There were no more than a few hundred troops in this camp; occasionally Ned heard noises in the distance, muffled explosions or echoing voices that suggested others. Of the recruits around him were a few that Ned had a smacking acquaintance with, but he was still a pug who’d rather fight for money, had no bones to pick out of the ring.
These recruits were a very mixed lot, a few Varvani wrestlers who also could not find matches, some small but very wiry Bengtvadi with complex clan insignia tattooed on their hairless heads, a Dabiri male the size of a Clydesdale with one hind quarter replaced by robotics, and a Meshar woman from Barrazan V, a species Ned had never before seen, with coal-black fur and an arrow-tipped tail. By some mischance she had been marooned here and saw no other hope of getting offworld. He had heard rumors that the Meshar were teleports, but if this one was, her talent could not help her, or she had given up trying.
He counted more than forty O‘e, and, surprised at first, Ned thought that to come here and risk being despised by the cruel and stupid they must have been desperate or their recruiters were. Then it occurred to him that the O’e had been well manufactured in one respect: they had a greater tolerance of variations in oxygen levels than the other hominids who needed the oxycap sockets behind one ear; these were hard to maintain and keep clean, and uncomfortable even when they worked well.
O’e did not mingle much, but they got fed and clothed like everyone else, and were willing to fight anywhere. The Lyhhrt did not shy away from them, but he did not let them come too close either, and made sure no one noticed. The woman, Azzah, so eager to be with these other O’e, was perhaps happier than she had ever been. “Maybe I am home at last,” she said, and no one was cruel enough to deny her. Spartakos had managed—or the Lyhhrt had managed for him—to comport himself in such a way that he did not stand out like a beacon; the O’e stayed close to him and he did whatever was asked of him.
After the troops had been fed and clothed as well as they could be for their shapes and sizes, they were harangued about prophylaxis and sanitation by a very old army man looking much like Gretorix, who had bossed the fighters in Zamos’s arenas long years ago.
“That is your Gretorix,” the Lyhhrt said.
“Jeez you’d think he’d be puttin ’is feet up an wrappin himself around a jug by now,” one woman said, and Ned looked at her flashing cyber arm, modest compared to the Dabiri’s limb, and thought he remembered knowing her a long time ago.
In the first evenings, nodding over campfires, the recruits told their dreams, or their lack of them in an endless mutter like leaves in wind … .
… can’t find nothing that pays and im fucking tired of shoveling shit/lost job bitch of a wife grabbed kids and ran to maw/my children are lost without me and here is no whirling storm to soothe me/told that thumbsucker of a man to pull it out and get some cash/what work i come for aint no more/no place else to find a fight/dunno what that cat is doing here/listen if i was you i wouldnt ask neither/you chukkers look at this steel fist flashing i can fight as good as any man does shove my fist through a brick wall an come out clean/you think a cyber leg’s a good thing you should feel how this one hurts/never had money my whole life an i’ll kill if i have to i don’ mind at all …
“Aah, one time in our lives we all had something,” the cyborg woman said. “Not great, but good. Hey you iron man, what are you here for?”
“I go with my-friend-Ned-Gattes anywhere,” Spartakos said.
… darkness and stealth are my territory …
Rrengha, dreaming in the limbic brainform of her ancient ancestors.
AND WHERE IS THE DAMNED SHIP THAT WILL TAKE ME TO KHAGODIS?
Ned wrapped his arms around his head and wondered why in all the pits of hell he had come on this useless journey with this only too alien being who despised him so deeply. Then he slid into the Lyhhrt’s dream of hideous Ix, soulless Zamos, endless slavery, and eventually somehow he slept.
The next morning three men and a woman stepped out of a buzzer and began to curse the insects.
The Gardeners
They were thick-bodied and wrapped in dark clothes, and with massive aerial-sprouting comms buckled to their shoulders. The Lyhhrt knew them:
:Look now! So much for Brezant not telling us to keep our backs straight! Those four were the ones with Brezant in Montador City, before my Other was killed. Then they tried to destroy us where we were hiding. Now they have murdered their employer and hope to get more wealth. Eventually someone else who wants more wealth will kill them too. All fleshly beings act so.:
Ned wiped down his night’s sweat with his kerchief. “All I want is to get my flesh out of here in one lump,” he muttered. “You can keep the wealth.” The sky was the same as yesterday’s, with sunlight slowly clearing the mist.
“This the new batch?” The three men went walkabout, staring at the recruits, most of whom had been lining up for breakfast. Ned kept his head down. The Lyhhrt helped their eyes slide over him and Spartakos but they paused in front of Rrengha, who was fitting on the prosthetic ‘fingers’ that made her able to open her food packet.
“Lookit this one, I never saw one of them before. Hey you, you go talk-talk?”
Rrengha looked up at them—
:Go someplace else,: the Lyhhrt said quickly, and they went, without noticing.
Ned cracked his knuckles. Dunno how long we’re gonna last here.
But the Lyhhrt was thinking of something else: that Other who he was sure had killed his mate and his contact, the one who could only be an even more corrupted Lyhhrt than those who had planned to attack Khagodis. He saw the image of that wrought-iron shape in the minds of these men.
“These three Earthers also know of your past,” the Lyhhrt said. “You struck one of them on some other world.”
“I don’t start fights.”
“You must have finished one.” :That one called Oxman, with the lenses on his eyes, has caught sight of you. He has forgotten about it now, but—what does ‘He’ll die as good as the rest of them,’ mean to you? That is what he is thinking.:
Ned swallowed. “I don’t like to think.”
“What does it mean, Earther?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’d better tell me what you think.”
:They are going to send everyone here to be killed on Khagodis.:
Ned whispered, “What? That sounds—” He stopped himself from saying ‘crazy’. “How could they? What’s the point? Who’d kill us, Khagodi? Everybody thinks Khagodi are as straight as—as—eh …”
:Lyhhrt.:
“Right. I guess not.” Of course not. What everybody thinks, isn’t. Ned had known Khagodi arena fighters, men who hadn’t settled into any kind of society: they docked their tails to make them fork, and fitted the tips with spikes. Usually they fought each other, because no one else could match their size, and their heavy-helmeted bouts were clumsy and listless.
But except for those fights they had almost never been physically violent … and Lyhhrt had become so. Zamos had smeared whole worlds with new forms of corruption.
:Suppose it means that the brave Khagodi are going to defend themselves against attack by slaughtering invaders hired by Lyhhr … . :
“If you really believe this, tell me how long, Lyhhrt?”
“I believe. No more than two tendays.”
Shit, if that’s right I’ve just led us into a trap.
In the morning there were the usual jaw-jaws and drills and during the afternoon Ned found himself hooking loose brush into the robot loaders that compacted and hauled the garbage, and used the helmet as his guard against thorns; he took care to retract the sensor antenna and leave himself alone in the universe. Trying to pull himself together.
Rrengha came to work alongside him, or go through the motions; though she was a powerful and intelligent weapon, even with prostheses she had no more than half-hands. Aside from the Lyhhrt, she was the only other ESP he knew of here, and she took care to shield hard and wear the copper mesh.<
br />
Ned found her silent company good during the long afternoon. He said, to take his mind off everything else, “I guess you must be missing good food and a better place to sleep, Rrengha.”
Rrengha canted her head to one side, a massive negative. “Not everybody likes me the way you do, Ned, and working in that place there is too much flesh around me, all those women and men eating and drinking, eating and drinking …” She paused to swallow a mouthful of saliva, “too many big bites of meat.” She grinned. “Not lean like you, Ned.”
Ned laughed. “You’re takin’ away my appetite.” Her appetite was one of the few things he wasn’t scared of.
In the evening after dinner he asked the Lyhhrt: “If we had to get out, how would we do it?”
But the Lyhhrt had pulled away and closed his mind.
To get the chill off his spine Ned said, “I think I’ll go walkabout and check the fences.”
“Take care,” the Lyhhrt said.
Ned rubbed himself slick with insecticides and began his walk in a slow spiral around the fires and murmuring groups, talking casually to anyone he knew, gradually working his way through the tents area, taking the offer of a dopestick and squatting to smoke it, moving further out among the scrubby trees that had been left standing, past several couples among the bushes grunting their way into whatever temporary paradise was available, until he heard the deep vibration and came up against the bulk of the cycler.
The windowless gray block went deep into the ground, once-and-a-half Ned’s height above it, and eight armspans to a side. All waste went into its bay doors, but the stinging smell of it came from its solvents and vaporizers. All the money that was not spent on uniforms, barracks and ground-clearing machines was fed into it; its roof was covered with branches and was almost invisible from above. The loaders that collected brush carried it here, and Ned realized that some had come from other camps, the ones whose noises he had heard. Ned wondered if this Company was a business that ran other kinds of illegal militias and did not see why not … but sending them to death? How much money had been spent and would be spent for this, and so many lives … where was the payoff coming from?
He pulled himself away from these thoughts and wound his spiral past the watchtower, that did not rise far above the trees, and along a narrow path through them. The sun had dropped and the mists were rising; the stars were fuzzy and twinkled wildly in the still-hot air.
Insects were sticking to his face and that air was hard breathing; every once in a while some unsuspected flower would burst from a thorny bed with a waft of fragrance that was almost too sweet. Ned paused to listen for footsteps through the endless insect buzzings that were drowning out the cycler’s rumble, and was turning his head to look back when something hit him hard between the shoulders and he was face down in dirt.
He stayed there, with a foot holding him down. The voice snarled, “What d’you think you’re doing here?” Woman’s voice.
His teeth were gritting with the dirt and he snorted it from his bruised nose. The foot lifted and flipped him like a stone. “Whatsis, Chrissake, I come for a walk!”
Another of the heavy ones, she had arms as thick as the Beer Goddess’s, a zapstick in one hand instead of a lightning bolt, and a heavy stunner slung over her shoulder. Her hair was blond, chopped short.
Ned, cringing in a pose he had learned the hard way as a cheap pimp, recognized her with an extra twist of the gut: the one called Hummer, who had landed earlier with the three men, and even earlier had come in a fireproof fighting suit to kill him and the Lyhhrt back near the cave in Miramar, he had seen her hard face and yellow chopped hair through the suit’s headpiece. She would have slaughtered him gladly, but now she did not recognize his face through the dirt and the blood running from his nose.
“G’t up!”
Everything hurt but nothing was broken. He scrambled up, rubbing the dirt deeper into his face. “I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ miss, what’s wrong with walkin’?”
“Lessee your tag.” She was raising the zapstick.
“It’s in my kit, I got a rash on my neck an—Please don’t—I’m Tommy Longjeans, Tent Alpha-Seventeen!” Tommy had been the biggest bully in Ned’s school, and Ned would have been glad to trade places.
She grabbed his arm with her free hand and shoved her face close. “You looked like you were trying to go AWOL, Mister Longjeans, we don’t like that, next time we’ll push your face into the fence for a real good shave, and just to remind—” The stick was sparking the stubble of his jaw—
“Halloo, Hummer! You got trouble?” The voice was not far away in the bush, too close for Ned.
She turned her head to yell back, “Nothing, just a—”
Ned gave a hard edge-hand chop to her wrist that loosed her grip, wrenched his arm free and ran. He heard yells and cracking branches, but he was a lot lighter on his feet than Hummer and he ran as if demons were after him until he reached the cycler, then kept up a fast walk through the trees, past the lovers and when he was surrounded by tents, slowed to a limp, panting.
Suddenly he had a hideous mental image of her and all of the other brutes standing at the ship’s bays driving out all their load like cattle, to be slaughtered before they hit Khagodi ground. But he did not know whether it came from his own paranoia or the Lyhhrt’s.
The Lyhhrt was inside the tent doing his awkward best to refresh his liquids without being seen. He did not care to be near fires where he might boil in his own juice. After he had finished he lay down beside Spartakos, both of them in straight lines.
Ned thumped down beside him, groaning. “Found the fence, got scratched … Lyrhht, how many people and camps would you say there are here?”
The Lyhhrt stirred himself reluctantly and said, “In your enumeration, fourteen hundred and seventy-one persons in five groups.”
“Any more coming?”
“There are no more signs of recruiting.”
Fifteen hundred. A distance away from the Duke of York’s ten thousand. Ned had been almost certain that Brezant was spritzing. “You’re certain they mean to kill us.” Fact, not question.
“Almost certain.”
Ned swallowed on panic. “Lyhhrt, we gotta find a way out of here.” He waited out the silence.
“I can leave,” the Lyhhrt said. “I might be able to bring out all of those that I led in, but I would be lying to myself and everyone else if I promised.” There was a dark withdrawing depth in his mind.
“I don’t want to make any move without being sure they mean to do that,” Ned said. “Make sure really soon and move fast. But, Lyhhrt … can we run out of here and leave everybody else to be murdered?”
He crawled off to the showers. The good news was, if what the Lyhhrt believed was true, as long as they needn’t go to Khagodis, he needn’t get that damned oxycap socket reamed out again, if only he got out of here.
FIVE
Khagodis, New Interworld Court: Choices
Tharma was squatting at her desk eating a trencher of bread and a slab of cold myth-ox as usual for the late morning meal, but no matter what else she thought about, her eyes could not move away from that air-freight package on the desk just beyond the food. She found herself holding the spice-cellar over her tea-bowl without being able to remember whether she had shaken it, took a sip of tea and found it was already over-flavored, drank it anyway, in two gulps, and followed by gulping her food, and having it sit in her belly in a congealed lump. All ceremonies ended today and everyone would be leaving in two days at the most, but there was endless unfinished business.
The murder of that fellow Sketh, whatever his worth, needed a solution; the insistence of minor officials who had meant well, on imprisoning both Sketh and Hasso without formal charge, did not encourage confidence in public institutions of the public who lived and worked here. The problem of calming Gorodek and protecting Ekket. And that truly peculiar occurrence on the Mesa …
She set her teeth, swept the crumbs aside, drew the pack
age toward herself, and pulled the sealer’s tab. Stared at the symbolingua text: Report concerning the evidence of force. The title stopped there, because no one had dared fill it in further.
If this had been one of her old cases in Burning Mountain reported in cuneiform on clay tablets, she could simply have maintained privacy by stamping them out of existence. Not so now, when every thought could be engraved as solidly on electronic record as it might be on stone.
She nerved herself to pull the file from its wrappings, break the seals and pluck out the sheaf of thin and crinkly papers. They whispered in her hands.
The good news was victim not penetrated embedded in a lot of elegant language: so then Ekket was safer than she might have been—but what followed no elegance could alleviate: seed of perpetrator immature, suggest testing for Kartenat’s Syndrome. The genetic defect that caused male sterility in Khagodi.
“By Saint Gresskow’s Seven Bastards, why do I need to know this!” She wrapped the package up again, sealed it with her personal signet and handed it to the most trusted aide to lock up. This was one she would push upstairs to her Prime. Let him gnaw on the problem of keeping Gorodek from exploding in even more furious embarrassment.
Then a message burst in her ear with such force that it nearly blew the comm button out of her gill-slit: “Have I heard you correctly, Prime Director?”
Ravat, a good sensible fellow from Tharma’s own West Oceania, said, “I am afraid you have. Governor Gorodek has demanded—ek! replace that with ‘requested’!—the privilege of making an announcement”—pause for a gulp of air—“of great importance to the whole assembly in the Hall of Communication and Telegraphy, at the beginning of the fourth quarter, just between Refreshment Hour and Farewell Dinner.” Another gulp. “I’m sure you know what this means.”
She did: a carefully crafted information leak to the media and an unobtrusive increase in security at the Hall. Heavier duty for herself and an increased expense in keeping on extra forces when there was nothing left to the gathering but a dinner. “What else do you believe it might mean, Director?”
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