Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  (Also at around the same time, fifty light years away, the colonists of San Damiano were spiraling into a life-or-death crisis. In our case, it was nothing dramatic, just a lot of little stuff—soil problems, insect problems, foot-and-mouth disease, viruses—that added up to an onrushing colony failure event. Our technocrats stared the math in the teeth and pulled the trigger on the Big Shift. Some say that they just used the crisis as an excuse for something they wanted to do anyway. The Darkworlders were not led by a smartypants club of technocrats. They were led by kings and queens, and they found a different solution.)

  When the dust settled on Old Gessyria and New Gessyria, neither planet had a single working spaceship left.

  They were cut off from one another by a void of 1.1 AU.

  They stayed in radio contact for a while, but when the radio telescope arrays got broken up for parts, that ended, too.

  Three hundred and fifty years passed.

  *

  One day in 3375—the year of my birth, coincidentally—Fleet ships burst out of the sky of New Gessyria. The Darkworlders were clinging on at an eighteenth-century tech level. They had started mining coal for fuel, and they dressed in clothes made from the wool of local fauna. Unknown to them, during the last three hundred years, humanity had colonized the Cluster. The Fleet was now casting back over our path from Earth to the Messier 4 Cluster, visiting older colonies that had not been heard from recently. San Damiano had been re-contacted in 3361; my parents were young adults at the time, and they never quite got over the shock, nor did most people of their generation.

  Re-contact seems to have been an easier adjustment for the Darkworlders. They looked agreeably mainstream, and they played the part of supplicants with the virtuosity you would expect from people who had lived under a monarchy for four hundred years. The Fleet, and the whole constellation of government agencies and charitable NGOs based in the Heartworlds, showered them with goodies … including spaceships. Crucially, they gave ships to the New Gessyrians first, supposing them to be in more need. The Old Gessyrians had done better during the long separation—there were fifteen million of them by this time, spread out over two continents with rail, road, and sea connections.

  The first thing the New Gessyrians did with their new ships was to head over and bomb the shit out of their neighbors.

  The story got a bit confused at this point. Rafael Ijiuto, who had concurred with Justin’s telling so far, now yelled that Justin and Pippa had it backwards. It was the Old Gessyrians who had attacked them first.

  “Whatever,” I said. I was sitting on the floor, leaning against an altar-table. I’d begun to feel sick again. I was smoking vile cigarettes blagged from the Sixers to try and combat the nausea. The story so far had been punctuated by the thunder of the Travellers pounding away at the wall, while Sixers rushed in every so often to update Justin on the status of the power plant. We couldn’t stay here much longer. That was very clear. Yet I was far from making up my mind what I should do. “It doesn’t matter who started it. All war stories are the same. People are horrible to each other and lots of them die. Skip to the end.”

  “Well, that is the end,” Justin said. “A tiny remnant of Old Gessyria escaped to the Cluster. They found refuge on Gvm Uye Sachttra, and there they lived for fifteen years, until that wretch showed up with his Travellers to destroy them.”

  I looked at Ijiuto. “You know, it’s never stopped bugging me. Why did you come up with that preposterous scheme of using toy fairies to—to infect them with IVK, instead of just dropping a nuke on the refugee camp? Your people clearly have no objection to bombing civilians from orbit. And since you were hiding behind the Travellers, you would’ve had deniability.”

  Ijiuto sat up, skull-faced in the gloom. “Exactly! That’s what I wanted to do!”

  “But?”

  “The Travellers refused.”

  “Even though you were paying them so much money?”

  “Not money. Antimatter.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  Antimatter is hellishly difficult, expensive and dangerous to produce. You’d better not manufacture it on the surface of a planet if you like your planet. The Eks do it on orbitals in barren star systems. We do it on airless moons ringed with gigantic particle accelerators.

  “From the Fleet,” Ijiuto said, “of course. For our spaceships. But we don’t have any more spaceships. Our last ships were lost chasing the Old Gessyrian carrier that the refugees escaped on. Back to square fucking one. We won, but it doesn’t feel like winning sometimes. So there I am, sitting at home, wondering what I’m going to do about those vermin that stole our Code, and here comes the antimatter tanker. I tell the guy, ‘You might as well take that away. What are we gonna use it for? We don’t have any more ships.’ And the guy goes, ‘So why not hire some?’”

  I sat up. I sensed something important here, maybe even the key to the whole mystery …

  “So I did,” Ijiuto said, “and now they’re sitting outside of here, trying to kill us. Demon-worshipping cretins.”

  On cue, another boom reverberated through the bunker. Pippa shuddered. “We’d better go,” she said, pulling Justin to his feet.

  “Yes, we’d better.” Justin straightened his coat and looked around at the other Sixers. “Bernard, I’m leaving you in charge. Once we are gone, the Travellers will have no reason to remain. Then you’ll only have to deal with the Eks …”

  “Hold up, hold up,” I interrupted, moving around to stand in front of them. “Where are you going?”

  I could practically feel Justin’s excitement, like the warmth from a fire, banked down behind his solemn expression. “Away.”

  “Together,” Pippa said.

  “You can’t do that,” I said.

  “I love him,” she said.

  “I’m abdicating my throne,” Justin said. “This is the only way I can save my people.” But the look in his eyes gave the lie to his noble sentiments. The sheer heat coming off those two made the nuclear power plant look like a candle. They lit up the room, and I unwillingly remembered the beginning of my relationship with Sophia, when the same kind of heat had burned between us, like the gravity binding a binary star into its death spiral. I knew all about doing dumb shit for love.

  50

  Dolph, sitting in the starboard airlock of the St. Clare, watched the day darken. There were no city lights to illuminate the snowclouds. The whole planet seemed to be sinking into a primordial night, rent by battlefield noises.

  The floodlights around the perimeter of the spaceport came on. Armored Guardians patrolled the inside of the force field perimeter. Dolph noticed, with his pharmaceutically enhanced focus, that the patrols were spaced pretty far apart. One would go past, and it would be 3 minutes and 20 seconds (he timed it) before the next one appeared.

  During one of these gaps in coverage, he spotted someone trudging towards the St. Clare, not from the gate, but from the river. The figure wore a heavy coat, and had only two arms, but it was not one of us. He could tell by the gait. It was a woman.

  He waited, with his chilled finger on the trigger.

  “Little pig, little pig, let me come in.” The hooded figure, standing at the bottom of the ladder, turned its pale face up to him.

  “Sophia.” Dolph stared down the barrel of his Koiler.

  “Can I come up?” She was alone. She sounded like she was in pain. She was wet—her hair hung out the hood of her coat in lank dark strands.

  “Drop your weapons. Whatever you’ve got. Fucking do it!”

  “I don’t have anything. Please, Dolph.”

  Dolph didn’t want the Guardians to see her hanging around the ship. “All right. Quick!”

  Sophia started to climb the ladder, favoring her left side. Dolph backed out of the airlock. He dropped into the trunk corridor and aimed his Koiler at the inner hatch.

  “Shut the outer hatch,” he yelled when she appeared.

  The airlock thunked shut. Sophia sat on the edge o
f the inner hatch, hunched over beneath the ceiling, looking up and down the trunk corridor. She wore an ordinary down coat, not a Traveller coat. It was sodden. Water dripped off her onto the floor. “So this is Mike’s new ship.”

  “Not that new.” Dolph pointed the Koiler at her. “Weapons.”

  “You mean this,” Sophia said, cupping her crotch, “and these? What you see is what you get. I escaped along the river. The Sixers can’t see you to shoot at you after dark. They still haven’t got any barriers across the river where it enters the spaceport. The Guardians saw me, though; shot at me. The ice broke. That’s what saved me. I dived under the ice and waited until they were gone.” She showed him some cuts on her bloodless fingers.

  Her lips were blue. Dolph said, “Take off those wet clothes.”

  “Strip-search?” Sophia grinned palely and pulled her shirt off over her head.

  “You can change in one of the berths.”

  “Really? I might find something to use as a weapon. You’d better watch, so you can be sure I’m unarmed.” She peeled off her sodden shoes, socks, trousers, and underwear.

  Sophia had the body of a goddess. Close my eyes and I can still see her long thighs, those full breasts with dark nipples and aureolae, the slender waist flaring to a luscious ass. Seven years couldn’t have changed her that much. It would have been as if a fertility deity of olden times had materialized in the St. Clare’s trunk corridor.

  “Go in there,” Dolph said, motioning with the Koiler. The nearest berth happened to be his own. “Look in that locker.” He directed her to take out one of his shirts and a pair of his sweats.

  She winced as she closed the locker. Bruises discolored the left side of her ribs. Dolph wondered if they were fractured. That’s what he was thinking about, he swore.

  “Give me what I want, and I’ll give you what you want,” she said suddenly, holding his clothes in her hands.

  “What do you want?”

  “The entire freaking Cluster is after me. I’ve burned up my credit with everyone I know. There’s more than one bounty on my head. Hide me. Get me off this goddamn planet.”

  “In your dreams.” Dolph was thinking that he’d let her get dressed, then lock her in the admin berth. Take her home to Smith as a bonus gift. He felt a certain self-disgust, he told me, even as the plan took shape. Good dog …

  “You don’t even have to tell Mike,” Sophia suggested.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you want what Mike has.” Her voice was soft. Knowing. She stepped closer to him. “You always have. You want his ship. Hey, I don’t blame you. This is a nice ship. Ceilings are a bit low … You want his amazing ability to Shift into sixty different animal forms.”

  “No, I don’t,” Dolph said with conviction. He knew better than anyone else what I’d gone through with Chimera Syndrome.

  “And you want his wife.” She held up one finger, as if telling him not to say another word. Dolph stepped back, keeping the Koiler out of her reach. “Ex-wife, of course. That’s convenient. Your faith doesn’t have to get in the way.”

  “Ain’t no such thing as ex.” Dolph’s heel hit the wall. He couldn’t back up any further.

  “So you’re saying nothing’s changed? Well, maybe it hasn’t. I remember how you used to look at me even when Mike and I were married.”

  The fact is that Dolph spotted Sophia first. We met in an Ek bar, right there at the spaceport on Mittel Trevoyvox. It was him that tried to pick her up. And it was he who convinced me, at a later time, when Ek felons were shooting at us, not to leave her to find her own way home. He was chivalrous in those days. Not long afterwards, of course, he turned against her. He told me that she was trouble on legs. And he was absolutely right. I should have listened to him. But the fact remains, he was attracted to her at the very beginning, and I never quite managed to forget it. Even after he was best man at our wedding, even after he moved on to someone else and someone else and someone else again, I could never shake a little niggle of insecurity. When Sophia left me, it at least had the silver lining of removing that irritant from our friendship.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “I would’ve loved to do you and Mike at the same time. One of you in animal form, the other in human form. God, that would have been hot. You’d have liked it too, wouldn’t you?”

  Dolph told me this to illustrate how depraved she was. But it had the effect of reviving that niggle of insecurity. I’m still not sure I believe his version of what happened next. She would have been standing so close to him. She was naked. Her nipples would’ve been as hard as bullets in the cold air. Didn’t he at least struggle with temptation? We’re all human, so I don’t blame him if he did.

  What he said happened was this.

  He grasped Sophia by the shoulder and drew her closer, as if he was going to kiss her. The Koiler dug into her stomach. Her eyes were wide and drowning-dark. He said, “You know what Mike has? IVK. He’s got five years to live, because of you. So no, I wouldn’t screw you if you were the last woman in the universe.”

  He spun her away with a contemptuous snap of his wrist. But she grabbed his arm and pulled him with her. They crashed to the floor. He reared up to flip her over, but she was faster.

  That’s how he said it happened. And if, in fact, it didn’t go quite like that, if there was indecision, if there was drug-impaired judgement, if he forgot how dangerous she was, what does it matter?

  All that matters is that one way or another, Sophia ended up with the Koiler in her hand.

  Dolph picked himself up. He was going to rush her. He didn’t think she’d shoot him, or maybe he just wasn’t thinking that clearly.

  A metal tentacle whipped around his arm, hauling him up short.

  Our new maintenance bot, which had crawled soundlessly into the berth, said in its monotonous croak, “Do not move.”

  It raised another tentacle, brandishing an injector full of something clear, and lowered the needle to within a few centimeters of Dolph’s arm.

  “What’s … in the injector?” Dolph said.

  “Not sure,” Sopha said carelessly. “I told it to pick whatever was closest to shabu. I know you used to be a fiend for that stuff.”

  Dolph eyeballed the dose. It looked like enough to kill a mainstream human being. Maybe not a Shifter. Maybe. “How?” he said at last.

  Sophia laughed. “I was telling the truth: I don’t have any weapons. I don’t need any weapons, when there are poorly secured AIs around.”

  “But you don’t have a computer, or a phone, or—”

  She pointed at her head. “Wireless uplink. Yeah, I finally caved in. I’m against cybernetics on principle, but it’s just so handy being able to carry my favorite exploits in my brain.”

  She put on Dolph’s spare clothes, and wedged the Koiler into the pocket of the sweats.

  “The bot was easy to crack, but it looks like I can’t break into your ship’s computer. You’ve got some outstanding encryption there.” Dolph mentally gave thanks to MF for that. “I was planning to get the bot to knock you out. But since I can’t access the flight controls …” She chuckled. “I guess we’ll find out if Yesanyase Skont was a fluke, or if you really are that good.”

  She herded Dolph onto the bridge. The maintenance bot followed, and stationed itself behind Dolph’s couch.

  “Turn up the heat,” Sophia said. “It’s freezing in here.” To the bot, she said, “If he makes any sudden moves, give him the whole dose.”

  Dolph figured she was probably bluffing, since she needed him to fly the ship, but he didn’t want to find out. She perched on the arm of the left couch, pointing the Koiler at him, while he went through all the pre-launch checks again, as slowly as possible.

  Sophia could pilot a spaceship, of course. But the St. Clare’s bridge had a unique console layout, due to being built by MF for the Kroolth, and we’d further customized it to our own preferences, making it difficult for outsiders to figure out. Dolph satisfi
ed himself that Sophia couldn’t actually tell what he was doing with all the screens and switches. That gave him a potential advantage, although he couldn’t think of any way to use it right now.

  “Hurry up,” Sophia said. “Mike’ll be back any minute.”

  “I know how I ended up here,” Dolph said. “But what about you? You used to talk about human solidarity, the search for the Divine, the rebirth of meaning.” These were some of the shipboard conversations we used to have, late at night, half-drunk or completely drunk. God, we were young. We used to wrestle with what it meant that we would do bad shit for money. Sophia had had several different elaborate justifications. After she left, we stopped wrestling with it. We just did it.

  “Nothing’s changed,” she said. “I still believe in all that stuff.”

  “Which stuff? You used to have a different philosophy for every day of the week.”

  “No, I didn’t. I just hadn’t put it all together yet.”

  “So what’s the meaning of life?”

  “It’s obvious. That’s why it took me so long to figure it out.”

  “Well?”

  “How big is your cock?”

  Dolph chuckled despite himself. “Blatant change of subject alert.”

  “No, it’s really not. How big is it?”

  “In human form, jackal form, or dolphin form?”

  “Any of the above. Human form.”

  “Big as I need it to be.”

  “That’s my point. I’ve never known a male Shifter who wasn’t hung like a horse.”

  “And you’ve known so many of them.”

  “Not really, but there’s been research done, believe it or not. Adult male Shifters have anomalously large penises, even in human form.”

  I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true. Show me the adolescent boy who, when he learns to Shift, doesn’t try to enlarge his penis. Real animals tend to have pencil dicks, but Shiftertown is teeming with well-hung wolves, lions, and so forth. Even on San Damiano, the authenticity criteria are relaxed with a wink and a nod when it comes to boys endowing themselves with a couple extra centimeters. And mightn’t it carry over a little bit into our human forms when we Shift back? I’ve certainly always considered myself above average, but maybe every other Shifter guy does too … and maybe we’re all right. I would just like to know who the heck did that research. Sophia did not say.