by Wen Spencer
“What is it?” Indigo asked, seeing the reaction.
“Maybe nothing.” He stalled her as he backtracked through his memory of exploring the scout ship. His father, Prime, had sabotaged the scout ship so it crashed, and then used explosive charges to bury it under the Oregon Blue Mountains. By all evidence, Prime had smashed everything useful during a running fight, and Hex, wounded to the point of forgetting the ship’s location, had never found his way back.
“Tell me.” She covered his hand with hers.
“Every ship carries an arsenal of machines that create bioweapons. The machines are called the Ae.”
“And they weren’t on the scout ship,” she guessed, eyes going wide.
He nodded unhappily. “The armory was empty. There were broken weapons scattered all over the ship, but I just realized that I didn’t see the Ae among them.” Kittanning squirmed, adding a wet diaper to the list of world-threatening problems. “If Hex took the Ae with him, though, he has had them for over two centuries with the Pack hounding him the whole time. It’s possible a Pack dog, even Rennie himself, has already destroyed the Ae and Rennie was too wounded to remember.”
“But you don’t know where they are.”
“I’m going to find out,” he promised her.
After Indigo kissed them both good-bye, promising to call after the autopsy, Ukiah carried Kittanning back into the mansion to change his diaper.
“Last diaper,” Ukiah told Kittanning as he arranged the diaper-changing supplies. “We’ll have to go shopping now.”
His mind, though, was on the Ae. Rennie had given Ukiah a blood mouse with genetic memories stretching back countless generations of Pack and Ontongard, to a time when Ontongard were nothing but pond scum. Ukiah sorted through those memories now, trying to juggle through several lifetimes—Rennie, Coyote, Prime—to find the last memory of the Ae.
While both Rennie and Coyote searched often for a sign of the machines, neither had found any clue to their fate. Alarmingly, Prime’s only references to them was that he dare not tamper with them while working on the destruction of the mother ship and other assorted plans including Ukiah’s conception; the mounting number of disasters made Hex obsessive about all the weapons.
Linked through all the memories—naturally enough—were references back to the Ae’s creators, the Gah’h. The Ae had been a last defense stolen out of their hands; as a race all that was left of them were Ontongard memories.
Kittanning had been mouthing on his fingers. He held up his hand to Ukiah’s inspection now. “My hand?”
“Yes, that’s your hand.”
Kittanning stuck his hand into his mouth and gummed it some more. “Why is it like this? I can remember it as something else.”
Kittanning was made after Rennie had given Ukiah the blood mouse, thus he was “born” with a full set of the ancient memories. As he grew, though, those memories deteriorated, leaving a confusing hodgepodge of earlier hosts with different body types, from wolf down to the octopilike Gah’h. Apparently Ukiah’s thoughts had stirred up Kittanning’s memories too, leaving him disorientated as to which were truly his.
“Those were the ones that came before us,” Ukiah tried to explain. “They’re all gone now.”
Kittanning took the tiny hand out of his mouth again and held it out, concentrating on it. Ukiah felt the cells in the hand readying themselves to change and shift, rearranging them to the Gah’h ancient design—a long boneless tentacle with suckers.
“No, no, no, no!” Ukiah cried, catching hold of Kittanning’s tiny hand, forcing his own will onto it. “That was someone else’s hand. We like our hands this way.”
“We do?” Kittanning voiced doubts, comparing his limited abilities as opposed to remembered fluid grace.
“This is Daddy’s hand.” Ukiah held it up to show that it matched in shape the littler one, built on the identical blueprint. “Doesn’t it feel nice?” He massaged Kittanning’s feet. “It can touch, and tickle, and give you your bimpy.” This was the family nickname for the pacifier. “And pick you up, and love you.”
“Daddy.” Kittanning gurgled in delight at being cuddled.
Kittanning’s sense of self wasn’t as strong as Ukiah expected. He would have to be careful to keep his thoughts on the here and now.
Ukiah loaded Kittanning back into the Hummer. Concentrating on the task of gathering Kittanning’s things and the slight worry of Kittanning changing shapes at the supermarket, Ukiah shrugged into his shoulder holster out of sheer habit and locked the gun safe. He was arming the security system when he realized what he had done. Rather than taking the time to reopen the gun safe and lock his pistol up, he opened the back closet and pulled out a windbreaker. It covered up his pistol, but anyone that could read bumps under clothing would be able to tell he was carrying.
While Ukiah easily handled highway and country driving with the Hummer, city driving with the big, manual transmission SUV challenged his abilities. The narrow Murray Avenue was insanely busy as usual. He fought the clutch to keep the Hummer from stalling as he coaxed it into the Giant Eagle’s small, crowded parking lot designed by Escher. The only true near accident was with a white Taurus following him down Murray, apparently startled by his turn into the supermarket. Luckily he found an end parking space since the slots were all slightly too narrow for the extra-wide car.
Max had desensitized Ukiah to the Giant Eagle’s confusion years ago, when they first became partners. It was all new to Kittanning, who went wide-eyed and silent at the sudden bombardment of stimuli. Ukiah locked Kittanning’s car seat into the basket of a shopping cart and started into the produce section.
Mom Lara had given him a detailed list with brand names, sizes, and little notes to check for dings in cans, broken seals on jars, and expiration dates on everything. It was Max’s list, handed to him so casually, which was going to be a challenge: a ripe cantaloupe, a wedge of good Brie cheese, crackers, steak, potatoes, and “salad makings.”
After picking his way through a myriad of possible lettuce, tomatoes, and potato choices, using his perfect memory to pick up what Max usually bought, Ukiah found himself in front of the cantaloupes. He eyed the unrevealing green webbed rind. How did you tell if a cantaloupe was ripe? He picked one up and turned it in his hand. Did one assume that all of the cantaloupes were ripe? What exactly was a cantaloupe, anyhow? He knew it was a melon, but were melons fruits or vegetables? Ukiah could recall seeing people shaking and sniffing them. He shook the melon, squeezed it experimentally, and then sniffed at it.
The woman on the other side of the pile saw his confusion and said, “There’s two ends to a cantaloupe. One where the stem was, one where the blossom was.” She showed him the difference. “To tell if a cantaloupe is ripe, versus not yet ripe, the spot where the stem was should be slightly squishy but still firm. The blossom side should smell of cantaloupe.” She demonstrated a sniff. “To tell if a cantaloupe is overripe, shake it: if it rattles it’s overripe.”
She suddenly gasped, looking beyond him.
Ukiah turned, registered only that a tall man was lifting Kittanning out of his car seat, and snarled, about to fling the cantaloupe in hand as his opening attack. Recognition clicked in, and Ukiah checked his throw.
“Easy, Cub.” Rennie Shaw finished the motion of laying Kittanning on his shoulder. It was easy to know why the woman shopper had reacted with alarm; from shaggy gristle hair down to steel-shod biker boots, the tall, muscular leader of the Dog Warriors radiated menace. “It’s only me.”
“Rennie.” Ukiah could not stop growling, nonetheless. Apparently no amount of Magic Boy could erase the Wolf Boy instincts. Shrugging aside the confusion of the crowded supermarket, he could now sense other Pack members scattered around him. They prickled against his awareness like high-voltage electricity. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m just holding my grandson,” Rennie said lightly. “No need to stir up the other customers.”
Ukiah realized that the
cantaloupe lady had frozen in place like a deer in headlights. “It’s okay,” he told her. “He’s family. I just didn’t expect to see him here.”
She thawed out of her shock. “Oh, I see, yes, there is a family resemblance. It’s just that for a minute there—” She gave a shaky laugh. “All the kidnappings have made me skittish; you can’t turn on the television without hearing someone talk about the children being snatched right out from under their guardians’ noses. Good luck with the cantaloupe!”
“What’s wrong?” Ukiah demanded to know, telepathically.
“Nothing is wrong, Cub.”
“You’re here just to see Kittanning?” Ukiah asked, feeling like he was missing something.
“It’s been nearly a hundred and fifty years since I gave up raising my son to fight the Ontongard,” Rennie said. “I’d rather not miss seeing my grandson grow up too.”
Over two hundred years ago, an Ontongard ship entered Sol’s star system. If their invasion had gone as planned—following the same course as countless invasions prior—after a scout ship secured a landing site, the Ontongard would have landed en masse. Ukiah’s father, Prime, though had been a mutated rebel among the Ontongard ranks, physically like them, but mentally an individual. Prime sabotaged the mother ship so it crashed on Mars, and then, as part of the crew of the scout ship, sabotaged it too. Only one Ontongard survived, Hex.
Hex, like all Ontongard, could grow himself by infecting humans with his alien genetics, spreading from the one body to countless others. Wounded and dying, Prime had no choice but to infect the first creatures he encountered, a wolf pack, and hope that one would survive to carry on his fight. Coyote was the only wolf that survived, and he went on to infect humans with his wolf-tainted alien DNA, and thus the Pack came into being.
Rennie had been born human in 1834. He was the first human to survive Coyote’s attempts to make a Get. He had abandoned his wife and infant son to carry on the war Prime started; the decision was based partially on the desperation level of their secret war, and partially on the desire to keep his all-too-human loved ones out of the cross fire. When the Pack found Ukiah, Prime’s long-lost child, they decided to view him as their son; they were, after all, extensions of Prime. The same logic that made Kittanning Ukiah’s son, also made the infant grandson to all of the Pack.
Despite looking only in his late twenties, Rennie was full of grandfatherly pride as he held Kittanning. “What a big boy! Someone is impatient to grow up!”
“That makes two of us,” Ukiah thought.
Catching Ukiah’s thought, Rennie laughed. “Like father, like son.” Then, because it suddenly struck Ukiah that his own impatience might be spurring Kittanning on, Rennie added, “It’s Pack blood, Cub. It doesn’t like being helpless. He’ll slow down once he’s up and running. Bear did.”
As if summoned by his name, Rennie’s lieutenant, Bear Shadow, came around the corner pushing a cart. Unlike Rennie, who was in jeans and a muscle shirt, the Cheyenne warrior wore a full leather duster and smelled faintly of gunmetal. He had a hawk feather tied into his black braid and necklace of bear claws at his neck. “What did I do?”
“Grew up fast after the Ontongard reduced you back to infancy with that bomb,” Rennie told Bear. “We gathered what we could find of him that wasn’t burnt to a crisp,” Rennie explained. “Getting the mice to merge wasn’t difficult, but they chose to form a bear cub. We had to work to get them to convert to Little Bear, and then he wasn’t happy until he was running on two legs, so he grew like crazy.”
Kittanning was staring at Rennie with fascination. Ukiah wasn’t sure if it was just the novelty of being able to read the Pack leader’s surface thoughts or if Kittanning was fastening onto the idea of growing up quickly.
“Don’t give Kitt any ideas.” Ukiah shook the cantaloupe at Rennie. “It’s hard enough to explain my having a son, let alone why he’s suddenly a toddler.”
Rennie laughed. “People expect babies to grow fast.”
“Not that fast,” Ukiah growled at him and sniffed the cantaloupe. It seemed ripe enough. He added it to his cart. Bear, he noticed, had picked up yams, pineapples, sweet onions, red peppers, and was now looking at the mushrooms. “Are you actually buying food?”
Normally the Pack ate at a long list of bars where they could get a decent meal and yet blend in with the other customers. They rotated through the list so that their visits appeared random. It was a necessity dictated by the lack of time for food shopping and cooking, the desire to travel light, and the need to stay one step ahead of both the Ontongard and the law. Bear’s careful study of the mushrooms, though, indicated that they planned to eat the food instead of abandoning the full cart later.
“We’ve decided to have a cookout,” Rennie explained. “And do some howling at the moon.”
They paused at the bakery counter.
“Desserts?” Bear asked.
“Cheesecake.” Rennie patted Kittanning on the back as he eyed the selection. “Carrot cake. And Key lime pie.”
“Key lime,” Bear agreed happily.
They left Bear there, waiting his turn like a normal person. Hellena, alpha female for the Dog Warriors and Rennie’s mate, stood in the next aisle, reading a can of baked beans’ label. Like Rennie, she seemed devoid of weapons, leather pants too tight for anything concealed, her black lace camisole too skimpy to hide a weapon. Ukiah could smell gunmetal on her, an exotic perfume of forged steel, oil, and old powder. He wondered where she had it hidden.
There was something mind-boggling about the Dog Warriors food shopping. They were Pack. Protectors of the planet. FBI most wanted. Hardened killers. Elite soldiers. It didn’t seem right for them to stand in the stark clean aisles of a supermarket and study nutrient guides on food packages. All much younger-looking than their sometimes hundred years of age, they looked like art students stocking up for a tailgate party.
“Natural flavor,” Hellena said without looking up. “What do you suppose natural flavor is when it’s an additive?”
“We can make beans from scratch.” Rennie picked up a large bag of loose dried beans. “Your beans are better than anything we’ve had out of a can.”
“I don’t put chemicals into my beans and call it natural flavoring.” Hellena took the bag and put it in the cart. “I’ll need to get bacon, onions, brown sugar, and the rest of the makings.”
She went off for the other ingredients.
Ukiah consulted his mother’s list and added a bag of dried beans to his own cart. “Why are you having a cookout?”
“Because life is good,” Rennie said. “We’re home safe from Oregon. Hex is an urn full of ash and we’ve made a sizable dent in his Gets. For once, we’re on top and we’ve got our teeth in their throat.”
The cantaloupe woman wheeled past them as Rennie talked about teeth and throats with the baby on his shoulder. She gave Ukiah a look that indicated she thought he should retrieve his son from the scary man, family or not, and edged on by.
They moved on to the baby goods’ aisle. The smell of baby powder perfumed the air from a thousand sources. They paused in the flood of baby sweetness.
“And this is what it’s all about,” Rennie said, tracing a chubby baby smile on a diaper package. “Life, fresh and new, individual as snowflakes, innocent of yesteryear as it is of yesterday, free to be as good and noble as it chooses to be.” Rennie picked a bright rattle off the shelf, stripped it of its tag, and handed it to Kittanning, who crowed with delight. “And you’re going to be a very good boy, aren’t you?”
“Rennie!”
The Dog Warrior laughed. “We’ll pay for it.”
Ukiah picked up a package of diapers, made sure they were the right size, and dropped it into his cart. “So we’re winning this war finally? It sounds like it.”
“I’d like to think we are,” Rennie said. “The problem of cutting the head off the hydra is finding the body before it grows new heads. We’ve lost the trail and all the Gets left seem to have go
ne into deep cover.”
“Where they can be making countless more.”
Rennie shrugged. “The odds have always been in our favor. For every thousand people they infect trying to make a Get, only one survives, and the big spike in the death rate tells us where they are. If they weren’t so bloody hard to kill, we would have wiped them out by now.”
“But that’s what they’re most likely doing, isn’t it? Infecting everyone they can get away with?”
“Perhaps.” Rennie sobered. “The Ontongard is one vast creature spread across trillions of bodies scattered through the universe. Try as it might to keep to one pattern, its knowledge base is uneven. What one Get might know from its host, another won’t know until the information is shared via a mouse, and only after the source Get has recalled the information in order to store the knowledge in genetic memory instead of whatever the host uses for a brain.”
“Yeah.” Ukiah wasn’t sure where Rennie was going with this line of reasoning.
“Well, each host has a different knowledge base, sometimes overlapping, sometimes totally unique. Hex and Prime had similar memories and abilities, but not identical. At some point, they have a common origin point, where their knowledge base merges, but it’s impossible to tell how many generations back that might be. They were the same host race, but the creature that infected the hosts could have been one of a hundred thousand of the invading force.”
“So we don’t know how Hex thinks.”
“We’ve got a lot of experience figuring him out, but no, we don’t. And we’re not dealing with Hex anymore, but one of his Gets, or even several of them. Because of their host memories, the Gets might go where Hex wouldn’t have led.”
It was a sobering thought. Ukiah took hold of the cart to move on.
Kittanning squealed as they started out of the aisle, “Beef and applesauce!” And he whacked Rennie on the head with the rattle for emphasis.
“I think he wants us to get beef and applesauce,” Rennie said mildly, getting whacked again.
