“Yeah. There’s room here for a skimmer, though. It could have been carrying one.”
“In that case it’s long gone.”
“Yeah. Shit.”
“Maybe it didn’t have one, though,” Skallon said brightly. “Let’s do the search.”
Fain knew Skallon was right in principle, but he didn’t think the odds were good. The Changeling was thirty minutes’ flight time away, probably. That meant no simple job, no early liftoff. And all the time he hadn’t been maneuvering against the Changeling at all. Fain had spent valuable minutes working against a computer defense program. A good one, sure—but nothing an ordinary agent couldn’t outwit. Hell of a note.
“Okay,” he said.
They had been combing the area for forty minutes. Fain was getting tired of it. The damned Changeling could be anywhere in the tangled forest. Finding it here was unlikely. He was about to call Skallon when he picked up the acoustic warning.
It was a racketing noise. The clatter got stronger as he ran through his face plate situation inventory. One blip, homing on the Changeling’s capsule. Was it coming back? Damned unlikely. Fain leaped above the canopy of vegetation and sighted it,. “Skallon! What’s—”
“Alvean military copter. Probably coming to investigate. Don’t fire on it.”
Fain started moving toward it. He regarded nothing as certain until he got a good look. He moved three klicks, skimming just above the trees.
But on his fifth leap the copter shot at him.
Fain tumbled and fired some retros. They flared on his ribs, driving him down into the forest. He landed on his feet and took a lateral vector instantly. The greenery behind him erupted in a cloud of twisting debris. Fain sliced through a clotted mass of vines and broke free, running at full augmentation. Ahead of him a tree withered under a flame gun. He swerved left.
“I’m on them,” came from Skallon.
About time, Fain thought.
A hollow thump. Something shattered in the sky.
“Got em!”
Fain slowed. He would have tried a shot in a few more seconds, but it was better to have Skallon do it. Maybe the guy would settle down once he’d seen some action.
Fain took a full jump and went up for a look. Only smoke hung where the copter had been.
“Good job,” Fain said, and the back of his suit blew away.
3
He woke quickly under the auto-stim. Even as his suit had died, it gave him injections to offset the impact and shock he had suffered. The gyros kept him in good falling posture. The shocks still worked on the left side, and that had been enough; he’d only fallen a hundred meters.
Skallon was there. Fain twisted around groggily. His training took hold. He worked his way out of the ruin of the suit. It seeped fluids and buzzed and clicked, still dying. Something sparked. The arms jerked. The hydrasteel had lost its polish; it was pitted and dark. A beam had hit the small of the back and shattered the armor.
Fain groped for his rad count. No extra X ray: good. Small level of betas and alphas, but nothing serious. He might develop a fever, but that was it. He had been damned lucky.
“There were two of them,” Skallon explained. Fain frowned. “One must’ve been waiting until you exposed yourself. Then it popped up on the horizon and—”
“Yeah. These guys don’t fool around.”
“They’re Alvean military. I pulled one of them out of the wreckage of the first copter.”
“Let me see him.” Energy was returning to Fain; Part of it was the drugs but the rest was Fain himself.
Skallon carried him to the smashed copter. With most of its Y-rack exhausted and the directional missiles gone, the suit could carry the weight of another man. Skallon was getting near the end of his power reserve, though.
The Alvean was hurt pretty badly. His eyes were glazed. “You dope him up?” Fain asked weakly.
“No. I used the Vertil. I just breathed on him, the way they told us. Took about a minute. He absorbed it and now he’ll do anything we tell him to.”
“Yeah. Tell him to give us the truth.”
Skallon turned to the big Alvean, who was sprawled in the dry dust with his uniform burned and ripped. “Who told you to come here? And why?”
The Alvean blinked slowly. “Gen…General No-kavo. Ordered us. Why…” His face went blank.
Skallon rephrased the question. “What were you to do?”
“Gen…said…attack…anyone here….”
“Where are you from? What base?”
“Araquavaktil.”
“Where is it?”
The Alvean gave directions. Skallon nodded, memorizing them. Abruptly the Alvean trembled, gave a rattling cough, and went limp.
Skallon tried a spot probe at temple, arm, legs. “Guess he’s dead.”
Fain had been sitting on the ground. He stood up with effort. “So the Changelings gotten that far. We’d better move.”
Skallon seemed surprised. “Where?”
“Kalic. But we’d better check that base first Correction—I’d better check the base.”
“Why just you?”
“Chances are there’s nobody there. A Changeling always moves fast—something mixed in with that philosophy of theirs. So it’s probably going for Kalic now. You’re the Alvean expert—you should move into Kalic and make our contact point.”
Skallon paced nervously. His huge boots bit into the soft turf. The sliding ceramic plates of his arms and legs rasped and clicked in the pressing silence of the dense green world surrounding them.
“I guess that makes sense. But you’re still groggy. I—”
“We’ll need supplies. You go back to our module and get the stuff. Don’t forget my gear. And bring Scorpio.”
“He won’t be any use, operating in the open. I’ve told you, there aren’t any dogs here. Alveans will spot Scorpio at once and know exactly what’s going on. You can’t—”
“Right, I know that. So you take him. Into Kalic. We’ll need him later.”
“Me? Look, he’s your—”
“No, our. Our dog, at least in theory. He’s part of the team.”
Beneath his helmet horizon Skallon scowled. “Okay, okay. But I’ll have to figure a way to smuggle him into Kalic. I’m ditching this suit as soon as we get close to a town. We’ve got to maintain cover. That means your disguise, Fain.”
Fain sighed. “Yeah, sure.”
“You’ll be okay here while I’m gone?”
“Drop me somewhere a few klicks away. Leave me a flamer. And call Mother. Have her scan the area. Any aircraft, she burns ’em. No cross-checks. Just hit ’em.
“You can’t do that. We have no orders to just—”
“Look, it’s self-defense. There are more than two copters on that air base.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I didn’t say you had to. And on your way to the module, keep down. Go through the jungle, not over it.”
Skallon paced, clacking. “I don’t know … There are so many things a Changeling could do. I mean—”
“I know how they think,” Fain said harshly. “Leave that to me.”
“But isn’t that just it? They don’t have an orderly scheme. Intelligent, yes. But not planners, not—”
“Let’s get moving,” Fain said, irritated.
Fain lay for hours in a cool glade, waiting for Skallon to make the trip to the module. He let the soreness and aches seep into him, relaxing the muscles with bioreg techniques he had learned decades before. His mind skittered along, fretting and picking, reviewing what had happened, and he had to give it time to work away the anxious energy, to regain its cool center.
He sensed the knotted muscles where the unavoidable shock was, and realized that getting hit had shaken him more than it should have. His emotional centers were tied into this mission somehow, deep and troubling images seeped through to him as he lay in the jungle, and the dark, sliding sense of things unknown came swirling up within him.
T
his Changeling meant more. Fain had captured it before, on Revolium. Then the goddamn techs had studied it for years, and tried some experiments on it, and then had started to talk about finding a way to alter the Changeling genetic material. That was the long-range Consortium strategy—patch up the right hemisphere-left hemisphere division that made the Changeling form possible and remove all the complex biomechs that let Changelings alter themselves at will. Make them back into humans again. Or rather, return the next generation of Changelings to human norm. Fixing the living Changelings was, of course, impossible.
So the techs had puttered around and tried communicating with the captured Changelings, and pretty soon word spread to the Changelings about what the techs planned, using their own genetic material—and the Changelings escaped. Most of them died in the attempt. But not all. And this one, the smartest one, had gotten off Earth entirely.
Fain started the methodical murmuring, deep in his throat, that would send him into hypnosis. He would block out the pain and anxiety and the simple, fragmenting fear. He would slip free of all that, and just stick to the facts. Facts, events, motives: hard data. The world was made up of strings and loops of hard data. As the musky damp drifted into his nostrils from the fragrant jungle, Fain let his mind drift. Facts…There were so many of them, and each could change as you looked at it…but still … If you clung to them, they would see you through. That was the edge he had over the Changeling. Facts. About this planet, for example. Facts …
Alvea followed a mildly elliptical orbit around an F6 star, 1.68 AUs out. This was late summer, Fain recalled dreamily, as he began his inner chant. The natives were gathering for some festival. The vernal equinox, that was it. Because Alvea took over two E-years per orbit, the Fest carried more weight than it had in the older Earth societies on which Alvea was partially modeled.
Fain raised a wry eyebrow. More crap that would get in the way of finding the Changeling. But maybe that made it all the more interesting, anyway….
Skallon carried him piggyback, strapped in, for twenty klicks. Fain let himself stay in his balanced internal state, barely conscious, as the rocking, jolting, clanging rhythm of the suit carried them through the sweeping clutch of the forest. Snaky vines plucked at him and Scorpio as they passed. He had forgotten how noisy a suit was. Inside, you were insulated from the clattering and banging. It was a wonder the external acoustic pickups worked.
Skallon stopped in a matted mass of purple bushes. Fain let himself slowly come up out of the hypnosleep. Numbly, he followed Skallon’s instructions for putting on the Alvean disguise. Bulky, hot, stifling garments. They ate some rations and talked strategy.
Fain stroked Scorpio, explaining to him what had happened and what the dog should do. Scorpio didn’t want to go with Skallon at first. Fain quieted him.
“You know that dog pretty well,” Skallon observed.
“Yeah.” Fain continued stroking the dog.
“You train with him much?”
“We worked together before. And we retrained just before boost from Earth.”
“Did you have time to come up to specs on Alvea?”
“Huh?”
“I mean about the culture, the—”
“I know enough.”
“What about Gommerset?”
“What?”
“You know, the experiments he did, the data on immortality and the cult that—”
“What do you mean, what are you fishing for?” Fain spoke rapidly and savagely.
Skallon blinked, momentarily at a loss for words. “Well, I just meant, Gommerset was the reason people came here in the first place, and…”
“Oh. Oh. Okay, I see. I … I thought you were giving me some goddamn quiz, the way the techs are always doing Earthside.”
“No, I really didn’t mean to…” Skallon went on talking about nothing and Fain stopped listening. He stroked Scorpio smoothly, letting his sudden burst of nervousness seep out through his fingers. Scorpio picked up some of the tension, but then relaxed, panting slightly.
Skallon shed his thick suit of metal and ceramic. They hid it in the woods with a directional micro on it so they could find it later. Skallon seemed to be glad to get out of the suit. He hustled around, strapping gear under his Alvean robes. The thick folds of cloth flapped at his ankles.
Skallon peered intently at Fain’s hand-held faxplate, and listened carefully while Fain laid out the route each man would follow. Mother’s overlay grids changed as they watched the plate; the Alvean day was moving into afternoon. Skallon absorbed information quickly and easily, Fain noted. That was reassuring—
They located the best paths, using Mother’s finely detailed pictures of the jungle around them. A blue dot patiently traced Mother’s calculated route of least danger.
Skallon paused at the edge of his path. “Well…see you in Kalic,” he finished lamely.
“Right” Fain waved to Scorpio. “Keep your nose in the air.”
“That. My. Job.” the dog said flatly.
Fain nodded in satisfaction, feeling rested. The dog was all right. He wasn’t so sure about Skallon, but there was nothing to be done right away. He could deal with Scorpio because there was a bond between them. The past, yes, and something more. Not truly understanding, just the satisfaction of jobs done together and done well. Fain didn’t truly understand neodogs; they were funny creatures, the first product of genetic tinkering. They had neuroses and problems and a lot of the baggage humans carried around inside of their heads. He had great respect for them, though. Plain animals were something else entirely, something he suspected man could never understand. That was why he always refused to go with the high Consortium officials who, knowing what his work entailed, invited him for hunting on the company’s private reserves. Fain didn’t know how animals thought, so he never killed them. He did understand people, though.
4
It falls in a tumbling metal box. The lights around it wink and spurt patterns—constellations of the Dance. The amber crystals move and babble, clutching at numbers and lines. They sputter their truths and in the making of them give birth to lies. The liquid crystals merge and as facts are fixed, they die, becoming false as the Dance moves on.
Targets above, the dying lies say. It is so, was so, and thus will never be so again. The Changeling moves to swarm about these crystals of the Dance, to understand them in their sacrificing rhythm. They speak of the hot point of light in the sky. Fain comes, yes.
At last the moment comes, the moment rises and is consumed. As Fain will be consumed, is consumed, was consumed, as all things eddy together.
It presses against the pulsing crystals. Meaning seeps across the abyss between the metal box and the thing-of-the-Dance within the box. The thing sees, understands. Punch here, command that. Let the box do its work. There.
The hollow lights speak, tell of the beam which cuts air, rejoices in a sure strike. The thing knows this is but a moment passing, a locus through which it must move. The beam is not the end. It must be the beginning.
In answer, space rips open.
A fireball flares into being nearby, twin sun to the glaring purple star above. The air chums with crackling thermal death, small spikes spurting from the fire, fleeing their father, to bury themselves in the Changeling. But not enough, no. No. It will survive this. It caresses the box from inside, searching for its true center. The box must carry it to the flat plain below, deliver it to the next movement of the hunt.
The guts of this passing box are simple. Guts know nothing, do anything, sense no past or future and thus do not share the corrupt falseness of the Fain. The Changeling strokes the box, knows it, arranges it. So all will be done, when the moment decides.
Then, done, it alters. Coarse plumes encase it. Suddenly it is a great falling bird, spewing acrid odors into the stormy air. It selects not a graceful air being, but a great heavy armored bird of violent energy. At its rear something burns to slow the fall. It feels the searing throat, encrusted with excrement.
A chocked tube of chemical wastes, a foul and caked stuff. And, yes, it is clogged, too, with semen. The sweet syrup fills the Changeling. Slimy, ejaculated, yellow, coating the Changeling as it lies curled in the warm bowel of the plunging bird. Semen, inside the box that is egg. For the box brings a fresh womb, falling down from the prickpoints of stars above. New birth for the fallow flatland below. The Changeling will jerk and lunge and spurt yellow into the myriad bacteria of grainy soft Alvea. Dust will give forth.
The avenging bloody bird falls. Its beak screams in the clouds. It will mate with the wind. For now.
5
He walked away from Fain and as the distance between them grew Skallon felt a weight lift from him. The shooting, the death—it had rattled him more than he liked to think. But worst of all was Fain’s impassive face and cold assessing eyes. Granted, the man knew his work. But there was a quietly fierce way he went about it that unnerved Skallon. Sure, he’d had training himself. Earthbound simulations, computer-enhanced scenarios, game therapy, the lot. But Fain had been out here, to other worlds. He was different. And even as Skallon pressed on, anxious to get away from his partner, a reminder of the man skipped along, nosing into bushes, pricking up its ears at odd noises, studying the path with slitted eyes.
Alvea. Skallon shrugged off the events of the last few hours and stopped, neck craning, soaking it in. Alvea. Not a sim or a roughly approximate Earth-bound site, but the whole real goddamn thing.
Giant ferns nodded in a breeze. Musty pollen pricked at his nostrils. The ferns spread great fronds like umbrellas, magenta, leathery, shot through with complex blue veins. Skallon heard Scorpio stop. The dog was probably wondering why the halt. Well, let it. Skallon had spent years studying this planet. Now he was here. And he was damned if he was going to miss any of it.
He turned, names popping into his head as he identified the plants. Lugentana, hairy ferns stirring with languid grace, so that he felt like a small mite swaying, adrift in the sea beneath a coral reef. Bazartaeus alatan, peacock-blue puff balls that suddenly exploded into a fog of smaller spores. Reesjat, rubbery stems pocked by warrens of ground animals. Catakasi, parasitic streamers like glittering beaten copper that clasped the red and orange trunks. A sheen of Rutleria, webs between jeweled blossoms. Harsh, violet light flickered through the high ceiling of foliage.
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