by B. V. Larson
“Huh… it’s all so horrible—but what can we do about it?”
“We can find Green World, that’s what. If Legion Varus can find and target these hooligans, well sir, we can bring down some righteous vengeance.”
“Okay… now I see why you contacted me. I was out there, at one point. On Green World, I mean. As far as I know, Central never bothered to make a big effort to find the place, as we later beat the Cephalopods in the war without hitting them there. But there are clues.”
“Damn straight there are!” I said slamming my drink down and beckoning for another to a bored-looking waiter bot. “Uh… what clues?”
“For starters, we can triangulate using the various reported jump-times from different locations. That will give us a general idea of Green World’s vicinity. Then, we’ll have to start looking at each star system and eliminating them one by one. I’ll need all your tapper recordings from out there. Immediately.”
I hesitated. “Why’s that?”
“To gather data, James. A simple spectral analysis of the sunlight will probably be enough to rule out most star systems. We might be able to isolate the target with just that much information. If not, I’ll combine all the data on the local atmosphere and weather. We might not be certain which world it is, but I can at least build a list of likely planets.”
“Uh… that sounds great. You want another drink?”
She shook her head, and I tossed over all the data she asked for, tapper-to-tapper. She got up and left then, and I looked after her in sore disappointment. I’d shared a beverage with two women in two hours, but both of them had been too busy to give old McGill a second glance.
Sighing, I stood up and paid the tab with the waiter.
“A gratuity is customary, sir,” the robot had the gall to tell me.
This kind of pissed me off. These robots were from the Pegs, just like all the other advanced AI around. The Pegs were still recovering somewhat after half of them had been eaten and converted into cyborg minions for the Skay.
That was all well and good, and I wished them the best, but their morality since those dark days had slid to the bottom. They now sold machines that played on people’s feelings and such-like. Sure, this new breed of bot was supposed to be funding the rebuilding of their planet, and that was a good cause and all, but still… having robots ask for handouts got me angry.
“You’ve got no kids to feed,” I told the bot. “You’re just going to give that extra cash to the bar! Scram!”
The robot huffed and rolled away. I knew the game. The robots fleeced dumb humans, and that’s why the businesses bought the robots. None of that money was going home to 51 Pegasi—except for the price of the begging robot itself.
Walking out of the place, something caught my eye and stopped me at the door. Was that a flash of reflective blue out on the street? A metallic glint that I’d seen before?
Throwing the door wide, I charged out onto the sidewalk.
Raash already had hold of Natasha. She was bent back, helpless in his big leathery arms. He had her by her jacket, and those claws were digging into her back.
Natasha wasn’t much of a fighter, but she’d been in Legion Varus for a long time. She kicked and stabbed at him with a small sharp object. It could have been one of those stylus-things that convert into a weapon with a flick of the wrist.
Raash took the stabbing without much of a reaction.
“You are McGill’s woman. I shall leave you stained and dead, as he did to my greatest love.”
That was all he got out of that dribbly snout of his before I caught up and launched on him. I hadn’t shouted any warnings or threats thus far. Instead, I’d just pounded pavement until I was behind him.
My combat knife was out, and I pressed it against his thick hide, near the spine. I made sure it cut in a ways, so he could feel it.
Hissing, he dropped the girl and turned around. “McGill! You are so easy to manipulate. You make a poor agent for Earth.”
So saying, the scaly bastard shoved a shock-rod into my face. I tried to cut him, but I lost the use of my limbs. Soon afterward, I lost consciousness.
* * *
I woke up on the pavement, gasping for air. My lungs barely cooperated. Old Raash had stunned me good.
A few patrons from the bar were walking past, glancing down at me and tsking. They shook their heads, rolled their eyes and a few looked like they wanted to spit.
They all thought I was drunk, of course. There wasn’t much pity to be had on the street, and I couldn’t talk yet, so I strained to look around me.
Natasha was gone. Raash was gone. There was no one and nothing I recognized nearby.
A few minutes went by while I struggled to regain the use of my tingling limbs. Before I had recovered, a cop wandered by. Maybe someone had alerted him.
At this point, my limbs were operating at half-power, but my lips were still rubbery, as I’d taken the full shock right in the kisser.
The cop bent over me and looked amused. “I thought you legionnaires could hold your liquor. I guess you had a little too much of the hard stuff tonight, huh starman?”
I slurred something out, but it was unintelligible. That was just as well, because he wouldn’t have liked it if he had caught my words.
“All right,” he said. “I can see you’re waking up, and you haven’t pissed yourself or anything yet. How about I give you a break tonight and you keep walking? You want me to call you a ride or something?”
I managed to shake my head “no”.
The cop shrugged and shook his head. He turned away to walk off, but I reached out a long arm and hooked his ankle.
Now, under normal circumstances, a man might expect to tug away from a drunk’s fingers. After all, to his mind I was too far gone to speak.
The truth of the matter was the fingers of my right hand were still rubbery. The stun-gun had left some parts of me numb—but my left hand was doing pretty good. I caught him with a solid grip and didn’t let go. As a result, he took a header and landed on his face.
The cop got back to his feet, snarling. His good-natured joshing was forgotten, and he had a nightstick in his hands quicker than I would have credited.
“All right,” he said, “I’m a fool. I was trying to be the nice guy, but I should have known you’d be trouble.”
He didn’t just start whacking on my thick skull. That’s what I kind of expected, but I was still lying down, looking messed up. He walked around me warily and reached for my wrist, whipping out a pair of gravity cuffs. He got one of them snapped on, too, before I could stop him. He knew his business, I have to give him that.
Unfortunately for him, a gravity cuff on just one of my wrists was worse than useless. I immediately turned it into a weapon and whipped it around to crack him a good one on the temple. He sprawled, and I sat up.
He tried to get up again, but I gave him a hard time, pushing him back down.
“Sorry,” I managed to croak out. “Girlfriend… kidnapped.”
The cop wasn’t in the mood for talk, and I couldn’t blame him for that. He struggled and fussed, but with each passing second more tingling sensations came back into my thick arms. As I was a trained fighter, he didn’t have much of chance.
“Sorry,” I repeated, my voice clearing up a little. “Really, I need your help.”
The cop was on his face, which was bloody, and he was panting. He was a few pounds over the limit, and I calculated that he’d been skipping his morning jogs more often than he should have. As a result of his poor physical condition, he was running out of gas.
“Is this your way of reporting a crime?” he asked me from the pavement.
“Yeah. I’m not actually drunk, I was hit with a stun-rod and my girlfriend… she’s gone.”
“You’ll let me up and submit to arrest if you know what’s good for you, McGill. Yeah, I know your damned name. The gravity cuff reads tappers, you know.”
“Huh? Really? That’s a neat trick. But look,
I can’t take the time to get arrested and all that. I need to find Natasha.”
“Natasha? Specialist Natasha Elkin?”
“Yes, that’s exactly right.”
The cop heaved under my knees. I was kneeling on his back by this time to hold him in place, so he collapsed again, gasping.
“You freak!” he wheezed. “She’s dead! This is all some kind of legion thing, isn’t it? A hazing ritual gone wrong?”
“Dead? Where?”
“Just up the street three blocks, hero. You probably did it yourself, didn’t you?”
I heaved a sigh and put him out. With a murder nearby and me knowing the victim and all, there was no way any wannabe hog cop was going to help me find Raash. He’d probably put me in a cell and bury me with interrogations and such-like. I just didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense right now.
A few bar patrons thought about helping the cop, but all they did was circle around us at a good distance, filming it all with their tappers and calling for more police. This wasn’t my lucky day.
Taking a chance, I lifted the cop’s pistol and used his numb thumbprint to unlock it. Then I set off at a pace that was half-trot and half-stagger. I headed in the direction he’d indicated Natasha had breathed her last. With luck, I’d find Raash before the cop’s buddies found me.
-21-
It was a close thing, but I made it to the murder scene before any more police showed up. It was a district cop versus city cop thing that saved me. Murders were district business, while drunks were the city’s problem. Sometimes, details got lost in the layers of communication between the two forces.
A circle of police bots were on the scene. They were cleaning up what was left of Natasha. I ignored all that and examined the crowd. Picking out a portly man with a bald head and a nervous look, I grabbed his arm and spun him around.
“Did you see what happened?” I demanded.
He shook his head, looking up at me with a white face.
“The cops say you can identify the killer. Was it a lizard? A blue lizard?”
The man looked shocked. “How did you know that?”
“We’re not all idiots.”
He looked me up and down. “You’re a cop? That’s a legionnaire’s uniform.”
“Yeah, yeah, just tell me which way he went.”
The guy pointed into an alley.
“Why didn’t you tell the cops that?” I asked him.
The man shrugged. “These aliens—you can’t cross them. They travel in packs, you know. You should get out of here too, before his friends sniff you out.”
I let go of him and headed down the alleyway. It was dirty and full of fire-escapes. I could tell I wasn’t in the nice part of town any longer.
After a hundred meter dash, I saw nothing but a random maze of pathways. There were backdoors, apartments, and businesses on the bottom floor of every building. Everything was dark except for the seedy bars. The trail was cold, and I’d lost him.
Cursing, I activated my tapper and called Floramel.
“What’s wrong, James?”
“I’m hunting for Raash. Help me find him.”
I took a few precious seconds to fill her in on recent events. She sounded appalled.
“He… he murdered Natasha?”
“Looks like it. I think he’s a bad grow, and I’m going to have to put him down.”
“Wait, we haven’t scanned him yet. He can’t get another revival if he dies again now.”
“Come on, girl. He’s like a crazy serial murderer loose in the city.”
“Don’t perm him, James, please. We went through so much effort to bring him back. It would all be for nothing.”
“Yeah… all right. I’ll give the peaceful approach a try. Just tell me where he would go in this part of the city.”
She read the address, and she gave me some directions. Apparently, I was close to the Gray Zone of the city. That was the area where all the aliens lived. It wasn’t a slum—not exactly. It was more of a no-go zone for humans.
I was walking straight and confidently by this time. I’d shaken off the effects of the stun-rod. I headed directly into the Gray Zone, and I was all out of smiles today.
The first encounter occurred at what looked like a private pool. It was dark, with all the lights turned down to a dim, cold, bluish color. That was weird enough, but what I saw next was more disturbing. Big dark shapes were swimming in the pool.
“Squids?” I said, standing on the edge of the water.
A tentacle snaked out of the water and touched my shoe. It looked like it was tasting me.
“Piss off, squid,” I said loudly.
The big alien emerged. Water ran down off his leathery skin and a few nasty eyeballs studied me.
“A human… are you a gift, perhaps? A meal arranged by my comrades?”
“That’s right. I’ve got some ketchup for you, right here.”
I pulled out the cop’s gun and waved it in the squid’s direction. He inked himself a little and withdrew.
“Armed and aggressive in our part of this city. No sense of humor. I’m going to have to report you to the council.”
“You do that. Right now, I need you to answer a few questions. I’m looking for a lizard. He’s a rare blue color, about yay-high.”
I described Raash, and the squid listened in a surly fashion. “I assure you I haven’t seen any such vertebrate, but similar beasts dwell in the building to the southeast.”
He splashed up a mess with one extended tentacle, pointing at a building a block or so away.
I made the gun vanish again and trotted off. Squids were easy to cow, but if they thought they could get the upper hand on you, they’d do it in an instant. It was best to get moving while the getting was good.
When I arrived at the apartment building, I was surprised to realize I recognized it.
Long ago, when I’d first met Raash, it had been in this building. He’d lived near Floramel, and he’d been stalking her.
Taking the stairs two at a time, I was puffing by the time I reached the correct floor. I had to break in a few reluctant smart-doors, and by the time I found the right apartment there were alarms and things going off everywhere.
“Raash?” I called, standing in the splintered doorway. “Raash? I know you’re in here.”
A figure moved in the bedroom. I walked in and saw an odd sight. Raash was lounging on the bed.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked him.
“Preparing to die. I’m composing my death poem. Do you wish to hear it?”
“Your what? No, I’m not much of a poetry fan, I’m afraid. Look Raash, you’re the most obvious bad-grow I’ve ever encountered, so I’m willing to give you a break. Let’s body-scan you and then we’ll revive you again… somehow. Things should go better the second time around. Let’s hope, anyway.”
I got out my pistol and aimed it at his head. Raash seemed disinterested.
“I have achieved vengeance. I have bested you and killed your woman. I can die in peace, and I want no revival.”
This troubled me enough that I paused before shooting him. “What? You don’t want a revival? You’ll feel better the second time around, I can almost guarantee it.”
“No, foolish human. I’m not a bad grow—not exactly. My mind has been twisted by my suffering. If you were to bring me back, you’d only get a Raash that was even more angry with the universe.”
“Huh? Why’s that?”
“Because you have lost my body. We saurians aren’t like humans. We hold our bodies in great regard. They are temples to us—they are gods, and we worship at their feet.”
I laughed. “A neat trick. How do you kiss your own toes?”
He glanced at me and lifted his upper lip briefly. Then, he turned over on his side as if he wanted to go to sleep.
“Get on with the killing, human. I tire of this lifespan.”
“No thank-yous, huh? We went to hell and back to get you breathing again,
you ungrateful reptile!”
He turned back and regarded me. “Why do you torment me with lies?”
I told him the story then, the full story of all the work Floramel and I had gone through to get him a new life. He listened, baffled. I showed him some vids, and he believed me.
“This is strange. I understand the female, to some extent—but not you, McGill. Did you do all this in hopes of mating with Floramel again?”
“What? That makes no sense. If I wanted her, I sure as hell wouldn’t bring your sorry tail back to life. I’d leave you dead and gone, then make my move.”
Raash sat up. He nodded his head. “That would be a superior strategy,” he admitted.
“So, now do you believe we cared about you—or at least that Floramel did? That we brought you back not as a cruel joke, but as a great service for an old friend?”
Raash looked troubled. “I… I’m surprised.”
“What you are is one ungrateful, cold-blooded dick of an alien. I never worked so hard to keep anyone breathing in my entire life. You even killed Natasha, for crying out loud.”
Raash hung his big alligator head. “I… I’m shamed. I should not breathe this stinking air of Earth. I’m not worthy.”
I rolled my eyes. I was about two seconds away from giving this lizard his fondest wish and going back to Floramel with a sob-story about how it had to happen.
“What can I do to make amends?” he asked suddenly. Just like that, he looked up at me, and I’m no judge of lizard expressions, but he looked contrite to me.
“Uh… can you help us find Green World?”
“Treachery against those who employed me? That is the price?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it—”
“Very well. I will do this service. I will not die my final death with a great debt upon my scales. I would not want to live in the spiritual realm with such a burden.”
“Uh… okay, whatever. Let’s get out of here before the cops come find us. We’re both wanted men, you know.”