“I told you,” he rasped, “I wasn’t...afraid.” And then his head drooped low over his smoking chest, as if in death breathing in his own escaping essence.
“Jesus, Yengun!” Stake hissed.
“That was a mistake,” the Ha Jiin captain said, “mentioning my family.” He retrieved the Decimator from where Tengu had set it down, then nodded toward the door. “Let’s get out of here.”
***
Even with Don Tengu dead, Hin Yengun told Stake he would keep one of his men posted at his home at all times when he was away, until he thought he no longer had to fear reprisal from his commander or Tengu’s men, should they ever learn he was the one who had killed the crime lord. There was the one witness, after all: the frightened prostitute who’d hidden in the bathroom.
The sky had grown light when one of Yengun’s men arrived at his home – young Nha – during which time Stake had cleaned the blue pigment from his face and hands. He thanked Yengun’s wife again for the use of it. Stake left the house just as he heard the two sons stirring in another room. Yengun drove him back toward Bluetown, which was so hazy and ghostly in the distance that it looked as if it were on the other side of the sky looking in.
Stake twisted around to glance at the child seated behind him in the bulky security vehicle. Yengun’s wife had put his robes into a little bag for him, since he’d no doubt need them again at the monastery Yengun would be bringing him to after he dropped Stake off in Bluetown, but for now the wife had changed him into a set of clean clothing from one of her own children. The new clothing made Stake pity him twice as much as before. The boy wore shoes, also...but Stake wore his bracelet. He now had two on one wrist.
Utterly exhausted from too little rest, Stake turned to the front again and laid his head back against his seat, soon falling into a sleep more like unconsciousness. Before it came over him, however, he was remotely aware of a pain crowding the confines of his skull.
***
Behind the building, in an alley, a fire escape zigzagged its way to the flat roof of the last apartment building Stake had lived in while his mother was still alive. The steps did not clang metallically, as he remembered, but they supported his weight.
Atop the roof, the figure of an Earth man leaned over a large bundle. At the sound of Stake’s shoes on the blue coral, the man looked up and around. He was almost unnaturally fit, skin tanned and smooth, body as burly and muscled as a movie gladiator’s. 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, and a bluish cable was plugged into one of them, but it trailed off into the sky and vanished as if it pierced the atmosphere and extended into space itself.
“What are you wired to?” Stake asked Richard Argos.
“The future,” Argos said. “And the past.”
Stake shifted his attention to the bundle in front of Argos. It appeared to be a human figure under a filthy blanket swarming with tiny insects. No, not insects – nanomites. Noticing that Stake was studying the blanket, Argos indulged him by taking hold of its edge and drawing it away as he stood up. Indeed it was a human body, that of a woman in an advanced state of putrefaction, swollen a shiny dark purple. Argos grinned, as if performing a magic trick. “Shh,” he said, “it’s my wife, Helene.”
“What are you doing with her?” Stake took a step nearer.
“I wouldn’t get too close if I were you,” Argos said. “She hasn’t been at all well.” With a snigger, he pointed to the heavens. “I was going to build a trebuchet, and launch her the way armies used to catapult the parts of anthrax-ridden cows in the Middle Ages, but that’s just too comical an image, isn’t it? So I came up with something more beautiful, I think. Look.”
Argos took hold of the cable socketed into his skull and began pulling at it hand over hand, so that it looked like he was climbing a rope into the air, but actually he was hauling something down from it. While he worked he said, “I’d squeeze the gas right out of the bitch herself if I could, but I should have married a Ha Jiin girl for that.”
Stake looked up and almost gasped to see a dark parachute – diaphanous and iridescent – tethered to Argos by that one line, while a profusion of similar lines snaked freely. He hadn’t seen the bender descend through the sky’s blue haze until it was hovering just above them. Argos kept pulling it down, and Stake expected to see its arms reach for either of them, but instead the animal seemed attracted to the corpse of biotech heiress, Helene Camus. Its ring of longer blue arms began to encircle her body, lifting it up a bit so that the inner nest of shorter black tentacles could reach her plum-like flesh. The longer tentacles paralyzed their prey, though Helene Camus was well beyond that, but the black tentacles administered flesh-dissolving enzymes, and in her already putrid state the enzymes went to work rapidly. Stake clamped a hand over his nose and mouth and stared as, in what seemed only moments, the corpse was not only dissolved by the tendrils but sucked up through them like drinking straws, liquefied bones and all, until there was nothing left of the woman but a fetid slick.
Argos pulled the one connected limb from his head and released it. As if that were all that had kept the huge animal grounded, it began to rise again like a hot air balloon.
“Watch this!” he said, as engorged on pride as the bender was on his wife.
Floating above the rooftop of Stake’s old home, the bender was beginning to give off what looked like the windblown seeds of a milkweed pod. More and more of these gauzy spores took to the air and dispersed in every direction. The creature was giving birth to a horde of larvae, each one contaminated by the foul body its parent had absorbed. Each one would in turn give birth to more poisonous offspring.
Stake felt frantic to stop them, but glanced around helplessly. Argos was intent on watching the larvae as they drifted away, his arms spread as if he were orchestrating their flight or might take flight himself. Stake moved to the low barrier wall that surrounded the roof, and gazed down into the street below. There, he saw a group of clerics walking in a line out of a shadowed alleyway. The robes of the foremost monk were atypically covered in a pattern of golden birds, and Stake recognized him from VT as Abbot Vonh, the chief religious advisor of the Ha Jiin leader, Director Zee.
Stake was afraid to call out to them and give himself away to Argos, but he directed his thoughts at them, hard, hoping the monks with their honed mental abilities would receive them.
“He’s here!” Stake shouted at them, silently. He even pointed toward Argos, though he knew they couldn’t see him. “Here!”
Abbot Vonh stopped in the middle of the street below, and so the others stopped behind him. Slowly, the cleric turned his head and lifted his missing face in Stake’s direction.
TWENTY-SIX: POW
The global positioning feature of Stake’s orange hoverbike wasn’t working, but he was now familiar enough with Bluetown to know when he had passed from Ha Jiin land, into the Neutral Zone, and then into Jin Haa territory. And no sooner had he done so, than he saw a helicar lift from the roof of a building where it had been perched like a bird of prey waiting for its time to swoop. He veered into an alley too narrow for the craft to slip in and follow, but he knew it would keep pace above the rooftops, and when he emerged from the other end he saw there were now two helicars running with him above. They were Colonial Forces Harbingers – with guns he was sure were trained on him.
“Stake!” a voice rasped, cutting in through the speaker of the bike’s vidphone. “Pull over and surrender yourself or we will open fire!”
He recognized the voice of Colonel Dominic Gale. He felt fairly certain that Gale meant what he said, but he thought he’d still put it to the test by taking a sharp turn into another, even narrower alleyway, so tight that he tucked in his elbows and hugged his legs close to the bike’s flanks. He flinched and steadied his ride as the side car was torn away, banging end over end in his wake in a spray of sparks. Shooting out of the alley’s mouth, h
e fought to control the yawing of the bike from side to side. He just about had it stabilized when a third Harbinger descended out of nowhere, directly in front of him, front guns leveled for action. Stake had to swerve to avoid colliding with it, and finally the bike went out from under him. Riderless, it jetted above the street for a bit before crashing into the side of an imitation mailbox. Behind it, Stake hit the ground in a bone-jarring roll, felt the coral’s harsh texture tear his bare arms.
When he came to a stop he lay on his side, hugging his especially shredded left forearm, concerned that his wrist comp had been bashed against the pavement. Lifting his head, his hair ruffled in the wind thrown from a second descending helicar, he saw the camouflaged legs of soldiers as they appeared on either side of him like bars. “Do not move!” one man commanded, training an assault engine on him while another bent down to relieve him of the Panzer automatic.
From the second craft strode Colonel Gale, and he accepted the Panzer when his man offered it to him. “You keep managing to find yourself illegal weapons, I see.”
“And you keep managing to take them away from me.”
“That’s the idea. But it’s those I want, now.” Gale pointed at the two metal bands on Stake’s right wrist.
“You almost crashed me into a building. If I went up in a ball of flame, you might not have gotten these back in one piece.”
“They survived all those years buried in the forest; I don’t think a little fatal bike crash would’ve hurt them too much. Hand them over.”
Stake hesitated the one second it took for the man who’d confiscated his gun to hunch down and remove the two data bracelets himself. “These things might stop Bluetown, Gale.”
“Where’d you get the third?”
Third? Stake wondered how Gale could know these weren’t the only two they’d officially found. So was he aware that Stake had spirited one of them away to Oasis?
“I want to talk to Henderson.”
Gale slipped the bracelets into a pocket and sealed it. “I’m still enforcing the captain’s convalescence. But you might want to contact a lawyer, Stake, because I’m having you arrested on suspicion of terrorist activities.”
“Terrorist, huh? How is that?”
“Undermining the Earth Colonies investigation, impersonating Colonial Forces personnel...sounds like counterintelligence or worse to me. You’re coming from Ha Jiin land. That’s where the kid is, isn’t it?”
“You’re the one undermining the investigation.”
“I’ll have you truth scanned, momfuck!” Gale bellowed, leaning down over Stake as if he were a fresh recruit who couldn’t do that last push up. “I’ll have every last drop of your memory squeezed onto a disk! I’m sick of your blasting games!” The colonel turned his flushed face to the men who’d disembarked from his Harbinger with him, while the third kept watch over the scene by hovering above. “Get this bag of dung into the can!”
“I need a doctor,” Stake said.
“Yeah, Dr. Laloo will love to see you,” Gale said, “after you used his identity to steal the clone.”
“Are you just too proud to realize I’m on the same side as you, in this?” Stake asked the man. “Or are you still hoping to keep the old Wonky Science plan buried, so it doesn’t embarrass the EC and your good friend Dink?” Stake grunted as he was roughly hoisted to his feet. “All those deadstock that would have been?”
“You’re the only deadstock I see,” growled Gale. He gestured toward his vehicle. “Toss him in!”
***
Stake sat up on the edge of his bunk when he heard the cell’s blue-tinged barrier of force become deactivated. He hoped to see Rick Henderson there in the doorway, but expected it to be Gale instead. What he didn’t expect at all was Richard Argos, wearing a bright yellow five-piece suit and an equally sunny grin. He stepped into the cell with the barrier remaining open behind him, and two CF guards standing alert just outside. “Hello, Mr. Stake. I heard you were pretty banged up this morning. Feeling any better?”
“Gale won’t let Captain Henderson talk to me, but he lets you in, huh? Do you want to sell me some gas, Mr. Argos? I hear you’re full of it.”
“Not really, not so much as I was once. The stores are a bit depleted these days.”
“So I gather. What we need is another war to boost the body count. The way things are going, that might just happen.”
“Now Mr. Stake, can’t we be civil? I just wanted to be sure you were okay.”
Stake nodded toward the guards behind the businessman. “Where are your robots?”
“They’re around.”
“And your pal, Abbot Hoo?”
Hands in his pockets, Argos strolled casually further into the cell. “You’ve been away, so I guess you haven’t been following the news.”
“What news?”
“Hoo’s been assassinated. Can you imagine how? He was coming out of his temple when a flock of carrion birds attacked him – those blue things you see around, sort of a cross between pigeons and vultures? Tore the man to pieces right in front of the other monks. Horrible...horrible.”
“Wow. And I’m sure you know what kind of people around here can influence animals in that way. So what do you think – it was Ha Jiin clerics?” Stake remembered Abbot Vonh from VT, and from his visions.
“That’s actually not what I think. I’m afraid it’s worse – that the more conservative Jin Haa clerics decided Hoo was too friendly with us Earth folk, and wanted him dead. This is a very, very unfortunate turn of events in an already catastrophic situation.”
“Yeah...now it will be even harder for you to mine what little gas there is left.”
“You’re too cynical, detective. I mean, this can damage our relationship with the Jin Haa as a whole.”
“I don’t see where that’s necessarily so bad. They’d be better off without us here, anyway. Bluetown. The plague.” Bringing up the latter, Stake watched Argos’s face, but gleaned no reaction.
“Ohh, I know your type, Mr. Stake. You like the idea of noble savages living close to the land, spreading their manure and all. But where do you choose to live? What you love is a fantasy, an ideal, but I’ll bet all these Sinanese would choose to live in Punktown too if they could. My question is, which of these noble savages do you identify with the most? Gale seems to think you support the Ha Jiin.”
“Gale still thinks he’s at war. The fact is, I do support the sovereignty of the Jin Haa, but at the end of the day I don’t care too much about the politics as long as people aren’t killing each other and can live a decent life.”
“That’s what we all want, here. Peace, goodwill, and the mutually beneficial partnership my company has enjoyed with the Jin Haa people. If you can’t see that, and they lose sight of that, then I have to say I despair at the ignorance that passes for moral superiority.”
“Well, anyway, I’m sorry to hear about your friend, Abbot Hoo. I believe I saw him briefly at the Cobalt Temple Hotel, the night Captain Henderson was injured and Ami Pattaya was killed by a pack of snipes, but the Abbot and I didn’t have a chance to share a drink at the bar. And speaking of the Cobalt Temple and following the news, I am aware at least that David Bright has been killed. Ripped to pieces like a doll, I understand.”
“A KeeZee can do that.”
“So can a robot.”
Argos stopped pacing like a condemned man to lean back against the wall, muscular arms folded over his broad chest. Stake noticed a shiny residue of contact jelly around one of the open jacks in his skull. His smile was growing less unfazed, taking on a more wary aspect. “Do you know the main reason I wanted to see you, detective? I had the most remarkable experience this morning. I was in the ultranet, attending a virtual conference in my virtual office, and I had a virtual baseball bat in my hands. I was walking around the table, expressing my dissatisfaction with my PR people about their lack of effort in this time of crisis. Did you ever see the twentieth century gangster film, The Untouchables?”
“No.” But Stake was sure Don Tengu had.
“Well, I was just about to let the head of PR know exactly how dissatisfied I am. Hey, it’s only VR – actual fatalities occurring in the ultranet are uncommon enough, right? But then in the middle of it all, suddenly I’m not in my office anymore. I’m standing on a roof somewhere in Punktown, talking to you about my dead wife, and she’s lying there between us all bloated and wet from drowning.” He made a wincing expression meant to represent personal loss. “I had on a parachute and I was trying to leap off this building to sail away from your pesky questions, but you wouldn’t let me. And that’s all I really remember. But so strange! So disturbing.”
“Huh. Wow. Well...a glitch in the net. It happens.”
“Yeah.” Argos nodded slowly. “Felt so weird, though.”
“You’re under a lot of stress. And memories of your wife must haunt you. Do you feel guilty?”
“Guilty?”
“That she died while you were on vacation together? That you couldn’t save her?”
“I feel sad about it, if that’s what you mean.”
“But at least she would have been pleased to know that her company Camus Organics carries on as her legacy, under your management. And talk about stress – it must be a real handful running both those corporations! The most powerful sinon gas operation, and a biotech research and development company besides.”
“You have to be ambitious, have a vision.”
“I have visions, too. But I lack your sense of competitiveness.”
Argos narrowed his eyes. “I think you like competition more than you say. I think we’re having our little booby-trap competition even as we speak.”
“Can I tell you about my visions? I had a dream very similar to yours. In my dream, your wife wasn’t drowned but a victim of some terrible plague, apparently, and you were helping spread her body’s corruption across this whole planet.”
“That’s a very unflattering dream,” Argos chuckled. “And why would I do that?”
Blue War: A Punktown Novel Page 31