But even as he was thinking it, he heard, just ahead of him, the pneumatic sound of a hatch being raised. And a moment later, highlighted by the stark illumination of a level seven corridor, a hairy fist the size of a passenger car appeared in the opening, quickly and efficiently ridding itself of its palmed parcel of purloined Protoculture.
In the center of the flatscreen, against a viscous, transparent background, a faintly blue and vaguely circular object was being buffeted on all sides by smaller, oval-shaped objects, a few of which had managed to attach themselves to the circle by means of slender stalks.
“The large object is the Protoculture molecule,” Lazlo Zand was explaining to T. R. Edwards. “Surrounding it are molecules of the protein I’ve developed. Notice how the Protoculture resists all attempts at bonding.” Zand intensified the magnifying power of the electron microscope, zeroing in on an arc of cell wall. “What’s mystifying is how such an impermeable substance can be so utterly responsive.” Zand recalled the earlier screen; by now some half-dozen ovals were firmly stalked to the Protoculture molecule. “Luckily, my protein seems to be getting through to it.”
“Looks a little like the factory satellite,” Edwards commented, narrowing his eye somewhat.
Zand regarded the screen in pleasant surprise. “So it does.”
Edwards had flown to Tokyo immediately on learning of Zand’s success, and just now the two men were in the professor’s office at the Robotech Research Center. A disorderly rectangle tucked away in subbasement three, the office reeked of mildew and Zand’s rather pungent body odor. A few plants, including a bonsai, were dying, and the wastebaskets overflowed with fast-food wrappings.
Edwards clapped his hands on his thighs. “I’m very pleased, Professor, as I’m certain my employers will be.”
Zand’s eyes bulged when he grinned. He switched off the computer feed to the screen, called on a bank of overhead lights, and planted himself behind his desk.
“In fact,” Edwards continued, “something interesting came up while I was submitting my last progress report. My employers have asked me to arrange a meeting between you and a young man named Joseph Petrie, a very talented hacker. Either here, or in Monument, or—if you’re not adverse to travel—in Brasília.”
“This Petrie is a Southlander?”
“He’s chief aide to Field Marshal Anatole Leonard.”
Zand’s expression went from confusion to consternation.
“No reason for concern,” Edwards said. “Petrie has a strong interest in machine intelligence and my employers feel that he could profit from meeting you.”
Zand’s fears weren’t entirely allayed. “Do you represent the Army of the Southern Cross, Mr. Edwards?”
Edwards ridiculed the idea. “I have no military affiliations, Professor. I assure you, this meeting is strictly in the interest of science. Though I have to admit, it wouldn’t hurt to count someone like Leonard as a friend.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the Army of the Southern Cross is basically a fledgling operation, compared to the RDF. And who knows, Leonard might have need for a researcher such as yourself.”
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t get me wrong, I know you’re loyal to the RDF. But I also know how hard it can be to get funding for research, and right now Leonard is hungry to achieve parity with the RDF in terms of state-of-the-art technology.” Edwards trained his eye on Zand. “Don’t tell me you don’t have your pet projects, just as Lang has his.”
Zand swallowed audibly. Pushpinned to a cork bulletin board were photos of a dozen Zentraedi, including Rico, Konda, Bron, Miriya Parina, and an infant that could only be Dana.
“I have a few ideas—”
“Of course you do. But it’s damned hard getting anyone to listen when Lang’s busy sucking up every available research dollar. I mean, can you believe the RDF agreed to fund that robot mission to Pluto?”
Zand’s look hardened. “He always gets what he wants.”
Edwards nodded in sympathy. “The pecking order. Just like in the military.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Between you and me, you should have heard some of the comments about Hayes and Hunter when word got out about their promotions. You don’t think people felt overlooked?”
Now Zand nodded. “They have it so easy, designing their ship and filling it with mecha while the rest of us have to scrape by on allocations from the UEG. You begin to feel useless.”
“The Japanese used to have a slang word for it—chindogu, I think it was. An object of questionable value, like an umbrella with a remote control, or a toilet seat that adjusts to the dimensions of your ass.”
“Exactly, exactly.”
“That’s why I mention Leonard: as a potential funder, nothing more than that.”
Zand took a breath. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Edwards. And please tell your employers that I’d be delighted to meet Mr. Petrie, where and whenever it’s convenient.”
“They’ll be pleased to hear it.” Edwards fell silent for a moment, then said, “Seems unfair that Lang should get everything he wants just because he happened to get his brain boosted.”
Zand stared across the desk without saying anything.
“I was with him when it happened, Zand. Inside the Visitor. One minute he’s touching things on the console in Zor’s cabin; the next, he’s out like a light. But when he woke up, his neural circuits had been rearranged—just like what happened to one of the recon robots we sent into the ship.”
Zand wore a faraway look. “I would give anything …”
“To take the jolt?” Edwards asked. “So what’s stopping you?”
Zand cleared his head with a shake. “For one thing, Mr. Edwards, that console no longer exists.”
Edwards snorted, then smiled affably. “There was nothing special about that console. It was just a matter of Lang’s sticking his finger where it had no place being. Making contact with that impermeable Protoculture of yours. Lang wasn’t going for broke, Professor—it was an accident. But don’t tell me there isn’t something you guys salvaged from the SDF-1, maybe something right here in the Center, that couldn’t produce the same effect.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Numerous versions exist of Jonathan Wolfe’s “shopping trip” to Freetown, including those reported by Wolfe’s companion, Roger Malone (in Strange Days: Fighting Men and Women Talk About the Malcontent Uprisings) and Brian Cassidy (in Mizner’s Rakes and Rogues: The True Story of the SDF-3 Expeditionary Mission). Attempts at arriving at an authentic version—mostly by members of the “Wolfe Cult”—have repeatedly failed. However, all are in agreement that the Wolfe legend has its true beginning in Mexico.
Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point
Around them lay torsos and body parts: smooth, hairless heads, unadorned limbs at odd angles, a forest of upraised arms, all racial types and skin shades represented, bloodless and fashionably thin, reflecting the outré, “deepspace” trend of 2009—before the arrival of the aliens that would usher in a whole new look.
The mannequin morgue occupied the rear of a garage in what had been a Wal-Mart department store in the northern suburbs of Mexico City, looted during the race riots of 2012, burned and abandoned the following year, and now engulfed by the sprawl of the Freetown barrio. Hidden among the mannequins, Jonathan Wolfe and Roger Malone had an unobstructed view of the doorless shipping and receiving entrance. They had been sitting like that, hunkered down among the plastic heads and bodies, for well over an hour.
“Is this going to happen without gunplay, Captain?” Malone asked, using the honorific the way one would a sobriquet. He was a twenty-two-year-old with pleasing features and a thick mane of blond hair that fell below his broad shoulders. Even in Cavern City, he favored bandannas and brand name tees like the ones he was wearing now. “You think this Cassidy’s for real?”
“Is anybody for real in Freetown?” Wolfe answered. “Are we for real?”
Malone shoo
k his head in dismay. “Mexico sure ain’t what I thought it would be.”
Their handguns were enabled and within easy reach; it had been that kind of week.
On first arriving in town they had made the usual mistakes: taking a pricy room in a spy-ridden hotel, inquiring indiscreetly about people who might have a line on tank parts, showing way too much of the two thousand World Dollars liberated from Mayor Carson’s slush fund. Wolfe quickly realized he had been wrong to assure Catherine that black marketeers were of a kind no matter where you went or what you went looking for. Sure, even in Albuquerque you could get scammed out of a few dollars by money changers with a knack for prestidigitation, but at least there you didn’t get shot at. Whereas by day four in Freetown, Wolfe and Malone had been shot at twice, most recently by three gangsters in the employ of a teenager who’d approached them on the street with an offer of ubertech computer chips—chips Malone later identified as having come from a ten-year-old Petite Cola robovendor. Then, the following day, there’d been the four would-be muggers and the ensuing brawl which accounted for Wolfe’s still-bruised knuckles and Malone’s fading shiner.
It was the fight that had convinced them to forsake their swank suite for a flea-infested hotel room on Reforma Nueva, where they’d slept in shifts and ordered in meals of McTacos while reformulating their plans. Through it all, though, Wolfe had remained confident, reasoning that it was only a matter of time before word on them reached the ears of someone who could actually do the deal: procure the tank parts and orchestrate their transport to Venezuela.
And ultimately that someone had turned up, in the form of a pigeon-chested black Irish named Brian Cassidy, who happened to be Freetown’s most celebrated fence.
“I’ve only come out of curiosity, you understand,” Cassidy had told Wolfe at their, first meeting. “Two guys with World Dollars to spend, asking about tank hardware … You have to be military, don’t you, now.”
Wolfe saw some benefit in being honest with Cassidy and had admitted that he and Malone were RDFers.
“And why’s the Defense Force corning to Brian Cassidy all of a sudden?”
“Because the RDF won’t have anything to do with Centaurs.”
“Centaurs,” Cassidy had exclaimed, grinning. “Well, now you’ve handed me a regular challenge, haven’t you?”
That had been five days ago. Then, only that morning, Cassidy had sent word that the purchases had been made, and that the deal would go down at noon in Wal-Mart’s receiving bay number one.
“It’s gotta be close to noon now,” Malone was saying. His watch had been slipped from his wrist even before they’d exited Mexico’s airport.
“Five minutes,” Wolfe told him.
But another forty-five minutes would pass before they heard the six-note horn signal Cassidy’s runner had told them to expect. The blasts were followed by high-beam flashes against the back wall of the garage; then a boxy, petropig truck nosed slowly into view through the gaping, fire-blackened entrance. Before the truck came to a halt, two Zentraedi armed with Wolverines leapt from the rear. After a moment, Cassidy climbed out of the front passenger seat and asked in a loud voice if anyone was there.
Wolfe and Malone picked their way out of the morgue and approached, their handguns visible but nonthreatening. The Wolverines tracked them until Cassidy told the Zentraedi to lower them. Wolfe and the Irishman shook hands, street fashion.
“Did you get everything we wanted?” Wolfe asked.
“More than you wanted. You won’t be disappointed.”
“Where are the parts from?”
Cassidy shook his head. “That information wasn’t included in the deal.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Wolfe started toward the truck, but Cassidy blocked his path. “Sure thing, soldier. But first I’d appreciate having a look at the balance of payment.”
Wolfe cut his eyes to Malone, who lifted his T-shirt to reveal the bundles strapped to his abdomen.
Satisfied, Cassidy gestured gallantly toward the rear of the truck. He, Wolfe, and Malone were halfway there when shots rang out from behind the concrete that pillared the entrance. Hit in the shoulder, Cassidy fell, while his enforcers returned fire and Wolfe and Malone dove for cover behind an overturned dumpster.
Within moments, the two Zentraedi were cut down, as well as Cassidy’s Human driver, who tried to make a break from the cab of the truck. The Irishman, meanwhile, had dragged himself to safety.
A hail of rounds forced Wolfe and Malone to the grimy floor, unable to respond; but Wolfe lifted his head in time to see a Zentraedi female dash through the entrance and clamber into the unoccupied driver’s seat. When she had backed the truck out, three more alien females, firing handguns over their shoulders, vaulted into the rear of the truck.
“Cursed women,” Cassidy moaned as the truck was speeding from the scene.
Wolfe and Malone ran to him. Malone folded his bandanna into a square and pressed it against Cassidy’s shoulder wound, then went to check on the three others. Wolfe knew without looking that they were dead.
“Neela set us up,” Cassidy said in a pained voice.
Wolfe had heard the name. Neela Saam was a Zentraedi female, who had made a name for herself in Freetown. “Want to talk about it?”
Cassidy shut his eyes and nodded his head. “The Centaur parts came from a malcontent group called the Crimson Ghosts. Their headquarters is one of the old arms factories down near Tula. But Neela helped put the deal together.”
“So were those Ghosts that took the truck?” Wolfe asked.
“The Ghosts are an all-male band. But there’ve been rumors about an all-female band operating in Freetown. The Senburo or Senburu, something like that. Neela must have told them about the sale, figuring she was striking a blow for malcontentism.”
“Have someone watch your back next time you make a delivery,” Wolfe said.
Cassidy looked peeved, in spite of the pain. “This is my town, soldier. No one does this to Brian Cassidy. I’ll have the heads of those four Zents on my desk before the sun goes down.”
The paved but seriously deteriorated highway between Cuiabá and Brasília was routinely swept for mines, but recent reports of malcontent activity in the area required that all vehicles travel in convoys under RDF escort. So it was that Edmundo Ortiz found himself at the tail end of a line of two hundred and six tractor-trailers, pickups, passenger cars, and RDF armored personnel carriers.
It was a cloudless June morning and Mundo was behind the wheel of a vintage right-drive Mercedes truck loaded down with several tons of rice and coffee from the fincas of the Planalto de Mato Grosso. Outside the curving sweep of the wiper blades the Mercedes’s windshield was red with road dust, as was every horizontal surface and nook and cranny of the cab, from the duct-taped vinyl seat cover to the plastic statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe that sat on the dashboard. A swarthy man of sixty years, Mundo had his right arm out the window and the radio tuned to a station that played Mexican ranchero and pre-War country-western from the United States.
Mundo had been a professional driver for more than forty years, and was no stranger to the 500-mile Cuiabà-to-Brasília run. In the late seventies, he’d been one of the first to drive the Trans-Amazon from the coast clear to the Peruvian border, back when everything west of Porto Velho was pura selva—pure jungle, as it was once more, though no longer virgin forest but scrubby secondary growth that had reclaimed the frontier settlements abandoned after the Rain. Gone, too, were the indigenous peoples, the gold and diamond prospectors, and the once-productive cattle ranches. Now Cuiabá, the geographic center of the continent, was itself the frontier, vulnerable north and west to raids by the aliens who controlled the river systems of the interior.
At the head of the line, and largely responsible for the tedious pace—the convoy had left Cuiabá at midnight and had not yet reached the bridge over the River Araguaia—was some newfangled RDF vehicle said to be capable of detecting and disarming land min
es, including enemy knockoffs of the ceramic-encased AM-2s. Two Veritechs providing aerial escort had thus far kept to the skies for the entire trip. Mundo could see both of them up ahead, flying tandem in Guardian mode, a few degrees south of the highway.
Mundo was smoking his tenth cigarette of the morning and dreaming lazily about the platter of grilled meat he would have for lunch at Pito Aceso in Goias Velho when some kind of craft flashed over the cab of the truck, streaking toward the front of the convoy. Just as the roar of the thing’s engines was catching up with Mundo, one of the Veritechs vanished in a fiery explosion that blossomed in the southern skies.
Mundo’s feet sent the brake and clutch pedals to the floor, and he leaned forward in the seat, with eyes wide and mouth open. Then, all at once, what had been the windshield was a thousand pebble-size pieces of glass and the top of his right thigh was on fire. He looked down to find his lap filled with windshield and a small fire spreading from the perimeter of a neat hole that been punched through his khaki trousers. Reacting without thinking, he began to beat at the flames, becoming more and more aware of the shrapnel lodged in his flesh.
A second deafening explosion rocked the truck. Mundo’s right hand flailed at the door lever, and he rolled out of the cab and onto the sun-blistered surface of the highway. The sky was filled with fire; he could feel the searing heat on his face and the back of his hands. The roar he had heard only moments earlier returned, and he looked up to see some sort of patched-together Battloid hovering like an outsize bumblebee a couple of hundred feet above the midpoint of the convoy. Then the mecha was suddenly at the epicenter of a fireworks display of corkscrewing trails of smoke, and a split second later explosions began to mushroom, head to tail, down the length of the convoy.
Much to Malone’s grudging admiration, the captain refused to call it a bad deal and return home. “We’re out a grand, but Cassidy’s out a lot more than that,” Wolfe had said. “He’ll come through. And if he doesn’t, I’ll personally replace the thousand we lost and we’ll start from scratch.”
The Zentraedi Rebellion Page 19