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“I’ll stop you there. You’re going to ask if a standoff burst is plausible.”
    “You’ve heard of it?”
    “Oh boy, oh boy, Officer. I’ve heard of
all
of them.” The Night Bird sets down the Pabst and reaches out a thick palm. “Hand me that, will ya? The red binder there.”
    As it turns out, Officer Burdell’s made a study of all the various scenarios; she’s been collecting all the sober theories and glittery-eyed Hail Mary pitches and gauzy counterfactuals, all the off-the-wall ideas presented as possible world savers.
    “The standoff burst, kid, you’re talking about a top ten fantasy. Top five, maybe. I mean, you got, what, you got your push/pull fantasies, your gravity tractor fantasies, your Enhanced Yarkovsky Effect fantasies.” She flaps open the binder to a particular page, gazes with amusement at the long columns of figures. “People do get a hard-on for that Enhanced Yarkovsky Effect. Probably the funny name. But it won’t work. They never got the numbers right on all that magnetic field shit.”
    I nod, okay. All the science is boring me, I want yes or no. I want answers. “So, but the—the standoff burst?”
    The Night Bird clears her throat, cocks her head at me sour for a second, not liking to be rushed.
    “Yes,” she says. “Same story. It would take calibration and it would take hardware. The calibration, maybe, maybe this Space Command guy has some good numbers, maybe he’s figured out the target velocity and that, but no one’s got the hardware. Gotta have a highly specialized delivery system, built specific to this thing. To the material strength, the porosity, the velocity. Maybe there’s a chance someone builds the right launcher, does the math, if the sumbitch was a couple years out. If it was ten years out, you could nudge it enough that by the time it gets close it sails by, it’s a miss.” She angles forward in the armchair. “But you’re telling me someone thinks they’re gonna do it with a standoff burst
now
?” She looks ather watch, shakes her head. “What are we—a month? Month and a half?”
    “Forty-two days,” I say. “So you’re saying there is no chance?”
    “No. Listen. Officer. I am saying there is less than that. There is less than no chance.”
    I thanked her politely for everything and went downstairs and finished packing.
    *  *  *
    “You know, I hate to say it,” says Cortez, carefully constructing a hand-rolled cigarette. “But this is a very attractive girl.”
    I look at him sharply. There is nothing in either his tone of voice or his salacious expression to indicate that he does, in fact, hate to say it. He’s needling me is what he is doing, saying exactly the thing I will find most unsettling. Other people have enjoyed teasing me in the same way: my old friends, Detectives McGully and Culverson. Nico, of course. I get it. I know what I’m like.
    “I’m just saying.” Cortez lights a smoke and enjoys a long, satisfied inhale, contemplating the girl’s slim body with open appreciation. I don’t say anything, not wanting to give Cortez the satisfaction of even a joking rejoinder, no mild “ha-ha” or straight-man rolling of my eyes. I scowl, waving cigarette smoke away from the unconscious young woman, and he stubs the thing out on the floor.
    “Oh, dear Palace,” he says, and he yawns and stands up. “I’m going to miss you when I’m in heaven and you’re not.”
    I’m sitting on the toilet, beside the girl, whom we’ve laid out on the thin bare mattress, her hands tucked at her sides. The bed is just inside the bars, inside the actual cell part of the holding cell, along with the toilet and the sink and mirror. Cortez is on the other side of the room, the good-guy side, in the thin space between the bars and the door leading out to the hallway. That’s the only place I could find a ceiling hook for the saline bag, so that’s where it’s hung: on the good-guy side of the room, the sterile fluid dripping out of