Rain, anyway. At SiteCrime, all the talk was war. The Nastic – allies for a day or two some time in the middle 2400s, but now in possession of new physics and a hybrid cosmology that trumped the rest – were moving out of bases in Delta Carinae. Rumour said that EMC had a new best buy in its arsenal, even now being R&D’d from alien blueprints on a secret research asteroid in the very shadow of the Tract. No one knew what it was. They called it the ‘field weapon’ or the ‘non-Abelian’ weapon. Meanwhile, Lens Aschemann’s ghost hung in a corner on the fifth floor. I don’t pity the dead, the assistant thought, not when they persist like this. Two floors down it was common knowledge: she would be helpless without him. One floor up they said she had no personality. What the assistant thought of these opinions, if she knew, went unrecorded. She did her work. She watched Toni Reno and his loader fade to zero. As Epstein the thin cop put it, there was never a point at which you could safely say, ‘They’re gone’, but after ten days only a sketch remained.
