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ry operation. Which it wasn't. Instead he had merely been on the duty roster as the lead technical engineer for the lambda phase on 21 October. He had pulled his turn, more or less fairly just like everyone else, and no one was surprised when his own inattention to the necessary details struck him down. Who alone of the external teams, after all, didn't think to do regular and steady maintenance on his environmental suit? Who among them, it was asked, didn't have the foresight to expect any number of catastrophic eventualities and supplement his environmental suit with at least one emergency bulb in his kit--enough goddamned air to make it back to the mobile transport unit?

Icky, of course, and it was Icky who had paid for it, and in some ways all the better for the rest of them. They didn't have to worry about pulling double duties, covering their own logistical nightmares while repairing the holes in Icky's mission plan in their spare time.

But not just better for that reason. There were the cards, too. The glossy, oversized deck of Tarot cards he'd shuffled at night before sliding off to sleep, playing his stubby reddish fingers over the green and yellow Celtic knot patternings. Dealing them flat in the old gypsy lay, circle cross in the middle, four sisters down the right side. This means this, and that means that, and don't touch my goddamned deck or you'll cloud the energy. You'll skew my reading. Fthwap! Fthwap! Fthwap! Laying out his fortune again and again, never less than half a dozen times before bed.

Lots of beautiful women in his future, Icky would tell them. Blondes and brunettes, and once even a pair of redheaded twins--at the same time, he crowed. One to suck me and one to fuck me. Maybe even sisters.

The cards hadn't said anything about his critical mission failure, though they all knew that a Death card rattled around in that and any Tarot deck. If he'd gotten it, he wouldn't have told them anyway.

Once Icky was dead, his brain starved and vitals

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