Tarkos shrugged. “We—humanity—weren’t involved in that war. So we’re a weird place to start. But I suspect it’s more than that. If their ideology—almost a religion, really—hasn’t changed, then these Ulltrians, like the old ones, want to spread life through the Galaxy—”
“Don’t we all?” Yeats interrupted.
Tarkos shook his head. “Not in the same way. The Ulltrians believed that they were on a kind of mission to accelerate evolution. They wanted to spread all organisms everywhere, let them fight it out on every planet, in every ecosystem. A kind of mad chaos of death and struggle and adaptation. All the clades mixed and fighting. Every species in the galaxy made into an invasive species. The KunPaTel weapons that they preferred weren’t just a way to attack enemies. It is a way of furthering their goals. It’s an… ideological weapon.”
“And what do they expect at the end of all this biological war?”
“They believed that at the end of millennia of such struggles, the Ulltrians would be victors, as the ultimate life form, top of the food chain. Only it was supposed to be a new food chain, that spanned the known universe.”
“That doesn’t explain why one of them is here,” Yeats said.
Tarkos nodded. “Maybe this is a good place to hide a few Ulltrians. It is likely a good place to steal life forms. We don’t have the kind of surveillance technology that is common in the Galaxy. The oldest forests in the galaxy have more cameras per square meter than London.”
Yeats nodded. “They have biological weapons, don’t they?”
“Each one of them is a biological weapon. The Ulltrians practiced radical genetic engineering: conscious adaptation was part of evolution too, as far as they were concerned. So Ulltrians are all highly modified. There’s nothing natural about them. They’re a nightmare that dreamed itself. Most have the ability to generate and spread bioweapons, with their own bodies. But I don’t think it has attacked Earth’s ecosystems yet. We would know.”
“I liked it more when Earth was under quarantine,” Yeats whispered. “We were safe then.”
Tarkos looked down at the horrible wreckage of the strange woman’s skull, and frowned. What could he say to that? In the war that started now, no planet was safe, whether it was quarantined or not.
No one wants to grow up. But no one has any choice about it.
_____
Earth’s Harmonizer Headquarters rose up, a corkscrew shaped building, on the outskirts of Paris. Bria set their cruiser down on one of the landing platforms that stuck out, like a flower, from the fiftieth floor. Cold wind whipped through the small ship when they opened the door. Before the door’s ramp had hit the ground, Dr. Murakami sprung onto it, running.
Tarkos felt relief to see the familiar doctor. He suspected, for a moment, that she’d crossed the Atlantic just to examine Bria, but then he thought better of it. Murakami was the best human doctor in the Corp, he’d been told by Vice Commander McDonough. That meant she was one of the best on Earth. And she knew a lot about Galactic technology. Murakami went straight to the autodoc and scowled at what she saw.
“Dear god,” she said. “What butchery.”
Bria rose up and started down the ramp when Murakami pointed at her. “You, commander!” she shouted. “Don’t move.”
Bria turned, the brow of her top eyes knitted down in a threatening glare meant to convey she was about to take insult. Two medics, carrying lifters to put under the autodoc, backed down the ramp, giving the Sussurat room.
“Don’t give me your scowl. In medical matters you follow my orders. You’re a mess, and you might be dangerous to others. Who knows what diseases lurk in the claws of an Ulltrian? You will report to the medical center immediately.”
Bria growled and hissed some complaint in Sussurat. She dropped on all fours and walked down the ramp, shoving aside the waiting medics with her broad shoulders.
“She’ll go,” Tarkos said. “But please be respectful of her.”
“Respectful?” Murakami shouted. “Find me the virus or bacterium that is respectful, and I’ll change my bedside manner. Till then, you fly spaceships and I’ll heal the sick—got that, Harmonizer?” She paused, as if a thought struck her. “Tarkos. Amir Tarkos. Tarkos,” she said, as if reading off a roster. She patted her pockets, and then produced a big syringe. “Here. Good. I got it. Sit still. Second course of your cancer treatment.”
Tarkos froze, eyes wide with surprise, as Murakami came at his jugular with the hypodermic. He tried not to swallow as she injected what seemed a very long, slow quantity of nanotech. His throat burned as it went in.
“Good.” She pulled the needle and capped it, then shoved it in one of the many pockets on her white smock. She waved at the men below. “You lot, stop standing around, get this autodoc into the criticare suite. We’re going to have to map out what’s shoved down into this poor woman’s brain. I’ll have to call Petot. Best brain surgeon in Paris. In Europe. And she’s got a broken neck. You shake her and I’ll throw you off the landing platform.”
Tarkos and Yeats waited while the autodoc was secured, and then they followed the team down the ramp. Wind snapped Yeats’s hair into her face as they stepped out below the ship. She got the faraway stare of someone who received a message on her implant. “Ah. I’ve got to talk to some of the people from biologics. They have questions. Conor is calling in to talk with them too.”
She hurried off the platform, following some virtual map that only she could see.
Tarkos stood alone. The shouts and murmurs ended as the doors to the tower closed, to be replaced only by the sound of the wind whipping over the edge the platform, and the ticking of the hot hull of the Cruiser cooling above him. The view from the platform stunned him, now that he looked out toward the sunrise. All of Paris lay in the distance, a cream and gray lacework of human civilization at its most graceful.
He checked his duty roster. Seven hours of nothing. No one wanted to talk to him. They’d read his report, and now data analysis would proceed without him. At least until the morning. That meant he had the evening free. War had come to Earth, and he didn’t much feel like leaving the tower. But he had made a promise long ago that if he had a second free in Paris, he would use it.
“Well,” he said aloud, “I better get down there, or my mother is going to kill me.”
_____
Tarkos stowed his armor, bathed in the Cruiser because that’s where his spare uniform hung, and then entered the tower, where curving halls circled each floor, opening onto glass walled offices with epic views of Paris. After a long search, he found a team of Kirt engineers and asked them to inspect his ship. The crablike Kirt, always precise but oddly polite in their own officious way, promised him to put the request into the queue last, and ensure later requests came after it. That was the most you could expect of a Kirt, and it had the advantage that they really meant it: no other ship would jump the repair list to get ahead of them.
“No ship lasts forever,” the engineer told Tarkos. “Some day it will be food for the recyclers.” Typical Kirt: they acted like optimists but always talked about the worst of things. Accustomed to this, Tarkos thanked the engineer and looked up directions to the infirmary.
He found Bria hunched up, hair erect, and with all four eyes squinting in an expression close to rage, while a young doctor pasted some white foam over Bria’s cuts with trembling hands. Sweat dripped down the doctor’s pale forehead. But Murakami watched the whole scene with a peaceful look of concentration. Someone had already shaved Bria’s fur around her gashes, and as she sat despondently on her haunches, Bria looked like a cat with a dozen tufts of fur torn away. Tarkos decided that his continued existence might depend upon not mentioning to Bria how mangy she really did look. He suspected that Bria was rather vain about her fur, in her own Sussurat way.
“Commander,” he said. “I am pleased to see you well.”
Bria only growled, perhaps suspecting sarcasm.
Murakami dismissed the young doctor, who
fled the room, hand still clutching the medical foam dispenser. Murakami turned to her chart and made a note.
“Doctor,” Tarkos said. “How is our patient—our human patient?”
Murakami looked up at him and frowned. “Tarkos,” she said, as if reminding herself. “Well, someone did a crude butchery on her, not caring about the damage, trying to crack her brain. The technology is not my field. Quantum entanglement stuff.”
Tarkos nodded. “That might just solve one mystery. The woman said that she could hear them, and if she thought too hard then they could hear her. That’s the thing about quantum entanglement connections. They work both ways. They dug into her head, but now she can dig into theirs. Or at least into whatever system is entangled with her.”
“Well,” Murakami said, “that’s all beyond me. But the Corp found an exo-archeologist who had worked at one of the Ulltrian worlds, Dâk-Ull, to help us try to understand it.”
Tarkos turned to Bria. “I checked with the Executive earlier. They’re working with French police and with international intelligence agencies. So far, no one has record of the woman’s biometrics. So: no identification of her, yet.” He shook his head. “Here’s what I don’t understand. The Ulltrians come to Earth, grab this woman, and operate on her. Somehow she escapes. But she said to us they didn’t know she was here.”
Bria’s green pupils dilated, which often happened when she thought hard. After a moment, she said, “Maybe not from Earth.”
“What?”
“Ulltrians harm her elsewhere. Didn’t know she was on Earth.”
Tarkos sighed in consternation. “That’s consistent with what she said. But how in the hell could it happen? How’d she get to Earth from off planet, leave no biometric records that we can track, and return with all that metal in her head?”
“Must ask her,” Bria said.
Tarkos turned back to Murakami. “Can you help her, Doc? Any chance you can get that stuff out of her, and make her whole? We want her well. But—and I’m sorry to put it this harsh way—but we also need to talk to her. Earth is in danger if there are Ulltrians here. Grave danger. We need her help.”
Murakami frowned and put her pad under her arm. “You want a miracle. Well, you’re lucky, because I’m the most likely person to deliver one. But we’ve got a whole suite of machines in her body right now fixing her internal bleeding and her neck fracture. She cannot be conscious and moving, not even talking, while that’s happening.”
“How long?” he asked.
“For the neck, thirty hours.” She nodded once, as if to finalize the estimate, and then turned so briskly that her pony tail swung wide behind her. She took fast strides out of the room, leaving Tarkos and Bria alone.
Bria stood slowly. Tarkos frowned in sympathy as she flinched from her many wounds. For a moment he imagined the absurdity of offering his arm to the giant predator. She’d likely bite him if he did.
“Commander, there’s something I want to ask you.” Tarkos hesitated, mouth open. He wanted a favor, but the Sussurat did not generally take kindly to requests for special leave. Bria turned her four eyes on him, dropping her head in a sign of slight impatience. She took a step forward, testing her legs, and hissed in pain.
Well, Tarkos thought, here goes. “Commander, my mother lives in this city, and....”
“Must see her immediately,” Bria said.
Tarkos smiled and nodded. Sometimes he forgot that Briathursiasaliantiormethessess was a mother herself.
CHAPTER 11
“Alfonso,” Victoria said to her husband, in an exaggerated whisper. “Isn’t it divine?”
DiAngelo knew she was playing it up for the camera that floated to her left, but he could not tamp down his genuine enthusiasm. “It is divine. A minor work by Puccini, but a minor work by Puccini is a triumph of our civilization.”
They sat in his darkened box at the Metropolitan Opera. On stage an old man sang his final will and testament to a priest. The family that stood around him recoiled in horror from the unfolding betrayal. An English translation streamed along the arch over the stage, but DiAngelo fastidiously ignored it, forcing himself to concentrate on the Italian.
“Now,” his wife whispered “explain it to me again.”
Here goes, DiAngelo thought. I get to explain to the viewers in Oklahoma a little bit of culture.
“The people standing are all relatives of the miserly old Donati. Donati died, but no one outside the family knows it. They hired the clever peasant Gianni Schicchi, who’s laying in the bed, to pretend he’s Donati. They want him to trick the notary—there sitting on the edge of the bed—and dictate a will in which the dead relative leaves all his wealth to them. Instead, Schicchi is dictating a will in which all the wealth is left to Gianni Schicchi.”
His wife smiled and clapped her hands softly. “Their comeuppance!”
They listened to the finale. The curtain dropped, and though the audience clapped enthusiastically, the applause died quickly, and a second bow did not follow. As the lights glow brighter, a soft roar of voices rose from the seats below. The opera had been a single act, and another single act opera would follow in twenty minutes.
“Oh, be a dear,” Victoria said, shuffling her program, looking for the title page of the libretto. “How do you say it again?”
“Gianni Schicchi.”
“And that was the man in the bed?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, it was so beautiful. The music!”
The cameraman had not taken the hint and sat up in the distant bleachers, where DiAngelo had purchased a seat that trembled on the steep balcony as if it might tumble down to the seats of the great. Instead, the kid leaned against the wall in their box, his faded black jeans annoyingly vulgar in this sea of tuxedos. He chewed gum with slow boredom as he drilled the lens in on DiAngelo’s face. The hovering camera—the damn galactic camera, DiAngelo called it in his own head—buzzed close to him. Too close. He pushed his seat back and rose abruptly.
“I’m going to the men’s room.”
“Bring me a white wine, be a dear,” Victoria said.
“Of course.”
He pushed past Bobby the cameraman, resisting for the thousandth time the urge to shove the fat boy over, and slipped out into the hall. In a few seconds he was moving with the crowd down the stairs that led to the cafe. A thick crowd pressed up to the shining marble surface of the bar, ordering drinks and hovering around and blocking the way after they received them.
He sighed. He’d walk the lobby a moment, till the crowd thinned, and then just buy a few glasses of wine, and return only after the music started. His wife could not drag him into a televised discussion once the music had started.
“A very clever man, that Gianni Schicchi,” a woman said, so close to his ear that he felt the breath on his skin.
He turned. For a moment he just stared at the woman standing before him. She wore a sleeveless red dress with a long split down each side, and a high neckline like a collar. Her hair was put up, but she wore no make-up, a strangely provocative sight in this room of preened women.
He glared, then walked to an empty and dim corner of the room. He knew she would follow. When he got there, he turned and said, “What the fuck do you think you are doing here?”
The woman had high cheekbones and dark eyes, and she was very pretty, although her nose had clearly been broken, perhaps several times, and never quite reset properly. There was a scar over one eye that had healed to leave a white line of skin through her eyebrow.
“Enjoying the opera,” she said, flatly. She betrayed not the slightest fear at his sharp tone. Her accent still eluded him. Something Eastern European but then filtered through England.
“You following me? How the hell did you know I would be here?”
She shrugged. “I watched the livefeed episodes of Wealthy Housewives of the Upper East Side . Great show that. Tells me everything you fascinating people are doing, and when you’re doing it. But you come off a little
dour.”
“Talk,” DiAngelo said. “I am not to be toyed with.”
“But you are toying with us. You’re not keeping up your side of the bargain, DiAngelo. And you don’t answer our calls.”
He leaned close. “I had Predators visit my office a few days ago. This is not a time to be handing over cash to the Terran Liberation Front. Nor is it a time for you to be seen with me.”
“Wrong. This is the time. We need it now. We strike next week. Without the money, we can’t make it happen.”
DiAngelo gripped her arm tightly. He meant to squeeze her bicep painfully hard, but instead his fingers closed down on unyielding muscle. This woman had once had a bit of fame, fighting in the cage-match circuit. He had suspected cage matches were mostly fake, but looking at her it did not much seem like they were. “You listen to me. You do not give me orders.”
“Didn’t you pay attention to the opera?” she said. “The family cannot threaten Gianni Schicchi when he betrays them, because then they would be exposed. You can’t threaten me. Not in any way.” She flexed her arm, and the bulging muscle forced his fingers apart and broke his grip on her expanding bicep. “You do what you promised, or we will see that you’re first to go down if we get caught.”
“I’ve given you plenty of money.”
“People have died doing this work. We destroyed two factories in India last month. Kirt factories. The Galactic Alliance is ready to kick Earth right out of the arrangement, cancel the application for citizenship, if we just make it a little more clear that they’re not wanted here. But it costs money. And it costs lives. We have people dying while you go to the goddamned opera.”
DiAngelo squinted. “I’ll deliver the money tomorrow. The usual place.”
“Double,” she said.
He just glared.
“I’m not shaking you down,” she said. “We lost our man who had access to the Enforcer Headquarters. We have another mole, but she is going to cost. A lot.”
“That will take time.”
“No, it won’t,” she said. She stepped forward, until her breasts pushed against his tuxedo, and leaned her head forward to whisper in his ear. “And someday, when we’re not in public, please try to strong hand me again. I’ll beat you till you piss blood.”
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