Free Starfist: A World of Hurt by David Sherman & Dan Cragg

entrance to the Heptagon to verify his visitor.
    Hiram Birkenstock and Lieutenant Commander Soupy Gullkarl reached the guard station at the Heptagon's southwest entrance almost simultaneously. Rather than begin the verifications and other formalities involved in securing a visitor's pass for Birkenstock and admitting him through the guard station, Gullkarl came out.
    "My meeting got canceled," he said sourly. "Let's go to lunch."
    Sixty thousand people worked in the Heptagon and its immediate annexes, and a small city of shops and eateries had sprouted up around it to service them. Gullkarl steered them to a medium-size place that advertised a traditional Eastern European menu. Birkenstock let Gullkarl order for both of them, since he was unfamiliar with Eastern European cuisine, preferring traditional British himself.
    They made small talk about seldom seen relatives while they waited for their meal, and even smaller talk while they ate. Only after the dishes were cleared away and they were enjoying a cup of real coffee did they get to their ostensible reason for meeting. Birkenstock popped a crystal into his reader and handed it to Gullkarl.
    The navy officer read through the report and looked up at his cousin. "What's supposed to be of military interest in this?" he asked.
    "Tarah, Tarah Shiskanova--she's the analyst who flagged it--thought she saw something."
    He took the reader back and scanned the report beyond its what and where for the first time.
    "Here it is," he handed it back, "the bit about acid."
    Gullkarl studied the minor note for a long moment, wondering why on earth anyone would think the military would be interested. Then he blinked. Right. He'd heard something, a vague, whispered rumor. There was somebody out there using acid guns. He nodded and almost snorted. Right. An alien invasion. Absurd. Absolutely absurd. And that was being kind. Everybody knew there was no such thing as sentient aliens. Still, there was that whispered rumor.
    "Can I have the crystal?" he asked, returning the reader. "I'll check it out."
    Birkenstock nodded. "It's a copy." He popped the crystal and handed it over.
    They chatted over a second cup of coffee, wrangled over who would pick up the check--Birkenstock won, he was certain he could charge it to his division as a military liaison expense--and went their separate ways, vowing to get together soon for another lunch. Maybe Gullkarl could come to dinner sometime and, yes, he could bring a lady friend.
    Lieutenant Commander Stewart "Soupy" Gullkarl, fully aware of the pun, stewed over the report and what to do about it for two days before deciding to go upstairs with it. He didn't literally go upstairs--"upstairs" was the glass-walled office at the end of the row of desks of which his was one. Captain Wilma Arden occupied the glass-walled office. She sometimes mused over the irony that an office with walls she could see through in all directions was a career dead end.
    She didn't realize it when Gullkarl rapped his knuckles on the frame of her open door, but her career was about to take a very dramatic change in direction and progression.
    "Enter!" she called.
    "Excuse me, ma'am," Gullkarl said as he took the seat she waved him toward. "Someone at Colonial Development passed a report to me and I can't figure out what to do with it." He gave her the crystal when she extended her hand.
    Arden morphed the console out of her desktop and popped the crystal into it. "I don't see anything about orbital weaponry. Why would anyone give it to us?"
    Gullkarl lifted his hands in embarrassment. "He didn't know who to queue it to. We're distant cousins, so he asked if I could direct him to the appropriate office."
    "Hmm." She read through the reports again and this time noticed the bit about acid. She'd heard the rumor too. She looked up and swiveled her chair to look out the window toward...toward...She knew all the constellations and could name every major star she saw in the night sky, but