The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  “This site is the mother lode,” I said, hushing down my voice. Mom-Faye telling goblin stories to the tots. “In the Greenstrider war, how do you think the Peacock kept charge of his tribe? How do you think he intended to make ‘peace’ with enemy factions?”

  Muscle looked at Mouth. Mouth looked at Muscle. “Weapons?” the Mouth asked.

  “What else could it be?” I lowered my voice more. “Think about it: after the Peacock locked up Xé, why did he keep cooling his heels on Demoth for thousands of years? Especially since it was centuries between the last strider dying and the first Ooloms showing up to colonize. Why did the Peacock hang around, with nothing to Ride but leaners and siren-lizards?”

  I waited for them to make a guess. They didn’t. Unimaginative sods. “Because,” I finally said, “the Peacock couldn’t leave for fear of the League! He was every bit the murderer Xé was. They were two of a kind, making weapons to slaughter each other’s people. The only difference is, Xé beat my Peacock to the punch; she cobbled together her germ factory, after which everything else meant bugger-all. But the Peacock’s whole arsenal is still intact. Practically under our feet. When I show you this bunker, I guarantee you’ll find a whole slew of goodies you can commandeer for the Admiralty.”

  “Why should we believe you?” the Mouth asked. Not “I don’t believe you.” He damned well wanted to believe; he just needed an excuse.

  “Because I don’t want you prying my brain open,” I replied. “And because it’s dick-easy for you to check whether I’m telling the truth.”

  “How do you know about this place?” the Muscle asked…just as eager to believe as Mouth was. The two must be panting-desperate for something to show their superiors; they’d screwed up and given the Admiralty a bad name, not just on Demoth but on every planet that hated the idea of military bullyboys running roughshod over civilians. The High Council had bailed Mouth and Muscle out of jail because admirals are obliged to stand by their people…but my captors were in deep dip-shit with their bosses, and finding a cache of high-tech goodies would go a long way toward saving their rumps.

  “I’ve known about this place for a long time,” I lied. “You’ve checked my reports. How did we learn about Maya in the first place? Because she wanted Chappalar to help her get an excavation permit. But why did she care about a permit? She and Iranu were already working plenty of sites illegally—they didn’t mind breaking laws when they were hot on the scent. So why was a permit important this time?”

  I waited. Neither Mouth nor Muscle had a guess. Christ, when I made up stories for the kids, they always had a guess.

  “Maya needed a permit,” I said, “because she wanted to work a site in a reasonably public place. Somewhere folks would see her coming and going, and wonder what she was up to. Her letter to Chappalar said the site was owned by Rustico Nickel…and the only mine that fits all the criteria is a place I know, out on the edge of town.”

  “You never told anyone about this?” the Muscle asked.

  “A smart woman always keeps an ace in the hole.”

  The Mouth gave a short chuckle…and it galled me to hear how it was tinged with admiration. “You’re a shark, Ms. Smallwood. I knew you couldn’t be the goody-goody you pretended. Not with your previous history.”

  Bastard.

  Mouth put a hand on his partner’s arm and drew him back toward the door. They both went outside to discuss their next step. Me, I didn’t even try to overhear what they were saying—I was too dazed, half by the rampaging headache banging the inside of my skull, and half by the words that’d come out of my mouth on the spur of the moment.

  Why had it taken me so long to figure out what Maya’s letter meant? The story I told the dipshits had completely nailed the explanation; she wanted to investigate a bunker that was so public she knew she’d need a permit. The only possible site was the mine where we’d buried the Ooloms during the epidemic.

  I’d gone down that mine dozens of times playing little-girl Explorer, and had never found bugger-all. But that was before we’d filled the tunnel with corpses, and some drunk touched off a gas explosion. What did the kaboom open up? What had the Dignity Memorial androids seen the day they carried out the dead?

  Iranu senior must have suspected they’d find something; that’s why the Iranu group sent the androids in the first place. But our local authorities had closed up the shaft as soon as the bodies were removed, to make sure no more little-girl Explorers risked their lives down there. After that, no archaeologist, Maya or the Iranus, could do much around the place without attracting attention. Maybe a few forays in the middle of the night, but even that was risky—in a town full of miners, people working odd shifts might well go for a stroll at four in the morning.

  Which is why Maya needed a permit. I should have figured that out long ago.

  As for what I said about the Peacock—that he’d made weapons, that he didn’t dare leave Demoth, that my noble protector was as much a murderer as Xé…

  I thought of that moment beside Lake Vascho, snow falling thick, when the Peacock appeared gloomy as a ghost above the water.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  Botjolo.

  Cursed.

  Damned.

  The Mouth and the Muscle came back into the room. They looked as iron-jawed serious as ever, but now it seemed put on—as if they were gleeful little boys pretending to be rough-tough customers. The dipshits were all bubbles, now that they saw a chance to get out of the Admiralty’s bad books: open the Peacock’s bunker, find tech that would dazzle the High Council. For all Mouth’s talk about Festina planting disinformation in my brain, neither of these pissheads believed their own conspiracy theories; they’d just been grasping at straws till I offered them something better—a whole bale of hay.

  “We’ll go to this bunker,” the Mouth said. “Tonight, after dark. And you’d better not be lying.”

  “I’m not,” I replied. “Can you handle a Class 2 security lock? The Mines Commission bolted a steel cap-shack over the entrance to the bunker…like a hut sitting plunk on the tunnel mouth, and you have to open the door before you can head down. Of course,” I added, “if you can’t open the lock, I can do it myself with one call to the world-soul. Any door the government locks, the Vigil can unlock.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” the Muscle said, giving me a “How stupid do you think we are?” look. “We can open any lock up to a Class 5.”

  “In our sleep,” the Mouth added, never one for a simple statement when he could twist it into a brag. “And speaking of sleep…” He drew a stun-pistol and aimed it at me. “Nighty-night.”

  In the last second, I pictured my fist connecting with his face. Maybe the image would give me sweet dreams.

  Clawing myself awake was harder the second time—like a trick I’d forgotten how to do. I kept fumbling to get it right, then flopping back into blackness.

  When I finally managed to grapple up to consciousness, I fiercely regretted it. It’s flat-out amazing how many ways you can feel god-awful at the same time—the hammer-thud headache, the rock-in-your-gut nausea, the scritchy-knife stab in your bladder. Festina had told me the average stun-blast put you out for six hours…which meant I’d gone twelve hours with no water, no bathroom break, and damned if I could remember the last time I’d eaten. Not that I wanted to eat; the thought of food brought me close to the heaves. But my body was running toward empty on blood sugar, and I felt like a mashed dog turd.

  “Guys!” I shouted. At least it rasped like a shout in my croaking throat, and sounded loud to my headachy ears. I rolled onto my back and tried again. “Guys! Come on!”

  Seconds crept by. As I lay staring at the ceiling, I could see the room was dark again. Night. Festina lay beside me, still breathing but now with a sandpaper edge when she inhaled. I wondered how often you could have a stunner frazzle your neural connections before you developed permanent nerve damage.

  “Peacock?” I whispered. Silence.

 
Then Mouth and Muscle came through the door, and I tried not to sound whiny as I demanded a trip to the toilet.

  We’ll skip past the hot-cheek/hard-face indignity of pouring pee while two men watch and you’re bound hand and foot…except to say I was glad the Muscle was there. He kept the whole operation businesslike; unlike Mouth, who was precious near licking his lips with the urge to play lord-and-master games while I was manacled. Sick-minded toad. If I got a chance to break his other knee…

  Cherish that thought.

  After my one-woman show on the john, the dipshits gave me water and some protein jelly…all my stomach was likely to hold down. They were dash-ahead eager now to make for the bunker as soon as possible, but Festina was still out cold—put down hard by two heavy stun-blasts, and a willowy little thing compared to yours truly. Gymnasium-tough, but not hardened by boozing, brawling, boozing, brawling. The Muscle wouldn’t leave her behind unguarded and the Mouth refused to lug her unconscious body around the countryside. They began to whisper together in the far corner of the room; and with a cold jolt of dread, I knew they were debating whether to kill her.

  “Don’t be witless!” I snapped. “If you cork her in cold blood—if you even consider it seriously—the League will never let you off Demoth. Which means a heap of trouble, not just with the police; there’s a plague coming, and it’s going to be a vicious old bugger. You don’t want to be trapped and go Pteromic, just because you didn’t wait for someone to wake up.”

  “Admiral Ramos is already infected,” Mouth said. “Isn’t that right? So putting her down painlessly now is just a mercy killing.”

  “Odds are that you’re infected too, you crazy buggers. You’ve been breathing our air, haven’t you? If you’re hot for a mercy killing, start with yourselves.”

  Mouth turned away from me and whispered something to Muscle. Despite input from our esteemed Proctor Smallwood, the proposed homicide was still on the table, being discussed in committee.

  “Come on, Festina-girl,” I said. After my trip to the bathroom I was sitting on the edge of the bed, Festina splayed out beside me. I twisted till I could touch her with my tied-up hands. Grabbed her knee and shook it. “Come on, wake up. Don’t give them an excuse.”

  Nothing. Her breathing hadn’t changed, and her face still had a nobody-home emptiness. I shook her leg harder, squeezing her knee. “You have to wake up now, Festina.”

  Sheer blank nothing.

  I gave her leg a full-strength yank, and roared, “Explorer Ramos, atten-shun!”

  Suddenly, I wasn’t sitting on the bed anymore. I was flying across the room, jet-propelled by a pair of feet slamming into my back with a double thrust-kick. For a second, I thought I’d plow headfirst into the wall; but I tucked enough to hit with my shoulder, denting the plaster before I toppled to the floor.

  Stun-pistols slapped out of their holsters—I’d fallen with my face to the wall, but I could recognize the sound. “Stop!” I shouted. “Everybody stop!” Then I added, “Ow.”

  “Sorry, Faye,” Festina said behind my back. “It’s a reflex.”

  “I’ll remember that next time we share a bed. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.”

  My shoulder was going to have a grand old braise. I contemplated the throb of pain while Mouth and Muscle impatiently processed Festina through the bathroom. They gave her a grudging sip of water but no food; I wondered if they were cranked at Festina herself or admirals in general.

  Then: out to their skimmer in the chalet’s garage. The temperature was balmier than ever—soft spring. As the garage door opened, I caught sight of a night sky heaped with fast-moving clouds.

  Mouth took the driver’s seat, and I sat beside, giving directions. In the two minutes we took to get to the bunker, Mouth must have said a dozen times, “You’d better not be lying about this.”

  His way of making conversation. Men.

  The dipshits weren’t half as handy with the Class 2 lock as they thought they’d be: cocky-assed city boys who hadn’t expected the jet-black of night on the tundra, with clouds blocking the sky and no nearby lights. The closest home was the Crosbie family compound, a hundred meters off…and the Crosbies had always been crazy-cheap, never leaving a yard lamp burning once everybody was inside for the night. When I was seventeen, I sometimes parked Egerton plunk in the middle of his family’s lawn and with both of us bare-assed to the stars…

  Never mind.

  The dipshits fumbled and swore at the lock for a good five minutes, not daring to spark up a light for fear the Crosbies might see. While they were busy, I considered hobbling over to their portable radio-jammer and jumping on it a few times. If I broke it, who cared if the dipshits whazzed me with their stun-guns? The world-soul would pick up low-level link-seed activity from my unconscious body. Heaven knows, the authorities must be scanning for me by now—the world-soul would have raised the alarm as soon as I lost radio contact in the guest home. But Mouth and Muscle had obviously got me away before the cops arrived….

  The Class 2 lock snicked open. So much for pulling a fast one behind the dipshits’ backs. Mouth picked up the jammer and slung its carrying strap over his shoulder, while the Muscle grabbed Festina and me by the arm, hustling us into the tunnel.

  They locked the entrance behind us again, just in case some local wandered by. No one would be able to tell we’d come down here. And if Festina or I tried to run for it, the locked door would make it that much harder for us to get away.

  Nothing I hate more than a dipshit who thinks ahead.

  We started downward. Our light came from a torch-wand the Muscle had strapped to his upper arm to keep his hands free. As he walked, his arm swung…and our shadows shifted back and forth, back and forth, along the tunnel walls.

  The shaft here was made of the same false granite we’d seen in Mummichog. Or maybe it was real granite—the Great St. Caspian shield. Hard to tell, considering how there were black scorch marks covering most of the stone. I tried not to dwell on the thought that all this carbonization came from burning Oolom corpses. Even after twenty-seven years, the air was filled with a strong whiff of charring…the smell that never leaves a place where there’s been an uncontrolled fire.

  The ash streaks on the walls grew thicker the farther down we went. Somewhere under the black stains, I’d once painted my initials in stolen yellow paint: F.S. LOVES…I forget who I loved that day. Probably one of my future spouses. I’d only liked a few people in Sallysweet River, and I’d forced them all to marry me.

  Damn, I missed them. It hurt. And at that instant, I realized I could never go home for fear of making them sick.

  “Are you all right?” Festina whispered.

  “It’s the smell of smoke,” I said. “Making my eyes water.”

  The tunnel ended in a standard pithead: flat floor, blank walls, empty elevator shaft leading down. In the early days of the plague, this is where we’d gingerly laid out the dead…but that was before the flash gas explosion. After that, we just wrapped the corpses in body bags, stood at the tunnel’s entrance, and tossed the stiffs down as far as they’d go.

  As I expected, the explosion had blown a hole in one wall of the room—a jaggedy rupture in the stone, opening into a room we’d never known was there. Sometime since the explosion, a lot of the fallen rock had got cleared to one side. I wondered when that happened. The day the androids removed the bodies? Or just recently?

  Maybe Maya knew how to handle Class 2 locks too. I hoped so. That was the whole point of bringing the dipshits down here.

  Muscle unstrapped the torch-wand from his arm and led us across the room to the hole in the wall. The floor underfoot was gnubbly, covered with hard specks of grit. Not sand or dirt—the grit was dried gobbets of Oolom, scattered by the explosion and left to mummify over the years. I could see the stuff everywhere, flecks daubing the walls and even the roof: preserved for nigh-on three decades in this cold dark vault.

  The Mouth moved forward to join the Muscle, peering through the hole into the ne
xt room. I arm-wrestled my conscience a moment, then said, “You realize we found killer androids in Mummichog…in a place exactly like this.”

  “Are you trying to scare us?” the Mouth asked with his trademark sneer.

  “I’m trying to warn you. Maya Cuttack left Mummichog in a fast skimmer more than twelve hours ago. Plenty of time for her to get here ahead of us. And if she thought people might come after her, she could have set traps.”

  “We’re supposed to worry about traps set by a little old lady?” The Mouth snorted. “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay,” Festina muttered, “that man is plant mulch. A terminal case of stupidity. Fill out the death certificate and paint Oh Shit on his forehead.”

  The Mouth gave her one last sneer, then turned to his partner. “Let’s go.” Muscle discreetly stepped back as Mouth straightened the jammer on his shoulder and clambered through the hole in the wall. “All you have to do,” the Mouth continued, “is watch where you step in case there are trip wires…”

  His gaze was focused on the ground, watching his feet. He didn’t look right or left…which is why he didn’t see the acid coming till it whapped against him.

  Two impacts, split-splat, shot by androids on either side of the hole. Most of one blob slapped harmless against the jammer…but the other wad caught Mouth smack across the face.

  “Stop, you’re making us allergic!” Festina and I shouted in unison. The Muscle only watched, as if he’d be ever-so-fascinated to see what happened next.

  Mouth turned to see what hit him—no sign of pain, just pure dumb wonderment. His cheek billowed smoke; the hair on his left temple disappeared under the smear of acid like a magic trick, and blood spilled down as skin corroded away. He lifted his hand toward his face, as if he were curious to touch the goo that was eating him alive. The hand got as high as his chin. Then Mouth slumped with barely a sound, crumpled into a smoking heap.