Blue War: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Airborne craft of various sizes moved through the sodden air like light-bejeweled deep sea fish. One was more like a whale: a dirigible-shaped gas freighter with the word ARGOS in huge blue letters across its silvery flank, conveying a shipment from the company’s sprawling refinery. Huh, Stake thought. Sinon gas, from the world Sinan. He saw these blimps all the time and thought little of them, but now this one seemed like the steely finger of God Himself, prodding his mind.

  As he watched, a helicar floated down into the shipyard’s parking lot, its blowers sending up a spray from the rain puddles as it hovered. A young man with an umbrella and briefcase ran to the vehicle and hoisted himself inside, car pooling to the office. Stake was reminded of larger helicraft he and other infantrymen had run to, hoping they wouldn’t be shot as they broke cover, escaping one area of blue jungle so as to be deposited into another area of blue jungle.

  Last night after coming home from LOV 69 he had fallen asleep on the sofa, going from watching VT to the VT watching him. He had dreamed of what Henderson had told him. In his dream, it was Stake and a team of Colonial Forces troops who had ventured into a strange blue building in a strange blue city. They had cut open a sealed door, and entered a room with three circular holes like huge organic orifices in the floor. Stake had got close to them, and looked down into the pools they contained. Three figures had been floating in the amniotic fluid: three adult men in blue camouflage uniforms. He’d recognized their faces. Three privates named LeDuc, Devereux, and Rick Henderson.

  Stake had reached into one of the holes and dragged Henderson out onto the floor, bending over to resuscitate him. Two other men helped pull out LeDuc. They left Devereux in his odd womb, however, because he was dead, the pool dark red with his blood.

  Stake had woken before Henderson and LeDuc could be revived. Before he could see if they were mere clones, mindless copies, or the actual men. Before he could see if they’d survive. But he understood the significance of the dream quite clearly.

  Eleven years ago, those same three men had crouched in a forest clearing, away from the rest of the team, to take a brief rest from their advance. From their packs they had removed and examined personal possessions they’d recovered from the bodies of three of their fallen comrades, killed by a Ha Jiin sniper, belongings they hadn’t had a chance to examine closely before that moment. There were cookies that one man’s mother had sent him. It seemed that he had been saving them, too sentimental to actually eat them, but the three soldiers shared the cookies then as they began reading aloud to each other the letters that loved ones had sent to the three dead men. A letter from a mother, a letter from a wife, a letter from a child. As Henderson had related the story to Stake later, LeDuc had been the first to start weeping. But soon the other two followed suit.

  It was their tears that saved them. For the entire time they were in the clearing, the same sniper who had killed the men they wept over had the Colonial Forces soldiers in her sights. But their brittle emotions, in that raw and vulnerable moment, had prevented her from pulling the trigger. This Ha Jiin woman was so accomplished a soldier, so skillful a sniper, that her own people had dubbed her the “Earth Killer.” That ominous name had even found its way to the whispering lips of her enemy. She was said to be a tiny, hard-eyed killer, as beautiful as she was deadly, with a rifle as tall as herself.

  But because she could not bring herself to kill those three enemy soldiers that day, her comrade reported her to their superiors. After the war she was tried for treason. Because of her exemplary record prior to that mystifying lapse in judgment, she was not punished, but she earned herself a new and more mocking moniker. Her people took to calling her the Earth Lover.

  The Earth Lover. Staring out into the gray morning, Stake smiled ironically. The nickname went beyond the mercy she had shown those three vulnerable soldiers in her cross-hairs.

  Her name was Thi Gonh. Stake learned this, because his team ended up capturing her and one comrade alive, and holding them prisoner inside a seized Ha Jiin monastery for a week, until Stake’s crew could be met and joined by a unit of Advance Rangers. By this time, Corporal Jeremy Stake was the commanding officer. That was because the Earth Killer had previously picked off their lieutenant and sergeant – this sergeant being one of the men that Henderson and the other two had wept for.

  Stake left the monitor, sipped his coffee as he resumed pacing his metal cell in the belly of this grounded leviathan. It was like sipping at his memories. Carefully, lest they burn him. Coffee both bitter and sweet, a blend of dark and light.

  The young corporal had been bewitched by his prisoner immediately. She was beautiful like a blue-striped tiger, a blue-scaled cobra. And she had immediately been stunned to witness his chameleon-like abilities, as he unconsciously took on a semblance of her features. Stake couldn’t speak much of her language, but Henderson had a translation chip in his skull. He’d told Stake that the woman was calling him Ga Noh. It was a Ha Jiin term for a kind of mythical entity; “a chimera or a shapeshifter,” as Henderson explained it then. “A mystical kind of being; part human, part god. Maybe good, maybe evil.”

  They had been in awe of each other. Afraid, and attracted. Maybe attracted because they were afraid.

  He had started out by protecting her from the other soldiers. He had ended up in bed with her, behind the closed door of her cell.

  A single week, his lover. The Advance Rangers had rendezvoused, the prisoner had been transported away, and he and his team had carried on with their jungle fighting as if nothing exceptional had occurred. That was the last he had ever seen of the Earth Killer. At least, in the flesh.

  Stake set his mug aside, leaned over his computer to see what messages might have come in while he slept. He was reminded of the last time he had seen Thi Gonh’s face. It had been on this very screen, a year ago. With Henderson’s help, he had finally learned of her current whereabouts. She told Stake that she had married, though she had been unable to conceive children, and she and her husband owned a farm.

  Ten years of trying to forget her, and intermittently searching for her, only to have his heart ground under her heel in a call lasting a few short minutes. But then, it had only taken him a few minutes to be enraptured by her in the first place, hadn’t it? And what a fool he’d been anyway. Pining for a woman who had killed his friends around him, a woman he had barely been able to converse with, and known for the span of a single week. Maybe, after that call, he’d have finally been able to forget her.

  But at the time, Stake had been involved in a dangerous case, and had sustained a beating, and with her keen sniper’s eye Thi Gonh had put this together during their call. Unknown to Stake, she had managed to concoct a lie to leave her husband, leave her world and dimension, to travel to Oasis. To Punktown, where she had never even been. She had stalked Stake like her quarry, never actually giving herself away. Afraid to disgrace her husband by drawing too close. Not trusting her prey, and apparently not herself. And when Stake’s enemies had struck, she had struck too. She had killed two men before Stake could even blink. He’d been wounded by his enemies, fell into unconsciousness, and she had seen him to a hospital; in doing so, had touched his body while he was unaware. By the time he regained consciousness again, she had already gone. Back to her far-flung world, her parallel realm of existence on the flip side of reality. As if she had never even been there; a figment of his delusion. But she had been there. She had risked her marriage and her life to come to his aid.

  So she hadn’t forgotten her Ga Noh either, after all these years. Just one short week a decade earlier, but their destinies had remained connected like the “entangled pairs” of atoms, as they were called, that made quantum teleportation possible across the multiverse.

  He had not called her since, though. In the past year, she had not called him either. Were they waiting for the other to make that move? Or had her visit here to help him been a kind of closure, a coming to full circle, after he had protected her ten years before? A
kind of ending?

  If so, would it be a mistake for him to go back to Sinan now, and shatter that symmetry? Because he knew he could not possibly return to Sinan without seeing her. Rick Henderson had to know that as surely as he did.

  Stake punched up his recorded calls. Some ads that he deleted, and one personal message. A face came onto his monitor. It was like a jack-o’-lantern’s: empty triangular eyes, a single triangular nostril, gaping toothless mouth. It was the visage of a pencil-thin Stem, greatly magnified. Those macabre features in its rough, blood red flesh did not move at all as its translated voice came through the speakers.

  “Detective Stake,” said one of the brother-in-laws of the Stem male he had killed, “you can hide with your changing face, like a moth against tree bark, but our people are born hunters, born warriors, and we will always find you. You should never have meddled in this affair. You had no right to interfere in our culture, our hallowed traditions. You had no business helping these three women. You have killed the honorable husband of a hateful wife who deserves a thousand deaths. Your people may have exonerated you for this crime, but you will find no such mercy from us. We will not rest until you have paid for your transgressions, Detective Stake. And you will find no rest, not here nor in the world beyond!”

  The world beyond, Stake thought.

  “You and all your arrogant kind are cursed, cursed, and you will know this on the day that a billion dead warriors feast on your soul in revenge!”

  “Ouch,” Stake said, “I hate when that happens.” He cut the message off in mid-sentence and forwarded it to Punktown’s police force, as he had been doing these past months.

  He straightened and retrieved his coffee. It was cooling.

  What did he have here now, aside from a couple of homicidal Stems – who if they were quite as good as they bragged would have caught him already, but made every day a hazardous enterprise nonetheless? He had briefly been involved with someone last year but it hadn’t worked out, due to his own lack of enthusiasm. The nearest he had to a close friend these days was probably Watt, and for all he could tell the man didn’t have a lower body behind that bar. The only other person he might consider a close friend was, of course, Rick Henderson.

  It might be nice, spending some time with an old friend like that. Doing him a favor. Making a little money. Sure. And avoiding the wrath of the Stem brothers and their billion hungry ancestors, besides.

  Stake leaned over his computer again, and made a call of his own. It didn’t surprise him that at this early hour the Colonial Forces captain was awake, showered, dressed in his handsome uniform. And apparently awaiting Stake’s call.

  “Congratulations,” Stake told him. “You’ve become a recruiter.”

  THREE: THE WORLD BEYOND

  The queue that lined up to board the pod was not a long one; mostly business types in expensive five-piece suits, and several blue-skinned Jin Haa who dressed and carried themselves with a similar aura of importance. This was, after all, the Theta Transport Station, not the Paxton Teleportation Center, where the crowd would have been very much larger. The difference being that at the latter institution, people teleported from one planet to another. At TTS, one could teleport to another dimension.

  “Nervous?” asked Henderson, ahead of Stake in line.

  “I’m wondering if people still get that nauseous feeling,” Stake said.

  Henderson smiled. “You may, Jer. That nauseous feeling was mostly about nerves, even back then.”

  As Stake watched, a bipedal beetle-like entity about five feet in height walked up the ramp ahead of the queue, so as to board the transdimensional pod before the passengers. An extradimensional being called a Coleopteroid.

  “Our captain, so to speak?” Stake asked his friend.

  “Probably just a technician. Or a consultant. Not like anyone actually pilots these things.”

  The extradimensional races the Earth Colonies had interacted with included the Antse, who wore over their own gray flesh the tightly-fitting flayed skin of whale-like creatures called flukes, this skin a beautiful malachite blend of green and black. There were the putty-like L’lewed, who in this environment were required to spend most their time inside a small metal container which would be transported about for them on the back of a robot or hired aide. The Vlessi race – with a reputation even more ominous than that of the Stems – resembled thin white dogs walking on hoofed hind legs, but with heads shaped weirdly like a human pelvis. The towering Kodju people were capable of slipping from one plane of existence into another by a process that, while requiring great discipline, did not involve any technology.

  But it was the Coleopteroids whose means of traveling from one dimension to another had proved most beneficial to the Earth Colonies. As Paxton had become known as Punktown, and now Simulacra had been renamed Bluetown, so had the Coleopteroids earned themselves a more user-friendly nickname: the Bedbugs. Not that the Bedbugs were all that friendly. They mostly kept to themselves, and some of their activities in Punktown and in other Earth Colonies had been controversial, if not occasionally alarming. But the enigmatic beings had been tolerated largely due to their cooperation in the advancement of quantum teleportation, in recent years making transportation to the known dimensions more accessible. Working in conjunction with the Earth Colonies’ Theta Agency – the government-funded scientific division responsible for extradimensional study and exploration – the Bedbugs had made it possible for Earth to discover the planet Sinan in its alternate reality, seventeen years earlier. And thus, had made it possible for the Earth Colonies to send soldiers there two years later, and go to war.

  The Bedbugs themselves utilized a different method to cross back and forth between their home dimension and others, and even before their cooperation with Theta researchers had operated a transportation terminal of their own here in Punktown. The conveyance they used to shuttle between dimensions was known as a tran. It looked rather like an ancient steam locomotive of black metal, and traveled along a complex series of tracks knotted into overlapping geometric configurations. As the tran accelerated, its rate of speed and the pattern it followed along this train bed determined which material plane the tran ended up disappearing into. As disturbing as Stake remembered traveling in a transdimensional pod to be, at least it didn’t sound as dizzying as the technique the Bedbugs employed for their own needs.

  A green twirling light came on above the ramp entrance, signifying that it was now okay to board the pod. The attendant began scanning each passenger as they advanced. Stake couldn’t help but feel like he was nineteen-years-old again, carrying a simple rucksack of camouflage blue colors. Henderson passed through, turned and waited for Stake to be scanned by the attendant, an attractive Choom woman with lipsticked lips wrapped halfway around her head. Stake tried on a sickly smile in return, much smaller.

  He followed Henderson forward. Neither carried any luggage; their one piece each had already been stored in a lesser chamber of the egg-like craft, hulking unseen beyond the end of the boarding ramp. Another attendant waited just inside the entrance, nodding at each passenger cordially. He was a Tikkihotto, fully human in appearance but for the striking difference that his visual organs were twin nests of clear tendrils that squirmed in the air with a life of their own. Stake remembered the pet newt, Brian, that Henderson had discussed, from the same planet and possessing a similar ocular arrangement. Tikkihottos could see colors that humans could not detect, could even discern the simple transdimensional life forms that ever floated in the air like plankton. Stake wondered if this ability was one of the reasons why a Tikkihotto might be hired to accompany a craft that would nose its way through the fabric of reality.

  Henderson and Stake took their allotted seats in one of the forward-facing rows. This was the only real difference he saw between this commercial vessel and the troop ship he had last journeyed to Sinan in. In those old infantry pods, there had been two rows of seats facing each other, forcing the fresh recruits to see their fear
mirrored in the faces of the soldiers opposite them. Stake remembered staring down at his boots instead. The guy across from him would be scared enough already without having to see his face literally reflected in that of the teenage Jeremy Stake.

  The egg was sealed up, the last of the passengers having settled and the Tikkihotto having taken a seat by a monitor station near the door. Looking back at him, Stake could make no sense of the overlapping data that scrolled both horizontally and vertically across the monitor screens. Maybe only a Tikkihotto could grasp it.

  “Prepare for initiation,” said a voice from a speaker; surely not the voice of the Bedbug technician, wherever he was hidden aboard. As softly modulated as the voice was, Stake flinched a little at its unexpectedness; there had been no such cordial announcements in his experience. But what was there to prepare for, except psychologically? There would be no jarring movement. No actual movement at all, really, except for a thrumming vibration through one’s soles and buttocks and back. The seats didn’t even have safety belts. The craft did not employ locomotion in the conventional sense. It would stand still, in effect, and the multiverse would pivot around it until the pod was where it needed to be, and reality came to a halt once more.

  The same voice began reciting a countdown. Stake turned to Henderson and joked shakily, “Nothing like milking the suspense. Do they want me to throw up, or what?”

  Henderson patted his shoulder. “Hey, think of it as an interesting vacation. You’re not going to war this time, Jer.”

  Going? In a way, Stake thought, had they ever fully returned from it? He couldn’t speak for his friend, but sometimes it felt like some vital component of his being had been left behind him when he’d returned to his own dimension at the age of twenty-three. When one went to the Paxton Teleportation Center and had their body transmitted to another planet, that body was actually destroyed in the process, and what was reassembled on the other end was essentially a facsimile. A copy even more exact than a clone, but a copy nonetheless.