“It’s the real gear that was found at the dig, not the bogus stuff Gale showed you, and it might put a stop to Bluetown if it’s in the right hands.”
“It was in the right hands! Do you think the Earth Colonies and Colonial Forces don’t want to see Bluetown stopped as much as you and I?”
“They do, but they’re at cross purposes with themselves by trying to keep the past buried. You’re not in their confidence, Rick. It’s not me you should be screaming at, but them.”
“Well right now I choose to scream at you!”
“Hold that thought for a second. You’re at the Cobalt Temple. So that means you must know what happened to Bright.”
“And so how do you know something happened to Bright?”
“He tried to call me but died before he could speak.”
“I’m surprised he could even manage to do that, from the shape he was in. So you knew about him, and you were going to let the authorities know about it...when?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“I can see that!”
“So how did Bright die, Rick?”
“His KeeZee tore him to pieces, that’s how. Bright managed to shoot the thing, but the damage was done.”
“His KeeZee? He’d called me earlier and told me his KeeZee had gone missing for two hours.”
“Well, I guess it came back to attack him, then.”
“Attack him why?”
“Paid to do so. You know how many people wanted to see harm come to Bright. Jin Haa and Ha Jiin alike!”
“And not just them, but our own people, Rick. I have in mind one very vindictive person in particular. I doubt the KeeZee did that to him. I’ll bet if an autopsy was done on the KeeZee, you’d see he died hours before Bright, and then his body was brought back to Bright’s room.”
“And who brought that giant fucking corpse back to Bright’s room, then – room service?”
“I don’t know how it was accomplished, but Bright trusted the KeeZee. You know how loyal they are. That’s why people use them for security. That’s why the KeeZee had to be taken out before anyone could get close to Bright. Jesus, Rick, next you’ll be telling me you think it was terrorists behind the snipe attack on you and me.”
“So who do you think was behind it?”
Stake sighed, feeling more weary than ever. “I think we’ve said enough for the moment.”
“We haven’t even begun to talk about this, Jeremy!”
“You’re right, but I have to go now.” Behind the controls, Yengun was nodding and pointing down the narrow, puddled street ahead of them. They were nearing their destination.
“Jeremy, you listen...”
“Sorry, captain, but I guess I’ve gone AWOL.”
Stake broke the connection, and Hin Yengun pulled to a stop in front of a house that wasn’t much bigger than the burly vehicle, surrounded by a wall. Decorative bits of colored glass were embedded in its concrete, and along the top, the bases of broken bottles were set like jagged fangs.
“This is my home,” the Ha Jiin said.
***
They had been quiet, hoping not to wake Yengun’s two young sons at this early morning hour, but finally his wife shuffled into the kitchen in faded flowered pajamas, her long hair in disarray around her face. She was no doubt surprised to see the two men going through her makeup supplies at the kitchen table, but Stake was surprised, too. He nodded to the woman awkwardly. She, in turn, looked uneasy not only to find a man of Earth blood in her home, but about how she must appear to him.
The left side of the woman’s delicate face looked like wax that had melted only to solidify again. Her left hand was missing at the wrist, as well, ending in a withered stump.
To break the moment, Yengun said something to her in their language and she turned away, busied herself. “I told her to make us a little meal,” Yengun explained. “She doesn’t speak English.”
“I see.”
Yengun raised his eyes to him. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re remembering that I told you my wife is very beautiful. I tell everyone my wife is beautiful, because it is true. She is beautiful in my memory...but not only that. The other half of her face – I challenge any woman to match its beauty with the whole of her face. And her smooth body, under my hands, is a marvel from the gods. She is like my nation: damaged by war, but its beauty persisting.”
“It happened in the war?”
“Of course. She was spattered by a shell from a plasma mortar.”
“Was it fired by the Jin Haa, or Colonial Forces?”
Yengun’s eyes narrowed to knife points. “Will it ease your guilt if I tell you it was the Jin Haa?”
Stake might have said to the man that there were many Jin Haa women who had been wounded in the war, as well – but then, they weren’t this man’s beloved wife. Now, at last he understood the half scar on one of Yengun’s cheeks. A full length ritual scar would indicate the loss of a loved one. This one, abbreviated, appropriately signified a lesser if still permanent kind of damage. “I’m sorry,” Stake said.
“I’m not asking you to apologize.” Yengun returned to picking through the makeup items, but Stake could see he was still seething. That he was ever seething at the harm that had come to his woman, even after these long years.
She set plates of fruit and cups of chilled water in front of them, then sat at the table herself. Stake smiled across at her while he said to Yengun, “I told you a little about my family when I first met you, but I didn’t tell you my mother was a mutation. She had her own disfigurements. But my father, who was not a mutant, would always tell her she was beautiful, too.”
The wife made an inarticulate cry and turned her face away, squeezing shut her good eye. Yengun looked first to her, then to Stake. “Please!” he said.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” Stake said, turning away as well. He touched the left side of his face, felt the skin there, hard and twisted as if with thick scar tissue. “I’m so sorry.”
But Yengun murmured, “I understand. You were empathizing with her.” He had leaned over to stroke the back of his wife’s head. He spoke in his native tongue, and Stake heard the term “Ga Noh.”
“Please ask her to forgive me for stealing her foundation,” Stake said, holding up a jar of the blue pigment she used to cover the discolorations of her scars. “I promise not to use her eyeliner.”
Yengun translated to his wife. She still kept her face averted shyly, but Stake heard her titter.
He unscrewed the lid of the jar, smelled the familiar scent of the foundation he had used many times during the war, to tint his skin before assuming the appearance of a Ha Jiin in his deep penetration forays. He had never expected to use it again, to embark on another such foray, just as dangerous. It might cost him his life. But what else was there to do for a soldier who no longer had a war to fight in? And he was sure that Captain Hin Yengun felt the same.
***
The bottom level Ha Jiin gangster who called himself Henry was in different clothes and had apparently changed the bandage over his ear as well. It was without stains, but he cupped a hand against the side of his head anyway, moaning and staggering with agony. The two guards behind the gate watched him come, saw him slump against the bars and cling to them to keep from falling. One guard laughed and the other asked him a question in their language. All Henry did was groan in reply and slip a little further down the bars. The one who’d laughed came forward to unlock the gate.
Henry lurched inside a few steps, then dropped to his hands and knees between the two men. One of them said something in a mocking tone, and kicked him lightly in the thigh. No doubt they found it amusing that, after betraying their boss to the security captain, he would dare to come back here alone seeking asylum. No doubt they were urging him to get to his feet so that they might take him to see the boss himself.
Henry heard the barest cough of sound, followed quickly by another. He felt a wet mist across the back of his neck, and one of the two c
ollapsing guards fell against him on the way down. He pushed him off, and when the man hit the ground he saw that the guard was missing the front of his skull above his stunned eyes.
No longer evidencing signs of pain, Henry rose quickly to stand beside Hin Yengun, who had appeared from around the side of the metal wall and slipped through the open gate, wearing black clothing and carrying a pistol with an internal silencing feature. It was not his issued sidearm, but a Don Tengu special – untraceable – bought on the black market a few years back.
Wearing the face he’d borrowed from Henry and the makeup he’d borrowed from Yengun’s wife, Jeremy Stake looked again at the two dead guards and felt a twinge of revulsion, maybe even guilt. He had sneaked up on and killed his fair share of Ha Jiin soldiers in his deep ops forays, but the intervening eleven years had left him more changed than he’d realized. He tried to bear in mind that there was a bigger picture here. And he tried to keep in his head the image of that child – the living idol.
Drawing the pistol that Yengun had given him – a big Panzer automatic also with a silencing system – Stake helped drag the two bodies into the shadows of the wall. Yengun took the less bloody of the two men’s rain ponchos and slipped it on, in a hurried attempt at disguise for himself. Then, Yengun motioned for Stake to follow him toward the house, going not only on memory but on the detailed directions he had elicited from the real Henry.
Inside they sensed the house in slumber, as if the air were more humid and dense with the exhalations of sleeping men. Stake heard someone cough in a room nearby. They stole their way into a hallway, its various doorways covered by a variety of means: beaded curtains, velvet drapes, and – at its end – a heavy wooden door lacquered to match the furniture within Don Tengu’s private quarters. There was snoring behind a velvet curtain, and through one of the beaded curtains the murmur of a VT with volume turned low, its bluish light glowing in a darkened room. Stake hoped that those who’d been watching it, in whatever numbers, had all lapsed into drink-induced dreams.
Yengun met Stake’s eyes for a moment, and then tried the handle of Tengu’s door. It was unlocked. He eased the door open, slipped in like smoke, Stake’s Panzer nosing its way in behind the security officer.
The huge VT was still playing in here, too, though the sound was muted. This movie was a disk of Tikkihotto porn, in which one man, one woman and one transsexual lay with their three-dimensional bodies and worm-like eye tendrils entangled and writhing. The woman shifted around to pour her tendrils into the shemale’s mouth, while the man’s eyes started reaching for her presented posterior.
Stake eased the door shut behind him with a soft click.
Don Tengu lay in a pool of disheveled silk sheets, wearing only black silk boxer shorts. Against one wall of his chamber was a sort of three-sided crib that Stake had wondered about during his first visit, earlier tonight. Now, upon its velvet cushion he saw the living icon curled in sleep, still in his blue robes but with the tricorn hat removed from his shaven head. A wheeze came from deep within the child’s well of a face. Around one ankle he wore the blue metal data bracelet.
It would have been easier to just unclasp the bracelet, and if the child awoke in the process he wouldn’t be able to call out in alarm anyway. But both men had discussed this, and were in agreement: the child was coming with them. Turned over to a monastery, at least he could live the rest of his life among similar beings. Stake thought that was a somewhat better option than shooting the poor creature to relieve it of its miserable condition, but he knew he wasn’t capable of doing that anyway.
He moved toward its little bed, thinking to lift the child into his arms. Yengun was keeping his pistol trained on the dozing Tengu. Neither realized that the door to an adjacent bathroom had opened until they heard the shrill, startled cry behind them.
Yengun spun around to point his gun at the figure in the doorway, a nude little nymph, blue and smooth and barely male, with long sweaty hair hanging about its wide-eyed face. The ladyboy began backing into the bathroom again, holding up his hands and begging for his life in the Ha Jiin tongue.
Stake had taken his eyes off Tengu, and looked back to see him rolling off the side of the bed, landing on his feet in a clattering spill of video disks that he had knocked down in retrieving the Decimator .340 from atop their storage cabinet. Stake’s finger was microns away from depressing the trigger of his Panzer, and peripherally he saw Yengun jerking his gun back toward Tengu also, but the crime boss had extended his arm to aim the oversized revolver at the child in its crib. The boy had sat up on his cushion, startled awake, but turned his head from side to side blindly.
“I’ll kill him!” Tengu cried. “You want that, captain? Huh?”
“You won’t kill your good luck charm,” Yengun said with icy calm.
“We don’t want a big mess here,” Stake said. “Just let us take the boy and you can keep the damn gun.”
“Henry? What are you, an undercover cop?” Stake figured Tengu had learned the term “undercover cop” from the movies.
“I’m not Henry. It’s me, Jeremy Stake again.”
“What the blast?” Tengu snarled.
They heard the sound of the bathroom door snicking shut. Was there a phone in there that the ladyboy might use to awaken the others, or a weapon he might use to come blazing through the door? Neither Stake nor Yengun were inclined to take their guns off Tengu to go in there and find out.
Tengu was inching sideways closer to the crib. Yengun gave the child an order; Stake could tell by the way it turned its head suddenly in his direction and looked poised to stand up. But Tengu barked an order at it, too, and the child remained frozen, indecisive with uncomprehending fear.
“You want to die over this child and that blasting bracelet?” Stake said.
“You want to shoot me, huh? Go ahead and shoot me.” Tengu thumped his bare chest with his free hand, eyes wild and bulging. “But I hope I don’t get my blood on you. I have the gift that you demons have brought to my world – the plague that’s ravishing Sinan. Your new microscopic army, to kill those of us you didn’t exterminate with your soldiers! Yeah, that’s right, I’m full to the brim with your poisons! So is every one of my men, here, and all the boy toys we keep. I forgot to thank you for your present, Mr. Stake, when you visited me before!”
“If you weren’t afraid to die, you wouldn’t be using that child as a hostage,” Stake said.
“I just don’t like to lose, Mr. Stake!”
“That’s not true. You have something to live for...a cure. You know one will come along eventually, and with your money you can keep alive until it gets here.”
“If you kill the boy,” Yengun cut in, “we’ll just kill you and take the bracelet. We still win.”
Tengu was only a couple feet from the child, his muscled arm and the pistol’s long barrel unwavering. “Oh, captain, I have a lot to say to your commander about you. He’ll either boot you out of the service or shoot you himself!”
“He’s too much a coward to face off against me.”
“And are you brave enough to face off against all my men? If you kill me, you won’t get out of here alive.”
“Take a good look at our guns, Tengu. You should recognize their models; I bought them off one of your own dealers a while back. Both of them fire silently. Your men will go on dreaming of beautiful ladyboys while we’re well on our way home.”
“Am I to believe you’ll leave me here alive if I surrender to you?”
“We’re either going to tie you up and gag you – which you might even enjoy – or bring you along with us until we reach our vehicle, after which you are free to return here, unscathed except for your immense pride.”
“All right, look, I’ll strike a deal with you.” The .340’s muzzle was inches from the living idol’s head. “You take the trinket, but leave my lucky boy here with me.”
“Not a chance,” Stake said.
“How about I just shoot your precious trinket, then?” Te
ngu shifted his weapon to point at the child’s leg, half-folded under him.
“If that’s worth dying for.”
“I told you, I’m already dead!”
“Don’t play games with us!” Yengun snapped. “I’m telling you, we only want the child! We leave here, and you can go about your filthy operations with my commander’s blessings, as before!”
Slowly, Don Tengu turned to face the two men fully. Slowly, he lowered the gun that had belonged to Lewton Barbour’s clandestine team. “All right, then...all right. I’m not an unreasonable man. If I were so lacking in flexibility, if I did not know when to step back from a fire, then I wouldn’t be where I am today. Go, then. Take my boy. I’ll just have another one made. Maybe from one of my slinky pets, here.” He tipped his chin toward the closed bathroom door.
“Put your gun down,” Yengun commanded.
Stake was a little surprised that Tengu obeyed him, laying the massive handgun down on the floor before he rose again, but he was too proud to raise his hands in surrender.
Stake then rushed to the crib and scooped the boy into his left arm. The child squirmed a little and gurgled deep in its throat, but Stake whispered in its ear as he backed toward the door.
“You’re coming with us, just for a short walk,” Yengun told the crime boss. “Quietly.”
Don Tengu smiled. “I hope you sleep with your eyes open, Yengun,” he purred. “And I hope you never turn your back on your family for too long.”
“What did you say?” said Hin Yengun.
“I said –”
Yengun’s gun coughed, and the slug drilled through the center of Don Tengu’s chest, flinging his tainted blood clear across the room to spatter and streak down the glowing aquarium of lust that was his vidtank. Tengu was slammed back against the wall, slid down it into an awkward sitting position, legs splayed wide. Shaking uncontrollably, he still managed to look down in wonderment at his tunneled body and the black puffs of gas exhaled by the faltering beats of his ruptured heart. He looked up at Yengun again with a brave attempt at a movie star’s smile.
Blue War: A Punktown Novel Page 30