by David Drake
They were trying to deal Tom Kelly in on this business. That gave him a notion of where their heads were.
Christ on a crutch. It really was what it seemed to be.
Kelly’s left hand reached into the case, his fingers tracing but not touching the surface of one of the arms. The hand had four fingers and no thumb, but it looked as though the two halves could be folded over one another along the central axis.
“There’re surgical gloves, if you want,” the woman said. She was looking at Kelly while she held the lid open. Only the flare of her nostrils implied that her eyes were on him to excuse them from having to view the alien. “It doesn’t have knee and elbow joints the way we do. Each arm is a double column of bones like paired spinal columns, and they’re connected only by muscle.”
“You can close it,” the veteran said, jerking his hand out of the cooler and flexing it repeatedly to work off the damp miasma that clung to the skin. The lid thumped behind him as he turned, and he thought he heard a grateful sigh. “How did it die?” he asked, facing Doug. “Did Mohammed kill it?”
Men waiting in the other room either glanced away when Kelly caught their eyes or matched his with stares of their own. Pierrard nodded coolly as he tamped a tiny meerschaum with a pipe tool shaped like a pistol cartridge. Doug shrugged, his expression less nonchalant when it remained fixed even though the rest of his body moved.
“They were both killed by nine-millimeter bullets,” Elaine said as she walked into the veteran’s field of view again. “Turkish service ammunition lots, though of course that indicates nothing. We’d had reports that bullets didn’t—affect them, fired at very close range. Those reports appear to be in error.”
The palm of Kelly’s right hand stung where he had gouged it, partly from his sweat and partly from the aura of burned pepper and phenolic resin which emanated from the thing in the cooler. “You can’t be too close to miss what you’re aiming at,” Kelly said. “Take my word for it, honey.”
He walked back into the larger room, again facing the men whom he’d never wanted to see and who didn’t see him even now that he stood in front of them. Except for maybe Redstone, Kelly was no more human to the eyes sliding over him like water over a statue than was the dead thing in the cooler behind him. Not officer material, that was God damned sure, and both sides would feel thankful for that. . . .
“Where’s his clothes?” Kelly asked Pierrard in a harsh, hectoring tone. “And the necklace he had on? Was that all?”
Pierrard took a deep pull on his pipe. Its bowl was discolored almost to the shade and patterning of briar.
The youngest Suit said, “The clothes were probably of Turkish manufacture—handwork, no labels, but local manufacture. The shoes were Turkish, made in Ankara, The legs must have twisted to form an ankle joint, the sockets in the leg and arm columns are offset enough to do that.”
Kelly stepped closer to Pierrard, so that he was wrapped in coils of pipe smoke whose bitterness underlay the cloying surface odor. “Where’s the hardware, Pierrard?” he demanded. “If this isn’t all phony, then that damned thing had a gadget to make him look like a man, not a lamprey. Where is it?”
Pierrard’s lips quirked as he lowered his pipestem. He blew a careful smoke ring toward the low ceiling.
“There were six items of equipment which couldn’t be identified,” said the young Suit, who was too beefy to be really aristocratic and whose forehead now glistened with sweat. Redstone knuckled his jaw and grimaced, but nobody else Kelly could see appeared to be breathing.
“None of them were larger than a cigarette case, and none of them did anything noticeable when they were tested. We think that when—” The young Suit glanced up and beyond Kelly. “—We think that when the medallion was first touched, all of the equipment shut down. The units we’ve sectioned after testing appear to have melted internally, but we can’t be sure what they looked like before they came into our hands.”
“Shit!” Kelly said and turned abruptly. He slapped the doorjamb, shaking the partition wall and making the overhead light jounce. Doug jumped aside, though this time the veteran’s anger was directed against the situation rather than any human.
Any human except himself and the fact that he didn’t seem able to walk away—that he had buttons that cynical bastards in suits could still push.
“Kelly,” said General Redstone from the far side of the room, “we need you on this one. It’s no time to fuck around.”
“Yessir,” said Kelly, slowly facing around and taking a breath that lifted his eyes back into contact with those of the others in the room. “What did you think you could get me to do? Give you names?”
“Because members or at least a member of the Kurdish separatist community had contact with the aliens,” said Pierrard, “we need a knowledgeable person in place in that community at the earliest possible moment.” His lengthened vowels had probably been natural for him before they were popularized by the Kennedy and Culver presidencies.
“You’ve got other Kurdish speakers.” Kelly walked over to a window and stared out at the lighted fence with his hands on the sash. “Hell, you’ve got agents, CIA’s got agents, every damn body in the world’s got Kurdish agents.”
“We’ve had no reports regarding—alien presences,” said a voice Kelly hadn’t heard before, a Suit of his own age with more gut and less hair. “It may be that depending on foreign nationals in this venue cannot guarantee satisfactory results.”
“We aren’t looking for a translator, Kelly,” said General Redstone as the veteran turned to face them again. “We don’t need somebody to man an intercept receiver. To get on this as fast as we’ve got to, there’s got to be somebody the sources’ll trust—and somebody who can go to them. There’s some other training officers—paramilitary types—but they don’t speak Kurdish, not really. You were the only real NSA staffer in Birdlike, the only one with a real language specialty. Otherwise the operation was slotted there just to keep clear of the Freedom of Information Act.”
“Got a problem with Kurds not trusting the USG all of a sudden, hey?” Kelly said, his voice struggling against the leash his conscious mind was trying to keep on it. Pierrard’s face was the only thing in the room which was not receding from focus. “Couldn’t be because of the way Operation Birdlike was wrapped up with all the finesse of a hand grenade, d’ye suppose?”
“Yes, of course that had something to do with it,” the old man agreed unemotionally as he lifted his pipe again.
“There were people in fucking Iraq waiting for the C-130 to duck in with the pallet of supplies, you bastard!” Kelly shouted. “And instead folks are shaking hands in some air-conditioned hotel and there’s not a problem anymore. There was a fucking big problem for the men on the ground, believe me! And the secretary of state tells the Senate, ‘You must remember, international diplomacy isn’t Boy Scouting,’ and gee whiz, how foolish those Kurds were to have believed the word of the United States government. It was all right, though, because they weren’t ‘pro-Western freedom fighters’ anymore—they were just an Iraqi internal problem.”
“They never were pro-Western freedom fighters,” said the middle-aged Suit who had spoken before.
Kelly stared at him. “They were men,” he said in a voice that quivered like the blade of a hacksaw. “That’s more’n I see in this room.”
“Are you always this offensive, Mr. Kelly?” said Elaine, as clear and hard as diamond.
The world collapsed back to normalcy, a room too warm and far too smoky, filled with men who didn’t like Tom Kelly any better than he liked them. Nothing to get worked up about, just the way the world generally was.
“Only when I’m drunk or scared shitless, Miz Tuttle,” Kelly said as he heaved himself away from the sash against which he had been braced. “And I could really use a drink right about now.”
He walked past Doug and Elaine, flanking the side door to the office. One of the Suits muttered, “Where’s he going?” but only the woman
fell in behind Kelly as he approached the grocery cooler for the second time.
The handle was cool and smooth, vibrating with the purr of the refrigerator motor in the base of the cabinet. Kelly raised the lid and reached toward the alien’s face. The floodlights had been switched off, but the analytical part of Kelly’s mind doubted that he would be able to see much anyway in his present emotional state.
“There are gloves,” Elaine said sharply.
“You can’t not do things because you’re afraid,” Kelly said in a crooning, gentle voice, more to himself than to the woman beside him. “I can’t not go back in because I’m scared of international flights and dark alleys . . . and because this thing scares me, scares the livin’ crap outa me. . . .”
He placed his stinging right palm on the head of the creature, the portion that would have been the forehead if the thing were instead human. The tips of the scales were lifted enough to give the surface the feel of something covered with hairs too fine to be seen. With firmer pressure there were differences in the way the alien flesh and bone resisted the weight of Kelly’s hand, but the texture of the covering was the same over hand and head. He lifted his hand away and let the lid thump closed.
“You’re not afraid of it anymore?” said Doug, standing hipshot in the doorway like a gunslinger ready to go into action.
The veteran dusted his palms together. The electric tingle in his right hand had spread to his throat and chest. It was probably psychological rather than a physical reaction to the alien’s chemistry; and either way to be ignored.
“Sure I’m scared,” Kelly said, looking at the big man and thinking how young the fellow was—and biological age had little to do with that. “That’s nothing to do with the price of eggs, is all.”
Pierrard stepped into the doorway. He touched Doug on the shoulder with an index finger, removing the younger man from his path abruptly. “Have you reached a decision, then, Kelly?” Pierrard asked. His mouth trembled with wisps of pipe smoke.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” Kelly said to Elaine. “You call me Tom from here on out, I call you Elaine.”
“With a proviso.” The dark-haired woman met his eyes with enough of a smile to indicate her amusement at the operational necessity of ignoring Pierrard for the moment. “If you ever ‘honey’ me again, you can expect to be ‘Sergeant Kelly’ for the duration. I think I’d prefer the honesty of being called ‘you dumb twat’ if you can’t remember my name.”
“We’ll work on it,” Kelly muttered with an embarrassment he had not thought he was still capable of feeling. To the old man in the doorway, he said, “Can she brief me?”
Pierrard rotated his pipestem in a short arc. “If you wish.” Kelly could see others in the orderly room staring at the old man rather than the couple in the office beyond.
“Okay, that’ll work,” the veteran said, half his mind already considering the people to whom he was going to have to excuse himself if this went the way it looked to. Meetings to cancel, phone messages to be taken and ranked for action. . . . “Some place that isn’t here to sit down at—”
Pierrard gestured. “Of course,” he murmured.
“—and Dougie goes home or to his kennel’r whatever. I don’t need the aggravation, I really don’t.”
“All right,” said Pierrard with no more expression than before, and Elaine looked down at her fingers, which had begun to fold a pleat in her skirt.
“Sir, I don’t think—” came Doug’s voice from behind the partition wall, out of Kelly’s sight. Pierrard turned his head just enough that Blakeley would have been in the corner of his vision. Doug’s words stopped.
“Let’s roll.” Kelly took a shudderingly deep breath before stepping toward the doorway. “Elaine?”
Nobody came out of the building after them. Kelly reached for the driver’s side door to open it for the dark-haired woman. The door was locked, and Elaine brushed Kelly’s hand away from the latch before she inserted the key into a slot in the doorpost, then unlocked the door itself.
“Very gallant, M—Tom,” she said with a smile to dull the sting of the words and the situation. “But on this car, the alarm is set automatically when it’s locked, and the last thing we need right now is for everybody in three blocks to lock and load before they come looking for the problem.” She smiled brightly at the nearest of the uniformed gunmen. Dazzled, the soldier smiled back.
Kelly walked around to his side of the car. The lock button had risen when the key was turned on the driver’s side. Well, the world had never had much real use for chivalry.
He sat down again, finding the seat a great deal more comfortable now than it had been before. Heading toward the meeting, his body had been a collection of bits and pieces as rigid as the parts of a marionette. He could bend at all the normal joints, but tension had kept the muscles taut as guy wires except when they were being consciously relaxed. “Bad as an insertion,” Kelly muttered to himself, knowing that the back deck of a tank would have given him as good a ride as the leather upholstery had on the way to Meade.
Elaine was still struggling with her seat, repositioning it from where the long-legged Doug had left it. “It adjusts on four axes,” she snapped, knowing that Kelly was smiling, “which gives you the theoretical possibility of finding the perfect solution, and the high likelihood that every acceptable solution’ll be lost in the maze of other alternatives.”
She sat back, grimaced, and started the car anyway. “It’s a lot like the information business, isn’t it?” she added, and her wry smile mirrored Kelly’s.
It had stopped raining, and the overcast had broken patchily to let a few stars glitter down. The air was so clear that lights reflected like jewels from all the wet surfaces around them. “The Buick going to be tagging along again?” Kelly asked, nodding at the follow-car as the inner gate opened. The bigger vehicle’s engine was running and its park lights were on while it waited outside the enclosure.
Elaine pulled through the second gate and clutched, looking over at the veteran. “Unless you don’t want it to,” she said in a voice whose surface brightness Kelly had already learned to associate with a mind nervously in overdrive.
“No problem.” He chopped his left hand down the road as if the woman were a squad he was sending forward. “Dougie-boy got on my nerves, that was all. But I really don’t bite, I promise.”
“Sure, Kelly.” Elaine gassed the car and shifted directly from first to third after revving smoothly to the top of the powerband. “And one of these days I’ll get a job instead of living off my daddy’s money.” After a moment she added, “But I know what you mean. Thanks.”
There was no bar for traffic outbound from the fort, but the woman slowed and waved toward the guard post. This time she accelerated away fast, keeping the back tires just beneath the limit of traction throughout the radius of the turn and beyond as she straightened onto the highway.
“You didn’t get the keys from Doug before you came out,” Kelly said while they waited at what he remembered as the last of the traffic lights, if they were headed back into the District as they seemed to be.
“I’d given him my spare set,” the woman said, coming off the light as if she were dropping the hammer at a drag strip. “I’ll pick them up tomorrow.”
Eyes on the entrance ramp and the possible traffic on the turnpike into which they were merging, she added, “Blakeley doesn’t get only on your nerves, Tom. But let me keep my mind on what I’m doing right now, okay?”
They were heading south for the skyglow above the capital much faster than Doug had brought them to Meade, though there was no similarity between the styles of the two drivers. Doug had a heavy foot for brake and accelerator, and a muffled curse for other vehicles which did not behave in the manner he wished them to.
Elaine dabbed, sliding diagonally through interstices in traffic with a verve which Kelly had thought only a motorcycle could achieve. She was anticipating not only the cars nearest in front and beside them, but
the next tier of vehicles as well, so that the drive had the feel of a chess game. Most of the time she kept the Volvo’s engine snarling in third gear or fourth. Only on the rare stretches of really empty pavement did she shift up into the overdrive fifth, trading acceleration for the car’s absolute top end.
“Motor’s to European specs,” she called in satisfaction over the engine note at one of the fifth-gear upshifts. “And the suspension’s had a little work.”
The team in the follow-car must be royally pissed, thought Kelly as he relaxed against the seat cushions, but they had a destination and might even be used to this sort of run if they were assigned regularly to Elaine. She wasn’t in a hurry, particularly, and she wasn’t trying to prove her competence—or manhood, though it was a joke to think about it that way—to Kelly.
Driving on the edge of control—and control was what was important, not speed—was a hell of a good way to burn away hormones and emotions which had to be bottled up in social situations. If you understood what was going on, you could achieve catharsis without acting as if you were furious with everyone else on the road at the same time. Elaine knew that very well, and she drove with a razorlike acuity not muffled by the need for false emotions to justify it.
“You know,” said the veteran as they halted at the first traffic light in downtown Washington, “you could fool me into thinking that you don’t like the people you work for a whole lot better than I do.”
“You had an escape valve in that meeting.” Elaine proceeded through the intersection sedately. The sodium-vapor street lights emphasized the color raised on her cheeks by the high-intensity drive. “You could always decide you were going to try to kill everybody else in the room. I didn’t have that luxury.”