by E. E. Knight
“Like I’d know,” Duvalier said.
“A Kurian is about to speak to the conference.”
“So much for our trip to warn security,” Ahn-Kha said. “I wish my David were here. Or perhaps not. He might go mad.”
“I can go plenty mad for both of us,” Duvalier said. “If one more person tries to tell me what great news this all is, I might turn into a one-woman mental asylum for manic-obsessive cockpunchers.”
Most of the delegates returned to the main auditorium. The curiosity of what a Kurian might say to them impelled them, and it was as good a place to make a last stand as any. The security staff waited at the now bolted and barricaded doors. No one was getting out, and hopefully not in, until the matter was resolved.
Duvalier watched from one of the upper-level concourse doors with Ahn-Kha and Rolf. Sime returned to his usual spot, and Pistols sat next to him in the half-empty auditorium.
The Kurian drifted out onto the stage. Unlike the others, he did not make an effort to appear to walk naturally; his legs hung down as though he were a body hanging from a dry-cleaner’s rack. While his form was human, his face was masked. Kurians, when they bothered to appear human, often hid behind some sort of helmet or mask. Perhaps trying to imitate human emotions was too taxing when what they really wanted to do was assess their surroundings.
He had four Reapers with him. Unlike the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, they appeared identical.
Still, it must be some kind of special Kurian, to go into a building full of potentially violent enemies. They were such a cowardly bunch that the only way even their trusted allies were usually able to speak to them was through a Reaper.
“I would like to thank the deputation for arranging our presence. I assure you, I mean no one here harm.
“We are not your enemies. The intelligent and resourceful have never had anything to fear from us. We appreciate the virtues of mankind just as much as your erstwhile allies do. I will not attempt to tell our side of the story, or take advantage of the fact that your so-called Lifeweavers are using you as pawns in their own game against us and disposing of you at need and to their advantage.
“The fact is, Earth is an important crossroads. I imagine many of you played a game called Risk at one time or another. As you recall, it is a game of dominating continents. There are only a few routes to move between continents, and if you remember, the old United Kingdom territories provided numerous ways to strike into continental Europe, as well as being a path to North America. Earth is like that piece of territory—it is a route to our home world and many others. We cannot be secure on Kur with your planet in the hands of our enemies. Therefore we have given up less important planets in exchange for this one.
“Once you come to terms with that unalterable fact, you can decide rationally how best to serve the people you are responsible for. While the Lifeweavers are still here you have some negotiating power. As they have told you, the best arrangement you can hope for can be achieved now, with their aid. After they depart, you lose your leverage, and offers will be less generous than this one. The longer this destructive insanity goes on, the worse your deal will be. Questions?”
“When do you need an answer?” a delegate asked, fortunately for Duvalier in English.
“We would like a vote tonight,” the president said.
“They’re necessary for our security.”
“Time to choke a squid,” Duvalier said. “I need to go to the bathroom. Coming, Ahn-Kha?”
The mighty Grog flexed and broke off a chair leg. He handed it to Rolf.
Rolf tested the break. The hollow tube made the improvised stabbing spear look like a huge cardiac needle. “Not sharp enough.”
Duvalier took a little stiletto and shoved it into her tube-steel leg. “I think this’ll work.”
Ahn-Kha tried again with another chair. This time, he twisted the tube as he broke it. The break formed a sharp corkscrew.
“Much better,” Rolf said.
“Can we kill four? With these?” Duvalier asked.
“We just need to distract that Kurian,” Rolf said. “All we need are a few seconds of confusion.”
“Confusion is my middle name,” Duvalier said. “Give me a couple minutes, then come in like you’re security stopping a disturbance.”
She crept into the auditorium, discreetly, as though embarrassedly returning from a bathroom break, and found a seat next to Pistols and Sime.
“Don’t suppose either of you can sing backup?” she asked.
Standing up, she decided on an old number from her chanteuse days at the Blue Dome. It was way vintage pre-2022, but it always got a good response:
One way, or another, I’m gonna find ya, I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha…
The “Q&A with a Kurian” sputtered out like a candle hit by a fresh breeze. The president looked at her in shock as she did a little hip grind and pointed at the Kurian. She tried to work up the courage to take off her shirt, like a surprise stripper gone terribly wrong.
“I’ll take care of her,” Ahn-Kha said, moving leisurely across a nearly empty aisle toward her. He’d acquired a security vest somewhere. Rolf moved toward her going down the stairs.
She took a few steps toward the Kurian, still singing the golden oldie. Sure enough, the Reapers moved up to form a protective wall between her and their Kurian.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, girl?” Sime shouted.
There was pandemonium all across the audience, with some standing to object, others tentatively moving to help, and still more diving for cover between the rows of seats.
Ahn-Kha, with one gentle vault of a long arm, made it to the edge of the stage, shielded somewhat by the piano.
In midline, with hands on shimmying hips, she drew and threw the stiletto in one smooth motion. She struck the midstage Reaper full in the eye.
Ahn-Kha hefted the piano and hurled it at two of the Reapers. The polished black wood shattered into a thousand sad little notes, the last the piano would ever play. The local pianist would have to import another instrument for the next Kokkola music festival.
Rolf leaped, used a chair to vault, and was on the stage in an instant. A Reaper moved to intercept, and he stabbed it hard enough with the improvised spear that the point came out black on the mid-back. He pried the dead thing off as Duvalier made it to the stage, ready to bury her teeth in the Kurian if she had to.
Ahn-Kha and Rolf were fighting the Reapers knocked down by the piano.
The Kurian was a diffuse blur, fleeing toward the stage door opposite the wreckage of the piano. But she was faster, and snatched it up by what turned out to be the crotch between two of its longer legs.
“Gotcha,” she said.
“You will all die,” the Kurian squealed. “Those creatures out there will not leave so much as an earlobe uneaten. I’ve called for them. You will die if you don’t release me.”
“I will die,” she said. “I’m mortal. You’re not, but I’m prepared to put the issue to a vote. All in favor of turning you into octopus salad? Sorry, fucker, the vote’s unanimous.”
The image blurred and she was left holding a writhing octopus shape. Tentacles lashed at her face, leaving painful welts that brought tears to her eyes.
She ran for the window. The Kurian managed to get a limb around her neck and it tightened. In turn she clenched her neck, bending her jaw forward to put space around her voice box.
A black curtain rose across her vision and the lights began to twinkle behind the curtain.
The snake around her neck gave one final yank and then released, taking some hair on the back of her neck and leaving a raw burn.
Rolf, bellowing in Norwegian, held the Kurian aloft above her, reminding her for a fleeting moment of a picture she’d seen in an old book of an ancient warrior with the head of Medusa. For a moment she thought he was going to make a Kurian kebab, but instead he burst out of the scrum and made for the lobby. She followed, knocking over a Lifewea
ver who’d appeared out of nowhere blabbing something about diplomatic immunity.
Rolf went to the lobby windows and stabbed his chair-leg spear into a vast pane, breaking the glass out of the second-floor overlook on the courtyard. The Big Mouths, so tightly packed that their backs resembled a writhing, rock-covered beach, turned their toothy faces up at the noise. He tried to throw the Kurian, but it clung to his arm, chest, and face with a whipping mass of tentacles. Blood ran from the gory pulp of one of Rolf’s eyes. He yelled something in Norwegian and threw himself through the glass.
The Kurian let out a gassy hoot as they fell together.
Rolf flailed back and forth with the chair leg, breaking jaws and turning great-fish eyes to pulp with his blows. He fended the Big Mouths off with the Kurian wrapped about his arm. It flailed in all directions with its tentacles, now fewer in number, some having been bitten off by the snapping jaws all around.
A fitting end for the Last Bear of Trondheim.
Still, the Big Mouths crashed through the feeble barriers and the glass of the lower level.
The Finns worked in layers. Teams of men with shotguns gave short-range cover to soldiers with big support machine guns in slings. The crackle of gunfire was so intense it sounded like surf.
The machine gunners took Big Mouths down in rows. Then the shotgun men blew basketball-sized holes in the wounded with their open-choke riot models until they gave only an occasional twitch.
Rifle fire from the handlers was returned by snipers on the roof of the conference center. The Finns were as methodical and efficient with their weapons as they were with street cleaners, and once a couple were shot down the rest fled.
The Big Mouths, caught in a feeding frenzy, either died gorging themselves or followed their handlers back to the waterfront. Duvalier had no way of knowing it, but fast-moving “cavalry” on bicycles had already stormed the wharf—they were retreating to a slaughter-yard.
“Glad that’s over with,” she rasped. The words came out like they had been dragged across sandpaper. She extracted a hook from her neck, a claw the Kurian had left there when he was ripped from her grasp by Rolf. It was blackish and translucent at the edges. She’d never been one to take souvenirs of the dead—explaining why you had a chain of Reaper teeth could cause difficulties for a Cat—but she decided she’d keep this one, at least through the voyage home.
Looking in the bathroom mirror back at what was left of the hotel, she saw that she had so many marks on her neck from the Kurian’s suckers that it looked as though she’d been trying to win a hickey scavenger hunt.
What chance did humanity have, without the Lifeweavers? No Lifeweavers meant no Hunters, and no Hunters meant the Reapers had nothing to fear.
She’d known Christians who’d had a crisis of faith. Sometimes it was the little things that sent them into despair, a single death from disease rather than a trench full of corpses. The Lifeweavers, to her, always explained the inexplicable. They took the long view, saw temporary losses as just that. They never panicked at bad news or rejoiced in a victory.
If they had given up on Earth, what hope had anyone?
Maybe the delegates should have taken the deal.
Her stomach was killing her. She should never have had that roast. She should have kept her diet light, a little rice and soup would have done nicely.
A hot bath would relax her.
Her hair needed a little trim. The part where the Kurian had ripped out even her quite short hair had made everything uneven. Using her sharp skinning knife, she did her best to even things up a little. She accidentally cut her thumb in the process. It was a slice running perhaps a quarter inch deep at its deepest, and it bled profusely.
Sucking at the cut, she decided the pain wasn’t so bad.
God, she was closer to forty than thirty. How had she lived so long? Sooner or later the odds would catch up with her; they always did.
She should have investigated Von Krebs more carefully, gone to that house on the gulf better prepared. Were it not for fortune, the whole population of Kokkola might be working its way through those damn Big Mouth digestive tracts right now.
It was the easiest thing in the world to make a long cut in her arm, running parallel to the bones. She was used to creating wounds without the hesitation stabs of a novice. She admired the work, the brilliant red line as straight as a sure-handed surgeon would make.
As she settled into the bath, the water turned pink and then red. She felt more relaxed and peaceful than she had in years; even the pain in her stomach subsided.
She began to have the most dazzling, warm dreams, though she couldn’t describe them, beyond the sense that there was music all around. Exalted, perhaps for the first time in her life, her whole body glowed in satisfaction that was better than any sex.
Something intruded on the wonderful dreams. Pain. The singing faded, and she heard a slapping sound. It took her forever to connect the noise with the pain she felt in her cheeks.
She came back to half consciousness. A bronze-skinned man with a scarred face looked down at her. He had the devil’s eyes and they blazed with unholy fire. She tried to shut it out, but the devil kept calling her name.
No! The devil wouldn’t get her. She would run, back toward the singing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Return: While the repercussions of mankind’s defiantly violent answer to the Kurian offer rippled across the globe, in Finland itself, and across the Baltic League, the average freeholder nodded in quiet satisfaction at the news that the Kurian diplomat had been torn to shreds by his own bodyguard. “Serves ’em right” in various Nordic idioms probably sums up the most popular reaction.
Sensationalists got hold of the story first, and turned it into a tale of Kurian treachery unmasked by the unconquerable human spirit.
Only later were more serious researchers able to piece together the Kurian plot to force a vote in their favor, a vote that would be broadcast worldwide by the Baltic radio network. There is the philosophical idea that once a matter is introduced into words, it becomes something that can be imagined and eventually accepted. If the news went around the world that the conference had voted to accept the Kurian “peace” offer, the word “peace” would have been on everyone’s lips. As it was, the Kurians proved too clever for their own good. Had they just made their offer and left it to the delegates to decide, with the Lifeweavers advocating that they accept this last, best chance, who is to say whether the Butter faction would not have gathered enough Guns to carry the vote?
She woke to the familiar rocking of the sea and the steady growl of an engine. She sensed that they were on a larger ship than any they’d used to this point. She was in some kind of dormitory with two bunks and just enough space for a little table that held a washbasin and tap.
She sensed a presence nearby. Valentine sat in a canvas chair, a book on his lap and another open on the arm of the chair. He looked tired.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“Ferry to Sweden. Or I should say, up the Swedish coast. We’ll take a train across, then back to Halifax and home. Your only worry at this point is eating.”
“Christ, I can’t even die right,” she muttered.
Valentine tut-tutted. The man had ears like a bat. Arrogant ass.
“When did you get back?” she asked.
“The night you had your bath. You’ve been unconscious or sedated. One of the Canadians with us is sort of a nurse-midwife-doctor, so you’ve had medical attention since we took you out of the Kokkola hospital. They gave you blood and plasma there, but they wouldn’t release you without running a few tests. They don’t know how stingy you’ve been with your nine lives.”
“That’s debatable.”
“You’re going to live, Ali. The war’s over for you for a while.”
“Is that an order, Major?”
“I think we had this discussion before we left. You outrank me. I can’t give you orders.”
She felt too tired to tal
k, so she didn’t respond.
“You went a little mad and did a dumb thing,” Valentine said. “I don’t know exactly what it was, but I hope—”
“Nothing to do with you and your glorious cock, Val.”
“I’m sorry I missed the mess at the conference.”
“Hope you at least had fun in Helsinki,” she managed.
“I learned a lot about art. Or rather, the value of art, or how our skipper friend decides what art she wants to buy. It’s not that different from a used-car lot, as it turns out. She acquires what she thinks will be worth something if the world ever sorts itself out again. Quite a vision.”
“She was a vision,” Duvalier murmured.
“It wasn’t an affair, Smoke. I just wanted a little glimpse of that world. It was that or fishing, and I’ve fished plenty of northern lakes in my time. Still, glad that you were there to take care of things. Why were you cutting yourself, when every Finn sergeant should have been buying you a Koskenkorva?”
She’d been running risks all her life. If, deep down, she wanted to die, wouldn’t she have been less cautious, at least a few times? It is so easy to screw up in the Kurian Zone. Of course, being driven in a collection van to the Last Dance wasn’t her idea of an easy death.
Funny, when you looked at his face, you mostly came away with the memory of the scar running vertically near his eyes. But he had a few other cuts and divots marring his beautiful skin. She knew plenty of women who would have spent fortunes for that skin. They were like two collections of scars talking to each other, the scars masking what lay beneath.
She wasn’t sure she could even form an honest answer into words, so she put him off. “I’m not ready to talk about it yet. Give me some time.”
Valentine’s upper lip twitched as he patted her hand. “Sorry. I thought this trip would give both of us a rest. Let’s talk more when you’re up to it.”
“Don’t go,” she said. How many times had she wanted to say those words to him? But to do so would make her sound vulnerable. Needy. “Nice to have you here. Don’t mean to be a burden. Do you have somewhere you need to be?”