What if, he wondered, and his world changed, knocked ever so gently off its axis so only the most very perceptive of people knew what had happened, even if they couldn’t figure out the reason why the world was suddenly a different place; if not all that much different. What if, he thought to himself, and his life proceeded to change. Only he knew for what reason it had happened, and only he could fathom the full depth of the alterations brought about in his relatively sheltered life because of his whimsical ‘what-if’ing. The change was not overnight, though swift; the changes were not overt, but most definitely there. What little he could be sure about what happened to him meant that he had been in very serious danger with some very serious sorts of people, and that getting out of that danger in the way he had was only taking him further down the track to further bothering those serious people, and they didn’t at all take to the idea of being bothered by somebody who was such a pathetic, barely- noticeable speck of a nothing to their plans; he was, at the same time, the most absolute and utterly important speck of a something to their plans, and that in the process of stopping him from being a bother in their inimitable and unspeakable ways, they were, in essence, giving themselves a good swift kick in the teeth for their troubles. Not that he would be the one to be dishing out that kick, of course. Not having any legs made it a frightful task to kick somebody in the teeth, no matter how much you may have liked the idea of inflicting a spot of harm on their dentures.

He wasn’t sure if the people he was worried about bothering had dentures, but for one thing, he did not. Dentures were something he was quite proud to lack, because as a senior citizen at the fairly senior end of that spectrum, having your own teeth was considered to be quite an accomplishment. Simply not having something was not reason enough to be proud of it, though, as he wasn’t at all proud of the fact that he didn’t have any legs. He had some legs, but not in the sense that people have ‘some’ potato chips, or ‘some’ money. He had parts of his legs, and those parts stopped not far above where his knee would have been, if it had not been removed by claws which were much larger than his own and more perfectly suited to tearing through uniform, flesh and bone, replaced by teeth, cheerfully gnawing away on his legs which were detached while he, Master Sergeant Grit Patrick Steben, had been left to bleed and scream. Screaming as he was, he had attracted the attentions of the rest of his squad, who had deftly repulsed the attack of the creature which took his legs with the kinds of guns better suited to destroying heavily armoured tanks; it was grimly appropriate, he thought, that such an amount of firepower could be brought to bear on his command. Bleeding had done him considerably less use than the screaming part, and because of said bleeding, his screaming had continued for a shorter period of time than he would have liked. Actually, he only really managed a short, suprised sort of ‘Erk!’ noise before he passed out. That was how he lost his legs, in a very simple fashion which belied the horrendously complex way that he liked to do things; things like wonder about what if.

What if he took the contract he had been offered, which was, in all things, pretty gosh darn good, apart from the part where it mentioned him waiving certain legal rights in the event that he came under fire/attack/grievous bodily harm. There was no mention of what would become of him if the bodily harm he received wasn’t grievous, and he wasn’t so sure he liked that as much as knowing he would probably not be paid any benefits. He liked to be sure of things, which he had already told that great pompous git that ran the Space Defence Force. Fleet Admiral Trevelyan was, without a doubt, one of the most bizarre men it had ever been his misfortune to bump into – literally. He hadn’t meant to bump into the Admiral, but his wheelchair had quite a wide wheelbase not at all suited to traversing the close, dank corridors that ran from end to end of SDF vessels. Several times throughout his trip through the ship he had bumped into lesser officers, but, as he so eloquently put it, they were junior officers, and he didn’t give a fuck what they did about him. He had his teeth, he had his wheelchair, and by God and sonny Jesus, he was going to use both of them to cause his own brand of ‘grievous bodily harm’ upon those officers if they tried to do anything at all to remove the cantankerous senior citizen, last seen careening towards the engine room. Hopefully he would forget what he was doing, fall asleep, and they could push him out an airlock somewhere over Mercury. Instead, with the ingratiating courtesy of men who are damned obviously up to something, they circumnavigated the tight stretch of steel that had been graciously named a ‘corridor’ and left Grit to find the Admiral, to first pick up the contract that had been offered to him. It was frightfully simple for him to complete, he had told the Admiral whilst he was posturing and preening in that ‘Look at me; I run things around here’ kind of way, and had quickly shaken hands and wheeled out at a speed ranging between two and five miles per hour, taking into account turning, and avoiding junior officers.

So. What to do regarding the contract, which sat in his lap, which was attached to his hips, which were sitting in his chair, which currently held pride of place in his apartment, the ‘Hammer’ bungalow in the Deimos complex, which was on – or rather in – Mars. He could probably hurl it out the garbage disposal unit, which would send the bedraggled piece of paper hurtling out into the icy tracts of space, and he wouldn’t have to give it any more thought; though if he didn’t come up with an answer – a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, really – then he would most likely be bothering those people who he was worried about being a bother to, so the contract was quite safe in his lap where he could stare at it quite closely. Holding things up for reading was a luxury of his younger days, now things had to sit in his lap whilst he looked at them, or they had to be at lap-distance from his tired blue eyes. The pale, weathered sky colour in his eyes was home to a few foggy cataracts, and there was no way in Hades he was going to get himself tested for glasses – the same pride in not having dentures was the same perverse reason he would not ‘inflict’ those ridiculous ocular aids on himself. He didn’t feel old, he said, so as long as he could possibly hold out, he would not be wearing glasses, or anything that made him look old, for that matter. For this same reason, he had to have things at lap- distance when he read them, like an awful lot more things he had to get closer to of late. It seemed strange to him, that at one point he had to hold things away to see them properly, but at the opposite end of the scale there were things that he had to get closer to, which was difficult, taking into account the size of his wheelchair. He wouldn’t admit it to himself, or to those who had been there to see – or experience the aftermath of it – the spectacle, but he had quite simply not seen those junior officers he had run into whilst rolling through the SDF ship, which made him wonder what use he was to the people offering him the contract. What if, he considered ruefully, he was being played for a patsy? Being set up with information simply to be in the wrong place at just the right time for somebody else? Who would kick up a fuss if something happened to him that was not entirely just, so long as it was pleasing to the majority that formed up the insatiable beast Society, with its endless craving for so- called ‘justice’ and ‘vengeance’. No, he thought, that was unlikely. He simply wasn’t important enough to even kick up that kind of a stink about; he was, after all, and as he had explained to the Fleet Admiral, a private detective.

He had tried to explain it in very simple terms for the Admiral to understand, as by most measuring sticks, the Admiral was nothing if not simple. Seriously considering if hand-puppets might aid in his explanation the other man had finally understood, and that was when the contract was exchanged, with an air of hostility towards the disabled senior in his chair from the Admiral, balanced out by the sharp glare at the moron in uniform from the detective. He dealt in information, the elderly detective decided, and that was what made him important enough to kick up a stink over. Perhaps he had something that the SDF wanted, or he would be called on to search out when requested, though reading over the contract provided no quick answer to this perfectly simple of questions; it simply stated that he would be available to work under SDF jurisdiction ‘when the need arose’. That held a lot more connotations than he would have liked. Something like that was far from legally binding, being as it could be twisted more ways than unsettled jelly – it didn’t wibble-wobble like jelly, but thinking about what might happen if he signed the contract was enough to have made his legs go all wibble-wobble, too. Not that he had legs, of course. Not signing the contract had the same effect: he would not know what would happen to him, and not being certain was a wibble-wobble sort of affair that he generally preferred to avoid with large bouts of drinking – whiskey was his favourite – which in turn led to wibble-wobbles of another kind, which he could handle. Being practically attached to the gleaming porcelain bowl in his bathroom was the kind of wibbly-wobbling he had dealt with many times in his slowly dragging lifetime, and another few examples of that wouldn’t be that bad to add to the list of really quite silly things he had managed to pull off through the course of his escapades. That was a good idea, yes. A drink would certainly calm jittery nerves – if nothing else, it would give him an excuse to get closer to the toilet, where he could see as much of it as clearly as he liked, if only in small bits at a time.

Leaning his weight forward over the fateful contract, Grit pushed himself across the short space in his apartment that he could properly navigate without wheeling over something that he’d rather not think about. Of all things, the floor was cleanest – clean being a relative term, considering the amount of complete and utter shite that graced almost every other surface in the room. The coffee table held empty coffee mugs and ashtrays, which had been there so long it looked as if they were beginning to share their jobs with each other. Newspapers were the main attendant in this conglomeration of crap; they were almost literally everywhere, as they were the source of the most juicy information. Conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, Grit Steben, fixed himself a shot of whiskey from the drinks cabinet that was always kept stocked, set the glass onto the coffee table in a place cleared with a deft backsweep of his hand, and took the bottle instead, draining it of almost a full quarter of its contents. The newspapers tumbled to his floor with complete disregard for what page they opened onto, but it didn’t particularly matter – they were all so aligned that no matter how hard he hurled them, biffed them, flung them or whipped them around his room, they would all open to pages that had mention of the same things on them.

Some pages had ‘The Graceful’ written on them.

Some pages had ‘Magnum’ written on them.

The rest of the pages had all sorts of things written all over them, but it was the person that they were written by which caught the intrigue of the disabled detective: Paelyn Blaquerocke.

He had been carefully cataloguing the sightings, rumours and pure hearsay that surrounded the enigmatic individual known amongst the popular conspiracy groups as ‘The Graceful’, and found that, like Superman of ancient Earth fame, it was a case that neither this shadowy agent or the equally mysterious Mr Blaquerocke were ever seen in the same place at the same time. He knew as he sculled back more of his whiskey, that this did not necessarily account for an awful lot of hard evidence; he knew who Jack the Ripper was, but would never meet him, and he could argue that the man had never existed at all, simply a murderer elevated to the status of ‘urban legend’ by unchecked rumour and the added embellishments to a story that accumulate over time. What he did know, though, was that something had happened that had caused the Ripper legends to emerge around the man known as ‘Jack’, and something had happened that had started the legend of The Graceful; his finger was pointed squarely on the bizarre figure of Paelyn T. Blaquerocke. The man himself was simply weird. Not the kind of weird one feels when standing in a room painted day-glo green (though of course Grit never stood in those rooms, he wheeled), but the kind of weird one could be said to experience when walking down a street, only to have the lights overhead flick out, one by one, as they walked beneath them. Unnerving, it would be, and this was Grit’s impression of Mr Blaquerocke. Simply put, he scared the buhjeezers out of the old man, though neither of them was consciously aware of this fact, if Paelyn at all knew who this strange little Grit Steben was that was frightened by him and collected newspaper clippings about, around, and by him. Which, with a nagging sense of circular argument, brought the detective back to the contract in his lap, still staring face up with the blank line where his signature would go if he chose to sign it, saying quite plainly: ‘Look! Here I am! Stupid amounts of money! Just sign me, and you’ll never have to work again!’. There were a few other things he was sure that the paper was insisting, such as needing glasses to read properly, but it only ever did that when he read it in his lap – which was always.

He was sure that somehow, however obliquely, Paelyn Blaquerocke was involved with The Graceful, if he wasn’t actually said figure of legend, and that somehow, on however small a scale, The Graceful was a very good friend of the SDF. They dealt in information, both of them; he had seen files kept on some supposedly ‘normal’ individuals that spanned near on their entire lives – where they had gone to school, where they were born, the last eight places they were known to live (and for how long), the brand of cereal that they ate most of... There was a frightening amount of data kept tabs on not by the SDF, of that Grit was sure, but somehow they had come across it, which meant that there was some outside force who the ninny Fleet Admiral of the grand Space Defence Force had decided was a good one to invest in. That was, of course, when the Admiral could be coerced into speaking about anything other than getting more Marines, more tanks to put them in, and more guns to strap to the tanks – so he correctly surmised that somebody of a great intellect must be behind he who was behind the single most powerful space-based fleet in the Solar sector, which, like the contract and the whiskey and the newspaper had all conspired to do, brought him back to that shit-eating grin in every picture graced by The Graceful; Paelyn Tango Blaquerocke.

“Hells bells,â€