Blue War: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “I suppose, to increase the rate of mortality in the Ha Jiin and Jin Haa both, to replenish the sinon gas in their burial systems.”

  “Oh, Mr. Stake, Mr. Stake. Next you’ll be accusing me of selling diseased blankets to the people of Sinan, like English colonists used to give blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans, at peace talks and the like.”

  “Funny you’re familiar with such a concept.”

  “The truth of the matter is the opposite of what you’re so crudely implying. Rather than spreading this terrible outbreak, my biotech firm is working to find a cure for it!”

  Stake applauded. “Well, I have to hand it to you, Mr. Argos. First you’ll make a fortune off those killed by the plague, then you’ll make a second fortune curing it once your gas reserves have been replenished. That’s what I call vision. But it’s tunnel vision. It doesn’t take into consideration the idea of accountability. It’s so arrogant that it’s self destructive.”

  “And you aren’t arrogant, detective? Self destructive?”

  “Reckless, maybe, yeah. But I can handle losing.” He’d lost his parents. Lost Thi Gonh. Maybe even lost his sense of home. Was he really handling all of that, though? Nevertheless, he went on, “I’m not too proud to lose. I saw a man die last night for being too proud to lose.”

  “Ah, Mr. Stake.” Argos stepped away from the wall and sighed. “You are an interesting man, I have to give you that.” He motioned toward Stake’s face. “And growing better looking all the time, too.”

  Stake understood he’d been reinventing himself to resemble his visitor, the way Dink Argosax had reinvented himself to become Richard Argos. “You’re an interesting man, yourself. Not only a mass murderer, by introducing a disease to these people, but a serial killer besides. David Bright, Anthony Leung...maybe even Lewton Barbour and everyone else killed in the mishap at Wonky Science.”

  This time Argos wasn’t smiling, his composure fractured at last. “That’s just insane, now. You’re more paranoid than that moron Bright was. Unless it was my dear old friend Persia who put that particular bug in your ear. If I’m as psychotic as you suggest, Mr. Stake, then why are you provoking me like this?”

  “Because I want you to know I’m onto you, and that you should back off and let me do what I have to do and stop Bluetown from spreading, whether it brings the Wonky Science project to light or not.”

  “And who’s stopping you? We all want the same thing here.”

  “No we don’t. You want to make money. I want to help these people, not turn them into rotting deadstock for a profit.”

  Now it was Argos who applauded. “And people think I’m the king of gas production! But my gas supports a vast array of technology. My gas enables teleportation across space and through dimensions! It enhances the lives of countless people. All your gas is good for is a farting contest. If that’s what we’re competing at, then I concede. You win, detective!”

  “I know what your gas company produces, Mr. Argos. But let’s get back to what your wife’s company produces. Organic computers, for one. Like the brains in your bodyguards. This STD results in massive neurological damage and the deterioration of the brain. I figure if one can make brains, one can also find a way to destroy them. Who knows...maybe this degeneration of the body makes corpses decay faster, huh? Produce sinon gas that much more quickly?”

  “Oh, now this is a stretch, even for you.”

  “Maybe. But Camus has also designed organic nanomites, a microscopic life form. Just as this virus is a microscopic life form.”

  “Your science is wretched, Mr. Stake. There’s a universe of difference between micro-surgical nanomites and a mutant strain of virus. What do you think, that I have some loyal cult of diabolical fiends helping me achieve all these plots you accuse me of?”

  “No, just a group of people who like your money an awful lot. I just pray that the government isn’t aware you’re spreading this disease. I just pray they don’t like your money that much, too.”

  “What’s going on?” said a voice from the door. Stake looked up to see that a new figure in a camouflaged uniform had appeared beyond the threshold, and Rick Henderson had both his hands again. It was his eyes that looked ready to strangle, however. “Mr. Argos, I don’t see where you have any business being in here.”

  “I was just concerned about your friend’s welfare, captain.”

  “I’m sure. But if you’ll excuse us, please.”

  “Of course.” Argos shifted toward the exit as Henderson stepped inside to let him pass. “I’m sorry we have to end our conversation at such a compelling point, Mr. Stake. I divide my time between Punktown and Earth these days. Should you be deported to Punktown, perhaps I’ll look you up sometime.”

  “And if we both get sent to prison, for our various improprieties,” Stake told him, “maybe I’ll look you up there.”

  Argos smirked. “Unlikely, since you and I dwell in different spheres – it might as well be different dimensions – but I’ll keep that in mind. We’ll do lunch sometime, somewhere.” Argos bowed a little to Henderson on his way out. “Good day, captain.”

  The officer turned to Stake. “What was that all about?”

  “Gale let him in.”

  “Well that won’t be happening again. I’ve been pushing CF high command on Earth, and I’ve got absolute authority to handle all aspects of the Bluetown investigation, the clones and everything else related to it – including you. Gale has to step out of my way whether he outranks me or not. But it wasn’t just my efforts that turned things around. There are some people here from Paxton. Persia Barbour, with her late husband’s parents.”

  Stake rose from his bunk. “Thank God. That was fast.”

  “They have some clout. Lewton Barbour’s father is a top biomech surgeon and the mother is an anthropology professor at PU. And to back them up, they’ve got the media behind them, shining a bright light on the proceedings. Crews from three news agencies are here, including the Punktown branch of the Earth Colonies News Network.”

  “Good job, Persia,” Stake sighed. “I didn’t know if she had the guts to go all the way.”

  “Well, she does look pretty spooked to me. Last I saw her, the parents and their whole retinue were at the embassy with Margaret Valsalva. Persia Barbour seems very keen on avoiding meeting Argos face-to-face. When she was told he was over here with Gale, she wouldn’t come see you.”

  “I don’t blame her for wanting to avoid him. She’s in danger from him. If he doesn’t know she’s here, the longer it can be kept from him the better.”

  “You’d better concentrate on your own welfare, for the moment.” Aside from their recent phone conversation, Stake had never seen Henderson look so stern with him. “You’re in some serious deep dung here, Jer. The only way I can help you now is if you tell us where you took Brian. If we can put a happy end to the cute clone story for the media, and the Barbours take him home to raise their son all over again, you’ll be a good guy instead of a kidnapper and the obstructer of an EC investigation. But you have to take us to Brian now.”

  “I can’t lead you to him, Rick. I have a friend caring for him. My involvement with this person puts them in danger. I have to go and get Brian alone, and then I’ll bring him back to you. That’s the only way I can do this.”

  “Gale caught you coming over from the Ha Jiin side. Brian’s on Ha Jiin land, then, isn’t he? Who’s he with, Jer? Who do you know over there? It isn’t Thi Gonh...”

  “No names, Rick. You have to trust me, here. I’ll get the Barbours their son, but it has to be done my way.”

  Henderson blew the air from his cheeks. “All right, look, let’s go over to see the Barbours and talk to Margaret Valsalva. I’ll have to tell them how this is going to happen.”

  “Can we trust Margaret Valsalva?”

  “With the ECNN cameras in her face, I’d say yes. Everyone wants to look good on VT.”

  ***

  When Henderson and Stake arrived a
t the Earth Colonies embassy, they found Chief Ambassador Margaret Valsalva had Persia Barbour and her in-laws in her office, but there were no media people in attendance at present. Stake smiled at Persia, who nodded back at him with a tight smile of her own. Lewton Barbour’s parents were very anxious once Stake was introduced to them.

  “Are you sure this child is safe right now?” the mother asked.

  “He’s in good hands. The people he’s with are just waiting for me to reclaim him.”

  “I remember seeing him on VT spots, and I thought it was a strange and sad situation, but I never once made the connection with my son. We were told Lewton died in an attempt to teleport to Earth, not Sinan,” she gave her daughter-in-law a look of restrained accusation, “and everyone has said the Sinan clones were from Blue War soldiers missing in action.” Lewton Barbour’s mother appeared stricken with guilt at not having recognized her son from VT, and torn as to whether to view this anomaly as her actual child reincarnated, or as a facsimile that she might love anyway in homage.

  “A good thing someone leaked it to the media about the boy in the first place,” Stake said, giving Henderson a quick glance to remind him that the detective wasn’t the only one who had gone to extreme lengths to protect Brian, “or you might never have known your son’s clone existed.”

  “We’ve been shown some vids,” the father said, weary with pain and confusion himself but his eyes shining with the pride of a parent who had just seen their child take its first steps. “He’s beautiful. We want him to have a normal life – in as much as that’s possible – with a loving family. His own family. We won’t leave Sinan without him.”

  “I’ll go and get him straight away, after I make a call to arrange it.” As had been their system, Stake would call Yengun first so that he might contact Thi himself, in case her husband was monitoring her. She, in turn, could let her sister know that Stake was coming to claim the boy.

  “We all want what’s best for this child,” Margaret Valsalva said, folding her hands on her desk as if posing, should the camera crews return at that moment. Stake thought of the “Valsalva Maneuver,” which was a means of forcing out the contents of one’s bowels while seated on the toilet. A good name for an espionage movie, he thought.

  Without replying to the woman, Stake turned to Henderson. “What about the ID bracelets, Rick? Did you get back the two that Gale took from me?”

  “I have them,” Persia spoke up, “and the one you gave me before. I’ve already been reprogramming it, as we discussed, to transmit new information to the smart matter in the code it understands. I’ll reprogram the other two immediately. And when I arrived I spoke to a gentleman named Cali, a technician for Simulacrum Systems. He and his whole team are going to work with me on this, lending me support in doing everything we can to get the smart matter to listen to the new commands. Well, not that the bracelets commanded the smart matter in the first place – the Simulacrum equipment did that – but the positioning transmissions gave it a new schematic, so what I’m going to do is ascertain how much of the Punktown map the smart matter has reproduced, then bracket off just a little more land area and delete the rest of the map. Theoretically speaking, when the smart matter comes to the borders of this new edited blueprint, it will feel that its work is complete...and stop. Better than trying to alter the cells’ nature. Even primitive cells want to follow their destiny. This way it’s, ‘Good job, boys – you can call it a day.’”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Well done, acquiring that third bracelet, Jer,” Henderson told him. “How’d you manage it?”

  “A story for another day. I have a gun, too, that belonged to Barbour’s team, but I left that with another friend in case I needed it later to prove Gale was lying about the artifacts found with the clones.” Not to mention that Hin Yengun had simply become enamored with the big Decimator revolver.

  “I promise to look into the fact that the existence of these items was not made known to me,” Margaret Valsalva said. “The colonel faces some serious questioning about how this matter was handled.”

  Save it for ECNN, Stake thought, remembering how chummy the ambassador had been with Argos the first time Stake had met him. He said to his old friend, “Rick, I’m going to need to borrow a helicar again. And I’m serious – I need to protect my friend, here. You have to promise me I won’t be observed, tracked or followed.”

  “You have my word on it.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN: WHISTLERS

  Stake knew well the place where he was to meet Thi Gonh, when Yengun called him back to relay the information. He saw it before him now as he approached in his borrowed Harbinger. The Plastech Foundries company had been shut down for many years, before even the map Bluetown was following had been generated, so Bluetown portrayed it in its sealed up state. Not only that, but the smart matter had replicated the parasitic restaurant called J. J. Redhook’s Crab Cabin, which stood on legs in what had once been Plastech’s cooling basin. Stake had eaten there numerous times, the silverfish-like crustaceans the restaurant served being seeded and raised in the basin itself. He saw that tropical rains had filled the basin almost to the level of its original.

  As he neared the towering foundry building one of the military craft’s display monitors alerted him to another presence in the air: what appeared to be a helicar tailing Stake at a closing distance. He scowled. Would Henderson break his word and send someone to track him, after all? He thought not. Maybe Gale then, acting on his own? Unlikely, at this point. He thought it might be one of the VT crews, having got wind of his errand; they would be less wary of the politics regarding Ha Jiin territory. But just as Stake was beginning to get angry, and considered flying past the rendezvous site in order to lead the other craft away, it veered off into a city chasm and left his screen. He considered opening up the monitor’s range, but decided that the craft hadn’t been following him after all. Maybe just tourists, anxious for a look at the infamous Bluetown.

  As he curved around in a descending half-circle, Stake realized his heart was beating hard, and not out of anxiousness about retrieving Brian. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered so much if he’d let Henderson and others accompany him to the pick up. The simple fact was, he had to admit, that he wanted to meet with Thi Gonh again without his fellow Earthers looking on.

  He took in the scene below, the most salient element being a yubo standing at the edge of the flooded cooling tank. It was dipping its sinuous back appendage into the water, and Stake saw it raise the limb up suddenly, grasping a squirming something-or-other in its eight-fingered hand. A number of boys and old men lay on their bellies or sat at the edge of the crab cabin’s platform, trailing fishing lines into the pool. Had amphibians or some other type of animal made the basin their home, or had the Ha Jiin introduced them into the water as J. J. Redhook stocked his own tank with his giant silverfish? A fire had been built off to one side, and more of the pool’s catch were cooking on a metal grill.

  He hadn’t noticed until now, because of their blue-on-blue colors, that plants were growing on the buildings themselves in this area. Some walls, facing the dual suns, were almost entirely covered as if with ivy. He recognized these as air plants, like terrestrial epiphytic plants, that needed no soil to root in. Instead, their airborne seeds had nestled into nooks and crannies, where their roots had taken hold. Now, fern-like shrubs exploded out of open windows, beds of spiny-leaved plants jutted up from tenement roofs, and flowers like orchids – themselves an epiphytic plant – bloomed along ledges as if growing out of window boxes. Even more amazing to Stake was that he saw women tearing handfuls of leaves from one of these types of plants and stuffing them into woven baskets. He realized it was a kind of herb he had eaten in various Sinanese soups and dishes. He was reminded of his vision of a city reclaimed by the jungle – but it wasn’t only the jungle reclaiming it.

  Laundry dried on lines strung like lianas between buildings. A woman with a broom swept in front of what had been an outer shed
of a steelworks complex, now serving as a home. Stake understood that what he was seeing was a village, superimposed upon the city after it had superimposed itself over numerous villages – as if, impossible to remain drowned, these submerged communities were rising again to the surface.

  Blue faces tilted up to watch Stake bring his vehicle in for a landing. He scanned them for the one face he sought. Just as the craft was alighting, he spotted a familiar group standing off near the peripheral structures of the steelworks. They were watching him, too. Climbing out to the street, he focused on three women who carried the wasp-like Kalian rifle known as a Whistler. A small boy with an incongruously pink face stood half-behind a tall young girl Stake knew would be Thi’s teenage niece, Twi. And there was a small man standing near Thi Gonh herself. Recognizing him, and hearing the man’s excited shouts, Stake strode toward them briskly.

  “You! You!” Thi Gonh’s husband screamed, jabbing his finger toward Stake before gesticulating at her again. “I knew she come here and meet you! I knew! I follow the bitch and see!”

  “Calm yourself down,” Stake said ominously as he came. Seeing Brian with his hands over his ears only made the dark brew bubbling in his guts more bitter.

  Thi’s husband Hin thrust one hand at her and snarled, “Give me that gun, bitch!”

  Stake saw Thi look to him, her eyes hooded and tense. He knew that under other circumstances, she would have backed down quickly, out of respect and probably even fear. But she had another obligation – to return the child entrusted to her care – so she remained planted there between the boy and her husband without saying a word and without moving a muscle, like a POW standing firm under interrogation, even on threat of torture.

  Hin looked back at the approaching Earther, and jerked his open hand at his wife more urgently. “Obey me, cunt!” He stepped closer to her and cocked back his arm, fist clenched for a blow. “Give it to me!”

  “You stupid fuck,” Stake said, seeing what was coming even before Thi Gonh took a single step forward and swung the butt of the Whistler up in an arc. There was a crack like a ball against a baseball bat. Hin’s head shot back as if he’d taken a bullet in the forehead, and his body hit the pavement.