by John Shirley
Finn considered the question, then shook his head. He lit a cigarette, remembering that LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS and CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES. “I didn’t see a damn thing,” he said.
Jack winked at him. “Good boy,” he said.
WUNDERWAFFE
BY JEFFREY THOMAS
Die Glocke Hotel was a giant globe suspended between two larger structures in Punktown’s business district: the United Worlds Bank and the Paxton Trade Center (for Paxton was the proper name for this Earth-founded colony-city on the planet Oasis). The globe, brassy and featureless on the exterior, was connected to the two flanking buildings by a pair of tubular passageways like enclosed bridges, carrying people to and from the hotel along conveyance belts or, for a fee, in personal shuttle vehicles. The brass orb hung above the street at the halfway point of the immense glassy towers, one of which was silver, the other black, like a titanic angel and colossal demon fighting over a prize between them.
In addition, surrounding the spherical hotel like a planet’s atmosphere was a bubble of water held in place with a tension skin. The water was full of exotic fish, jellyfish, and other aquatic life forms. Though the hotel had no actual windows, vidscreens on the interior allowed guests to look outside and see Punktown as if it rested on the bottom of the sea, colorful creatures seemingly gliding like vast monsters between the city’s spires.
The detachment of Colonial Forces soldiers assigned to what had been codenamed Operation Wunderwaffe had been instructed to arrive at the upscale hotel in civilian dress, so as not to draw attention to Die Glocke and arouse suspicion. They arrived at different times, over the course of several days, coming by taxi or dropped off by other soldiers in civilian attire. They rode up elevators in either the United Worlds Bank or Punktown Trade Center, entering Die Glocke Hotel from either direction. In their suitcases, the twenty Colonial Forcers carried their uniforms—which were in city camouflage colors of black/dark gray/light gray—their lightweight chest armor, and their helmets. Instead of bulky AE-95 Sturm assault engines, they had sacrificed a bit of firepower for the more compact AE-93 Sturm, which could still fire solid bullets or corrosive plasma-gel capsules, mini-rockets, and ray bolts. The 93s fit better in their suitcases, and anyway, were better suited for fighting in enclosed spaces. Like the inside of a hotel.
Though just who or what they might end up having to fight, Corporal Sia Coyne didn’t know.
After the last Colonial Forcer had checked in, regular hotel guests were informed by management that one of the two connecting tubes that upheld the globe had shown some instability, and that they must regrettably vacate Die Glocke so the problem could be rectified.
When the last regular guest had left, and the full hotel staff as well, the only people remaining in Die Glocke were the twenty Colonial Forcers, and a team of six business-suited agents representing both the military and scientific branches of the Earth Colonies government.
Them, and the group of Kalians that Corporal Coyne and the others had taken to calling the Nine.
***
“I got some tattoos, myself,” Sia told the Kalian man she was assigned to protect.
She thought of herself as his warder, in addition to being his guardian. Though technically he wasn’t a prisoner, she had orders not to let him leave Die Glocke Hotel should he attempt to do so. Not that he had expressed a desire to do anything but whatever it was he was here to do. She had not been told what that was. Only to stick by him at all times, for half of each day. For the other half, she was replaced by another CF soldier. Two Colonial Forcers had been matched with each of the Nine.
In the vidscreen over the sink, which, unlike a mirror, showed one’s reflection without reversing it, she saw the Kalian stiffen up, and raise his eyes to meet hers as she stood behind him. His eyes were entirely black, like embedded obsidian spheres.
In the bathroom of his hotel room—Room 404—he had just finished splashing cold water onto his face. Earlier this morning, pressing his palms against his closed eyes, he had explained that he was suffering a headache. All of the Nine had been complaining of headaches ever since they’d been moved into Die Glocke, three days ago. It didn’t seem possible that they could still be feeling discomfort, since they’d been given pain blockers by the medic allocated to Operation Wunderwaffe. Maybe it was their Kalian physiology preventing the meds from working properly?
This Kalian, whom she only knew by one name, Karik, had pushed back the long sleeves of his metallic gold tunic to prevent them from getting wet when he cupped the icy water. That was how Sia had spotted the tattoos: rows of alien symbols in black ink on the pale gray skin of both his forearms. Now that she had called attention to them, he quickly pushed the sleeves down to his wrists again.
She asked, “Are those words from your language?”
“Yes.”
“So what do they say?”
“Mom.”
Sia smiled and nodded. “Ahh.”
The tall, thin Kalian turned to face her, and to her surprise, he smiled down at her, too. It was a very subtle smile, with his full lips pressed together, but a smile nevertheless.
The Kalians were one of those few races that most closely resembled the Earthers, of whom Sia was one. She had heard that they believed their god, Ugghiutu, had seeded these human races across the universe. Everyone else believed it was simply a matter of convergent evolution, because the human form worked. Whatever the case, she found the gray-skinned Kalian to be quite beautifully formed. She figured he was somewhere in his twenties, like herself. He wore his curly black hair down to his shoulders. Most Kalians, both male and female, wore blue head wrappings best described as turbans. Not wearing a turban, particularly if one were a woman, was considered shocking. What did that say about this Karik, then? And the rest of the Nine—none of whom wore a turban, not even the women among them?
“So,” Sia said to him, “don’t you want to know what my tattoos are?”
“I fear it would be impolite to ask.”
“Hm. So you’re suggesting it was impolite of me to ask you.”
“I suggest nothing, Corporal Coyne.”
“My name is Sia. And I don’t mind telling you about my tattoos, ’cause I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Are you suggesting I have something to hide, Corporal Sia?”
“Just Sia. Oh I suggest nothing either, Karik. Anyway, I think my tattoos are more colorful than yours.”
“Your skin color itself is very beautiful,” he told her, those obsidian eyes intense in their gaze.
This sudden shift from tattoos to skin threw her off for a beat. Sia’s ancestors were African, though she herself had never been to that country, nor even to Earth, and she said somewhat warily, “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Um, okay … thanks. So, as I was saying, on my bicep here I got the emblem of my division.” She slapped her left arm through her camouflage fatigues. Then she slapped her other arm. “On this bicep I got the emblem of the Colonial Forces.” Next she patted her chest armor, over her abdomen. “Around my belly button I got a metallic gold star.”
“What does that symbolize? That your birth is connected to the cosmos?”
“Uh, no…it’s just decorative.”
“Perhaps not. You may have had a subconscious reason for getting it.”
She shrugged, and said casually, “Maybe some time when I’m not all suited up I’ll show you my tattoos.”
Karik looked away from her quickly. She wasn’t offended, didn’t worry that he found her repulsive. After all, he had just complimented her. Instead, she thought she sensed his embarrassment. No matter how moderate or modernized he and the other Nine appeared to be, they were still members of a very reserved people.
She asked him, “Is that all you have for tattoos? On your arms?”
“I think I should lie down for a while,” he murmured, leaving the bathroom as if he suddenly felt the space was too enclosed for the both of them. “Perhaps a nap will improve my h
eadache.”
***
He slept across the room from her, in one of 404’s two large beds. From where she sat, she could only see his glossy black hair spilled across his pillow. From time to time, he shifted position under his blanket restlessly. Several times she heard a soft moan. Pain from his headache, or bad dreams?
Sia slumped more deeply in her chair. Her Sturm leaned against the wall beside her, a handgun holstered at her side. But she didn’t wear her helmet behind 404’s door; it rested on the coffee table, near the remnants of a meal she had ordered from the room’s more-than-adequate food processor. The warmth and stillness of the room lulled her. If she listened intently enough, she could detect Karik’s deep breathing. Her own breathing seemed to fall into sync with it.
And soon enough, it was as though she fell into sync with his dreams, as well.
Sia was walking through the hallway of what she took to be a cathedral, with high vaulted arches spaced along the ceiling like ribs seen from inside some immense creature that had swallowed her. Also flanking the hallway were stone columns of a strange braided or entwined design. Everything—floor, ceiling, walls, arches, the rows of columns—was carved from a polished black stone. But unlike most stone surfaces, it felt warm, not cool, under Sia’s bare feet.
Bare feet? She stopped walking along this seemingly endless hallway to look down at her chestnut-colored body, with the realization that she was naked. Her boots were gone, her black chest armor, her camouflage uniform—which had a protective mesh lining to stop ray bolts and to prevent solid projectiles from penetrating one’s flesh. She was utterly vulnerable. All she saw, looking down past her breasts, was the metallic gold star tattoo that enclosed the black hole of her navel. But as she stared at the star, she realized something was different about it. Normally the star had five arms, yet now it had eight instead.
She continued on, bare feet padding stealthily across warm smooth blackness, until finally she decided to look out one of the windows that were spaced between the columns, and through which slanted the long reddish-gold beams that illuminated the cathedral’s interior. She thought the day must be ending. She wondered what the view would be. She felt there must be a great city out there, but she couldn’t recall its name.
The window was circular, and appeared to have no glass in it; she felt a cool breeze from beyond pass across her bare skin like a ghostly hand. Her skin pebbled with gooseflesh. Before she could reach the window, and gaze upon the scene it revealed, it suddenly closed up like the aperture of a camera lens. She backed away from it, and approached the next window, and the next, but each spiraled shut before she could get close, cutting off another shaft of red-gold light.
Sia feared what would happen if she should startle all of the windows into closing at once. If that happened, and she was swallowed in darkness, how would she find her way out of this edifice?
Sia resumed walking, walking, tempted to call out for another person but afraid to disturb this profound stillness … and embarrassed about her disrobed state. Might she find her discarded clothing and armor somewhere if she continued exploring? More so than that, she hoped to find her weapons. She didn’t know why this was paramount, but it was an intuition, and intuition had always been her most important weapon.
At last the hallway ended in a great staircase of black stone that curved upward, around and around like the inside of a seashell. She climbed these stairs, her calves beginning to ache from all her walking, until finally she arrived at a walkway along the inside of a massive dome, featureless except for one opening at the very center of the rotunda. The sky beyond this eye-like opening glowed blood red as the sun prepared to sink. When that happened, the total darkness she feared would descend.
As she started along the walkway, keeping one hand on the raised lip that served as its railing—lest she become overwhelmed with vertigo so close to the edge—a soft voice came to her. A hiss of air so faint she almost missed it.
“Sia,” the tiny hiss said.
She halted and glanced sharply over her shoulder, thinking someone had followed her up the spiraling steps. No one was there, but as she looked around further, she spotted a figure standing on the walkway at the opposite side of the dome. The figure was facing the inner wall, away from her. She then recalled having heard somewhere about “whispering-gallery waves” … how this phenomenon occurred in certain structures with circular walls, whereby a person might whisper and the sound would be carried to any other point along the curvature of the wall.
“Sia,” came the whisper again.
The figure was a man wearing a matching tunic and trousers of metallic golden fabric. He was tall, slender, with black hair falling to his shoulders in unruly curls.
Sia started around the walkway toward the man at a quickened pace, nudity be damned. She was heartened by the appearance of this familiar figure. At the same time, though, she maintained a prudent sense of wariness. She was, after all, a warrior.
The light glowing through the iris overhead was growing dimmer by the second. It had gone from red to purple. Glinting stars had begun to appear.
Sia wanted to call out to the man, but she had almost reached him now and was waiting until they could be face to face. Perhaps hearing her footfalls near him, he began to turn away from the wall … turn toward her …
Just as she started to make out his profile, however, the light in the rotunda drained away utterly, as if the circle of sky overhead had been eclipsed. At the same time, a wild gust blew down through the iris, concentrated like a beam, lashing across her nude body, as cold as a polar wind. With it came a howling shriek … but was that the wind, or Sia’s own voice?
***
“Sia,” whispered the man leaning over her.
She sat up so abruptly she nearly bumped foreheads with the person bent over her: Private Patrick Birkett. He jumped back a little.
“Easy … easy,” he told her, keeping his voice hushed so as not to wake the Kalian. “I’m just here for my shift, corporal.”
“Dung, man,” Sia groaned, rubbing at her eyes with the heels of her hands as she rose from the chair. She had a headache coming on, her sinuses feeling packed solid as if the bone of her skull were growing fuller, filling in its gaps.
“Sorry. Looks like you need to hit the sack, yourself.” The two of them had been given the rooms to either side of Karik; Birkett in room 402, Sia in 406.
“I think I’ll do that … so long as I don’t have any more nightmares.”
“Hey, talking about nightmares, you ought to see something. Come here.” The young soldier led Sia behind a partition that half-screened the bedroom area from the living room area, again so as not to disturb Karik. Here, he swept his hand over a large blank panel on the wall. The panel came alive as a vidscreen window, and Sia was oddly reminded of the windows that had magically closed up in the cathedral of her dreams.
The vidscreen revealed the city of Punktown beyond, seen through the sleeve of water that enveloped Die Glocke. The city was a familiar view: a dense forest of uncountable gargantuan towers, that because they were silhouetted against the red-gold twilight looked like the ruins of a city charred black by some monumental cataclysm.
Yet Sia noticed something was amiss right away. Before, the aquarium bubble had been filled with pulsing jellyfish trailing delicate silvery tendrils. Ugly comb-fanged fish with spots of green bioluminescence strobing down their sides. Lazily coiling giant sea worms with fluttery membranes like wings arranged along their smooth bodies. Now, the water contained only carcasses. A worm tumbled by in slow-motion, carried on some current rather than through its own volition. Those fang-faced fish hung suspended everywhere, gently carried along like the worm, their green patches gone dark. And the jellyfish appeared to have already started decomposing, leaving only shredded bits of gelatinous membrane and stray tendrils drifting in the water.
“Oh wow,” Sia said. “Dung, is this our fault? We booted out the hotel people, and maybe we didn’t do what
ever it takes to keep these things alive.”
“I don’t know, corporal … there’s weird things happening all over Punktown, if you see the news.”
“There’s always weird things happening all over Punktown.”
“I mean beyond the usual weird.”
Private Birkett described one news story he had seen. An unknown life form had appeared at the city’s Theta Transport Station. This facility was where Punktown citizens could board a craft to take them to a number of known alternate dimensions … or where sentient beings (on friendly terms with the Earth Colonial Network) from those dimensions could conversely come through to visit Punktown. Rather like the Paxton Teleportation Center, although that transportation service only communicated between worlds within this, the so-called Prime Dimension.
According to Birkett, a shuttle pod that had been returning to Punktown from the extradimensional world of Sinan had gone missing, apparently lost between realities. When it finally arrived after an inexplicable delay of three hours, the pod was found to be empty of the passengers and crew it was to have contained. Instead, aboard the transdimensional shuttle was a large creature convulsing in its death throes, as if it hadn’t been able to survive such a journey. Birkett said the creature was described as a formless black mass, honeycombed like a chunk of tripe, apparently without limbs or any internal organs. And yet, it possessed two huge wings, black and feathered like those of a condor. So far authorities could only speculate that the physiology of this being or animal had been compromised by the process of transportation from Sinan—or from wherever else it had originated. They were chiding a certain media source for referring to the thing as some kind of winged demon from the spaces between dimensions, that had somehow infiltrated the vessel and destroyed or consumed the passengers.
Though where those passengers had ended up, the authorities as yet had no theories.