Lethal Cargo

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Lethal Cargo Page 31

by Felix R. Savage


  “My goddamn truck,” Parsec swore, as if he wasn’t the one who’d just run it off the road himself. He steered the sub-limo down the slope, staying just clear of the ground.

  The tractor had landed driver’s side up. Now the door of the cab opened, hinging upwards.

  An airbag bloomed out. It deflated, and Rafael Ijiuto hoisted himself out of the life-saving cocoon. He took one look at the approaching sub-limo and jumped down into the pond behind the truck.

  “He’s running!” I howled. I pulled out my Machina and frantically rolled down the window. I glimpsed movement in the devil palms on the other side of the pond. I fired at the movement.

  Parsec put the sub-limo down at the end of the pond where the ground was flattest. He jumped out and ran around the pond, towards the truck.

  A few seconds later I jumped out, too.

  In the form of a wolf.

  Ijiuto was not getting away this time.

  52

  My wolf’s nose picked up Ijiuto’s scent around the far side of the pond. I could also see his footprints in the wet, boggy ground. The other side of the devil palms, the prints petered out, but I was still able to follow his scent, as it stood out pungently from the odorscape of mud, crushed grass, rotting fish, and Gillie. Casting to and fro over the heavily trampled ground, avoiding the broken glass and rubbish that threatened my paws, I loped up to the top of the rise beyond the pond.

  This was the edge of Gillietown: the raw end of a street of tumbledown row housing. Several Gillies clustered outside the last houses, rubbernecking at the crashed truck. When they saw my wolf, they fled.

  I glanced back. Parsec was waist deep in the pond, the tails of his tux floating on the muddy water, trying to get the back of the trailer open.

  I lowered my nose to the ground again, and caught a whiff of Ijiuto off to my right.

  I hadn’t gone much further before I saw him ahead of me. There was nowhere to hide, really. The occasional devil palm, a few patches of scrub. The Gillies had scrounged the place clean. He was running back towards the highway. Perhaps he thought he’d be able to thumb a ride again.

  I looped behind him, got between him and the highway, and dashed out of the scrub straight at him, snarling.

  He changed direction and ran towards the sea.

  I chased him, keeping to an easy lope.

  Pretty soon there was nowhere left for him to run to.

  The shore of the peninsula, like the rest of the Cape, is a tumble of glaciated boulders too steep to be called a beach. Ijiuto scrambled down the rocks, looked back despairingly, and stopped on a rock a couple of meters above the little lisping waves.

  I crouched on the scrubby overhang above the rocks and growled at him.

  “Help,” Ijiuto called. A quarter mile further out along the shore, Gillies swam around the stilts of outlying houses. Nearer, a trio of them drifted in a skiff, attending to a line of flags marking lobster traps. “Help,” Ijiuto shouted again. The Gillies in the skiff stared at him. They could see he was not a Gillie. They did nothing.

  Ijiuto sighed. I saw him trying to decide whether to jump into the water.

  “That’s gonna be a long swim,” I said.

  He jumped violently at the shock of a human voice coming from the wolf that menaced him. “Starrunner,” he said.

  “You left my apartment in a hurry,” I said. “Didn’t even stop to say thank you. For saving my life, that kind of thing. Looks like you’re still in a hurry. Got a flight to catch?” I grinned at him, the kind of wolfish grin that has struck terror into the hearts of men since Homo sapiens began.

  Ijiuto did not react quite as I expected. Instead of terror, he displayed resignation. His shoulders drooped. Something—perhaps hope—seemed to go out of him, like that deflating airbag. “I knew I would rather have you as a friend than an enemy,” he said.

  “Too late now,” I said.

  “I know how it looks,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you how it looks. Like you organized, and almost succeeded in carrying out, a terror attack against Ponce de Leon. The heart of human civilization. My home.”

  “No,” Ijiuto said. “You’ve got it all wrong. The kuru capsules weren’t for Ponce de Leon. Do I look crazy?” He smiled, palely. “Don’t answer that.”

  My earlier doubts flooded back, uncertainty mixing with relief. “What were they for, then? Who?”

  “That nest of vipers on Gvm Uye Sachttra, of course. Where do you think those people come from?”

  I shook my head.

  “From Old Gessyria. Our sister planet.” Ijiuto mistook my frozen silence for incomprehension. “I’m the crown prince of New Gessyria.”

  “Yeah. You said.”

  I hadn’t been sure whether or not to believe him before. Hadn’t thought it mattered, anyway. Now I believed him, all right. Everything I knew, or had heard, about royalty confirmed that the crown prince of a podunk planet in the Darkworlds would be exactly the kind of person to murder thousands of refugees because they supported a different one of his relatives.

  “So you were going to unload those damn fairies at the refugee camp,” I said, recalling how strong the wind was there. “That’s why you herded all those children out to the ship.” I remembered the smell of hot chocolate. The festival atmosphere. “You were going to give them presents.” I could say no more for sheer disgust at the vileness of it.

  “Exactly,” Ijiuto said. “Our read of the natives was that when they discovered the outbreak of kuru, they’d nuke the refugee camp from orbit. Even if they didn’t? Same difference. The Khratzes would die, anyway.”

  “Cratses?”

  “Khratzes,” Ijiuto enunciated. “My nephew and nieces. Actually, they’re also my cousins, and one of them’s also my aunt.”

  He turned to look out to sea, and the sunlight caught the diamond-sheathed knife he wore as a pendant. I remembered Pippa’s identical necklace. “What’s that you got around your neck?”

  “This? The crown jewels,” Ijiuto said morosely. “What’s left of them, anyway.”

  “I think I met your Khratzes,” I said. “Some of them, at least.”

  “You sure did,” Ijiuto said. “They hitched a ride here on your ship. Man, when I saw Pippa, I just about shat my pants. I thought she was going to get away, after all the trouble I went to. That’s why I shot at her. If it wasn’t for that damn wind, I would have got her, too.”

  “You were aiming at … Pippa.” As I spoke, I remembered that second shot, fired while Pippa was the only one still on her feet.

  “Right,” Ijiuto said. “Just between us, she’s got a better claim to the throne than I have. I figured if I could get her, it wouldn’t even matter about those other brats. So I snuck into the trees …”

  “So it wasn’t Zane.”

  “Nope. He survived, by the way. He had to stay on Gvm Uye Sachttra to have his hand amputated.”

  “I figured,” I said. “If it was him, he wouldn’t have missed.”

  “I only missed because of that fucking wind.”

  “You killed my admin. She was only twenty-four. She had her whole life ahead of her.”

  “I’m sorry, OK?”

  “Not as sorry as you’re gonna be,” I snarled.

  Ijiuto flinched, and turned to look across the bay to Space Island. I can imagine how the spaceport must have looked to him, the ships rising on their steeply slanted plasma plumes against the afternoon sky: escape, like a golden door. So near and yet so far away.

  The scrub on my left rustled to the sound of heavy human footsteps. Martin picked his way down the slope to me. He carried his bike helmet and a snub-nosed .38. “Put him down in the water?” he said. He wasn’t joking. “I want to get back to my bike. I left it on the street. Some Gillie kids were looking at it lustfully.” He set his helmet down on the ground and levelled the .38 at Ijiuto, whose eyes widened in panic, understanding, perhaps, that Martin was likelier to kill him than I was.

  “No,” I said. It was le
ss a sound than a sigh.

  Ijiuto mouthed words, but no sound came out. He turned, as if to run, and jumped into the water.

  “Fuck!” I yelled. “Get him!”

  “I’m not going in there.” Martin waved to the Gillies in the skiff, pointing to the water. Ijiuto was swimming away from shore in a strong but untutored crawl, kicking up big splashes.

  The Gillies finally acted. If it happens in the water, it concerns them. They engaged their outboard motor. They had just reached Ijiuto and hauled him into the skiff when Martin’s phone rang.

  “Parsec,” he said to me. “Yeah … Yeah, we caught him. No. The Gillies … What?”

  I scrambled closer to Martin, and heard Parsec’s voice coming out of the phone: “… that’s right. There ain’t no crates in the back. There’s nothing. Those goddamn toy fairies were never in this truck to begin with.”

  53

  I sat in the passenger seat of Parsec’s car with my legs hanging out the door, too tired even to put on the t-shirt I held on my lap. I could see down the slope into the back of the trailer. It was as empty as a sucked bone. Gillies stood on the other side of the pond, staring at us.

  “If the damn things ain’t here,” I said wearily, “where are they?”

  “One of the other trucks?” Parsec said. “Maybe the plan was to ship ‘em off-planet after His Royal Highness made his getaway.”

  “Could be.”

  “Or he could’ve already shipped them off-planet.” Parsec was standing outside the car, taking off his ruined tux. He had spare clothes in the trunk, like any Shifter would. The t-shirt I held was one of his: black, XXL, with the old Earth constellation of Ursa Major on the front. He was jubilant. Mission accomplished.

  I guessed I was jubilant, too. But I didn’t feel it. I was too exhausted to feel much of anything. Hardly surprising after the day I’d had. The climb up the side of Parsec’s house alone would have finished me if I hadn’t needed to stay strong for Lucy. Now, with Ijiuto in our custody, my body seemed to have decided it was safe to nope out. Muscles ached, and my gashed arm throbbed painfully. I’d lost the bandage, of course, when I Shifted. Then while I was stalking Ijiuto through the scrub, the cut on what became my right foreleg had started bleeding again. I raised my arm to my mouth and licked the cut, so weary that I forgot I wasn’t a wolf anymore. The smoothness of my skin reminded me. I let my arm fall.

  Ijiuto sat behind me in the back seat, soaked to the skin, with his wrists bound. (Surprise, surprise, Parsec also had rope in the trunk of his car.) He was not talking, but Martin was. Seated cozily beside Ijiuto, he was murmuring to him about the joys of life in Ponce de Leon’s large and badly run prisons.

  We had called the police as soon as we had Ijiuto back on shore. He deserved to die, but I felt that I needed to offer him up to the PD to get Dolph out of trouble. Parsec also knew the value of strategic cooperation with the authorities.

  “There they are,” Parsec said, pointing into the sky. “‘Bout fucking time.”

  I stirred myself. Dragged Parsec’s spare t-shirt over my head. Realized I was thirsty. Parsec’s ride was shamefully ill-equipped in one respect: he had no booze in the glove compartment. Beyond being picky, I finished off Parsec’s fruit slushie while the cop cars descended, one by one, and hovered around looking for level ground to land.

  There were three of them. Two of them had Extritium Precinct flashes on their sides. The PdL PD is unequally spread out: there are ten precincts covering uptown and downtown, but only one for Cape Agreste, and that one—Jose-Maria d’Alencon’s precinct—in effect covers Shiftertown as well, because the Strip is too important a money-maker to be left to Shifters to police. I say this in sorrow, not pride.

  The lead car touched down on the waste ground at the end of the pond. I saw Dolph sitting in the back seat. I waved to him. He sat oddly still. I did not realize at the time that he was cuffed to the large police officer beside him.

  Jose-Maria d’Alencon lumbered out of his cruiser. “What you done now, Tiger?”

  “Foiled a terrorist plot and captured an interstellar criminal,” I said, conjuring a grin. Lord, I was a fool.

  Another police officer came up beside me and laid hold of my injured arm, drawing an involuntary grunt of pain from me. “Cool it, Tiger,” d’Alencon said. This time, I got it. He wasn’t using my old call sign to invoke our bygone camaraderie. It was the opposite. “You are under arrest.”

  I reeled. My jejune expectations of praise and kudos collapsed. “Are you kidding? What for?” As the disbelieving words left my mouth, the officer twisted my arm up behind my back, silencing me.

  D’Alencon’s lips twisted into a bleak smile. “Where do I start? How about that?” He pointed at the truck lying on its side in the pond. “Or how about setting off a goddamn bomb in an office building? You might be able to get away with your bullshit in S-Town, but this time you went too far.”

  Oh, he was mad at me. He’d given me plenty of chances to talk, and instead I had taken the law into my own hands. He might even think I had been spinning a yarn about Lucy’s abduction, since I was hanging out in a apparently friendly way with Buzz Parsec right now.

  “The Extritium Precinct ain’t minded to tolerate any crap from Shifters,” d’Alencon went on, and a flicker of hope revived. His anger was at least partly a performance for the benefit of his colleagues. I guessed that he, too, was in trouble with his brother officers uptown, on account of his acquaintance with us. I glanced at the other cop cars. A red-haired woman officer leaned against the side of one, arms folded, waiting for d’Alencon to redeem himself by bringing me in.

  I said, “You got more to worry about than Shifters. There’s bio-weapons out there. Interstellar variant kuru, man! Didn’t Dolph tell you?”

  “Yup. He told me.” That was all d’Alencon said, but his eyes begged for some explanation that made both of us look less bad.

  The red-haired officer came over to us. Her nametag said Meaney. I guess she got a lot of stick for that. “Let’s have a chat with your buddy,” she said, motioning with her chin at Parsec, who was standing by the sub-limo, watching my arrest with not a little amusement.

  D’Alencon and Meaney approached Parsec. The other officer brought me along in a painful power hold. “Afternoon,” d’Alencon said to Parsec.

  “There’s the fugitive,” Parsec said, indicating Ijiuto. “Yours with the compliments of the Ponce de Leon Shifter community.”

  “Your Citizen of the Year award is in the mail,” d’Alencon said drily. “I’m currently considering whether I got reasonable cause to arrest you, too.”

  “You got nothing,” Parsec said smugly. He looked at me and said something under his breath about professionals versus amateurs.

  Meaney shouted to her officers to take custody of Ijiuto. Her style was clearly to arrest first and ask questions later. Martin cooperated by hauling Ijiuto out of the sub-limo and turning him over to the officers. This finally tipped Ijiuto over the edge into talking. But all he said—yelled, actually—was, “You can’t do this! I can’t go to jail!”

  “I think you’ll find that you can,” d’Alencon said.

  Ijiuto threw himself wildly from side to side in a doomed attempt to get away from the officers. D’Alencon pulled me aside under cover of the scuffle. Rapidly, he said, “Psycho told us about these supposed bio-weapons. But I got no proof they ever existed. I got a bot, says it belongs to you. I got traces of kuru in what looks like a chemistry lab, belonging to a taxi company with no taxis—”

  I stiffened. Suddenly, the truth dawned on my tired mind. I saw what I had missed—the crucial piece of information that Dolph hadn’t had time to tell me on the phone before they came for him. The taxis.

  I said, “There were no taxis? They weren’t there?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Then that’s where they are,” I groaned. Panicking, I blundered away from d’Alencon. I grabbed Parsec by his muddy lapels. “The taxis,” I yelled. “Forget the tr
ucks. Where are those taxis?!”

  Parsec’s face turned the color of clay. He jumped into the sub-limo and reset the tracking software as fast as his fat fingers could type.

  D’Alencon and I and Martin and Captain Meaney clustered around the sub-limo, staring at the dashboard screen.

  Painfully slowly, six new blue dots shimmered into view on the map of Mag-Ingat.

  They were all static.

  On the greenways of the Mag-Ingat Skymall.

  *

  D’Alencon and Meaney did not totally buy my read of the situation. But they understood the cost of ignoring my hunch if I turned out to be right. I prayed I was wrong. Prayed to our merciful Lord. Prayed for the damn cop car to go faster as we flew back towards the city, spinner lights flashing, the cruiser’s AI forcibly redirecting slower vehicles out of the way.

  D’Alencon had contacted the police AI department and tried to get them to redirect the Mujin Inc taxis away from the mall level.

  It hadn’t worked.

  The taxis had been hacked to prevent any external takeover of their navigation functions.

  “That’s impossible,” d’Alencon yelled at the AI people over the radio.

  “Told you Sophia was good with computers,” I said.

  “I’m starting to believe you.”

  And I, too, was starting to believe the unthinkable.

  The taxis were about to unload the toy fairies on the mall level.

  Where my daughter was.

  Where I’d thought she would be safe.

  Rigid with tension, I perched on the back seat of d’Alencon’s cruiser. The big police officer had shifted over to make room for me, squashing Dolph against the other door. Dolph was silent. He clearly thought he’d fucked up. But how could he have known? He had assumed, just like I did, that the toy fairies were wherever Rafael Ijiuto was. We’d both been wrong.

 

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