The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

  Movement calmed slightly, and I relaxed somewhat. I’d yelled out at Forno due to my confusion, but as I settled down, I felt that I should know what this was. I squinted at the swirling colors, the plasma-like fluctuations.

  “Datascreen,” Forno said, almost at the same time I realized we were caught in some kind of defense mechanism.

  “What the hell’s a datascreen?”

  “It’s virtual,” he said. “Like camoflauge. And a deterrent. I found something out about this place when I accessed the files in the NIO basement.”

  Like a hot zone. But I’d never seen tech like it. Unless the Memors had hidden it until now. “This place? What’s this datascreen keeping us from getting to?”

  “Oh, we’ll get there. The datascreen is automatic. The fields and data coils react to our flight path, but we’ll pass through it. No one actually starts and stops it, and very few even hang around to maintain it.”

  “But someone wants to keep ships away.”

  He almost smiled. “Most definitely.”

  More science from the Consortium? Another gift from the Memors, from Lorway? “The datascreen’s weakening,” I said, the colors and grays dwindling to a swirling muddiness, becoming more transparent.

  “Check out below.”

  I followed his arm, lifting myself off the seat a little so I could look down through the front window. We were almost through the datascreen now, the virtual shield giving way to the natural colors of the Aryellian sky and earth. Those patches of brown I’d seen earlier stood out in stark contrast to the disappearing gray and white, the last remnants of the datascreen, and now I understood why they had seemed to waver.

  They were wavering.

  Or, more accurately, fluttering.

  “Tents?” I said in a whisper. I whispered it, because the tents extended along the flat plain for miles in all directions and I could hardly believe it possible.

  Forno nodded out the window. “Welcome to New Venasaille.”

  “New—” I narrowed my eyes and took in a breath. “What?”

  “I’ve got to land this thing.”

  “Did you say New Venasaille?”

  “The datascreen’s automatic, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have people out here keeping watch from time to time.”

  “New Venasaille? Like Venasaille on Ribon?”

  “There’s a spot I used the first time I was here. Well out of the way, hidden for the most part.”

  “Ribon? The planet my partner barely escaped from?”

  “I can land this thing there, keep out of sight.”

  “Forno!”

  Forno stopped and finally looked my way. “You haven’t figured it out?”

  I had, in that instant, realized what I was seeing. I nodded, but didn’t say anything right away. In my mind, I saw the copy of the police surveillance holo Alan Brindos had made for me, the one the Venasaille police Lieutenant Branson had played him. I watched it, knowing what followed on Ribon after the incident. Wincing during the recording, when Dorie Senall pitched over the edge of the apartment in the Tempest Tower, her freefall down one hundred floors captured by the marble cam; I couldn’t help thinking she might have been one of the lucky ones.

  Luckier than the ones who didn’t make it off planet and had to watch Coral Moon fragment above them.

  Possibly luckier than these people here, in New Venasaille, depending on the conditions.

  A tent city. A massive tent city.

  “This is the classified spot the Ribon refugees ended up,” Forno said. He put the flier into a steep descent, and soon I couldn’t make out the tents anymore, a copse of wispy trees rising to meet us.

  As he set us down in a small clearing in the trees, I found my voice. “Are they all here? I heard they managed to evacuate nearly five hundred thousand people before the disaster.”

  “Five hundred fifty thousand,” Forno said. “Humans mostly, but some Memors and Helks. All that’s left of Ribon’s population.”

  I looked at him, my question still unanswered.

  “They’re all here,” he said.

  We left the flier behind and Forno led the way out of the clearing and through the evergreen trees. Here, away from the Flatlands, the temperature had dropped considerably, and patches of snow and ice slowed our steps. It was also getting on toward evening. I shivered. A warm Flaming Sea jacket would’ve been nice right about now. My blaster felt awkward tucked into my pants, but I didn’t want to be carrying it. Not with the footing a little tricky.

  Eventually we came to a small rise pocked with shrubs and dwarf evergreens and the ground cover became less dense. Forno crouched low as he neared the top and motioned for me to get down. On our elbows and knees, we scrunched upward until the tent city came into view.

  I could now make out individual tents, door flaps, rain flys. Once in a while, I spotted movement that turned out to be refugees of New Venasaille walking around with no apparent destination in mind.

  “But,” I said, searching for understanding, “what do they do here? Five hundred thousand people. They’re just hanging out in tents? Isn’t someone trying to relocate them? Are they looking for jobs somewhere? Are there first aid centers, food cantinas, water wells? I mean, what the hell, Forno?”

  The Helk nodded knowingly, looking across the tent city. “Hard to fathom, isn’t it?”

  “Can you do some fathoming for me, then?”

  He glanced my way and he narrowed his eyes. He jerked his head at the tents. “You up for a sprint?”

  “Sprint?”

  “To the nearest tent. Take a peek. Have to be careful, though. Don’t want to be discovered.”

  I frowned, not sure I was up for the challenge. “I’m not going to win a footrace with a Helk. Particularly since I haven’t had a chance to get to the gym for a while.”

  “I’ll hold back a little.”

  “A lot.”

  He stood and brushed off his trousers. “Ready?”

  I nodded as I rose. “When—”

  “Go!” Forno yelled, and he was off.

  It wasn’t quite a race after all. I followed him, and we just picked our way down the backside of the rise, sidestepping snow and brush, keeping as low as we could. No one seemed to take any interest in us, although I had to believe some of the tent people noticed our scramble toward them. I trailed Forno most of the way, but we weren’t going to get separated or lost.

  As he ran, Forno pointed to the tent we’d reach first, then made a circling motion with his finger, indicating we should sneak around to the backside of the fabric once we got there. Forno wanted to make sure we were as close to the tent as possible and found a spot out of sight from whatever and whoever would see us. Did he worry about the tent people, or just the brass that put them here?

  We made it to the first tent and crept around it a bit, until Forno was sure all was okay. Due to his size, he had to crouch closer to the ground than me to keep his head lower than the top of the tent.

  “Let me take a quick peek inside,” he whispered. He held a Helk stunner, now. I hadn’t seen him grab one in the flier. “See if anyone’s in there.”

  “If there is, then what? We keep looking until we find a tent that’s empty, right?”

  Forno gave me a funny look. If Helks actually had eyebrows, I believe one of Forno’s would have risen.

  “No?” I said, nervously scanning the next nearest tent.

  Forno shook his head. “We want someone to be home.”

  “Some tent person to be home,” I added.

  “Yes.”

  “And why’s that?”

  His mouth became a thin line. “You’ll see. I found this place, got out of here quick, and now you need to see. Maybe you can help shed some light on this.”

  He motioned me to hold my spot, then inched around to the front. Once he’d slipped out of sight, I crouched even lower, making myself as small as possible. I pulled the blaster out and held it tight in both hands. Not long after, Forno’s
shadow appeared, moving around inside. This tent must have had what Forno wanted to show me.

  His shadow came close to the side where I crouched. “Come on in,” he said, his voice muffled.

  Still in a crouch, blaster raised slightly, I worked my way to the front tent flap. I took a moment to glance down the aisle of tents, and six or seven tents away, a man and a woman stood watching me. Somehow, I avoided aiming my blaster at them. I froze, certain they would raise an alarm of some sort. Yell. Scream. Point. Jump up and down.

  They just stared at me.

  They didn’t move a muscle.

  “Okay, that’s creepy,” I muttered aloud. Another few seconds passed and neither of them budged, so I slipped into the tent, happy to get away from them.

  I stopped just inside, a chill prickling my skin. Even in the dim light, I could make out a male stretched out on a cot. Human, yes. Alive, yes. Moving, no. His eyes were open and he stared intently at Forno, who was on his knees next to the cot. Forno’s head still grazed the top of the tent.

  A strange odor permeated the tent, and I couldn’t quite place what it was. Strong, though, as if someone had spilled something.

  It looked as though the tent person wanted to say something, because his lips moved ever so slightly. No sound came from him, though, and I shot Forno a look, waiting for an explanation. I held my blaster loosely at my side.

  “He knows we’re here,” Forno said in a half whisper. “He’s aware, but feeling very little. Can’t talk or do much of anything because his whole body has shut down.” He shook his head. “I hadn’t realized it had gone this far. Not already.”

  “He’s in La-La Land,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?” Scanning the tent, I spotted an open trunk with clothes jammed inside, a small folding table, a small unlit oil lantern, and a cardboard box that I couldn’t see into.

  “Drugged,” Forno said. “Pretty much gone over the edge too. I was afraid of this.”

  Forno back at it, dredging up more mystery. I was ready to ask more questions, but then my eyes caught a glimpse of something on the dirt.

  Blood.

  A ragged red square of blood.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I noticed more of it, the blood scattered haphazardly along the floor, each square almost uniform. On the table too. Only … the red squares on the table were three-dimensional. They were in stacks. Piles.

  This wasn’t blood.

  Forno inclined his head toward the table. “You know what it is?”

  I nodded, now connecting the strong odor to the drug. “RuBy.”

  “RuBy,” he repeated. “What do you know about it?”

  “Not enough,” I said quickly, although I knew it had been developed on Helkunntanas. In my mind, I recalled the holo-recording again, the image of Dorie Senall taking the drug before sliding over to Jennifer Lisle, before asking her about adventure. About the Movement.

  “It’s nasty stuff,” Forno said. “Particularly for humans.”

  I craned my head around and stared at the tent entrance. “They’re all drugged? Five hundred thousand of them?”

  Forno got up off his knees and walked in a crouch to me. “In various stages, I imagine,” he said. “Men, women, Helk, Memor, and children.”

  Children?

  “No one’s looking for them?” I asked.

  “No one’s looking for them. Family, loved ones, friends—they were all told they didn’t make it off Ribon.”

  “But everyone knew there were refugees. The Union government had to—”

  Forno shook his head sadly. “The ships were commandeered on the way through the slot with a recalibration of the tracking signals via cobweb. Brought here to Aryell, hushed up, the datascreen put in place. All very quiet.”

  Picking up one of the red squares off the ground, I felt a surge of panic. That stale cinnamon smell made me wrinkle my nose a little. All that Forno had shown me, all he’d told me, had brought me to this moment: here I was, on a world far from home, in a tent city of massive size, a wild conspiracy ongoing, holding up a square of red paper. So flimsy. I could crush it, roll it in my hands until it crumbled into dust, harmless. I stole a glance at the man on the cot.

  I figured Forno would tell me everything now.

  But no.

  He didn’t know everything. After he showed me this place, he’d said. After he told me about what he knew. The rest of the mystery? Even he didn’t know it.

  But I knew things he didn’t. I hadn’t heard from Alan in a while, my code card as silent as the RuBy addict in the tent, but I suspected Alan knew things I didn’t. If, as Forno had told me at the Flatlands, Alan was in trouble with the bad guys on Temonus, he might know too much.

  “This is fucked,” I said, blinking away the tears brought on by the ever-present smell of too much RuBy.

  “Now,” Forno said, sitting down on the ground, “I’ll tell you the rest of what I know about the plan to tear apart the Union of Worlds.”

  Eighteen

  The RuBy hit him quickly, hazing his vision and numbing his head. Arms and legs rubbery. Sitting on the container in front of him, Dorie Senall scanned his face, trying, no doubt, to see how he would handle the stuff. The stuff he didn’t think he’d ever taken before.

  I am Plenko.

  Surely, at some point in his life, he should’ve popped a RuBy before this. It was a Helk drug.

  But he was not Plenko. Not exactly. This woman who claimed to be his mate had said as much. Needed to find out who he was. Had the person he was before this taken RuBy? Some goddamn wimp, he suspected, since the drug wasn’t playing very nice; he was definitely having trouble with it.

  He shook his head, groaning as an echo of the knife-pain from earlier washed through him.

  “Breathe slow,” Dorie Senall said. “Deep. You’ll be totally Rubed out in a moment. It hits fast, holds on to you hard, doesn’t last too long.”

  He forced himself to relax, breathing in and out as slowly as possible. It was almost automatic once he’d been reminded about the breathing, as if someone had wired the rest of the procedure directly into his brain. Count backward from ten. Tongue way back in the mouth, teeth apart, breaths full, clench the muscles in legs, arms, stomach. Then relax, head back, and close the eyes.

  He closed his eyes and watched the pretty lights.

  “Are you awake? Are you with me?”

  The soft voice brought him out of the light show, and he became more aware of the high. A new fog. This fog felt different from that which had rolled in on him when Chinkno and his buddy had stuck him with the needle. Earlier he’d felt euphoria, true enough. But he’d also felt a palpable fear, even though he didn’t know what he was afraid of.

  This time, the fog gave an understanding. The electricity punched all his pleasure buttons, but the dread had vanished. A shift took place inside his consciousness, one that allowed him to perceive his environment, his world. He felt Helkunntanas, most definitely, but he recognized another imprint. The world of Dorie Senall. The world belonging to the person he had been.

  Earth.

  “Earth,” he whispered, opening his eyes.

  Dorie stood on the container, level with his face now, intent on his eyes, which felt heavy with fatigue.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “You’re from there?”

  She shook her head. “No.” She laid a hand on his forehead. “Well, I was born there. But I lived most of my life on Ribon.”

  Sadness washed over him. Her world gone. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head, as if shaking it free of the memories. “No, that’s okay. I belong to Union, you see. I just find myself temporarily homeless.”

  Me too, he thought. Both Earth and Helkunntanas, they didn’t exist for him at this moment. He couldn’t figure out where he belonged, and the images he had of both flickered in and out like ghosts, not real people, not real places, and the uncertainty weighed on him like stone. Only the RuBy kept the ghost-worlds from crushing h
im.

  “But I found you, Terl,” she said. “I found you.”

  “You said—”

  “I know. You’re not him. Not exactly. But a part of him is in there with you, whoever you are.”

  “Will telling me about him help you figure out who I am?”

  She shut her eyes a moment, probably working her way through another wave of the RuBy. She whispered something to herself before opening her eyes again, and jumped off the container. She lay down on it, turned onto her side and faced him, then rested her head in the crook of her elbow. He could still see her eyes, and they had softened from the earlier RuBy-induced high. She was coming down from it.

  “I met him on Ribon,” she said. “Terl Plenko was a First Clan Helk like any other. He didn’t advocate violence. ‘Union bright,’ he used to say to me. ‘Union bright.’ He said it was a rally cry. Said there used to be an old saying, ‘Honor bright.” It was a promise. He cared about Union.

  “He was smart. He spent most of his career developing many of the DNA locking mechanisms we take for granted these days. He was creating new strategies for the next generation of DNA-locks, contracting with provincial governments, even local Authority and intelligence circles. But also, because of his interest in local politics, he decided to run for provincial mayor of Venasaille. That’s when he recruited me. I was a graduate student at the university, and he met with a bunch of us at a rally.”

  “And you fell in love.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Love? No. We married for convenience. We hoped to help knit the rift between Helkunntanas and Earth with a show of commitment. Our secret. We married, but we never consummated it.” She smiled. “I’ve heard stories about that sort of thing between Helks and humans, but still … I wasn’t too thrilled about finding out.”

  He looked past her, staring at the hanging red bulb as the RuBy did another tour through his system. He experienced another ghostly image: an apartment, lavishly furnished, high up on a black tower overlooking a city. He saw his ghost-hands, immersed in some kind of activity, a knife of some sort in his hand. Cutting. Carving.