“Yeah,” she said from the minuscule screen, “great idea. Especially the away from my boyfriend part. He just left the lab and my ears are still bleeding from him yelling at me about Brian. Bernard actually came into the room, afraid he might hurt me.”
“I’m sure I’ve said this before, but it bears saying again – I don’t know what you see in that wanker.”
“Army brat, Jer. I can’t get away from Daddy, I guess.”
“Well, you can for dinner, at least. But would you mind meeting me there? I have some things to do first. I was thinking the restaurant in the Cobalt Temple Hotel.”
“Are you crazy? Expensive!”
“Hey, it’s my friend’s money, so I’m being generous. Meet me in an hour? I’ll phone in a reservation.”
“Okay, why not? Sounds romantic.” She narrowed her lids and spread a slow smile.
“Great – see you there.”
***
On the science lab monitor, Ami Pattaya’s striking brown-skinned face, with its vaguely Asian eyes, lost none of its appeal despite the billed camouflage cap into which she had apparently bundled all her silky black hair. She narrowed her lids with a slow, sensuous smile. “Hey, cutie,” she said to her primary assistant, Bernard. “Can I ask you a dumb question?”
Bernard smiled back at her through her own screen, which he didn’t know was much smaller. “You’re going to the Cobalt Temple in fatigues?”
“I haven’t left yet. Listen, I know this is going to sound stupid, but with all the chaos going on I can’t remember where the Bluetown artifacts were put away the last time. Not the ones Dom showed Henderson; I mean the real ones. Did Dom take those back, or did we keep them in the lab?”
“They were in the usual place, last I knew.”
Ami hesitated a beat or two. “The lab.”
“Right.”
“Do me a favor, hon?”
“Say again? There’s a lot of static – I can barely hear you.”
“Really? Must be a glitch in the system.” Ami spoke a bit more loudly. The science chief moved her arm, bearing a wrist comp, a bit further away from a cheap multipurpose scanning device that rested on the edge of the bed. Its field, as presently adjusted, was disrupting the vidphone image with snow and distorting the audio as well, garbling her voice. “Can you bring the stuff to me? I’m in Jeremy Stake’s quarters, and I want him to have a look at it but I’m afraid Dom might walk in on us in the lab if we check it out there.”
Several tense seconds, as Ami waited for a puzzled Bernard to say something like, “But Ami, you know I don’t have access to that cabinet,” or to ask her for a password. Instead, though he still look concerned, the young tech said, “Um, aren’t you afraid he’s listening in on us right now? You told me you thought he was tapping your calls sometimes.”
“Good, let him listen in – I’ve been wanting to break up with that rat-faced son of a bitch anyway. He isn’t half the man I am.”
Bernard chuckled uncomfortably. “You’re the boss. But I hope he doesn’t blame me if he catches us. Remember, I’m just following orders.”
“Right, soldier, so get that stuff over here on the double.”
***
Based on the number Ami had related, Bernard found the investigator’s assigned room readily enough, buzzed outside, and Ami promptly cracked the door to lean out a little bit. “Hey, cutie,” she whispered, extending a hand for the specimen box he carried.
“I switched the stuff to a new box,” he said, “in case someone saw me in the halls.”
“I can see that; good thinking. Thanks, hon.” She drew the box inside.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he whispered back at her. “Gale told you not to talk to the private eye or Captain Henderson about these pieces.”
“Things have changed, Bernard. This has all got way too big now for us to keep buried. Trust me, okay? I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Okay...you know best.”
She blew a kiss at the tech through the crack as the door closed between them.
***
Jeremy Stake removed the camouflaged cap he had stolen from the troop craft before the descent into Bluetown’s underground, and no long silky hair spilled out of it. Still wearing the camouflage fatigues he had kept from that day, he shut off the battered old hand scanner he’d used on many a prior case, to mask his voice during vidphone calls. He then turned his attention to the specimen box he had set down on the mattress of his narrow bed.
As soon as he opened it, and even before he removed each item and spaced them on his blanket, he could see the artifacts bore no relation to the military equipment that Gale had shown Henderson while Stake was back in Punktown.
Scraps of clothing, yes, but the tatters of one or more black jumpsuits rather than blue-camouflaged military uniforms. Three mismatched boots; again, not standard military issue. And two identical bracelets. Stake turned one of them in his hands. They were of pale blue metal, but otherwise looked like the black ID bracelet that Gale had sent a soldier to give Stake upon his arrival at the base, and which Stake had declined wearing, not wanting his movements to be tracked. But Stake now opened this bracelet and clasped it on his right wrist. He wondered if he could use the little comp on his left wrist to interface with the bracelets and tap into their contents; they had to be programmed with information that would identify two of the three clones, whether Persia Barbour followed through with their rendezvous in two days or not.
He smiled, not without bitterness, to know unequivocally that Ami had been helping to obstruct his investigation all along. But he had finally come to that certainty even before he’d opened the specimen box, anyway – just as he was now one hundred percent certain that David Bright was not faking his dismay about Bluetown, and not intentionally responsible for its virus. He had to cut Ami some slack, though. She worked for Gale, and slept with Gale. And she no doubt hadn’t seen any great harm in keeping the authentic salvaged gear hidden – aside from standing in the way of locating Brian’s loved ones. Stake was sure she had studied the bracelets, probably even accessed their data. Which meant she might have known Brian was Lewton Barbour for some time now.
Stake had taken a chance about whether or not Bernard would also be aware of the gear, but he was Ami’s assistant, after all. If it had turned out that Bernard didn’t know about it, Stake would have had Ami stammer something about being even more befuddled from all the chaos than she’d thought, and to never mind – she’d tell him later.
The question now was what to do with the gear. He wanted to give Henderson a look at it, but he didn’t dare keep it long. When Bernard saw Ami in the lab tomorrow, he would very likely bring up the matter. Before then, Stake figured it best to have replaced it, especially should Gale come looking for it. He further decided that tonight, when he met Ami at the Cobalt Temple, he should admit to her what he’d done before Bernard could talk to her. She wouldn’t like it, but he suspected she was less in sympathy with Gale lately than she had been before. Stake would treat her to an extra nice dinner. Afterwards, maybe a drink or two as they watched a little karaoke in the bar off the lobby. Maybe they could even splurge on a room in the hotel for a single night. Stake just hoped they didn’t run into Bright, lest he launch into another rant about Argos.
Stake used his wrist comp to take still shots of every item, and then he replaced them in the container. All except the bracelet secured to his right wrist – he was hesitant to return it. Might he compromise, and hang onto just this one piece so he could show it to Rick, and so that he might peek into it or even copy its contents into his wrist comp?
Stake kept the bracelet on after all, on impulse more than anything else, and called Bernard again – remembering at the last moment to activate the disrupting scanner again and return his cap to his head. What would Bernard have thought of Ami with short, bristly dark hair?
“Cutie, sorry to bother you, but could you come back here to take this stuff and put it away agai
n for the night? We’ve had our look, and now we’re heading out for the Cobalt Temple.”
“So how much did you tell your friend?” Bernard asked, sounding a little jealous. Why shouldn’t he be in love with the lovely but lonely Ami like everyone else?
Stake as Ami gave Bernard a mischievous smile. “Sometimes I wonder how much you know, Bernard. Maybe you’ve learned some things that even I haven’t.”
“What? I know next to nothing. You won’t tell me, so who else is going to?”
“Well, I don’t want to underestimate you. You’re such an inquisitive little boy.” So, it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort to dig the young tech about Wonky Science. Stake’s meeting with Persia Barbour would be soon enough. In the meantime, he’d be late if he didn’t hurry, and he needed to lose his date’s appearance before he got there.
At least, until he was in bed with her at the hotel, and mirrored her face again. When all other sorts of love failed, people could at least love themselves. Try to, anyway.
TWENTY: SMOKE
At the entrance to the Cobalt Temple’s lounge, a stunning Jin Haa hostess – taller and curvier than was typical, though the curves might have been surgically enhanced – smiled at Stake as he stepped out of the hotel’s restaurant in order to take a call on his wrist comp. He did not smile back at her, lest he further anger Ami Pattaya, who was angry enough after what he had revealed to her over dinner. It looked like they wouldn’t be sharing a hotel room tonight, after all.
It was Rick Henderson, calling Stake back. After Stake had requested the check, he had phoned Henderson and left a message, asking him to meet him at the Cobalt Temple to hear about the latest development in the case. Better there, in the event that there might be people listening in on them at the CF headquarters. Henderson told Stake he was on his way, would be there in a few minutes. Stake lowered his arm and turned toward Ami, taking her by the elbow to guide her over to a white leather love seat discreetly screened by the fronds of potted blue plants, away from the hostess and the karaoke blasting out of the bar. Easily as striking as the hostess in a similarly clingy dress, the science chief plunked herself down, arms crossed, pouting like a sulky child.
“Rick is going to hear it from me,” she fumed. “He’s as at fault in this as you are, for hiring you in the first place and letting you use your unethical methods.”
Stake settled beside her. “Was it ethical to deceive him, a Colonial Forces officer in charge of an investigation, by keeping vital information a secret?”
“I was following the orders of a senior Colonial Forces officer.”
“You act like you care about Brian, but all this time you knew the truth about him.”
“What benefit is it, really, to reunite a five-year-old child with his forty-year-old wife? What’s she going to do, adopt her husband? He doesn’t know her. He’d benefit just as much from being adopted by a caring stranger. So don’t you dare make it sound like I don’t care about that boy!”
“Was there anything in the two ID bracelets besides personal information? Anything about why they were teleporting to Sinan?”
“Aside from the identification data for Lewton Barbour and another person named Kiyoshi Nihei, they were mostly transmitters, for the teleportation scans to home in on when it was time to bring them back again. The transmissions were extremely powerful, as I guess they’d have to be to beam back to the source of the teleportation. Not that it’s such a big deal now, when we can send vidphone calls back and forth from Oasis to Sinan like it’s just the planet next door.”
“But nothing about the nature of the mission?”
“I suppose these Wonky scientists just wanted to develop a new process for extradimensional teleportation, like that Leung guy told you, right? So we wouldn’t have to be so dependent on the technology of the Bedbugs.”
“Ami, I’ve had another episode with the bender poison, but in the first one I saw Brian and he said something like, ‘he wears the singing bracelet.’ I think that’s significant.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, it was a covert type of project, you know, so the data was encrypted; I suppose in case they got captured by the locals or whatever. The encryption’s been hard to crack, but it also appears to be corrupted – either through time, or maybe even corrupted during the teleportation process. So there could be more on the bracelets, but there’s also the matter of the third one. Assuming, as I think we must, that all three people who teleported were wearing these things, we’re still missing one of them.”
“The Ha Jiin did the initial excavation of the pits, but they’ve let our people look some more, correct?”
“Yes, and the ground was scanned pretty carefully, Jeremy. But a lot of time had gone by. The smart matter might have dragged some of this stuff along as it advanced, displacing it widely. Or animals could have dismembered the bodies, taking more bits of gear and the missing bracelet along with them. They may even have been stripped of weapons and equipment, if some Ha Jiin people encountered them. We don’t know if they arrived dead, or were killed once they got there.”
“Has Argos been asked to try to read the bracelets?”
“Yes. He’s the one who came in and helped me get out of them as much as I have. But he said it was another of the Wonky people who programmed the bracelets, and she’d be more adept at sorting them out.”
“She? Would that be Barbour’s wife, Persia?”
“Yes. And I don’t know, but listening to Argos it sounds like she hasn’t wanted to become involved.”
Stake didn’t trust Ami enough to tell her about the meeting in Punktown he had planned with Lewton Barbour’s widow. He hated not trusting her. It was why he had resisted believing she was involved in matters to this extent – a critical failing on his part. Not prudent, not professional. Still, he liked her, and not just the crossed legs exposed by the provocative dress she had chosen for their date. At another time...if he hadn’t again encountered Thi Gonh...who could say what he might have felt toward her?
Ami sat up and craned her neck, gazing toward the lobby’s front wall of glass, facing out upon one of Di Noon’s more upscale streets, dazzling with the light of night traffic. “Is that them?” she asked. “I think a CF vehicle just pulled up.”
Stake rose from the love seat. “Come on,” he said, heading across the expansive lobby for the front doors. There were two conventional doors flanking two revolving doors in the center. As Stake strode toward them, he could see that Ami was right: a pair of soldiers in camouflage had climbed out of a CF helicar along with Captain Rick Henderson. The Harbinger lifted out of sight, so that the driver might park it elsewhere, while Henderson and his bodyguards headed for the doors themselves. Through the glass, Henderson spotted Stake and waved. And through the glass, Stake saw a large thin animal come bounding out of the darkness. A second dog-like creature leaped onto the hood of a hoverlimo idling at the curb, and then launched itself into the air.
“Jesus,” Stake hissed, recognizing the animals at once, but it was Ami who said it first.
“Snipes!” she cried.
The first snipe, skeletal and hairless, a cadaverous blue, sprang onto one of the two bodyguards from behind, turning its head sideways to clamp its jaws on the back of his neck. He went down with the creature atop him. The man was carrying a Sturm AE-93 assault engine, but it was pinned under his own weight.
Stake bolted. It was relatively cool tonight and he wore an open button-up shirt over his t-shirt. Hidden by the outer shirt’s tail, tucked into the rear of his waistband, was the scan-resistant pistol Thi had given him. As he moved, he pulled the gun out of hiding.
While the first snipe shook its head madly from side to side, jaws still locked on the back of the downed soldier’s neck, Henderson wheeled around and was able to draw his own holstered pistol a moment before the dog that had leapt from the limo’s hood hurled itself into his arms. Together, they fell backwards into one of the two automated revolving doors.
Stake saw a thi
rd snipe appear on the broad sidewalk outside the hotel. It had seemed to crawl out from under another hoverlimo with opaque windows that was stopped in the street. Then he noticed a door of the limo was partly open, and a fourth snipe slipped directly out of the luxury vehicle, hit the pavement with its red-glowing eyes already fixed on Henderson’s second bodyguard, who had also whipped around to confront the attack. Before the car door closed, and with the snipe out of the way, Stake caught a glimpse of shimmering orange silk within.
He had planned to rush outside, but skidded to a stop and turned toward the revolving doors, in which Henderson had become trapped with one of the eerie blue canines. He had to have dropped his pistol, because he had the animal’s scrawny throat in both hands, not so much trying to strangle it as hold the snapping jaws away from him, but the creature was thrashing violently and Stake didn’t know how much longer Henderson could maintain his grip on it before it grabbed the captain by the throat instead. Flecks of blood had spattered the glass of the revolving doors, and snipe blood was neither red nor liquid once it hit the air.
The second bodyguard had decided on his assault engine’s shotgun mode, and a blast from it sent the third snipe flying back through the air, folded and broken. A cloud of black smoke bloomed, and more smoke streamed from the shattered body that hit the sidewalk. Snipe blood when exposed to air was not unlike sinon gas, but was more like the black wisps from a Sinanese person’s heart when riven. A haze spread like a spurt of octopus ink unfurling underwater.
The soldier didn’t get off a second shot, however, before the fourth snipe threw itself onto him, fastening its jaws on his face. Man and dog barreled into one of the conventional doors with such momentum that they both crashed to the floor of the lobby beyond. Muffled, hysterical cries as the man tried to scream. The snipe did not make a sound, not even a growl, silent as an avenging ghost.
Henderson and the snipe he’d been holding off had spilled out of the revolving door together. Somehow the captain managed to remain on his feet, even though the snipe had latched itself onto one of his forearms and snapped its whole body like a whip as it tore into it. The snipe had already badly clawed his arms and neck with its forepaws and kicked at him with its lower legs, ripping his clothing and flesh. Under such an attack, he had no longer been able to hold onto the thing’s neck.
Blue War: A Punktown Novel Page 24