“Where are we meeting the others? Where’s the tunnel entrance?”
“We have to go further. Drink. Eat some more. You’ll be fine.”
The cone was ahead of them, a mass of rugged glittering granite: a solid though unlikely landscape feature. To reach its skirts they had to descend into a shallow valley. There were no trees. Between strands of windswept snow the turf was crisp with the brown ghosts of summer flowers.
Misha gazed into his inner eye. “Lalith’s inside. She’s landed the flier, and left it in quarantine. She and her passengers have deplaned safely, they’ve been dipped in quarantine; they’re being escorted to a reception suite now. All the precautions are normal, no problems. They’ll want to separate her from the others soon, and take her off for her own debriefing, that’s also normal but she’ll resist. So far she’s managing to convince them she has to stick with her asylum-seekers. They only trust Lalith, the halfcaste doesn’t speak; they won’t impart their vital information unless Lalith’s in the room, that sort of thing.”
“You’re talking to her aren’t you? I didn’t know Lalith had an inset.”
“Of course she’s wired. She’s a secret agent. You don’t know all our secrets, Miss Alien-in-Disguise. Just listen, don’t interrupt. She’s sending up to some FDA satellite or other, and down again, as if she was calling me on a global-mobile. Leaving no trace of where I am, if they should catch her out. We’ll lose contact for a while, now she’s with the staff. Once we’re in, we’ll be able to talk again, she’s bit-stitched me and Joset into the system. Nothing that’ll stand human scrutiny, but we should be okay for as long as it takes. The Aleutians aren’t here yet, and there aren’t many humans around. This is actually the most dangerous part. Where’s the map I gave you? Take a look at it.”
Head up, staring inward, he traced the contour lines on the flimsy she spread between them on the ground. “See here. A dip, under the slope of the cone, opposite the fissure we climbed. We have to get there without alerting the exterior surveillance. We have the advantage that the surveillance ‘knows’ nothing has crossed the shorelines: Lalith has fixed that. So it won’t be actively searching. The suits have good camouflage. They’ll make us look like whatever is next to us, long as we don’t move. When we move, they’ll give us the signal profile of large animals behaving naturally. Only trouble is.” Abruptly his eyes changed their focus. “There aren’t any large animals around. When I say run, run like fun. When I yell stop, stop at once and pretend to be a boulder. When I say run again, run. Got it?”
She nodded.
“Run!”
Run: stop. Run: stop. Run: stop. Catherine stumbled and fell into the final cover, an iced-over marshy dell, frosted tussocks and moss. A tussock flew into the air. Rajath’s impish noseless face burst from hiding. He scrambled up, leapt at Catherine and embraced her. Joset rolled dripping from a marshy lair.
“You made it! You made it!” Rajath was dancing with excitement.
Misha slung his bag of firearms down beside the bags Joset and Rajath had carried. He and Joset bent over them. Catherine heard fragments of their spoken interchange: “a sticky moment on the beach, when she…”
“Did you get the flames, or did you climb?”
What did I do wrong on the beach? she wondered: and closed her eyes.
Misha was right; she really shouldn’t be wearing this body. She had lived in Catherine’s limbs all these years: suddenly she felt trapped in a scanty ill-fitting suit. She’d chosen to wear a human body so the earthlings wouldn’t be able to call her a superbeing; so they wouldn’t feel she was unfairly advantaged. That part of the plan seems to have worked, she thought, ruefully.
She lay waiting for the telepaths to report.
“Wake up, Catherine. We must get underground.”
They moved swiftly and with confident precision. Near to the rendezvous dell Misha dropped to his knees and tugged at a granite slab. It opened like a hatchway, revealing a dark pit, roughly square. “Got it. There are exits and entrances everywhere, escape routes for the worst case scenario where the aliens get inside the ultimate bunker. Campfire Girls don’t like to be trapped.”
He reached inside and brushed away fibrous earth, uncovering the first rung of a metal ladder. They clambered, one after another, into darkness. Joset, bringing up the rear, hauled the slab until it dropped back into place. At the bottom of the shaft a section of the wall rose silently, and they stepped into a sleek horizontal tunnel. It was dimly lit, tall but not wide. Misha handed out charged superheat: they set off in single file. Misha, then Catherine, then Rajath; and Joset last. Misha and Joset were carrying the bags. The tunnel took them to a junction, where there was better light and an air of occasional use. Joset and Misha found a panel of controls, and used them to open a supply closet. Shining limbs swayed, disembodied heads peered from a shelf.
“Suit up. We’re in Campfire Girls uniforms from here on. One at a time. Rest of us on guard.”
One by one they shed their outdoor clothing and climbed into the body armor. Catherine was surprised at how light and flexible her suit seemed, how speedily it adjusted to her physical dimensions. She pulled the helmet into place and felt the seals connect. She breathed stale packaged air; then the sweet cold returned, as her suit decided the air in the tunnels was viable. Text and graphic display burst across her field of vision. Testing. She entered a shared world.
“Now Lalith can send to me, and I can send to you,” came Misha’s voice inside her head. “But don’t say a word unless you must, we don’t want to be spotted as strangers and have to kill innocent people. Some of the staff at this mothballed base are compromised, we have to treat them all as hostiles, but we don’t want to kill, is that understood? Lalith’s arrival should cover us for a while. Let’s see what’s going on.”
In Catherine’s field of view a transparent image blossomed. She saw Lalith, Agathe, Mâtho, and Lydie. Mâtho, and Lydie were finishing off that dice game. The reception suite, what she could see of it, looked like a corporate hotel in another age. Fitted carpets and wall-lamps. Mâtho seemed to have lost the play-off. He pocketed the dice with a dignified little smile.
“Now study this infra—” ordered Misha.
Another layer sprang into being over the reception suite picture; unpeeling the intricacies of Seimwa L’Etat’s anti-Aleutian bunker. In section the base was strangely beautiful: level on level of curved paths and chambers configured like a nautilus shell around a ribbed central spine. The spine itself was hollow: a well that seemed to drop in a single fall from the floor inside the “volcano” cone, to the platform level undersea.
In the old days, anyone recruited to this service could never return to the Mainland. That way the Americans could be sure that none of those sneaky alien-microbes would ever contaminate their country. For generations the Special Exterior Force—all of them women, forbidden to marry, discouraged from “lasting attachments”; all but a few either infertile or sterilized—had lived and died here, between tours of duty; on their artificial island. Those days were long gone. The infrastructure revealed emptiness: very few people moving about, few streams of power or data.
“This is realtime,” said Misha’s voice. “There has been an invasion, that’s Lalith. A friendly invasion, or so it seems, but totally unexpected. We’ve introduced a foreign population. We’re watching for an immune reaction.”
Catherine’s display focused-in on raised levels of activity, and counted off the systems and locations involved. The stir that clearly sprang from Lalith’s arrival: information and other vital fluids hurrying around the locus of the flier in its quarantined bay; another locus around the reception suite, and related offices. There were routine activities: a kitchen, power generation, a heated swimming pool. And there it was, the tell-tale hotspot. The palimpsest fell away, leaving one group of rooms highlighted: enhanced security converging on the third level above the deepest, midway between the buried shell of the nautilus and the central spine.
“A sick-bay,” reported Joset. “Non-acute hospitalization, says here.”
“That makes sense,” whispered Misha. “I suppose. So we head for the maternity ward. Lalith will follow when she can. She has things under control.”
“Wait!” cried Catherine. “Something’s happening—”
A group of suits, shining fungoid beings, had entered the suite. Their helmets were intimidating, the visors silvered blank. Their voices emerged flattened and stripped of expression, announcing they’d come to take Agathe, Lydie and Mâtho away. The Youroans got to their feet, each clutching a piteous bag or bundle of personal effects. Lalith asked the SEF to take off their helmets. She must have noticed that none of the suits displayed badges of rank or identity. She didn’t comment on this.
“They don’t know what’s happening, they don’t understand—”
A suit challenged Lalith in turn. “Are you Astrid Liliana Villegas Como?”
“Yes, I am. You checked my ID. What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong is that we’ve double-checked, and you’re not her. We don’t have any record of an SEF agent with your physical ID.”
“I’ve been morphed. I’m a halfcaste now. My new biometrics should be in the file.” Lalith stayed calm: Lydie grabbed her arm and cried in French: “Astrid, don’t let them separate us! What’s going on? I’m frightened!”
“Don’t worry,” said the first suit: flattened, cold. “‘Astrid’ is coming along.”
Suddenly one of the suits had hold of Lalith’s arms. Another was pointing a light-pen into her eye. Agathe, Mâtho, and Lydie were shouting, protesting, the other suits closed around them—
“They’ve been rumbled!” howled Rajath. “The suits’ve found Lalith’s inset! They’ll know she’s talking to someone! What are we going to do?”
“Thanks for the information, Raj,” snapped Misha. “We might never have guessed.” He hesitated, he shook his head. “Too bad. We have a mission. We’re going to check that sick-bay. Is that agreed?”
They walked quickly. Catherine felt the muscles of her weary calves trying to resist the suit’s intervention and made herself relax. She thought of Mâtho’s brave timidity, Agathe’s glow of virtue. Lydie’s athleticism, the spin and leap and spring of the dancer’s body. Up a ladder (the suit assisting her arms and shoulders) into an enclosed space. A locked door that slid aside when Misha tapped the keypad. A garden. Flowering plants, trees, wisps of water vapor; a moist and scented air. Loungers, chairs, cushions; a vast false window showing ocean and the sky. There were sculptures, mobiles, decorative screens, every sign of wealthy comfort but slightly wrong. Different, old-fashioned: and all the leaves were pure green. There was nobody around. Rajath skidded and fell against a cane lounger. Catherine hauled him to his feet and Joset restored his weapon, but Rajath refused to take it.
“It’s weird,” he wailed, waving his arms. “Why’s it like a fancy hotel? I thought this was an army camp. I don’t think we’re seeing it right, it’s masked, we could be walking into anything—”
“Why are you always like this, Rajath?” yelled Catherine. “You’re the one who has the terrific ideas for getting into trouble. And then you panic. Always!”
She clutched her helmet with gauntleted hands, shocked at herself. That’s not Rajath; it’s a halfcaste local…. She felt as if she’d been shouting loud enough for the whole base to hear. Misha had rushed back. He ignored Catherine, silently bundled the weapon into Rajath’s arms. They hurried on.
Lalith was still transmitting: her view laid over Catherine’s field of vision. Mâtho, Lydie, and Agathe being marched along a wide passage. Lalith must be in the rear. Why the hell was Lalith still sending? Surely the suits could use the signal to trace the other intruders. It was bad, bad luck that their diversion had been discovered so soon. Maybe the bad guys don’t yet know yet why we’re here, she thought. We need to distract them again, convince them that Lalith and her party are nothing to do with the weapons trial—
The Phoenix Café gang had already thought of that. The prisoners reached a gallery around the central well. Elegant liftshafts played like fountains, empty but decorative, between the spurs of a huge spiral stairway. Lydie suddenly ran for it, and the distraction began.
“I am a terrorist act,” she screamed, in English. “I am an explosive device, I am a camera. Attack me and I detonate! I’m here to tell the American peoples, North and South, about their federal government’s complicity in alien oppression. Don’t touch your weapons! Injure me and I appear instantly on every news-site on earth, telling my story!”
“My God!” wailed Lalith, grabbing her escort frantically. “I didn’t know! I knew nothing about this! You’ve got to believe me! My God!”
“Get her!”
Catherine saw Mâtho and Agathe running after Lydie, who gave a wordless howl and went pelting off around the gallery. The suits rushing after in disarray, Lalith yelling. “Don’t fire! I don’t think she’s bluffing!”
Transmission abruptly ceased.
They hurried on. Catherine’s visor flashed scraps of the continuing pursuit: she didn’t know if they still came from Lalith or if she was catching Campfire Girl communication. The others didn’t speak; neither did she. She had her wish, she was stripped of privilege. It was Catherine, the Aleutian, who followed the humans: stumbling and blind, unable to share their plans. She couldn’t catch her breath. She was functioning on a knife edge, in the stink of lattice fusion; continuous bleeding of one surface into another.
The scenario Agathe and Lalith had outlined was appalling: a bomb packed with weapon larvae, anonymous microbial plague. She heard Misha’s father speaking, in noble bitterness, of “the pure human tradition.” He did not regard Reformers as human. The conspirators believed they had found some marker of difference that would spare the elect. It was not a new idea; it had been tried before: but never with proliferating weapons to back the madness. On such a big planet, such a volume of atmosphere, the kill would take time. The weapons would mutate, eventually become harmless. But life on Earth was already brutally weakened: by the Gender Wars, and three hundred years of alien rule. They really could die, all of them. True genocide.
Surely it can’t happen, surely it can’t happen. Episodes from the past of her own home and from Earth’s history told her: It can.
She saw a sign on a corridor wall. Level Three.
They reached a locked double door. Medical Rooms. The keypad didn’t respond to Misha’s codes, Joset tried too, failed too. There was a fetid sickroom smell: one of those nasty human smells. It couldn’t be real, couldn’t be getting through the door. It must be an artifact of her fear.
“Luck’s run out,” muttered Joset. “It couldn’t last.”
They moved away from the doors. Misha, the firearms expert, was going to slice the barrier with a fine blade of superheat. Rajath, Joset and Catherine watched his back. Rajath gave a soft moan, in Catherine’s head. She aimed and fired: wheeled, aimed and fired. Joset stood looking at his own unused weapon, and at two fallen suits: one who’d been coming up behind them, the other who’d appeared from around a corner.
“You’ve played before,” he remarked, in admiration.
“Played?” she repeated, shocked at his choice of expression.
“Inside,” yelled Misha, as the door seals gave way.
Stale air rushed out. They had entered the citadel through a garden: the sick-bay smelt like a farmyard. There were no beds, they’d been removed and replaced by strong slatted stalls. There was a thunder of panicked movement. Animal eyes peered, glistening. The stalls were shoulder high to Catherine. She had to look over the top to see inside. Pallid faces looked up: food for the monsters. She had dreamed of these creatures. Rajath yelled something incoherent. Superheat flared, churning incandescence through the bars and the live squealing meat. Misha shouted, “Leave them! Get to the bride!”
Running feet. Mâtho,
Agathe, and Lalith burst together through the doors Misha had burned open. “Sorry!” gasped Mâtho. “They’re coming! Lydie’s still keeping half the army occupied. But there are so many! Far more SEF than there should be—” Joset unslung the second case of weapons and thrust a firearm at each of the three, as a crowd of suits came rushing after their friends. They didn’t have a chance to follow Misha’s advice. Catherine flung herself headlong, tonguing her armor rigid and switching to packaged air. There was wild firing. The hiss of gas cartridges exploding—
“I am a terrorist act!”
The central well was higher than a cathedral nave of the Church of Self, deeper than dreams. The stairway rose in nacreous curves, throwing off ribs and whimsical spurs into vertiginous space. Far below, Seimwa L’Etat lay in state: an image delivered in realtime from the clinical suite where she slept away her immortality. Her tank, from which gross signs of medical intervention had been erased, was a gold and crystal casket. Lydie raced round and round, into the empyrean. She reached the apex and turned to look down on the armored women. So many, how did there come to be so many? Thought this place was supposed to be shut down. They looked up, some helmeted, some bareheaded.
This is what it means to be a halfcaste: it means being something other than a single self. To be gestures, to be fragments, thefts and dreams. To be a creature of your own imagination. Lydie jumped onto the balustrade. The doors of the fountain lifts opened. Woman warriors all in identical armor came pouring out. Soldiers, soldiers. You’ve sold yourselves. I’m not for sale. Balanced herself, arms stretched wide as wings. Either/Or. Stupid coin, same on both sides. I am not a woman, I am not a man. Who knows? Maybe they lied to you all these years, those others, the sensible ones. So leap, then—
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