“You sure this is where you want to go?” I asked the lady in the back of the cab. Fools’ Paradise was the local biker hangout, about two miles out of town, near the off-ramp from the highway. During the day you might get a few of the tougher interstate truckers stop in for a beer and a gawk at the strippers, but after six, the clientele was strictly guys with handles like ‘Mother,’ and ‘Piston.’ From time to time, some dentist or accountant who’d had a mid-life crisis and bought himself a Harley showed up, but it never ended well.  The girls who worked there were too young to be legal and too used for anyone to make a big deal about it; if they had a fake ID that said they were a 42 year-old man, it didn’t matter. It was just something that someone copied and shoved into a file that disappeared into the manager’s office, and was never seen again. The girls tended to last at the club about as long as an accountant’s teeth, as their ‘boyfriends’ hustled them from sleazy club ...

It wasn’t much of a tourist destination; someone told me the name ‘Mira Loma’ meant “Look at the Mud.” That might have been a joke, but the place wasn’t high on anyone’s list of beauty spots; if not for the tiki bar on the edge of the small beach town, it would have little to recommend it. The margaritas were lacking, and the beer was warm, which annoyed the Americans, though the table of Brits seemed untroubled by it, downing cerveza after cerveza as they watched Champions league and sulked.   “Why did you bring us here?” I asked Johnny. We’d known each other for years, and been friends ever since he lied to give me an alibi. “You remember the Green Parrot?” Johnny asked. I nodded. No one in our business didn’t know the Green Parrot;   it wasn’t quite as big or famous as the Hope Diamond, but it was pretty much in the same league. It edged out the Dresden Green by a couple of carats, and was almost flawless. “Sure,” I replied. It had been stolen a few years back. It was a fan...

Chapter 1 The father died during childbirth. Everyone knew that was just the way it was. Arzid males’ short lives had only one purpose: to brood the eggs females laid in them. That was nature, nothing personal; it’s why females never bothered to name the males that were born. i was 'boy', nothing more, the same as most males i'd ever met. “Males are so simple,” the Mother commented, petting my head as i knelt by her chair. “They’re made to breed and brood our young.” The Priestess nodded, as she sipped the tea i'd made and served them. She was twice the height of an Arzid male, taller than the Mother, and the red silk robe that priestesses normally wore made her seem intimidating. i guessed she was 40, but the cycles had been kind to her. In different clothes and wearing her setae long she might have passed for a female just out of third school.  “It’s how the Goddesses ordained it,” Priestess Xarzi agreed. “They’re just vessels, born to servitude.” She looked down at m...

“I think about leaving, sometimes,” Jacques said, looking out over the wide, treeless morass. “But, even if I knew where to go, I’d likely just stumble into a bog or mud pit and die.” A visible shudder went through him. Buddy, as Jacques usually called him, sensed the tension and the cascade of neuro-chemicals, as he was programmed to do, and nodded.   “Do you want another drink, Pardner?” Buddy asked. He didn’t know he had a Texas twang; to be precise, he didn’t know that Jacques had chosen that speech mode because he found it amusing. Buddy poured another glass of the reconstituted orange juice before Jacques could say yes.   “Sometimes it seems like you actually understand me, and you’re not just responding to stimuli,” Jacques said, knocking back the shot glass of juice. Buddy gave an involuntary, machine like shudder, and set the container of juice down a little too hard, breaking it. It was the hardwired reaction to any human suggesting it might be more than an automaton...

She resolved to stop speaking to people, when she was out on her walks. The looks were bad enough, and the sotto-voce comments she was forced to ignore. But it was the silly questions that she could no longer face. “Who do you think you are?” asked a pompous man, in a trilby. It would require either a long answer or none at all, but since he had stormed off as soon as he had spat out his question, she was relieved that the former was unnecessary. Honestly, you’d think she was parading down the street topless, the way some people went on. “I don’t know what you think your game is,” an older woman said, her hair in curlers and hidden by a scarf. “But I’ll be on to the authorities. You can’t keep something like that in town.” Fortuna was fairly certain there was no by-law specific to the situation, but she was sure the woman would try to make trouble; her sort always do. Children weren’t as bad. “Where did you find it?” they asked Fortuna, as they stroked Primrose’s muzzle. It was safe to...

Tom recognized three of the names on the list. He flipped the pages on the clipboard over; there were easily a dozen pages. "There's got to be 300 names here!" Tom said. The Lieutenant nodded, a short, curt, dip of his chin. "There's 352," he said. "And that's just our list. Every other team has a list that's at least that long." He let the words sink in for a moment. A fleet of trucks pulled up, and the driver and his assistant hopped out of each one and opened the tailgate, ready for loading. "I'm not sure I can do this," Tom said. "Then add your name to the end of the list," the Lieutenant said, with a shrug. "The time for second thoughts was over a long time ago. You know that; we all do." He patted his pockets absently, looking for a pack of cigarettes. Then he remembered that had been banned as well, and he grimaced. Tom understood; nicotine would steady them for what lay ahead, but they'd have to...