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T here mighta been a time when I hated bein’ a Mod.

Maybe while I was in that series of dumping grounds on Paggen. Maybe during my first month in SAWL while I was getting hazed like every other new recruit. But those times have always been brief.

Mostly I’ve appreciated the genetic fuckery my parents passed on to me; I would have modified myself even more heavily if it had been allowed in SAWL.

A direct, permanent link to the hyper-net would’ve come in all kinds of useful over the years.

But those kinds of modifications are banned in the military, just like they are in the Core System.

Makes the grunts too vulnerable to outside interference, the heads said. Too bad, I would have liked a socket.

Without one, I patch in to Mother Jo through the eskey built into the skullcap.

It’s a clumsy, clunky interface, dependent on voice commands.

Still better than a public patch, where I’d have to be careful to cover my tracks to avoid leaving a blazing trail across the K-net.

Unlike Chiara, I’m not a public face of Tyng Enterprises, and I don’t want to be.

The entry menu overlays my darkened surroundings like a digital veil, growing more solid as I work through the Tyng-net’s security toward the AI.

By the time Mother Jo’s face appears, that’s all I see.

I can still feel Kez’s warm weight against me.

The solid press of the couch beneath me.

But my sight is taken up by Mother Jo’s warm eyes and round, brown, wrinkly face.

Why their designers gave the AIs faces, I’ll never know.

Must give the AI a complex to look like an octogenarian.

Or maybe the AI doesn’t care. Mother Jo smiles at me but grows somber when I begin giving her security handshakes.

I work my way up to the highest level. “Come live with me and be my love,” I tell her in a whisper, to avoid waking Kez.

“And we will some new pleasures prove,” Mother Jo responds, her black eyes like wormholes.

“Of golden sands and crystal brooks,” I say.

“With silken lines and silver hooks,” she finishes.

That’s all I can remember of the poem, but it’s enough. The likelihood that even those goggle-eyed little creepers in R-and-D could break my voice and passcode security is forty billion to one, according to Mother Jo. ‘Specially since I change the sequence every week. I’ll take those odds.

“Weapons inventory, Tyng Tower,” I say.

A green display immediately scrolls beside Mother Jo’s face. It’s a long inventory. Longer than I thought, given the size of the armory. “Search, Gaudde mag-gun,” I tell her.

I keep the search command simple. Mother Jo is not a real AI.

She hasn’t achieved true sentience, and what little independence she has is limited by her TYE.

Her physical systems are hard-wired into some poor fucker who roams around Tyng Tower in his skivvies late at night.

Kez and I stumbled on him one night after a quickie in my office.

Surprised the hell out of all of us. Particularly when Mother Jo’s voice came out of his mouth.

Having her systems tied to a human mind – one that ain’t got all its marbles – keeps Mother Jo from becoming truly free.

Everyone knows what happens when an AI gets free. You get Tundra’s Rebellion, the day the hypernet went dark. You get Phogath. A million dead and food shortages for a year throughout the Core. You get Tje Dhos. So the AIs are TYED, and the sheep never look up.

“No entries found,” she tells me.

Maybe the search was too specific. “Search, mag-gun.”

“No entries found,” she repeats.

I rub my chin with the hand I don’t have wrapped around Kez. Try again. “Search, magnetic disruption weapon,” I say.

“Three found,” she responds and a short list pops up. Spectra MRG. Probably a newer model than what I used in SAWL. The specs look pretty much the same, though.

“Locate, Spectra MRG,” I tell her.

“Two, Tyng Tower, Hemos City. One location unknown.”

I fucking knew it. “Unknown? Query.”

“Querying,” she tells me. Her brow creases along well-worn lines. AI emoting. “Spectra MRG serial number 6097-4414-863 released to Security Xec Zatlan on twenty-eight-four-twenty-one. Authorization, Sandringham Snow.”

That was three days ago, and I’m pretty fucking sure I did not authorize it. “Locate, Security Xec Zatlan.”

“Locating,” she says. I know Tyng employees have trackers implanted, because the Tyngaling doc tried to stick one in my arm. “Security Xec Zatlan found.” And then she gives me a location less than fifty meters from where I’m sitting.

Fuck. “Employee identification image, Security Xec Zatlan.”

A man’s face overlays Mother Jo’s. He looks vaguely familiar.

I’ve probably met him during security briefings, but he’s not high enough up the Tyng ladder for me to know his name.

The blond hair, caught up in a regulation queue for his ID vid is plenty recognizable, though.

It was floating around in the current when I last saw it.

“Terminate employment, Security Xec Zatlan,” I tell Mother Jo. Once his employment is terminated, the tracker will go dead. That’ll prevent any do-gooder from finding him on my shock net. “ Family?”

“Contracted. Two registered offspring.”

Fuck. “Reassign. Security Xec Zatlan killed in line of duty. Full family benefits.”

“Noted,” Mother Jo tells me.

“Query, Spectra MRG activation key.” Some of the weapons in SAWL were keyed to the user’s bioprint. So the weapon wouldn’t work if it fell into civvy hands.

“Confirmed. Authorization Sandringham Snow.”

Gotcha fucker. “Revoke authorization, Spectra MRG 6097-4414-863.” That’s one mag-gun that will be going dead in someone’s mangy paws.

“Authorization revoked,” Mother Jo confirms.

One problem down. Now to figure out who really authorized the weapon that eventually ended up in Dom Fox’s pink paws, since it sure as hell wasn’t me. “List, log ins Tyng-net, Sandringham Snow.”

Mother Jo does and I read through them carefully. Nothing unusual. No off-hours log ins while I was sleeping, or on the Clouds, or unconscious. They’re all at times when I was either in the Tower or logging in from the Warren or my place by the river. Someone’s covered their tracks.

But the pool of suspects can’t be too deep. Sure, most of the Tyngalings know who I am, but those are long fucking odds on breaking my encryption. No, it’s someone close. Someone in our inner circle. And I still don’t know who it is.

So I set a trap.

“Mother Jo, increase authorization, security commands level three and above. Password, HH-KK. No prompt. Ten second delay. On failure to authorize, notify Spinning Infinity , ship code SI2662. Confirm.”

“Confirmed,” Mother Jo acknowledges.

Tough for someone to crack security they don’t know about.

“Mother Jo,” I say. “We got a traitor in our house.”

“Yes, sir,” she says.

I’m not sure if she thinks there’s a traitor, or if she’s just agreeing with me because she’s programmed to. Either way, I decide to make it the AI’s problem, too.

“Find him for me.”

I wake Kez with twenty minutes to spare.

Neither of us is dressed, and she may want a few minutes to wake up before we climb on my trike and head out to her plate-picking appointment.

I don’t tell her any of what I’ve been thinking about while she’s been asleep.

She wakes up with a smile on her face; it doesn’t fade as we dress.

She holds my hand as we walk to my trike, humming to herself.

She’s happy. And I want her to savor that happiness, without having to think about what I’m about to do to her friend, or the potential horde of people conspiring to murder her.

So I don’t object when she sticks her hand down my pants as I drive.

And I take her helmet with a smile when I drop her off at the Crackle planner’s, where Chi and Mike are waiting for her.

I brush her bangs back from her face, agree to meet back at Tyng Tower at fourteen-hundred, and give her a deep, sweet kiss before I say goodbye.

It’s only in my rear-viewie that I see her smile fade, and pain etch lines around her eyes, as she watches me drive away, to kill her friend.

I am a hunter of men. I am the strangled cry in the night.

Top read us that shit in AHOS, the advanced training they gave my unit third year in, to make us more efficient killers.

While we were spinning around in zero-gee, trying to gut each other while trying not to puke into our breathers, he was standing outside the training pod, reading to us.

Anti-distraction training , he called it.

I didn’t listen closely. I wasn’t supposed to, and poetry’s not my thing.

Unless it’s the poetry of movement. The sonnet Kez’s ass makes as she walks, for example.

That’s poetry. The rest is shit and air.

But I’ve found over the years that a lot of it has stuck with me .

I am a hunter of men.

I haven’t hunted in a long time. Three and a half years.

Since I hunted down Nello and the guards who killed Mouse.

That’s the last time I felt this cold rage.

The desire to rip the life from someone who has taken away what’s mine.

Who took the warm, sweet-smelling, golden-skinned woman I’d fucked so satisfactorily that morning and turned her into a cold, unmoving, piss-stinking lump of torn skin and broken bone.

Remembering the Bale Brothers’ plans to do the same thing to Kez, remembering that Duncan gave them the means to do it, fills me with an identical icy fury.

I didn’t feel this way when I went after the Bale boys.

But then, I didn’t know them. Not the way I know Duncan.

I’ve eaten with him, played Vizzion with him, joined him in ribbing Gig and Ape and Kez about the small things that people who live with each other joke about.

And all that time he was giving our enemies information that could have taken Kez away from me.