Android Weinstine Co. Type L/Y-906, more colloquially known as Lyon, hummed a Christmas carol as she walked down the residential building's hall. A humming android was not a common sight, but Lyon was, like most androids in the Hunter's Guild, an advanced model with a highly complex AI designed to simulate that of an organic female, including emotions. She was happy this morning, and her personality matrix had produced a priority suggestion that this happiness be expressed externally.

She stopped outside the door to her partner's res-unit and touched the panel for his door chime. 0.5 beats passed, and she touched it again. When that also did not produce a response, she called him on his PDL. Lyon wondered if he was out, the most obvious reason why he might not answer his door. It took eight rings for him to answer and his voice, thick and fuzzy, told her that it was the second-most obvious answer instead.

"Hello?"

"Rise and shine, Ryland. We have a meeting scheduled for 450."

"Lyon? Wait...a meeting? What?"

"Don't worry; you didn't forget to schedule something. I got you an early Christmas present."

"Lyon, I've been up most of the night. It's 403 and I only got back to bed at 387. You're going to have to speak slowly and use small words."

"Okay, but would you let me in? It'd be easier to do it face-to-face."

"All right; just let me get some pants on."

A couple of moments later, the door opened and a very bleary-looking Ryland, shadows under his eyes, wearing loose sweatpants and a sleeveless undershirt, let her into the res-unit.

"You look like hell," Lyon said sympathetically. "I'm sorry for springing this on you; I'd have given you advance warning if I'd known you had plans."

Ryland shook his head.

"That's all right; I didn't actually have plans. It's just bad luck I had two things surprise me together."

"Oh, I see. Well, you'd better get dressed. If you need to, you can always back out later, but it would look bad if you didn't show up for the initial meeting."

"You're probably right. Um...would you mind waiting out here?" he asked as she followed him towards the bedroom.

"Ryland, you know that I am not ESI-compatible."

"I know, but you're still a woman."

She nodded.

"Very well, I'll wait here."

That was very typical of Ryland, Lyon thought, and one of the things she liked about him: he never failed to treat her as a person. Many people, including some hunters, viewed androids as second-class citizens, or little more than machines, tools. This perception had not been helped by the fact that most generally were machines in the past, and even modern androids did not always have extensive personality matrices like Lyon's that included the full range of organic emotions. Military androids, for example, often were designed without compassion or valuing life outside their own allegiance.

Ryland, though, always treated her just as he would anyone else. Indeed, when he erred it was inevitably in the other direction, when he reacted as if she was indeed an organic instead of taking into account the fact of her being an android. His modesty was a perfect example. While Lyon was quite capable of forming emotional ties, up to and including romantic love, she had no sexual feelings. It was possible to install parts and programming (ESI stood for Extraordinary Social Interaction, which Lyon thought was a bit delicate a description for a very straightforward concept) that could allow an android to engage in and desire sexual contact, but Lyon felt the concept was kind of pointless unless she should happen to fall in love with an organic who would desire such activity as part of their relationship.

Nonetheless, her personality matrix indicated that it was a suitable response for an organic to exhibit modesty around a gender to which they were attracted, regardless of the observer's potential interest or lack thereof, so she'd complied with Ryland's wishes. In any case, it was a simple matter to raise her speaking volume to be heard in the next room.

"Speaking of ESI, I was thinking of getting Rina that upgrade as a Christmas gift," she said. "Since she only needs the parts installed"—their friend's AI had been created in a somewhat unusual fashion—"it won't be as expensive as the full job would be, and she'd be really grateful."

"She and Nyle are still together, then?"

"Uh-huh. They're even talking marriage."

"Well, that's a good thing. I was never really as hopeful as you were about the outcome of that job. I'm glad I was wrong."

"You're just a cynic, that's your problem. And you really shouldn't be, since you're such a romantic about history and magic and all that. You turn basic technology into a storyteller's dream, and yet you have trouble believing in happily-ever-after or at least 'till-death-do-us-part between people."

"Photon technology is more reliable than people are."

Lyon crossed her arms over her chest in an attitude of disapproval. She knew no one was there to see her, but her body-language functions called for consistent behavior regardless of the situation.

"Was that including the parts of it that are based on using the body of an evil god of chaos as an experimental base?"

"Sarcasm does not become you at this hour of the morning."

"Oh? When would it be appropriate?"

"I haven't really found an answer to that one, yet."

Lyon hadn't been simply exaggerating. The so-called D-Factor, which allowed for some of the more amazing things Photon technology could do in the area of physical transformation, had proven to be drawn from the emanations of Dark Falz. The Pioneer Project had been directed to Ragol rather than other suitable worlds for settlement because it was the source of the D-Factor, which had led to Pioneer 1's destruction. Thankfully due to the efforts of hunters and the wills of its possessed victims, Rico Tyrell and Heathcliff Flowen, the entity had been suppressed. She couldn't help but wonder, though; so long as there was a changeable universe, could such an elemental force as chaos and entropy really be defeated? Perhaps on Ragol it had been beaten, but couldn't its will manifest elsewhere, such as back on Coral?

"I think I've been hanging around you too long, Ryland," she said aloud.

"Oh?"

"That last exchange triggered a series of philosophical musings on the nature of Dark Falz and whether it would ever be possible to be truly free of it."

"Quite possibly not; after all, the opposite of chaos is stasis, and life can't exist in a perfectly static universe. Maybe that's what it means that Dark Falz resurrects in the 'millennial cycle'; somehow, it is an inherent part of the nature of the universe, or at least of Photon energy."

"You see what I mean? You came up with that off the cuff in response to a casual remark. You're corrupting me with your romantic ideas about universal forces, and I don't seem to be corrupting you back."

"Experience," Ryland said. He emerged from the bedroom dressed in a Force's robes, apparently ready for business.

"Oh?" Lyon tilted her head to regard him curiously.

"You're what, three years old? So you can overwrite your existing database pretty easily since that's just pre-programmed facts. I'm twenty-six, so I've got actual life experience shaping my opinions, so it's not so easy for them to be dislodged."

She thought about it.

"That makes sense. My own decision-making algorithms are designed to give higher priority to information that I obtain myself versus information that comes from external sources, simply as a matter of reliability." She waited just a moment, then added teasingly, "I guess we just need to find you a nice girlfriend so we can build your experience positively."

Lyon had expected one of the typical responses: embarrassment, bluster, a long-suffering groan. She'd even calculated a 5.4-percent probability of Ryland losing his temper due to her teasing growing too personal, at which point she would apologize (like an organic, it was quite possible for her to make bad judgments in interpersonal relationships). But Ryland's response hadn't fallen into any of the predicted categories. Instead, his face turned pensive, as if remembering something unpleasant or unhappy. Lyon might have assumed he was thinking about someone who'd broken his heart and soured him on romance, but that did not match up with past conversations—and she was sure there was no recent heartbreak in his life.

She was quite curious, now, but her next-stage analysis suggested that based on their established relationship levels this was none of her business and as the friendship was a higher emotional priority than her desire to know, she deflected attention from the topic while subtly reminding him that his reaction existed (to invite him to talk if he felt like it) but changing the subject.

"You look like you're going to fall over if you don't get some caffeine in you. I picked up a cup of coffee for you from Leeson's on the way over; it's waiting for you in my aerocar."

"If there's a Heaven for androids, that alone should be enough to get you in." Ryland, Lyon had noted, enjoyed his coffee.

"Good. Then if that's settled, let's go."

"Where are we going?"

"I told you that it was a Christmas present. Don't expect me to tell you before we unwrap it."

~X X X~

"I appreciate you meeting me here rather than at the Hunter's Guild," Revelle Lucerne said. She was a Newman, with the look of a woman in her late twenties. She wore a long, flowing dress and had her silver hair done up in an elaborate style, her overall appearance reminding Ryland of nothing so much as a female human Force. "The truth is that I'm frightened to have it known I'm meeting with hunters."

"Oh? What are you afraid of?" he asked.

"A rival. His name is Tobias Stane, and I believe he was responsible for my father's death."

"Maybe you should start at the beginning," Lyon said.

They were sitting at a corner table in the Blue Grotto, a restaurant and club which ran off an undersea theme. While the aqueous light filtering down from the ceiling and the coral reefs beneath the floor were projected by highly lifelike viewscreens, the walls actually were aquarium tanks with live fish. Lyon enjoyed the animals' antics, Ryland knew, making this one of her favorite places to hang out or have meetings. The food was, in his opinion, lousy (and the coffee nearly undrinkable), but she didn't consider that any kind of problem for obvious reasons.

Lucerne, for her part, didn't seem to notice the food quality, consuming her grilled salmon-substitute and rice with apparent enthusiasm. A squid seemed to eye them before swimming away, perhaps jealous that these land-dwellers had usurped its rightful spot in the food chain.

"My father's name was Dr. Kylan Lucerne. He worked for the Lab as a Photon engineer. His specialty was weapons research and design."

"That's a provocative field."

Lucerne nodded.

"I know, and one that isn't always well-regarded. Whenever one builds a weapon, one is already accepting the possibility of violence, and weapons research is about making killing faster and easier."

"Of course, you're talking with hunters," Lyon told the Newman, "so you have an audience ready to believe that some forms of violence are necessary and even positive. Believe me, when a rampaging dragon is trying to bake me extra-crispy, I appreciate having the newest and best weapons I can have."

Their client gave her a wan smile.

"I'm glad to hear that." Ryland suspected that she'd gotten a certain amount of grief from other people over that—and it was true enough that the weapons business was by no means a clean one. Unethical scientific testing like Dr. Osto Hyle's bioweapons projects and equally unethical sales of arms to people that were guaranteed to misuse them by "merchants of death" like Black Paper had definitely painted it in a negative light. But as Lyon had pointed out, fighting could be done to protect as well as to seize or destroy, and guardians needed the best equipment just as did reavers.

"In any case, Father's particular area of interest was in ancient legendary weapons and how they could be duplicated with Photon technology." She frowned. "I'm not explaining that quite right. It's more...he believed that ancient weapons were created with Photon technology, and he wanted to understand them in today's scientific terms so they could be recreated if it was feasible."

"So your father thought that Photon was used in the ancient past, but as a kind of alchemy?"

Lyon grinned at him, or rather at how eagerly he'd asked the question.

"Yes, that's right."

"My partner has the same belief," Lyon said.

"It's more than a belief; it's a working hypothesis backed by some supporting evidence and without significant contradiction."

"Father thought so, too. He believed that he had the opportunity to at last validate that hypothesis as a theory."

No wonder Lyon called this job a Christmas present! Ryland thought. It was exactly on point for one of his own pet theories about Photon and Ragol.

"Explain, please."

"Father learned that there had been, I guess you could call it a 'relic,' from ancient Coral on board Pioneer 1, a hand-to-hand weapon known as the Psycho-Wand. The weapons research project of the Pioneer 1 Lab had apparently succeeded in creating a few duplicates of this item, which Pioneer 2's hunters have occasionally found."

Ryland nodded sharply.

"Yes, indeed. They're prized by Forces, since they function to augment techniques in multiple ways—oh! I see exactly what Dr. Lucerne was driving at. If he could prove that the original Psycho-Wand had the same effect on techniques which had not been invented yet in ancient Coral, then it would be strongly suggestive that what we called Photon and the ancients called magic were the same energy. Particularly, the Psycho-Wand was supposed to be a 'wizard's staff,' so its effect on techniques would not be an accidental side effect."

Lucerne smiled at him, a wistful sadness in her expression.

"You sound just like Father." She glanced over at Lyon. "You were right when you said that your partner would appreciate the details of this job. I'm...I'm glad that it's someone who understands the importance of what Father was trying to do that will take it on."

"I only wish I could have known him," Ryland said. "But if there's anything I can do to help establish this link to our past, then I want to try." He paused, then added, "But I'm sorry; I let my enthusiasm get the better of me. The combination of a topic of interest and the fact that I'm running on caffeine instead of sleep this morning will do that to me. Please, go on with your story and I'll try to stop interrupting you."

The young Newman sipped at her glass of juice. It apparently wasn't as awful as the Grotto's coffee tended to be, or else she was simply a stoic about such things.

"Father thought he knew where the Psycho-Wand had been kept, so he commissioned a hunter team to try and retrieve the relic itself as well as, if possible, the Pioneer 1 research data. He pinpointed a subterranean facility on Gal Da Val Island connected to one of the Control Tower and accompanied the group down personally. Only one hunter returned. Apparently there had been an ambush led by a rival team."

Ryland scowled. There were bad apples in every group, but it particularly bothered him when hunters went wrong. Since Principal Tyrell had placed the job of investigating Ragol in the hands of hunters, many criminal and political groups had planted their agents in the guild so that they could use them for intelligence gathering and even shadier work.

"You suspect this Tobias Stane of being behind it?"

"I do. He's an influential man, a member of the Council, and a passionate collector of matters associated with ancient Coralian history. He doesn't care about the scientific significance of the Psycho-Wand; he just wants it as a prize to possess."

"It was the hunter who escaped who told you about the ambush and your father's death?" Lyon asked.

Lucerne nodded.

"He did."

"Can we talk to him?"

She looked down into her meal, her face falling.

"He's dead. Apparently it was a bar fight, but I can't believe that. I think Stane's men wanted to get their hands on what he knew or what he had, and they killed him for it."

"Maybe. What was his name?"

"Barton Dorn."

"Did he know anything?" Ryland asked. "I mean, was there anything to know?" He stopped. "No, there must have been, unless the bar fight was just a bar fight. Otherwise, he was either killed to keep him from identifying the ambushers, and if that was all he knew he'd have immediately gone to the Guild authorities the instant he got back. So there had to be something else they wanted from him. But he reported to you, Miss Lucerne, about your father's death?"

She nodded.

"That's right."

"Why you? Why not the Guild or the milipol or the Lab?"

"Apparently, it was at Father's instruction."

She took out her PDL and called up something, then turned the screen to Ryland.

"His report was delivered in a series of simple-mail messages."

He looked through them, showing Lyon as well. Apparently, the hunter team had been ambushed in the subterranean complex. The team's FOnewm had been gunned down at once, paralyzed and then killed by rifle shots. They'd tried to retreat, but they'd been prevented from using telepipes or Ryuker by a jamming field. Then the ambushers had used explosives to bring the roof down, with only Dorn narrowly escaping. He'd managed to get back to an installed teleporter and retreat to the Central Command Area on the surface, and from there back to Pioneer 2.

"'Your father said to tell you, you can dig up his legacy in the past, but it will take the arms of a hunter to unearth it from the ruins,'" he read aloud.

"What does that mean?" Lyon wondered.

"It's certainly cryptic."

"Was Dorn afraid that the simple-mail account was going to be hacked? That's not easy, but if Stane is a Council member he might have unusual resources. But then, maybe not. I remember Gowan telling me once about BEE transmissions having to be snooped while they're being sent, unless of course you get direct access to the sender or recipient's PDL." She cupped her chin, her face assuming a thoughtful mien. "I wasn't paying close attention then, so I'm not entirely sure I followed that explanation correctly."

"Androids can forget things?" Lucerne's curiosity momentarily overcame her focus on her personal problems.

"Oh, yes. Data archival of five-sense information does consume storage space, so we compress, archive, flag, and on occasion delete matters outright. Events are given archival priority, and that updates and changes over time as memories are consulted or ignored. This particular memory was converted to a text-summary with date/time/location indexes but the actual record was deleted so that the memory space could be used for other items. My STM—short-term memory—buffer is in constant flux, you see, holding only 7034 beats' worth of full data. A week and small change, as an organic might say."

Ryland grinned at Lucerne's surprise.

"The main difference I've found between a high-end android and a human or Newman is that androids are much better at knowing their own mind."

"It really is much easier," Lyon agreed. She most definitely did not suffer from organic envy.

"Getting back to the point, though, there's one other explanation for the message being so cryptic. Dr. Lucerne probably knew that there was potential danger—obviously did, if he gave Dorn the message after the initial attack. That presents the possibility of one of the other side capturing a hunter alive and interrogating him or her."

"So the message is cryptic so that if Dorn was captured and the details forced out of him, he wouldn't be able to immediately tell everything."

Ryland nodded at his partner.

"Exactly. Ideally, this references something that only the intended recipient—that's you, Ms. Lucerne—knows the meaning of. Is that the case?"

She looked at them helplessly.

"No, none of it. I can only guess that Father's 'legacy' means either the Psycho-Wand itself or his research data, but the rest of it makes no sense at all to me."

"The rest might be literal," Lyon said.

"You mean, 'the arms of a hunter' meaning it'll take a Hunter's Guild member to get to it?" Lucerne asked.

"Exactly. That is, whatever it is might have been cached in the Ruins under Ragol. That's certainly something from the past, and no one is going to retrieve anything from there if they don't have hunters along."

Ryland winced. He'd only been down to the Ruins—actually, a wrecked spaceship where Dark Falz had been sealed by some ancient civilization—on two missions. That was two more than he wanted, despite the immense cultural and historical interest. If he ever saw another Indi Belra or Gran Sorcerer again it would be too soon; even the simulated ones in the Lab's VR system were more than enough.

"If that's true, though, how did he get it there? He'd have had to send hunters down, apart from his escort team, and we know what happened to them. It's not like he could just send it by data transfer; there'd be nothing there to receive it, so it would have to be a physical cache."

"Unless he had something planted in advance to receive that data transfer," Lyon noted.

"That's an extremely sneaky idea."

"I've been hanging around you long enough to understand how some of these mysteries work."

"Well, I wouldn't rule it out. If Dr. Lucerne knew about Stane's involvement in the matter and the lengths he might go to, then it's entirely possible that he'd plan in advance and..."

The two women looked at him curiously, no surprise given how he'd just trailed off in the middle of the sentence.

"Ryland? Did you think of something?"

"Lyon, when did you sign up for Ms. Lucerne's Guild Quest?"

"Yesterday, at 713.4."

"And this meeting here, how did you set it up? I mean, Ms. Lucerne didn't specify the Blue Grotto for breakfast in her job posting, right?"

"I called her," their client explained, "when the Guild informed me that my quest had been taken. She insisted on working out the specifics by simple-mail, though."

"Which is probably why we don't have a team of killers breathing down our necks right now. But it was enough for Stane to learn that you'd hired hunters and more importantly, whom." He should have made the connection before now; the fact that this was a new job had confused him. Even so, he could only blame his massive personal interest in Ms. Lucerne's job and his lack of sleep for distracting him from the obvious, that in order to surprise him this morning Lyon had to set the Guild Quest up sometime previously.

In other words, when the "message" had been delivered by the assault on Justine, Ryland had commenced working on something. He just hadn't known it yet.

"Ryland, what are you talking about?"

"Someone's been snooping Ms. Lucerne's PDL calls. They identified you, and that led them to me as your partner. The reason I hadn't gotten any sleep last night was that I'd been rousted out of bed by Kendric to go down to the medical center where Justine, his girlfriend, is in a coma. Someone tried to warn me off the job through him."

"Stane went after your friends?" Lucerne gasped.

"My brother, actually."

"My God, where is this going to end? You have to quit, of course; I can't be responsible for—" She broke off in mid-sentence when she saw both hunters shaking their heads at her.

"No, that's not going to happen. There's our pride and professionalism as hunters, of course, but more than that there's the personal level. Stane isn't going to get away with this."

"But your brother..."

"From how Kendric feels, I don't think he's ready to run and hide. On the contrary, given how angry he is I just hope he's willing to take our help when he gets down to the serious business of revenge."