Blue War: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  EIGHTEEN: GOLDEN FLEECE

  The message on Stake’s wrist comp read: “THE PERSON YOU ARE TRYING TO REACH HAS BLOCKED YOUR NUMBER. FURTHER ATTEMPTS TO CONTACT THIS PERSON MAY RESULT IN YOU BEING REPORTED TO THE LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY APPROPRIATE TO YOUR LOCATION.”

  “Thank you and fuck you,” Stake murmured. So Persia Barbour had tired of the messages he had left her. Well, he’d just try her from someone else’s phone next time. In the meantime, he tapped in the number for Timothy Leung, still hoping to persuade him into further cooperation, and maybe into persuading Persia Barbour for him. The number rang a moment, and then the following message appeared on Stake’s screen: “THE PERSON YOU ARE TRYING TO REACH...”

  “Dung,” Stake hissed, and disconnected.

  “Uh-oh,” said a child’s voice.

  Stake looked up to see Brian standing in the door to the examination room. Ami Pattaya was behind the boy, and urged him into the room. She smiled at the detective, but then frowned when she saw the livid pink burns around his neck, one arm and one leg, as he sat on the edge of the examination table in just a pair of plaid flannel boxer shorts.

  “Boo-boo!” Brian said, pointing to the wound that made it look like Stake had survived an attempted lynching.

  “Isn’t he cute?” Ami said. “So are you.” She tugged on the cuff of his underwear, then touched his poisoned arm gingerly. “God, that thing could have killed you! You were very lucky, Jeremy.”

  “I was lucky I had my friend with me.”

  “Mm.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “So I heard. Some Ha Jiin assassin you knew during the war?”

  The Colonial Forces base’s chief medical officer, Dr. Laloo, appeared from an adjoining room and complained, “Maybe you can persuade the investigator to let me filter the toxins from his body. He seems to think he’s had a mystical experience, and will have more of them if he lets that stuff remain in his system. I told him if he wants to hallucinate, he should just buy some purple vortex or another illegal drug like a regular junkie.”

  “Jeremy,” Ami scolded, “is that true? Don’t be foolish!”

  “The monks use bender poison to induce visions, and I think there might be something to that.”

  “The monks also smoke incense that makes their faces rot into huge holes; are you going to start doing that, too?”

  Stake looked back to Brian. The way the boy was staring at him was so much like the delusion he had had while the bender was attacking him that a wave of gooseflesh flowed down his arms. “You are a cutie, Brian, aren’t you?” he said. Stake lifted the arm that wore his wrist comp – “Say cheese!” – and captured a still of the boy in the little computer’s memory.

  A pleasant young black man named Bernard, whom Stake had seen about before, trailed after Ami into the examination room. Stake understood him to be Ami’s main assistant in the science department. Before he lowered his arm, he snapped a few quick pictures of Bernard, too, to add to his growing file. Later he would sort them alphabetically. He had face files going back years. Not all those faces were still alive, though he could give them fresh life at any time. Necromancy: Brian had said it in Stake’s delirium.

  “He has a fever,” the Choom doctor grumbled, poking about the room as if he had turned to other business and was waiting for Stake to leave. “But if he doesn’t want the poison out of him, he can just deal with it.” He faced Stake and tossed him a bottle of pain pills. “Here. For the headaches. I hope they’re illuminating.”

  Ami placed a palm on Stake’s forehead. “Jeremy,” she sighed.

  Stake smiled past her at Bernard. “She’s got quite the maternal instincts, huh, Bernard?”

  “She’s a very nice person,” her assistant replied.

  “Thanks, cutie. At least Bernard still appreciates me.” Ami pouted, dropping her hand.

  “He’s just brown-nosing the boss,” Stake teased. He slipped off the edge of the table, ruffled Brian’s hair, and reached for his pants.

  “Well, I just wanted to come by and make sure you’re okay. I’m taking Brian around the base for a change of scene and a little exercise; they won’t let me take him past the wall, though. Care to come with us, if you’re not busy?”

  “Sure. Let me finish getting dressed.”

  “Do you realize you’re starting to look like Brian again? Or at least, kind of what Brian would look like as an adult?”

  As an adult, Stake thought.

  ***

  Bernard left them to tend to work-related matters as they began their walk around the Colonial Forces base. Brian held onto one of Ami’s hands, and reached over to take Stake’s hand as well. Stake looked down at him, the boy smiling up at the investigator in return.

  “He’s so affectionate,” Ami said, proud as a mother.

  “I think you’re helping instill that in him.”

  She smiled at Stake, then, too. “Thanks. I’d like to think that.”

  They ended up in the mess hall and ordered themselves ice cream. Much of their subsequent conversation revolved around Ami’s revelation that she was an army brat who in her youth had traveled from colony to colony, base to base, and whose father had in fact helped her secure her current position here on Sinan. “So I know how you feel,” she told Stake. “Seems like I’m a bit of a war veteran, myself. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t have a home anymore.”

  “I know what you mean, too,” he muttered.

  “Yeah, you see? I was lonely through my childhood, especially being a mutant, and I’m sure you were, too. You change faces, I change partners, just trying to find out where we really belong. I think we’re more alike than you realize.”

  “Your ice cream is melting,” Stake said.

  When they’d finished they worked their way back to the medical unit that Brian called home. Just outside its entrance, they heard a commotion within. Ami glanced at Stake before leading the way through. They found that Dr. Laloo had himself a new patient now – an agitated, swearing David Bright. His shirt was off, and his expensive slacks spattered with the blood that twined down his right arm. Laloo was tending to the injury, while a young male nurse passed him implements and Bright’s KeeZee bodyguard loomed in the background, watching over the doctor’s efforts and the newcomers with its three unblinking, distrustful eyes.

  “What happened?” Ami asked.

  Bright looked up and raved, “You see this? Huh?” His wild eyes went to Stake. “One of Argos’s robots did this to me! I wasn’t even going to hit the bastard – all I did was poke him in the chest with my finger!”

  “Whose robots?”

  Ami looked to Stake. “Argos is one of the business owners who arrived this morning. A group of them have come to assess the threat to their Sinan investments from the spread of Bluetown, especially now that it’s growing belowground, too.”

  “The bone isn’t broken,” Laloo said, “but its claws lacerated his skin.”

  “Why were you poking his chest?” Stake asked.

  “Because the fucker was poking me about Bluetown, bitching to me about how it’s threatening his own damn business. Good! Good! I hope I ruin him. Let all these wankers go down in flames with me!”

  “Argos...Argos,” Stake said to himself, as if he were trying to recall where he’d heard the name, though he actually knew it well.

  “Argos built the ship the Argonauts sailed on, looking for the golden fleece,” said the well-read Bright. “Let the fucker’s golden fleece burn to ash.”

  Thinking that Stake was unfamiliar with the name, Ami explained, “He’s the biggest supplier of sinon gas in the colonies. I should say, pretty much the only supplier of sinon gas in the colonies. He’s got a monopoly on it.”

  “Because he’s in bed with the chief ambassador here, that bitch Valsalva,” Bright fumed. “Not literally, but who knows about that, either? Wouldn’t put it past either of them.”

  Stake was nodding thoughtfully. “I see his gas freighters just about every day where I’m living now. Seen him
in the news a thousand times, too.”

  “Well, I’m going to sue that rich monopolizing fuck,” Bright said. “Trust me! He thinks I’m ruining his business? I haven’t begun to ruin his business!”

  Laloo looked over Bright’s shoulder and asked Stake, “So how are you feeling? Any more delirium? Mystical visions?”

  “Unless I’m just imagining all this, then no. Not yet, at least.”

  Bright looked to Stake again. “And while I’m at it, I’m going to fire that traitorous fuck Cali, him and the whole Simulacrum Systems team. What was Cali doing here just now? I didn’t send him here. Why did I see him outside the officers’ lounge talking with Gale? You see, Stake? I swear, this Bluetown virus is no accident! I don’t trust Cali or any of them now. They’re done – finished!”

  “Please try to stay calm, Mr. Bright,” Laloo advised him. “I’m sure the colonel was only conferring with your man about the ongoing efforts to stop the city’s growth.”

  “They can confer with my ass, the both of them.”

  “Where is Argos now?” Stake asked.

  “They were still down in the lounge – the officers’ dining room, whatever they call it. All the stuffed suits who crossed over to check on their business ventures came here to tour the base, so Gale could reassure them there’s still a strong security force in place. Yeah, I’m real reassured, myself. What about my business venture, huh? Who’s looking out for me? I tagged along with them and I saw the hate in the eyes of even the ones who didn’t openly accuse me. But when Argos started in, I couldn’t hold back any more, and that’s when his machine grabbed me. Maybe the other one would have come after me, too, if my KeeZee hadn’t jumped in. Good thing Argos called them off or my boy would have had them apart in seconds.”

  Stake turned to Ami and said, “I’d like to take a walk down to the officers’ mess, if you don’t mind.”

  “Hungry again so soon, huh?”

  “Sure, and why should I have to eat in the mess hall? I was a corporal once, remember?”

  “We’re going to leave Brian here, right?”

  “What? No. Mr. Bright said there’s a tour today. So Brian gets the full tour, too.”

  ***

  The party was breaking up in the hallway outside the officers’ dining room, and a diverse party it was. Stake didn’t know which individual to look at first. Besides Colonel Dominic Gale, Captain Rick Henderson and chief ambassador to the Jin Haa nation, Margaret Valsalva – whom Stake knew only from VT – there were two human males in five-piece suits, one female in a somewhat more feminine but still severe pant suit, a Jin Haa cleric, and two robots. The robots were almost exactly the same model as the one Timothy Leung had named Magnus, with chrome-bright segmented neck, waist section, and flexible arms and legs, but the head, chest, pelvic section and hands and feet were of a green plastic as clear as hard candy, instead of honey colored. Their bio-engineered brain masses could be viewed through their transparent green skulls but Stake found himself looking instead at their sharp-fingered hands, for traces of blood.

  Stake couldn’t be sure, for the cleric’s lack of a face, but he felt the Jin Haa sensed their approach first, though the twin robots were the first to turn their heads, and Gale the first to speak.

  “Well, look at this happy little family.”

  “I thought I’d take Brian for a walk,” Ami said, and Stake was embarrassed for her at the bright nervousness in her tone, “and I figured maybe our guests might like to meet him.”

  “And why did you figure that, exactly, Ami?”

  Before she could speak, one of the business-suited men grinned and said, “This isn’t the little boy who was cloned by Bright’s process, is it? Oh my Lord...look at him! It’s uncanny!”

  “Uncanny,” echoed the other business-suited man.

  Rick Henderson stepped in for introductions. “Everyone, you’ve met our science chief, Ami Pattaya. The boy – as you guessed, Mr. Shabo – is the clone we’re calling Brian. And this gentleman is a friend of mine I brought in to help with identifying Brian and the other two cloned remains: Jeremy Stake. Jeremy and I served together in the Blue War.”

  “And with whom are you affiliated, Mr. Stake?” asked the second businessman. “Some government agency, or...”

  “I’m a hired investigator.”

  “Oh, really? You mean, as in private eye? Oh how quaint!”

  “That’s why I became one. It seemed the quaint thing to do.”

  Henderson hastened to resume the introductions. “Jeremy, this is Richard Argos, the owner of the aptly named corporation Argos, which as you probably know processes and supplies sinon gas, with branches on Earth, Oasis, and other worlds. And here we have Penelope Godfrey, vice president of operations for the Greenview Corporation. They’re a lumber company.”

  “The view is more blue than green here,” Stake said, “though neither, once the trees are cut down.”

  “We replant new trees constantly, Mr. Stake,” Godfrey said icily.

  “A little humor – forgive me.”

  “And this gentleman,” Henderson went on, gesturing toward the man who had exclaimed over Brian, his face a ruddy red and his snow white hair rising from his head like a dollop of whipped cream right down to the single curl at the top, a style popular among business types of late, “is Hassan Shabo, owner of Shabo Bio-comestibles.”

  “Ah,” Stake said, “bio-comestibles. You manufacture deadstock.” He was familiar with these operations from a case he had worked on last year, the one that had got very ugly and inspired Thi Gonh to travel to Punktown to lend him support. Deadstock, as they were nicknamed, were bio-engineered meat animals such as cows, pigs, chickens, Kalian glebbi and so on, but grown without heads, usually without limbs, often without any bones or internal organs, not to mention fur or feathers. Stake didn’t mind eating them, but he sure hadn’t enjoyed seeing the pathetic creatures in their living state – if it could be called living. He knew it was better than raising and slaughtering natural animals with brains that could register fear and pain, but shooting a child who was in a coma as opposed to a child who was normal and active would still be monstrous to him.

  “Yes,” Shabo said, “that’s right – our specialty being Sinan’s yubos. We’re not only introducing yubo meat to the Earth Colonies, but selling the Jin Haa people themselves yubo meat that’s produced as deadstock instead of raised in the conventional sense, to show them it can be a more affordable and practical process. I’m hoping to open a plant here next year, that will also provide a lot of Jin Haa citizens with employment. And did you know we supply all the meat that you folks eat here at the Colonial Forces base and the Earth Colonies embassy? Speaking of which, you just missed a very tasty dinner, Mr. Stake. Is that S-t-e-a-k?”

  “Afraid not.” Stake was impressed, if that were the word, with how readily businessmen like Shabo leapt into their spiel, as if every set of ears might be attached to a potential investor.

  “There were two other visitors representing their businesses,” Henderson said, “but I’m afraid you just missed them. Have you met Margaret Valsalva before?”

  “Can’t say that I have.” Stake shook her hand.

  “Thanks for coming to Sinan to help us all out with this mystery, Mr. Stake. We’ll rest more easily when we know what this poor child’s name really is. The other two who weren’t resurrected, as well.”

  “And this,” Henderson indicated the Jin Haa cleric, “is Abbot Hoo, one of the most esteemed religious leaders of the Jin Haa nation.”

  Instead of the traditional blue robes that most Sinan clerics wore, Abbot Hoo’s were a shimmering orange, as if to defiantly identify himself as a Jin Haa. There was another article on his person that set him apart from the common cleric: around his neck, what appeared to be a woman’s fur stole, which lifted its head to blink at Stake suspiciously. In his service days, they had called these limbless animals worm sloths, and Stake recalled hearing their slow rustle outside the windows of barracks and the
cheap Di Noon hotels he had stayed in during R&R excursions, as the animals slowly and sinuously made their way up the outer walls – their gummy undersides adhering them to the surface – in search of night insects they caught with long, similarly sticky tongues. Stake had seen them turned into pocketbooks, with their tails sewn to their snouts to form a shoulder strap, but never worn as a living accessory. He noted the glistening mucus that smeared the abbot’s neck, like the lubrication of a hangman’s noose.

  “Honored,” he said, bowing a little, his eyes drawn irresistibly to the spiraling orifice that was what the holy man had in lieu of a face, like a portal to a lightless afterlife. The monk nodded his head, upon which rested the usual little three-cornered hat, and Stake heard the faintest of wheezes from within that crater-like visage.

  “The abbot works closely with me, Mr. Stake,” Argos explained, “to insure that our gas-collecting processes within the Jin Haa burial systems are always done with respect, and without disturbing the bodies or the tunnels they’re entombed in.”

  As striking a figure as Hoo was, and as menacing as were the similarly silent robots, it was Argos who most commanded Stake’s attention. Richard Argos was young for a mogul, not yet forty, and looked almost unnaturally fit, skin tanned and smooth, body as burly and muscled as a movie gladiator’s. Too perfect; Stake figured it for the work of drugs, or even body implants, rather than hard work in a gym. His head was shaved bald, proudly displaying its bumpy contours as if they were lumps won in street brawls. He had two ports in the right side of his skull, doubtlessly for serious immersion in the ultranet, but nothing was plugged into them just now. Argos’s eyebrows were as thread thin and arched as those of a drag queen.

  “That’s very considerate. Very respectful,” Stake muttered absent-mindedly, staring at Argos’s eyebrows. He was feeling a bit of fever again, a little pain focused at the bridge of his nose.

  “And speaking of the tombs, you served beside our Captain Henderson, eh? As a deep penetration operative?”

  “Yes..”

  “Well, then I have to thank you! My company, of course, started up during the Blue War, and so you and the others who helped set up those first gas-siphoning apparatuses in the Ha Jiin tunnels were, in a way, working for me.” Argos’s broadest smile yet.