by Julian May
"That'd fit if Galapharma agents are supervising and guarding the Haluk facility, the way they did on Cravat."
We lay motionless. The humming sound of the engine changed pitch but got only slightly louder, as though the aircraft was slowly circling the area near the pinnacle. Finally it landed and we dared to peek out from under our concealing ponchos.
The hopper was about seven hundred meters northeast of our position, partially concealed by the heaps of fallen rock that lay around Corkscrew. It was human-made, almost certainly a Vorlon, painted black, with no alphanumerics or other identifying marks. At full magnification my visor showed at least four moving figures but no decent detail.
"Ildy, can you bring yourTala-G scope to bear on them?"
"Doing it. Wait one .. . Oh, my. We got four homo saps in simple Class One envirogear, sidearms only. One guy with some sort of scientific apparatus that might be a portable ST scanner, another with unknown gadget, two kibitzers. My gunscope calls the aircraft ESC-10XA. It's the armored model, carries one Harvey HA-5 cannon, two Kagi BRB-200 blasters."
"Anything on the EM scan?"
"Wait... Affirm on that. Tuning. Dammit, the transmissions are encrypted and our descrambler can't hack it. Most likely they're just reporting the touch to base. Gone quiet now."
"It's okay. Keep watching. They look excited?"
"Not a bit. The scientific pair are passing out of sight among the rocks. Others hanging back, don't seem eager to get close to the smoke until the area is guaranteed safe. Apparently no attempt being made to search the area systematically. Now all subjects ex-visible."
About twenty minutes passed before the masked and hooded human figures reappeared, emerging from among the rocks in single file. They stood by the aircraft for a short time, conferring. Then everybody piled inside and the Vorlon flew away.
"You're certain there were only four of them walking around?" I asked.
"Positive. You were thinking they might have found O'Toole's body? It sure didn't look like they were carrying anything except small equipment."
"Never mind. Let's get on with it."
We climbed to our feet. I couldn't see her face, of course, but she seemed to be studying me. "Not a body . . . You were afraid O'Toole was alive and called the hostiles to pick him up. You thought he'd finked on us somehow."
I didn't reply.
"Doesn't compute, Helly. Why would he have waited this long to make a move?"
"So the Galapharma goon squad could grease us and the people in the privateer without endangering him. But it looks like I misjudged poor old Zorik after all. He was an asshole, but not a double-crossing asshole." I shifted into a more comfortable position and pulled out my coffee canteen. "Let's wait here five more minutes to be sure the hopper doesn't circle back, then get on with the recon."
We covered the final distance quickly. Zorik's trailblazes followed a circuitous path, avoiding the hot cinder patches. In a couple of spots my subterrain scan showed dangerously fragile crust above the smoldering firepits.
The red boulders heaped around the pinnacle were chunks of sandstone that had weathered off the larger formation and crashed to the ground. We clambered up on them as Zorik must have done and made our way east, toward the source of the smoke. I had to put away the scanner temporarily, needing both hands to climb.
The area immediately around the columnar base of Corkscrew opened, forming a flat-surfaced corridor strewn with drifted sand and small stones. I was tempted to jump down and travel where the footing was easier, but there were no boot prints in the sand, indicating that Zorik had kept to the partial cover of the rocks. So we did, too.
Damned good thing.
We found the smoke just short of the vantage point—the place where it was possible to see beyond the pinnacle into the region where the Haluk facility lay. Just below our position on the boulders was a broad expanse of windblown sand. A jagged hole about two meters wide, stained with a great splash of soot around the edges, had been punched into the surface right next to the rocks. Roiling black smoke rose from the opening and a red-orange glow pulsed obscurely in its depths.
There were no footprints near the hole. Zorik had obviously hopped down off a boulder onto what had looked to him like firm sandy ground.
And plummeted into fire.
"Aw, shit," Ildy whispered. "I wasn't any big fan of O'Toole's. But to go like that. . ."
I pulled out my STS unit and swept the area, describing what I saw on my display to Ildy. An infernal chasm underlay almost the entire flat tract of sand, which concealed a volcanic-rock crust that was less than four centimeters thick in some places. The underground chamber was as long as two soccer fields and equally deep, containing a mixture of incandescent petroleum and mineral matter. It extended from our rock pile to the great sandstone block that formed the underpinning of Corkscrew, and wrapped around the formation's far side.
"Let me take your Tala-G while you set up the thermal body-scanner right here," I said to Ildiko. "This little nook in the boulders gives pretty good cover for a survey of the facility."
Too bad Zorik had decided to get closer.
Creeping into the natural redoubt, 1 propped up the heavy blaster and brought the scoop-shaped eyepiece to my visor. There it was at last, a building standing on a small open plain surrounded on all sides by soaring rock formations. The shallow lake on the right side of it had begun to gleam as the sun rose above the bulk of Jukebox Butte.
The place had only a single story but was fairly large. A domed roof over the central module held a tall tower supporting the GBD projector and a collection of com antennas. Only two of the three radial wings of the structure were clearly visible to us. Their roofs were flat, and at the outer edge of each was an efficient-looking blaster turret. The windows in the facility were small and there weren't very many of them. The only door I could see was situated in the angle between the wings.
The facility's hopper pad was a simple slab just west of the building. As I watched, a ring of caution lights surrounding it flashed and the aircraft parked upon it sank down on an elevator platform and disappeared. A sliding lid sealed the opening in the ground. There were no fences or external guard installations, but a ring of small sensor housings armed with antipersonnel Kagis encircled the place about a hundred meters out, just beyond the hopper pad.
A distinctly tough nut for two people to crack.
Sprouting at the back of my mind was the seed of an idea.
If it worked, then Zorik O'Toole's awful death might not have been useless after all.
"The sniffer indicates lots of warm bods inside there," Ildiko remarked. She had the hypersensitive thermal scanner set up in a little collapsible tylar tent that would shield it from the firepit's radiation. I came over to have a look at the monitor. She said, "We have excellent cross-sectional views of the east and west wings, but I'm afraid I have no idea how to interpret the data. Those regularly spaced indistinct blips are certainly ranks of individuals. Hundreds of them! But they're not moving, and I can't believe they'd be asleep in an upright position. And see—other people are walking among the lines of stationary ones. Most of the mobiles appear to be Haluk, but there are a few humans there as well. More humans and Haluk are moving about in the central part of the building. Total enemy complement—wow!—four hundred and seventy. What the hell are they all doing here?"
"I think I know what this facility is," I said. "It fits a theory I had about this place." I sat down on the rock beside her. "Keep an eye out for any indication that the hopper's coming up again. We'll hang out here for a little bit while I brief you on what Galapharma and the Haluk were doing on the planet Cravat. Then you and me are gonna start some serious trouble."
I figured they'd land the hopper fairly close to the place it had set down earlier, so we threw together a little stone fort in a convenient rock pile near there and crawled inside. Both of us carried LGF-18s. Since I was the leader, I had dibs on shooting off the fireworks.
Af
ter I programmed their timers, I launched three magnum HE grenades, one after the other. They plopped onto the sand that roofed the combustion chamber and exploded simultaneously in a multilobed fireball. The concussion stunned us for a moment. A cloud of sand containing bits of rock blasted over our tiny shelter.
When the dust cleared, we saw flames leaping half as high as Corkscrew Pinnacle out of three new holes. The fire subsided after a few minutes and columns of smoke much larger than the one marking Zorik's pyre billowed into the air, all but curtaining the twisted red-rock formation.
We waited, knowing that observation instruments inside the facility would be trained on the novelty. But would the hopper return?
"I don't think they're going to fall for it," Ildy said after twenty minutes had gone by with no sign of an enemy excursion.
"Give 'em time. They have to do a little arguing. The scientists have had their innings. Maybe this time a load of tourists will come. It's got to be stone boring duty, guarding four hundred dystasis tanks full of Haluk genetic engineering subjects."
"I don't understand why Galapharma built the facility here instead of on a Haluk planet," she said. "Even if Dagasatt was more convenient to the source of the genen vector they were stealing from Cravat, there's the huge expense and inconvenience of this remote site, and the need to maintain security against the Qastt."
"My guess is that the decision was political. The Haluk leadership might have wanted to keep the project secret from their general population—at least for the time being, when so few of their people are able to undergo the new treatment. Otherwise, there might be some serious unrest on the part of the have-nots."
"You think that only the Haluk elite are being freed from the allomorphic cycle?"
"It's likely, since their supply of PD32:C2 is still very limited. As I understand it, no other genetic engineering vector will work, and the stuff's not easily synthesized. The only reliable vector source the Haluk have at the present time is Galapharma. Except for the rip-offoperation on Cravat, Gala agents have have been obliged to buy PD32:C2 from Rampart on the open market, then resell it at an exorbitant markup to the Haluk. Gala was also responsible for setting up the dystasis facilities and training Haluk personnel in the techniques developed by Dr. Emily Konigsberg. Emily's dead now. She used to be the lover of Alistair Drummond, the Galapharma CEO. The Haluk genen scheme was her idea. Ultimately, it spawned the whole illegal trade conspiracy."
"It's hard to understand why you think the genen project is so wrong," Ildiko said. "I mean, it's reprehensible of Galapharma to try to destroy Rampart in order to control the vector supply, and to engage in profiteering at the xenos' expense. But why shouldn't Rampart itself help the Haluk escape from this ghastly allomorphic thing? It could sell the genen vector to them at a reasonable price—"
"Ildy, there's more at stake here than correcting a highly inefficient alien physiology."
I hadn't told her about the demiclone threat. The advent of nonallomorphic Haluk was bad enough. In their gracile phase, Haluk are highly intelligent, perhaps even smarter than humans. They spend about one-third of their day sleeping and are active the rest of the time, just as we are. But they also exist for nearly half of every four-hundred-day year in a state of tightly cocooned suspended animation, and endure an intermediate lepidodermoid phase that turns them into lumbering feebs for another couple of months before they enter their shells.
I reminded Ildy about that. "Haluk allomorphism is the reason why their civilization has been so slow to progress, even though their race is much older than humanity and far more numerous."
"You're afraid that if Haluk acquire a human-type life cycle, they'll compete with us?"
"I think they'll wage war on us, babe. Their planets are vastly overcrowded, even with half the population zonked out at any given time. Think what'11 happen when the Big Sleep is eradicated. Part of their devil's deal with Galapharma is an agreement that will turn over more than a thousand Rampart-mandate T-l and T-2 worlds to the aliens for colonization once Gala owns the Perseus Spur. But the Haluk won't stop at that."
"How can you be so negative about them?" she demanded. "Heaven knows they're a contentious lot, and they seem to hate and fear humanity. But if Galapharma can work out a trade agreement with the Haluk, then why can't—"
"There's more. Besides the genen equipment, Gala is also selling them other high technology stuff. Brokering starships, computers, energy generators, all kinds of advanced hardware produced by colluding Big Seven Concerns. The shortsighted idiots think they're only helping the Haluk improve their quality of life. So far, the Concerns haven't traded weaponry or large quantities of important materiel—just enough to keep the alien payoff flowing. Do you know that the Haluk star-cluster is exceptionally rich in rare transac-tinide elements? That's all Alistair Drummond and his greedy cronies care about."
"So you're afraid that the reengineered Haluk will someday be able to build advanced starships and weapons of their own, and the balance of political power in the Milky Way will be upset."
I gave a little mirthless croak of laughter. "Ildy, even the allomorphic Haluk are smart enough to copy our starship and energy technology right now! I've got personal evidence that they've already done it on a small scale. But there's worse dirty work afoot. The PD32:C2 process can do more than eliminate the allomorphic cycle in a Haluk. It can change a Haluk into a human . . . and vice versa. The process is called demicloning."
She uttered an astonished phrase in another language I presumed was Hungarian. "But how is that possible?"
"Emily Konigsberg used human DNA to eradicate the allomorphic trait. That gives an altered Haluk entree into our racial genome and makes demicloning feasible. The process itself is complex. I certainly don't understand it, except to know that it works."
"But why in God's name did the woman do such a thing?"
"She explained it to me once, not long before she died. An idealistic dream about improving human-Haluk relations through a temporary exchange of physiology. What it came down to was that Emily was a naive simp and the Haluk pulled the wool over her eyes. By the time she began to suspect that her xeno buddies weren't as committed to inter-species brotherhood as they claimed to be, it was too late. The Haluk had made the demicloning thing an immutable part of their deal with Galapharma."
"I can't believe that Gala didn't understand the potential danger!"
"They thought they had a handle on it. Konigsberg inserted a redundant DNA sequence—a kind of marker—into all of her Haluk-human transforms. Other than that, it's virtually impossible to tell a demiclone from a genuine human except by its actions. We presume Gala knows how to identify the ringers. We don't. Not yet, anyhow. We will know as soon as we compare a known demiclone's genome with that of a genuine human."
"These demiclones would make perfect spies—"
"Or thieves, once they sopped up enough of our culture to pass muster. We know of at least one perfect Haluk-human. It was a duplicate of Dr. Emily herself, and it might have been on its way to Earth when it was accidentally killed. I can't believe that Galapharma's agents knew that Fake Emily existed. The Haluk are playing a secret game of their own with at least some of the demiclones, and the Commonwealth of Human Worlds is the unsuspecting opposition."
"Have you alerted CHW to—oh, Christ! Look! A hopper's coming up on the facility's pad lift."
"Right. Get ready. Keep monitoring the com bands."
I scuttled out of the rocky redoubt and took up a position among some boulders a dozen meters farther north. If the hopper touched down in the same place as before, we'd have it flanked.
In a few minutes the black aircraft was hanging over our heads, doing a look-see for the sightseers aboard.
Come down! I begged them telepathically. You can't savor the real experience unless you smell the oily smoke through your inefficient respirators, and feel the heat, and imagine what it would be like to plunge feet first into flaming death. ..
Finally it
landed, farther east than I would have liked but almost out of sight of the facility. Good enough.
When its hatch opened, five humans emerged, clad in the simplest class of envirogear. Two of them wore Kagi pistols. Their leader carried a subterrain scanner and the others crowded around to study the monitor's depiction of the fire down below. When that thrill palled the crew began tramping through the boulder field to obtain a closer view of the smoke holes.
"Any com traffic?" I asked Ildiko.
"Negative."
"Wait for my shout."
I made certain that nobody remained behind in the aircraft. When the tourists had Corkscrew's solid rock between them and the Haluk facility, I said, "Hit 'em, Ildy."
Each of us launched a sleepy-gas grenade. They soared in a very low trajectory and exploded, phut phut. The targets were wearing Class One breathers fit only for filtering smoke, dust, and microbes. The AG97 went right through them. The hopper crew staggered, turned around and made a desperate attempt to retreat. One of the armed men nearly managed to make it back to the aircraft, collapsing as he attempted to pull a communication unit from his belt.
Ildiko and I were up and running as the last one went down, sheathing our launchers, drawing our Ivanov sidearms in case of opposition. But all of the enemy were snoozing.
"Let's haul 'em aboard," I said.
We dragged the nearest body into the aircraft. It was damned heavy. The Vorlon was without passenger seats, the roomy compartment behind its cockpit open to accommodate freight or the bulky gear of combat personnel. I spotted an antigrav tote clamped to a side bulkhead and let out a yip of appreciation.
"Now we're in business! I'll use this cart to gather up the rest of the baggage, and you climb into the pilot seat and make sure the base isn't trying to raise us on the com. If they do, simulate a gronk-out."
"Affirm."
I retrieved the other four hostiles, slammed the hatch, stripped off their masks, and set off a gas-neutralizer cartridge. All of the captives were human males. While I disarmed and restrained them, Ildiko lit the hopper's engine and turned on the environmental system. A few minutes later we were able to pull off our helmets and lose our heavy packs and other combat gear. We lounged side by side in reversed command seats, slurping hot coffee and nutrigoo from our canteens and surveying our inert quarry laid neatly side by side on the deck. Given the neutralizer, they'd wake up within ten minutes or so. Without it, they'd be gorked for half a day or more.