Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  "Oh," I said. "Um."

  "And," she went on, "many people have an irresistible urge to touch."

  "Does the stuff rub off on them?"

  She shook her head. "I stepped on the Balrog when it was in a dispersal phase — actively looking for a new host. Now, it’s happily bonded to me and reproductively dormant. Entirely. Almost. It would only spread to someone else if the chance was too promising to pass up: a host so superior, the Balrog had to seize the opportunity, for the greater good of the universe." Her smile flashed under the cover of her hair. "Do you consider yourself that superior, Teelu"?

  "No," I said. But I kept well clear of the moss. Kaisho was kind of daring me to touch her… and Samantha trained me when we were kids, never ever ever take a dare.

  Kaisho’s wheelchair stopped beside a clump of scrawny trees. The trees didn’t look much different from any others we’d passed — almost like Earth trees, except for the blackish leaves and a light puffiness to their trunks, as if their bark was wooden foam — but Kaisho cut her chair’s skimmer engine so the chair settled down on its big solid wheels.

  Apart from the starlight and those three confetti moons, we only had the glow of Kaisho’s legs to see by. Still, it was easy to tell the soil had been trampled half to mire by the Mandasar militia; they’d come through here chasing Mr. Clear Chest.

  "There," Kaisho said, pointing to the ground between four close-growing trees. Festina and I leaned our heads in; Zeeleepull tried to look too, but the trees were rooted too near each other for him to get his wide shoulders into the gap. I guess that’s why the dirt here didn’t get mucked up as the warriors stampeded past — they had to go around the trees instead of between.

  Imprinted in the soft mud was a sharp-edged circular outline… like a big heavy can had been set down long enough for it to settle its weight into the soil. As far as I could tell, there was nothing else to see; but Festina made a soft, "Hah!" sound and grabbed a little thread caught on one of the tree trunks.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "Black fiber," the admiral answered. "Probably off that recruiter’s pants. They were black, right?"

  I couldn’t remember. I’d been so busy gawking at his exposed heaving lungs, I hadn’t noticed much else. "You think he was doing something here?" I asked.

  "He tucked himself between these trees for a while," Kaisho said. "A good place to hide — his shadow would blend in with the tree trunks." She turned to Festina. "Do you recognize that outline on the ground?"

  The admiral nodded. "It’s exactly the size of a Bumbler."

  "Bumbler?" Zeeleepull asked. "Bumbler what is?"

  "Equipment from the navy’s Explorer Corps," I told him. Too bad Festina’s Bumbler had been destroyed, or I could have showed him. "It’s like a medium-sized cooking pot," I said, "only the lid is a vidscreen. It’s got cameras and sensors and things, so it can show you an IR scan of the area, or work like a telescope or microscope…"

  "Not to mention reading and recording the entire EM spectrum from gamma waves to radio," Kaisho put in.

  "So the recruiter… Explorer is? Navy hume Explorer?" His voice was going huffy with outrage.

  "Of course not," Festina answered, just as huffy. "I’ve read the files on every Explorer in the fleet, and not one has a see-through thorax. That recruiter might have carried Explorer equipment, but he doesn’t belong to the corps." She turned to Kaisho. "Do you think it really was a Bumbler? All we’ve got is a circle in the mud…"

  "The Balrog assures me it was a genuine Bumbler," Kaisho replied. "It left a characteristic metallic taste on the dirt. As distinctive as a fingerprint."

  I stared at her a moment, trying to think how the Balrog could taste the soil. Had Kaisho touched her mossy legs against the ground? Or could Balrogs taste things from long distance, the way you can sometimes taste campfire smoke, or the vinegar in strong pickles before you actually lift them to your mouth?

  "My guess," Kaisho said, "is the recruiter set down his Bumbler while he was busy with something else. Probably he had some gadget for monitoring the Laughing Larry as it homed in on our dear Festina. He stayed till he heard the Mandasar militia coming toward him…" She looked at Zeeleepull. "Following his scent, correct?"

  "Smelled him we," Zeeleepull agreed proudly. "First the loud laugh-laugh that drew us across the water. Then the stink of hume on the ground. Chased him we. Harried him we."

  Kaisho nodded. "The recruiter snatched up his Bumbler and ran, with the warriors on his heels. He headed for that other clearing, where his skimmer waited to pick him up."

  Festina frowned. "I saw him on the rope ladder," she said. "No Bumbler then. Which means," she went on, suddenly eager, "he must have lost it as he ran from the warriors. Either he dumped it deliberately so he could sprint faster, or he got the carrying strap snagged on something and he didn’t have time to work it free." She gave a wry smile. "When I think how often I’ve caught my own Bumbler on bushes… well, finally, some poetic justice."

  "You really were an Explorer?" I asked. "With a Bumbler and everything?" The first time Festina had mentioned being an Explorer, the Larry showed up before I could ask any questions. Now… I still found it hard to believe an Explorer could ever make admiral. When I was young, the Explorer Corps was stuck off to one side, out of the chain of promotion for the regular navy. Explorers couldn’t become ship captains or admirals or anything. That was one reason Dad made me wear the black uniform — to be sure I’d never get put in charge of anything. (Or maybe just because the High Council had no Admiral of the Black to tell Dad I wasn’t wanted.)

  The navy must have changed a lot in the twenty years I’d been out of touch. An admiral who’d been an Explorer — pretty amazing. But when I studied Festina’s face for a moment, that big purple blotch sure made her look like an Explorer.

  "Yes, Edward," Festina said, "once upon a time, I was a full-fledged ECM." (ECM means Expendable Crew Member… what Explorers call themselves.) "But I’ll tell you my life story later," she went on. "Right now, we have more pressing business. If we find that recruiter’s Bumbler, its memory may contain useful evidence."

  She struck off forward, tracing the recruiter’s path as he’d run from the militia. Soon she called for Kaisho to take the lead; a Balrog’s spooky senses were better than human eyes following a track in the dark. That didn’t sit well with Zeeleepull — he couldn’t stand waiting for the wheelchair’s snail-slow progress, so he put his nose to the ground, caught the scent, and barged his way forward as fast as he could sniff. You’d think the trail would be hard for him to make out, considering how a horde of warriors had trampled over the original scent… but Zeeleepull never seemed to hesitate. Of course, he’d gone this way before: only half an hour ago, when the militia followed the same spoor through the trees.

  Mr. Clear Chest must have had a rough time of it, racing on the slant of a hillside through the deep night dark… trying not to trip over logs or get tangled in patches of brush. Of course, this forest was alien, not like the nice Terran woodlands on my father’s estate; but the undergrowth here knew all the Earth tricks, with bristles and prickers and nettly bits to jab you as you dashed by.

  It also had those puffbally things I’d felt popping under my feet ever since I came into these woods. Festina said they were insect eggs and got a crinkly fond look in her eyes; she even scraped up a few and put them in a test-tubey thing she had in her pocket. Me, I just saw those eggs as slimy gunk that made it easy to fall if you didn’t watch your step. That recruiter must have got whipped and ripped by branches pretty thoroughly on his run… till finally he hit a major hitch. "Bandolier," Festina said, crouching to peer at something in the mud: a big leather sash with all kinds of clips, the sort of thing you sling from your shoulder and hang doodads on. It was tangled into a shrub with thorns the size of knitting needles, nasty sharp things that stuck out in all directions. Mr. Clear Chest must have brushed too close to the plant and got himself snagged; in the dark, with all those t
horns, he wouldn’t have a chance of getting the sash unstuck without gouging up his hands. Especially not with a horde of musk-crazed warriors on his heels. All he could do was unbuckle the strap and abandon his gear.

  Which may have given us all kinds of good evidence, like stuff from the Bumbler’s memory… except that right after Mr. Clear Chest ditched his equipment, it got trampled to topsoil by two dozen stampeding Mandasars.

  The shrub with the thorns was crushed into the dirt. So was the Bumbler — nothing but scrap metal now, hammered as flat as a waffle. Now, the only data you could read on it was a whopping bunch of dents from warrior feet.

  Festina kept poking at the ground, prying up the squashed remains of everything from the recruiter’s bandolier. A lot of it looked like navy equipment — not just the Bumbler, but a service communicator, a deluxe multitool, and even a universal map. (The map was a flexible vidscreen that could fold down to palm-size or out to a meter square. Its memory didn’t really have charts of the whole universe, but it could display top-sheets for every planet known to the Outward Fleet.)

  The map and everything else was smashed and dirty… not even good for fingerprints, though the admiral did her best not to smear the surfaces more than they were already. I knelt beside her for a closer look at the wrecked equipment. The plastic case of the multitool had split open, showing its broken insides, all folded neatly in place: a jackknife, some scissors, a whisk brush, several electronic skeleton keys…

  Those keys sparked a memory. "That tool," I said to the admiral. "It’s the kind used by Security Corps." All the Security officers who guarded Dad and Samantha had carried little gizmos like this one.

  Festina grabbed a pair of nearby twigs and used them like chopsticks to pick up the tool. When she brought the casing close to the glow of Kaisho’s legs, we could see the plastic was olive green — the color of navy Security. "A Security Corps tool," Festina murmured, "but an Explorer’s Bumbler. And universal maps are only carried by the Diplomacy Corps."

  "They’re all navy issue," Kaisho agreed. "Can you see any serial numbers?"

  The admiral used her chopsticks to flip through the debris. Despite dents and damage, it wasn’t hard to find ID codes notched into every piece of equipment. The navy was always real thorough about labeling fleet property. "You’ve got your communicator?" Festina asked Kaisho.

  "Of course."

  "Then call Starbase Iris and check the ordnance database. I’ll give you my own access codes. Find out who’s registered as the owner of this stuff."

  Kaisho’s legs flared a little brighter. "Is that an order, dear admiral?" she asked, all innocence.

  Festina rolled her eyes. "I know — the Balrog doesn’t take orders from lesser species. Consider it a humble request."

  "We love to serve," Kaisho said with a smile.

  18

  THINKING ABOUT ADMIRALS

  Kaisho got to work, whispering into her communicator: reading off serial numbers, issuing search instructions to the computers on Starbase Iris. Meanwhile, the rest of us prowled around, looking for anything else that might be in the neighborhood. Zeeleepull snuffled in the mud; Festina tracked forward a bit, still following the recruiter’s path through the woods; and since I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I tagged along behind her.

  When she saw I was following, she waited for me to join her… and even smiled a bit as I came up. I couldn’t remember an admiral ever smiling at me — laughing, yes, but not smiling. When I was young, Dad mostly kept me out of sight when other admirals came to call… but if someone stayed for several days, I couldn’t be hidden forever. My father had this trick of staging "family" breakfasts, as if he and Sam and I ate together every morning; he thought it would make a good impression on visitors. When my sister and I were old enough not to give away the game, he even put a photo of our "late mother" above the dining table.

  I don’t know who the woman in the picture was — someone blond and pretty. Our real mother had been a paid surrogate, chosen for her healthy medical profile and ability to keep a secret. Dad never took a photo of her.

  So I’d met a fair number of admirals at those contrived little meals: men and women, humans and Divians, but all of them with the same sort of look in their eyes. Staring at me when no one else was watching, as if I were a mystery they were keen to figure out. Exactly how stupid was I? Was it a miracle I could even handle a knife and fork, or had Dad exaggerated how dumb I was? Could I be some kind of secret weapon — that Dad wanted them to think I was a total idiot, when really it was part of some devious plan?

  The admirals I’d met were very keen on devious plans. But Festina Ramos was different. A real smile for me. Not a grin, like someone amused at the way I got tongue-tied in front of strangers, or a leer, like those women on Willow who offered to show me the service tunnels. Just a smile, a nice smile.

  "How are you feeling?" she asked, as we walked side by side through the woods.

  "I’m all right," I said.

  "No aftereffects from the venom?"

  "Not that I can tell."

  "Good." She glanced my way. "You should still see a doctor, as soon as you can."

  "Oh." I didn’t like doctors so much; I decided to change the subject. "That recruiter guy — Mr. Clear Chest. He sure had a lot of navy equipment."

  "He did, didn’t he?" She was looking away from me now: making a show of examining the ground, though there was nothing down there but trampled mud.

  "How do you think he got it?" I asked.

  She didn’t answer for a moment. We were entering the clearing where the recruiter had faced off with the militia; ridges of stone poked up through the soil, which must have been why the trees hadn’t grown in to fill the gap.

  "What do you know about admirals?" Festina suddenly asked.

  "Um," I said. "One or two things, I guess." She must not know who my father was… and I didn’t want to tell her, not right now — for fear she started looking at me like those admirals at the breakfast table, sizing me up to see if I could be used as political leverage.

  "Do you know the difference," she asked, "between the High Council and the lower admirals?"

  I thought, Lower admirals never got invited to breakfast. But out loud, I said, "The High Council is the inner circle. One for each corps in the service."

  "Except the Explorer Corps," she told me in something close to a growl. "Officially, Explorers fall under the jurisdiction of the council president. Which mean they mostly fall between the cracks."

  "But if you used to be an Explorer," I said, "and now you’re an admiral, couldn’t you sort of be the admiral in charge of the Explorer Corps?"

  She turned to me and smiled. Another nice, real smile. And pretty, too. Even with just the starlight, I could see the splotch on her face, but I was getting used to it. It wasn’t so bad, especially when her eyes were so alive… and the way she moved, very easy and graceful, sure on her feet. I even liked her voice — it was sweet and kind, without the teeniest bit of talking down to me. Just for a second, I wondered if she ever put perfume in her hair; then I nearly smacked my own face for being so stupid.

  Thank heavens Festina couldn’t read my mind the way Kaisho seemed to. Still smiling, the admiral sat down on a small stone outjut in the middle of the clearing and patted the rock beside her, like I should sit too. She was just being friendly, I knew that; ready to have a talk with a fellow Explorer. Feeling shy and awkward, I took a seat but made darned sure I wasn’t so close I might accidentally brush against her.

  "Edward," she murmured quietly, "I’m never going to be the admiral in charge of the Explorer Corps. Like I said, that job goes to the council president — Admiral Vincence. Vincence would never surrender a shred of his power to someone else… which means he won’t let anyone take over the Explorers, even if he doesn’t give a damn about the corps."

  She sighed and stared out into the darkness. "The High Council is like that, Edward. Admirals lower on the totem pole are mostly decen
t competent professionals: the ones who make sure ships are where they’re supposed to be with the supplies they need. But the bastards who claw their way to the top — and stay there for decade after decade — sometimes I think they’re all clones of a single Machiavellian bastard who seized power four hundred… what’s wrong?"

  I’d nearly jumped to my feet and run off into the night. Talk about clones always did that to me — flooding me with guilt. "Sorry," I said, trying not to sound like a terrible liar, "I just saw a shadow… like a wolf or something."

  "There are no wolves on Celestia," she answered. "The planet’s still in its Devonian period; the only native life-forms on land are insects." Festina rolled to her feet. "Maybe we’d better look around, in case the recruiters have come back."

  "No, no," I said, "it was nothing. Just a shadow. A tree moving in the wind. Sorry."

  She peered off into the woods for another moment, then slowly sat down. "Where was I?" she asked.

  "Um." I remembered very clearly but didn’t want to remind her. "You were talking about admirals, but I’m not sure why."

  "Oh. Well." She thought for a moment. "You asked how that recruiter got hold of navy equipment. I was getting around to that." She eased back onto her elbows, staring idly up at the stars. "For the past twenty years, the High Council has taken a great interest in Celestia. And when I say great interest, I mean on the order of eighteen percent interest per annum."

  "Money?"

  "Money. The Admiralty funded a lot of people to come to Celestia two decades ago, and they’ve been reaping dividends ever since. Solid returns on investment." She glanced at me. "Does that surprise you?"

  "Um. No." When Sam described how Dad had sneaked twenty million humans onto Celestia, she hadn’t described all the financial arrangements; but of course the Admiralty would have worked out some way to take a percentage of whatever the settlers earned.