Haze, p.1
Haze, page 1
Haze: A Novel of a Far Future © 2025 by Katharine Kerr. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without written permission except short excerpts in a review, critical analysis, or academic work.
This is a work of fiction.
Cover art by Dany V.
ISBN EBOOK: 978-1-64710-152-7
First Edition. August 2025
An imprint of Arc Manor Inc.
www.CaezikSF.com
For STEPHEN GORDON
1969–2021
His music stopped too soon.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Out of sheer habit, readers tend to assume that all characters in a science fiction book are Human, and that all the Humans are White. In HAZE, unless a character is specifically described as light-skinned, it would be more accurate to assume the opposite.
ONE
The harsh sunlight turns everything Dan sees to pain. White buildings tower over him with edges as sharp as knives and windows like accusing eyes. The ruins in the War Memorial across the pitted street glisten like black bombs half hidden in underbrush. Except there’s no brush on Nowhere Street; not a trace of green, just stone and perma and cracking roadblack. The sunlight itself crackles and flashes in long streaks that turn window reflections to fire. On the bombed-out edge of the vast city, Gleam lives up to its name.
Once Dan owned a chip-augmented visor for light control, a beautiful strip of darkness to wrap around his eyes. It was a very long time ago, it seems now, back when he was someone else. He pawned it, just as he’s pawned almost everything else he once owned.
Dan stumbles over a fragment of tile lying on the remains of a sidewalk. He rights himself, finds he’s shaking too hard to walk, and decides to sit down and rest, just rest his human, all-too-human body, just a few minutes, then move on. He manages to get to the strip of shade thrown by the nearest building, puts his back against the wall, and slides down until he can sit with his legs stretched out in front of him. His backside on the hard concrete hurts no matter how he shifts his weight. He wonders if he’s still bleeding a little from his night’s work. Rough trade. Wanna hurt me? Just pay in advance. The last rung of the ladder down.
Haze. Dan wants Haze, needs Haze, has sold himself on the street more than once to get the creds to buy Haze. This morning he’s looking for a dealer—any dealer—who can give him the tabs that will turn the glare and crackle of the sunlight into a warm, soft glow. Once he gets a tab down, every nerve in his body will stop shrieking at him. The sunlight will dim. Shadows will fall around him like soft blankets to cover him from the world.
He shuts his eyes. He is just tired enough to drowse—not sleep, but drowse in a flicker of dreams and silences—until the sound of footsteps wakes him. Lod-Mata, the one friend he has left, kneels down beside him and flips the fabric of his kilt back to ensure his stub of a tail stays covered. The blaze of sunlight makes the Lep’s gray-green head scales glitter and spark. His bright green skull crest flattens in alarm. He reaches out one clawed hand and lays it gently on Dan’s arm.
“You loaded?’
“No such luck. Waiting to score. You got any?”
“No, and the hell I’d give you that core-crap anyway.” Lod rummages in the pouch pocket of his tunic and brings out a clear vial of pink liquid. “Drink it. It’ll help.”
“Sai. Thanks.” Dan takes it, cracks off the top, and gulps down the bitter contents. “Pay you back when I can.”
“No sweat. I stopped in at Mission House after work, and they were handing it out for free. Along with news. Someone’s looking for you. Two someones, a woman and a man, both Human. The priest guessed they were both ex-Fleet officers. The way they walked showed it and she gave orders like she was used to them being followed.”
“Shit. That’s all I need. Did you recognize them?”
“I never saw them.”
“Did anyone tell them?”
“No. They all knew nothing, not even Father Kev. I guess his Lord Jessy will forgive him for lying.”
The pink juice takes effect fast. Dan’s shakes ease up, and the screaming in his nerves quiets to a snarl.
“What’s that red mark on your face? It looks like someone hit you with a whip.”
“He did. You should see my butt.”
“No thank you, spare me! But what in hell—”
“Last night’s john’s idea of a good time. He paid enough for it.”
“You keep this up, you’re not going to be the pretty boy much longer.”
“Throwbacks like me heal fast. So they told me, anyway.”
Lod looks away for a long moment, sighs, looks back again. His crest droops to one side. “I don’t suppose you want to talk about rehab.”
“Hell no! I’m not doing rehab.”
“Why not?”
“Three months, pal. They want to shut you up for three fucking months in some damn room somewhere. And fuck with your brain. Can’t see the stars, not for three months. Bad enough I can’t reach them, but not even see them? No.”
The last word echoes up and down the empty street. Lod gets to his feet. “The Church of the Redeemer is handing out dinner tonight. They usually do a pretty good spread. Do you want to eat?”
“No.”
“Whatever. You don’t need to yell at me.”
“Sorry. I mean it. Sorry.”
“It’s sai. See ya.”
Dan closes his eyes and leans back against cold stone. He wants to sleep, but the pink juice has steadied his mind. He remembers that he’s carrying creds. If he gets rolled for them, he won’t be able to buy the Haze. He owns a Fleet officer’s long knife, an ancient-style real metal dirk, a mark of his former status, the one thing he has left from the days before his long slide down. He retrieves the knife from its sheath in his right boot. The blade sends a flash of light into the ruins across the street.
Dan has a little ritual. Every time he draws the long knife, he keeps it in his right hand while he holds up his left to study his wrist. He can see under his pale skin the long blue veins that cross a tendon. One good cut, and it won’t take him long to bleed out. Someday—not now, but someday—he’ll escape from the street and from his memories. The memories hurt worse than his life on the street. But for now, he lays the knife on his thigh and rests a hand on the hilt, ready for any trouble.
Sooner or later, a dealer will cruise by on a fancy grav sled. They prowl this particular sector of the city, looking for buyers. In a couple of minutes he sees someone walking in his direction, someone striding briskly along like he—no, she—knows where she’s going. Ordinary clothes, blue slacks, a striped shirt, but they hang wrong on someone with military posture and a shipboard walk. Curly black hair cut short, and the ice-cold gray eyes that contrast so oddly with her rich brown skin
“Shit. It can’t be.”
“But it is,” Captain Evans sets her hands on her hips and considers him. “You shouldn’t yell your head off if you don’t want to be found. I heard you two blocks away.”
“Ma’am.” Dan raises a trembling hand but stops short of a salute.
“No need for that. We figured the priest was protecting you when he said he didn’t know where you were. So we waited outside until I scanned him telling someone the truth.”
“We?”
“Devit’s out looking for you, too.” She softens her voice. “Did you think he wouldn’t be?”
Her face seems to blur and waver. Tears fill his eyes. Thanks to the pink juice, he cannot stop them from spilling over.
“Intel finally figured out that you’d ended up on Ruby,” Evans said. “Gleam’s the only Human-run city on this godforsaken planet. The priest told someone you were likely to be at the Memorial.” She tips her head back to look up at the white buildings. “Does anyone live in those?”
“No, ma’am. They’re part of the Memorial. Sealed up and empty. One for each war.”
Evans tips her head back and stares up at the tall white buildings with their knifepoint roofs. “No wonder the locals call it Nowhere Street.”
The tears have stopped. Dan wipes his face on his shirt sleeve while he searches for something to say. All he can come up with is, “Why?”
“First, to see if you were still alive.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. To me and a fair number of other sapes. Second reason: to see if there’s anything left of your mind.”
“So that’s what they want? They need a replacement part for an AI or something?”
She quirked an eyebrow. “Who’s this ‘they’?”
“Whoever sent you.”
“I can’t discuss it out here. We’ve got a protected space—”
Dan winces. “No. I’m not going anywhere. This is where I belong.” He crosses his arms over his chest to hide his shaking hands.
Evans looks up and down the street for a minute or two, then smiles with her usual half twitch of her mouth. “There’s Devit. It’s about time he got here.”
A nondescript gray car pulls up and sinks down to ground level with a long sigh of compressed air. A tall male Human gets out, lays a hand on his jacket pocket, and pauses to look around him. Pitawanna Tevita, his real name, marks him as an Islander from Nesia, as do his wavy black hair and deeply tanned skin. Chief Warrant Officer Peter Devit, as the Fleet insists on calling him, always pauses
He leaves the door open with a voice command and strides over. “Dan, shit! Your face!”
“Yeah. I’m a filthy mess. Not worth your time.”
“Shut up and listen. We’re here to get you off the damn street.”
“No. I’m not going anywhere. I belong here, right here, with all the other pieces of crap floating around.”
Devit‘s face shows no emotion at all, so impassive that he might have been thinking of something else entirely. Dan recognizes that look. It signifies that Devit sees a problem and is considering how to deal with it. Devit takes a vial out of his shirt pocket and holds it up with a little shake. It rattles. The two tabs inside gleam with a momentary blue light from their nanites, the sign that they’re pure, actual Haze. Dan breaks out into a cold sweat.
“Come with us, and they’re yours.” Devit glances at Evans. “This is what took me so long. Scoring.”
“You bastard.” Dan can barely speak. His mouth has filled with the spit of pure desire.
“Which is it, Dan? If you don’t want this Haze, I can dump it down a street drain.”
Dan takes a deep breath. Why fight? He knows he’ll lose. Yet he cannot bring himself to agree aloud.
Devit shakes the vial again. “One tab as soon as you get in the car. When you come down from that, we’ll talk.”
“Then I get the other one?”
“That’s a promise.”
Dan slides the knife back into its boot sheath. Now comes the real difficulty: getting to his feet when he’s shaking and sweating with drug lust. He manages to twist and shove his reluctant body until he can use both hands to push himself into a kneel. There he sticks, head down and panting.
“We’re going to need a medic,” Evans says.
“No, ma’am, not really.”
Devit’s on the tall side for Human males. From the look of him, he’s in decent shape, but no one would ever call him muscle-bound. He bends down and slides his hands under Dan’s arms. “You remember this, Buddy. Hang on.” He picks Dan up as easily as an ordinary person might lift a small child.
Dan drapes one arm over Devit’s shoulder and goes limp. Hearing his old nickname and feeling Devit’s body against his, so familiar and warm, bring him more tears. “Hey, Pete? I’ve missed you so bad.”
“Yeah?” His voice shakes, then steadies. “Well, I missed you, too.”
Evans is already waiting by the car. “I’ll drive.”
Devit stows Dan into the back seat like luggage. He opens the vial and gets out one tab. Dan’s hands are shaking so badly that he lets Devit put the tab into his mouth. It dissolves without any need for water. He gasps in relief and leans back to wait for the Haze to protect him from the razor blades of the sun.
Special Ops has provided a suite of rooms sealed away from every kind of interference beam as well as vision, sound, infrared, ultraviolet, and even old-fashioned wall bugs. No normal sapient walking down the corridor would see anything but a long stretch of painted wall. Captain Evans, of course, can see the door. At her touch on the code pad, the door slides open. She steps back to let Devit carry Dan inside, then follows with one cautious glance back. The door slides shut, locked and invisible, at her voice command.
Evans tosses her utility bag onto a shabby brown chair and walks over to one white wall.
“Play.”
The hologram lights up to display a view of Old Earth Park in Gleam’s Civic Center, a flourish of green among white buildings. She takes a moment to scan the other walls, switching her various vision functions back and forth, just as an extra precaution against unauthorized surveillance. Despite the paranoid gossip and rumors, Throwbacks with her functions cannot see through solid objects. What she can see with her oddly colorless eyes is the flicker of energy that would come through a wall if some kind of sensor were behind it.
She does another sweep of the room, but she finds nothing new or suspicious.
Devit has taken Dan into one of the suite’s bedrooms. Evans follows as far as the doorway, watching as Devit lays him down on the bed and props him up with the pillows. Dan’s smiling, his eyes only half closed, but she doubts he’s seeing anything outside of his own mind. Devit ducks into the attached Waste Management room and comes back with a wet washcloth. He perches on the edge of the bed and begins to wipe crusted blood off Dan’s chin.
“He bit his lip pretty badly,” Devit says. “The flogging must have hurt like hell.”
Evans studies Dan’s face, still impossibly handsome despite the livid red line on his cheek. His mother—his famous mother, JohDanna, the vid star of stars—had insisted on her offspring being as beautiful as she was. With her money and fame, she’d gotten her fetus the genes she wanted. She never bothered to find out what other genes her beautiful son carried. Judging from the vid gossip about JohDanna, Evans figures that she wouldn’t have cared if she had known.
Evans’s admiration of Dan’s genetically enhanced beauty is strictly abstract. The men in her own marriage quartet had both been the rugged type, she supposes you’d call it. She and the other woman, Leeta, had agreed on their taste in men, just as they agreed on most things. So many years ago. I loved them all. I just loved the Fleet more.
As if he feels Evans’s attention, Dan opens his eyes, deep-set and dark green in a face as exotic as an ancient painting of an angel, his skin close to an ivory color tinted with beige. And just like one of those angels, he has thick golden blond hair, shaggy at the moment from poverty but still beautiful because the color is so rare. He’s not feminine, no, though not strikingly masculine, either. It’s a facet ambiguous in a way that invites the viewer to see whatever fantasy they cherish.
Devit’s a decent-looking man, neither handsome nor ugly. Their faces contrast—Devit’s a more common deep tan compared to Dan’s unusual Pale, as the latter’s rare coloration is known—but the way that they are staring at each other, so completely absorbed, is the same. Evans shakes her head. Trouble coming, she supposes, for Devit at any rate. She reminds herself that Devit has walked through this particular fire before. He knows who and what Dan is.
“How long before he comes down?”
“About six solstandard hours, ma’am.”
“Sai. I’ll be in the other room.”
Evans returns to the living room. To her surprise Devit joins her in a few minutes. “He’ll be fine on his own for a little while, ma’am. The Haze will take care of that. I’ll get him cleaned up once he begins to come around. I’ll go get his spare clothes from Mission House.” He pauses, frowns. “I need to find more Haze, too.”
“Sai. Ye gods, this rotten drug’s going to be a problem. Are we going to have to keep feeding it to him?”
“I don’t see any way around it. He should be in rehab. They need to find someone else for the job.”
“Special Ops insisted. That’s why I agreed on him in the first place.”
“Right. But, ma’am? Can I enter an objection into today’s report?”
“By all means. The order to find him came from the Bureau itself, and there’s no arguing with that. So post a warning, yes. It’ll be there whether they ignore it or not.”
“Thank you.”
“Honest opinion, Chief. Do you think he can still function? My god, he’s a mess.”
“I don’t know, but damn, he deserves a chance. First they promoted him way too fast. Not even thirty yet. And then the Fleet threw him away. Dishonorable discharge over the damned drugs.” Devit shrugs. “I still don’t get it. Most starpilots use Haze off duty. Why single Dan out?”
“They claimed his drug use was excessive. Beyond the usual. Chief, the brass can always find something to say when they want to.”
“I know, ma’am. But it gripes me.”
Evans considers, then decides that enough time has passed for the truth. “Keep this to yourself. It was a top flight scandal. I didn’t hear about it until it was all over. Someone way high up in the command chain was—well, we could say that he was obsessed with Dan. Dan turned him down. The five-star someone took steps. Revenge. Ridiculous! But Dan takes some people that way.”
