Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  Festina snagged another of his arms with her free hand and shouted at the egg-shaped torso, "Settle down, or we’ll throw you into the moss. I mean it. We don’t want to hurt you, but if you can’t behave, we’ll toss you and find someone who can."

  The Fasskister continued to flail about. Festina met my eye, and together we swung him back for a big throw, the way kids do when they’re about to chuck someone into a swimming pool. "Last chance," Festina said to the Fasskister. "That moss sure looks hungry."

  For once, the Balrog decided to play along — the patch of moss in front of us flared up fiery bright, like hell flames leaping to catch another sinner. The Fasskister gave a mousy shriek and went completely limp.

  Slowly, regretfully, the Balrog settled back into its usual dull glow.

  "That’s better," Festina said. Keeping a tight hold on the robot’s arms, we lowered it until its feet touched the ground. Bare dirt — the Balrog had pulled back a few paces so we had a little circle of clear space in the middle of the village square. "No place to run," Festina told the Fasskister as she let go of the robot’s wrist. "You be nice, and we’ll be nice."

  "He’ll be nice?" the Fasskister asked, pointing at me.

  "Sure," I answered, confused by the question. "Why wouldn’t I be nice?"

  "I know you," he said. "You are definitely not nice."

  Festina opened her eyes wide in surprise. I was surprised myself; but then I remembered how the Fasskisters on this orbital had been booted off Troyen for causing trouble, back before the war. For all I knew, this guy might have been stuck inside a queen robot on that first night, when Sam got me to crush the crystal globe and discombobulate them all. Or he might have been one of the many Fasskisters who’d been banished personally by the high queen, while I stood solemn-faced beside Verity’s throne. He might just have despised me because I was tied to the whole system of monarchy, or because I was Diplomat Samantha’s brother — the Fasskister community never liked her much either. All kinds of reasons why I might not be popular with this fellow.

  "I’ll be nice," I told him. "Really."

  The thing about Fasskisters is they’re all locked up inside those robots, so you can’t read the expressions on their faces. They don’t even have body language unless they deliberately make the robot shake its fist or something. Even so, just standing there like a lump, this Fasskister pretty well communicated he didn’t trust me a bit. "Good," said Festina, "we’re all just the peachiest of friends. So tell me now, one pal to another: where did this fucking moss come from?"

  "Humans," he replied. "And one of the Gragguk."

  Gragguk was a Fasskister word they considered so obscene, their language circuits never translated it. Gragguk was also the word they used for Mandasar queens. "How long ago?" Festina asked.

  A pause. "Twenty-four of your standard days," the Fasskister answered. I did some calculations: I’d been on Willow ten days from Troyen to Celestia, then two days hanging off Starbase Iris, a day on Celestia, and another ten days coming back here… so Willow must have visited this orbital just before picking me up from the moonbase.

  The Fasskister was still talking. "They came from over there," he said, gesturing toward the docking port with one of his smaller arms. "A Gragguk and four humans. All wearing uniforms of your navy."

  "Black uniforms?" Festina asked.

  "No. Two in dark blue, two in a shade of green."

  Dark blue meant the Communications Corps; the "shade of green" was likely olive, for Security. Just the sort of party Willow would have sent to meet with aliens, if the ship’s Explorers had already been left behind on Troyen.

  "What did the group want?" Festina asked.

  "Revenge!" The English word came out calmly from the translation circuits, but I could hear a sort of shriek inside the robot. The real Fasskister had screamed the word in his native tongue. "The Gragguk claimed she was the last of her caste, and she wished to apologize for the trouble caused by Verity’s old regime. What she really wanted was to infect us with this!"

  He spread all his arms at once, waving toward the moss surrounding us. "It appeared as soon as the Gragguk left. Her blatant attempt to destroy us."

  Probably true: your average queen is more keen on smiting her enemies than apologizing to them. If that Queen Temperance was leaving the Troyen system and thought she might never come back, she could have given Willow some story about wanting to make peace with the Fasskisters; then she’d dumped some Balrog spores on the ground when neither humans nor Fasskisters were watching.

  "Where do you think the queen got the spores?" I whispered to Festina.

  "From Kaisho herself," Festina answered. "Our beloved companion stepped on the Balrog twenty-five years ago, before the war started. When human doctors couldn’t help her, the navy brought in a Mandasar team — the best medical experts available. They took spore samples back home with them, so they could research ways of separating the Balrog from its host… not that they ever came up with any answers. The samples must have stayed in some test tube on Troyen, till the queen from Willow got her claws on them."

  "If she only planted the spores twenty-four days ago," I said, "the stuff grew pretty fast."

  "Like lightning," the Fasskister told me. He began to walk toward one of the crystal huts. Grudgingly, the Balrog slipped out of his path; Festina and I followed along behind.

  "The plague swept over us without warning," the Fasskister said. "Tendrils of it spread through the grass, so thin they were practically invisible. When you took a wrong step the moss would suddenly sweep upward, covering your shell and shutting down all movement systems. It left life support intact, and even seemed to be providing basic food through our nutrient ports; but I’ve been frozen for days!"

  "Do you think it’s the same everywhere?" Festina asked.

  The Fasskister let his arms go slack. "I don’t know. Our village is closest to the docking port, where the plague was released. We were taken by surprise. Perhaps others had time to prepare…"

  "And perhaps not," Festina finished. "When our ship came to call, no one was answering the radio."

  The Fasskister pulled in its arms and passed through a door into the hut. There was plenty of light inside, diffused straight through the dome’s crystal. I could see a clutter of moss-covered bulges on the floor, but didn’t know if they were machines, furniture or people. The Balrog wouldn’t let any of us get close enough to tell — the moss let us inside the door, but wouldn’t yield any farther.

  "Your family?" I asked sympathetically, looking at the bulges.

  "My vidscreen and sound system!" the Fasskister answered. "I swear I’ll sue that Gragguk till she screams."

  "That’ll be a good trick," Festina told him. "She’s dead." The admiral pursed her lips and thought for a moment. "You were one of the people who met the humans and the queen?"

  "Yes." The Fasskister was still waving his arms, turning the eyes on his hands to survey the great mossy mess. "The bastards came straight to our village."

  "Because it’s closest to the docking port," Festina murmured. "I don’t suppose you planted any of your own nano on them… the way the queen planted spores on you."

  "What do you mean?" the Fasskister asked.

  "Nano shaped like little eyeballs," I told him. "Well… like human eyeballs anyway." I slipped out the door to bare ground, then knelt and drew a picture in the dirt: a nanite’s big head, the long dangling tail. "They were programmed to sneak into a queen’s venom sacs, steal a bit of venom, then run off before they were caught."

  "Yes," Festina said. "If you made the nano, what for? Why would you want to steal venom? And even if you did want venom, how did you think you’d ever retrieve the nanites when Willow was headed to a different star system?"

  For a second, the Fasskister said nothing. Then, from inside the robot shell came a high-pitched cluttering sound, like a squirrel scolding someone for disturbing its nest. Mechanical arms lurched and bounced as if they were having spasms… o
r as if the Fasskister inside was rocking back and forth hysterically, bumping into control switches at random.

  From the robot’s speakers, the language circuits drily pronounced, "Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha." The Fasskister was laughing his amps off.

  "What’s so funny?" Festina demanded.

  "You think… ha ha ha… we could make… ha… nanotech like that… ha ha… in so little time? The Gragguk was only here… ha… for an hour. Your little eyeballs… ha ha… took a team ages to develop."

  Festina and I just stared bug-eyed. After a while, she said, "So you know about those nanites?"

  "Of course. They were a major commission. Almost all of us on this orbital worked on the project."

  "How long ago?"

  "Many of your years. It’s gratifying to know they’re still operational."

  "Why did you make them?"

  "For a client," the Fasskister said. "I don’t know who. The business office said it was top secret — no name on the specifications."

  "What did the specifications call for?" Festina asked.

  "An integrated nanotech system," the Fasskister replied. "For secret entry, secret exit, some independent decision making, plenty of built-in evasion strategies… all standard requirements. We get a lot of orders for nanites that can sneak in and out of places without being noticed."

  "I’ll bet," Festina muttered.

  "The real trick was keying it to his DNA." The Fasskister pointed at me.

  I yelped. "Me?"

  "Yeah."

  Festina’s jaw had dropped. "Edward? The nano was keyed to Edward?"

  "Yeah," the Fasskister said. "The high Gragguk’s pretty-boy gigolo."

  I swallowed hard. "What were the nanites supposed to do?"

  "Find a queen," the Fasskister said. "Take a swig of venom. Go running back to you, wherever you were, and spit the venom down your throat. Like a mother illi’im that fills up on food, then vomits it into her baby’s mouth."

  "So," Festina murmured, "the nanites weren’t on Willow to begin with?"

  "I don’t know what this Willow is," the Fasskister told her, "but I do know those nanites. They follow the high Gragguk’s consort wherever he goes, and dose him with venom whenever they can steal some from a queen. That’s their job. And they’ve been doing it since well before the war started."

  I stood there like a dummy, not really taking it in. I was the carrier: me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised — you can be surrounded by a horde of nano and never notice it, any more than you notice the billions of natural bacteria in the air around you. A full nano scan would have found I had hitchhikers, but I’d never been put through the slightest examination… not when I’d gone from Troyen to the moonbase, and not when Willow picked me up. That was pretty darned careless, when you thought about it; but by then, Willow had left its Explorers on Troyen, and Explorers are the ones who are supposed to be fanatical about decontamination. The rest of Willow’s crew just assumed I was clean.

  I’d assumed I was clean too. In twenty years on the moonbase, my nanite attendants hadn’t done a thing. They’d only kicked into action when I found the dead queen in Willow’s hold. All of a sudden, they had something to do: filling their little eyeballs with venom and ferrying it back to me. No wonder I got sick — I probably would have died if I hadn’t stationed those defense clouds around the queen’s venom sacs. The clouds cut off the nanites from getting more poison.

  The real question was why I hadn’t died on Troyen. If the nanites had dogged my heels since before the war, they must have had a busy time when I was living in the same palace as Queen Verity. They’d be dosing me with venom morning, noon, and night; but I was perfectly okay till I caught the Coughing Jaundice…

  Oh.

  Oh.

  The jaundice was really venom poisoning. The night I got sick was when the nanites started their work. And the only thing that kept me alive was a team of the best doctors on Troyen. Right there at the end, when I started to get better, maybe I’d finally built up a resistance to the stuff; after all, it’d been a whole year and the queen’s chemical cycle was repeating itself. But till that time, I was constantly getting dosed with new enzymes and hormones and junk, twisting me inside out, practically killing me…

  For what? Who would intentionally do that to me? The Fasskisters must have charged big money for a project so complicated… and who would put up that much cash just to kill yours truly? I wasn’t anyone important. And if somebody really did want me snuffed, why choose such a strange and complicated way to do it?

  The same questions were probably going through Festina’s head. When I turned toward her, she was looking at me thoughtfully. "You, Edward," she said, "are the eye of one nasty fucking shitstorm. It’s not your doing, but it terrifies the crap out of me." She thought a moment longer. "I’m going to ask you a question, and I want an honest answer. Okay?"

  All of a sudden, I felt too scared to talk. I just nodded my head.

  "Edward," she said, "were you and your sister genetically engineered? From scratch? Before conception?"

  Even though I’d been expecting something awful, I’d never expected her to hit my darkest secret. For a wild second, I hoped some spirit would take possession of my body — tell a convincing lie, or pump out some magical pheromone that would make her forget she’d ever brought up the subject. But no deus ex machina came to rescue me. In the end, all I said was, "Um."

  "Okay," she said, patting me gently on the shoulder. "That explains a lot. About nanites and Mandasars and the war." Her mouth turned up in a wry little smile. "It even explains about judo mats." She lifted up quickly on tiptoe and gave me a light kiss on the cheek. "But you were a perfect gentleman. A real prince." She chuckled. "Now let’s get back to Jacaranda."

  "Hey," the Fasskister said. A very calm, "Hey," because the translation computer seemed to be programmed to keep an even tone of voice. But inside the robot shell, the "Hey" had been a sharp piercing squeak. "You’re just going to leave now? Walk off like you’ve solved all your problems? Forget about my vidscreen and my sound system?"

  "And the people," I said.

  "Right," the Fasskister agreed hurriedly. "The people. There are hundreds of us on this orbital; are you just going to leave everybody frozen here?"

  "What do you want us to do?" Festina asked.

  "You got the moss off me," he said. "Do the same for everything else. Everybody." When Festina hesitated, he told her, "I helped you, didn’t I? I answered your questions. So now it’s time you owe me a favor. Lose the damned moss."

  "All right," Festina sighed. She lifted her hand to her throat. "Kaisho, have you been following all this?"

  A whisper came back over our receivers. "Yes."

  "I have to sympathize with this fellow," Festina told her. "The Balrog has gone completely overboard. Sooner or later, the Fasskister Union is going to find out about this; they’re sure to notice if a whole orbital goes incommunicado for any length of time. When they send a ship to see what’s happened, the Fasskisters will turn ape-shit. They’ll run to every race in the known universe, screaming to have you declared non-sentient."

  "Let them," Kaisho answered. "The highest echelons of the League know the Balrog is more sentient than all you lesser species put together."

  "But it doesn’t look that way," I said, trying to be reasonable. "It kind of looks like you’re… well, that queen from Willow was a dangerous non-sentient, right? And she brought the Balrog to this orbital so she could get back at the Fasskisters. The Balrog did exactly what she wanted. So it looks like you’re aiding and abetting a dangerous non-sentient."

  Kaisho chuckled. "Nicely argued, Teelu. They’ll be fitting you for a diplomat’s uniform any day now. But this has nothing to do with the queen. The Fasskisters know full well why it’s right and proper to lock them in their precious metal suits, with physical needs taken care of, but their minds slowly going crazy."

  "What do you mean?" Festina asked. No answer. "Come on, Ka
isho, cut the crap and explain what’s going on."

  Still no answer from Kaisho; but it was obvious the Fasskister understood exactly what she was talking about. A high-pitched squeal came from inside the robot shell. The machine suddenly spun away from us and ran out the door. He only got two short steps before reaching the edge of the clear space untouched by moss. Beyond that, there was nowhere to go — the Fasskister’s arms waved in panic, all his eyes scanning the ground for an escape route. Even as we watched, moss surged forward, like a wave on a beach lapping over the Fasskister’s toes.

  Except that a wave doesn’t leave a fuzzy red coating on your feet.

  As quickly as the spores had trickled off the Fasskister’s metal housing, they swept back up again: crimson mold climbing over ankle joints and knees, crusting over the central egg, scaling the arms. Elbows stopped waving; wrists stopped writhing; fingers froze into frantic claws that fattened with moss till they looked like furry mittens.

  Inside the Fasskister’s shell, a high-pitched mousy wail echoed for a few seconds, broke off, then started again. I took a step forward, but Festina grabbed my arm to hold me back. She pointed to the ground — the Balrog was starting to advance toward us, cutting us off from getting close to the Fasskister.

  We had to retreat… with the moss crowding us out of the village, forcing Festina and me along a narrow track that grudgingly opened in front of our feet. Leaving us no option, the Balrog shooed us to the docking hatch and back into Jacaranda.

  32

  SCOPING OUT THE GROUND

  I spent the rest of the day in quarantine. We all did: getting completely cleaned off, swept free of nanites. At least it didn’t hurt as much as getting scoured by the defense cloud — a personal detox chamber took its time, rather than ripping at anything that might be suspicious. Gentle thoroughness, as opposed to the quick and dirty.