"Karen, no!" she heard Filer shout from behind her.
"Sue me," she said, and squeezed the trigger.
The trigger snapped, and there was a moment of silent expectation. Then the throat of the rifle spat, and Geyl realized her mistake as she watched the trail of fire arc toward the fleeing assassin.
"Karen!" Filer was shouting. "Drop it and jump! Drop it and jump!"
The assassin had cleared the last of the boxcars, and was now running down the ridge of the first of fifteen tankers full of liquid petroleum gas. Geyl dropped the rocket launcher and dashed past the cupola, swung over the rail and leapt to the rear deck just as the little missile's warhead impacted against the side of the second tanker.
She saw Filer double up and tumble head over heels into the grass on the embankment in the lurid yellow light of the fireball she had ignited. She followed Filer into the weeds, rolling over once and running as the shockwave hit them, knocking her from her feet. Then a second explosion, and a third.
"Get up! Keep running!" Filer shouted, and the two of them ran along the tracks away from the conflagration with the light at their backs, falling once and then twice in the concussions from the exploding tankers. Filer scooped up their packs and ran with one in each hand, Geyl behind him, her bare feet in stabbing pain from the gravel between the ties.
"Thirteen!" Filer shouted in answer to another explosion. "Fourteen! Fifteen!" A pillar of fire towered halfway to the zenith behind them. The continuous roar of the exploding tankers dampened, and now the dominant sound was the crackle of the forest burning on either side of the tracks.
Most of a kilometer down the way, Geyl and Filer huddled in a brick culvert beneath the tracks, waiting for the gas to burn itself out. The wind was from the east and would not blow the flames directly toward them, but Filer hurriedly swabbed the gashes on the soles of Geyl's feet with some stinging disinfectant, drew cotton socks over her feet and forced her boots back on. She stood, and rolled the legs of the spare pair of Filer's pants that she wore so that they wouldn't drag on the ground.
"We can't stay here. Sycorax is just thirty klicks down the line. They're on their way already; I'll bet you could see that flame from Melkar."
Geyl glanced at the elfin light entering the culvert from Hell's gray moon. "So let's go."
"I know your feet will hurt."
"I can handle pain." She stood, wincing. "Trust me. Give me my pack."
They walked as quickly as Geyl's feet and legs could bear, between the tracks in the chill moonlight.
"I hope you know what's going on," Geyl said, one step behind Filer. She noticed with an ironic grin that his file protruded from his pack as it always did, undamaged.
For once, Filer's voice betrayed some agitation. "Moomoo sicarii. It was an ambush. Joe set it up with Randy's help. I don't know what the payoff was but Joe demanded it when the first one came in the door. It was a two-man job. The first one shot the place up, figuring I'd run out the back door. His buddy was supposed to be on the roof, watching for me so he could put a bullet in the back of my head. I heard you take care of him while I was holding the guy off from behind the pot-bellied stove. He would have done better but Joe kept grabbing at him. I went out the back door. The first guy knew his pal was gone, so he slabbed Joe and went out the cupola, probably to work his way forward and put a slug in Randy to keep him quiet. We wouldn't want to be on that train when it rolled into Sycorax, so I tossed our packs out the back door and came to get you just as you were torching the consist."
Geyl winced. "I'm sorry."
"No need. It was really great work, and a fine show." Filer laughed for the first time since the explosion. He looked over his shoulder at the flames in the distance. "And now I know your name isn't Karen."
Geyl started. "And why would that be?"
"You're somebody's sicaria. And sicarii never use their real names."
They walked several paces in silence. "I am not a sicaria."
Filer held his hands out in a gesture like a shrug. "Maybe there's another name for it on Earth. But Ma'am, my hunchmaker says you're a sicaria."
"I'm a new drop."
"Obviously. You'd never seen a Rasputin 018 launcher before. But nothing in that keeps you from being a sicaria. You've been trained to kill."
Denying that was pointless. "If you like. What did they have a rocket launcher for? I don't get that part."
Filer paused, shifted the load on his back. "Moomoos have too much money and not enough brains. They buy all kinds of crazy stuff they never figure out how to use correctly. It usually kills them."
"You make it sound like they do this to you all the time."
Filer laughed grimly. "Ahh, me. Well, Ma'am, whatever your real name is, let's just say it's been an interesting year."
Another two kilometers along the track saw Filer stop and wave at Geyl for silence. Filer pulled something from a side pocket in one of his packs. It was a decimeter-long copper tube that telescoped to something half a meter in length. One end of the tube had a mouthpiece of some sort. Geyl watched Filer place it to his lips and blow.
A deep, thrumming, near-subsonic tone echoed among the trees to either side. Filer paused for several seconds, and repeated the call. Off to their left, something answered. It began as a deep thrumming hoot, not as deep as Filer's instrument, but then climbed to something like a howl. A second, slightly higher-pitched call followed the first.
"They're there. Both of them. Now we sit and wait."
Filer eased himself down on the rail and waved at Geyl to do the same. The silence descended again, and Geyl heard a crashing in the forest ahead of them. Their wait wasn't long; first they saw glints of moonlit steel waving beneath the tree cover. Then one followed by a second enormous black shape emerged from the forest.
"Elephants!" Geyl hissed.
"Sorry," Filer said softly. "Mastodons."
The two animals stood at the forest edge for over a minute. They were shorter than elephants, but with long, forward-reaching tusks that had been tipped with cruel hooked blades over a meter long. Their trunks waved in the air in front of them as though tasting it. Filer put his hands to his mouth, made another deep hooting noise. The mastodons lowered their heads and touched their trunks to the ground.
"Moomoo mastodons. I'd assume the mounts of our late visitors. Look well trained."
"And well armed," Geyl observed.
Filer nodded. "One sideswipe with those blades will take your head off. Follow behind me and don't move quickly." He rose and took short steps down the embankment toward the two huge animals, hooting again through his hands.
"Filer! What are you doing!" Geyl slid down the embankment after him, balancing with her hands.
"Stealing them," Filer replied, advancing toward the steel-tipped tusks.
"What makes you think you can do that?"
Filer reached the first mastodon and began scratching its ear. "Easy, Ma'am. I'm a Moomoo."
12. Eigen's Wager
Jamie Eigen smelled the smilodon while he was working the never-ending cinder block. His nose wrinkled as he pulled another block from the turbid water in the galvanized iron trough. The water immediately seethed and bubbled as its nanomachines began assembling another block.
There's a large cat nearby. I smell its musk.
|I do too.| As inexplicable as they were, Jamie had come to trust Sahan-Grusa's comments and warnings. They were almost invariably correct. He froze, sniffing the air. Jamie and his team of COs were adding another wing to CO quarters, off at the far end of Lincolntown, where the trees were thicker and the brush hadn't been entirely removed. Conscientious objectors were not popular on this planet called Columbia, and Jamie soon realized that they were being kept out of sight.
CO's were also kept unarmed, here, where the forest that stretched away out of sight to the south on this almost-virgin world (109 Piscium 3? And where in the universe was that?) brushed up against their back door.
Jamie looked up and saw y
oung Tom Donatello sniffing the air and looking puzzled. The boy dumped his shovelful of limestone gravel into the iron trough, scanned the bushes, then slowly stooped to pick up a facing brick that lay near his feet. Marv the Mason (which was precisely how the older man demanded to be known) continued slapping mortar down on the rank of cinder blocks he was laying, his long gray hair falling in loose tangles halfway down his back.
The thicket nearest Marv the Mason crackled, and a huge, mottled yellow-brown form threw itself on the bricklayer's back, tearing at the man's throat with its impossible teeth. Blood was already spraying from a severed artery by the time Tom leapt toward the smilodon, to bash the side of its head with the facing brick. Jamie marveled at the 16-year-old's bravery, then felt stung by shame at his own inability to help the man.
The smilodon roared, lunged at Tom as the boy ducked, then turned its blood-smeared muzzle toward Jamie and snarled. Jamie's next action shocked him: As though by some will not his own, he leaned toward the animal's face and spat.
The big cat shook its head, then screeched once more, leaping backwards and around in a circle as though trying to escape something. It fell to the ground and convulsed there, thrashing and stabbing at its own shoulders, clawing at its eyes and muzzle. Jamie looked away.
Don't turn aside. I must observe this.
Jamie found his head turning back toward the dying animal against his will. The cat had gouged holes in its haunches and was crying piteously as its own blood poured into the dirt beside Marv's pile of blocks and mortar trough. It lay there, panting and crying and twitching for another long minute before it was still.
I killed it quickly for your sake. It deserves to suffer much longer.
|It's a cat, dammit! It evolved to kill!|
So did I.
"Marv's's dead, Jamie!" Tom said, looking up from the crumpled heap in stained overalls. "Damn, that happens fast!" Jamie saw a traitor tear running down the boy's cheek.
Several men came running down the dirt path from the main road. One pumped several rounds into the smilodon while the others gathered around the dead bricklayer.
"Second one this month," the man with the rifle muttered. "We oughta maybe build a fence or somethin'."
Jamie walked the gravel road to the Square, a messenger three steps in front of him. He had been too enraged to speak to the spirit in his ears since the incident that morning. Now, the labor of walking was bringing his anger back into line.
|I think it's time we dropped this crap about you being some kind of Indian spirit. You're an alien intelligence that lives inside people like some kind of virus, and Peter infected me with you.|
Fair enough. But had he not, you would be dying or dead by now. Instead you have the musculature of a man half your age, your cuts and scrapes heal in minutes, your teeth will never wear or decay, and if I can work out the causes of aging, you may live yet for thousands of years.
|I should be grateful. Forgive me if I'm not.|
I do not need your gratitude. I need only your cooperation.
|You have yet to tell me what you're trying to do.|
For now, I am simply looking out for threats to my own freedom, so that I can neutralize them when I find them.
|I doubt there's much I can do to help you with that.|
On the contrary. You are the perfect disguise.
Jamie had been summoned to the Capitol Building of the Interstellar American Republic. And although he was in no mood to cooperate with this mob of petty cutthroats who were planning on invading and laying waste to southern Canada, he needed a distraction. He had been invaded himself.
Something was living within him, something that was not human, something that could torment or kill him at any moment, as it had tormented and killed the smilodon that had attacked his team that morning.
Something that took pleasure in pain inflicted upon animals was the purest evil he could imagine. No matter that the cat was a predator and that it could have turned on him as easily as it had on poor Marv the Mason. Its kind had lived on this virgin world for unknown hundreds of thousands or even millions of years—humanity for four short years only. Jamie did not blame the smilodon for considering his naked, clawless species an easy meal. He only wished he could have conveyed to the big cat the terrible truth.
On every known Earthlike planet except the Earth, the Pleistocene era had never ended, simply because nowhere but on Earth were there primates of any species to force the transition of the biome. How identical animal and plant species had been scattered across the starry void was a problem that bothered a lot of people, but it never bothered Jamie. He did not question populations; he only studied them. It seemed significant to him, however, that the deadliest group of animals ever to evolve had evolved on one world only.
For his money, star travel was an ethical tarpit. Humanity had gotten the Earth. It could have left the other worlds to the mammoths and smilodons and mastodons and all the other unknown species wiped out at humanity's emergence. Now, twenty thousand years later, the whole bloody slaughter was beginning again.
This time, mankind evidently had a partner in the slaughter, a partner now living in Jamie Eigen's bloodstream. Jamie had begun spending his empty moments pondering how to end the partnership without ending his own life.
The gravel road became concrete as the thick of Lincolntown closed in on him. On all sides men were hard at work, laying new roadbed and raising new structures against the sky. Small shacks, huge tents of white cloth, and endless rectangular barracks of cinder block appeared everywhere he looked. In recent days they had gone to triple shifts, working around the clock. Something was going to happen in less than a month, something significant. But he was a CO, and no one was bending his way to tell him what.
The messenger who had come to fetch him paused at the door to a large cinder block building and waved him through. Shortcut. Jamie and the other man walked briskly between rows of corrugated sheet iron tanks, with gloved and aproned men swarming around them. Each tank was a never-ending something—pipe fitting, girder, length of ventilation duct, mercury vapor lamp, floor tile, or any number of other things. The men watched dials and gauges beside the tanks, and adjusted the automated hoppers that fed tiny spheres of raw materials into the bubbling water where the magic happened. To an outsider, it was magic in the purest sense: In a tank, the dirty-looking water bubbled, then stopped bubbling. A man reached into the steaming tank and removed an object. The water bubbled for a few seconds and stopped. The man reached in and removed an identical object, and the bubbling began again. Another man stacked the objects that came out of the tanks on little trucks, to be carted off to warehouses and construction projects. The smaller tanks were bled of waste heat by fans; the larger ones with cooling coils and heat exchangers. The building was always sweltering inside, but the men who worked there sounded very smug about the brilliance of it all.
Jamie granted the system a certain disarming elegance. A few kilometers outside of town he had seen a five-hectare concrete pond of dirty water that bubbled and steamed continuously. At one end, a zero-point generator in a bunker fed electricity into the water. Into the other end a continuous procession of trucks dumped crushed rock, soil, dead vegetation, and the entire town's production of trash and salvage. That night, he suspected that Marv the Mason's ravaged body would slide into the pond as well. Something in the water, something related to the something that was in the never-ending iron troughs, dismantled whatever was dumped into the pond into its component molecules, and gathered like materials together. Periodically, a gantry scoop erected over the pond dipped into the water and removed tons of small spherical nodules, each of which was a chemical element or useful compound. The nodules produced by the pond were composition-coded by diameter, and were sorted from one another by a system of graduated screens. Simple mechanical gadgetry fed the nodules into the galvanized iron tanks as the gauges indicated they were needed. Skilled labor was not required.
At the far end of the Never-
Ending Factory building was a huge iron tank, ten meters long, fed by six man-sized rattling canisters of spherical nodules and bled of waste heat by copper coils and heat exchangers. From the tank crept a continuous sheet of glistening white clothlike synthetic, a meter a minute, day in, day out, spooled onto rolls eight meters long. Wide-eyed Tom Donatello had made a daily habit of hanging around the tanks, asking questions of the men who tended them. They told him that the white cloth was part glass and part metal, part plastic and part carbon, created molecule by molecule in the tank by untold billions of busy machines too small to see. The boy suffered from seizures and was thus not considered warrior material, but he raved about the wonders that the rulers of the Interstellar American Republic controlled until Jamie would like to have throttled him, certain that the boy was a torment deliberately inflicted upon Lincolntown's COs.
Similar if smaller tanks exuded continuous lengths of twenty gauges of electrical wire including insulation, nearly-unbreakable composite rope, silver-gray utility tape, flexible plastic hose, optical fiber data conduit, and other things Jamie could not even identify. Somewhere, said sotto vocce Tom, was a secret building where an immense tank yielded one sleek cruise missile per hour—or so he had been told by a sweating old man in the Never-Ending Factory—and once the IAR's prospectors located the uranium deposits they were sure they could find, the missiles would become nuclear.
Then, boom! Tom always said, with a triumphant gleam in his teen-aged eyes. No more Canada!
Jamie shivered to recall it, and was glad to emerge on the building's far side, which faced the National Square and the Capitol Building.
The square itself was still empty, though a five-meter wide concrete slab a meter thick had been poured at its center. On that pad would someday be erected a monument to their victory over 1Earth's ruling government. Arguments continued to rage over desks and drinks as to what the monument should portray. There was an eagle faction and a galaxy faction, and blows were sometimes traded between the disputing parties. Look ahead, said one. Look back, said the other. "Look out," Jamie would mutter under his breath, and leave the room.
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