Blue War: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “That’s for you,” Stake told him.

  His wrist comp announced another call. It wasn’t Thi: David Bright again. Muttering under his breath, this time Stake took it. As he had expected, the man was agitated to the point of implosion.

  “Jesus, man, where were you?”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Bright? I’m sort of in the middle of something.”

  “I’ll pay you to be in the middle of something else. Any price you ask.”

  “The middle of what?”

  “I need you as a bodyguard. I need you to spend the night here with me until I can teleport myself the hell out of here tomorrow.”

  “Your KeeZee isn’t bodyguard enough?”

  “He would be if he was here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a lady who works the lounge off the hotel lobby. Clean, classy – I’ve had her up here a few times before. I sent the KeeZee to go fetch her up here for me. That was almost two hours ago. That isn’t like him at all. He wouldn’t run out on me – he’s a KeeZee. They’re loyal as dogs.”

  “You think someone intercepted him?”

  “To leave me defenseless in here, yes!” he hissed. “A little while ago someone tried to come in to bring me new towels but I wouldn’t let them in. They want to kill me, Stake!”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “Argos! Don’t you get it, detective? The attack here at the Cobalt Temple, that got those people killed and Captain Henderson wounded? You think that attack was meant for you? How did they know you’d be here at that time? No – those snipes were sent for me! They knew I was staying here! But when they saw you, the people who brought those things made a last minute change of plan, to take out you and your friends instead.”

  “What makes you think it was Argos behind that?” It wasn’t at all that Stake doubted him, only that he wanted to know how Bright had come to the same conclusion he had.

  “He has Gale in his pocket! The whole of the Colonial Forces and the embassy besides! Their presence here is all about sinon gas, isn’t it? And my operation has put their operation in peril. I’ve been making too much fuss, and now they want to shut me down and shut me up!”

  “Look, Mr. Bright, I understand how desperate you must feel, but I’m honestly so deep in my own dung right now that there’s nothing I can do. Not at this moment, anyway. I suggest you sit tight and try to get through to Margaret Valsalva – tell her you’re afraid of another terrorist attack and insist on being given asylum at the embassy. If you take it to her like that, she’ll have to act on it. The safest place for you to be right now might be in the heart of enemy territory, if you catch my meaning.”

  “I catch it, but I don’t buy it. Valsalva is only here because of sinon gas, too. All of them.”

  “I don’t know what else to say. My mind is a blur right now and –”

  “Oh, blast you, Stake. Blast everybody! I’m on my own, totally on my own, the leper of Sinan. I thought maybe we could help each other stay afloat in the shit, but now I guess I’ll be seeing you at the bottom of the pond.” Bright signed off.

  Stake sighed. “Fuck.” Then he glanced over at Brian. “Sorry.” But the boy was oblivious, seemed pacified by the badge he clung to as he watched the approach of the mammoth blue city as if in anticipation of coming home.

  ***

  Fortunately the rain didn’t begin until Stake was well within Bluetown. He pulled the bike over to fashion a hooded parka for Brian of Dr. Laloo’s lab coat before continuing on. By the time Thi called him again, darkness had fallen and the rain had gone from steady to downpour. She described a distinctive bridge to him, asked him if he knew it. Of course he did; it was the Obsidian Street Overpass. The original was an enclosed bridge based on a Ramon design and built of sturdy, black lacquered wood. Not only did vehicles swarm beneath its roof, but packed along its pedestrian walkway was a miniature shanty town of homeless shelters thrown together from every sort of scrap and material conceivable. Its replica, of course, was blue in color and devoid of both traffic and this amalgamation of shacks, tents and lean-tos. In this part of the city, two levels of elevated highway curved and crossed above the streets below. Stake rode an exit ramp up one of these highways, and pulled his bike into the cavernous shelter of the covered bridge.

  He didn’t venture deeply into the tunnel, wary of its utter darkness, kept the bike near the mouth of the bridge. The rain was now of monsoon strength, blasting the roof above them like a fusillade loosed from a fleet of helicraft. His clothes were soaked and plastered to his skin, and even in this tropical climate he shivered. Despite his parka, Brian wasn’t much better off. He was wet, tired, hungry, whiny and reluctant to remain boxed in the side car. Stake wrung his hair out as best he could, talking to the child to soothe him. Who was going to soothe him, though? He heard an odd distant cry, and knew it was a hunting snipe calling out to another one in the street below the bridge.

  Every surface of Bluetown had a porous look, and it seemed the city-in-the-making soaked up both darkness and rain, so that its presence weighed more heavily around Stake than it did in the daylight. Though he could see much less of it, it felt all the huger in the blackness, crushing him with its swollen presence. It was easy for him to imagine this was a coral city resting at the bottom of a deep sea canyon, and he was drowning slowly in the heart of it.

  Scattered here and there in the city, at street level but also in high windows, he saw tiny orange embers of light that he knew must be the campfires and lanterns of refugees. A fleeting but bolder source of light came in lightning flashes like the burst of distant bombs, that blended the silhouettes of buildings with those of the shaggy and frayed heads of tropical trees – as if the trees grew within the streets themselves, had overtaken a city of decaying ruins. Stake envisioned such a city so clearly that he couldn’t tell if it were solely his imagination or the bender poison at work. He saw a city reclaimed by the forests that it had consumed to come into existence. He saw streets carpeted in moss that thrived in the shadows of skyscrapers with fronds bursting out of their windows like greenhouses run wild. Nets of lianas covered the faces of some structures in feathered leaves, wooly vines like cables were draped from buildings to bridges, from bridges to traffic signal poles. Was it a premonition of what the city would look like once it stopped growing? He found comfort in the thought that, whether Bluetown reached full size or not, the jungle might have its revenge yet.

  Another detonation of thunder, this one directly overhead, made Brian begin to cry and become even more agitated. Stake had an idea, and the soft light of his wrist comp came on. He found an image of Ami Pattaya in its memory, and studied it closely. He felt the almost subliminal whisper of his cells as they shuffled, realigned, seemed to shrink or expand. When he sensed the transformation was sufficient, he turned on the headlight of the bike, which he had kept off before to avoid attracting unwanted attention. He moved into the light and squatted down so Brian could see him, worrying that the alteration of his features might frighten rather than calm the child.

  Brian sobbed and held his arms out, fingers reaching. Stake stood up, lifted the boy into his arms. He clung to Stake like an orphaned monkey, whimpered in the crook of his neck. Stake patted his back and rocked him side to side, not speaking so as not to break the illusion with his voice.

  He didn’t hear them come up behind him until they were only steps away. They had entered from the other end of the bridge, Stake realized as he whipped around. He sucked in his breath, thinking it was a pack of snipes. Three black shapes in glistening camouflaged parkas, the brief flicker of eyes floating red against black. Now that their presence was known to him, the figures moved closer until they came into the light thrown by the hoverbike’s headlamp – revealing themselves to be Thi Gonh and two other Ha Jiin women.

  Stake recognized one of the women to be the tall, willowy teenager with sweet eyes who had sat with Thi outside the doctor’s office after Thi’s beating. Her niece T
wi, Stake recalled, and he remembered Thi had said she was teaching the girl to shoot like her aunt, so as to defend livestock from the attack of benders and other predators. In fact, the girl held a sniper rifle in her arms, as did the third woman, older than Thi and thickset, with her hair cut short under the hood of her parka. Thi had one of these rifles slung across her back, herself. Stake knew it as a Kalian model called a Whistler, black and with a mean, almost organic wasp-like look. Their aluminum-coated depleted uranium bullets blew through their victims with such force that the air was said to whistle through the tunnels they left.

  Thi was smiling as she took in Stake cradling the boy in his arms, Brian looking up at the newcomers sleepily. She stepped closer and cupped Stake’s transfigured face. “Beautiful,” she said.

  Stake turned his face into her palm and kissed it before she withdrew her hand. He didn’t care what the other two women thought of this, but he saw them smile shyly. Thi turned to sweep her arm toward the eldest of the three. “Older sister, Yha.”

  “Older sister? Oh!” Stake said, and nodded his head in respect. With Thi’s uncle calling the shots in the family, Stake hadn’t expected Thi to have so close a blood relation still living. Then again, the uncle was a man and Yha was not. Yha bore a resemblance to Thi, now that he looked at her again, but was maybe ten to fifteen years older, her eyes and mouth gentle but also hardened around the edges. The woman nodded back at him.

  “Sister is mother of Twi,” Thi went on. “Farm of sister gone, too. Sister and Twi live in Blue City now.”

  “Really? Oh God, that’s terrible. Why hasn’t your uncle or Nhot taken them in, too?”

  “Sister hate uncle and Nhot.”

  “Well, can’t blame her for that.”

  “Sister need money from Ga Noh, a little,” Thi said in a lower voice, looking embarrassed to ask.

  “Well, sure, but I don’t have much to spare.”

  “Two-hundred munits? Very much for her.”

  “Oh, okay, that works.” He dug out his wallet and counted off two-hundred colonial munits, handed them over. Yha examined each bill in the light as if he might be trying to pass off counterfeits, but at last she slipped them into a pocket and smiled at him. They exchanged nods again.

  “Sister fight in war like me, a little,” Thi explained. “Take care of baby very good.”

  “Right now he needs food and sleep.”

  Thi said something to Twi, who leaned her weapon against the bike to come forward and accept the boy into her slender arms. She bent back with the effort, but Brian wrapped his limbs around her, perhaps swayed by her soft beauty, laying his cheek against a stream of hair as long and black as Ami’s had been.

  “You stay with sister too, Ga Noh?”

  “No. I’d like to, especially to keep off Jin Haa land, but it’s not a good idea. These bracelets are tracking devices.” He indicated the pale blue band around his wrist. “I don’t know if they’ve cracked enough of their code to be able to trace them remotely – and since they can’t find the third one, I’m assuming they haven’t – but I don’t want to take the chance of leading the Colonial Forces straight to Brian. I’m not sure, but I might head back to Di Noon and try to get Henderson on my side until Brian’s family can get here to claim him.”

  Thi gazed off into the torrents, which were lessening in severity as the storm plodded onward. “I go home soon, before husband too angry. Husband understand I am with sister, but no like my sister.”

  “Are you on foot? Is your sister camped far from here?”

  “Maybe good I not say. Maybe soldiers hurt you, make you say where baby is.”

  “Torture me? They wouldn’t, but yeah, they might truth scan me, so I guess it is better if I don’t know exactly where Brian is.” Stake stepped close to her, wanting to touch her, wanting to put his arms around her, but mindful of the two women watching. “Are you okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Stake asked her what she had told her husband she was doing out tonight, and she explained that she had said she was bringing supplies to her sister in the Blue City. Would he try to follow her? She laughed. At night, in the rain, with the city stalked by snipes and benders? “Right,” he said, “only crazy people would be out here now.” They smiled at each other. The moment was broken by a call on his wrist comp. Bright, again? Or maybe even Gale, with accusations and threats? By now there must have been a search underway for Brian, the bracelets – for a Dr. Laloo look-alike who could only be the mutant Jeremy Stake. Stake had blocked calls from the Colonial Forces base, to prevent his wrist comp and thus himself from being tracked and located, but there were always ways around such measures. Unless Stake wanted to block all calls, except for those from a few certain people, all Gale had to do was call him from a phone outside the base’s frequency.

  But he saw that it was Hin Yengun, and when he let the call through the security captain skipped the greetings and got straight to business. “I’ve found the third one,” he said cryptically.

  “Ah! Fantastic! God, that was quick!”

  “Well there is a complication. It’s not in my possession – I still need to go and retrieve it. I will tell you more later, but right now I request that you accompany me. I don’t want to involve any of my men in this, but I would like someone as a second pair of eyes.”

  “Gladly. I’m already in Bluetown; I can meet you at the place where the clones were found.”

  “All right, then, in an hour.”

  “In case we’re being monitored, if you see anyone other than me there, turn away.”

  “First of all, I’m an officer of national security. I would like to see your people try to harass me on Ha Jiin land. Secondly, with your gifts, Mr. Stake, how would I know if it was you or a stranger, anyway?”

  “Point taken, but I’ll try to be myself for the occasion.”

  They broke off, but just as Stake began to turn back toward Thi another call came in. With a grumble of irritation, he saw that this time it was indeed David Bright. Given Bright’s agitation, he felt too guilty about ignoring him, so he let the businessman through. “Stake,” he sighed.

  The image on Stake’s miniature screen was tipped at a giddy angle. Confused, he leaned in and allowed himself to engage with the device so that it linked directly with his brain, the screen opening up to fill his mind’s eye. It became immediately apparent that Bright’s tabletop computer had tumbled to the carpeted floor of his hotel room. Stake saw the leg of a chair, the corner of a bed. And there was a sound, something between a dry wheeze and a liquid gargling. He knew, even before he saw red-smeared fingers dragging an arm into the frame, that he was listening to the aspiration of blood.

  “Bright!” Stake called out.

  But the fingers stopped their laborious crawl through the carpet’s lush fibers. And a moment later, the wheezing sound had stopped, too.

  TWENTY-FOUR: ANALOGS

  Stake wished they could have agreed on another place to meet than the facsimile of Wonky Science, where people from the Colonial Forces base might think to look for him, but it had been easy to suggest the location where he and Yengun had met previously. It was a place they both seemed drawn to, unable to avoid, as if they had been bound there as surely as the remains of Lewton Barbour’s expedition.

  So Stake was wary of the vehicle that approached along an otherwise barren street, its headlights causing the diminishing rain to sparkle in their beams, until he recognized the military vehicle with oversized wheels that had transported Hin Yengun the first time he’d met him. When it pulled up alongside, Yengun gestured for Stake to bring the hoverbike around back so they could hoist it aboard rather than leave it at risk from refugees. Yengun barked at a man who had ridden beside him to help with the bike. This man wore a short-sleeved shirt left unbuttoned to reveal his thin, almost concave chest, and had a wad of stained gauze taped over one ear. With an unenthusiastic expression, he jumped down from the vehicle to lend a hand. Stake said to Yengun, “I thought I was going t
o be your second set of eyes.”

  “This gentleman is named Honrei. You may call him Henry, if you like; it’s what he likes, and he speaks English well. Henry has been to this building before. In fact, he is one of the men that my commander gathered to drain and excavate the three holes the clones took form in.”

  “And so I take it Henry found something? Something he didn’t mention earlier?”

  “He mentioned it, but only to his boss – a man known as Don Tengu.”

  Henry glanced up at the name, looking more miserable than ever. They had the bike stowed now and climbed aboard Yengun’s vehicle to take seats. “I’ve heard of Don Tengu,” Stake said. “He runs a major black market operation.”

  Yengun put them in motion, his eyes cutting into the night as intensely as the headlights. “It embarrasses me, as an officer in service to my country, that my commander is very...shall I say, lax about Don Tengu’s movements across the Neutral Zone. It disgraces all of us in national security – disgraces my people. I’ve been too lax, myself, in not having reported my commander’s activities or opposed him before. Now, it infuriates me to think he handed this job over to a team of men on Tengu’s payroll, and that this might have prevented the Blue City from being halted sooner.”

  “Captain,” Stake goaded him gently, “tell me what this guy did with the bracelet.”

  “What did you do with it, Henry?” Yengun snapped. Stake took in the bloodied bandage over Henry’s ear again. Stake admired the captain, but this and Gale’s experiences as a captive during the war reminded him why he had always been ready to put a round through his own head before letting himself be captured by the enemy.

  “I gave it to Don Tengu,” Henry grumbled. “I didn’t think it was much!”