Free Wild Cards 15 - Black Trump by George R. R. Martin Page B

masculine voice. "I'm Cosmic Traveler. What do I need with doorknobs?" And he walked through the door.
    On the far side a short hall led to another door. "That fool Meadows needs to quit fretting like a brooding-hen," the cowled figure muttered as it walked forward. "I've got all the memories that high-kicking bimbo does. And a lot more upstairs. Anything she can do, I can do better." At the door he paused and smirked. "And then some," he said, and stepped through. As he passed through the wood he felt tearing dislocation. "Oh, shit!" he exclaimed. "It's too soon - "
    He fell forward, through the door onto the polished hardwood floor of a small office. What landed on all fours was another male figure, tall and lanky, dressed in jeans and blue work shirt, with ashy blond hair getting long and the beginnings of a goatee.
    "Whoa," Mark Meadows said in a long expulsion of breath. "Almost lost it there."
    He shook his head and reached for round wire-rimmed spectacles that had dropped from the aquiline bridge of his nose. "I'm being the Traveler too much. It's giving me a death wish."
    Not to mention the fact that at the end of the interview Trav had broken character to ask if the colonel had a daughter, for God's sake. "If you can't maintain better," Mark said aloud, "I'm gonna start leaving you in the bottle and winging it myself."
    Down the dim and dusty back-corridors of his mind a dry mocking laugh rebounded. The threat was empty, and no one knew it better than Cosmic. Power in Asia was a personal affair, and the President of Free Vietnam was Isis Moon, also known as Moonchild. Mark was her chancellor, fully authorized to speak for her - but unless she put in fairly regular appearances, people would sense an opening and start to conspire.
    And Moonchild wouldn't come out to play any more. Not since she had broken her vow against taking human life by breaking the neck of the joker-ace Ganesha. Small matter that it was an accident - and that Ganesha had been trying to rape Sprout. Moonchild's powers and very existence were predicated upon observing the Tenets and Student Oath of tae kwon do ; to her the third portion of the Oath, "I shall never misuse tae kwon do ," meant she could not use her ace powers or martial arts skills to kill a human.
    Mark had tried. Endless internal monologues elicited no response. When he took the silver-and-black powder that summoned Moonchild, he curled into a fetal ball and went catatonic for an hour. He didn't even know if she still existed . Or whether, like Starshine - killed by a Ly'bahr cyborg in orbital combat over Takis - she was simply gone .
    So he had to rely on Trav, slimy and unreliable as he was. He was taking the blue powder too much; and when he took a single potion too often, bad things happened. Like the one-hour duration of a "friend's" visit became unstable, and you risked translating back into solid with skinny Mark Meadows in the middle of a hardwood door....
    A knock on the door. It made him shudder. He picked himself up with the sense of assembling scattered pieces.
    "Come on in."
    It was Osprey, pumping a feathered fist in the air. "Yeah! You'd think that stiff-necked son of a bitch never heard of "good cop/bad cop." And you should've seen the boss! She worked him to perfection. Perfection ."
    He blinked huge, golden eyes. Beetling eagle brows frowned. "But she's starting to act, I don't know, a little weird . She's still an ass-kicking little lady, but man, maybe you better talk to her about taking some time off."
    "I'll do that," Mark said, in what he hoped wasn't as much a croak as it felt like.
    He folded himself into his swivel chair. "What's eating at you, boss?" Inmon asked, perching on the edge of his desk.
    A two-time Joker Brigader, Mark's comrade-in-arms in the fight to liberate South Vietnam, Osprey had proven himself a shrewd and resourceful warrior. But sometimes Mark thought he had a tendency to let natural optimism get the better of him. It had to be a