It looked the tree up and down, then turned to the left and began what, to Jesmin, looked like the slowest walk in history toward the sensor fence.
Huhunna heaved a sigh, then spoke in Wookiee. “Too slow. Nothing will want to eat something that smells like that, but something may come along and want to play with it. And will wreck it. It needs to move faster.”
“No, any faster and the motion detectors would pick it up. At this speed, it looks like static display on the sensor screens. And once it’s ten meters past the fence, it can pick up speed.”
Huhunna just stared after it, shaking her head, her expression sorrowful.
Back in the operations center, Trey watched the occasional burst-transmitted holocam images from the slow-moving droid. Occasionally he’d run through the entire visual recording at high speed, which made it look like the droid was moving at a normal rate while windblown leaves and insects flashed past at supersonic speed.
Long after Jesmin and Huhunna returned, the image showed the droid entering a surface-level cleft in a small hillside. The holocam view cycled unsuccessfully through standard optical mode, infrared mode, and light-gathering mode, then clicked on and stayed on motion-detector mode. Now detection of air movements allowed the droid to build up a three-dimensional diagram of the series of cracks, caves, and tunnels it was navigating.
Eventually Trey stopped receiving new signals. “It’s too deep for the comm signals to get through.” He rose and began assembling his pack. “So it’s Skifter Station and more sabotage for me. How are you going to get Stage Boy on base?”
Jesmin glanced at Huhunna. “We put Stage Boy in a bag to prevent him picking up any forensic evidence. Then we go through the trees, bridging gaps with an old-fashioned cord-and-grapnel rig, which Huhunna is a genius at using, until we’re past the perimeter defenses. I break trail, and Huhunna does the heavy lifting.”
Trey hefted his pack. “Tell Turman you heard that the shellfish the suit’s based on adapts for survival by modifying itself to digest new food types introduced into its environment.”
Jesmin grinned. “That’s the dark side of the Force talking through you.”
“I suspect the dark side is more fun. ’Night.”
“Good luck.”
Voort and Turman stared down at the body Turman was about to wear. The Embass suit, the final version of the full-sized neoglith masquer, lay on Scut’s laboratory table, the vertical slit in its chest and the emptiness beyond the eye sockets indicating that it was not truly alive.
Except that it was. Voort was certain he could see it breathing. He offered Turman a sympathetic look. The Clawdite was about to crawl into a liner bag of living tissue that had been engineered from a crustacean’s stomach. And he was going to live there for days.
Turman turned to Voort. “I once swore—swore—I would never again play ridiculous-looking monsters while wearing cumbersome full-body suits.”
Voort snorted. “Just remembered that, did you?”
“Just made it up. I’m still looking for a way out of this.”
“Get in, Stage Boy, and you get one year of me telling all the ladies that you’re the bravest man I ever met.”
Turman’s expression graduated from tension to resignation. He nodded. “You’ve discovered my weakness. Every actor needs validation. And reviews.” He took a deep breath, then stepped up on the crate Scut had set beside the table to facilitate his climb.
He wore only a kilt, of a material Scut swore would not irritate the masquer’s stomach lining—undyed suede leather. As Scut held the edges of the suit’s chest cavity open, Turman stepped up on the table, then, a brief flicker of distaste crossing his features, put his foot into the suit.
It took several minutes and help from both Scut and Voort. Turman had to sit in the chest cavity and gradually ease his legs into the suit’s leg channels, stretching the fleshy suit lining to conform to his body contours as he did. Then he leaned back, unenthusiastic, and repeated the process with the arms.
Scut grabbed the suit’s jaw and pulled, firmly and steadily. After a few seconds, with a slurping, ripping noise, the head split open, seams appearing that ran from behind the jaw and up to the temples. The action opened the head cavity.
Turman leaned back, lowering his head inside. “Ever since I stepped into this thing, every second of my life has been more disgusting than the last.”
Scut smiled. “And you are not even done yet.” From opposite sides of the table, he and Voort shoved the chest seam closed. “How is it?”
Turman grimaced. “Like putting on an ambience suit that someone has poured warm butter into. But it occurs to me that if you could add a vibrator function, you could sell three trillion of these.”
“I will consider that. Hands?”
Turman raised the Embass suit’s hands. He flexed its fingers. Then he did it again, making the gestures seem spastic, jerky, insectile. “Its own muscles are helping.”
“You will want those muscles for walking.” Scut checked along the entire length of the chest seam, making sure it was correctly aligned and once again invisible. “Otherwise you will tire fast. And remember, in about two days the masquer will start to die. That might take two more days, or four. The enzymes used to accelerate its growth to this stage can’t be neutralized, and its body mass doesn’t carry enough nutrients to keep it alive for long.”
“I know, I know. And spray it down frequently with water, and keep it out of direct sunlight.” Turman sounded miserable.
Voort moved up to the head. He fitted a compact headset to Turman’s true head, carefully positioning the earplugs, affixing the mike to the corner of Turman’s lip with a dab of sticky gel. He looked at Scut. “Turman’s skin needs oxygen, right? The masquer provides that?”
“Oxygen?” Scut looked stricken. “I forgot that part.”
Voort and Turman both looked at him.
“Kidding. Yes, the lining brings oxygen—the surrounding atmosphere, actually—to his skin and carries toxins away from it. Instead of digesting him.” Scut took hold of the suit’s open skull. “Ready?”
“No.”
Scut lowered the skull into place.
This version of the Embass suit’s head was somewhat different from the previous one Voort had seen. The eye sockets were a trifle smaller, fitted more precisely to Turman’s facial dimensions, and a film of red tissue covered them, transforming Turman’s eyes into reddish orbs. More red film crept into place across Turman’s lips and jawline, transforming them into what looked like odd inner-mouth organs of indeterminate function.
Two horns of Mulus’s fractal-coral ruby protruded from the forehead, decorative but menacing.
Turman spoke. “It’s clinging to my jaw.” As he spoke, the suit’s mouth moved realistically. “And my eyeballs—that red coating is touching them.”
Scut smiled again. “Good. Everything is working correctly.”
Voort tried to make his voice soothing. “The effect is very realistic.”
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
Scut’s good cheer did not falter. “You can! The mouth will admit whatever you decide to purge. But you’ve been on a liquid diet for days, so it won’t be very interesting.”
Voort put his hand under Turman’s back, preparing to lift. “While he decides how to tell us he hates us, let’s get him on his feet.”
They did. Turman spent a few minutes adapting the body language he’d been developing for the last week—an extension of the movements of his hands, it was jerky and twitchy, definitely non-mammalian—to the limitations imposed by the suit. He also tottered a bit until he mastered the art of balancing on alien feet.
Finally he turned to Voort and Scut. “I am more panicky, claustrophobic, and revolted than I have ever been in my life. But I’m ready.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Boring detail.” The Pop-Dog corporal, a dark-skinned human, stopped at the fork in the forest trail and looked in both directions. He could
see little but the hard-packed soil trail; the trees met overhead, permitting only slivers of moonlight to reach the ground. He raised his blaster rifle to his shoulder and repeated his scan, this time peering through its scope. His augmented vision showed everything ahead in shades of gray, but there was still nothing interesting to see, only tree trunks, tree roots, stones. “They ought to import some regular army pukes to pull details like this.”
“Oyah.” The private, redheaded, freckled, rawboned, looked exactly like what he was, a rube from a backrocket planet trying, and failing, to acquire a veneer of experience and sophistication while serving in the army. “Better, even. Convicts.” He mimicked the corporal’s action, scanning the surroundings through his blaster scope. As his barrel aim swung across the corporal, the corporal ducked.
Once the barrel was past, the corporal rose. “Let me get this straight. You’d put blasters in the hands of convicts so they could do the dirty work of the base.”
“Oyah. They’d suffer more than they do lying around in jail all day, living off my taxes.”
The corporal’s jaw worked. No words emerged.
He was saved from answering. A crackling noise from down the right fork in the trail drew his attention—feet walking on dried leaves. “Come on.”
Quiet compared with their quarry, the two trotted along the trail, slowing every twenty or thirty meters to get a better estimate of the walker’s location. After three such stops, the corporal pointed the private toward a tree, then concealed himself behind another. He put his finger on the button that would activate the glow rod located under his rifle barrel—it would shine where the barrel was pointed, blinking a prospective target in light conditions like these.
The crunching noise approached, resolved itself into heavy footsteps as well as crackling leaves.
Then a shape, bulky, its body language strange even in this darkness, stepped out on the trail.
The corporal aimed and triggered his light. “Don’t move!”
In the glow stood a ... thing. Taller than a normal human, shorter than an average Wookiee, it had rough, reddish brown skin that looked rigid, massive jaws, eyes that gleamed with an evil redness. Red, too, were the small, strangely delicate horns that protruded from its brow. In its left hand it carried a square object, glittering. Its right hand was raised and open, palm toward the corporal, in what the corporal hoped was a gesture of peace. The creature wore no garments.
Then the private’s light came on, shining right into the corporal’s eyes. “Don’t move!”
“Blast it, shut that off!”
“Oyah. Sorry, Corporal.” The light went out again.
The reddish creature still stood in the corporal’s light, unmoving.
“State your name and your purpose!”
“Me, Corporal?”
“You, shut up.” The corporal felt his blood pressure rise to a dangerous level. He returned his attention to the creature. “State your name and your purpose.”
Finally it answered, its voice shrill, garbled, alien. “Stayte joor nayme mand joor pyurpose.”
The corporal breathed just a touch easier. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem hostile and was trying to communicate. Maybe it was just an Outer Rim visitor who’d gotten drunk and decided to wander around nude on the army base. He’d call in the situation. In half an hour this wouldn’t be his problem anymore.
He wondered if he could give the private to the base police and keep the alien as his partner.
He hit his comlink with his thumb. “Patrol Six to command, we have a situation.”
Colonel Gidders, a Bothan whose fur was gradually shifting from a gray of youth to the gray of age, stared unblinkingly at the hologram of General Thaal. Around the colonel were the light-and-sound dampening wall and ceiling tiles of a dedicated holocomm chamber. “I’ve had a team of specialists working with it, on it, all this time.”
General Thaal, shown standing before a galactic map with blinking situation lights at several star systems, looked like he felt much less weary than the colonel. It was morning, Fey’lya Base time. “What are your findings?”
“It allowed us to obtain some tissue samples with our micro-extractors, so we’ve done some preliminary genetic work on what we obtained. It’s definitely related, distantly, to a local aquatic species, but it’s unprecedented in the planetary fossil record. The creature is very intelligent and has learned three or four hundred Basic words in just the hours it’s been here. It can string simple sentences together. Our xenolinguistics expert has worked with it to make some determinations of its role and mission.”
“Which are?”
“To act as ambassador—it likes the term embassy that climbs—with the new species here, us. It says its kind sleeps in the deep caves but will awaken soon. It awoke because of some sort of fault-line slippage we detected fifteen hours ago. The creature brought a present for our king-warlord, whom I have explained is you.”
“Yes.” Now Thaal showed additional interest. “I’ve looked at the scans you sent of the gems in that casket. Interesting.”
“The casket itself seems to have been shaped by the same technique, but it’s only rock crystal.”
“All right. Show him in.”
Colonel Gidders gestured. The door at the back of the chamber slid open. The creature, flanked by two Pop-Dog sergeants, entered, his walk jerky and spasmodic.
The colonel gestured between the creature and the general. “King-Warlord Stavin the First, I present Embassy-Who-Climbs.”
The general bowed. “I am honored.” His words sounded more perfunctory than anything else.
Embassy-Who-Climbs walked, twitching, past the colonel to the general’s image. He reached for it, his hand passing within the hologram. “Glitter.” His voice was less shrill than it had been hours earlier, but it still sent a chill up the colonel’s spine.
“Yes.” The colonel resigned himself to another slow struggle to communicate. “A glittering image. The king-warlord sees and hears you through the glitter.”
The creature withdrew a step. “We sleep. Stavin-First spawn come. We wake. Share or eat?”
Thaal looked blankly at the colonel.
“He means we’ve settled on their world while they hibernated belowground. What do we do now—share the world and its bounty, or eat one another? Meaning wage war.”
“Oh.” Thaal didn’t bother to restrain a brief chortle. “What do they taste like?”
“Sir ...”
Thaal looked at the creature. “Share, of course. Peace is what we want above all. Peace and mutual respect.”
The creature rocked forward and backward, a crude simulation of a human nod. “Share. Arrrrrt.” It turned back toward the door. Past the two sergeants, just in the doorway, a dark-haired woman in medical whites waited. At the creature’s look, she moved forward and handed Embassy-Who-Climbs a crystalline case, twenty centimeters long, ten wide and deep.
The creature held up the case and lifted its lid. It opened as if hinged; the colonel could see, and again admire, the intricacy of the slots and projections along one edge that fitted into each other, allowing the lid to behave like a hinged component.
The creature displayed the organic-looking gems, red and blue and green, within. “Arrrrrt. For king-warlord. More below to share.”
Thaal’s eyes widened just a little. “How much more?”
The creature paused. Its head twitched from side to side, its jaw vibrating. Then it answered. “Cave. This cave.”
Thaal looked blank again.
The colonel cleared his throat. “I think he means he could fill a cave the size of the holocomm chamber with the gems.”
The creature listened to the colonel’s words. “Ten of ten cave.”
The colonel’s eyebrows rose. “Twenty caves this size?”
“Ten of ten! Ten of ten!”
The woman who’d brought the case interrupted. “He means one hundred, Colonel. Ten times ten. Or perhaps several hundred. We’re still wo
rking on the concept of plurals. I think he indicates them with body twitches, but we’re not there yet.”
“Hundreds of caves this size full of art.” Thaal looked as though he were struggling to shake off the effects of a stun bolt.
“Ten of ten for king-warlord. More not for king-warlord. What arrrrrt for me and me-spawn?”
“Oh. Yes, of course.” Thaal clearly had to switch mental gears. “For you we have spice and sweetblossom. Brandy. Dancing pit droids and the most sordid Hutt melodramas. We’ll let you sample a thousand arts and tell us what you like best, and we’ll give you that and more.”
Embassy-Who-Climbs performed his nod again. “Must not glitter. Must smell to share.”
Thaal looked at the linguist.
She shrugged. “Trade talks must be conducted in person.”
The creature rocked in affirmation. “Yesssss. Smell to share. Embassy-Who-Climbs and King-Warlord Staaaaavin-First.”
“How inconvenient.” Thaal took a deep breath. “Colonel, prepare for a surprise inspection by the Chief of the Army.”
“Yes, King-Warlord.”
Thaal grinned. “King-Warlord will smell you soon, Embassy-Who-Climbs. Soon.”
“Sooooon.”
After the sergeants and linguist escorted the creature away, Thaal became businesslike. “You think the underground slippage you mentioned will wake others of his kind?”
“He indicated so, yes. My scientists speculate that the slippage may somehow have been part of a life-cycle event. He wakes up first, emerges as a scout. Then the others begin to awake. Tens of tens of tens of tens is what he told me.”
“Tens of thousands.” Stavin rubbed his chin, thinking. “Well, maybe we can drop some barrels of targeted toxin down in their caves. Wipe them all out cleanly. Get your people to work on that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
Trey had invented it, the game of Backstop, and tonight the Wraiths played it on a patch of grassy soil down in the quarry. Each wore a stretchy black nightsuit and carried a toy laser pistol that fired a harmless beam of light.
Mercy Kil Page 30