FOUR: MAKING CONTACT
Stake felt guilty knowing that most of the men and women doing their stint at the Colonial Forces base slept in bunks, stacked like corpses in a morgue’s drawers, but not so guilty that he wasn’t grateful for having a room to himself, however small that room was. No windows to break up the monotony of the unadorned walls, but he soon had his comp unfolded and set up on a little table, its screen the closest thing he had to a view. After the vistas of Di Noon and Bluetown he had sailed above yesterday, he was feeling more than a little claustrophobic. Pouring his mind into the net made him feel more like he was flying again.
He had turned in early last night and slept like a rock; nine hours of unbroken slumber. How long had it been since he’d managed that without a pill? He recalled nothing of his dreams. How long had he managed that without a pill, too? Well, to be fair, his bouts with nightmares came and went, sometimes waning for months or even a couple years before his phantasms regrouped for a fresh attack.
He had just returned from breakfast in the spacious mess hall, echoing with the chatter of hundreds of the base’s personnel, most of them in blue camouflaged uniforms, just like the old days. Most of them were human. None of them were Sinanese. A young aide had come to where Stake was sitting alone, and politely introduced himself as an assistant to Colonel Gale, the outpost’s commander. He had presented a bracelet in the form of a matte black band and said, “Captain Henderson has already processed your arrival, sir, except for this data bracelet. It’s been programmed with your relevant information to serve as your ID, and it will allow your position to be traced should you run into any trouble when you’re out on your own.”
Stake had just stared at the bracelet in the young man’s hand. “I’m a guest at this base, and I appreciate that. But I’m a tourist here, not personnel. Please tell your commanding officer that I’m flattered by his concern, but I’ll be okay. I understand that tensions are high right now, and I’ll exercise caution.” Stake had then gone back to chewing his toast, leaving the kid squirming in his uniform like a school boy who’d forgotten the next half of his oral presentation.
“Sir? I think – ”
“I’ll talk to my friend Captain Henderson,” Stake had said. “He’ll square it with the colonel, don’t worry.”
And so the kid had staggered away, a short-circuited automaton. Stake was sure the colonel, whom he hadn’t met yet, would be none too pleased, but Stake was none too pleased with the idea of having his every step monitored.
Now, back in his room again, refreshed from food and sleep, Stake bent to a private project before turning his attention to the matter he’d come to assist in.
Stake called up his comp’s vidphone mode, and his address book. He scrolled down the column for G. Gonh, Thi.
Was that still her last name, or had she taken on the surname of her husband? He hadn’t asked her, in the one brief exchange they had shared since he had last seen her face-to-face, eleven years ago. Back when she had been his prisoner.
Again, he had not contacted her in a year. Not since that single call, during which she had put it together that he’d been beaten in the course of a case. Not since the time she had managed to travel to Punktown to come to his aid, unbidden. But he’d never seen her there – elusive warrior that she was – despite her having fought on his behalf, and he hadn’t seen her or heard from her in any way since the lone text message she had sent his computer while he was recovering from a gunshot wound sustained during the nasty confrontation she had aided him in.
And again, Stake had known all along that he could not return to her dimension and her world without some attempt to resume contact with her. To meet with her face-to-face, on civilian terms, as ill-advised as his guts told him that reunion would be. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? As beyond his control as who he fell in love with.
Her number didn’t ring through. A message came up on the screen. His system translated it as: SERVICE TO THIS NUMBER HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED.
So she had changed her number, then, sometime over the past year. Stake set about finding access to a local directory, hoping she had not taken on her husband’s last name, or else he might never find her. He supposed he could have someone more familiar with the Jin Haa phone system or their version of the net help him hunt her up; Henderson, who after all had helped him locate Thi Gonh last year, after a decade gone by. But he was embarrassed to ask him, much as he knew his friend wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised at his request. Not surprised, maybe, but not approving either, he feared. Especially since that was not what he was being paid for out of Rick Henderson’s own pocket.
Before Stake went very far in searching for a directory, though, another thought came to him. In his mind, he saw again the sprawling expanse of Bluetown from the air. As their helicar was about to leave the eerie city behind, Stake had noticed black smoke curling out of a window in one of those buildings that had empty open windows instead of the crusted blue panes that most of the buildings evidenced, like eyes gone blind with cataracts. “Is that a fire in there?” he’d asked Henderson.
His friend had looked down and said, “Must be squatters. They keep a low profile, because of the security patrols of both the Ha Jiin and Jin Haa, but the patrols have been tolerant of them. Mostly they’re on the lookout for troublemakers, vandals. More than that, really, I think it’s just a gesture to make it look like they have some control over the situation. But a lot of people have been displaced already, farmers and people from small hamlets, and where do they have to go now?”
Farmers, Stake’s mind echoed.
With her husband, Thi Gonh owned a farm. She had told him that herself during his call to her.
He didn’t know where exactly her farm might be located in relation to the border between the Ha Jiin and Jin Haa lands. Where, in relation to Bluetown. Could it be, then, that her farm was one of those that had been swallowed up? Might she herself and her husband have been reduced to taking shelter inside one of the replicated structures of Bluetown, and that was the reason he couldn’t get through to her now?
His vidphone beeped. For a moment, startled, Stake thought that maybe Thi Gonh’s machine had alerted her to an attempt to access her former number, and she was calling him back. But it was Rick Henderson’s face that appeared on the screen.
“Hey, buddy. Sleep well?”
“Yes, I did, in fact.”
“I hear you declined the ID bracelet Gale had them make up for you.”
“Sorry, Rick, but I’m not a wild animal to have a remote tracker clipped to its ear.”
“I’ll smooth it out, don’t worry. Anyway, are you ready to have a look at the three bodies found in Bluetown? That is, the two bodies and the cloned child?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll be right there to get you, then.”
Henderson signed off, and Stake put his comp into sleep mode. He would have to get back to his search for the Earth Killer later. His obligation right now lay elsewhere, and when he was on the job, Jeremy Stake was still a good soldier.
***
The military base had a science department with a small staff, Henderson explained – as they navigated a series of bland corridors enlivened only by paintings and holoart created during hospital stays by Colonial Forces soldiers wounded in the Blue War – but the staff had been augmented since this Bluetown situation had begun. When they reached the Science Office, as it was designated, it was to find two guards gripping blocky Sturm AE-93 assault engines, forest-blue units that could fire solid projectiles (or plasma gel capsules), mini rockets, and ray bolts. Bulkier model AE-95s could also fire shotgun shells, plasma grenades, and several more types of beam. Stake was experienced with earlier models of both styles of weapon. The primal hunter in him got a testosterone rush just seeing them, and he almost wanted to ask one of the guards to hand over his weapon so he could have a look at it. He knew it was the location that made this feeling so intense. Memories experienced even by his hands.
The guards straightened up and gave Henderson a crisp nod in lieu of a salute. Henderson said, “Morning, boys. This is my friend from Punktown, Jeremy Stake. We’re going to have a look at the Bluetown clones.”
“Yessir. The colonel advised us as such.”
One guard stepped aside to let Henderson approach a recognition scanner mounted by the side of the door. He leaned close to it, and a wave of green light rolled down his face and upper chest, reading his features and the ID badge clipped to his uniform. The lab door whooshed open, and the captain led Stake inside.
The head of the science department took note of their arrival; Stake figured she must have been given forewarning by Henderson. She came to meet the two men wearing an attractive little smile. “Captain.”
“Ami, this is Jeremy Stake, my friend from Punktown and a former corporal in the CF. Jer, this is Ami Pattaya, our top lab rat.”
“Mr. Stake.” They shook hands. Where the guns had brought out the killer from his past, the science chief brought out the shy teenager. Ami Pattaya was small, brown-skinned, with vaguely Asian eyes in a striking face and a river of dark hair, her lab smock doing little to hide her compact curves or the short but shapely legs her miniskirt revealed. High heels arched her feet and made her calves look tensed and strong.
Henderson said, “We’d like to have a look at the Bluetown clones now, Ami; the two that didn’t make it, and the one that did.”
“Of course. I’ll be right with you gentlemen.” The science chief clicked across the room on her spikes to finish a bit of business with one of her technicians, a young black man they heard her address as “cutie.” Stake seized the opportunity to widen his eyes at Henderson meaningfully.
“She must be popular with the boys stationed here,” he said quietly.
“Definitely. And I’ve heard a few of the ladies lusting after her, too. She’s a hermaphrodite.”
“What?” Stake looked across the room at her with fresh eyes. “Wow. Surgical?”
“No; mutation. I shouldn’t spread rumors but I hear she likes to party. You’d think most of these macho boys wouldn’t go for a he-she, especially when there are plenty of female Jin Haa prosties out there, not to mention our female soldiers, but I think they like the down-and-dirtiness of it. Prison syndrome, sideshow kink, whatever. But she’s been nice to me so it’s rotten to talk behind her back like this.”
“She’s been nice to you?” Stake arched a brow.
“Hey, Jer, you better know I’ve never cheated on my wife. Here she comes. Time for us to pretend we’re professional again.”
“All right, gentlemen, if you’d walk this way.”
“I’d walk that way if I was wearing stilettos,” Stake whispered to his friend as they followed Ami into another series of hallways.
“And if you had an ass like that,” Henderson whispered back.
“The wife, Rick, the wife.”
Ami had stopped at a door, her smile knowing. Stake felt embarrassed and a touch guilty, but she seemed unperturbed as she opened the door and ushered the men into a small lab room.
Two circular tanks rested atop a counter, the violet fluid in them burbling quietly. One tank contained what appeared to be a terribly deformed infant that looked like it had made it full term, at least, before expiring, though Stake knew better; that it had been grown in no human womb at all. Its disproportionately large head was bifurcated to such an extent that brain matter unraveled from the back of its open skull. Lidless black eyes gave Stake the disturbing feeling that the creature was studying him as he studied it. Its dead smile – both amphibian and cleft like a cat’s muzzle – heightened the unsettling effect.
But the other dead clone was in an altogether different state. It seemed to be made all of the same blue smart matter as Bluetown’s structures. Stake again thought of the ancient city of Pompeii, the molds of human figures. This creature looked more fossil than clone.
“Why is this one alone made of smart matter? Or, to what extent is it smart matter?”
“Here.” Ami indicated a scanning display set into the edge of the counter at an angle. She touched keys, and a screen revealed the petrified clone’s interior. A delicate skeleton, ribs as fine as a fish’s, that the scan made appear red as if the bones were translucent and filled with glowing dye – or blood. “Maybe this MIA was only a skeleton, and the smart matter had to extrapolate the rest of the body, whereas the other two were in less of a state of decay. Or maybe it just got this one wrong, before it moved on to the next, and the next, more successful at cloning the remains each time. Honestly? I really can’t account for the three different states of these remains any better than that.”
“You can’t tell if the bodies all died at the same time, or at different times, before they were buried or left at that spot?”
“No, I can’t be sure.”
“Has their DNA been cross-checked against the CF database?”
“Yes. There have been no matches.”
“Is that because their DNA has been altered?”
“It could be. Though it doesn’t read as unusual, in itself. It just isn’t on file.”
Stake put his hand on Henderson’s arm and steered him aside, speaking softly. “What I’m thinking, Rick, is that these might have been deep penetration scouts, like me, purposely working without identification in case they were captured or died behind enemy lines, and needed to remain as shadows.”
“But like you say, you were deep ops, and you were always on file, right? I know I was.”
“Maybe they were even deeper penetration than us.” Stake faced Ami again, was again struck by how fetching she was, those shining large eyes confidently accustomed to men drinking her in.
“Deep penetration?” she said. “Sounds like you guys had some fun during the war.”
Stake chuckled nervously. “I wouldn’t call it fun.”
“Not even on leave? Hitting the bars in Di Noon?”
He thought of Thi Gonh. An enemy fighter, not an allied prostie. He changed the subject. “We’re certain these are human beings from Earth, at least?”
“We are. You’ll know it as soon as you see the living clone.”
“Let’s do that, then.”
“He’s being cared for in Health Services; I’ll take you to meet him and our chief medical officer, Dr. Laloo.”
As they headed toward the door, Stake had a thought and hesitated, looking back at the tanks of gurgling preserving solution. “The DNA doesn’t match anybody on the MIA list, but how about soldiers who made it back alive? What if these clones were made from matter left by soldiers who didn’t die? The DNA could have been there in blood or bits of flesh, after a firefight in which they were wounded. Who knows?”
“That might still prove to be true, that the originals are alive and not MIAs at all, though I’d say that’s a less likely scenario. But in any case, their DNA has been cross-checked with all the data on file from all the Colonial Forces combatants who served in the Blue War, living and dead. Yourself included, I’m sure. Sorry, Mr. Stake; they don’t match up with anyone living, either, at this point.”
“Okay; just a thought. Well then, speaking of living, let me meet the clone that Bluetown got right.”
***
“Are there always guards posted outside the science lab and the infirmary?” Stake asked, as two more soldiers with assault engines let the three of them pass through the door to the medical unit.
“No,” Ami said. “But then we don’t get specimens like these three clones every day.”
The chief medical officer, Dr. Laloo, promptly appeared from a room labeled MORGUE, having been buzzed before their entrance that they were here to visit. His surgical gown was smeared with blood, and he still wore a hair covering and a mask over his lower face. For one terrible moment, Stake thought that they were too late; that the cloned child had been dissected in the course of examination, a fear Henderson had suggested to him.
“Was someone hurt, docto
r?” Ami herself asked in concern.
“A local child was killed after stepping on a mine in the forest,” the surgeon explained. When he lowered his mask, Stake could see from his ear-to-ear mouth that he was a Choom. “I’ve been doing an autopsy to determine whether it was one of ours, or Ha Jiin or Jin Haa. Seems to be one of the latter two, fortunately.”
“Not fortunately for the kid,” Stake couldn’t stop himself from speaking up.
The surgeon gave the stranger a frosty look. “What I mean is, both the Jin Haa and the Ha Jiin are not all that happy with us lately, and so what we don’t need right now is another civilian killed by Earth ordnance left over from the war.”
“This is Jeremy Stake, doctor,” Henderson said. “I’ve brought him in to help us identify the three Bluetown clones.”
“Mm,” the Choom grunted dubiously.
“He’d like to see Brian,” Henderson explained.
“Brian,” Laloo echoed, not bothering much to hide his contempt that Henderson had deemed to give the clone a name. “Very well, then. This way.”
Walking behind him down an off-branching hallway, Stake said, “Shouldn’t you take off that bloody gown, doctor? It might frighten him.” He was simply prodding the man now.
“He’s got the mind of an infant. He doesn’t know enough to be scared of blood,” the surgeon groused.
A large tank with ventilation holes sat square in the middle of the room they entered. The eyes of cameras and scans were directed toward it, judging from the images on monitors arrayed with other equipment on work counters ringing the room. There was only one person in this room at present, and he sat on a mat within the specimen tank. A male human child of approximately five-years-old, wearing pajamas a Jin Haa or Ha Jiin child would wear; the best they could come up with right now, apparently. The child’s back had been turned to them when they came in, but at the sound of their entrance he looked around, almost falling onto his back in the process. Badly coordinated. His expression was mild and good-natured but uncomprehending.
Blue War: A Punktown Novel Page 6