Free Halo: First Strike by Eric S. Nylund Page A

business."
     
    Lizzie nodded at Gonzales and said, "You're the corporate
    handler, right?"  She was looking hard at Gonzales but seemed
    amused.
     
    "Yes," he said.
     
    "You plan to fuck anything up?" Lizzie asked.
     
    "How should I know?" Gonzales said.  Lizzie laughed.  He
    said, "You people have your problems, I have mine.  I don't see
    how we come into conflict, but unless you're willing to tell me
    all your little secrets, I can only guess."
     
    Lizzie said, "I will tell you one home truth:  the Interface
    Collective look to one another and to Aleph; then to SenTrax Halo,
    then to Halo  and that's about it.  What happens on Earth, we
    don't much care about.  Particularly those of us who have been
    here a long time.  Like me."
     
    Gonzales nodded and said, "That's what I figured.  And it
    looks like you've got a little tug of war for control of Aleph
    with Showalter and Horn."
     
    "We do," Lizzie said.  "Insofar as anyone controls Aleph."
     
    "How long have you been here?" Diana asked.
     
    "Since they buttoned it up and you could breathe," Lizzie
    said.  "From the beginning."  She pointed across the square and
    said, "There's going to be some music.  Let's have a look."
     
    Under a splash of light from a pole on the edge of the
    square, a young woman sat at a drummer's kit.  She wore a splash-
    dyed jumper, crimson and sky blue; her hair stood in a six-inch
    high spike.  She placed a percussion box on a metal stand, opened
    its control panel, and gave its kickpads a few preliminary taps. 
    Two men stood next to the percussionist.  One, nondescript in
    cotton jeans and t-shirt, had the usual stick hanging from a black
    straplong fretboard, synthesizer electronics tucked into a round
    bulge at the back end.  The other stood six and a half feet tall
    and was so thin he seemed to sway; his skin was almost ebony, and
    his close-shaved head looked almost perfectly rectangular.  He
    wore a long-sleeved black shirt buttoned to the neck, black pants. 
    A golden horn sat dwarfed in his enormous hand.
     
    The percussionist hit her keys, a slow shuffle beat played,
    and a fill machine laid a phrase across the beat:  "Bam!  Ratta
    tatta bam! Bam bam!  Ratta bam!"  The stick player joined the
    drummer with his own lo-beat fillswalking bass, sparse piano
    chords, slow and syncopated.  The horn player stood with his eyes
    closed, apparently thinking.  After several choruses, he started
    to play.
     
    He began with hard-edged saxophone lines, switched to trumpet
    then back to saxophone, played both in unison, looped both and
    blew electric guitar in front of the horn patterns.  Scatting
    voices laced through the patternsGonzales couldn't tell who was
    making them.  The drummer's hands worked her keyboards, her feet
    the various kickpads below her; the song's tempo had speeded up,
    and its rhythms had gone polyphonic, African.
     
    The woman stood and danced, her body now her instrument, feet
    and hands and torso wired for percussion, and she whirled among
    the crowd, her movements picking up intensity and tempo.  The
    song's harmonies went dissonant, North African and Asiatic at
    once, horn and stick player both now into reeds and gongs and
    pipes, the ghostly singing voices gone nasal, and the dancer-
    percussionist laying out raw clicks and hollow boomings, cicada
    sounds and a thousand drums.
     
    The crowd clapped and whistled and called, except for the
    group from the Interface Collective.  "Hoot," they said in unison. 
    "Hoot hoot hoot."  Very loud. Lizzie was smiling; Diana sat rapt,
    staring into space, and Gonzales got a sudden chilly rush:  this
    was what she looked like when she was blind.
     
    "Hoot," said the Interface Collective, "hoot hoot hoot."  And
    the whole group had made a long chain or conga line, each person's
    hands on the hips of the person in front.  They shuffled forward
    until a circle cleared, then surrounded the drummer, the whole
    line still moving, most of them