Still conscious but minus his two front teeth, Hin lifted his head to see that Thi’s sister Yha and her daughter Twi had edged nearer to his feet and were aiming their own Whistlers down at his face. He didn’t sit up one millimeter further. Thi spoke in her native language then, in a hard dark voice, and though Stake couldn’t understand most of it the meaning was pretty clear.
“I apologize for dishonoring you, husband, but you have dishonored me since the day we were married. The apology I owe you is for marrying you in the first place – it was unfair to both of us, because I never loved you any more than you loved me. For becoming your wife, I am truly sorry. I will respect our ways and stand by my vows. I will care for you as a wife should. And if you ever put a finger on me again, I will kill you in an instant.”
Hin stared up at the three cold-eyed women with his own eyes wide, spluttering frothy blood bubbles in exasperated terror.
Stake came to a stop, facing Thi with her husband lying between them, but ignored him as if he were of no consequence. “Please thank your sister and niece for taking care of Brian, Thi. It’s time for me to take him to his family now.”
“I am sorry you see that, Ga Noh.”
“Don’t be sorry. If I can only go on remembering you, at least I want to remember you with respect.”
“Only you respect me.”
Stake nodded toward her sister. “I don’t think that’s true. Having said that, I do think you’re a fool if you stay with this worm.”
“If I am wife of Ga Noh, not want me stay with you always?”
“If you were my wife, I’d treat you the way you deserve. Your loyalty is misguided, Thi. Whether it’s loyalty to him, or to your culture.”
“Some things we never understand each other. Please...not judge me.” Her eyes finally looked moist. “Enough people judge my life. Earth Killer. Earth Lover. I am only Thi.”
Yha barked an order at Hin, and jerked the barrel of her rifle to indicate he should get to his feet now. He looked like he was on the verge of muttering to himself, but thought better of it and spit some blood onto the ground instead. Thi was just turning to say something to him again herself, and Stake was turning toward Twi with Brian behind her, when a string of holes opened up in the pavement just to the right of the detective. From the holes jetted pulverized smart matter, looking like puffs of billiards chalk. Stake swung around and saw a second line of holes zigzag toward Twi and Brian. The last puff in the air was red, and Twi dropped to her side screaming, leaving Brian exposed and startled. Blood spread across Twi’s pants at mid-thigh.
“Run, run, run!” Stake shouted, rushing toward Twi and grabbing one of her arms. With her other, she still held onto her weapon despite her wild sobbing. Half dragging Twi under his arm, Stake looked back to order Thi to scoop up Brian, but saw she already had and was running off with him in another direction, to make their attacker have to choose between two moving targets. Hin was left whirling around in circles, abandoned and disoriented, before he loped off in a third direction with his head tucked into his shoulders.
Refugees were crying out, scattering, a couple back toward the old foundry even plunging into the water of the cooling basin. Stake made it to one of the steelworks’ satellite structures and ducked behind it even as a firecracker chain of projectiles strafed across the front of the little building. He flattened himself there for a moment, pushing Twi behind him, and then crouched low so he could peek around the building’s corner.
A figure was racing in his direction, looking like a cross between a human and a giant ant with its green body segments connected by lengths of flexible silver cable. In one hand, the robot carried a machine pistol with a curved magazine. The barrel raised, the muzzle flashed a nova of hot gas, and the gun made a distant, soft burble. Stake pulled back just in time as bullets chewed up the edge of the building.
Stake spun toward Twi with the intention of grabbing the Kalian Whistler from her. What he saw was the teenager at the other end of the back wall, bracing herself against it to take the weight off her wounded leg. Before Stake could tell her to stop, she had the gun wedged into her shoulder and was slipping around the side of the building out of view.
“Jesus,” Stake hissed, and he almost lunged after her. Instead, he peeked out from behind the chewed corner again. He thought he heard something fizz through the air, though the rifle itself was silent, and the thick central cable that passed for the robot’s waist was severed. Scythed into two pieces, the automaton went down, though its legs did their best to run for a few steps more before they toppled.
The upper body was more alive than the lower, however. The head and gun lifted from the pavement. Stake almost pulled back, but the robot’s skull shattered like a green lollipop, releasing an atomized spray of encephalon tissue. As the machine dropped back, truly dead this time, Stake glimpsed Yha across the way, leaning out from behind a storage shed with her Whistler shouldered.
Stake sought out Twi on the far side of the building, and this time he did take hold of her weapon. She resisted a little, her beautiful face crumpled in agony, but Stake grasped her by the wrist and directed her to put pressure on the wound in her leg. He hoped he wasn’t being egotistic in thinking his experience with weapons might be better than the education Thi Gonh had passed on to the girl.
“Shh,” he said to her, poking his head out and retracting it again. He didn’t know if she understood him, but he said, “There’s still another one of these things.”
The helicar that he’d wondered about; so it had been tailing him after all. Was the second robot waiting behind the vehicle’s controls for its partner to rejoin it, or had it disembarked on foot as well? Stake almost marveled at Argos’s lack of discretion, but he knew the man was unused to limitations. The question was, was the target him or Brian? He supposed Argos would be happy to see either of them filled with bullets. Stake, because he was his new enemy, and maybe Brian because he was an old rival who wouldn’t stay buried.
“Stay here,” Stake whispered, gesturing to the girl and dropping his eyes to her bloodied pants again to determine an artery hadn’t been hit. “They don’t want you.” Then, clutching her gun in both hands, he broke into the open and ran toward another structure, this one looking like some sort of power relay, more machine than building. He almost hoped to draw fire, so he’d know if the second robot was close by and where it might be lurking, but nothing came. He caught his breath in the relay’s shadow, his eyes on the next outbuilding. This was the direction Thi had bolted in, lugging Brian in her arms. His wrist comp hadn’t been damaged in his bike accident, after all, but he knew Thi didn’t have a comp on her that he could contact.
A person dashed between two buildings and Stake tensed up, thinking it was Thi at first, but then recognizing it as Yha headed toward her daughter’s hiding place. Good; Stake felt less guilty about having left her.
Then he heard the splutter of a machine pistol, not aimed in his direction. The other robot had discovered Thi, then, before he could. He broke cover again and sprinted toward the deceptive purr of a second discharge of automatic fire. This burst was more prolonged, as a finger kept the trigger depressed. Puffing as he ran, Stake realized a knife point of pain was slipping behind his left eye, probing toward the bridge of his nose.
There was a tree sitting at the edge of a parking lot ahead of him, appearing as though it had grown straight through the blue pavement, though its reek and the eerie movement of its roots identified it as a slow-moving carrion tree. The second blast of fire had ended but Stake was following its last echoes when a skeletal shape stepped out from behind the tree’s trunk. Without stopping he brought the Whistler up close to his face, and a bullet struck the weapon as others hummed past his head and took a notch out of his right ear. The impact against his gun levered it hard in his arms, smashing him across the nose. Stake fell backwards, meeting the ground in what seemed a flashback of his hoverbike crash.
He couldn’t raise both his head and the Whi
stler, so he left the latter lying across his chest and looked up through a new membrane that had grown over his eyes, gelatinous and pulsing with dark veins. The creature from the tree shadows was striding toward him. It was working at one of its limbs, which ended in a bulky smoking appendage. He heard a metallic scrape as the creature dislodged a curved section of the appendage’s underside. The creature was like an insect, with sinuous silvery limbs dazzling with glints and glitter. Stake thought of insectoid surgical nanomites. He had seen a news story about a mutant strain of escaped nanomites dwelling in one of Punktown’s slums; their queen was as big as a hippo when the health agents discovered her. This was an entity like that, then. It was here to see that its countless microscopic brethren dispersed their viral contamination throughout the land. It was here to destroy anyone who stood in the way of that mission – as soon as it had fitted a new curved object into the underside of its smoking hand.
A bright smacking sound. The nanomite’s head came open like an egg, and damp spores of corruption blew into the air in a volcanic mist. The creature teetered, swayed, spilling cranial fluid between its dead silver eyes. Then, it crashed forward onto its face and Stake saw pickled brain matter oozing to the ground like some escaping giant ameba.
He let his head rest back on the pavement and closed his eyes, willing their new lenses away. A touch of hands made him open them again, and he recognized Thi Gonh leaning over him. Her fingers were dabbed red from examining his clipped ear, but she was smiling. “I am always saving Ga Noh.”
“Yeah,” he mumbled drunkenly. “Well, you said you owed me, remember?”
TWENTY-EIGHT: AUDIENCES
Stake had a dream along the way to the capital city of Coo Lon, which lingered at the edge of the vast Ha Jiin territory as if to gaze wistfully and resentfully across the Neutral Zone at its divorced counterpart of Di Noon. When they arrived, and he awoke, Stake knew it had been a dream instead of another bender episode. In the dream, he had come to Sinan to find that he had impregnated Thi Gonh during the Blue War, this genetic impossibility apparently overcome by the adaptability of his mutant cells. The blue-skinned child Thi introduced to him, however, was only five-years-old. The boy seemed to recognize him, lifting his little arms and saying, “Mee!”
“Me?” Stake said to the dream child.
Hin Yengun, in handsome dress uniform, accompanied Stake as they were led by a party of armed guards into the seat of the Ha Jiin government, a beautiful palace of blue marble clouded with white and veined with gold. They were conducted into a chamber with a high ceiling supported by gilded columns, the ceiling a colorful mosaic depicting more scenes from the eventful life of the prophet Ben Bhi Ben. Behind a high counter of lacquered wood sat the leader of the Ha Jiin people, Director Zee, handsome with his close-cropped head and trimmed goatee. To his right sat his top religious advisor, Abbot Vonh, in his familiar robes embroidered with golden birds. Stake had to remind himself that he had never seen the man in person before this. He wondered if he seemed just as familiar to the inscrutably faceless cleric.
There was another familiar person in attendance, whom Stake had not anticipated. Atop a velvet cushion in a high chair to Abbot Vonh’s right sat what might have been a miniature version of himself. Stake knew this was the child he and Yengun had freed from Don Tengu’s compound; his good luck charm. The living icon wore a brand new robe. It was covered in a design of golden birds.
To Director Zee’s left stood a stunning young woman with a sweetly melodious voice, who commenced to speak in English. “Jeremy Stake, you have been summoned into the presence of the honorable Director Zee so that he might extend to you his appreciation for helping to liberate this poor child from the possession of a disgraceful criminal whom had eluded justice for too long. Had the existence of this child been known to Director Zee, he would have called that criminal to task sooner.”
Stake didn’t want to ask why the Ha Jiin leader had indeed not dealt with Don Tengu many years before this. It was easy to denounce the man now that his dead hands could no longer pass out money. Stake found it easier to simply nod in acknowledgment.
“And the information has come to us that you have made great efforts to halt the advance of the Blue City, efforts that it now seems will prove successful. While you may have acted more on the behalf of your own people and the Jin Haa, you have helped put a stop to one of the greatest catastrophes the Ha Jiin people have ever faced. For this, Director Zee would like to bestow upon you a token of his gratitude.”
From the counter she lifted an object wrapped in a velvet cloth, which she bore before her as she stepped down from her perch and approached Stake. She turned back a flap of the cloth to reveal the handle and part of the blade of what he knew to be a short sword at least a hundred-years-old. These were what Ha Jiin warriors had once carried into battle, long before Sturms and Decimators, Panzers and Whisperers. Stake accepted the sword with a deep bow in the leader’s direction. Director Zee gave a small smile and slight nod.
Next, Director Zee himself spoke to Yengun in their shared tongue, his voice softly modulated. At the end of this, again the young translator came bearing a swaddled sword to present to the security officer.
“Now,” the woman said, having returned to the leader’s side, “we are told you would like to address the honorable director, Mr. Stake?”
“Yes.” Stake cleared his throat. “First of all, I would like to thank the director for this great honor; I’m very proud.” He paused to let her translate this. “What I wanted to ask the director is if he would also acknowledge the assistance the war hero, Thi Gonh, lent me in my endeavor to understand and control the Blue City. She, her sister and her sister’s daughter risked their lives to protect the cloned child who was the key to this great mystery.”
After she relayed all this, Director Zee spoke to the woman, and she said, “Your recommendation has been noted.”
Director Zee’s smile had spread somewhat. Was he amused at this request from the man who was obviously the Earth Lover’s lover, or was he impressed with Stake’s devotion?
The Ha Jiin leader hadn’t finished speaking through the woman yet, so she went on, “Abbot Vonh has been having troubling visions, Mr. Stake. Some of them concern the Earth business owner, Richard Argos. The Abbot believes you may understand what he means by this. The Abbot believes you have encountered each other in the dream realm several times.”
Sort of like the original ultranet, huh? Stake thought. “I survived the sting of a bender, yes. I’ve had a number of strange premonitions myself. In several of these, it did seem I crossed paths with the Abbot.”
“As you have investigated the Blue City situation exhaustively, Director Zee would like to know what your own observations are regarding Richard Argos.”
As much as he was appalled by Argos’s actions, Stake didn’t dare tell even Yengun about his suspicions that Argos had spread the nameless STD epidemic by design. It was a familiar theory by now, but not one that any Earther had thus far spoken in support of. Director Zee might believe the Earth Colonies government itself had been aware of Argos’s activities, had even sanctioned them. And he couldn’t say for sure that he didn’t believe that, himself. For the same reason, he didn’t want to spell out the whole of Wonky Science’s Plan A, that had resulted in Lewton Barbour and his two teammates perishing on Sinan before there had ever been a Blue War. If the Ha Jiin and Jin Haa found out everything eventually, then let them do it on their own. If Earth colonists were barred from Sinan as a result of that knowledge, he washed his hands of it, as ardently as he hoped that wouldn’t happen. Because if it did, he might never return to Sinan himself one day.
Instead, Stake was evasive but still very clear, he felt, when he replied, “Mr. Argos is a terrible and dangerous man. He is no friend to the Ha Jiin or even the Jin Haa people.” He turned to face Abbot Vonh directly as he continued, “I return to Oasis tomorrow night, so I’ve arranged to meet Richard Argos for drinks this evening.” He tried to
screw his thoughts into the holy man’s orifice of a face. Had he seen the faintest flicker of violet electricity far back in there? “At the Cobalt Temple Hotel.”
“Why would you meet him socially,” asked the woman, “if you feel he is so terrible a man?”
“I guess I just want to rub it in again that I see inside him. I want him to know, again, that I haven’t finished with him yet. I’m sure that’s why he agreed to meet me. I’m sure he isn’t finished with me yet, either.”
Director Zee dictated to his translator, who said in turn, “You must be very careful, then, Mr. Stake. Director Zee will say a prayer for your safety, and he wishes you a safe return to Oasis as well.”
With their audience come to a close, Stake and Yengun were escorted out of the chamber. Stake threw a look back at the living idol. The boy raised one fingerless hand as either a gesture of goodbye or a benediction.
***
Outside the government palace, parked at a discreet distance down the street, was a small hoverbus usually rented for tourist excursions, which had brought Stake here to Coo Lon. Yengun walked him back to it. “May we never cross these swords in combat, Mr. Stake,” Yengun said, carrying his wrapped award reverently.
“I’d never want to cross swords with you,” Stake said. “There are limits to my courage.”
When they had arrived at the bus, Yengun motioned toward Stake’s bandaged right ear. “You look like you’re imitating Henry again. How is your ear?”
“What?” Stake cupped a hand to it.
Yengun smiled, and gave Stake a Colonial Forces style salute. “Corporal Stake.”
“Captain Yengun. Excuse me – that is, Commander Yengun.”
Blue War: A Punktown Novel Page 33