It’s got terracotta shingling.
I’m expecting anything, but what I get is a man with his back against a mango tree, chewing a stem of grass, looking straight at me.
“Is this a friendly?” I subvocalize to the Tai.
“Okay,” the Tai says, ignoring my question. “Your regular weaponry is locked under my command. You have a tanglegun in your left pocket, if you need to use that. This is a police action, we’re not here to kill anyone. There are no hostiles on this side of the mountain range. We’re just here to talk and gather information from the New Anegada locals. HQ has brokered a meeting between some high level locals and an Azteca representative at this spot.”
“This is a friendly, then?” I ask again.
“Yes.”
I look down. The extendable cannon I have aimed at the man is primed, but useless because it will not fire in a friendly situation. So I let go of the trigger.
“Go ahead,” the Tai orders. “We’re here to gather information and any confirmations about who the Azteca are, where they came from, and what, if anything, these people can do to help us. I am recording everything back up to Orbital HQ. I’ll prompt you as needed. If you do this well, you’ll be promoted. So will I.”
The cannon swings back up under my arm to fasten itself to the back of my exoskeleton armor. It’s a smooth lubricated slide. A whisper. I hear the cannons of the other soldiers from the pod withdraw in similar fashion. They’re all fanned out behind me, facing into the jungle, covering the man in front of me and glancing up at the sky, just in case.
The man by the mango tree pulls the stem of grass out of his mouth and stands up.
“So,” he says to me. “We get invade, or what?”
I have no idea how to respond. I stand there, still, waiting for someone besides me to do something.
“You speak English?” The man asks. His brown eyes twinkle. He has a deep tan that is almost the colour of oak, and short, tightly-curled hair. He’s wearing a cream-coloured suit. With no shoes on.
I nod.
“You looking for Bouschulte, right?” He says, the words so quick they blend into each and I stumble over the accent. He ambles over to us. Someone’s booted feet shift just behind me. If anything goes wrong, I have backup.
I speak my first word.
“What?”
“You. Looking. For. Bouschulte.” The man repeats himself as if I’m slow. He looks frustrated for a second. “He up in he house.”
“What is. . . .” I swallow, “a bouschulte?”
“It a name. Frederick Bouschulte. If you have a Azteca name like ‘Acolmiztli’ or some stupidness like that, and you hiding with us, you don’t keep calling you-self ‘Acolmiztli.’ Seen?”
“Seen.” I agree out of sheer panic. The Tai in my head is still silent. I wouldn’t mind some assistance. The man’s accent is hard and I still haven’t been given any damned orders. “Tai,” I subvocalize. “Damnit, where are you?”
The man reaches out to touch my face, then stops when I flinch.
“You eye them, chineeman: you do that to fit in with them?”
“It. . . .” was done a long time ago. Far away. “An old tradition my forefathers continued.” I’d been too young to protest the removal of my eye folds.
A tiger-striped cat tiptoes out from behind the building and sits down. It starts to lick its tail, working hard at ignoring the five people on the grass before it.
“What you name?”
“Kiyoshi,” I say.
“Well, Kiyoshi, let we get on with this so-call invasion, eh?”
My Tai wasn’t being quiet, I realize, it was gone. And looking around at the panicked faces of the three other soldiers with whom I fell out of the sky, I realize theirs are dead too. We’re on our own. That was sudden. The Tais must have sensed an attack and bailed.
We might be just one step away from getting slaughtered.
The panicked feeling that follows that thought comes and goes swiftly. Old training takes over. Yes, the Tais make the decisions, but we have training. We’re still mobile representatives of The League. We’re still soldiers. We can still do something.
I grab the man’s shoulder with one hand, aim the tangle gun right dead in the middle of his forehead with the other. At this range, the tangle gun is lethal.
“What’s going on?” I hiss. “Tell me what is going on!”
He snaps loose of me, shrugging my armored arm aside as if it were only a nuisance. The motion is quick enough I have trouble following it. There is, surprisingly enough, a small knife now shoved up between the joints in my armor.
Smith aims his tangle gun at us, but it’s an empty gesture. He’s too far away. We no longer have superior weaponry to a barefoot man with a knife.
“You conquest failing.”
“There is no fucking conquest,” Steve snaps from behind me. “We’re here to save you from the Azteca. “
“Yeah man, so I hear. But first thing: seeing that we been making do for a few hundred years already, you might wonder what we know that you ain’t figure out yet. Second thing: you here to tell us what to do, right? Because you assume we don’t know what we doing. You want tell us what to do, how to think. That is mental conquest, friend. Mental.”
A boom shakes the air. Paige looks up at the sky. None of us can see anything, but I shiver anyway.
“Any of you able to contact anyone?” Paige asks us.
We all try. Shake our heads. We’re cut off.
“Come inside with me now,” our new host says. “Drop you weapon to the ground. You don’t need them.”
For some reason, without the Tais, the three soldiers are looking at me. Command structure has returned to our small unit. Ironic how we fall into the old patterns. This is what it would have been like in The League before the Xenowars. Only then it wasn’t The League, just scattered groups of space-faring humans spreading throughout the wormhole systems.
I have a decision to make.
“Do you have any way that we can communicate to our superiors?” I ask.
The man nods.
“That we do,” he says.
Into the rabbit hole, I decide, and nod. I give the order and we drop our tangle guns and the blade near my ribs disappears just as abruptly as it had appeared. I still want to know how it got under my armor.
“I name Jami,” the man in the cream suit says, shaking my hand. “Jami ‘Manicou’ Derrick.”
Jami turns around, and we follow the barefoot, dapper man into the concrete-block house. We troop past the cat, which is now working on cleaning an extended furry back leg.
Jami asks us if we read much. He wants to know about some old book none of us have ever read, or heard of, or care about right now. He tells us it has an interesting moral to it.
He laughs gently at our ignorance, our focus on what is going on right now. He takes off his tie and suit jacket and hangs them off the back of a canvas chair.
“You going wish you know these things,” he laughs at us. “You should have wait and talk with everyone longer. So now, it a mess. The League trying to come in and reshape everything to be just the way it wants, and it ain’t that easy.”
The door creaks open and we look straight into the face of the enemy.
The Azteca reclines in a leather chair while an elderly black woman in a bright red and yellow patterned shawl carefully snips at his flat hair. Much to my amazement, her skin is even darker than Smith’s, who still stands behind me, clearing his throat slightly to let me know he’s there. It is an adjustment, I remind myself. Almost everyone on this planet is some shade darker than myself. I am the stranger.
A red cape drapes around the Azteca’s knees where his hands rest, gently crossed over each other. The gold plug in his nose glints in the light streaming through a large opened window, and his jade earrings gleam as he slightly turns his head to regard us.
Blue eye shadow swirls around the crinkled edges of his eyes. His black-smeared lips twitch.
&
nbsp; “The League has arrived,” he pronounces, looking at our uniforms. “What do you think of our conquerors, Jami?”
Jami is leaning against the concrete wall, arms folded, looking at the small ensemble in the room. “Centuries ago the first conquerors of Tenochtitlan arrive in small numbers,” Jami smiles sadly at us. “They had armor and superior technology. The League only got the small number and the armor.”
“But this is not a group of Spaniards with gold lust and domination in their hearts,” the Azteca says. “The League is here to save us. Is it not?” His eyes are piercing. Something has wounded him. He hates us. “The first conquistadors thought they were saving the savages back then too,” he adds. “As you mistakenly think now.”
I have nothing to say, but stand straight and return his restrained fury with a calm gaze of my own. I am a professional.
“You done then, Frederick?” Jami asks.
“I miss my true name,” the Azteca man says.
Jami sighs.
“Acolmiztli, Frederick . . . I guess it don’t make no difference what you call yourself now,” he says.
“Done,” the woman with the scissors says.
Acolmiztli stands up and takes the cherry bowl with his hair clippings in it from her.
“I’m not much of a believer,” he says, “but the old ways are specific. You must have your hair cut in a way that does not lose tonalli. Or you risk losing the strength of your spirit.” He takes a deep breath. “In times like these, I need all the strength I can get.”
The door slams behind him as he leaves the room.
“He’s bitter,” Paige whispers to me. They’ve been taking my lead. I’m in charge. I’m their Tai.
“Acolmiztli very bitter. But the League shouldn’t assume,” Jami says, looking at the door with us, “that all Azteca go be your enemy. Some go be your friend.”
“How would I know?” I snap. “We know nothing right now. All we do know is that the Azteca didn’t exist on this planet when it last had contact with other worlds. We know you’re in danger from the Azteca. That’s it.” I want to ask if the Azteca are ruled by aliens, who’ve bred them, but that’s a rumour, and I keep quiet as Jami explains that there are what he calls Tolteca, reformed Azteca who have spurned human sacrifice and made great changes to Azteca society in the last hundred years.
My stomach flip-flops.
“Human sacrifice?”
Jami unfolds his arms.
“Acolmiztli tells me he only sacrificed snake, bird, and butterfly. He say,” and Jami imitates Acolmiztli’s voice perfectly, “because he so loved man, Quetzalcoatl allowed only the sacrifice of snakes, birds, and butterflies. As he was opposed to the sacrifice of human flesh, the three sorcerers of Tula drove him out of the city. The people of Tenochtitlan did not follow Quetzalcoatl. Instead, they followed the war-god Huitzilopochtli or Xipe-Totec: the flayed god. Then the fifth sun was destroyed and we lived in the sixth and it became a time of change.”
It sends shivers down my spine.
“You said you had communications equipment.” I fold my arms. The shivering continues. “We’d like to use it now.”
I shiver again, my knees weak. Jami catches me under my arms as I drop to my knees.
“What’s happening?” I’m disoriented; the walls of the room seem to bend in on themselves.
“Remember how I tell you you should have read Wells?” Jami says. “Come on.” He helps me over to a wooden bench in the corner of the room and opens a cupboard. I vaguely recognize the device behind the wooden doors. It looks like a museum piece. But it responds to a wave of my hand and my voice.
Static is my only reply. There is accusation in my angry stare, but Jami gestures at the device.
“Try again. You feeling rough.”
Sweat drips from my forehead, the shivers continue to wrack my body. This time I find a carrier signal and send a voice request up. Archaic. But they reply.
“Who is this? Identify.”
I do, giving personal ID codes and answering questions until the voice on the other side is satisfied.
“We give nothing away by saying we’re doing a retreat,” it says. “All ground assaults have been infected with some sort of virus. We’re losing this battle. We have your touchdown coordinates. Be outside in five minutes for a starhook. You’ll be in quarantine upon return.”
Then it’s gone.
My three companions are sprawled on the floor, sweating.
Infected. Quarantine.
“When we saw you,” I say, “you walked over to us, touched me.” My hand goes up to my face.
“Acolmiztli gave it to me, and I passed it to you,” Jami says.
“Is it fatal?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Better get back up to orbit and find out, right? I look alright, but I could have take an antidote.” He smiles.
I purse my lips.
“Get up,” I order everyone. It’s been interesting being in charge, but I’m glad to see the end of it coming. Paige, Smith, and Steve struggle up. Smith leans heavily on Steve. “Get outside, now.” Smith nods. He must still be able to understand me, which is a small comfort in the middle of this mess.
We’re a pathetic group that pushes through the door with Jami following us. My knees wobble, but I manage a convincing stride through what looks like a bar.
Dim lights cast shadows, and from those shadows loom wooden tables where several men in khaki camouflage toast us with their glasses and sly grins. I see no weapons, but my stomach churns with the weapon they’ve already used to defeat us.
My gut spasms. The pain almost blinds me.
“Come on.” I push my three soldiers on in front of me, shoving my hand against their hard armor, ignoring an unidentifiable chuckle from somewhere in the room.
I trip over a chair, grab the table to steady myself, and when I blink everything is blurry. I have no soldier-sharp senses, no wired edge for combat. The armor I wear to assist me do all that is failing as well as my body.
Right before me is an aquarium taller than I am and stretching half the nearest wall’s length. Something moves sinuously through the tank and presses against the glass. I stumble closer and a woman stares back at me through the refracted water and solid glass with wide brown eyes. Sheets of her oak-coloured hair twirl behind her head. Her ultra-pale skin has an almost greenish tint.
The eyes hold me until my face presses right against the glass.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Acolmiztli grabs my shoulder. “She was a present I inherited from one of my brothers. A gift from the Emporer Moctezuma the Ninth. One of the teotl created her for him.”
Her smooth stomach fades into the singular muscle and pilot fins of her tail’s trunk. The wide fins are splayed out. They’re delicate, yet powerful enough to drive all six feet of her through the water with a flick.
Which she does. Out away from the glass.
“Created?” I ask. And then, “Teotl?”
She turns back, looks at me, and her hands flutter.
“Created just like we were,” Acolmiztli whispers. “But unlike my countrymen, there is only one of her, and many, many of us.”
We have to keep moving, he’s just toying with me. I walk away from the tank.
“Keep moving, dammit,” I say. Smith looks at me and frowns. He shakes his head, points to his ears. He doesn’t understand a word. His hearing implants must have failed. Could a virus do that?
We keep walking, and pass out of the door into the sunlight. I lean back and look at the sky. Nothing yet.
“Why are you doing this to us?” I ask Jami, who is still right behind us.
“The Azteca doing it to you, not me.”
“But you knew about it,” I snap.
“Yes.”
“And yet you did nothing. You collaborate with them.”
“You the one that drop out the sky and land. We didn’t force you.”
Overhead I hear a roar, then a rumble.
“But all those deaths. .
. .”
“All because of you. Consider: before you came we were changing the Azteca from the bottom up, and inside out. The Azteca a hornet’s nest, and we blow some sweet smoke their way. Now you throwing rocks.”
Thunder rolls and a small oval speck drops out of the sky. The long carbon filament trailing behind it is strong enough to reel us all up from the ground we’re standing on into orbit and then into the hold of a waiting mothership.
“Snap in when it drops,” I order everyone, voice husky. “Paige, make sure to help Smith, he can’t hear what we’re saying.”
I turn and look at Jami, dizziness threatening to drop me at any second.
The pod slows to a halt and falls into our midst. Paige struggles over and snaps on, pulling Smith with her and making sure he got hooked in. Steve looks at me and follows suit. Three soldiers, ready to get lifted, the cable rising up into the heavens from between them.
“We have a minute, maybe two,” Steve says to me.
I’m still staring at Jami.
He stares right back. “We study you. When faced with the other, when the hard times had hit, you choose to cleanse the aliens from all the human worlds. And right now you all still working on ‘purifying’ The League. Making it only human.”
“There was no other choice,” I say. “There were wars. Humanity was endangered. Dammit, I was four. You can’t hold me responsible. It’s different now anyway.”
“You had start with war. Then deporting the rest from any human territory. But The League ain’t stopping there, right? Now The League tries to manage the entire human bloodline, disqualifying humans with altered DNA.”
“Like the Azteca,” I say. That is why Alcolmiztli has no love for us. He knows The League doesn’t recognize him as human.
“Yes. Listen, during all these years we been cut off here all of you all almost wipe yourselves out. Yet you come here to tell us what to do now? That’s hypocritical.”
“Drastic things were done,” I admit. “But we never would have survived the alien attacks if we didn’t do these things. We could never have matched their superior military skills and constant encroachment.” And, despite the fever, I have a trump. “You talk hypocritical. Hypocritical is the mermaid,” I hiss. “You let that Azteca keep his slave in a tank. How dirty does that make you?”
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