Vigilant lop-3

by James Alan Gardner

  So yes, I’d heard of Festina Ramos. Ad infinitum. She’d been an Explorer First Class till two years ago, when out of the blue she got vaulted to Lieutenant Admiral… a position that had driven Nate to cracked-voice fits (bass/soprano, bass/soprano) because it was some bastardization. ("It’s crazy, Mom-Faye! The lowest rank of admiral is rear admiral. It’s been that way for absolute ever! They can’t just invent ranks out of the blue!")

  But the High Council of Admirals could. And did. After which, the shiny new L-Adm. Ramos was appointed to chair a board of inquiry for restructuring exploration practices. The media had gone into blood frenzy, convinced there had to be a lip-licking scandal behind Ramos’s promotion; but the blitz of attention had come to a screechy halt when the board hearings began. It was the press’s first chance to see Ramos in person… and she looked like an Explorer. Not only that, but the hearing room was full of people waiting to give testimony, and they all looked like Explorers too.

  Harelips. Scabrous faces. Seal-flipper arms, like that cadet who talked to me the night Zillif died. A host of antiphotogenic physical conditions that were never seen on mainstream Technocracy worlds. Such peculiarities were what made these people expendable enough to be Explorers… and what made news directors scream, "Shut down the cameras! Turn them off now!"

  From then on, Festina Ramos ceased to have "positive news value." At least in the lard-headed nicey-nice mainstream, where reality isn’t supposed to be so real it upsets people.

  Personally, I didn’t see much wrong with Ramos’s face as she bent over me in that dimly lit room. Yeah, sure, she had that birthmark. But so what? If the mainstream found it so precious ghastly they couldn’t bear to look… well, this wouldn’t be the first time I’d wondered how mainstreamers came by such stunted brains. Demoth people would never react with such horror. As far as I knew, our planet had never forced anyone into becoming an Explorer: first, because we weren’t so weak-kneed as to ostracize folks who were different, and second, because there was no blessed way the Vigil would let public hospitals deny anyone the cosmetic surgery needed to fix the problem.

  Not that I thought Ramos had a problem. In my eyes she looked fair presentable — attractive, going on handsome, going on a sweet sight more — and what kind of fool couldn’t see that, birthmark or no? I pegged her age at late twenties, early thirties, though YouthBoost always makes it hard to be sure. Her skin was a shade and a half browner than mine, her dark hair short and unfussy, her eyes that piercing green. An intelligent, no-nonsense face, pursed with concern as she cradled my head in her lap.

  "Are you all right?" she asked.

  "Sure." Would have sounded more convincing if I could move my lips, my jaw or my tongue… but everything was still muzzy from the stun-blast. The word came out less like, "Sure," and more like, "Uhhhr."

  "I’ll take that for a yes," Ramos said. "Next question: are you Faye Smallwood? Because if you’re some criminal or alien spy, and I just shot two men who’d arrested you legitimately… well, won’t my face be red."

  I bet she used that phrase a lot. Preemptively. Mock yourself before someone else does. I ignored it, and just said, "I’m Faye." The words blurred out to I ay, but Ramos understood.

  "Glad I found you," she said. "The police have been searching everywhere. They’ll be pleased to have you back." She patted my cheek with a warm hand. "Hold on a second."

  Setting my head down carefully, she moved to the unconscious Muscle. It didn’t take long for her to check his breathing and pulse, then roll him into recovery position. As an afterthought, she pried the stun-pistol from his clenched fingers and slipped it into her own belt.

  "Stunners are Explorer weapons," she said, turning back to me. "I hate to see one in the hands of these dipshits." She paused, then gave a soft smile. "Dipshit is a technical term — at least I’m trying to make it one. Short for diplomat. Officially, these gentlemen belong to the fleet’s Diplomacy Corps… which is mostly a cover for the High Council’s dirty-tricks brigade." She knelt beside me again. "How are you feeling now?"

  I tried to say, "Great." It didn’t work, but at least a sound came out of my throat.

  "Don’t worry," Ramos told me. "You only caught a light dose. Ten minutes and you’ll be ready to break more knees."

  Sliding her hands under my armpits, she hiked me up and wrestled my flop-fumbly body onto her shoulder. Her strength impressed me — Demoth’s gravity might be mild, but I know how much I weigh. Ramos was almost a full head shorter than I, but she slung me into a fireman’s carry and began moving toward the door.

  "Sorry we can’t wait till you recover," she said with a grunt of exertion, "but I don’t know whether there are other dipshits in the neighborhood. Best if we aren’t caught hanging around." Lifting her feet high, she stepped over the Muscle’s body. "I don’t know what the bastards would do if they nabbed us — they’d think twice about messing with an admiral, even a lowly lieutenant one — but this team hasn’t shown any scruples so far. Someday I must find out how the Admiralty trains them to the very edge of homicidal non-sentience without actually pushing them over."

  If you ask me, Mouth and Muscle had crossed the line as soon as they decided to strip-mine my brain; but I knew the League of Peoples didn’t see it that way. If the dipshits (good name) sincerely made their best efforts not to kill me, the League wouldn’t raise a stink if I happened to die anyway… or if I ended up a pith-headed vegetable. After all, the League let the Vigil plant a link-seed in my skull, despite the chance of stir-frying my cerebellum. In the College Vigilant, one professor told us, The League doesn’t mind if you risk other people’s lives, as long as you honestly believe there’s some chance for survival… and as long as you take the best precautions you know of. The League’s definition of sentience doesn’t require us to be intelligent, humane or non-exploitive; we just have to be careful.

  And some folks still call the League "benevolent."

  Ramos lugged me out the door into a room filled with humming cabinets of the electronic persuasion — probably equipment for jamming my link-seed connection, plus hologram projectors and who knows what else. One black box looks precious like another, especially when you’re hanging upside down over somebody’s shoulder. Anyway, I was mostly paying attention to a growing queasiness in my stomach: my nervous system was still too jangly to provide accurate feedback, but I could feel the grumbly-rumblies where Ramos’s shoulder dug into my gut.

  Not good. I’d never bothered with la-di-dah manners, but it wouldn’t do to puke down an admiral’s leg.

  We passed through another doorway into a room with wall-to-wall picture-carpet: currently showing a velveteen view of Demoth from orbit, half daylight, half night. As Ramos walked forward, her feet brushed over a moving image of ships docking at one of our space terminals. "This is a live broadcast," she said, tapping the picture with her toe. "The dipshits have their own sloop parked near your North Terminus. This is probably the view through the ship’s nose camera. Or should I say the boat’s nose camera? I take great pride in being the only admiral who doesn’t know the difference between a ship and a boat… and who doesn’t give a flying fuck either way. I wouldn’t even know it was a sloop if my crew hadn’t told me."

  She stopped herself suddenly. "I hope you don’t mind me blathering like this — Explorers are trained to give running commentaries whenever we go on missions, and I still haven’t broken myself of the habit. If I weren’t making one-sided conversation with you, I’d probably be describing the furniture." Ramos lowered her voice to a dramatic near whisper. "We are moving through what seems to be an artificial chamber, surrounded by four-legged assemblages of unconfirmed purpose and origin… perhaps of religious significance." She gave a laugh and went back to her normal voice. "Or would you prefer I tell you about the dipshits?"

  "Dipshits," I said. Which came out "ick-ick." Not a bad description for the Mouth and the Muscle when you think of it.

  "Dipshits it is," Ramos said. "And I was talking a
bout their sloop… which came to my attention as soon as I arrived at Demoth two hours ago. I was flying in my so-called ‘flagship’ — which has living quarters the size of a pup tent, and the surliest crew of Vac-heads in the entire fleet. The comm officer made some sulky remarks about a Diplomacy Corps ship lollygagging here, eighteen light-years from our nearest diplomatic mission… and I immediately suspected a team of bad-ass boys had come to town.

  "To check things out," she continued, "I radioed the base commander in Snug Harbor. He couldn’t tell me anything about the dipshits; they’d never contacted him. But he did say how glad he was that an admiral had finally deigned to drop in — he thought I was following up his report about a mysterious Sperm-tail seen during an assassination attempt. As a new wrinkle, the intended victim of that attempt, one Faye Smallwood, had just been reported missing and the civilian authorities were going bugfuck." Ramos shifted my weight on her shoulder. "Basically, the commander gave me a crisp salute, said, ‘You’re in charge, Admiral,’ and declined all further responsibility."

  Step by step we continued to cross the moving-picture carpet — Ramos’s feet scuffing past the blue rim of the planet and into starry blackness speckled with parked spaceships, then the brick orange expanse of the terminus itself. The resolution of the rug’s image was so finegrained I could see tiny dockworkers in tightsuits, skittering over the space station’s hull… as if I were looking down on everything from far above…

  Ooo, Christ. Vertigo. Just what my stomach needed.

  "So I concluded," Ramos went on obliviously, "that the dipshits from the sloop had been sent by the High Council to investigate this strange Sperm-tail. If the prime witness was missing, the dipshits had probably snatched her; precisely their style. So I asked myself where they’d take you. Most likely answer: an Admiralty safe house. The fleet owns property on every planet in the Technocracy, secret hideaways where admirals can entertain government officials or have sordid little trysts because they think that’s what powerful people do. I decided to pay a visit to the house nearest where you disappeared… and you can fill in the rest."

  Abruptly, Ramos stopped and bent over to set my feet on the floor. My stomach lurched like a bucket, then settled. I felt a wall behind me; a moment later, I was leaning ass-against it, wondering when my knees would buckle. They didn’t. And after a while, I even felt the blood stop draining from my face.

  Ramos watched a few seconds, then said, "See? You’re stronger already. Wait here while I scout ahead."

  She disappeared through another doorway. Now that I was upright, now that I was merely nauseous rather than prevolcanic, I had a chance to survey the room; before, all I’d seen was carpet and chair legs. Expensive legs attached to expensive chairs. Every piece of furniture was made of Grade A smart-stone: cores of depleted uranium topped by a simulated marble foam of nanotech that molded itself snugly to the shape of your rump. Looked like solid rock, but felt like comfy cushions. Farcical when you thought about it. From your butt’s point of view, these were just cozy easy chairs… but built obscenely chunky and ponderous (depleted uranium, for Christ’s sake!), purely so guests knew you paid top dollar.

  I glared at the chair nearest me — letting myself build up a snooty blue-collar resentment, mostly just to keep my mind off the continuing rockiness of my stomach — when suddenly I heard a whisper-faint yipping in my mind. Yes, yipping: like when you accidentally step on a beagle’s tail. Suddenly the whole surface of the chair cringed under my gaze… flattening out against the frame, cowering, nanites fleeing around to the chair’s underside, hiding there, even peeking fearfully out from the edges to see if I was going to come after them.

  You could almost hear their worried little hearts going pit-a-pat.

  "Sorry," I mumbled. "Didn’t mean to scare you." Jumbly-mumbly sounds coming out of my mouth, not words; but the nanites began to creep timidly back, slug-slow in case I’d glare at them again…

  I shook my head hard, then shut my eyes. Faye, I silently told myself, nanites don’t have pit-a-pat hearts. They’re teeny soulless machines, the size and intelligence of bacteria. They may be programmed to make a plushy surface under someone’s butt, but they are definitely not programmed to act like whipped puppies just because you stared at them harsh.

  Hesitantly, reluctantly, I opened my eyes. The chair was back to normal. Stony-surfaced. Stony-faced. And there was no yipping/whimpering to be heard.

  Well, I thought, that sure took my mind off the queasy stomach.

  Ramos hurried back into the room. "The coast is clear, at least for the moment. Should I carry you again, or can you walk?"

  Concentrating hard, I tried to move my feet; they responded, though I could scarcely feel them. Ramos shifted in to help me, taking my right arm over her shoulders and wrapping her left arm around my waist. When I started forward it was more a babyfied toddle than a walk, but we found a rhythm after a few paces — faster than a tortoise, slower than a hare. Somewhere about the speed of a dog with worms as it drags its ass across your best broadloom.

  Have I mentioned our family has pets?

  Ramos and I shambled down a short passageway into a kitchen, the place sparkling-clean except for two dirty plates on the counter. By the looks of it, Mouth and Muscle had made spaghetti while they waited for me to wake up… and, of course, they were just the type to leave dishes for someone else to clean.

  Cavalier buggers.

  The kitchen led to a back-porch area, too spotless to call a mudroom. Through the windows I saw black night, as dark as a miner’s boot: clouds hid the stars, and thick forest crowded up within ten meters of the porch steps.

  "We’re still on Great St. Caspian," Ramos said in a low voice, "but a long way from Bonaventure. The air’s a little thin outside… not that you can tell inside this pressurized house. We’ll be all right out there if we don’t try anything energetic — and we don’t have to go far, I’ve got a skimmer parked five minutes away. How are you holding up?"

  "I’m fine." This time the words actually sounded like words — slurred words spoken by some pisshead drunk, but at least they had consonants.

  "Amazing powers of recovery." Ramos gave me a faint smile. "Hang on, while I make sure we’re alone."

  She bent down to a small machine that sat on the floor beside the door. It matched the size of a paint can, but its top was a flat glass screen. Ramos picked up the machine and swept it through a slow scan of the yard outside, keeping her eyes on the screen. "The Bumbler shows nothing on IR," she said, clipping the machine to her belt. "Let’s go."

  The way out was a double-door arrangement: an airlock between the house and the skimpier atmosphere outside. My ears popped as the outer door opened, but it wasn’t a fierce hurt; either my neurons were too dizzy to register pain, or the pressure differential wasn’t so scary as Ramos thought. I leaned toward the second alternative. Offworlders always get overexcited about the threadiness of our atmosphere.

  We hobbled across the dark yard and entered the darker woods. This wasn’t a sparse, well-spaced tundra forest — these trees were wild boreal. Instead of demure carpet moss, you got angry snarls of underbrush; instead of don’t-bother-the-neighbors bluebarrels, there were cactus-pines thorned up for war, reaching out to strangle each other with as many branches as possible. It all added up to show we were in the south half of the island… just a fraction warmer year-round, but enough to shift the ecology from tightly contained order to every-bush-for-itself chaos.

  The only route forward was a game trail, narrow enough that Ramos and I had a devil of a time walking two abreast. Lucky for us, we didn’t need to go a long way — just over a ridge and down to a creek gully where Ramos had her skimmer waiting.

  In the dark, the skimmer was blessed near invisible — not just camouflaged but chameleoned, its hull perfectly mimicking the nearby terrain. No identification markings either… which was mildly illegal, in a Class II misdemeanorly way. Ramos carried me to the back hatch, which opened as we reache
d it.

  "Get in, get in!" cackled a voice from inside. Exactly the voice I’d heard in a junior-school play, when Lynn’s ten-year-old Barry got cast to play an old man: cartoonish, nasal, enthusiastically cracking every other syllable. The old-man voice people use in dirty jokes.

  "Faye Smallwood," Ramos said, "this is Ogodda Unorr. Our getaway driver."

  "Call me Oh-God," he grinned. "As soon as I start driving, you’ll know why."

  The man was a Freep. A native of the Divian Free Republic: the closest habitable planet to Demoth, a mere six light-years away. The Free Republic started much like Demoth — a Divian billionaire bought a planet and commissioned a custom-engineered race so he could create his own Utopia. This particular utopia was intended to be staunchly libertarian but had too much wired-in greed to maintain any higher principles; it nose-dived into dog-eat-dog anarchy for three centuries after its founding, then calcified into a corporate oligarchy run by rich trade barons. Cartel capitalism. The Freep plutocracy chanted the mantra of "free markets" while making sure their markets were only free for those who played the right game.

  By the looks of it, the Freep driving the skimmer had got himself out of the game by joining the navy — he wore black fatigues, faded and gone shiny in places, but still recognizable as a uniform of the Explorer Corps. The uniform had several circular spots darker than the surrounding cloth: places where insignia must have been sewn on. Oh-God’s badges were gone now, leaving no sign of his rank or ship assignment. He must be that rarity, an Explorer who’d lived long enough to retire.

  I looked at Oh-God more closely. Yes, he was old. Cracking ancient. Like all Freeps, he was short, stocky, and cylindrical… a chest-high tree stump with arms. His skin was pale orange at this moment, the way all Freeps go orange on Demoth. Back on their home planet, Freep skins can chameleon all the way to black, a tactic for shutting out the barrage of ultraviolet that comes from the smaller of their two suns; but on Demoth, especially on a winter-spring night in Great St. Caspian, the UV was too weak to demand pigment protection.