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the face of the man who had sired him would give him the jolt he needed to slip the alien mask that had fused itself onto his skull, the way a normal person’s face remained fixed. But that was not normal for him.
     
         The best Stake could do, before leaving Tin Town, was to next seek out and stand before the place where his mother had been living when she died. Maybe the building’s familiar face would urge the shifting of his cells.
     
         Yet, even the buildings were mutated. He passed through an old low income housing project, the buildings all bulging at their middles, and at their summits the plastic of which they were composed had been weirdly affected by pollution, teased out into intricate branches so that it seemed that Stake strolled down a rubble-strewn promenade of baobab trees.
     
         He finally found the building he sought in this now transfigured neighborhood. He stared at the third floor windows through which his mother had once gazed, as if hoping that her face might appear there. As if hoping his own, younger face would appear there. But the restorative miracle he desired was not triggered.
     
         Stake flinched when he heard the chatter of automatic gunfire, a few blocks over. The sky was going coppery as evening approached, and it was best even for a seasoned war vet like himself not to be out in the gangs’ combat zone after dark. So he turned back toward the border of the mutant slum. As he walked, someone called out to him and he paused warily, looked over. A man sat on the top step of a tenement doorway, arched and shadowy like an alcove. In the gloom, long appendages stirred; tentacles? The man gurgled, “Are you a Ha Jiin?”
     
         “No,” Stake told him. “I’m not.”
     
         As if he hadn’t even heard Stake, the mutant said, “You call us Earth people ghost-eaters, don’t you?” And then, without waiting for another reply, the man purposely gave out a long rumbling belch.
     
    *     *     *
     
         Jeremy Stake .
     
         Cal Williams had found him, mostly by eliminating the others from his list. He learned little about the man from the net, but he had supposedly served as a corporal in the Colonial Forces in the Blue War. Oh, there was a picture...yet the man in the service ID photo looked absolutely nothing like the man Cal had followed to the apartment building. That only proved the point. This Corporal Stake had survived the war only to be killed here in his own dimension by the Ha Jiin terrorist, and have his identity stolen. In the more treacherous red tape jungle of bureaucracy, no one had become the wiser.
     
         The man had recently begun phone service to the apartment on Judas Street. And his number was not unlisted.
     
         Now, Cal felt his mission was more imperative than ever. He had to avenge this dead man. This murdered fellow war veteran named Jeremy Stake.
     
     
     
    7
     
         Stake had fallen asleep in his chair, seated in front of his new comp system. He had it in VT mode and had been watching a program on the Blue War cease-fire, and the return of most of the Colonial Forces. Vets and their families interviewed about being reunited. He had wondered if the ratings were as good now with the war over as they had been with it on. Some of its battles had been broadcast live, at times from the point of view of the soldiers’ goggles. Not those battles, of course, of deep penetration teams like his, particularly skirmishes in the gas tunnels. No – battles in support of the Jin Haa’s independence.
     
         A staccato burst of automatic fire – from a drive-by shooting, perhaps – awakened him, and he grabbed the Wolff .45 that rested on the desk beside his keyboard. For a moment, he had thought he was back there. Not in the blue-leaved forests, but Tin Town, where he had grown up. Tin Town, from which he had escaped.
     
         Still gripping the big pistol, with his free