The turbidity was clogging his gills. His head rang. He felt sick to his stomach.
The net, he thought, could have taken half a dozen people.
He pulled first Cadwal, then Herenui out of the tunnel, then dragged each of them by their harnesses through the narrow tunnel into the largest cavern. There, he noticed that they seemed to be regaining consciousness and the use of their limbs, so he stunned them again.
It occurred to him that he was very tired. He paused, hovering in the darkness, and used his wings to fan water over his gills. His weariness faded.
It was only then that he thought of Bitsy.
—Bitsy? he chirped. Bitsy?
—Bitsy?
That second blast, he thought. Bitsy must have got tangled in the net, and had been drawn through the Venger’s wormhole.
Bitsy was in another universe. The Venger, or whoever or whatever was on the other side of the wormhole, had been expecting a human victim and instead got an amphibian pet. He wondered if the enemy was angry, or alarmed, or merely amused
Probably Bitsy was prancing around pretending to be very confused and much less intelligent than she was. Aristide hoped that no one would scan Bitsy to discover her true capabilities.
Maybe she would become the Venger’s mascot.
Aristide took Herenui and Cadwal by their harnesses and dragged them out of the cave. Above, the dark outline of the catamaran was visible against a million tiny, pulsating reflections of the bright world above.
He yanked the triggers on the two harnesses and there was a hiss as CO2 inflated a pair of balloons. The two unconscious forms began to rise. The balloons made little gurgling noises as they ascended, and the gas inside expanded and was vented.
Aristide re-sheathed Tecmessa but kept the stun baton in his hand as he followed the bodies upward, and then was blinded by the sudden flare of emergency strobes flashing from the two sets of safety gear. He heard an exclamation and shaded his eyes, and he saw the catamaran lying black on the water.
He heard a roll of engines, and then the sound of Ari’i running to the foredeck and pulling up the anchor. Still half-dazzled, Aristide swam to the boat and climbed the ladder to the stern. He kept a fold of his wing over the baton.
Strobe lights blazed on Ari’i’s heavy, barrel-chested body as he returned from the foredeck, nimble as he ran along the gunwale.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Aristide said. “There was, like, a big noise. Herenui and Cadwal were in that little tunnel. Do you think they could have banged their heads together or something?”
“Damn.”
Ari’i jumped to the controls and backed the boat up to the nearest flashing light. Aristide intended to walk up behind him and hit him with the baton, but the boat lurched and he swayed and had to recover his balance. Opportunity lost.
“Help me get them aboard,” Ari’i said.
He reached under one of the bench seats and pulled out a boathook, two and a half meters long.
He swung it at Aristide’s head. A strobe flashed on his blinding white grin
“Grax the Troll!” he shouted.
09
Aristide avoided the boathook by the simple expedient of dropping limp straight to the deck. He landed with a thud that rattled his teeth, and then tried to roll forward and lunge for Grax with the stun baton. A backhand swipe with the boathook caught Aristide a blow on the radial nerve and knocked the baton into the scuppers. His right arm dropped limp. Aristide kept moving forward and snatched at Grax’s heel with his good hand. He intended to lean his shoulder into the huge man’s knee, lock it, and bring him down.
But Grax took a step to the rear with his free foot and then just stood there, braced. His leg felt like a pillar of stone.
In his broad, powerful Polynesian body Grax was as much a fighting troll as he had been on Midgarth.
The strobes flashed, freezing instants of time in searing light.
Aristide hung onto Grax’s leg for lack of anything better to do. Fighting through the paralysis of his right arm he fumbled for Tecmessa.
Grax shortened his grip on the boathook and drove it like a spear for Aristide’s back. Aristide sensed the point coming and rolled away onto his left side, but the boathook punched through his right wing. Pain shrieked along Aristide’s nerves as the point rammed through his gills and pinned them to the deck. Grax kicked him with a bare, callused foot and he felt the wing and gill tear.
Grax’s eyes flashed in angry strobelight. Aristide brought Tecmessa from its holster and fired.
Grax was not his enemy, but a victim of the Venger, and he didn’t want to send Grax to the place he sent his real foes. So instead of sending Grax to the dull, dreary, twilit place he called Holbrook—a private joke—he sent Grax’s left leg there, along with a chunk of the gunwale, both amputated with microscopic exactitude.
This time Grax did fall. The amputation had been so clean that Grax hadn’t realized that he had lost his leg, and so he tried to get up and fell again.
Wearily, shuddering, Aristide took hold of the boathook. The wood grain impressed itself on his fingers. He wrenched the boathook from the deck and his wing and rose to his feet. He swayed, took a step, then stopped swaying.
Grax flopped on the deck, yelping, amid a growing lake of his own copper-scented blood. He had worked out that an important part of him was missing, and the nerves that had been sliced in half were beginning to react in pain. His eyes widened as the strobes revealed Aristide staggering above him. His eyes widened.
“You!” he said.
“Hail,” said Aristide, bleeding. He found the stun baton in the scuppers and used it to hit Grax in his remaining leg. Then he found some rope—no lack of rope on a boat—and tied a tourniquet about Grax’s stump.
“Contact the office of the Domus in Magellan Town.” Aristide spoke to the AI he’d mated with Tecmessa. “I wish to speak personally with Lieutenant Han Baoyin.”
There was a delay of several seconds during which the AI exchanged high-priority passwords with the AI at the Domus, and during that time Aristide took control of the boat and backed it down once more on the drifting, strobe-lit figures of Herenui and Cadwal. He reached for the boathook.
“Yes?” There was a sense of hilarity in Han’s voice, as if he’d answered just after someone else had told a good joke. Han wasn’t transmitting video, but Aristide heard chatter in the background, and the clink of glasses.
“I have a message from Commissar Lin in Myriad City,” Aristide said. “The message is ANGELS WEPT.”
“Is that—” Han began, and then fell silent. A few seconds later, the background sound stopped. When Han’s voice returned, his speech was very deliberate, and Aristide knew he was dictating through his implant.
“Who are you?” Han asked. “Where are you?”
“I’m on a boat in Matahina Strait.” Aristide held the AI out so that it could scan the boat and transmit the video to Han. “I’ve subdued three unauthorized pod people. One of them is badly injured and will need blood and medical attention. I’ve been wounded myself. And I’m keeping them quiet with a stun baton, but sooner or later it’s going to run out of charges. What I need is just you and a doctor, and the doctor needs to bring a squid to confirm the altered brain structure on these people.”
“I’ll call my boss. We can mobilize the whole—”
“No.” Aristide tried not to shout. He swayed on his feet and reached for the cockpit screen to steady himself.
“The pod people have been operating here for months,” he said. “Your boss may have been taken. I just want you and a doctor you can trust. One who’s been backed up very recently.”
“I’ll take the copter,” Han said. “It’s got a hull that floats. I’ll be at least twenty minutes, depending on which doctor I can scare up.”
The conversation ended. Aristide used the boathook to pull Cadwal to the boat. Cadwal was muttering and moving in a disorganized way, so Aristide
hit him with the stun baton again. Because he didn’t think he was strong enough to drag Cadwal onto the boat, he lashed Cadwal to the stern. Then he did the same—including the stun baton strike—for Herenui. He turned off the emergency beacons, and the strobes stopped flashing.
His mind was full of fog. He made his way to a seat in the cockpit and sat down.
He would wait for what happened next.
He was very sorry that he was going to miss the mass chorale.
“So Han’s got them under guard in a secure hospital ward,” Aristide said. “His colonel arrived to demand an explanation, and Han threatened to shoot him unless he went under the squid, so he did. Once the colonel proved he wasn’t under the Venger’s influence, he was brought up to speed, and now he’s in charge of the investigation on Hawaiki.”
“The information isn’t going to be made public?” Daljit asked.
“No,” said Commissar Lin. “Right now the Domus is doing a complete backtrack on everything Herenui, Cadwal, and—ah, Captain Grax?—have been doing for the last few months. Every known sighting, every communication, every appearance on passive surveillance video. Once we find out who they’ve been talking to, we can start the same search on their contacts, and with any luck we’ll have their whole network—or a large chunk of it, anyway.”
“How long will all that take?”
“It should be done by now. What will take time is the prisoners’ loading into bodies that haven’t been tampered with and their subsequent interrogation, which should confirm what we suspect and perhaps add a few things we hadn’t anticipated.”
“Poor Grax,” Aristide said.
Daljit looked at him.
“I liked him,” said Aristide. “For an adventurer, he wasn’t half bad.”
The sun was in its stable cycle, and the only illumination were streetlights and the ghostly light of the solar corona. The three of them shared the cab of a tractor-trailer truck in Myriad City with one of Lin’s subordinates, a Sergeant Shamlan. Shamlan—a freckle-faced woman with auburn ringlets—was driving. Lin sat next to her, and behind these two, sharing a plush bench seat covered with a blanket in a leopard-skin pattern, were Daljit and Aristide. Aristide wore Franz Sandow’s first, stocky, fair-haired body.
Lin had produced a pair of subordinates he was willing to vouch for. After General Tumusok had canceled Lin’s order requiring the staff of the Domus to have their brains scanned, these two had smelled something in Tumusok’s order that wasn’t quite right and had done the scans anyway. Endora had seen the data from the brain scans and reported to Lin, and Lin had approached the two privately and recruited them into his conspiracy.
Shamlan was one of these. The other was a lieutenant named Amirayan, who was currently on lookout.
It had been thirty-nine hours since Lieutenant Han’s helicopter had found Aristide drifting in the Matahina Strait. Since then the pod people had been properly restrained and taken to a secure hospital, where Aristide himself had been treated. The boat had been sent on autopilot to a Domus dock, its AI ordered to refuse communication from anyone except Han. And Aristide had traveled express through Hawaiki’s wormhole gate to the surface of Aloysius, where he had taken a shuttle to Endora, Topaz, and Myriad City. On the shuttle he’d raised eyebrows because he’d still worn his amphibian body—since Aloysius was still a suspect, he hadn’t wanted to change bodies in Hawaiki lest he rise a pod person from the pool of life. He hadn’t shifted to the more conventional body until after he’d reported to Lin.
Rising after his first sleep, he’d tried to echo-locate in his dark hotel room and been very frustrated when he’d found that he couldn’t.
There was a brilliant flash on Aristide’s retinas, and he jerked his head back and raised a hand to shade his eyes. The others reacted as well.
“There’s the signal,” Lin said, redundantly.
The amateur aspects to this operation were very annoying.
Aristide missed Bitsy, and in more ways than one. Though Endora was assembling a new avatar—Aristide would be able to pick up a new black-and-white cat from a nearby pool of life next morning—no artificial intelligence could possibly be involved in this operation. The Asimovian Protocols would set off a thousand alarms.
The absence of AI assistance was vexing. With only a few personnel available, the conspirators had been forced to create a crude plan with an absurd number of melodramatic aspects, as for example Amirayan the lookout signaling to his cohorts with a hand laser.
If they had been able to rely on an AI for surveillance and timing, the operation would have gone off perfectly, and Aristide wouldn’t have to repair holes burned in his retinas.
As it was, the best Aristide and Lin could do was request that Endora simply not look in certain directions. Cameras and other sensors in the area had been shut off. The conspirators had been very careful not to explain why these precautions were needed.
“I’ve never killed anyone before, you know,” said Daljit.
“Ssh,” Lin said.
Even though every precaution had been taken, no one could know for certain what might be listening. Those with implants had turned them off. All the conspirators were wearing inconspicuous clothing that had been combed for electronic tags, and each tag removed or slagged with an electromagnetic pulse. All wore wide-brimmed hats to help conceal their faces from individuals or passive surveillance video. The AI that normally drove the truck had been shut down.
In theory, there was nothing about the four conspirators to identify them except for flakes of skin and hair, which would give everything away but not immediately.
But that was theory. This was no time to go testing theories.
“Start the engine,” said Lin.
General Tumusok had been to a formal dinner that evening given by the Minister of Justice. The speeches and toasts had gone on well past the time when most people were in bed, and Tumusok—who rated a driver but who was democratic enough not to use one—had taken the trackway home to his house in the suburbs.
Amirayan had been on the roof of the trackway station and signaled as soon as he saw Tumusok leaving the capsule in which he’d traveled.
“Pull out to the head of the road,” said Lin.
The tractor-trailer moved forward on silent electric motors. Aristide looked out of the cab to observe that he was on a hill above a typical suburban street, single-family homes in a wide variety of sizes and styles, from blocky Georgian Revival, with a portico, to Colorform Geometric, without a single right angle, its video walls playing dark patterns that would not disturb the sleep of the neighbors. The golden globes that marked the entrance to the trackway station glowed softly in the night.
Supposedly Tumusok had chosen to live in the suburbs because it provided convenient access to his golf club, visible now as a level expanse on the other side of the small woody creek at the bottom of the road.
The choice was a convenience not simply for Tumusok, but for those who had come here to kill him.
“Stop here,” Lin said. The truck eased to a halt at the head of the street. He turned to Aristide and Daljit.
“Your move.”
Aristide opened the door on the side opposite Tumusok’s street, and stepped out of the cab. Daljit followed. Each carried a small laser cutter.
The tractor pulled a long, flat trailer carrying a stack of pipe. Each piece of pipe was made of the latest high-density, high-quality ceramic, with a diameter of 1.4 meters and weighing nearly half a tonne.
Aristide bent to look beneath the trailer as he walked to his station. A dark figure had just passed the two golden lights at the station entrance, and was walking down the street, crossing on a diagonal on his way toward Tumusok’s house. Aristide straightened and stopped, his cutter poised, next to the wide strap that secured the load on the trailer.
Daljit stopped by the other strap, her face pale in the light of a streetlamp.
Aristide winked at her.
The sound of the man’s footsteps
sounded faintly in the still night. Lin leaned out of the cab, a set of night-vision goggles still strapped over his widely spaced eyes. “It’s Tumusok, and he’s alone,” he said. “Cut.”
Aristide triggered his laser cutter and began to slice the strap. Aristide knew that the strap, woven with semi-intelligent fibers that had proven impossible to silence or destroy, immediately began broadcasting a message that its integrity was being compromised, that it was in danger of giving way. The broadcast was short-range, however, and he hoped no AI was close enough to hear it.
The air filled with the odor of burning plastic. He saw Daljit’s intent face illuminated by the orange flare of her own cutter.
The straps gave way at the same instant, and the great weight of pipe began to roll. Aristide knew that as soon as the first pipe landed on the roadway with a great clang, both the pipe and the roadway would begin to call for help.
Aristide vaulted onto the back of the trailer to watch the pipe cascade down the road toward the man that Lin had identified as General Tumusok. Aristide had argued in favor of a simpler assassination—he’d wanted just to walk up to Tumusok and plunge a dagger into his heart—but Lin had vetoed the idea.
“The operation has to be complex,” Lin said, “so that there’s an excuse for it not to be solved right away. We’ve got to keep investigators off our backs until the old Tumusok is restored from backup, and the more oddities and doubt we can cast, the better we can slow the investigation.”
Aristide had decided to concede to the expert. But he still wanted to watch what happened next, just in case Tumusok needed that dagger blow after all.
The lengths of pipe were bounding downhill, spreading into a great wave and making an astounding din as they went. Bushes and hedges were already being flattened on the fringes of the wave. Tumusok had frozen in the center of the road at the first sound, then turned to see what was causing the clamor. He stared into the darkness for a few seconds, then turned and began to run clumsily for his house.
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