the successful reversal of the Sword ambush. "Tactical officers and the NAPD are arresting the terrorists now," he said. "After that, we get to go in and sort out the mess. The crime scene's been contaminated, but under the circumstances there wasn't much we could do about it. We'll just have to make do." He turned to Sara. "You should know that the tactical team that followed Hot Shot and Warrick into Mathews Memorial didn't find Vincent Hayg'n. Or your Tahoe." "Does that mean I have to spend another night at the Monolith?" Sara asked with a little smirk. Grissom chuckled. "We'll see," he said. "After we get through here tonight, you may -want- to." The cops and tac troopers got the Swordsmen out of the gym with commendable speed. When they brought the last one, Karn, out, the major in charge reported to Brass and Gryphon. None were dead, none even all that badly injured, considering. They were loaded into a removal van and driven away for further processing. "It's all yours," Gryphon said to Grissom. Grissom nodded. "Thanks. And... thanks." Gryphon grinned. "You guys have had a busy week. Hopefully now things will get back to normal for a while." "Well, they would have, if you hadn't said that," Nick Stokes mock-grumped. The investigators formed up, gathered their equipment, and headed for the gym, where Raven and Starfire were staying on guard just in case anything -else- squirrely decided to happen tonight. Sara brought up the rear, having stayed behind to say hello to the Chief and thank Hot Shot again for his part in her extraction from the airport. Just as she reached the door, a voice called her name. Pausing, she turned to see Geoff Depew approaching. "Investigator Sidle," he said. "I won't hold you up for long. I just... well, I owe you an apology. And a thank-you." Sara looked faintly puzzled, so Geoff explained. "The apology is for threatening you when we met," he said. "I told Mr. Grissom I was sorry at the time, but I didn't see you again. I was desperate, not thinking straight. I shouldn't have done it, and I'm deeply sorry." Sara favored him with the customary frown she adopted when thinking hard about something; then she smiled slightly. "Thanks," she said. "I think I can accept that." He looked relieved. "What's the thank-you for?" she asked. "I understand you're the one who found my identity record," Depew said. "They tell me you worked like hell to get it, too. If not for your dedication, I'd... I wouldn't have gotten the second chance I'm getting now. I can never really repay you for that. I just wanted you to know I'm aware of the debt." "You don't owe me anything," she told him. "I was just doing my job." Depew nodded, not so much conceding the point as declining to argue it. "Well, thank you anyway," he said. "I won't let the chance you've given me go to waste, I promise you that." She thought for a second about what to say to that, but by the time she'd thought of anything, he was gone, walking back toward the Chief. Sara watched him talk with the green-coated figure for a second, then turned and went into the gym. "Good work tonight, Geoff," Gryphon said as the two men walked away from the school. "You showed excellent restraint and stayed on task - confirmed everything I've been hearing about your progress. I don't think you're ready to hit the field on your own just yet, but I'm going to approve you for SA7 operations. You'll be working primarily with Logan." Depew nodded. "Suits me fine, sir." "Oh, one other thing." "Sir?" "You're an SA7 agent now," Gryphon said. "You don't have to call me sir." "Due respect, sir, I'd rather," Depew said. "I'm more comfortable with at least a little protocol." Gryphon smiled. "OK, have it your way, then." He turned and shouted back to the police cordon. "Hot Shot!" "Yo!" Hot Shot replied. The Autobot turned, stepped over the yellow tape, and walked toward them. "You mind taking Geoff back to Headquarters?" Gryphon asked. "If I know him, he's going to want to get started on his after-action report right away instead of leaving it 'til tomorrow like a normal person," he added with a grin. Depew chuckled. "Busted," he said. "Sure, no problem," Hot Shot said. He transformed back to vehicle mode and swung a door open. "Jump in, Geoff. You hungry? In-n-Out on Satriani's open all night... " "Works for me," Depew said. "You want me to come back for you, Chief?" Hot Shot asked. "Nah. I've got my own car here." He smiled slightly. "You can come back for Cath if you like, though." Hot Shot laughed. "I might just do that," he said, and roared off into the night. Gryphon stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the Autobot's taillights disappear up the street, then turned and walked back to the high school, whistling. Sara Sidle walked into the Chief's outer office two hours later. She thought she probably knew why he'd asked her to come up, and she wasn't entirely looking forward to it. Of course, she felt a little off-balance anyway, what with the events of the evening. She wasn't all freaked out and shaky like she'd been the last time someone had pointed a gun at her, nor wired and punchy like she'd been after the incident in the desert, but the confrontation with Vincent had left her a little bit rattled. Hearing that her Tahoe had been found abandoned near one of the perimeter-fence gates at the far edge of New Avalon International Spaceport, devoid of anything of interest except another one of those pasteboard cards, hadn't helped either, especially in light of that card's message: "Traitors die, Sara." (Nice of him, she thought darkly, not to put my private name on something he knew other people would be reading. At least he's a -polite- crazy terrorist son of a bitch.) And now, of course, the Chief was about to bawl her out for going off on her own, and she couldn't say as she blamed him. It had been a dumbass thing to do - although she hadn't had any way of knowing -how- dumbass until after the fact, which ought to be a point in her favor. Either way, she wasn't looking forward to it. This was one of those inevitably awkward moments that came when you were sort-of-dating- or-something the CEO of your company, so to speak... On the other hand, Luornu Durgo (who had to know what was going on) just smiled to see her, saying, "Go on in, Sara. He's just finishing up." "Thanks," Sara said, now unsure of exactly what was going on. She stepped through the doorway into the inner office and stopped just inside to wait while Gryphon finished his conversation with the being standing in front of his desk. The aforesaid was a Selkath wearing an elaborate encounter suit, the most elaborate one Sara had seen since the last time she saw the Vorlon ambassador to Babylon 6 on TV. It even included a water- filled bubble helmet, something most Selkath, being capable of breathing air with almost as much ease as water, didn't bother with. The creature's raspy, weirdly-subtoned voice had an extra depth and bubbliness to it as a result, which Sara decided after a moment didn't make it any more pleasant to listen to. "... government of Manaan offers its most profuse apologies, Mr. Hutchins," the Selkath was saying, and he didn't sound happy about it. "I have been instructed to tell you that we regret this incident most highly." Gryphon smiled a friendly little smile. "By which you mean," he said mildly, "you regret that we caught you." The Selkath stiffened slightly, then said with exaggerated dignity, "Just so." "Well, better luck next time," Gryphon told him with apparent sincerity. "-Thank- you," the Selkath replied, icily cordial. Grypyhon glanced past him, saw Sara, and then got to his feet. "Well, Mr. Ambassador," he said, "I have business to attend to, so if you'll excuse me, I trust your spy can find his own way out of the sphere?" The Selkath eyed him fishily (er, so to speak), then said coldly, "Indeed," before turning and stalking out. "Who was that?" Sara asked. "Selkath Ambassador Shalketh," Gryphon replied casually. "Oh. Wish I'd have known. I'd at least have put on a clean lab coat," Sara said, glancing down at herself. "Anyway, you called?" "I did." Gryphon walked around his desk and sat down on the corner of it, regarding her thoughtfully. "I want you to tell me something." "What?" Sara asked, bracing herself. When it came, though, the question wasn't quite what she'd been expecting. "Was your going to that hangar to meet Vincent Hayg'n stupid, or just careless?" Sara bristled - she didn't appreciate being talked to that way, even by the Chief of the International Police - until she realized what the question actually meant. What he wanted to know was, had she gone to the hangar to meet Vincent thinking it was a personal matter, thoughtlessly neglecting to inform anyone of where she was going, or had she gone intending to work some kind of impromptu undercover sting operation, something for which she was neither qualified nor authorized? She mastered her instinctive flash of temper, looked back at him, and said, "Careless. Catherine and I weren't up to speed on Grissom and Warrick's end of the case. We didn't know they suspected Sword involvement. I thought I was just doing a favor for an old acquaintance." She held up a hand to forestall his next observation. "It was a -dumb- favor, I know, you don't have to tell me, but that's all it was." Gryphon nodded. "OK," he said. Sara stood looking at him, waiting for him to say something further. After a couple of seconds, she said, "That's it? Just 'OK'?" "You said yourself it was dumb," he pointed out. "I don't like to harp at people who already get it." Then he grinned, dropping the matter entirely, and said, "Go get changed and report to the lobby." Sara arched an eyebrow at him, puzzled. "There are still almost two hours on my shift," she pointed out. His grin broadened. "Not tonight," he said. When she got to the locker room on the tenth floor, the others were there too - even Grissom and Greg Sanders, shedding their lab coats and freshening up, just like it was the end of a normal day. Sara found that obscurely disappointing, but at the same time it piqued her curiosity. Nobody else seemed to know what the deal was either - except Grissom, perhaps, who answered the query with his little Buddha smile. The six of them came out of the elevator into the building's cavernous Art Deco lobby, and Sara was unsurprised to find the Chief waiting for them with a big grin on his face. "I suppose," he said, "you're wondering why I've called you all here." "Hey, that's my line!" Greg protested. Gryphon dug in his pants pocket for a second, then tossed a quarter-credit to the Dantrovian tech, who plucked it out of the air and pocketed it with a grin. "You guys have had the week from hell," Gryphon said, "and it's only Tuesday." Adopting a solemn mock-pompous look, he went on, "You are valued employees and, as your Chief, I care deeply about your happiness and productivity." Grissom snorted. "You sound like Brian Mobley," he said, smiling. "Or you would, if Brian had ever uttered the phrase 'I care' in his life." Gryphon cleared his throat. "Gil, we've been friends for a long time," he said, "so I'm going to overlook that grievous and unwarranted personal attack. ... Now where was I?" "You were about to tell us about our 20% raises," Warrick said helpfully. The Chief gave a cheery laugh. "Nice try, Warrick," he said. "But I -am- taking you all to dinner." Warrick grinned lazily. "I'll take that," he said. "I'm not proud." Sara got out of Grissom's Tahoe and stood looking in disbelief at the facade of the building the Chief had led them to in his Skyline. "THIS is his idea of a departmental attaboy?" she inquired rhetorically. "Taking us to -Mornington Crescent-?" "Oh, Sara, don't be so -boring-," Catherine chided her playfully as she climbed out of Hot Shot's driver's seat. "Excuse me, I am -not- boring," Sara replied half-mock-testily. "Don't judge the place before you've even been inside," Grissom said, smiling. "The food here is excellent. Anyway, we'll be in the pool room. It's quieter in there." Sara subsided, except to shoot Catherine one last half-hearted (and cheerfully rebutted) glare before falling into step behind Grissom. A second later, she gave the back of her supervisor's head a puzzled look as it dawned on her that, for him to say what he'd just said, he must've been familiar with the place. It didn't seem like the kind of place a man like Gil Grissom, who sometimes appeared to find sentient contact almost painful, would frequent. Mornington Crescent was famous throughout New Avalon and, indeed, the galaxy. It had the (in Sara's mind, somewhat dubious) distinction of being the Zeta Cygni system's first and finest strip club. It was also, she discovered as she passed through its doors for the first time, a rather nice pub. It was done up in an English style, with a lot of dark wood and brass, and the walls were covered wih London Underground memorabilia. The tables had the names of London tube stations on them, the exits were marked with cheerful yellow "WAY OUT ->" signs, there were dart boards and a bulletin board with the football scores... and there wasn't a stripper anywhere in sight. Gryphon, who was standing by the doors watching as the CSIs came in, saw the curious expression on her face and grinned. "That's all on the lower level out back," he said, nodding toward the big red double doors at the back of the room, which were adorned with a large painted Underground "bullseye" logo. "This part's just a pub." "I never knew that," Sara said, in a tone of voice which indicated that she found that gap in her knowledge of the world impressive. "People who've never come here usually don't," Catherine told her, "but the folks in the neighborhood love this place. There are 20-year pub regulars who've never seen the Underground once." She shrugged. "Hell, I used to come back on my days off just to hang out in front here. Nobody ever said a thing about it. That's down there, this is up here." "You worked -here-?" Greg said, his voice verging dangerously close to a squeak. Catherine grinned. "Of course. Where did you think? In this town, it's either the Crescent or a dive." She folded her arms and gave him a stern look. "Catherine Ardeen didn't dance in dives." While Greg was absorbing that intelligence, Gryphon laughed and led the way across the pub - which was reasonably busy for midnight-thirty on a Tuesday night - to a side door. That door led into a similarly decorated but quieter room with a second bar and a quartet of billiard tables, each under its own hanging light fixture. "I used to come here all the -time- in college," Greg said in an amazed voice as they all sat down around the billiard room's one round dinner table. "I wonder why I never saw you." Catherine laughed. "Greg, when I worked here, you were still in a -tree-," she said. "All right, you guys," Sara announced after they'd all ordered drinks and had a few minutes to peruse the menu. "Just so we get it all out of the way right now, I'm ordering a steak and I'm going to enjoy it." She put down her menu and flashed the table a wry grin. "I was recently reminded that my people evolved from predators." Her co-workers greeted this news with a round of applause and a few glasses raised in salute. "You know King Jetanam the Fifth was a lifelong vegetarian," Grissom observed conversationally. "Some think his madness was the result of a protein imbalance stemming from his improper diet." Sara took this in and nodded. "Then I guess I'd better order some chicken fingers, too," she said, her grin widening. /* Warren Zevon "Werewolves of London" _Excitable Boy_ */ They ate (laughing, talking, relaxing, having a good time), and then they adjourned to the pool tables. With only seven of them, they couldn't all play at once, so rather than break up into groups, they clustered around one of the tables and traded off while those who weren't playing stood around and kibitzed, or fed the jukebox in the corner one of a succession of quarters. A system soon emerged under which the winner of one game would play the next person in line, and hold the table until displaced. Catherine took the first two games, beating the Chief narrowly and Nick handily. As the burly young investigator grinningly admitted defeat, she winked and said, "Don't feel bad, Nicky. I've been winning this game since before you were born." Turning her slightly predatory smile to the rest of the group, she added, "Next victim, please?" /* ZZ Top "My Head's in Mississippi" _Recycler_ */ Gil Grissom stepped to the side of the table with his playful little smile in place. With the precise-but-not-fussy deftness that characterized most of his movements, he put a long, narrow wooden case on the edge of the table, opened it, and removed the two pieces of a custom-made billiard cue from their blue felt nest, then started nonchalantly screwing them together. "Oh ho!" Catherine said, raising her eyebrows. "Looks like I've got a live one here." Grissom closed his cue case and handed it to Sara, who looked as if she had no idea what to do with it for a moment before putting it down on the now-cleared dinner table. "In college they called me Saenar Slim," said Grissom with a slightly wider smile. Catherine smirked. "Well. If it's going to be -that- way," she said, "I demand a handicap." Grissom made a gallant gesture. "Be my guest, Catherine," he said amiably. Setting her cue down on the table to free both her hands, Catherine proceeded to do just that. Slowly, languorously, never taking her eyes or her smile off Grissom, she unfastened the top two buttons on her silk blouse. She made it last three minutes and seem like it took half an hour, to the vocal delight of her co-workers, though Grissom seemed resolutely (if smilingly) unfazed. "(Steady, boy,)" Nick murmured to Greg. "(Remember, you've got a date this weekend.)" Greg made a production out of swallowing hard, then muttered without taking his eyes off the show, "(Yeah. I'm cool. Thanks, Nick.)" "(No problem,)" Nick chuckled, clapping the Dantrovian on the shoulder. Catherine finished her performance, adjusted her collar, polished the fingernails of her right hand nonchalantly against the scarlet silk of her blouse front, and said in a satisfied tone, "I still got it." Her co-workers broke into applause. Even Grissom set down his cue and clapped politely, his expression affectedly detached-but-amused. "You sure do," Gryphon remarked. "If I had a fiver, I'd put it in your pocket." Catherine laughed throatily and threw him a wink. "Come on, Ben," she said. "You used to come here all the time. You know that's not where they go." Sara snorted with laughter as the boys catcalled and Gryphon guffawed. Then the two players took up their cues and played a game of eight-ball that was as much ballet as billiards, between Grissom's angles and Catherine's curves. "(This is the most fascinating display of elastic and inelastic collisions I have ever witnessed,)" Greg murmured raptly to Sara. The Salusian hid a grin behind her hand and whispered, "(Greg? You're a chemist.)" "(I'm a student of the universe,)" Greg replied in a cosmic-awe kind of voice. Grissom emerged victorious, but in the end, those who witnessed the game agreed that they were the real winners. "That was a good match," he remarked as he retrieved the balls for the next one. "Thank you, Catherine." Catherine smiled, bowed deeply for effect, racked her cue, and retired. "Sara? I believe it's your turn." Sara selected a cue, chalked it, and waited for Grissom to break. /* XTC "The Mayor of Simpleton" _Oranges & Lemons_ */ This was a different sort of game, but in its way, no less interesting to watch. Sara's playing style was, naturally, very different from Catherine's. She was all business, frowning thoughtfully at the balls with that familiar expression all her co-workers had come to enjoy. Instead of prowling around the table like a hunting cat, she paced it as if it were a crime scene, looking at it from different angles. "You gonna take your shot," a grinning Warrick asked after a couple of minutes of this, "or do I need to get your ALS from the car?" Without taking her eye off the 6-ball, Sara bent down, lined up her cue, murmured casually, "bite me, warrick," and sank her shot. The cue ball didn't come back quite the way she wanted it to, though, and that left her with a rather ugly lie for the next shot. She paced the table twice, considering, then got out the rake and started setting up a bizarre deflection shot. Grissom watched all this with an indulgent smile, as of a master watching a pupil trying something creative but probably futile. He walked around behind her and said in a quietly amused voice, "Sara? This reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Do you remember that?" Again Sara didn't look away from her work. In the familiar tone of voice she used when she was concentrating on something and not really paying attention to the conversation, she replied, "... that would've worked if you hadn't stopped me... " She took the shot; the cue ball hopped over the 13, clipped the 7, and sent it, after a long, lazy curve that looked like it would surely run out of steam long before it got there, clattering into the far corner pocket. "... boo-yah," Sara said in the same quiet tone, a crooked smirk settling on her face. She picked up the rake, twirled it once in her hand like a drum major, and stowed it away. Then she started stalking the 2-ball, eyeing all the angles, primary ears twitching involuntarily with concentration. She ended up losing the game, but only just, on a rebound shot that didn't quite come off the bumper the way she expected it would. Though she'd been playing to win, she didn't seem to mind losing much. She just racked her cue, congratulated Grissom, and retired smiling to the gallery. Grissom held the table through the rest of the round, which meant that once he knocked off Greg, the Chief was up again. /* Sam Cooke "Bring It On Home to Me" _The Best of Sam Cooke_ */ Sara came back from the bathroom while this game was going on, and, seeing Catherine over at the bar having a pint, decided to join her. The two women sat for a couple of minutes, backs to the bar, watching the game, before either one spoke. "So," said Catherine. "Mm," Sara replied. "Still going to the lake this weekend?" Sara glanced at her, then took a sip of her Newcastle before replying, "Far as I know." "Still not dating?" Rather than bristling, as Catherine had half-expected, Sara just shook her head and replied in her 'analytical' voice, "Not enough data." "Evasive," Catherine noted. "Lot of reasons not to go there," Sara noted. "Such as?" Catherine prompted. Both women realized they were slipping into a dialogue much like the sort they might have while overviewing a crime scene. They weren't looking at each other as they spoke, but at the subject of their conversation, watching him laughing and joking with the others, just out of earshot. Both noted internally that it might just be the only way they could -have- this conversation. Nine times out of ten, Sara would have changed the subject or walked away, but tonight the vibration was right or something. Maybe it was just all that she and Catherine had been through together this week, maybe it was just the energy in the room. Either way, she decided to keep playing. "He's a -lot- older than me, with a much wider scope of life experience," she said. "True, but not conclusive," Catherine replied. "He's rebuilding his life after a major catastrophe. Bad time to be introducing new factors." "Or the best time," Catherine pointed out. "I work for him," Sara noted. "Not directly." "It's still probably inappropriate." "Yeah, it's a tough call," Catherine agreed. "We come from completely different worlds." "Undeniable." "I don't mean just in species terms." "Ah," said Catherine, somehow fitting into the one sound (not even really a syllable) the meaning, "I am partially enlightened, but please go on." "Where's the common ground?" Sara asked rhetorically. Catherine smiled. "Figuring that out is half the fun." "What's the other half?" The blonde's smile became a bit of a smirk. "Oh, you'll find out if you get that far," she said. Sara coughed, then shook her head again and went on, "And then there -is- the whole... species thing." "Certainly a factor," Catherine conceded. "But should it be?" Sara wondered. "I can't... " She trailed off, then said with sudden vehemence, "I'm not a racist asshole like Vincent." Catherine glanced at her. "Nobody said you were," she said. "Most of my friends are human," Sara went on. Then, snorting wryly, she took in the room with a small gesture and added, "Hell, most of my friends are -here-. I just... Wasn't my thing. At least I didn't think so. But... " She trailed off again, unsure how to put into words what she was feeling. Catherine shrugged. "Hey, you like what you like," she said. "I knew a girl once who would only date men under five-ten. It wasn't that she hated tall guys or anything. She just never met one who turned her on." She chuckled nostalgically and added in a wry undertone, "(Until she met Zoner... )" Sara slid her an I-don't-know-whether-to-believe-you look for second, then returned her attention to the pool game. "Have you ever dated a non-human?" "Maybe." "Now who's being evasive?" Sara asked wryly. "We're not talking about me," Catherine said. Then she abandoned the analytical pose, turned to face her Salusian colleague, and told her, "You know, the funny thing is, I had a conversation a few months ago with someone who's a lot like you. Trying to look too many steps ahead. Held back by the worst-case scenario. And you know what?" Sara turned to look her in the eye. "What?" Catherine smiled. "Life's too short for that, Sara." She glanced significantly at Gryphon (he was glowering at the cue ball, which had somehow ended up tucked into a corner behind two colored balls, almost inaccessible and hovering on the verge of a scratch), then turned her eyes back to Sara and added, "Even if you might live forever." Sara gazed thoughtfully at her, at a loss for words. Catherine held her gaze for a second, then the game ended with a deft play by Grissom and a round of cheers, and she turned and hailed the men around the table. "Hey, boys! Who wants to go downstairs with me? I'm curious what kind of talent they've been able to get in this place since the best in the business retired." Greg perked up like a prairie dog. "Subscribe!" And so they went through the double doors, bought their tokens, went through the turnstiles, and rode the wooden escalator to the Underground - even Grissom, to Sara's renewed mild bafflement - and left Gryphon and Sara alone with the pool table. They looked each other for a second, both a little disoriented by the sudden silence and solitude, and then did what people did when they found themselves alone with a pool table. Sara racked; Gryphon fed the jukebox and hit the big red 'random' button. /* Barenaked Ladies "Falling for the First Time" _Disc One_ */ "Listen," Sara said. She paused to break, watched the balls rattle around the table and the 3 go down, then went on, "There's some stuff we need to talk about? But tonight's not the night for it." "I agree," Gryphon replied. "Both parts. Are we still on for this weekend?" She sank the 7, watched the cue ball roll to a halt, then looked at him and nodded. "Yeah. That'd be perfect." "OK," he replied equably. "In the meantime... " Sara said, leaning over the table and pocketing the 1, "... I don't want you to get the wrong idea, but... " He gave her a curious look. "Go ahead." She paced around the end of the table, looked over the way the balls lay, then straightened and asked him, "You mind if I come over to your place when we leave? I just... don't feel like going back and... rattling around my apartment all alone. Not tonight." Gryphon smiled. He knew what she meant. He lived alone a lot of the time, especially now that his children were mostly gone, and most of the time he preferred it - but there were times when it was just nice to know that there was someone else in the building, someone else in your world. "No problem," he said. "You're sure?" "'Course." "OK." Sara felt like she should probably say something more than just that, but she couldn't think of anything that seemed appropriate, so she ended up adding a bit lamely, "Well... OK." Then she bent, lined up, and took her shot - and missed the corner pocket by almost a full inch. "Well," she observed wryly, "I just blew -that- completely. Your shot." The Underground expedition returned an hour later to find them sitting in a couple of the armchairs at the far end of the pool room, talking - although what they were talking about was something most of the others would never know, since they abandoned the conversation as soon as their comrades returned. They all called it a night not long after that, drifting into the parking lot with something of the manner of people leaving a party they were sad to see end. "Benjamin," said Grissom with a smile, "I think this was exactly what we all needed. On behalf of my department: thank you." The CSIs broke into a round of applause; Gryphon held up his hands, a broad grin on his face, and when they'd quieted down he replied, "Not a bit of it, Gil. Anyway, it's all coming out of your training budget." They all had a good laugh at that, then started drifting toward their vehicles, saying their goodnights. If anyone noticed that Sara had arrived with Grissom but left with the Chief, nobody thought it worth remarking about, although a bit of a private little smile touched Catherine's lips. Nick was just about to ask Warrick if he could get a ride back to HQ for his car when a sleek, gleaming black motorcycle swept around the corner into the parking lot. Nick, being Nick, paused to check out the bike and its rider, and as it drew nearer he could see that both were worth checking out. He'd never seen a Yamazaki Razor turbine racer in person before, and the girl - unmistakably a girl - riding it did some nice things to an armored racing suit. She stopped in front of him, put one booted foot down, pulled off her helmet, and shook out her long, wavy red hair. "Hey, crimestopper," said Barbara Gordon with a grin. "Need a lift?" He blinked at her, then recovered and put on one of his better smiles. "Sergeant Gordon, fancy meeting you here." A movement caught Nick's eye; he glanced past Barbara to see Greg Sanders partway across the parking lot, just about to climb into Warrick's Tahoe. The Dantrovian was holding up his cell phone and waggling it with a huge grin on his face. The message was clear: You owe me, frat boy. Nick acknowledged the debt with a smiling nod, then turned his attention back to the detective in front of him as she said, "This late, you can call me Barb." "You -are- up late for somebody with a real job," Nick observed. "I've always been a night person," she said, then laughed and added, "In college, after my friends found out I'm from Kane's, they called me Batgirl. Jump on - I'll buy you that coffee I owe you. If you're still up for it?" Nick's grin widened. "Absolutely." Catherine and Grissom stood next to the supervisor's vehicle and watched as first Warrick and Greg, then Barbara and Nick, left the lot. "Do you need a ride, Catherine?" Grissom asked. She opened her mouth to say yes, but as she did, a vehicle's lights came on in the next row of parking spaces over, and the about-to-talk expression became a grin. "Guess not," she said. She clasped his shoulder briefly. "Thanks, though. Good night, Gil." He smiled. "Good night, Catherine. See you tomorrow." "If you're lucky," Catherine tossed back over her shoulder with a laugh as she sauntered across the parking row. Grissom chuckled, climbed into his Tahoe, and drove off. "What are you still doing here?" Catherine asked Hot Shot as she slid behind the wheel. "Don't you Autobots ever -work-?" Hot Shot's face appeared on his viewcom panel. "My hours are flexible," he said. "You want a ride home?" Catherine bit her bottom lip thoughtfully. "I guess." "You don't seem convinced." "Well... it -is- 3:30," she said, in the tone of a person trying to convince herself to Do the Right Thing and not really succeeding. Hot Shot, being an Autobot and thus an upstanding defender of justice and right, knew that the path of his duty lay clear. He popped open a compartment on his instrument panel, just below the viewcom screen, and said, "I've got a fresh interface cable... " Catherine raised an eyebrow and gave his virtual image a speculative little smile. /* The Eagles "Take It Easy" _Eagles_ */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited Well I'm runnin' down the road presented Trying to loosen my load UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES I got seven women on my mind FUTURE IMPERFECT Four that want to own me Two that want to stone me CSI: NEW AVALON One says she's a friend of mine [102/103] Parallel Lines Take it easy The Cast Take it easy (in order of appearance) Don't let the sound of your own wheels Morgan deKalb Drive you crazy Gil Grissom Lighten up while you still can Dick Grayson Don't even try to understand Jim Brass Just find a place to make your stand Hot Shot And take it easy Catherine Willows Nick Stokes Well I'm standin' on a corner Warrick Brown In Winslow, Arizona Sara Sidle And such a fine sight to see Ray O'Riley It's a girl my Lord Barbara Gordon In a flatbed Ford Albert Robbins, M.D. Slowin' down to take a look at me Devax Carleg Graig tz'An Daarst Come on baby Benjamin D. Hutchins Don't say maybe Raven I gotta know if your sweet love Melissa O'Brien Is gonna save me David Phillips, M.D. We may lose and we may win Morris LaChance But we will never be here again Brian Mobley So open up I'm climbin' in Vasseck Kelshar To take it easy Thomas Boothroyd Adam Savage Well I'm runnin' down the road Jamie Hyneman Trying to loosen my load Balzar Olmeyer Got a world of trouble on my mind Vision Lookin' for a lover Bobby Dawson Who won't blow my cover Vincent Hayg'n She's so hard to find Steve Rogers Geoffrey Depew Take it easy Karn Helard Take it easy Jesla Tadeya Don't let the sound of your own wheels Koriand'r Make you crazy Luornu Durgo Come on baby Teskar Shalketh Don't say maybe I gotta know if your sweet love Director/Producer Is gonna save me Benjamin D. Hutchins Oh we got it easy 2nd Unit Director We oughta take it easy Chad Collier Foley Janice Barlow Chris Pinard Lineup The Usual Suspects "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" created by Anthony E. Zuiker (CBS, Thursdays at 9) The night shift will return Sara Sidle finished buttoning her pajama jacket - not really her style, these, but they were here already, and she'd only thought to grab her toothbrush and a change of clothes for tomorrow when they stopped by her apartment - and regarded herself in the mirror for a few moments. Her face looked back at her, solemn and composed. It was smooth-skinned and lacked a muzzle, and it was flanked by a pair of rounded, mostly-immobile ears that lay flat against the sides of her head. Except for her large, dark eyes and the furry triangles of her primary ears, it was the face of an alien - what Sara would have looked like, presumably, if she had been born an Earthwoman and not a Salusian. But - - and this was something the likes of Vincent Hayg'n would probably never understand - - it was her face, all the same. She smiled and, without turning, spoke to the non-Salusian who waited on the bed behind her. "I want you to know this isn't like me," she said wryly. "It's been a strange, strange week. Last night I slept with Cath - well, no, not like THAT - and now this." She chuckled and turned around. "And you'd better not steal the covers like she does, understand?" she said sternly. Wolfgang, the Beagle of the Lens, tilted his head inquisitively, then gave a single muted "wurf" of acknowledgement. Sara nodded. "OK," she said. "Long as we've got that straight." Then she climbed into bed, snuggled down with the Lenshound, and put out the light. E P U (colour) 2004