“A new esthesia implant?” Gil echoed, in his lisping growl.
“That’s what I said.”
Gil was curled on top of his desk, which was the size and shape used by humans. He wore a sumptuous garment, all charcoal-gray silk points and pleated bits, with onyx buttons. He had an ashtray, a computer, and a glass of amber liquid within reach. He said, “I have been promoted. I’m now the Uzzizellan ambassador to the Human Republic. It’s rare to be promoted out of the field; these are usually political appointments.”
“Congratulations.”
“I am just explaining why I can’t help you. You should talk to Crasibo Lovelace.”
“I did. They said no. In fact, they examined me and said the implant is working fine. It isn’t.”
“Yes, they attached the scan results to your report,” Gil said, tapping a claw on the screen of his computer.
“So you’ve read it.”
“Yes.”
“So you know what happened.”
“You destroyed the base on Mezamiria, at a cost of millions to Crasibo Lovelace and the Human Republic.”
“That’s correct.”
“I’m curious. How?”
“I rigged a suicide switch on the reactor at the base.”
“How?”
“Pepto-Bismol.” Colm laughed at the puzzled twitching of the queazel’s ears. “Liquid bismuth. Irradiate it and you get polonium. Mix that with beryllium and you get a neutron generator. Neutrons plus uranium waste products equals a decent-sized boom.”
Truth be told, he had got the idea from the Ghosts. On Majriti IV, they’d exploited uranium waste products from stolen reactors to build mushy but no less lethal nukes. They learn from us. Who says we can’t learn from them?
“They can see Mezamiria glowing from Triton,” Gil said, twitching his hindquarters.
“That was the point,” Colm said. “The Ghosts won’t be paying a return visit to that rock. Once they get a fix on an energy source, they always come back. Well, I made sure there’s nothing there for them to come back to.”
“A heroic deed, but pointless,” Gil said. “They also invaded three other Kuiper Belt Objects at the same time.”
“I heard.” Gna was talking about nothing else. “But to return to the reason I’m taking up your time, I need a new esthesia implant. The mute function on this one doesn’t work. I was in so much pain that it affected my judgment. I did not sufficiently consider the safety of my crew. As a result, two of them died.”
Colm fumbled his computer out of his pocket, planning to show Gil the pictures of Zhanna’s corpse. He blamed himself for her death. Smythe had raised doubts about the safety of the gearship, and Colm had dismissed them, because the incessant pain made him short-tempered and short-sighted.
He lumbered stiffly up to the desk, holding out his computer. Gil uncoiled his forequarters and held up a wee black hand. “Please. It would not be appropriate.”
“Whit’s nae appropriate is she’s fucking deid,” Colm said, losing his temper. He was not a man to rave and roar. He’d had enough of that from his father. Colm got mad like his mother: his voice grew quieter and his accent more pronounced, and as people said of Daisy Mackenzie, you could feel the temperature drop ten degrees in the room.
Gil said, “I’m sorry.”
“I’d expect no less. In fact I expect quite a bit more.”
“Her family will be generously compensated. So will the family of Fitch Reynolds.”
“Sure, it’s all about the money,” Colm said with heavy sarcasm. “The Ghosts have reached Sol system. Earth is in the firing line. The Ring Around the Sun was meant to be our first line of defense, but it’s not finished, it’s not nearly finished, it’s been a nightmare of cost overruns and procurement scandals. And this—” he tapped his skull, over his left ear, where the implant resided— “this really tells the whole story, doesn’t it? You compromised our efficiency by sending me out there with a defective piece of junk in my head.”
Gil reached down and opened a drawer in his desk. He took out a fancy gift box of mixed chocolates and Turkish Delight. He picked a banana cream neatly out of the box with his long tongue. “Would you like a chocolate?” he said, pushing the box towards Colm.
“No thanks.”
“Not hungry?”
Colm took a step towards the desk. He’d asked the ground techs to fill the reaction mass tanks while they worked on the crewship. Of course they had refused—repairs came before refueling. He lowered his face to the queazel’s level. “I am so hungry,” he hissed, “that I could eat you alive.”
Gil recoiled.
Colm grinned.
Gil nervously crunched a second chocolate, keeping his eyes on Colm. He licked his chops and tapped fretfully on his computer. Colm waited. At last the queazel looked up. “It may be possible to update the settings of your implant.”
“That’s not what I’m asking for.”
“It’s what I am offering.” Gil had recovered his poise. He tapped on the computer some more. “By the way, it appears that the media has tracked you down. They are waiting for you outside the embassy.”
“Oh, brilliant.”
“I can show you a different way out. I use it myself sometimes.”
Gil left for a few moments and came back in a scruffy quilted vest with food stains on it. He led Colm down the embassy’s back stairs, to a service umbilical connecting the embassy to the mainland. They walked along a maintenance tunnel and came out underground, on the life-support level of Regnar. Machinery drummed and roared. Colm followed the queazel into an elevator. It reminded him of the night he’d rescued Gil from Drumlin Farm. Then, Ghosts had been chasing them. Now, he was pursued by the ghosts of the dead.
The elevator dumped them on a scuzzy level of Regnar where Colm had never been before. Shacks crowded the gaps between exposed conduits and pump housings. Music struggled through the noise of machinery. Gil whisked into a doorway. “I often come here,” he said.
It was a dive bar. Thin, unhealthy-looking people sat around boozing in the murky light.
“I don’t want a bloody drink,” Colm said, draining half the beer that was set in front of him. “I want a new implant.”
“I cannot provide that. I’ll make an appointment for you to receive a settings upgrade, free of charge.”
Colm uselessly rubbed his back. “It hurts.”
“The upgrade will restore the mute function.”
That would be a lot better than nothing. “All right.”
“I’ll tell the clinic to fit you in tomorrow morning.”
“OK.” Colm drank the rest of his beer, sagging over the sticky, dirty table.
“Have you been taking anything for the pain?”
“Tropodolfin. Left my stash on Mezamiria.”
Gil beckoned to a boy sitting on a high stool by the door. They spoke in low voices. Colm paid no attention, wallowing in his misery. A few minutes later the boy came back with a plastic container. Colm hoped to see a blister pack of tropo. Instead, Gil took out tourniquets, ampoules, sterile syringe packs.
“I’m not injecting myself.”
“It works faster.”
“How would you know?”
Gil’s lips wrinkled back from his muzzle in his dog-like laugh. “The life of an ambassador is very stressful.” He stretched out one of his bony forepaws. “Will you apply the tourniquet? It’s difficult for me to do it by myself with this human gear.”
Colm shook his head. Right out in public. Not that any of the losers around them were paying attention ... they were probably drug fiends themselves. He wrapped the smaller tourniquet around the queazel’s little foreleg and prodded until he found a vein, remembering the last time he’d tended to Gil, in the sickbay of his gunship, when he hadn’t even known if Gil was sapient. He smoothed the impossibly soft fur aside and injected Gil with the dose marked QUEAZEL. Then, because it was sitting there, he injected the dose marked HUMAN into his own arm.
The night got a lot better after that.
Gil lay on the banquette next to Colm, telling Colm about Uzzizel—where he’d never actually been. He reminded Colm of those guys in the Fleet who would bang on about their Scottish or French or German heritage, and then you found out they’d actually been born on Mars. Colm half-listened, lost in his own memories.
“Stop that,” Gil said suddenly.
Colm looked down. He’d been stroking Gil’s neck fur. It was just so nice and soft. “Does that bother you?” he said, laughing. “Can’t resist. You remind me of Sprite.”
“Sprite?”
“Had a cat when I was a kid. Sprite. She was the daintiest little thing. Tortoiseshell with a lot of orange on her. So intelligent, you’d swear she could understand what you were saying.” Colm’s smile wavered.
“Where is she now?” Gil asked.
Out of the blue, grief and anger smashed through Colm’s high. “My sodding father killed her, didn’t he?”
“Your father killed her?”
Colm nodded. He hadn’t thought about this in decades. Hadn’t allowed himself to think about it. For precisely that reason, the wound remained as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. “He took her out to the shed in the middle of the night.” He hadn’t been able to get to sleep that night on account of Bridget, who’d been poorly and kept waking up and crying. “I saw him from the window. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, apart from ‘Why is Dad going to the shed in the middle of the night?’ ... but the next day, Sprite didn’t come to get her breakfast. I looked in the shed and she wasn’t there, either. There was only a funny smell ... and some stains on the old table he kept for his work. Looking back, those were bloodstains.”
Gil said tentatively, “Perhaps you misunderstood? Perhaps—Sprite?—simply ran away?”
“She did not. I know that for a fact, because I found her head later. Just her little head, stuffed. The bastard had it stuffed and mounted. It was still in the taxidermist’s box.” Tears of grief and fury sprang to Colm’s eyes. He’d never let on to his father that he’d found that box, and its grisly contents. Never told anyone, until now. He sniffled. “Jesus. Sorry. This is ridiculous. She was only a cat ...”
“What. er, is a cat?”
“What is a ...? They’re animals. We keep them as pets. You must have seen pictures. They look sort of like you, but about a quarter the size.”
Poor little Sprite, killed by Dad, the very man she trusted to look after her. Poor Zhanna, killed by Colm’s failure to foresee the danger she was in. A cat was not a girlfriend, of course, but it was all one big muddy pool of grief. His eyes stung and his nose ran. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried like this.
Gil laid a claw on his shoulder in wordless sympathy.
Without really thinking, Colm reached over and began petting the queazel again. He blotted his eyes with the back of one hand and stroked Gil’s fur with the other. It was comforting—until Gil backed away, claws scrabbling on Colm’s leathers.
“Hey! I did not say you could do that. I am the Uzzizellan ambassador to the Human Republic. I can trace my lineage back a thousand years. I am not a pet!”
“I’m aware of that. If you were a pet, you wouldn’t be such an annoying wee cunt,” Colm snapped. The rebuff stanched his tears, at least. He reached for his glass, found it empty.
“Another drink?” Gil said, awkwardly.
“If you’re buying.”
CHAPTER 23
MEG GOT MOBBED BY the media as soon as she emerged from the security wickets at the spaceport. She had expected they would chase after Colm, but somehow a half-bald, half-ginger six-foot Scot had got past them, leaving her to take the heat.
Well, she didn’t mind. Every human being alive needed to know what had happened on Mezamiria. The media flacks crowded her, all looking weirdly the same, with their perfect hair and perfect skin and perfect teeth, high-end infocals imparting the same silvery glint to every eye, forefingers with implanted directional microphones waggling above the fray. It began to feel like an assault, and the sense of being attacked, even though it was an illusion, flipped her switch. She became detached, and told her story in strictly factual terms, as if she were getting debriefed by a superior officer. She left out Zhanna’s glorious strip-tease, and the way her blood had boiled in the 110 Kelvin vacuum of the gearship’s cargo hold. The stringers were disappointed. They prodded her for juicy details.
Meg took a secure grip on the strap of her rucksack. Swinging it in front of her, she barged through them. She stepped on sandaled toes and shoved her rucksack into poreless faces.
“This way,” said a male voice in her ear. A hand fastened on her left elbow. She spun, rotating her arm to raise the grabbing hand, already visualizing how she’d apply a joint lock and get him down on the floor.
A familiar face. Hazel eyes and high cheekbones. Dark hair that had been allowed to grow into a floppy fuck-you to the Fleet.
Axel Best.
Wow. She hadn’t even thought about him in years.
“Back through security,” he said.
Side by side, they reversed through the media mob. Best sorted the security guards with a nod and a wave. Catching her breath, letting the unwanted adrenaline leave her body, Meg followed him through the loading area to the spaceport staff exit. This must be how Colm had escaped. They wound up on a train platform, among glaze-eyed technicians and mechanics.
“Thanks,” Meg said.
“No problem. I heard you were back.”
“I guess everyone’s heard what happened.”
Best smiled wryly. “We’re having our biggest collective freak-out since first contact. Our home system’s been invaded.”
“The Kuiper Belt is only just barely in our home system.”
“Yeah, but the psychological impact is huge.”
“I hope we’re doing more than freaking out. We’ve got to hold the line. That’s what I was trying to tell those idiots.”
Best sighed. “I don’t know what happens now. There’ll definitely be a response. I heard we’re sending troops to the three KBOs that the Ghosts took.”
Meg marvelled at how easy it was to talk to him. It seemed like they’d last spoken two days ago, rather than two years ago. As they waited for the train, she eyed him curiously. He had gone home to work for his family’s company, or one of his family’s many companies. So what was he doing back on Gna?
He looked good. Business suit, shaggy haircut, designer stubble, the whole young executive package. He wasn’t carrying a weapon that she could tell.
The train came. As the crush carried them aboard, Best said, “Have you got dinner plans?”
“What?” Meg yelled, separated from him by half a dozen people.
He fought towards her. They ended up squashed face to face, with her rucksack between them. “I said, have you got plans for dinner?”
“Um. No. It’s early morning for me.”
“FTL lag,” he said with a hint of wistfulness.
“Yeah.”
“Well, then, have you got plans for breakfast?”
Meg laughed. It felt strange. She hadn’t laughed since Zhanna died. “Are you treating?”
He took her to the most expensive restaurant she’d ever eaten at in her life. Located in its own outlying loftar, it was a garden filled with palms, ferns, and terracotta frogs with scented candles in their mouths. The holographic ceiling created the illusion that they were outside, beneath Gna’s star-blotched sky. When the menus came, Best ignored the gourmet dinner offerings and ordered pancakes, sausages, eggs over easy, and coffee. Meg enjoyed her off-hours breakfast all the more for the incongruity of eating greasy-spoon food off artificial diamond plates with solid silver cutlery.
Best kept her company, carving his pancakes with knife and fork. A band started to play oldies.
“So what are you doing back on Gna?” Meg said, raising her voice over the band.
Best wiped his lips with a linen napkin t
hat probably cost more than the food. “Still working for my father.”
“Cool. Doing what?”
A moment’s pause. “R&D. Before I say anything else, I should probably mention that Best Industries directly competes with Crasibo Lovelace in several sectors.”
“Screw Crasibo Lovelace,” Meg said. After Mezamiria, she felt zero loyalty to her employers—if indeed they still were her employers. “Their quality control is shit. They undercut everyone on cost by outsourcing most of their production to—”
“Juradis. Yeah, we have a major gripe about that. Crucial components of Earth’s security infrastructure are being manufactured by aliens, on an alien world. How is that not a problem?”
“I agree. I do have to say though, they pay well.”
“They pay you well, because you’re taking all the risk.”
Meg swallowed a mouthful of sausage that no longer tasted so great. “Yeah. Until yesterday, we thought the biggest risk we would face out there was the cold.” She flashed back on the cargo hold of the gearship. Zhanna’s blood boiling away into the vacuum. “Sorry.”
“Hey, it’s OK,” Best said. “I’ve been there.”
He hadn’t, but she knew what he meant. She nodded, pushing the remains of her breakfast around her plate.
The band segued into an upbeat number that reminded her of high school in Tokyo. She glanced up and saw diners making their way to an open space among the ferns.
“Wanna dance?” Best said.
They bobbed around awkwardly until the band downshifted to a slow tempo. Best pulled her into a light, formal embrace. Meg tensed, then made herself relax. This was how you slow-danced. It didn’t mean anything.
“I’ve never forgotten what you did for me,” he said.
“Uh ...”
“You were there for me when I hit rock bottom. You gave me a helping hand.”
“I mostly just held your coat while you puked.”
“Sometimes, that’s all it takes.”
“Sully—Suleiman Tan—was there, too.”
“Yeah, but he would have left if you hadn’t stayed. All I’m saying is I owe you one, Megumi Smythe. If there’s anything you need, you’d be doing me a favor if you let me do you a favor. If that makes any sense.”
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 14