DIRTY PAIR (See also, Chief Gooley, Kei, the Lovely Angel, 
Lovely Angels, Mughi, Nolandia, Project Eden, Yuri)

...Many of the Dirty Pair's missions remain classified to this 
day.  One of those missions, however, is simultaneously highly 
classified, and highly discussed, since the WWWA and the 
Government have both suppressed all official records, but it had 
highly public consequences.  It started innocuously enough.  Of 
course, with the Dirty Pair, it always STARTED innocently.  It 
was said of the Pair that they could cause reactors to explode 
just by waving at someone while driving down the street.  Thus 
it was that Chief Gooley was rather reluctant to grant them the 
vacation time they wanted...

Galactic Encyclopedia, 117th Edition, 1051 FE, Terminus.


Chief Gooley shook his head.  "No.  Request for vacation 
time is denied.  We simply cannot afford to pay for the damages 
you two cause every time you go on vacation.  Especially not 
when you're wanting to take your vacation on Makeen.  Makeen 
is VERY wary of its independence, and sending uninvited 
WWWA agents there could provoke another incident.  
ESPECIALLY you two."

Kei leaned forward and put her hands on the desk.  "We 
haven't had any vacation time in six months!  And we spent the 
last three freezing our asses off on Giri IV!  We're due a month's 
vacation, and we WILL HAVE IT!"

"N. O." he replied.  "Would you like it in sign language, 
too?"

"But it's going to be Mughi's birthday soon, and that's 
where he's from!  We wanted to take him home to see his family 
and everything," Kei said.

"Mughi doesn't HAVE a family," Chief Gooley said.  "He's 
a genetically engineered bioweapon.  He was grown in a test 
tube in a laboratory.  If he has any family at all, you're it."  
Which would explain a few things, he thought.  He drummed his 
fingers on the table and said, "I'd be willing to let him go by 
himself.  I know he wouldn't cause a diplomatic incident, but 
there's no way I'm going to let you go there right now.  
Especially not when..."  He suddenly clammed up.  "Forget it."

Kei cocked an eyebrow.  "Is there some sort of hanky-
panky going on?"

"No, no, no," Chief Gooley said.  "Certainly not."

Yuri laughed.  "C'mon, you can tell us."  

"No, no, no.  Nothing is going on.  Nothing."  He was 
about as convincing as a cat trying to pretend it didn't like milk, 
fish, or birds. 

 	"Well, can we take a vacation somewhere else?"  Yuri 
asked.  "We'd really rather go to Makeen, but if we can't have 
Makeen..."

"I'll feed your request into the Computer, and see what it 
thinks," Chief Gooley said.  He slid his keyboard out of his desk 
and quickly punched in the request.  There was a few second 
pause, and then his jaw dropped.  "I'd think you'd tampered with 
the system somehow...but that's impossible."

Yuri leaned forward.  "It says we can go to Makeen?"

He slumped in defeat.  "Yes.  I'm supposed to give you a 
month off and let you go wherever you want that isn't actually in 
a state of war.  Except Dorea."

Kei blinked.  "Why not Dorea?"  She'd been thinking about 
that world if the Chief had kept up with forbidding them to go to 
Makeen.  It was a pleasure planet, one of the best vacation sites 
in the galaxy.  

"Who knows?  This thing is the most complex Computer 
ever built with the most powerful AI of all time.  It's been 
improving itself for over fifty years.  I sometimes think it just 
keeps us around because it can't go anywhere itself."  He 
shrugged.  "Let's see what it says."  He typed in a clarification 
request and read it.  "The Doreans have declared it illegal for 
you to visit their planet.  The punishment is death repeatedly by 
slow torture."

"..."  Kei boggled.

Yuri sighed.  "Makeen hasn't passed any laws specifically 
to deal with us, have they?"

The Chief checked.  "Nope."

"Makeen it is, then," Kei said.  "See you in a month, 
Chief!"

As they left, the Chief prayed he wouldn't hear from them 
for a month.  He didn't believe that for a second.

*****************

Random Elements
Chapter 1: Welcome to Makeen

A Dirty Pair Story

By

John Biles


*****************

In the year 953 FE, ninety five percent of the inhabited 
worlds of the Milky Way Galaxy were united under one 
government.  That government was as democratic as any 
organization encompassing quadrillions of humans was capable 
of being.  It had a special agency, known as the Worlds Work 
Welfare Association, which did a million different things, some 
of them even well, but which was most noted for its 
Troubleshooters.  The Troubleshooters were a combination of 
an interplanetary police force, business consultants, repairmen, 
and spies, often all of the above at the same time.  As police 
forces always are, it was both loved and hated by all those 
within the great Terminus Federation.

The Federation took its official name from its capital, 
Terminus, the world which had provided the seed from which it 
had grown, beginning with the creation of the Galactic 
Encyclopedia Project in the last years of the now long defunct 
Galactic Empire.  As the Empire had sunk under its own weight 
and collapsed, it had grown, exploiting its superior base of 
knowledge to dominate its neighbors first economically, and 
then politically, until now virtually all of the Galaxy had come 
into the Federation, first as trading partners, then as Associate 
Governments, and then as full members of the Federation, 
though Terminus remained 'First Among Equals'.  

By this point, only a few worlds remained completely 
independent of the Terminus Federation, although a few worlds 
on the galactic scale seems huge to the uninitiated.  A little over 
a million worlds remained outside the Federation.  Given that 
the Federation encompassed twenty four million inhabited 
worlds, this made them marginal on the Galactic scale.  They 
were known as the 'Holdouts' informally, grouped into dozens of 
leagues, republics, federations, kingdoms, empires, and 
confederations.  A quarter of them were worlds which had 
regressed to pre-space flight technology due to damages caused 
by the wars which had wracked the Galaxy since the beginning 
of the collapse of the Galactic empire nine hundred and fifty 
years ago.

The Holdout Worlds had only one thing in common to all 
of them.  Pride.  It was vastly more advantageous to be a 
member of the Terminus Federation than to be outside it, since it 
possessed better technology, better trade networks, and 
represented the future instead of the past.  Only the proudest 
worlds held out now, and even they knew they were living on 
sufferance, that the Terminus Federation could conquer them 
whenever it liked.  That was not the way the Federation 
operated, however.  It snarled you in the grip of its economy and 
slowly sucked you in once you couldn't live without them.

To stay independent and prosper, a world needed two 
things.  One, it needed to have enough pride to resist the 
obvious benefits of joining the Federation, or as it was more 
commonly called the 'Foundation', for all remembered how it 
had essentially begun as a colony to support the Encyclopedia 
Galactica Foundation, which was still producing yearly editions 
of the Encyclopedia.  Secondly, it needed products that it could 
supply more effectively than other worlds, especially more 
effectively than the Foundation.

Not many worlds could meet the second requirement.  It 
was like a flea trying to compete with an elephant at producing 
ivory.  Makeen, however, was one of the few prosperous 
Holdout Worlds because it DID have a viable product.  In fact, 
it had several.  It was the only world outside the Foundation to 
be able to economically produce gravitic ships.  Many of the 
Holdout Worlds had learned the secrets of the gravitic drive 
over the years, but most couldn't produce them cheaply and 
effectively enough to compete with the Foundation.  Makeen 
could.  

Makeen also benefited from not being a one trick pony.  
Makeen had been a center of biological research for untold 
millennia.  This paid off in several ways for its inhabitants.  
They were among the healthiest people in the Galaxy and had 
some of the best doctors and medical care.  They grew 
supercrops with almost unbelievable yields.  And in the last few 
centuries, they had begun to produce highly enhanced lifeforms 
like Mughi.  

While many of these lifeforms were designed for combat, 
they also had a popular line of 'animal companions', highly loyal 
talking pets with human level intelligence.  The morality of 
these creations remained a fiercely debated topic, but they were 
sufficiently popular that desire tended to squelch guilt.  

Mughi himself came from an earlier 'model'; he had human 
level intelligence, but couldn't talk in human speech, though he 
could make himself understood somewhat through charades, if it 
came down to it.  He was smart enough to pilot a spaceship, in 
fact, and to calculate the coordinates for hyperspatial jumps, 
which was more than the talking ones usually could do.

When the Lovely Angel popped out of hyperspace two days 
flight from Makeen, Mughi was indeed doing the piloting, while 
Kei and Yuri both napped.  Hyperjump drives had a major 
advantage: you could go almost anywhere in the universe in 
about ten seconds once you calculated the coordinates.  They 
had a major disadvantage: all of those points had to be far from 
a major gravity source, or you would end up embedded in it.  
The result was that you jumped from the fringe of one system to 
the fringe of another, then spent anywhere from a day to a week 
cruising inwards to your destination, depending on the speed of 
your ship and how far into the system you were going.

Makeen was the second of fifteen planets, so they had a 
goodly ways to go.  The Lovely Angel was a gravitic ship, 
however, so they would make good time.  Gravitic ships also 
had the advantage of not causing nausea during a jump, which 
had been the bane of many a novice space traveller who lost his 
lunch after his first hyperspatial trip.  

Mughi wouldn't have been bothered anyway.  He had been 
designed to operate both inside space ships and on the ground; 
he was virtually immune to motion sickness of any kind, as well 
as adapting quickly to changes in gravity, or its lack, although 
he had rarely experienced zero-gravity.  

He was excited, although he lacked a good way to express 
it, other than purring.  He had not seen his homeworld since he 
had left it two years ago.  Indeed, he hadn't really seen much of 
it when he was there, growing up in a laboratory/training 
complex, learning to fight and pilot ships.  He had thought about 
visiting it, but everyone he remembered was likely to be gone, 
scattered across hundreds of worlds, aiding whoever they had 
been sold to; he was glad he had gone to the WWWA, who were 
relatively kind masters; many warcats ended up treated almost as 
badly by their owners as by the people they fought.

Several ships drifted past him, but he ignored them; they 
were just large passenger ships heading out beyond the 
outermost gas giant in order to be able to Jump.  He could see 
they had old-style microfusion drives; most large passenger 
vessels did, although it was likely that soon the gravitic drive 
would replace the old microfusion drives completely.  The new 
drives out the old, but it does so slowly and patchily.  He did 
pause to wonder what they would think if they knew a warcat 
was piloting the ship or that the Lovely Angels were on board.  
They'd probably try to Jump immediately and destroy 
themselves or end up in the Andromeda galaxy, he thought.

He purred a little more loudly, his closest approximation of 
a laugh, then settled back to let the autopilot carry them in, 
though he kept an eye on everything just to be sure; he trusted 
himself over a machine any day; every warcat did.

**************

The Pride of Sayshell was a beat up piece of junk, and even 
its captain, Mari Haskell, would have admitted it.  Whoever had 
named it a good hundred years ago had obviously suffered 
delusions of grandeur, or possibly Sayshell had simply been 
hard up at the time.  She knew little of history, so the truth 
would remain a mystery to her.  Still, it held together, somehow, 
and the parts were cheap, though growing harder to find.  

Bulk passenger flights were her business, transporting 
people back and forth from Makeen to Sayshell; the amount of 
travel between the two amazed her sometimes, although she 
supposed every prosperous world had large amounts of travel to 
other worlds, and both Makeen and Sayshell were prosperous.  
The volume of travel had grown noticeably in the last few 
months, mostly businessmen, which surprised her, since they 
usually flew on faster ships.  It took a good week and a day for 
the Pride to lumber from Makeen to the edge of its system, and 
another four for it to slog across the Sayshell system to Sayshell 
proper.  

She watched the small personal gravitic ship on her 
monitor.  Usually, she ignored other ships, except to avoid them, 
but she had long dreamed of owning a ship like that.  It wasn't 
likely her dream would ever come true, but it didn't hurt to 
fantasize a little.   Probably some rich kids out tooling about for 
fun, or coming home for a visit from college, she thought, and 
wasted a few seconds on envy.

She sent a recognition pulse from curiosity, just to see 
where it was from.  The signal bounced back that it was the 
Lovely Angel, registered to the WWWA.  She blinked in 
surprise.  Surely the Makeen wouldn't ask the WWWA for help. 
 Unless something really bad had happened, anyway.  The 
Makeen were too proud to ask for help from the Foundation; she 
couldn't understand why.  They'd benefit from joining us, she 
thought.  The captain was a proud citizen of the Terminus 
Federation herself, as was most of her crew.

"Captain, we have a problem," the Social Director said over 
the intercom.  "Two of our passengers are drunk and having a 
brawl.  Permission to use the Neuronic Whip?"

She frowned.  This happened every so often; it was a 
danger of serving drinks on a flight.  If you didn't do it, you lost 
business.  If you did do it...  "Are they using weapons?"

"No."

"Then don't use the Whip.  Get Cody and Hari to suppress 
them.  We can't afford another lawsuit."  That woman's just a 
little too eager to use that thing, she thought.  I need to see about 
getting another Social Director...why I hired this nutcase, I'll 
never know.  She actually did know; Jezi Iyu worked cheap and 
was usually quite effective at keeping the passengers entertained 
and out of trouble for the nearly two weeks of flight.  

Unfortunately, she was either easily panicked, or mildly 
sadistic.  Mari knew what being hit by a neuronic whip was like. 
 It basically triggered all your pain nerve endings 
simultaneously.  And most of the other ones too.  If the intensity 
was high enough, it could knock someone out from the pain, or 
even kill them if they didn't handle the shock well, although 
deaths were very rare.  It was a fascinating weapon in its own 
way, thousands of years old, yet no defense had ever been 
created against it that wasn't ridiculously expensive.  Perhaps if 
man-portable force fields ever panned out, but until then, it was 
a highly effective weapon...if your opponent got within ten feet, 
you aimed well, and you didn't accidentally whip yourself, 
which was how Mari had learned what it felt like.

"Will do, Captain."

************

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
SHIP IDENTIFICATION JOB #578493028-B.
NAME: Lovely Angel
REGISTRATION NUMBER: WWWA-56784
OWNER: WWWA
TYPE: Gravitic Model #34
RECOMMENDATION: Security Flag, Code Green
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

************

"State your name."  Clerk Andi Rupov was short, skinny, 
dark haired, dark skinned, dark eyed, and bored out of his mind. 
 Manning an entry station in orbit around a planet paid well, but 
was long and boring, involving harassing innocent tourists most 
of the time, because if you didn't harass everyone, you'd miss the 
.001% who were smugglers, madmen, or spies.  

"Kei."  Kei sighed.  "Federation ID number 56734-BJX-
34672.  Place of birth, Andruil City, Nhioghi.  You need 
anything else?"

"Kei what?"  The guard asked.  "State your last name."

"It's classified," she said, sighing.  Inside the Terminus 
Federation, this wasn't a problem; she could just flash her 
WWWA badge and move on, but outside it, she had trouble 
every time she had to go through customs.  "To protect our 
families from possible retaliation."

Andi muttered something about people watching Secret 
Agent Ixi on hypervision too much.  He typed away at his 
computer.  "Step over to the retinal scanner."

Kei frowned; she hated them, mostly because of a 
hypervision show she'd seen where the scanner had been 
replaced with a high power laser.  The other reason was that you 
felt disoriented for a few minutes afterwards, and in her line of 
work, you couldn't afford to be disoriented.  "Do  I have to?"

"Yes, Agent Ixi.  We don't have your retinal scan on file, 
and if you blow up something while tracking down the forces of 
IMP, this will help us identify who you are."  He went over to 
activate the scanner, which was simply a big box with a 
peephole and a keyboard.  

Yuri giggled.  "So, Agent Ixi, where do you think IMP's 
agents will be hiding this time?"

"Oh shut up!"  She put her eye to the tiny hole, then 
resisted the urge to close it as light bored into it and took a 
picture of it in detail.  "You're next, Gumpy."

Gumpy was the rubbery blue host of a popular children's 
show, with long blue hair, a big heart, and a tiny brain.  Kei and 
Yuri had both grown up watching this show, but Yuri didn't like 
to be reminded of it, though Kei wasn't sure why.

"I am NOT GUMPY!!!!"

Kei giggled, then stepped away from the scanner, 
immediately tripping and falling down.  "I HATE these things!"

"Entry approved," the clerk said, stamping a piece of paper. 
 "Next."

**************

Data Record #348547484-AA0-3457
Date of Transmission: 3-15-21892 SY
BTXY-4567: Identity confirmed.
BTXY-21: Stated purpose of visit?
BTXY-4567: Vacation.
BTXY-21: Likelihood of truth of previous statement?
BTXY-4567: 12%
BTXY-21: Assess threat level.
BTXY-4567: Insufficient data.
BTXY-21: Assess threat level if they become aware of our 
existence.
BTXY-4567: Gamma Level threat.  Team 'Lovely Angels' have 
a 100% success rate.  However, our resources are vastly 
superior, which downgrades the threat level from Omnicron.
BTXY-21: Said team has access to WWWA resources if 
necessary.  Compute.
BTXY-4567: Threat Level Omega.
BTXY-21: Arrange for them to be expelled from the planet.
BTXY-4567: Standard procedures state that...
BTXY-21: Termination would only alert their superiors they are 
on to something.  In addition, there is the small possibility that 
this is merely a coincidence.
BTXY-4567: Commencing computation of a method by which 
to expel them. [20 nanoseconds pass] Plan complete.  
BTXY-21: Transmit your plan to BTXY-235, then close this 
link.
BTXY-4567: Done. [hyperwave link closed]

****************

Kei flopped down on the nice plush hotel bed, bouncing 
slightly.  "This is GREAT!"  She sat up and started jumping up 
and down on the bed.  "Lots of bounce, just like I like it."

"If you break it, you're gonna pay for it," Yuri said, hanging 
up her clothing in the closet and starting to unpack.  "A whole 
month off.  We'll probably get bored by the end of it."

"Naah.  I got some brochures on this planet...there's a 
million things to do.  And most of it is pretty cheap.  All I'm 
gonna do tonight, though, is sleep."  She yawned.  "Then 
tomorrow, we run wild."

Mughi curled up in the corner and passed out; he was the 
one who had been doing most of the real work on the trip.  

"They've got an Imperial history museum here in Yanno 
City," Yuri said.  "I'm probably going to go see that in the 
morning.  There was a dynasty of Emperors from this world."

Kei leaped off the bed, nimbly landing by the 
clock/hyperwave receiver on a table across the room.  "Now 
THAT's bounce."  She began to fiddle with it through the 
stations, trying to find some decent music.  "Who cares about 
Imperial history? The empire's been dead for hundreds of years."

"It's a hobby," Yuri said defensively.  "Koucha was the 
home of a dynasty too, you know."

"They had a lot of dynasties, but they all died nastily," Kei 
said, spinning an idle finger around in a tight circle as she kept 
up the search with the other, pausing on a station playing 
polysymphonic triphasic Shala music, which had a fast beat and 
hard to understand lyrics.  "This okay with you?"  

"I guess," Yuri said.  She preferred Anacreonian Neo-
Synthie herself.  It drove Kei up the wall, unfortunately.  
"Knowing about the past is important to understanding the 
present and the future.  That's how Hari Seldon created the 
Seldon Plan, you know."

"Oh piffle.  The Seldon Plan is just propaganda by the 
government to make everyone else in the galaxy think the 
Terminus Federation taking over the Galaxy is predestined.  You 
can't REALLY predict history like that."

"What about the appearances by Seldon in the Hall of 
Records on Terminus?  How could he have prerecorded 
messages giving advice on how to deal with the Seldon Crises if 
he didn't have a way to predict the future?"

"I could fake those appearances if I felt like it," Kei said.  
"Besides, if HE could invent this method, why hasn't someone 
else?  Anything scientific can be invented by anyone, given 
enough time."  She headed over to the beverage dispenser; the 
room had its own vending machine built into the wall, faster 
than room service, but less versatile.  "But no one else has 
EVER duplicated it.  There's 40 quadrillion people; why hasn't 
someone else been smart enough to come up with it?"

Yuri had no answer to that; she'd never even really thought 
of it.  "If it's government propaganda, then why didn't the 
message match up during the crisis of the Mule, eh?"  The Mule 
had been a powerful mutant who had built a short lived empire 
around the planet Kalgan; he was the strongest mentallic in 
recorded history, able to turn even his most bitter enemies into 
loyal servants, and for a time, it had seemed that even the 
Foundation could not stand against him.  

But then, one day he had abandoned his course of 
conquest, and ruled quietly until his death shortly thereafter, for 
reasons still not understood.  While he had shaken the faith of 
the populace in the Seldon Plan, this turn of events had restored 
faith in it.  And faith it was, for no one in the Terminus 
Federation knew the secrets of psychohistory, at least as far as 
Kei and Yuri knew, though there were whispers of a 'Second 
Foundation', the guardians of the Seldon Plan, who kept the plan 
going, for one of the few things known of psychohistory was 
that it was based on probabilities, not certainties.  That was why 
Seldon Crises happened, turning points where the Plan could go 
off course if the wrong course was taken.

"Maybe the Mule influenced the people who fake it 
normally."

"All the way from Kalgan?  If he was that powerful, he 
could have just made everyone on Terminus bow down and 
worship him."

"There ain't no all-powerful Plan predicting MY actions," 
Kei said flatly.  "It's just a trick Seldon thought up and passed on 
to his followers who founded the Foundation.  And they 
convinced everyone else it was true because they won.  If 
Anacreon had sacked Terminus like they nearly did in its first 
few years, everyone would have forgotten the Seldon Plan by 
now."  She shrugged.  "Let's get some food, if you're done 
unpacking."

"Aren't you going to unpack?"

"Naah," Kei said.  "I can unpack when we get back.  You 
coming, Mughi?"

Mughi leaped up, always ready for food, and they went.

*************

"No, he has to go back to your room," the waiter said.  "We 
don't allow war machines in the dining room."

"Hey, he's not a war machine," Yuri said.  "He's just our 
little kitty."  She patted Mughi on the head, and he did his best 
to look innocent.

The hotel restaurant was quite nice, and deep down, Yuri 
knew the odds of them being allowed to keep him in there were 
rather small, but she had to try.  

"No pets either."  The waiter rolled his eyes and muttered 
something to himself.  He was tall and thin, with bright red hair 
and dark skin.  His brown eyes matched his simple brown and 
white uniform.  

"Sorry, Mughi.  We'll make sure to bring you some food," 
he said.

Mughi got up and slunk out, heading back to the room, 
while the waiter got Kei and Yuri a table.  "Is this one by the 
window acceptable?"

"It'll be fine," Kei said, picking up a menu.  "Hmm.  I don't 
recognize anything on this except the drinks."

"Most of the food items have traditional names from a now 
completely defunct ancient language," the waiter said.  
"Tradition has it that the language was named after a region of 
Earth."

"Named after a patch of ground?"  Kei asked.

Yuri whapped her on the head with her own menu.  "Earth. 
 The legendary world of origin of mankind."

"Oh, you mean Gaea," Kei said.  "That's what we called it 
back home.  And why do you call it a 'legend'?  You think the 
Cabbage fairy brought the first humans?"

"No!  It just...oh, forget it.  Can you tell us what this stuff 
is?"  Yuri asked.

Most of the dishes turned out to be salads of various kinds, 
pasta dishes, sometimes with meat, and a variety of kinds of 
marinated fish and meats.  The local wine proved to be quite 
good, though they tried to not drink too much of it while waiting 
for their meal.  After about five minutes, Kei pointed over to 
another table and said, "Those guys are eyeing us."

Yuri looked over at the two men.  One of them was a short, 
heavily muscled man with short black hair and pale skin with 
dark brown eyes, dressed in a nice blue suit.  The other was 
much thinner, of medium height with dusky skin and curly 
blond hair.  He was quite handsome, and wore tight pants and a 
'peasant' shirt, making him look faintly archaic.  He wore a long 
green cloak, pinned in place by a brightly colored badge of a 
yellow lightning bolt against a black background.  He was 
looking at them, and for a moment, their eyes met.  Yuri felt a 
faint jolt, almost as if she had been electrocuted and was unable 
to look away.  Her best efforts to fight off the urge to have a 
goofy grin failed, and a tiny rational part of her mind felt 
completely ridiculous.  
Kei whispered, "He'll notice if you stare, you know."  She 
took a good look at Yuri and sighed.  "Here we go again," she 
muttered.  

The man got up and sauntered over to their table.  "Ahh, I 
am rarely so blessed as to see two such lovely ladies here.  What 
brings you to Makeen?"

"We're on vacation," Kei said.

"Hi!  I'm Kei," Yuri said.  "I mean, I'm Yuri.  Nice to meet 
you."  She shook his hand and felt that tiny jolt again.  

"A pleasure to meet you as well," he said.  "My name is 
Antonio.  Antonio Delmarre."  He smiled and the light glinted 
off his teeth.  Kei tried to think of an excuse to draw her blaster 
and failed.  This guy is bad news, she thought.  He's probably 
going to flimflam Yuri for all her money.

Kei glanced over at the man's friend, who was lost in his 
food.  A briefcase with a retinal lock sat by the friend, stamped 
with a Streeling University logo.  Trantorian, she thought.  
Streeling was the most famous university in the Galaxy, not so 
much because it was good, but because of two things: it was the 
only university to survive the Sack of Trantor a good five 
hundred years ago, and because Hari Seldon had taught there.  
He must be from the Foundation like us, Kei thought.  Could be 
another tourist this guy is conning.

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Delmarre," Yuri said, still holding 
his hand, and fighting off the urge to do something foolish.  I 
can't believe I'm acting like this, she thought.  "Can you 
recommend any interesting places for us to visit during our 
trip?"

Kei and Yuri's food arrived seconds later, and he said, "I 
can think of many places, but I see your food is here, so I will let 
you eat.  But I would be happy to talk to you after you finish 
dining."  He smiled, let go of Yuri's hand, bowed, and went back 
to his table.

Yuri said, "We're in luck!"

I'm in Hell, Kei thought.  

***************

"Do you HAVE to hit on every woman you see?"  Thom 
Brannick asked Antonio later, when he finally came back from 
his post-dinner tourism advice to Kei and Yuri.  They were up in 
Thom's room, 605.  It was quite plush, better than Thom was 
used to on his miserable salary.  Being blacklisted by an old 
enemy back at Streeling University, Professor Horick, meant 
that he had gotten stuck with a job at Poshellion University on 
scenic Poshellion, approximately a million light-years from 
anything interesting.  It was like getting an engineering degree 
from Terminus University and then finding the only job you 
could get was fixing drone mining ships on the Galactic Rim.  
All he had to show for his expensive education was a briefcase 
with the university logo, which he still used since it was very 
sturdy, utterly secure, and got him more respect than his actual 
job usually did.

Poshellion did have some nice fringe benefits, like a perfect 
climate and cheap food, but still, Thom was glad to be off that 
planet for a while, even if Antonio's latest enthusiasm was 
probably a wild goose chase.  If it panned out, though, he would 
be the luckiest man alive...among ancient historians, anyway.  
His specialty was the pre-Imperial period of history.  It had been 
Antonio's specialty as well, which was how they had met at 
Streeling.

He still wasn't sure why Antonio had come all the way to 
Streeling to get a degree just to make his family's theme park 
more accurate.  Like most of the Holdout Worlds, Makeen took 
a great deal of pride in its past, and the Delmarre family ran a 
theme park modeled after what pre-Imperial Makeen had 
supposedly been like.  Thom was curious to see it, but he 
suspected that it wasn't very accurate; ancient history was a very 
difficult field due to the tendency of the old Emperors to 
periodically destroy or alter records to suit their liking.  Most 
worlds overly glorified themselves as well.

Not that Makeen didn't have reason to be proud.  It was the 
capital of a five hundred world federation, and one of the richest 
of the Holdout Worlds.  It also was one of the older worlds to be 
colonized, so old that any accurate record of where it had been 
colonized was lost.  A few scholars argued that it had been 
colonized from Earth itself.  He wasn't sure what the Makeen 
themselves thought.  

Antonio laughed.  "Only the pretty ones.  Besides, my 
family expects me to drum up business for our park, you know.  
Although I think the redhead doesn't like me."

Thom laughed.  "No threesome for you this time?"

"No such luck."

"They're coming to the park with us tomorrow," Antonio 
said.  "Perhaps you'll have more luck with the redhead than I."

She had been good-looking, Thom thought, but also 
cranky-looking.  Worth a try, though.  "So what is this big find 
of yours?  The one so big you couldn't even say in your 
hyperwave message?"

Antonio leaned across the table and smiled.  "You won't 
believe me until I show you.  Tomorrow, we do the park, and 
the day after that, we head out to my little find.  Our mining 
company found it."

He says that so casually, Thom thought, as if everyone had 
a mining company.  Sometimes I'm not sure if he realizes that 
most people don't.  "It had better be good; I had to take a 
sabbatical to do this."

"We will be the most famous ancient historians in this 
century, my friend," Antonio said.  "Maybe in this millenium."

Just like that authentic set of diaries of Harkonnen V 
someone sold you back at Streeling, Thom thought.  You said 
that then, too.  Antonio could talk anyone into anything, but it 
often seemed anyone could talk Antonio into anything as well.

**************

Mughi felt restless.  Someone kept going back and forth 
past the door, every few minutes.  Given that it was four AM, 
there shouldn't be so much traffic.  Finally, he opened the door 
with a bit of fumbling, and stuck his head out, just in time for a 
maid to ram it with a cart full of clean sheets and towels.  White 
fluffy cloth with the 'Mixi Hotel' logo wrapped itself around his 
head, and then the maid screamed.

Mughi tried to pull back into the room, and managed to flip 
the cart over in the process, as his head had become entangled 
with it.  The door then caught on the towels and wouldn't close.  
He started trying to shove the towels and sheets back out the 
door, but this just panicked the maid further.  "WAR CAT!" she 
howled, running down the hallway.  Other maids took up the cry 
of panic and fled in all directions.  

Kei sat up groggily.  "Mughi, WHAT are you doing?"

He mewed pathetically in reply.

***************

"What's your staff doing changing sheets and towels at four 
in the morning?"  Kei yelled at the manager of the hotel, a 
middle-aged man with brown hair starting to gray, and the 
deeply tanned skin that seemed to be characteristic of everyone 
native to the world that they had met.  

Olan Mixi said, "Most of our guests don't send their 
warcats out to attack people just for passing by their rooms at 
four AM.  But to answer your question, your room is near our 
laundry facilities, and we were busy cleaning out the west wing 
and preparing it for a flock of conventioneers who will be 
arriving tomorrow.  People who will not be very happy if they 
see a war cat roaming the halls.  You are aware of our laws 
regulating those things, aren't you?"

"Mughi is not a 'thing'," Yuri said, irritatedly, choking back 
a yawn.  "And he's from Makeen.  He knows all that stuff."  I 
hope, she thought.

"Anything he does is your legal responsibility," Olan said 
flatly.  "If there is another incident, I will throw you out and 
report it to the authorities.  I don't know how you people do 
things back in the Foundation, but we are civilized folk here, 
who don't take war machines into hotels and let them run loose."

Kei ground her teeth, and started to reply, but Yuri put a 
hand over her mouth.  "We'll make sure there isn't more 
trouble."

"Good.  As Outworlders, you could be deported for causing 
an incident involving a war beast.  Be warned."

"But you make them here," Yuri said.  "I'd think everyone 
would be used to them."

"We make gravitic ships too, but I don't keep one in my 
garage," Olan said.  "Well, now that I've made myself clear, let's 
all go get some sleep."  He yawned.  "And try to keep out of the 
west wing."

"What kind of convention is it?"  Yuri asked as she got up.

"The Heraclian League," he said, then noticed the blank 
look on their faces.  "They're one of the major political parties in 
the Makeen Federation.  A bunch of lunatic isolationists.  They 
want to cut off all contact with anyone outside the Makeen 
Federation.  They only have five percent of the legislature, but 
they're well connected, rich, and polite, so we've hosted their 
annual convention the last five years."

Wonderful, Kei thought.  We picked the hotel about to be 
descended upon by a bunch of backwater hicks.  Well, if they 
mess with me, I'll give them a black eye, she thought.

************

Stettin Ilvander was the most powerful man in the Galaxy.  
He was the Mayor of Terminus, the head of the Terminus 
Federation, with more power than many of the Galactic 
Emperors had possessed.  It wasn't enough for him. He had 
power, but there was nothing impressive left to do with it.  He 
wanted to make a mark on history, and being the longest-ruling 
mayor to date wasn't enough of a mark.  He wanted to be the 
man who brought the Seldon Plan to completion, the man who 
completed the Unification of the Galaxy.  

To his mind, there was no point in waiting for the last few 
worlds to simply fall into the hands of the Federation.  That 
might take decades, and even with the breakthroughs in 
longevity treatments which had been rediscovered during his 
forty years as Mayor of Terminus, he couldn't be guaranteed of 
living that long.  He hadn't always thought that way, which was 
why he was the leader of a party that didn't agree with him.  The 
Foundation had four major parties; he lead the 'Blues', who were 
focused on domestic affairs and the promotion of trade; they had 
been the dominant party of the Federation for a good two 
centuries, and the party was officially opposed to any sort of 
military expansion.  They supported the peaceful expansion of 
the Foundation, but constantly opposed any sort of military 
spending.  In his youth, the Mayor had agreed with this, and 
once he had begun to change his mind, to shift positions 
publically would have buried his career in a deep black pit from 
which there was no returning.  The Reds would never have 
accepted him, and more importantly, he would never have 
become Mayor if he switched parties, or stayed Mayor if he 
switched now.

This made him an impatient and irritable man in private, 
though in public he hid his disgruntlement.  Today, he was 
tapping his fingers on his desk loudly enough for some to 
mistake it for thunder.  "You know, Michi, I don't have time to 
read reports on every one of our spies who gets killed."

"This isn't just any spy.  He's one of our agents on 
Makeen," she replied.  Michi Hallofane was short and slender, 
with hair dyed green and curled in the latest style.  Her eyes 
were a bright blue, and her skin lightly tanned.  She wore the 
long toga-like garments which had come into fashion in the last 
few years, done in a floral print with green and yellow flowers 
on a purple background flecked with white 'stars'.  No one 
would have thought to look at her that she was the head of The 
Advisory Board, the spy service of the Terminus Federation.  
While the WWWA did a certain amount of undercover work, 
they ultimately were more policemen than spies; the Advisory 
Board, while supposedly simply an information service for the 
Mayor, was really a network of spies on millions of worlds.  

"That's nice, but...?"

"He died from being hit with a neuronic whip when he 
pulled a blaster during a brawl on a cheap passenger liner," she 
said.

"And?"

"Our agents do not die from being hit once with a neuronic 
whip," she said.  "It might kill a child, but adults only die if they 
are congenitally frail or badly hurt already.  And our agents 
wouldn't even die from such a thing unless they were already on 
the verge of death.  Still, that's not the most important point.  
What's important is what our agents on Makeen have learned."

"Which is?"

"Are you familiar with the Heraclian league?" she asked.

"The what?"  He was quite certain she reserved that 
expression for things she already knew he didn't know about.  "I 
can't keep up with every organization in the Galaxy, you know."

"The man who our agent had the brawl with was a member, 
one Sto Iturbe.  While the league is too weak to control the 
Makeen Federation, it has members at several influential 
positions in the government, especially its military.  The league 
is quietly setting itself up to stage a coup."

"And why is this important?" he asked, getting a little 
impatient.  Michi always seemed to take forever to get to the 
point.

"The Heraclian leadership has a plan they think capable of 
causing the Terminus Federation to collapse, paving the way for 
a return to Makeen greatness."

Stettin began to laugh hysterically.  "As if a bunch of 
lunatics on one world..."

"Five hundred worlds," Michi cut in.

"...could possibly pose a threat to 24 million worlds.  Even 
if all the Holdout Worlds joined them, it would be a slaughter."

"If everyone on Terminus dies, it won't matter much to us if 
the Federation as a whole survives, now will it?"  

"And how exactly would they do that?"  He stared blankly 
at her; it seemed impossible to him.

"The Makeen are some of the premiere biologists and 
doctors in the Galaxy.  Until your recent redistribution of 
research funds, the Foundation has traditionally emphasized the 
hard sciences over the life sciences, and both over the social 
sciences and humanities.  This puts us at a disadvantage in 
dealing with bioweapons, despite our vastly superior resources.  
Just look at how long it took us to catch up in the area of 
aganathics, and really, they still have the lead on us there."

Stettin raised an eyebrow.  "What, they're going to attack 
Terminus with an army of enhanced cats and dogs?"

"They call it 'MIP', Multiple Interlocking Plagues.  Most 
people will be resistant to one, maybe two, but not all ten.  And 
the plagues work together, each inducing symptoms which help 
the others to spread.  And they have a sufficient gestation period 
to make it hard to stop the spread before it's too late and many 
people have been infected unknowingly."

He shuddered.  "So what was our dead agent carrying?"

"We have reason to believe our codes have been cracked, 
but we thought our network of agents was fairly secure.  He was 
one of several couriers carrying information critical to locating 
where the plagues are being made and who are the Heraclian 
agents in the Makeen government.  It could be that this agent's 
death is just a coincidence; three other agents got out, so we 
have three fourths of the information we need, but the means of 
his death makes me find this implausible."

Stettin nodded.  "I'll have to think about this, but not for 
too long.  We must act swiftly."  

"My greatest fear is that we will be unable to prove the 
existence of this conspiracy to the Makeen government.  It is 
they who will have to crush this plot in the bud; we simply can't 
get enough people onto Makeen to be sure the plagues are 
suppressed before they can be unleashed without too much risk 
of alerting them."

"Then work on getting that proof.  I will be working on 
contingency plans."  Time to contact the head of Bioresearch, he 
thought.