“Guy on the zucchini crew.” Patrick grins lopsidedly. “It’s period. Uh, do you know how to use a knife?”
I’ve never used a weapon that wasn’t computerized, and precious few of those. “I’m guessing it’s pretty intuitive.”
“You probably won’t even need it. Just in case, you know.”
“Have you ever run into any of these wolves?” I ask.
“Naw. I’m not sure they even exist. But … you know.”
“Thanks, man.”
“See you at midnight.”
He turns and trudges off into the snow. He will spend the next two hours climbing wolf-proof fences, sneaking through people’s back gardens, waving an infrared imaging scanner around, having to check out endless hits on dropped self-defrosting car keys and—yes, this is a thing—underground bulb incubators. Apparently, it used to be a big deal here when the crocuses and tulips would bloom in the spring. And the Belgians have not given up on their spring flowers, even though Earth now orbits Jupiter. They just plant the bulbs in electrically heated frames that stop them from freezing solid.
I have a scanner, too, but I don’t expect to need it. Sliding Patrick’s dagger into my pocket alongside it, I enter the park with Aardie at my heels.
It’s even worse than it looked from the street. The moon emerges fleetingly from the clouds, but doesn’t make it through the canopy of snow-laden needles. Birches and chestnuts used to grow here; now it’s all black spruce. I have to rely on my flashlight, and on Aardie’s headlamps. When I built her new headpiece, I installed 1,000-lumen LEDs where the eyes would be. She goes loping ahead, slinging her high beams through long-neglected shrubberies. Treacherous shadows entangle my feet as I hurry behind her. Once I crash through snow-covered ice into a forgotten ornamental pond. The water comes in over the tops of my snowboots.
Aardie stops to dig in the snow. Leaning against a tree trunk, I take off my left boot and put an unopened foilpack of soup inside. The boots are too big, anyway. By loosening the velcro I can get the foilpack to sit on top of my toes. Hopefully the heat will dry my socks.
As I start to repeat the performance with my right boot, I hear a growl.
I freeze, one boot on and one boot off.
That wasn’t a dog’s growl.
It sounded …
… human.
6
The wolves slink out of the shrubbery at my twelve o’clock, my eight, and my two. There’s probably one on my six, as well.
Their eyes glow yellow in Aardie’s headlights. Snarls contort their furred faces.
Ragged thrift-shop coats hang off their bony shoulders.
These are not the wolves we know from history books. They are the human kind.
Gene-modded, by their own choice, using biotechnology developed for livestock, which has not been approved for human use.
I’ve heard that it sends them crazy. And their eyes seem to bear that out. I can’t see anything human there.
“Geef me je jas,” snarls the one right in front of me.
I can smell its fur—a wild, nose-prickling smell, not the smell of homeless person, but the smell of something that is homeless by choice, because it has rejected the very concept of home. Warm buildings, money, electronic devices, history, the wolves have rejected it all. Instead they’ve chosen this way of being ‘at home’ on the mostly-frozen planet Earth has become.
“Wh-what did you say?” I stammer.
The wolf’s lips curl back, flashing over-developed teeth. “Give coat!” He, or she, reaches out and yanks at the front of my parka with a furry hand.
I wrench away, and the wolf slaps me in the face, tearing my cheek open with its claws.
Bleeding, gasping, I can’t get the coat off fast enough. I hate myself. I’m such a wimp. But there are at least three of them and one of me. The pack leader tears the coat out of my hands and puts it on, and believe it or not, I don’t remember Patrick’s knife, which he lent me for just this purpose, until the wolf finds it.
“Nice!” The wolf slashes air with it and laughs. The sound is barely different from a snarl. “Merci.”
That is when I remember what else is in my coat.
Tancred’s blankie.
I can’t let them take that!
“Can I have the—the other thing in the pocket?” The cold grips my torso like pincers. Aardie roots in the snow, lighting up the scene to no purpose.
“What? This?” The wolf takes out my infrared egg scanner, holds it up, and throws it into the nearby pond. It breaks through the thin ice and sinks.
Then they all start to fade into the trees.
They’re not going to give me the blankie.
One of them kicks Aardie in passing, just because.
Aardie.
My phone, thank God, is in my pants pocket, so I’ve still got that. I fumble it out and take a picture of the pack leader. I send it to Aardie and gasp a voice command: “Sic ‘em!”
Obediently, she rises. She spins around like a furry ballerina until she spots the person in the picture I just sent her, and then she gathers her hind legs under her and launches off the ground in an awesome leap.
I programmed an attack string into her because I was afraid. Back there in my cozy cell at Brussels Sprouts, I didn’t know what I was afraid of. Now I know, and I’m more afraid than ever.
But Aardie is not afraid. She’s just a machine. She hurtles straight at the pack leader.
Who is already spinning back to face me.
Aardie is fast, but she’s not faster than a wolf.
The pack leader dodges. Aardie lands in the shrubbery and struggles to get free.
I hear crashing in the trees behind me. Oh God, there are more wolves. I knew it!
Insane with fear and anger, I run straight at the pack leader, howling, hands extended in claws as if in imitation of the wolves themselves.
The pack leader actually freezes for a second. Perhaps it’s sheer surprise, or not knowing which threat—me or Aardie—to face first.
I plough into the wolf and knock him or her to the ground with my momentum. I land on top of him or her and grab the zipper pull of the parka. “You can have the damn coat!” I howl. “Just give me my blankie—”
Steel flashes in the moonlight.
I roll, on sheer instinct, and now the wolf’s on top of me.
Its eyes reflect Aardie’s beams, red with inhuman ferocity.
I bite into the hairy hand gripping my face, knowing that I’m finished. The wolf is raising my own knife to stab me in the throat—
Without warning, the wolf’s weight lifts off me. It flies into the snow.
I scramble up, and nearly collide with Patrick.
“Earth! Earth!” he yells. “Come on, you fuckers!”
He’s wielding a broken branch like a sword, and he looks as inhuman as the wolves, his face transformed into a mask of aggression.
I lunge past him and pounce on the pack leader again, landing on the wolf’s back as it starts to rise, clawing at its shoulders. This time I have no trouble getting my parka back. The wolf shucks it off and leaves it in my hands as the whole pack flees, silently blending into the shadows.
They leave one of their number lying on the ground. Looks like Patrick took care of it.
“Is it dead?” I’m hurriedly putting my coat on, checking that the inner pocket is untouched.
“No, it’s not fucking dead. I didn’t hit it that hard.” Patrick kicks it, and it moans. “They’re not like real wolves,” he says. “Real wolves don’t leave each other behind. They back each other up in a fight.”
Tancred’s blankie is still in my pocket. Hallelujah. My mouth tastes of wolf. I spit. Then I realize I still have only one boot on. I find it in the snow and drag it on over my double layer of wet socks. Every motion I make, even the discomfort and the pain in my cheek, reminds me that I’m alive … but I wouldn’t be if Patrick hadn’t turned up. “I didn’t know you were there,” I say, not knowing how to thank him.
“I called you, but you didn’t pick up.”
“Oh. Sorry. My phone was in Aardie command mode.” I stumble over to my mecha. She’s stuck fast in the shrubbery, caught by her stupid fur costume. I free her with shaking hands.
“I thought something might’ve happened, so …”
“They tried to mug me for my coat.”
“I shouldn’t’ve sent you in here,” Patrick says.
“It’s OK!” I find a laugh. “I mean, I came this close to dying a horrible, meaningless death. But apart from that, it’s OK.”
“Your face is a mess.”
“Yeah, I’ll probably get rabies.”
“You did good. Scatter, taking on a pack of wolves singlehandedly … I should’ve taken pictures! No one’s gonna believe it.”
Little does he know that the only thing which gave me the courage to attack the pack leader was my fear of losing my last tangible connection to Tancred.
I reach inside my parka and fondle his blankie as I walk, my relief turned bittersweet by the reminder of how far away he is.
Patrick stays in silent, wary, wilderness-survival mode as long as we’re in the park. When we pass through the rusted iron gates, back to the street, he transitions back to normal. It’s actually scary how normal he sounds, considering what we just went through. “So what were you doing with Aardie?”
I’m shaking a lot now. Like, a lot. My voice comes out wobbly. “I was using her to hunt for eggs.”
“Not the scanner?”
“No, the scanners are crap.”
Patrick nods. “They’re too sensitive. I was getting false positives out the ass. Think you could reprogram them?”
“No, I mean they might not even be looking for the right thing.”
“They’re looking for heat.”
“Right.” This was the only criterion the eggheads at ARES could agree on. I probably could reprogram them to define the imaging criteria more narrowly, but I don’t think it would help. “If there are any eggs around, they may be at ambient temperature. Tancred’s egg was warm after I dug it up—” I just about manage to say Tancred’s name without stumbling. “But what about before I dug it up? We don’t know. So …”
I gesture at Aardie, who is following us, looking considerably the worse for wear. The fur is gonna have to go.
“I programmed her to hunt for eggs using different criteria.” Remembering my work calms me down. While we were on the Bohemond, I put Pinkie Pie through every kind of scanner that I could persuade the ARES techs to let me use. I found that a magnetic field would induce a slight amount of magnetic activity in the egg, and I also found that the egg would absorb ultraviolet light at the 15nm wavelength, returning a characteristic spectral signature. Of course, Elsa’s people must already have done these experiments, but they did not share the results with us, so I had to do them all over again.
I was hoping to find some information that would help Francie to hatch Pinkie Pie. But that didn’t work out. So I used the test results to modify Aardie for her new job. In plain English, I tell Patrick, “She’s got a metal detector, a UV light source, an active spectrograph, and a wide-angle photon detector.” I tap her furry nose. “All in here.”
Patrick rips open a sterile pack with his teeth. “Stand still.” He attacks my face with an antiseptic wipe. He really is the perfect Boy Scout. “You probably ought to take a course of antibiotics, just in case,” he adds.
I realize I can see him fine, because we’ve walked all the way back to the station. “Are we calling it a night?” The antiseptic burns like fire.
Patrick shrugs. “Did Aardie the wonder scanner find anything?”
“No.”
Actually, I now recall that she was digging in the snow when the wolves mugged me. Maybe …
Fuck it. I’m not going back in there.
“I didn’t find anything either,” Patrick says. He checks his phone. “We can catch the 12:29. Come on.”
“Are we going home?”
“Home,” Patrick echoes bleakly. I suddenly wonder where home is for him. Then he grins. “Fuck, no. I’ve had enough of this. We’re going to Amsterdam.”
*
It is a two-hour journey on the mag-lev from Gare Centrale. Patrick sleeps all the way. Not being a grunt, I never developed that knack. I periodically wipe the condensation off the window and cup my hands to the icy glass, peering out at the moonlit snowscapes of northern Belgium. For some reason, all that whiteness makes me think of Tancred.
Oh, who am I kidding? Everything makes me think of Tancred. I take out my phone and type another email to Elsa, pestering her for more pictures.
Amsterdam, of course, got wiped out in the Age of Terror, way back in the 21st century. Flattened by a suitcase nuke, it was left as a blackened monument to the human condition until the Void Dragon came. Now it is covered with snow. Genemodded reindeer wander through the ruins, eating mildly radioactive lichen, while walking towns circle the old Museum of Terror in a pre-programmed gavotte, using the frozen canals as access routes.
We call Huifang and Milosz. They say they’re in a town entitled The Moveable Feast. It has cheery fairground flags flying from its castle-shaped hull, unlike some of the other ones, which look like heavy metal octopi, or pirate galleons—or spaceships. The walking towns are spaceships, really, minus the going-into-space capabilities. They’re pretend spaceships. It’s another way that people have come to terms, or refused to come to terms, with the reality of life on Earth.
Our snowmobile taxi bounds along a canal until we catch up with The Moveable Feast at one of its regular stops. We scurry up its drawbridge, into a perfect recreation of what winter in Europe should be.
Oily flames leap from torches and barrels. Smells of chocolate, fresh pastries, and marijuana tint the cold air. Fur hoods frame pink-cheeked smiles. A procession of bicyclists ride hands-free, playing accordions, along the main concourse. A random dude prancing around in a loincloth with a crown of twigs on his head swoops upon us and puts a Santa hat on Aardie. All this at 0340 in the morning!
“This was a good choice,” I say. “I wonder if it’s always like this?”
Patrick gives me a funny look. “Dude. It’s Christmas Eve.”
I’d lost track.
We find Huifang and Milosz in a nightclub where people are dancing with no clothes on. After my first beer, I wish Francie was here. After my second one, I’m glad she isn’t. Patrick—who drinks beer much faster than I do—homes in on some infantry guys, who are wearing their BDU pants as headdresses and nothing else, and picks a fight with them for disrespecting the uniform. You would think he had had enough fighting for one night, but apparently not.
Milosz says, “He needs to blow off steam.”
Patrick lays one of the guys out on the floor.
“OK, now that is too much.”
Milosz is good at smoothing things over. He helps the victim up, persuades all of them to put their trousers on, and brings them over to our table. Meanwhile I just sit there shaking. The fight in the park is repeating on me. I guess it’s repeating on Patrick, too, but differently.
He and the BDU-headdress guys are now best buddies, of course. He buys them all drinks out of our expense fund to apologize. I’m still in no state to make conversation. It does not matter, as I am invisible to guys like this, anyway. They “no WAAAY” and “fuckin’ RIGHTEOUS” and “Happy Christmas” us, and the one with a cyborg eye asks Huifang if she sat in a pile of sugar, because she has a sweet ass. Sadly, she does not deck him.
“Nice place to be stationed,” Patrick says, after a naked woman gives us all cookies shaped like sprigs of holly.
“Fuck, man, we aren’t stationed here.”
“I wish.”
“We aren’t even supposed to be here. We’re way out in the boonies. Gotta be back at oh seven hundred for sick call.” Wink, wink.
“Whatcha doing out there?” Patrick says.
“Aw fuck, man, we’d have to kill you if
we told you.”
“It involves fast cars, beautiful women, and piles of moolah.”
“Remember the big thump on December second?”
“No,” Patrick says.
I don’t remember any big thump, either, for the very good reason that we were not here on December 2nd. We were still about two million kilometers from Earth.
“Well, that’s why we’re here.”
“And that’s all we can say.”
“Hazard pay for deploying to the freaking Netherlands,” says Cyborg Eye with immense self-satisfaction. “WINNING!” These guys are the most boring and annoying characters I’ve met in a while. Why are the others tolerating them? Cyborg Eye now compounds his odiousness by holding his elbow out to Huifang. “Wouldst thou favor moi with the next dance? It’s Christmas Eve. That means it is time for all lovely ladies to flash their assets.”
Huifang looks trapped. She may have a punk haircut, and she may be wearing a high-fashion tank top that says Baby Me, but she’s basically a serious, down-to-earth girl. She clearly does not want to take her clothes off and dance naked with a guy who has replaced his left eye with an augmented-reality lens. Yet she starts to pull her tank top off, robotically, as if she’s scared not to. And Patrick and Milosz just hide their noses in their beers.
Fuck it. These guys are not a tenth as scary as gene-modded wolves. Forcing myself not to stop and think, I stand up and move in between Huifang and Cyborg Eye. “Hey guys, I don’t think she feels like it. Maybe some other time, huh?”
As fighting words go, mine are pencil-necked. Still, they force Cyborg Eye to notice my existence. “Did I ask you, geekface?”
Hur hur hur from his buddies.
“It’s OK, Scatter,” from Huifang.
“No, it isn’t OK,” I say. When in a hole, dig deeper—Scattergood’s Guide to Life. “In fact, I think you guys better head back to wherever. You wouldn’t want to miss sick call, because you clearly are sick … in the head.”
“Oh, funnee,” says Cyborg Eye. He grits his jaw. I flinch in anticipation of his punch. But instead of hitting me, he turns away, beckoning his friends. “Fuck this shit.” They shoulder away through the crowd.
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