Betray me not, milady, For then I shall be... unkind.

I’d laughed at the lyrics in rehearsal as Alex good-naturedly waved a finger in my direction. Now the words came from the Singer, skeletal, ominous; and the threat in his voice chilled me. He blazed with danger... and I, in ripped and ragged clothes, shuddered at my vulnerability.

“Close-up on Lyra,” I heard Helena whisper.

I screamed again. On cue.

“That Kilgoorlie is a spooky guy,” Jerith said.

It was after supper and we were in a Quonset hut in Jerith’s camp. Three of us, Jerith, Roland, and I, stood at a workbench where we brushed dirt off chunks of metal that Jerith claimed were archeological artifacts. The piece I had to clean was slightly bigger than my hand, fairly solid, and heavier than it looked. It was mostly copper-rust green, but a trumpet-like mouth at one end had its interior streaked with bronze. Like most of the artifacts on Caproche, this was probably a broken weapon.

We were dusting off the past because we had become archaeologists-in-training. Technically speaking, the planet Caproche was classified SIO, Scientific Investigation Only; but seven hundred years ago, unknown alien races had warred here from tropics to tundra, and the resulting devastation fit Alex Kilgoorlie’s music like a chain mail glove. Helena had decided she must shoot Alex’s next album on Caproche. To get around the Planet Protection Agency, she paid Jerith a great deal of money to claim our party was helping him in his studies; so when we weren’t in recording sessions, we made a show of devotion to the digs. Well... most of us made such a show — Helena had yet to touch a shovel. And Alex got so enthusiastic the first time he came to the work hut, he’d somehow smashed the lens of a heavy-duty battle laser; so Jerith excused him from future duty.