A short distance away, Stake stopped, braced his whole body, and fired two quick shots from the pistol’s clip of solid rounds. The bullets hit the creature in its chest, black smoke puffing from two neat holes. The snipe released Henderson at last and flopped wildly on the floor like a fish out of water. Even so, its jaws still gripped the man’s severed left hand.
This time Stake aimed at the head. His first shot missed, whined off the floor, due to the animal’s convulsions, but his third and fourth bullets hit it in the shoulder and temple respectively and the snipe went still, its jaws widening impossibly in death and giving one last quiver. Finally, the captain’s hand had dropped free.
Outside, the first snipe raised its head from the neck of the soldier who’d gone down on his face. He wasn’t moving. The snipe’s muzzle right up to its eyes was slathered in dripping blood. It curled its lips at Stake.
Henderson, weaving dazedly, compressing his left wrist with his right hand, looked over at Ami and cried, “Don’t!”
In being driven through one of the side doors, the other bodyguard had lost hold of his Sturm and it had skittered across the lobby’s marble floor. Ami had darted forward to retrieve it. Hearing Henderson’s cry, the snipe that had hold of the soldier’s face lifted its eyes to the officer. Then it was letting go of the dying man, and lunging.
Stake whirled toward the animal, but Ami had deftly scooped up the gun, raised and discharged it in one motion. Thunder and recoil; she was almost blown off her high heels. The buckshot caught the snipe in the hindquarters, so that it hit the floor and skidded toward Henderson, giving off a weird, piercing howl of agony and rage. Stake followed it with his pistol and fired three times. By the time the snipe had come to a stop, it was dead and largely obscured in whorls of noxious black gas.
Stake looked to Ami in surprise. Army brat, he thought.
He looked back toward the first snipe, but it was gone, its victim’s blood pooling across the sidewalk. The hotel had a uniformed Jin Haa doorman, whom the snipes had oddly overlooked. He knelt by the body, while pedestrians timidly hung back at a distance.
Henderson slumped, crumpled. Stake saw him just as he fell, rushed to catch him too late. The captain hit the marble hard. While hunkered down beside his friend, now compressing the man’s wrist himself to staunch the heavy flow of blood, Stake heard the clatter of nails on the floor behind him. Jerking around, he realized too late that the first snipe had not run off into the night. It had entered one of the revolving doors, below the level of its glass, and was now inside the lobby. Now charging toward Ami Pattaya... leaping into the air, jaws already spread wide like those of a striking snake.
It caught her by the throat, and her eyes went wide. They locked with Stake’s eyes for one terrible second of shared comprehension. Her finger contracted on the assault engine’s trigger and a burst of shotgun pellets shattered a basin holding huge glossy fronds. She dropped the bulky weapon after that. She dropped, too. Stake couldn’t see her face, only her spasmodic legs as the snipe braced itself over her, shaking its head side to side. One of her pretty shoes was kicked off.
Stake let go of his friend’s arm to aim his pistol with both hands, and fired. He hit the animal high enough in the back that the bullet would hopefully not pass through and hit Ami, unless it should be deflected off bone. The snipe released her to raise its head with a howl. The next slug struck it in the eye and punched out the other side of its head. With black smoke billowing out both eye sockets, the snipe flopped to one side and Stake was rushing to the small brown woman, who lay spread-eagled on the cold marble. Unmoving.
He crouched low, a hand flat on her belly. Her eyes were still wide, as if frozen in that moment of comprehension, but they no longer locked with Stake’s. Blood poured from her savaged, gaping throat.
Stake glanced toward the front windows. The limo at the curb was still there, but the one that had stopped in the street was gone.
The doorman darted over, came to a stop above Stake. Numbly, the detective looked up at the Jin Haa and said, “Call the Colonial Forces base. Colonel Dominic Gale.”
Then he looked down at Ami again, and realized he was holding her hand.
***
Stake was sitting on the love seat where he had sat with Ami not an hour before, cupping his head in both hands, when Colonel Gale finally came striding over to talk to him alone. Lifting his head, Stake saw that Gale’s hands were stained in Ami Pattaya’s blood, as were his own. And shouldn’t that be the case, he thought? Hadn’t they both involved her to the point of putting her in the direct path of danger?
Before Stake had half risen, Gale seized him by the front of his shirt, hoisted him to his feet, and threw him sideways to the floor. He didn’t resist, even when Gale brought his boot up into his gut.
“Colonel!” one of his men said, starting forward, but Gale gave him a look that stopped him in his tracks.
Gale reached down to where Stake had openly left his gun on the cushion beside him, plucked it up and turned it in his fist. “Nice piece, Stake. And illegal as all fuck. Have you had this on my base? Huh? I could put you in a cell for this!”
“I’m sorry about Ami,” Stake croaked, not looking up.
“What was she even doing here with you, huh?” The officer’s voice was shaking. “Yeah...don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. What an idiot that little whore was! Look where it got her!”
Through gritted teeth Stake said, “Snipes in the middle of Di Noon, Gale. What does that mean to you? They were a weapon. They came out of a big white hoverlimo. Someone was trying to kill one or all of us. Rick, Ami, me...”
“Terrorists, I know. They use the clerics to control the snipes.”
“Not terrorists, and not just any cleric. It was an assassination, and the cleric was Abbot Hoo.”
“Shut your mouth! You know what you’re saying? Hoo is a friend to the colonies – it’s because of him we can harvest sinon! You’ve caused enough trouble without talking that dung. Listen good, Stake. If your friend Henderson dies, too, then he won’t be able to protect you any more, will he? In the meantime, I’m keeping your gun, and you’re off the base for good, no matter if Henderson makes it or not. You’ll never set foot on it again, you fucking understand me?”
Stake lifted his head to watch as the colonel clomped way, then from under him he slid out his left arm, which he had not so much tucked there to protect his belly as to hide the blue bracelet he still wore around his wrist.
TWENTY-ONE: CROSSING OVER
Salem Street was a fairly intact remnant of the preexistent Choom town upon which the Earth colonists had superimposed Punktown, and so it retained the cobblestones and some of its brick architecture for a quaint, historical effect. Salem Street took the form of an open mall lined with upscale shops, always thronged with pedestrians but closed to vehicular traffic. Decorative trees were spaced along the sidewalks, and a fountain sprayed water into a pool upon which children floated seaworthy-looking pieces of trash.
Jeremy Stake sat on a bench, watching the children and remembering how mere days ago he had walked upon a blue-toned replica of these cobblestoned streets, bereft of all the people who poured into and out of the bright little shops. It was odd that instead of the Bluetown version seeming haunted and unnatural, now the original was the alien landscape, and these many people seemed to him like a population of ghosts. He felt invisible to them, an outsider, a mere observer, but one of the pedestrians detached herself from the crowd and approached him uncertainly.
“Are you...Mr. Stake?” she asked. She was a petite, attractive woman of about forty, with a small pale face and a luxuriance of thick dark curls. Sunglasses hid what Stake remembered as large dark eyes. She was expensively attired, and carried a shopping bag, though Stake took it to be a prop.
“Hello, Mrs. Barbour. Thanks for meeting with me.”
“If it wasn’t for that awful lime green shirt you said you’d be wearing, I wouldn’t have known you. Who are you suppose
d to look like now?”
“Marlon Brando, an actor from the twentieth century. The way he looked in a film called On the Waterfront. I like it a lot.” Stake didn’t elaborate that his face had even cleverly copied the way the character’s eyes were puffy with scar tissue from his boxing days, though it had only been makeup trickery in that ancient film – nothing like Stake’s own trickery. “I’ve been dying for a coffee but I wanted to wait until you got here.”
“Well – I’m here.” She glanced around nervously.
Stake rose. “Good. Let’s go over there.” He pointed to a café that a sign identified as Beantown. “It’s one of my friend Rick Henderson’s favorite coffee shops in the city.”
***
They sat at a little table in a corner. The atmosphere was warm and richly scented, as Punktown’s moneyed minority lined up at the counter to order expensive concoctions or browsed the gift displays. Over the sound system came a female singing in Arabic; Stake recognized it as a twenty-first century recording from Natacha Atlas. It was indeed an afternoon for ghosts from the past. The bass-heavy Middle-Eastern beat resonated in his chest.
“Why are you so afraid, Mrs. Barbour?” he asked her bluntly. “And of whom?”
“The government, of course – for one. The work we were doing for them would have caused some controversy had it come to light. But more than them, I’m concerned about another person I used to work with at Wonky Science. Another who survived the mishap.”
“Dink Argosax,” Stake said. “Or these days, Richard Argos.”
For a few seconds he couldn’t read her face, and she hadn’t removed her dark glasses, but her mouth was tight. “Tell me everything you know, Mr. Stake. Then I’ll do the same.”
He did so, culminating in the attack two days ago in the lobby of the Cobalt Temple. Hearing this part, Persia Barbour looked even more pale than before. She fidgeted with her now empty coffee mug, pushing it about with her fingertips like a planchette on a Ouija board. “I’m sure it was Hoo,” Stake said. “But Hoo acting on Argos’s behalf. When we spoke, Argos could see I’m standing on his tail, and Henderson made trouble by hiring me. Ami, well, she was either just in the wrong place or else that was Gale’s contribution – revenge on his unfaithful girlfriend for getting too close to me in more ways than one. But I don’t know if Gale is in quite that deep with Argos and Hoo, and he seemed genuinely shaken up by what happened, so if Ami was an intentional target then maybe it’s because Argos thought she looked too chummy with me and decided to eliminate her as a potential threat, too. But the question is, what is the exact threat we pose to him?”
“I’ll get to that, now that it’s my turn. But you see, Mr. Stake? This is why I was reluctant to speak with you before. Hearing this doesn’t surprise me; I’ve been wary of Dink for some time. Did you know that two years ago, his wife drowned when they were vacationing together? There was some suspicion about the circumstances at the time, but with Argos’s money the suspicions didn’t go far. His wife was the biotech heiress, Helene Camus. So he doesn’t just head Argos, now, but Camus Organics as well.”
“I think I’ve heard of it. What do they do there?”
“A lot of research and development for other companies, but they’ve also released a variety of encephalon computers, for instance, and a few types of organic nanomites. It’s all Dink’s, with her gone. And I guess you haven’t heard about Timothy, since you didn’t mention it.”
“Leung? Why – what do you mean?”
“His life support system crashed, and the attendants got to him too late. He’s dead.”
“Crashed.” Stake snorted and looked about the shop, as if in search of one person who might believe such a story. “After all these years on life support, and it just happens to fail now, only days after he talked with me?”
“It didn’t quite fail; they say his robot did something to it accidentally while making an adjustment, and shorted out the system. They can’t look into the robot’s memory, though, because it shorted out, too. Its brain was turned to mush.”
“How convenient.”
“Mm. Not to make you feel guilty, but I imagine after you revealed to Dink that you knew something about Wonky Science, he sent out feelers to find out how. He either learned that you talked with Timothy, by questioning staff at the complex he lived at, or else he just decided to do away with him whether you’d already talked to him or not. Looking at it now, I’m surprised Dink didn’t take me and Timothy out of the picture years ago, but then again, he’s been a happy man up until this Bluetown matter threatened his gas operation. Everything had been going his way. Now he’s...upset. And I know Dink. He’s obsessively competitive. He doesn’t like to lose.”
Stake massaged the center of his forehead with his fingers, as if rubbing sleep from a bleary third eye. “I saw it,” he muttered. “I saw Leung die.”
“What?”
He didn’t relate his vision, instead asked, “You say Camus produces organic computers? Argos’s bodyguards are robots with encephalon computers. Maybe he was able to reprogram the brain of Leung’s robot remotely, and ordered it to kill him. It had that type of system, itself.”
“God...I didn’t know all of that.”
“Look, you should go into hiding,” he told her. “Change your address.”
“I’m way ahead of you. I’m staying in Miniosis now.” It was Paxton’s sister city, not all that distant relatively speaking, an even greater megalopolis in size though not nearly as rundown and crime-infested.
“I wouldn’t rule out the government when it comes to dark deeds – I was part of some myself, when I was deep ops during the war – but I think this is all Argos. So now I want you to tell me why he feels he has to kill people over his past. What were your husband and the other two doing by teleporting to Sinan, Mrs. Barbour?”
“Well you know the background on Sinan, but let me go back to it anyway, because that’s where this starts.” So Persia skated over the history of the Earth Colonies’ relationship with the planet Sinan, discovered by the Theta Agency research program seventeen years earlier with the aid of Bedbug transdimensional technology. The first field agents to journey there, led by a top Theta agent named Hector Tomas, had met the citizenry of the Ha Jiin nation but had also ventured into an emerging, smaller nation peopled by the Jin Haa ethnic class. Cynical critics of the forthcoming Blue War would say they couldn’t tell the difference between the Ha Jiin and Jin Haa – they were reminded of the people Gulliver encountered, at war over which end of the egg to crack open – but the difference was crucial to the Earth Colonies. For one thing, the Ha Jiin tended to be religious conservatives, the Jin Haa generally more moderate. The Ha Jiin, wary and increasingly hostile toward the explorers, would not even permit Tomas’s team to look in one of their burial tunnels, but the Jin Haa did. Tomas was intrigued by the bluish gas that rolled through the tunnel networks, which the Jin Haa claimed to be the spirits of their ancestors. This gas appeared to possess some remarkable qualities; for one thing, it was used to light the lamps that illuminated the sepulchers. So Tomas’s crew gathered samples surreptitiously and brought them back with them when they returned to their own realm.
Shortly after this, the Earth Colonies government contracted Wonky Science.
“This is the part you don’t know,” Persia said. “Between the discovery of Sinan and the decision to support the Jin Haa.”
“I know this much,” Stake interrupted. “We wanted sinon gas, the Ha Jiin wouldn’t even consider it, but the Jin Haa gave us access because we agreed to back them in the war.”
“Before that,” Persia told him sternly. “Listen. Before the colonies took that route and backed the Jin Haa, there was another plan to develop sinon gas, and that involved Wonky Science. For one thing, the colonies wanted to get people there covertly, without the Bedbugs, without even the Theta branch, who are under public scrutiny. So that was the first project: transdimensional teleportation to Sinan.”
“When
it went wrong and your lab caught fire, you told the press that the teleportation had been a test to send your husband and the others to Earth, using some new method. But actually, you were successful. You got your husband’s team to Sinan. But how did they die there?”
“We never knew. I still don’t. I suspect they arrived dead, or I don’t think their bodies would have remained at that spot, unless natives discovered them there and buried them. But then, I don’t think they’d have left anything like that.” She pointed to the blue bracelet Stake wore on his wrist.
“What was the other part of the research, the project-within-a-project Leung hinted about?”
“That’s what involved sinon gas. The government was keen to have access to it, once they’d studied its properties. But they didn’t want to back a war to have it; not at first. When they realized it’s a byproduct of the decomposition of Sinanese bodies, they had another plan. Are you familiar with the word deadstock?”
“Very.”
“Then you know it pertains to bio-engineered animal forms, mass produced as meat products, and this was something like that. Only, this idea involved bringing back tissue samples from a broad variety of Jin Haa people, dead and alive, so that a kind of Jin Haa deadstock could be developed and cloned in large numbers.”
“You’re saying...you mean, so they could be killed? And allowed to rot, to produce sinon gas?”
“Yes.” Persia gave a sardonic smile. “Horrible, I know.”
“Would these things at least have been without heads, like animal deadstock?”
“Boneless, maybe, but not brainless; the gas requires not just the decomposition of flesh, but the internal organs and brain.”
Blue War: A Punktown Novel Page 25