by Eric Flint
Three minutes later, they had hauled the shocked driver out of the vehicle, even if it was apparent that the vehicle was not coming out of the ditch.
The trooper shook his head. "He said he could drive . . . So I thought it would do no harm to have him stand on my lap and let him hold the wheel . . ."
"Here," said Nym waving a bottle at him. "Some griefs are med'cinable. 'Twas not a patch on the tractor, but not a bad vehicle to drive."
"Drive? Drive! You mad animal—" The driver coughed as he took an unwary swallow of the proffered drink. It was raw, uncolored, high-test brandy looted from an abandoned wine-farm. It would have made great lighter fluid.
They all pushed. The rats and bats didn't have much push to offer, given their mass, but they tried. They bounced, heaved at the truck. Piled rocks in the ditch. Became covered in mud . . . and the vehicle stayed embedded in the mud-churned ditch.
"Well, at least we're stuck in the mud on this side of our lines," said Chip, digging for a jack behind the seat of the jeep. "And I'm not in that much of hurry to rejoin the army, anyway."
"Yes. Things could be worse," said Doc cheerfully, offering Melene some of the brandy. "One has to view this in Neoplatonistic terms, I think."
"Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy," said Fal sourly. "Spare me. So what do we do now? Send the bats to fetch a rescue?"
"Indade, no. I think we hang tight. A vehicle will be along presently and they can pull us out." O'Niel was one of nature's laziest fliers.
"Methinks 'tis goodly advice," said Pistol, stealing Fal's bottle. "If they're going to hang us for this, that is. If I have any choice I'll not hang sober."
" 'Twas not what I meant," said the bat. "I meant a comfortable dangle by our feet."
* * *
Standing in the soft rain, looking at the truck in the ditch, listening to the rats and bats bicker amicably, with a mutual lack of understanding—despite a common tongue, Virginia Shaw had to think about her own implant. An alien-built, lentil-sized chip of imprinted semiconducting plastic that had given back her life . . . only it wasn't quite her old life. Without the soft-cyber implant between the hemispheres of her brain, she'd been a child in an adult body, with a damaged speech center and uncontrollable tantrums born out of confusion and an inability to communicate. With the implant, her parents had found their brain-damaged child a far more socially acceptable mechanical doll, no longer able to shame the colony's first family with her condition.
They'd never realized that she wasn't a doll. She had become a person. She was shaped, perhaps, by the material downloaded into her soft-cyber's memory chips. In her case, Brontë had had a large effect. But, just as the rats remained ratlike despite Shakespeare and Gilbert and Sullivan, and the bats remained bats, despite Wobbly songs and Irish folk music, she remained human despite the implant. Not a doll, but someone who could think, reason and love.
She looked fondly at Chip. Private Charles Connolly . . .
Now attempting to put a jack under a vehicle that was chassis-deep in mud. He was neither Heathcliffe nor Edward Rochester. He was just himself: a Vat-born human, born in poverty, raised to servitude, indebted for life to the company of which her father had been the majority shareholder. A company whose founding purpose, in theory, had been to build a new utopia based on the ideals of Fabian Socialism.
Like the truck, the ideal had lost its course, got stuck in the ditch and was now axle deep in the mud. It had become trapped in entrenched privilege. It had betrayed the trust that the clone-fathers of such men as Chip had put in the dream. And now, with the Magh' invasion, the new Utopian dream had become bogged down in worse: Enslaving two new-created species, the rats and the bats—on the assumption that they were biomechanical cannon fodder, not creatures of reason who should be accorded the same rights as any sentient being.
Like getting the jeep out of the ditch, it wasn't going to be easy to change the status quo. It had taken betrayal, capture and living side-by-side with them, having her own implant, and then falling in love, to do it for her.
As if he'd been aware of her gaze, Chip turned and looked at her. He dropped the jack, walked over, and took her in his arms. "Chin up, Ginny. It's not that bad."
She smiled at him. She couldn't wait for new glasses, to see him clearly again. Not, she admitted to herself, that he was the nobly born, handsome-faced, swallowtail-coat clad hero that she'd once dreamed of. He was short, stocky, spiky-haired, and full of combat-scars. The battered remains of his uniform bore not even the vaguest resemblance to an elegant coat of superfine. He was, as the bats put it, as common as vatmuck. But he was a hero, her hero, and worth ten of any noble from between the covers of a Regency romance. She kissed him, treasuring what she'd found.
"I am surprised it's not a full-on debauch you'd be indulging in," said a disapproving Bronstein.
* * *
Chip was good at ignoring Bronstein, at least while he was kissing Virginia. Well, if by "ignoring" he meant not standing to attention and doing what Senior BombardierBat Michaela Bronstein said. The bat was one of nature's organizers. But kissing Ginny was a powerful distraction. He'd wasted a lot of time thinking her one of the vile Shareholder class. Someone better put up against the wall and shot, than kissed. It had taken everything the war and treachery could throw at him to change his mind.
Fat Falstaff, the paunchiest of the rats, snorted. Chip watched him with one eye while continuing his lip-and-tongue gymnastics. Fal turned to his henchman, Pistol, who was sampling the canvas cover of the jeep for flavor. Knowing the rats had engaged in rampant gluttony less than an hour ago, and, in the way of field soldiers on this or any other world, had packs bulging with looted food, Chip wasn't too worried. Otherwise—given the rats' metabolic rate—once they started to eat the furniture, it was usually a sign that you might be next on the menu. For all that the alien cybernetics had uplifted the cloned creatures they remained essentially shrewlike. Their morality was not that of humans. Actually, they only had any morals at all, if and when it suited them.
"Well, Auncient Pistol? What think you? Methinks 'tis fine talk from a set of cozening flyboys who have mass orgies."
Pistol shook his head mournfully and spat out a piece of canvas. "No texture this stuff has. I say for a good long-lasting well-flavored chew you can't beat Maggot-hide, and a few little kickshaws on the side—like a fresh Maggot. But," he added, composing his villainous face into his best effort of injured sanctimoniousness, "if you refer to the amorous peck of our companions, and the self-righteous 'plaint of the bats . . . You have the right of it. To think of all of them indulging in the slipping of the muddy conger in concert, in a public place like that. Shocking, I call it."
The bats rose to the bait. Bats, Chip had long since concluded, were a trifle dim that way. They thought deeply about things, which rats never did. Politics was meat and drink to them, and argument about it was as intrinsic as breathing. Humor and sarcasm, natural to the rats, came only with effort to the bats—if it came at all.
"Indade, 'tis not like that!" protested Eamon. "We're a social species, and live together. Estrus just occurs simultaneously. We're faithful to our spouses."
Doll Tearsheet, reputed to be the naughtiest rat-girl in the army, lowered her eyelashes and said thoughtfully: "I'faith, 't must be true they're full. To think of waiting a year before having to do it again."
"You mean, to think of being able to wait a year," grinned Melene, the littlest rat-girl. Her tail was firmly entwined around her chosen partner, the philosopher Doc. "Mayhap after such a public orgy they know not how to look their fellows in the face again, until the level of passion doth again become too much."
"Begorra! It's not like that, I tell you!" The bat O'Niel was now plainly feeling better, having cast up the cause of his afflictions. He turned to his friend and chief drink-purveyor, the rat philosopher. Doc—or Georg Friedrich Hegel, or, as he had lately renamed himself, Pararattus—was an experiment in the download tolerance of the soft-cyber impla
nt. They'd put the whole of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit and Science of Logic into the chip's memory.
The chip hadn't cracked, but one had to be less certain about the philosophical rat's sanity. Still, given the dire state of the war effort, even experiments such as he had been drafted into the line. He was—as an aside from being a bad philosopher—a very good medic.
"Doc, explain to her, 'tis not wanton slaves to constant lust that we be, like rats or humans. 'Tis . . . 'tis . . ."
Doc nodded. "Merely biologically different, with each species considering theirs the only right and proper way to do things," he supplied, wrapping his tail around his love's in turn. "And you bats should, by now, comprehend that it is not disgust, but envy, that motivates the mockery of such as Pistol."
The bats blinked at the idea. Michaela Bronstein was, as usual, the quickest on the uptake "You mean . . . ?" She looked in horror at the one-eyed rat, who was winking lewdly at her.
Pistol nodded cheerfully. "We'd love an invitation next time, you saucy winged jade."
Bronstein shook her head. "Rats!"
"That's us," said Fat Falstaff cheerfully. "Mind you, I am not so sure about doing it upside down. There is a great deal of me to hang by the feet, while distracted." He hauled a small bottle of the looted brandy out of his pack. "Methinks I'll quaff a stoup of this sack. At least we can drink in public, even if our girls prefer some privacy for other pastimes."
He looked at the others. "What? Do I drink alone?" he jeered. "What paltry rogues!"
"I might as well join you," said Chip with a grin, taking the bottle from Fal. "We humans don't feel the same as the bats do about sex in public either. So, although heaven knows when I'll get to see Ginny again, after this, and I'd rather be doing other things, I might as well drink. We're bound to be stuck here for ages."
It was obviously an inspired decision, because a ten-ton truck immediately came around the bend. It drove straight past, showering muddy water at them as they tried to flag it down.
Chip was just working up to a good swear . . . when the truck stopped, and began reversing cautiously. The rain, the muddy road, and poor light all made good reasons to reverse cautiously. But when the truck got closer it was apparent the real reason was Bronstein. She was clinging to the little sill above the driver's side window. By her wing-claws. She had the trigger bar of a bat-limpet mine between her feet.
When the truck drew level with them, they saw that the limpet mine was attached to the glass just in front of the driver's wide-eyed face.
"Nice of you to offer to help," said Chip evenly.
* * *
Once a little misunderstanding got cleared up, the driver had been very cooperative.
The misunderstanding had been that they couldn't do this to him.
They drove on, all squashed into the cab, through the rain and the gathering darkness, showering a convoy of motorcyclists in mud.
"Wonder why they were out here? This road doesn't really lead anywhere except to Divisional headquarters and the Front. Those looked like civilian police," said the driver.
"They're probably looking for Ginny," said Chip, giving her a squeeze.
Ginny shook her head. "For all of you. You're important people, too. Major Van Klomp said so."
"Huh," said Chip, with a conscript's natural suspicion of any officer coming to the fore. "Van Klomp should stick to parade jumps. That's not how the army works. They're looking for you."
"But that's not right," said Ginny, determinedly. "After all, you are all heroes. If it hadn't been for the rats, bats, Fluff and the Jampad, we'd have died, and the army would never have captured the scorpiary. You'll surely get promoted and be used to train the army. Every general must just be dying to talk to you. To shake your hand. Or paw," she said, after the briefest of pauses.
Chip laughed. "Not in this man's army! You watch, Ginny. We're more likely to be charged with desertion, negligent loss of equipment, and failure to salute an officer."
* * *
Chip was quite wrong.
That wasn't more than a quarter of the charge sheet.
Chapter 2
An odd but unpretentious house perched above a small ravine and waterfall, on the wooded outskirts of George Bernard Shaw City.
Sanjay Devi was an unlikely conspirator. She was the colony's Chief Scientist, and the "mother" of the rats and bats that now fought beside humans against the Magh' invaders of Harmony and Reason. Their genetic engineering was in no small part her work, and the choice of material downloaded into their soft-cyber brain implants all her own.
In her choice of download material, as with everything she did, Devi had her reasons, not all of them obvious. Perhaps it was just that she was fond of Shakespeare, and nothing more sinister. After all, she was one of the founding patrons of the New Globe Thespian Society, and a devoted amateur dramatist. One of her favorite statements, in fact, was that life tended to imitate the Scottish Play.
Right now she was attempting to decide whether to clutch the dagger that she saw before her.
It was an odd-shaped dagger, and made entirely of paper. Part of it was a pile of news-reports. Part of it was a printout of several confidential biographical snoops prepared by the HAR Special Branch. Part of it was a history book—a rare thing on HAR. She'd been carefully reading up the details of the trial and fate of an obscure artillery captain.
His name had been Alfred Dreyfus.
She took a deep breath, then muttered: "If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow, and which will not . . ."
If only it were that simple. She needed to select and promote an evil grain. It had to be both evil and weak, if it was to work as she planned it to. There were three possibilities—and each of them would kill innocents, and destroy lives. She'd cultivated all of them carefully.
Finally, she made up her mind and reached for the telephone. She'd grown up using a bonephone-implant and vis-vid. But, chasing the dream, Sanjay had left the technological advances of Earth behind. Here, on Harmony and Reason, there had been none of the vast interlocking support systems a technological society required to support itself. They'd had to step backwards to technology that didn't require such an interfacing of support-systems. Back to carbon-granule telephones, for one thing.
At least no one saw your face while you spoke to them. That sometimes had advantages.
"Talbot," she said, when the phone was picked up on the other end. "Fascinating news about this Major Fitzhugh."
She waited for the explosion from the man who was in charge of the colony's Security portfolio to subside.
"The general is a fool, Talbot. Even if he did marry your sister. That was probably the one and only intelligent thing he ever did. You'll have to lead him. He's not exactly mentally capable."
She shook her head sympathetically at Talbot Cartup's pungent reply.
"The answer seems obvious," she said calmly. "Treason, Talbot. You have the means to arrange the evidence. He may not be a Vat, but he's plainly a Vat-sympathizer. He not only trained with them, he volunteered to train with them. That's as good as an admission of guilt to me. Why would any man who was not some sort of fanatic do that?"
As it happened, she had a very a good idea why Fitzhugh had done it. But Sanjay Devi always played her cards close to her chest.
Apparently, Talbot Cartup found himself in bitter and complete agreement with her. And found her suggestion remarkably attractive.
After she put the telephone down, Sanjay sat for a long time looking at the odd-shaped dagger. At last she sighed.
That hurt, as usual. Deep breaths always did, but there was nothing that could be done about it other than to take painkillers. And she couldn't afford to take those. She needed her mind sharp for the time she had left.
Finally, the pain eased. She muttered "by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes," and reached for the telephone again. But this time she clipped a little piece of solid-state circuitry onto it
. It was a relic of old Earth, a piece of technology this colony could not dream of mastering for another two centuries. The scrambler-recorder was singularly useful to a conspirator.
"Major General Needford, please."
The JAG switchboard system was slow. But she got hold of Needford eventually.
He listened to her in silence. He was unnerving in that way, as well as in others. John Needford had a mind like a razor, and Devi knew that he was neck deep in the "young Turks" in the Army. He asked incisive questions—as always.
She was surprised to find that his special investigator had encountered Fitzhugh before . . . but she shouldn't have been. Their paths had been bound to cross, given the nature of the men.
When the conspirator put the phone down, she muttered "eye of newt" with some satisfaction. None of the other three calls would be as stressful as the one to the man she privately called "the Spanish Inquisition." It was almost a pity his ancestry was Liberian instead of Iberian.
She saved the most enjoyable of the calls for last.
She answered the sour grunt from the other end of the line with a carefully planned insult. "Liepsich, you stink. And HARIT's physics is at grade school level."
A smile twitched across Sanjay Devi's face at his pungent reply.
"And the same to you. With brass knobs on. Now, how goes the slowshield research?"
* * *
She put down the phone for the last time, detached the device she'd used, murmuring "and toe of frog." She bit her lip, thoughtfully.
"I still need some more ingredients. Wool of bat . . . and although it is part of the witch's role . . . the rat without a tail."
Chapter 3
A mock-chateau on the edge of HAR wineland-country.
Now the Divisional Military Headquarters of the Fifth Brigade.
No one had explained to the Vat driver about the wisdom of avoiding the rats' stolen booze. In fact it was a good thing that Chip had restrained him after the first unwary swallow or he might have had more, and they'd have ended up in the second ditch . . . if they were lucky.
