Read Conscience of the Beagle for Free Online

Major Holloway from the Home Force . . .”
    The gaze sharpens. “You talk funny. Your uniform . . .”
    Dull brown. But she’s been dulled, too. A patina of dust coats her hair. “I’m from Earth.”
    She holds a piece of bloodied dress. Squeezing it, she looks away.
    “Did you see anything, Ma’am? Before it happened? Did you see someone running away? Anything like that?”
    The woman kneads the bit of dress with the mindless absorption of a cat. “I tried to run away. I grabbed at her. She was right beside me.”
    “I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this, but it would help if you could tell us anything out of the ordinary you might have seen.”
    The woman lifts her head. A groan comes from her throat, one so protracted that I think she’ll run out of air and die there in the hall. In the dust. Among all those empty-eyed people.
    Suddenly she gasps and makes the sound again. I scrabble to my feet. Is that how grief sounds? It’s like a dumb animal, not human at all.
    On the floor. There. By my feet. Right there. Two round drops of blood. An inch apart.
    I catch my breath before the groan escapes. Held it so long it’s part of me.
    “Really, Major . . .”
    The Warriors’ senior officer. I look up quickly. My expression must be fierce.
    He backs away. “Ah, well. So. I think we have the situation under control. You can see we’re interviewing the witnesses. No sense in going over the same ground twice.”
    God’s Warriors are talking to the dazed. Death poisons the air. Every place I look I feel the pull of the scab over my own grief. I could tear my heart’s wound open. Could bleed to death.
    “Also we need to get some people down in the tunnel to take EPAT readings. Even if there aren’t survivors, there are lots of dead still there. Relatives are waiting for news.”
    My dream. Lila holding horror in the palm of her hand.
    “Major?”
    Don’t look down. The red drops at my feet whisper, Look. Look.
    “Major? Are you all right?”
    “What?”
    “If your stomach’s queasy, we have some Nausease around here somewhere . . .”
    “No.” I clear my throat. “You can talk to these people better than I can. I’ll want everything, you understand?”
    “Of cour —”
    “Everything. And I want it downloaded to my net tonight.”
    Before he can reply, I turn away. Head high, I walk past the survivors. By the time I reach the street, I’m nearly running. I shove through the Warriors at the entrance. Stumble down the stairs. The smell of blood glues itself to my nostrils. Dust makes me sneeze. When I reach Arne, I’m coughing.
    “Have you found anything?”
    Arne doesn’t look up from his laser.
    “I said, have you found anything?”
    The demolitions man is so pale and insubstantial, he could have been assembled from the floating dust. Finally he turns. Unlike me, he remembered to bring all his equipment. The eyes over his mask are colorless. “Goddamn it, Major! Get off my back! I won’t know anything until I have the trajectory of the parakeet!”
    Parakeet. He said “parakeet.”
    Across the cathedral-sized room Beagle stands near a chunk of metal, broad back to me. I can’t tell whether he’s frozen in horror or in thought.
    As I pick my way through the rubble, I pass a slab of wall that has come down intact. A trickle of blood leads from one flat side. That body. I’ve seen jumpers, corpses turned to strawberry jam. But that body. Under there. Skin expanded with pressure, stretched to the breaking point. I look away.
    When I walk up behind Beagle, he doesn’t bother to turn. What seems inattention isn’t. He recognized the sound of my steps long before I reached his side. A bit of robotic one-upmanship.
    “Ground zero,” Beagle says.
    A boulder of ruddy metal sits on a marble base. A gold-leafed inscription reads: HAROLD AND MIMI TENNYSON AND TINKERBELL. GOD PROVIDED A WAY.
    I recognize the remains of what once was a statue. On the lee side is a fold of bronze fabric, the