Free Mind Over Ship by David Marusek

watching their back. You’d need your own mentar to deal with it, and as you may know, Charter TUG has never sponsored a mentar, so we are lacking in that area as well.
    I see
, Ellen said.
Perhaps, then, you could point me toward an appropriate specialist.
    Oliver’s proxy shook its head.
That alone would make us accomplices. In point of fact, we recommend that you discontinue your planning along this path, for we are already too closely tied to you, for the service at the Sitrun house and services to Burning Daylight, and any investigation of you will bring the HomCom to our door as well. Even our open visit with you today at your home implicates us in whatever you’re planning.
    You don’t seem to understand
, Ellen insisted.
Someone murdered my mother, and I must make them pay.
    Veronica-by-proxy said,
I can appreciate your feelings, Myr Starke, but perhaps you will take some advice from people who know something about exacting payment. Murder at the level of Eleanor Starke will have been ordered for practical purposes: a business decision, a power struggle, an ideological disagreement. Don’t think of the killer as an individual but rather as a team. Your natural impulse is to want to kill the whole team, but you can never get them all, and all you accomplish is starting a death spiral of attacks and counterattacks.
    It’s much better to take a longer view. Find anonymous ways to hurt the entire team. Cripple them in ways that matter to them. There’s lots of ways to play dirty that are less extreme than murder, a lot safer for you, and more effective in the long run. In that area our charter excels, and we may be of service to you.
    But Ellen’s proxy wasn’t convinced.
If you do this for me, find my mother’s murderers and kill them, kill as many of them as you can, I won’t sell you an Oship, I’ll
give
you one.
     
    IN THE MAP Room, the player chimed. Ellen removed the datapins and held them up to the light in her unsteady hand. The paste bulbs wereblackened—nuked. “I guess you didn’t like my proposition,” Ellen said. “Too bad.”
     
    IN THEIR CAR, Oliver said, “I wonder what that was all about. Something we wouldn’t touch. And how freakish she looks with that head. Worse than you.”
    Veronica let that pass. She was having a hard time getting comfortable in her car seat. She reached around and opened a special flap in the rear of her jumpsuit to let her tail out.
    “Anyway,” Oliver concluded, “so much for Plan A. On to Plan B.”
    Veronica jabbed her elbow in his ribs.
How is our little Plan B. coming along? Did it pass the isolation test?
    Yes, forty-eight hours of solitary confinement. Most of the batch survived. We’re interacting with them this week before putting them in for seventy-two.
    You look doubtful.
    Oliver sighed.
We’ve never raised a mentar before, and we don’t know what to expect. Even so, there’s something weird about these.
    In what way?
    They’re crazier than any mentar I’ve ever met.
     
     
Bait and Switch
     
     
    As the Starke limo pulled into the station adjoining the John P. Walters National Detention Center, Mary put the finishing touches to her costume. She wore a baggy pantsuit of a medicine-pink color that few, if any, evangelines would dream of wearing. But it was exactly what she’d asked Lyra to make for her.
    The limo came to a whispery stop on the brightly lit platform. Clouds of media bees awaited her on the other side of the gull-wing door. She let them get a good look at her through the glass, then put on her medicine-pink hat and lowered its veil to completely cover her face. Leaving the car, she strode purposefully to the NDC entrance tunnel. The flying mechs mobbed her along the way, but they were constrained to halt at the tunnel entrance. Mary continued on through to the scanway and into Wait Here Hall.
    Wait Here Hall was a hushed, cavernous chamber where thousands of visitors languished on hard, plastic benches. This being Mary’s