A pretty good digital image of Terl Plenko glared from the computer monitor inset into the prowler’s main console. There was a moment of reckoning as Brindos struggled with this information, then he looked into the side mirror. His nightmare got worse, and he pushed his back against the door of the prowler and slid to the ground, stunned. Now he knew why the prowlers had come looking for him.
Joseph, goddamn it. You played me, set me up, and threw me to the wolves.
Of course, it was perfect.
He was Plenko.
Thirteen
I walked the Helk outside, staying behind him after showing my blaster. “Next bar down,” I said, and we entered Mack’s Asylum, a glitzy bar a quarter of the size of the Flaming Sea. No sex workers here, just a circular bar in the middle of the room, a few gaming tables, and a small dance floor amid the regular tables. A Memor was playing a console game in the corner that screeched and whistled. His orange hair bobbed and weaved as he wrestled with the controls.
I motioned the Helk to a side table close to the door, told him to stay put, and went to the bar to order a few drinks, keeping him in my sights. Maybe I could loosen him up with a Helk ale. I ordered a glass of the blue poison for myself, left money, took both drinks, and sat down at the table, trying to look menacing.
“You going to talk?” I asked.
Probably not the best way to start a conversation with a Helk. Nearly an eighth of the Helk population is mute. Someone at the agency once tried to explain to me the nuances of defective genetic mapping, but he’d lost me at defective. So fine, I didn’t wait for this Helk to initiate the contact. Didn’t wait to see if he’d say hello or bring out a digipad. I had his earring, found at a crime scene—what would become an official crime scene as soon as the local police showed up—and I’d be damned if I was going to worry about Helk conversational protocol. He’d string some sentences together, I knew.
“Talking?” I asked as I dangled the earring in front of him again.
“Maybe,” the Helk said, eyeing the earring.
Not a sentence, but at least he wouldn’t be using a digipad. I hated those things. Turned a ten-minute conversation into thirty. The Helk reached for the earring, and I closed my hand over it and pulled back. “Not that I’m actually going to give it to you.”
“What do you want?” he said.
I sipped at my drink. “Some answers.”
The Helk snorted. “How original.”
“You know where I found this?” I asked, tapping the earring with a finger.
“In the restroom?”
“Someone’s dead in the room I found it in, if you need a hint.”
He sat back in his chair and glared at me. So far he hadn’t touched his ale.
“Don’t waste that,” I said, pointing at the ale. “Stuff’s not cheap.”
“I didn’t kill the woman,” he said.
So he knew. He’d most likely been in the room, guilty or not. “Kristen.”
“Yes, Kristen.”
He looked like a giant stuffed animal sitting there, until he suddenly leaned forward. I had my hand in my coat pocket, gripping my weapon, but even as I considered pulling it, he reached out and grabbed his drink. In one quick motion he downed half of it.
“When were you there?” I asked, making an assumption, relaxing again.
“She was already dead. On the bed. The place a mess.”
“Things you might know if you’d killed her.”
“It’s not a Helk thing.”
“Pardon me?”
“We wouldn’t have positioned her that way. Remember how she was?”
“Remind me.”
“Feet together, arms across her chest. That’s a human ritual. Helks, we don’t bury our dead or give them lavish funerals, we—”
I stopped him by waving a hand. “Yes, okay, I know what happens, I don’t need the gory details.” I leaned my elbows on the table and squinted at him. “So we didn’t find Kristen in pieces in each corner of the room. Doesn’t mean you didn’t kill her. You know human rituals, you could have done it to lead the cops to the wrong conclusion.”
The Helk finished his ale in a second gulp. He held out his palm. “I didn’t kill her, Mr. Crowell. Can I please have my earring back?”
Someone else who knew my name. This was getting embarrassing. “I’m at a distinct disadvantage here. You seem to know me, but I haven’t a clue who you are or what you’re doing here.”
The Helk nodded, his upper lip curling in amusement. “My name is Tem Forno.” He smiled. “I’m here because of you.”
“Me?”
“I was following you, waiting to see what you might find out. You left with Miss Landry. So I thought, maybe, just maybe, she had left something with Kristen. I went up there a few hours after you left with Miss Landry, but found the room just as you found it today.” He shook his head. “Someone got there first.”
What the hell was he talking about? “Wait, slow down, just slow down for Christ’s sake. So … what’s your name again?”
“Tem Forno.”
“You know Cara? You were following me because I knew Cara? How did you know who I was? And what could Cara possibly give Kristen that someone would kill for?” I imagined it was this fabled key Koch had been after, but I held that information back.
No answer. Instead, I got Forno’s outstretched palm again. “The earring, please. If you want to know more. And there is much more to say, trust me.”
I practically threw it at him. “There’s your damn earring. Now talk.”
“Hand out of your pocket.”
If the Helk had wanted to kill me, he would already have tried. I removed my hand from my pocket without the blaster.
“Caps?” he asked.
“Spent.”
Forno nodded, then stood up. “I can get them recharged for you on the way.”
I froze, not liking how the conversation had turned. “On the way to where?”
He didn’t answer, making a move to the exit.
I stood and tried to look menacing as I blocked his path to the door. “What were you looking for in Kristen’s room?”
The deep lines in his massive forehead thickened when he frowned at me. “Something awfully damn important.” He saw I wasn’t going to move, so he sighed. “Mr. Crowell, if whoever killed Kristen didn’t find what he was looking for, he will certainly go after it elsewhere.”
“Maybe he already did,” I said, thinking about Tony Koch at Cara’s apartment.
As if reading my mind, he said, “And where is Miss Landry—Cara—now?”
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
“Then perhaps you don’t need to know what’s going on here on Aryell.”
For the moment, Cara was safe, away from Jennifer Lisle. I didn’t trust either of them. How could I? Cara was the last to see Katerina Parker, Miss Kristen, alive. Jennifer had been on Coral Moon. She was a Movement sniffer for James. How much did she know about the NIO’s plan to make us scapegoats? Or Cara for that matter? Scapegoats for something I didn’t even know about yet.
“Cara’s on vacation,” I said. “That’s all I’m going to tell you. And if I’m to go with you, you’re going to at least tell me where we’re going.”
Forno loomed over me, looking hurt. “What, my offer to recharge your capacitors isn’t enough?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “We’re going out to the Flatlands.”
I frowned, remembering what Cara had told me about the heat-blasted Flatlands when I’d first met her. Even in winter, it never snowed, never got cold. At least I wouldn’t need a jacket.
“There’s nothing out there but miles and miles of dirt and rock,” I said.
The Helk shook his head. “Not anymore.”
I was surprised to find the sun directly overhead when we came out of Mack’s, the temperature bearable. Midday already. I’d lost track of time. I made a quick check of my code card, but nothing new
came up. Nothing from Alan, nothing from Jennifer.
No new NIO alerts. That surprised me. I mean, it was great not to see anything else about Alan and me splattered all over it, but shouldn’t there be some alerts?
An automated street sweeper crawled by on Amp Street, and the first few police cruisers had pulled up to the Flaming Sea half a block down. The few tourists not skiing paraded up and down the sidewalks, enjoying Kimson’s quaint ambiance, but they all stopped to gawk at the police activity. A half-dozen officers in green uniforms and several men and women in plainsclothes got out and filed into the tavern.
Forno pointed down the street at a parked flier.
We boarded—it was a two-seater, probably imported from Earth, strictly an economy model from several years back—then headed for the Flatlands. Leaving Kimson and its gentle hills behind, the flier took us north, out past the spaceport where the terrain flattened out, trees giving way to scrub brush, scrub brush giving way to rock and sand.
“How long?” I asked.
“Half hour at the most.” He pointed at my hands. “You want to recharge those capacitors? There’s a unit in the back.”
The flier reminded me of an antique sports car I’d had in New York: a sliver of space behind the seats for storage, the trunk practically useless with the spare tire taking up most of the room. The flier gave me the same sense of space as I twisted toward the back to scavenge behind the seat. I found the charger on the floor behind Forno, and I had to stretch awkwardly to reach it, jostling the Helk’s right arm a few times in the process before grabbing it by its carrying strap. Charger in hand, I regained my balance and faced the front again.
Once I’d found the power cable and Forno had pointed out the correct socket, I plugged the charger into the flier’s dash. I opened up the unit with a push of a button, snapped my capacitors over to recharge mode, then inserted the fingers of my left hand into the five matching slots. Suction pulled my fingers in, and the current surged, sending tickling vibrations up my arm.
“It’s got an auto shutoff,” Forno said, “just in case you want to rest your eyes for a while.”
I was about ready to tell him I had no intention of sleeping, especially since I hadn’t known him for more than a half hour, when the first waves of exhaustion passed over me, and I soon succumbed to sleep.
When I woke, the flier had landed, and darkness coated the windows like black paint. Forno was not on the flier, and that prompted me to reach for my blaster. It was gone. Cursing to myself, I checked my capacitors. Green power indicators glowed under my fingernails. Charged and ready. Strange. Why would Forno charge my caps, then take my gun? How long had I been out? Forno had said a half hour to the Flatlands, but the Flatlands stretched for forty miles in every direction. Still, it shouldn’t be dark outside. Late afternoon, maybe, but not pitch-black.
Code card still in my pocket too. No alerts. No messages. I could crossword a message to Alan, see if I could find out what was going down on his end, but this whole silent code card thing had me spooked.
I tried the flier door, but it was locked. I couldn’t blast my way out, not with caps. Only after I decided to sit back and wait, my side door thunked open. Sunlight slanted into the flier. Forno peered in, bent at the waist, one hand resting on the flier’s rooftop.
“Shielding,” he said to me when I squinted into the light. “This flier is in the Flatlands a lot, and it gets hot, even this time of year.” He smiled benignly. “Come on,” he said, taking a step back.
“Where’s my blaster?” I asked, pointing my fingers at him.
“I’ve got it put away, safe.” He slapped my hand away. “Don’t point those things at me. I wanted to be sure about you.”
I asked the obvious. “Where are we?”
He took another step back. “If you’ll get out, I’ll show you. You did want to know what’s going on, right?”
I stepped out onto hard dirt and straightened. Though Forno had landed us in the Flatlands, he’d managed to find about the only bump in the landscape with enough elevation to give us a good view of what I’d come to see. Only I hadn’t expected to see it.
It wasn’t finished, I could tell that much. That’s why I saw plenty of heavy machinery and dozens of workers scurrying around below.
“Know what that is?” Forno asked me, smiling. “Know what it will be?”
Slowly, as I inched forward, I nodded. “Yeah. They’ve got one just like it on Temonus.” There was no wire, but I saw the first tower rising a half mile into the sky, and far down the hard plain of the Flatlands I could barely make out a second one. I said to Forno, “Another Transcontinental Conduit.”
And all this time I’d thought Aryell, out of all the Union worlds, had the best way to tweak unfavorable climate, thanks to Lorway, the Memor, and the rest of the Science Consortium. But now I knew, deep in my gut, that whoever controlled the Conduits controlled something much more volatile than the weather. I just didn’t know what.
Fourteen
Brindos thought: I am Plenko.
Sitting with his back against the prowler, eyes closed, he recalled Plenko’s words when he had first seen him out in that deserted field: Soon I will be more than a name to you, and you will be much more than a name to me.
Ozsc.
Soul.
Had Brindos’s soul somehow been lifted from his body and transplanted to Plenko’s? Nothing he knew about could do that. Nothing. He shivered, knowing full well his human body might be walking around Temonus with Plenko’s “ozsc” inside.
Nightmare upon nightmare.
He’d lost his identity, his blaster, his code card. His humanity. Stranded on Temonus, wanted for murder—hell, forget that. Plenko’s list of crimes against the Union was as long as Brindos’s new Helk arm, and murder didn’t even top the list.
Take Ribon. What chance had it had against the Movement’s planet killer? Coral Moon, a hammer coming down with little warning. Less than a week to kill a world. Some had escaped the slaughter, but too many had not. Not like the powers-that-be were going to let that one slide. Plenko was fair game, a “shoot-to-kill” target throughout the Union.
If Joseph had a hand in all this, if it had been his idea …
A hum startled him from his thoughts, and he opened his eyes. On the sidewalk, about twenty feet away, a Temonus cop stood poised, his weapon leveled. It was the prowler’s owner, the young cop from the holo image. Young, probably fresh out of the academy; the gray and blue uniform looked brand new. The blaster shook a little in his hands.
Brindos didn’t blame him.
Funny. Brindos’s first reaction as Alan Brindos would’ve been to put up his hands and shout “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” adrenaline pumping through like RuBy shooting through an addict’s veins. But while his consciousness had certainly taken root inside Plenko, some obvious instinctual behaviors of a First Clan Helk had not changed—well, as far as he knew, anyway, considering he’d been a Helk for less than a few hours. At least he had no desire to eat the poor guy.
Brindos felt calm. Confident. No anxiety. No concern for his safety. Right away he knew he didn’t need to be afraid of this cop.
And yet: the Alan Brindos part of him had doubts. Hesitated.
“Midwest City Authority,” the cop yelled out, a quaver in his voice. “Get up now. Hands high.”
Could Brindos explain it to him? Did he tell this kid he wasn’t Plenko, that he was human, an operative for the NIO? The cop would laugh himself silly—if he didn’t drop dead from a heart attack first.
Brindos stood, letting the cop see what he was up against. Not once did Brindos take his eyes off him, and somehow, unbelievably, the young cop didn’t flinch. He held his ground.
“Sideways,” the cop said.
He knew the routine, that much was certain. Turn the Helk slightly to his right, expose the left side and, because of its location on that side of the body, the heart. Turning right would put the cop in a good position to fire at a point just under Bri
ndos’s armpit and blow him away if he did anything stupid.
Brindos decided to do something stupid. He turned left. Of course, the cop could’ve aimed for his head, but he was all textbook now.
“The other way, goddamn it!” he yelled. “To your right, to your right!”
Desperation had the cop a bit frazzled, and Brindos took that quick moment to move, zipping toward him faster than any human, feeling the near-thrill of moving that way. He reached the cop just as he fired his weapon.
This is what Helk quickness looks like, Brindos thought.
Accelerating and stopping. He knew about it now after running down alleys, through hallways, and across rooftops to escape pursuit. Acceleration got him to the cop in a flash.
Brindos stopped suddenly right in front of him, and a split second later twisted out of the way, the projectile of the weapon missing. He reached him an instant later.
This is what Helk power feels like.
Realizing its full potential in a blink of an eye, Brindos brought up his fist in an uppercut and connected with the cop’s jaw. He grunted once as his feet left the ground, and he was out before he hit the sidewalk. The blaster clattered harmlessly beside him like a child’s abandoned toy.
Brindos relaxed his hand and flexed the fingers as he took a single step to where the cop lay. Brindos might be an ugly son of a bitch, but he was starting to appreciate the super-strength thing.
More sirens warbled in the distance and he knew he’d have to get out of there fast. No use trying to steal the prowler—it would be keyed to the cop’s DNA. He could probably start it up by getting the cop’s thumb to the ignition, but he’d have to have the cop sitting in his lap to get anywhere. Brindos bent down and picked up the cop’s blaster, but it also had a DNA trigger. Goddamn. He dropped it, straightened, and glanced at the cop’s face.
His head rested against his right shoulder but his face looked away from Brindos, turned to the far left.
The cop was out cold and going nowhere soon. He’d have a hell of a headache, and probably would need jaw surgery.
The Ultra Thin Man Page 13