Kaigo forced his way through the crowd and crouched beside us. "What has happened here?" he demanded.
"Lucío’s men broke their truce," Mavro said. "The cowards attacked us!"
Kaigo’s brow furrowed. He snarled, "They broke their oath? They lied to me? They are men who know not honor!" He pulled his sword and stepped over Abriara. His body language—his furrowed brow, the expression of disgust on his face—seemed exaggerated, entirely out of proportion, as if he were some bad actor aping the expression of someone who was enraged. It was a thing I’d noticed with other samurai, and it struck me as strange—they spent a great deal of time attempting to appear entirely stoic, free from emotion, yet when they expressed emotion they tried to appear entirely enslaved to passion. He marched off as if heading down to kill Lucío and his men.
Mavro shouted, "Master, wait!" Kaigo turned to look at us. In the only humble tone Mavro ever used, he asked, "Master, Lucío’s men have assaulted us three times now. Permit us to slay the dogs."
Kaigo grunted his permission, "Hai!"
Chapter 20
"We dragged Abriara into our room and pried her housing back into shape with the point of a wooden dagger. Abriara immediately regained her senses, and we told her of Mavro’s bargain with Kaigo. She was pleased at the prospect of vengeance.
Perfecto returned with the pipe Samora had used to stab Zavala. It was sharpened at one end. "Zavala is not hurt badly, but the heavy gravity puts so much pressure on the stitches, he’ll have to remain in bed a few days."
Abriara shrugged. "Then we’ll have to kill Lucío’s men without him. But first, we need to know where they are."
Mavro and Perfecto began jacking in calls to friends, offering the last of our cigars for information. Within three minutes Mavro got a response. "Vasquez says he just saw them in the hall down on level four, near the showers, having an argument about whether to come attack us openly or whether they should wait for us to come after them."
"Tell Vasquez to inform them that he saw us heading for the infirmary," Abriara said.
Mavro haggled with Vasquez over the price of his treachery, and ended up promising twenty cigars. Vasquez told us to take a minute to get into position.
We ran to the ladder and dropped two floors. Perfecto headed down a corridor that led away from the infirmary. The floor was still dark, the men here still on night cycle. The silence seemed strange after so much commotion. We reached the intersection where the corridor met the outer walkway that circled the ship, then held tight. Only Perfecto stayed in the open, watching for Lucío’s men to ascend the ladder.
We waited several minutes. Six times Perfecto snapped his head back as someone climbed up from level four.
Mavro said, "I get the next one, no?" glancing around to see if anyone objected to him claiming the next kill. No one did. "Ai, ya, yi," he said nervously, "I hope someone here does silver-blue tattoos." He was already thinking of adding a third tear to his cheek.
Perfecto snapped his head back for the seventh time.
He gave us an "I knew it" look and began counting, giving them time to get high on the ladder. Someone opened a door in the corridor between us, and some men laughed. Perfecto stopped counting. Lucío’s men would be on the ladders watching the open door. They’d slow in their progress.
Perfecto began counting again, nodding his head silently, and suddenly pushed off against the wall, making a whuff as he exhaled. Mavro jumped out to follow, with me behind. Perfecto was already halfway down the hall, running silently on bare feet.
Three men in white kimonos had stepped from their dormitory room. They were still laughing as Perfecto rushed past them. One said, "Huy!" and lurched back in time for me to glimpse the ladder.
One man perched on the ladder—a chimera nicknamed Bruto. He held an aluminum pipe in his left hand. Six corridors radiated away from the ladder, and he was trying to peer down them all at once. His head was twisted around at an unnatural angle so that he could see over his back. Bruto spotted Perfecto and jumped off the ladder, spinning to face the attack.
Lucío was ascending the ladder just behind Bruto. He couldn’t climb up in time to join the melee. He saw this and slid back down the ladder.
Perfecto met Bruto and both stopped just out of arm’s reach of one another. Bruto’s stance wasn’t good. He held his club up threateningly and had his right arm cocked to swing. This put him off balance. Perfecto danced forward in a feint, trying to draw Bruto out, get him to swing, then stepped back. Bruto jerked his club hand, saw the feint, then thought better of swinging. In that moment when Bruto was undecided, Perfecto lurched in and his knife blurred.
It appeared Perfecto had missed Bruto completely, for Bruto just stood there. But then Bruto stopped and stared straight ahead and a little up toward the lights. He appeared confused, surprised, then a little blood spurted from his carotid artery. It was like water gushing from a hose that has air in it. The blood pumped up and out of the artery and spattered the wall, and Bruto turned his neck to the right and gazed at it in wonderment.
A second gout of blood spurted farther to the right, for Bruto had twisted his head in that direction. Bruto leaned his head back and tried to step forward, as if to catch the drops of blood on his tongue as they fell. But when he raised his leg he lifted it very high in an incredibly graceful gesture, as if performing ballet while climbing a great stair. His eyes already had the glassy look an animal gets when it dies. No blood was reaching the brain, and it distorted his perceptions.
A few drops spattered my face and I stopped cold. I didn’t realize it, but I’d been running to the scene. Bruto began a strange and graceful dance, moving as if in slow motion. The blood would spurt from his neck and he’d step forward half a step and turn in the air in a pirouette. Then his blood would rain in bright red droplets.
The infirmary was just down corridor six, not forty paces from him, and I thought, If we get him to the infirmary quickly, we can fix that artery.
But I didn’t move. It was a thought I had, not a thought I’d act upon. Perfecto stepped in and slashed with his knife, dealing a blow that gutted Bruto. Before the body could fall he pierced Bruto’s brain with his metal stake, leaving him more than dead, fulfilling the code of the Quest.
I felt strange—like an observer, totally dispassionate.
Two weeks earlier this scene would have revolted me. I felt nothing.
"Did you see the look on his face when Perfecto stabbed him?" Mavro said, too loud. "It was cartoon shock-the face of a caricature when it runs over the cliff and stands in midair before it realizes it will fall." He laughed heartily, and I found myself giggling as if it were a very funny joke.
"The rest of them are on level four," Perfecto said, pointing down the ladder. He was panting, and steaming hot blood was spattered on his face. When blood is that hot, my eyes see it as if it were molten ore the color of cinnabar. The room suddenly seemed chilly. "I’d hoped two of them would step off the ladder. It would have been a better fight."
I chuckled nervously and looked down the ladder.
"We got one of their best fighters already!" I said. "I’m glad." We were down one man, they were down one. The battle was even.
Perfecto stuck his bloody weapon in his belt.
Abriara gazed longingly down the ladder. "They’ll be waiting to ambush us down there," she whispered. "We can’t go down. They won’t dare come back up, at least for a couple of hours. Let’s go get breakfast. We’ll fight better on full stomachs."
Perfecto left his bloody weapons in his belt, and we drew stares at breakfast. Word spread quickly, and some of the men shouted things like "Hola, muchachos! How goes the Quest?"
Mavro waved and grinned. "Perfecto here stepped on that monkey Bruto. You should have seen!"
We picked a table in the corner and ate breakfast rolls—made from ground algae and baked with a thin syrup over the top.
Mavro ate them with exclamations of "How delicious! They taste even better than my f
iancée’s famous liver loaf!"
My hands shook as I tried to eat. It felt strange. Everyone knew that we had just committed a murder, and no one did anything about it. There was no shouting, no recriminations, no appeal for help to the police.
But then I realized that we were all murders at this table. I’d killed Arish. Abriara admitted to killing three men in Peru. Mavro’s tattoos proclaimed him a killer from Cartagena. Perfecto had killed Bruto as easily as a man might step on a cockroach. And these were only the people in my combat team.
If every combat team was made up of such people, then eighty percent of us were cold-blooded killers.
I had thought when I signed up for my team that I would be serving society—a few people united against the pains of the world. But how does one serve a society of murderers?
When I was small, don Jose Mirada had told me that one serves a society by serving the individuals within the society. But how does one serve a society of murderers?
It soon became evident we were mistaken to sit in public. Across the room Lucío’s friends were dining, and we weren’t seated two minutes before one of them slinked off to inform Lucío of our location. Kaigo had left it to us to punish Lucío and his men, but the fact that he’d given his blessing didn’t mean we’d necessarily be victorious.
Since it was breakfast time for a third of the ship, the room soon filled up. Fernando Chin, the genocidal xenobiologist, came and sat on the bench next to me. He said, "Hey, do any of you know why communications have been cut between here and module B? What’s going on over there? Is it true they got bombed?"
"Jesus Christ," Mavro said. "What are you talking about?"
Lucío and his three living teammates walked through the door.
I watched them and thought, Bombs? This is too much to handle! You could handle one situation at a time. But you’ll go crazy if you try to do too much! Don’t think right now! Relax!
Lucío looked ghastly, with a tremendous scar down his face where I’d cut him. The bandage sprayed over it was roughly flesh-toned, but looked like glue, so he appeared to have some huge deformity rather than just a cut. He and his men didn’t even glance at our side of the room. They knew exactly where we were.
"I don’t know if they got bombed or not, but communications are out," Chin said, "Try making a comlink with someone on module B, and you’ll see what I mean."
Lucío and his men stepped into the chow line at the far side of the room and filled their plates, then sat at a table and began eating. I looked at Mavro. He was staring at them, his lips curled in a gloating smile. He was waiting for one of them to make eye contact so he could stare the man down.
Mavro shouted, "Hey, has anyone seen Bruto lately?"
Lucío and his men did not respond to the taunt.
Abriara said, "We’d better get to battle practice. It’s 10:25." I looked at her in surprise, thinking the Quest would take precedence over such matters.
Abriara stared across the room and said to no one in particular, "They’ll have to go to battle practice, too." Lucío’s team worked in the same time slot as we did. They’d be busy for the next two hours.
We got up, deposited our trays at the scullery line, and carefully retreated out the door.
When we got to battle practice, Kaigo was sitting on his dais, waiting. He watched us come in, but didn’t speak. I was very self-conscious. Our white kimonos were spattered with Bruto’s blood. It was obvious we’d been killing people. Kaigo didn’t ask us about it. He seemed preoccupied. For once I wanted to jack into the simulator. For once I saw the battle as a cleansing thing, something that could serve as an escape. We suited up into our battle armor, climbed aboard the model hovercraft, armed ourselves, and jacked smoothly into the world of illusion.
We skimmed over a salt marsh on a thin layer of water. Dark mangroves surrounded us, thrust their twisted roots into the brackish pools. Insects played on the beer-colored water, dancing among shafts of sunlight tainted the color of rose. Tiny fish jumped at the insects and darted into the shadows under the mangrove roots at our approach.
I was instantly wary. Something was different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. An intangible nag. I tried to watch all directions at once. The warning siren screamed the approach of the Yabajin. Instead of dueling with the samurai, Abriara chose to veer right, shooting straight between the boles of two mangroves and into the darker woods beyond. We barreled through the underbrush, knocking aside thick green leaves, dodging trees. A small anaconda dangling from a limb fell at my feet and I looked down. We hit a rise and the hovercraft bounced in the air; at the same moment I glanced up from the snake just in time for the thick limb of a mangrove to swat my face.
I flipped over the back of the hovercraft and bounced once. My helmet speakers buzzed, warning of the approach of the Yabajin. I retrieved my laser and tried to clear my thoughts. My helmet was cracked across my cheekbones in a line that followed the contours of the air filters imbedded in the armor. I pulled at the magnetic latch at the side of the helmet, and the whole helmet split in two, fell to the ground. Fresh air filled my lungs.
Fresh air! Not air from the simulator, which always smelled as if six dirty peasants had wedged themselves into your suit with you. This air smelled of grass and sea and carried the stifling scent of rotting fruit. And beneath it was an odor of sugar and strange turpines, a sweet alien fragrance. I could see full-spectrum, and Baker appeared far less drab than the simulator had shown it to be: a patch of sky bore the same cinnamon-rose hue as always, but clouds of yellow and green oparu no tako floating high up in the atmosphere were colored differently. Wherever they flew, a platinum shimmer shone with them. Among the mangroves of the salt marsh were native grasses of irregular shape, like some type of seaweed-not the purple the simulator showed, but an ultraviolet so dark my prosthetic eyes registered them as almost black.
I left my helmet lying on the ground, the warning buzzer screaming insistently, and walked down to the water’s edge, into the open. A cool breeze whipped my face. Thousands of Baker’s avians, thin waffles of plastic with small tails, hovered over the marsh grass. Some danced before my face—insubstantial creatures the size of tiny moths with taut wings fully extended.
Almost immediately a robin-sized avian feeding upon the small moths shot into view and hovered before my face with its tail pointed toward me. It hummed like a hummingbird. I’ve described most of these creatures as being shaped like mantas or skates, but this is only vaguely accurate. Its front half appeared to be a triangular body, clear as glass, with two large rigid wings held stiffly to the side, unmoving. Its tiny flat tail floated out behind it, as if just resting on the wind, but as I watched closely the rigid wings trembled ever so slightly, and the tail bent to help the creature turn. As it hovered it slowly turned to face me. It had two pale yellow eyes, a tiny mouth shaped like a sparrow’s beak trailing a pair of tendrils at each side, and just behind the eyes was an organ I can describe only as a forewing-a thin transparent membrane that vibrated rapidly, blowing air over the fixed wing. From this vibrating membrane came the humming sound.
Birds on Earth use their muscular wings to club the wind, to literally climb into the air on fingers of feather. The same wing provides both the lift and the forward momentum. But with Baker’s fragile-looking "bird" the thin forewing blew wind over the fixed wing, allowing the creature to lift. I imagined that with a strong wind the avian could relax the vibrating forewing and just hover in the air, much as a seagull does.
I wanted to view the creature closely. Tiny lines seemed to delineate segments to an exoskeleton, other lines appeared to be translucent muscle, and blue and yellow threads within the transparent body appeared to be veins and intestines, but I could see none of these clearly. I quickly reached for the creature, as if to catch a fly in my hand, but it dipped in its flight and sped away over the marsh with a buzz.
On the ground were twigs and individual blades of grass, and some black insects swarmed among the grass. I�
��d have thought them to be boring beetles, but several were pushing bits of dark ultraviolet leaves across the ground and they’d woven these together with twigs and pebbles to build small round shelters the size of a cupped hand. The shelters looked very much like tiny huts. I toppled a hut, wondering if I’d find something remarkable beneath—insects playing chess, or sculptures of alien beetle gods—but found only huge fat beetles tending tiny white larvae. I replaced the hut and sand flies jumped up at the movement of my hand.
There was far too much detail for the computer to have generated this illusion. The world was too complete to be a simulation. The insects, the avians, the tiny fishes in the water, the scents—all were things I’d never witnessed before. And the fact that the computer now compensated for my prosthetic eyes meant the illusion was tailored specifically for me. The ship’s artificial intelligence couldn’t provide this type of service to everyone—not with seven hundred men jacked into the simulators at once.
This felt like a trap. Immediately I recalled the men who’d died in the simulators, the men who were incapable of penetrating the illusion. I wondered: Could they have been murdered? Could they have died from shock because they were slain in an impenetrable illusion, an illusion such as this? I searched for something out of place: a tree that was too symmetrical and healthy, a patch of ground that looked as if it had been generated by fractal equations rather than formed naturally. But the trees had leaves that were yellowed and worn at the edges, insect eaten and diseased. The ground didn’t have the characteristic rumpled look of landscapes generated by fractals-there were too many smooth folds punctuated by sharp lines. I could find nothing out of place.
If someone was using this method to murder, I decided not to be a victim. I reached behind my neck and tried to claw at the place where I knew the computer leads connected to my cranial jack. But it was no use. My body was really sitting slumped in my chair in the hovercraft, completely disconnected from the real world. I couldn’t penetrate this illusion, and I could not escape it.
On My Way to Paradise Page 26