“Who’s this?”
“Swanson, Corporal Francis X. We ran into a contractor convoy about three nights back. Things got pretty hot, and he went down, but we managed to recover his body and get away. They got some place we can keep him until we can get him back up to the Fitz?”
I nodded.
“The Sammie doc’s got a cooler.”
* * *
I carried one end and Wataski carried the other. Swanson had been a big guy, and I was still feeling a little weak, so by the time we got to the infirmary my knees were wobbly. The Sammie medical orderly on duty knew me by sight and waved us into the morgue holding area, and we hoisted Swanson’s bag up onto a polished metal table. Wataski took off her forage cap—she called it a “cover”—and scratched her pale straw-like hair that looked as if it had been barbered by a goat missing half its teeth. She looked at me from under heavy brow ridges. The deep cut she took to her cheek back on the trail looked like it was going to make a puckered scar that would go really well with her broken nose and lantern jaw. In a lot of ways, she did remind me of a Zack, and her expression was particularly sour and Zack-like right then.
“I need to open the bag and pull his ID tag.”
“Want me to?” I asked.
She looked at me as if I was an idiot, put her cap back on, and unzipped the bag.
“SON OF A BITCH!” she yelled and jumped back, and I saw a flash of movement as something scrabbled out of the bag and dropped to the floor. It was one of the local crustaceans, about twice the size of my fist, and it scrabbled a meter or two across the floor before Wataski’s heel came down on it hard, crushed its shell, and sent green and red guts and fluid squirting out.
“Goddamned thing scared me half to death,” she said. “We must have scooped the sonuvabitch up in the dark when we bagged Swanson.”
I looked at the open body bag, and half of Swanson’s face had been eaten away.
It took about one second to sink in, and then the adrenaline rush made my hair stand up. I just stood there with my mouth half open.
So that’s why the Varoki back at that ag research station had been so hostile to Humans: guilt often manifests itself as rage. A lot of other things started to come together, too many to sort out all at once, but the first thing that popped to the surface was Survival 101. I scooped up the dead crustacean, threw it back in the bag, and zipped it up.
“What the hell?” Wataski hadn’t put the pieces together.
“Look . . . just let me think for a minute.” I took a deep breath and rubbed my forehead, momentarily overwhelmed. “Okay . . . I’m gonna get word to Gasiri, but until I do, don’t mention this to anybody.”
“How come?”
“Because all the time the Sammies were chasing us, they weren’t trying to kill TheHon. They were trying to kill us.”
“You and the kids?” she asked.
“No, not the children. Us. Humans.”
* * *
I found TheHon sitting by himself, watching Tweezaa play with three of the other children from the convoy, and I lowered myself down to sit by him. We watched the children play in silence for a while before I spoke.
“You people are really sick,” I said.
He didn’t react at first, didn’t turn to look at me, but after a few seconds he sighed.
“I gathered from Dr. Marfoglia that you have learned about the . . . fraternal associations which form a part of . . . our social lives.”
“Social lives? Kiss my ass.”
He turned and looked at me, ears flared out, anger in his eyes.
“I’ll get back to that in a minute,” I said before he could reply, “but there’s something more pressing. Your other little secret.”
He frowned and looked at me, confused.
“What, do you have that many secrets that you don’t know which one I’m talking about? Well, I already passed the word on to Gasiri in orbit, so the cat’s out of the bag, and no way to get it back in. I did it so casual that the duty commspec didn’t even realize what I was saying—just mentioned the body of one of the Marines being half eaten by a local crab—and I’m not sure the commspec even understood what it meant. Guess he’s not high enough up the pecking order to be in on the secret.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, frowning in irritation, but his ears began to flutter nervously. Since he was a politician—some would say a guy who lied for a living—that reaction let me know this was as big and ugly as I’d been afraid of.
“What am I talking about? Let me ask you a question, TheHon. How come there’s no permanent Human enclave here? Most worlds with this many air-breathers living on them have Humans, even if it’s just some dirty little ghetto. What’s the deal here?”
“Perhaps the locals are xenophobic—people on colonial backwaters . . .”
“Bullshit. Answer me this: How’d you react to those shots you had to take before you hit dirtside here? Pretty rough, was it? Funny, didn’t bother me at all. None of the other Humans, either. The local bugs sting the shit out of us but don’t seem to bother you. Why is that? Well, maybe the bugs are xenophobic, too.
“So here’s the real question: Why didn’t the fucking crab die?”
I waited, but he just looked away, ears sagging in surrender. What could he say?
“I’ll tell you what I think. I think that if Humans lived here, or even visited here on a regular basis, they’d figure out the truth. The indigenous protein chains on K’Tok are Human-compatible. That’s why the scavengers don’t touch Varoki dead. That’s why the shots don’t bother us—we don’t need them. And that’s why the local government types, even in the middle of this giant shit-storm of a war, were so desperate to wax all us Humans before we ate something—or something ate us—and we put the pieces together.”
I waited for him to deny it, but he didn’t.
“You lousy, no-good bastards! Every so-called habitable world in the stinking galaxy we’ve found so far has protein that kills us. You’ve got Akaampta and a couple other places that are Varoki-friendly. That’s not enough? Other people find worlds with protein chains compatible with a different race, you broker the exchange. But when you find a world that could actually be a garden for us, what do you do? Keep it a secret and start force eco-forming it so someday it’ll kill us, too.”
He looked at me for a moment, then tilted his head to one side.
“I had nothing to do with this decision,” he said at last with a sigh. “It was made long ago and far above me. It was a foolish decision, but that is not something you can say to certain people. Industrial concerns believed that the environment could be—altered, made more hospitable . . . to us. A terrible decision, in many ways.”
“Yeah, up to and including the fact that it doesn’t seem to be working. What made your eco-science guys think they could pull this off in the first place?”
He looked away and said nothing. And then I got it.
“Son of a bitch. You’ve done this before . . . with a similar protein group.”
“Nearly identical,” he said softly. “But I did not tell you that.”
“Where?”
He turned and looked at me but again said nothing.
“Peezgtaan?”
“It was before we contacted you, before we knew the strain was remotely compatible with that of any intelligent race. The eco-form template was developed in the Peezgtaan project. By the time we had contacted you, discovered the similarities, the original project was complete.”
“Yeah. But K’Tok was just ramping up.”
“Considerable funds had already been invested.”
“Money talks and bullshit walks.”
His ears twitched in reluctant agreement.
“But that means . . . aw, hell. That’s why AZ Tissopharm moved a shitload of humans to the Crack, isn’t it? To work the black farms. That was the plan all along. The mold spores are original form; if they were genetically altered, they’d be no good to you. So the mold proteins
won’t kill us; we just die a little later of chronic pulmonary disease, or malnutrition, or just despair.”
He returned my look and answered carefully, ears motionless.
“As to that, I cannot say with certainty, but it is a reasonable conclusion.”
I looked at him for a while and then shook my head in disgust.
“Reasonable from people who, instead of belonging to the Elks or Moose or KC, join the Mystic Order of the Eternal Blood Jellyfish, or whatever the hell.”
“Do not confuse the one with the other,” he snapped. “Your own world had the Skull and Bones, Illuminati, other secret societies to which men of wealth and power belonged. Is it not so?”
“Yeah, but where I came from, those were the bad guys.”
His eyes flickered away, his shoulders and ears sagged.
“Yes,” he admitted softly.
“So, which little sicko club do you belong to?”
“I cannot say . . . will not say, at any rate. None of the things I have done concerning her”—and he pointed to Tweezaa—“or her brother, Barraki, have been at the command of any will but my own. These children are . . . not important to my brothers, only to me.”
“Why should I believe you?” I asked, and he immediately turned and looked me in the eyes.
“You should not. You are responsible for their safety. Believe no one. Trust no one,” he said firmly, and he meant it. It sounded like pretty good advice.
“What do you know about this End of Empty Dreams outfit?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he answered, turning away and shaking his head. When I didn’t say anything, he turned back and looked at me, saw I didn’t believe him.
“Do not be stupid, Sasha,” he said. “I know only that it is a Shadow Brotherhood. It is neither allied with nor an enemy of mine. Beyond that, I have only even heard its name once—perhaps twice—before. I know nothing else about it . . . because it is secret. You understand? Secret.”
“Well, he says they’re mostly centered inside AZ Crescent, and there’s some sort of messianic prophecy about end-times and the e-Traak blood line, and there’s a computer projection or something . . .”
“You should not be telling me this,” he said, turning away. “It violates the privacy, the sanctity, of his brotherhood.”
“Yeah, like I give a damn,” I answered.
He turned and looked me in the eye, and there was fear way back there behind everything else.
“If anyone learns you know this,” he said slowly, softly, and carefully, “or that you have told a member of another brotherhood, we will all die, Sasha. You and Dr. Marfoglia and the children will die quickly; that young fool and I will die slowly, but we will all die. Knowing that K’Tok is Human-friendly is a terrible thing, but if the truth is out, there is nothing to be done but face the consequences; knowing the name of his brotherhood is next to nothing; but knowing this other thing is death. Please, never speak of this again if you value the lives of the children.”
Most of the time, all you can do is guess at what’s going on in somebody’s head, but once in a while, the clock face falls away and you can see every gear and spring and flywheel, all going round and round, clear as high noon in the Crack, when the sun breaks the canyon rim way up there and the light floods everything, bouncing and sparkling off the turbulence of the river below the first spillway.
Right then, for just that moment, I could look inside of TheHon and read him.
He needed to know whether I would tell anyone else, because if I did, it would almost certainly lead to the death of Barraki and Tweezaa, and so if he thought that I would tell, he would try to kill me himself. He didn’t think he would succeed, but he would try, because their survival meant more to him than his own life.
That was interesting.
“Dr. Marfoglia and I will never tell anyone else what we know,” I said. “I’ll make sure she understands.”
He studied me for a few seconds, and then he nodded, satisfied.
“You people are really sick,” I said.
He sighed and nodded, and looked away.
“Yes.”
We watched Tweezaa and the others play for a while in silence before I spoke again.
“What’s your interest in those two children?” I asked.
“You asked that once before, and I told you—”
“Yeah, you told me shit,” I said, cutting him off. “The children of an old flame? I believe it; I just don’t believe it’s enough to die for.”
“My interest in them is exactly the same as yours, Sasha.”
“Not likely,” I answered. “I’m getting paid.”
“Of course you are!” He laughed that creepy honk of a Varoki laugh, just like Arrie would have. “Both of us are,” he continued. “Both of us are desperate for our payment, my friend, are we not? And when they are finally safe, we will receive it in the only coinage for which we both truly hunger—redemption.”
I could have said something like Speak for yourself, Bud, but I didn’t. Instead we just sat together in silence for a while, watching the children play.
* * *
How and why did TheHon know about all those old secret societies back on Earth? The Black Hand holovids.
That was the how. The why was more interesting. Leaving aside for a moment why anyone would make those pictures, why would a man of the education, sophistication, and stature of Special Envoy Arigapaa e-Lotonaa rot his brain watching them? Maybe more to the point, why were those holovids so popular as exports? Why did Varoki—apparently all of whom belonged to one secret society or another—love watching holovids where the good guys were trying to bring down the evil secret society?
You people are really sick, I’d said.
And he had agreed.
Maybe deep down inside, most of them agreed. Well, so what? Tell a junkie the junk’s bad for him, like as not he’ll agree. Doesn’t mean he can walk away from it.
Funny, those pictures always had the stock “good cultist” character—maybe a woman who falls in love with the hero, or a man who can no longer face the evil of his actions—who helps the characters escape, and who always dies in the end. That’s one way to find redemption, I guess. Was that the character the Varoki audiences related to—the one who turned against his or her own and found salvation in the grave? Or did they relate to the hero, who got to do all the righteous killing in the bloody ballet of slaughter which always consumed the last ten or twenty minutes of the story?
Or maybe they related to the villain, who usually died as well but at least got most of the good lines. I guess it depended a lot on the viewer. Different strokes and all that.
But here’s a good question for you—had those Black Hand filmmakers just stumbled onto the winning formula? Had the forces of the marketplace showered riches on the first filmmaker who simply got lucky, and then everyone else followed the money and the herd? Or did the filmmakers know something? Were they trying to tell their audience something? Maybe prepare them for something—their Human audience as well as their Varoki . . . perhaps prepare each of them for something different?
See? This is exactly how you start thinking after a couple days of being around a headcase like Katchaan. Everything is a conspiracy. But you know what Freud said: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and so by extension I guess you’d have to say sometimes a bad holovid is just a bad holovid.
But when Katchaan disappeared the next day, I had to wonder.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Marfoglia and I were supposed to meet Katchaan for breakfast, but he didn’t show up. Well, sometimes people are late, and sometimes things come up unexpectedly when you’re trying to keep a revolt ticking along smoothly. We were done eating and ready to leave when one of the Varoki insurgents came over to our table, introduced himself as a maintenance specialist—no name given—and asked to sit down. Katchaan, he explained, had been called away to oversee an equipment transfer and pickup near the uBakai colonial frontier. He didn’t volunteer
who the equipment was coming from, and we didn’t ask. I gathered it was fairly high-tech stuff, which is why the technical advisor had to be present.
Okay, swell. Thanks for the heads-up.
But he lingered for a while, wanting to pose a question but hesitant to do so. Finally, he overcame his reluctance.
“I hope that you will not find me forward in asking this . . . but I am very curious about something Mr. Katchaan spoke of . . . an organization known as Tahk Pashaada-ak?”
I’d already given Marfoglia the warning concerning loose talk, and so she looked at me as if she’d never heard of it before. But this didn’t feel right to me. Time for maskirovka—admit the little thing to cover the big thing. I looked back at her, and then I “remembered” something.
“Wait . . . yeah. Didn’t he say something like that when we were in the commander’s office two days ago?” I looked straight at Marfoglia when I said it, and she met my eyes for a moment, got it, and nodded. She wasn’t stupid.
“Yes. Tahk Pashaada-ak . . . it means the End of Bad Dreams, doesn’t it?” she improvised, turning to the maintenance man.
“Empty Dreams,” he corrected her. “Or so I have been told,” he added hastily after a moment. “Did he tell you anything about the organization?”
We looked at each other, shrugged, looked back at him and shook our heads. Ya nya znayu, pal. Ya toureest. Know where we can get a bacon cheeseburger around here?
After another ten minutes of us playing dumb, he eventually wandered away, satisfied that we were no threat to anyone. The secret was safe; no further action required.
After he left, we just sat there for a while, not saying anything, and I could feel prickly sweat collect on my forehead and upper lip. Marfoglia got the shakes pretty bad, and got this desperate, haunted look in her eyes for a moment until her defenses came back up like a drawbridge.
The following day the security chief called Sergeant Gomez into his office and told him that, sadly, Mr. Katchaan had been killed in a government ambush. From that point on, Joe Security Chief would be his liaison.
Right.
There wasn’t much to liaise, really. We had a section of the underground compound all to ourselves, and we pulled our own security—or the Marines and MPs did. I was retired again. Rations were as good as could be expected, the wounded were doing okay, and we had free communications with Gasiri and the transport overhead, provided it was by tight beam and so didn’t give away the position of the compound. Just to make sure, their comspecs controlled the uplink, and I’m sure they recorded all our conversations, but I could live with that.
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