by Steve Perry
The trooper bent and grabbed the redhead’s tunic and dragged him up from the chair. As she did, he brought his hands around in short arcs and smacked her on both ears with his palms. She screamed and released him. Khadaji grinned. That was a nice move—
Suddenly, the other two troopers kicked away from the table and reached for their air pistols. The woman with the sore ears dug for her own weapon. Buddha, they were going to start shooting! Khadaji sprinted, hoping to reach them before they killed the redhead.
The redhead waved his hand back and forth, pointing his finger at the troopers. There were three coughs, a sound like a giant might make spitting. The three troopers fell, knocking over a table and two chairs, their air pistols in their hands but not yet clear of the clamps on their hips. What—?
The man with red hair came out of a shooter’s crouch, but Khadaji didn’t see a weapon. The man’s hands were empty, no way could he have drawn a weapon, fired three times, and put it away without Khadaji seeing it.
Red saw Khadaji approaching and shifted his stance slightly toward him.
“Easy,” Khadaji said, holding his hands in sight, fingers spread wide. “You’re clear, they went for firepower first.”
Red seemed to relax slightly. He nodded, but didn’t smile.
When Khadaji was two meters away, he stopped. “The sector pol works for us as a bouncer sometimes. We’ll call it self-protection—he’ll go along with that.”
Red nodded. “I’d just as soon not get involved with the local cools. Or the Confed Military pols. Maybe I’ll bend before they show up.”
Khadaji shrugged. “I’m not going to try and stop you.” He grinned.
The smaller man smiled back at him, and turned toward the exit.
“One thing before you go,” Khadaji said. “What did you hit them with?”
Red turned his right hand, so the back of it faced Khadaji. There was an angular parallelogram riding there, a diamond shape maybe six or seven centimeters on a side, with what looked like a slunglas tube extending from the end in a line with the index finger. The tube was a centimeter longer than Red’s finger, and was obviously a barrel for projectiles. The body of the unit was covered in flesh-colored orthoplastic, save for what must be a magazine and its snap-out button.
“Spetsdod,” Red said. “I’m running shocktox darts. They’ll be out for fifteen minutes.”
They heard the whine of a military ground-effect car, and Red dropped his hand and looked at Khadaji. “Back way out?”
“Through there.”
When the military pols blew in, Red was a minute gone. Khadaji stalled in telling of the shoot long enough for him to get further away. After the pols and medics were through, Khadaji thought about what he had seen. There was something important in it, something he couldn’t quite grasp.
Chapter Fifteen
IT WAS RAINING again. The pounding tropical downpour was punctuated with heavy electrical discharges and the resulting clap of air rushing in to fill the void left by the lightning. Thick-leaved trees danced and swayed under the windy sheets and puddles expanded into miniature seas, drowning gray plastcrete streets and walks.
Khadaji liked the rain. It reminded him of his homeworld. As a boy, he would watch the storms, sometimes with waterspouts, sweep across the ocean as if they were living things. Rain cleaned the air, refreshed the ions, and stirred the fish. It was always more fun to work the schools after a heavy rain, the mock-tuna seemed more frantic, the poda’s oxy streamers were fully extended, even the guard sharks roused from their normal lethargy. And it wasn’t just within a few meters of the surface, either. The deep fish knew about the rain, somehow, and they showed it.
Khadaji sat under the wide overhang of a pagoda roof, watching the rain. The wind blew spray at him now and again, but he was mostly dry. People walked or ran by wrapped in micro-plastic sheets or carrying umbrel-fields; life couldn’t stop because of the rain. In another few years, so they said, weather control would be installed on Bocca, and the storms would be scheduled and milder. So they said.
Khadaji sighed. If he considered his life since his Realization on Maro as a mountain climb, then he was certainly taking a lot of time to look at the rocks and caves along the way. First it had been Pen, then Juete, and now it was the seductive lure of education. There was inside him the drive to do something, even though he did not know what. What he did know was that he wasn’t moving. Sure, he was learning a lot—had learned a lot from all his experiences—but running through it all was a feeling of frustration.
Lightning scored the air maybe two hundred meters away, striking up at the clouds from a bleeder tower designed for that purpose. The thunder fired like a giant’s carbine and the sound seemed to shake more rain from the dark clouds. A short mue dressed in phosphor gear ran by, cursing the weather, as she splashed through the sea-over-plastcrete.
He remembered the fight in the pub vividly. The three troopers going for weapons and being blown down by a single man with what amounted to an air-powered dart gun. Sure, they were chem-lit, but they were also combat vets, highly trained and deadly. And Red had taken them, quickly and efficiently, without raising perspiration. The Confed wasn’t invincible: He’d been a trooper, he knew that. There were too many soldiers for any person or group to resist openly, that would be suicide.
He thought about the killing he’d seen, about his final participation in the slaughter on Maro. It still made him want to vomit, the thought of all those people ceasing to exist. Many religions had it that there was another life, another existence following the one known, but Khadaji held no faith in that idea. Maybe so, maybe not. It would be nice, but until it was proven, a person should make the best of his or her time on the physical plane. And if all those dead on Maro were wrong?… Then they were wasted, like a shipment of bad foodstuffs or contaminated chem. That felt so wrong to him there were no words for it. Any type of violence initiated by one intelligent being against another was wrong. Killing violence was worse than any other kind. How could it be condoned? In his brief moment of cosmic bliss, Khadaji had seen the value of intelligent life. Man and his self-created mues were alone in the galaxy as evolved intelligence. Certainly, there were artificials—computers and genetically altered animals—but no aliens had been discovered above the level of an unaltered dog. It was a big galaxy, plenty of room for every human or neo-human, it wasn’t necessary to kill any of them!
The rain continued to pound the trees and buildings and ground; Khadaji’s shoulders were tense and drawn up. He took a deep breath and relaxed as he exhaled both air and anger. Somebody had to do something. Somebody had to stop the Confed, had to make it release its steel grip, had to end its casual death-dealing.
Khadaji laughed into the rain. Who? Him? By himself? Sure. It wasn’t just funny, it was a screamer. But he kept seeing Red—who was he? What kind of man was he?—sweeping the three soldiers away. In the end, even the largest army was made up of single units, men and women like those in the pub. Like he himself had been. While no man could stand against the might of the entire Confed, a single man might be able to move against them in smaller numbers, if he were careful, if he were clever and skilled.
The rain began to slacken. The drops were smaller, the wind less; the clouds were nearly empty.
Yes. The time had come to do something. But—no matter how he twisted his thinking, Khadaji could only see one path to effect the kind of changes he wanted and it was not evolution but its faster brother—revolution. And violence was all too integral to that manner of change. The irony of it was not lost on him. I am for peace—do it my way or I’ll kill you…
The rain gave a short-lived surge and tried to recapture its glory as a storm, but the effort failed. The last drops fell and the hot sun was revealed by the retreating clouds. Vapor rose from slate roofs and plastcrete, returning to the air to begin the cycle again.
Khadaji stepped from the pagoda and walked in the warmth of the early afternoon. Could he use the same excuse as
the Confed—the end justified the means? Sometimes it did, of course, but could one ethically justify using the same methods as a deplored enemy, in order to get it to stop?
Khadaji waded through a puddle which covered his dotics and rose to his ankles. What other paths were there? His studies had shown him that revolution and evolution were the only ways that societies ever truly changed. Revolution and evolution, built of a mix of education and violence and politics and compromise and self-interest and self-preservation. Certainly, history showed that rigid societies, like ancient dinosaurs, always died. The Confed was the biggest dinosaur ever, and while it was already dying and had been doing so for a long time, it would take many years before it finally fell. Any empire which had to hold its citizens in check with military force was far down the road to destruction. Which brought up another thought: what would replace the dead beast when it began to rot? What parasite would emerge from the corpse to try and breed itself into superiority?
Khadaji shook his head. He didn’t know enough, he knew that much, but every moment he allowed to pass without action meant it was that much less likely he would accomplish anything. It was time to do something.
What, and how?—those were puzzles still to be solved.
He grinned to himself. Funny, how much he had changed in the last few years. Who would have ever guessed at what he was now planning and doing, compared to what he thought and did as a callow young soldier? Certainly not one Emile Antoon Khadaji. It had all sprung from one cosmic moment on a battlefield, something no one would have ever foreseen. Based on that one flash of knowledge and the subsequent faith attached, he had altered his life dramatically. He’d become a deserter; he’d educated himself in processes he’d never known about; he now contemplated unthinkable acts. Such things were utterly amazing, even now. That spiritual moment drove him, forcing him to become more than he’d ever dreamed he would be. In a way, he had become a kind of intellectual; it was time now for him to become much more active.
It took him two weeks to find Red. And even then, it was more a matter of luck than Khadaji’s skill as an investigator. He had read the texts on detection and investigation, but there were some things which didn’t translate well from a text file. “Contact local sources of information” was a lot easier in theory than it was in practice.
Red wasn’t particularly thrilled to see him.
They met in a somatic club, amid rows of people sitting in electrostim units, having their muscles exercised. Red was utilizing an old-fashioned set of free weights, and sweating with the effort. Khadaji noticed he wore the spetsdod even here.
“Yes?” Red looked wary.
Khadaji explained what he wanted.
“You jest.”
“No. I’ll pay you to teach me.”
“Why?”
“Self-protection.”
Red stared at Khadaji’s body. Like most of the others in the club, Khadaji wore only a groin strap. His body was better than most; all the hours of sumito practice kept him lean and tight. “You look as if you could take care of yourself, if the need arose.”
“Against three armed troopers?”
In answer to that, Red tossed the weight bar he was curling at Khadaji, and brought the spetsdod up to aim at the bigger man’s belly—
Khadaji wasn’t there. The weight bar clunked onto the rockfoam floor cover and Red found his outstretched arm clamped at the wrist by a powerful hand; Khadaji was standing next to him, out of the line-of fire of the dart shooter. Red grinned widely, and Khadaji released his arm suddenly.
“That’s what I thought,” Red said. “I saw you move in the pub. You don’t need a spetsdod, friend. You could have taken those three with your hands, no matter if they had air guns, am I right?”
“Probably. But I still want to learn.”
Red bent and recovered the weight bar. After curling it several times, he finally spoke. “All right. I’ll show you.”
As it turned out, Red had a name—Lyle Gatridge—but most people did call him Red. The College of Military Science had an underground weapons range, and they practiced there. The place smelled of lubricant and explosive chem, and it brought back memories of Khadaji’s own military training. He could still recall the Sub-Lojt telling the troops to load-and-lock-one-clip-ball-non-explo-and-ready-onna-firing-line.
Killing weapons were generally illegal for civilians in the civilized galaxy, but these weapons which would stun or shock an attacker were allowed, with proper licenses, for self-protection. Tasers, light-cannons and spetsdods loaded with charged ion-chem were fairly common, Red told Khadaji. He should know, because he earned his money as a bodyguard at times.
“Now you take a laser. It’s a fine weapon, it delivers a hard charge which will knock a big man stupid. Problem is, the range is short. A laser’s transmitter is only good for maybe fifteen meters, tops. Outside of that, you might as well throw it. There are short-circ vests which will absorb a laser’s signal, too.
“Light cannons are fine, they’ll blind you, especially at night, just like a photon flare. Problem there is, they’re not so good in bright sunshine, and you can wear polarizing contacts which will pretty much kill the effect.”
Red handed Khadaji a spetsdod. “Put it on the back of your hand—this is a right-side model—you peel the backing on the flesh and mold it, like this.”
Khadaji wiggled his fingers experimentally. The weapon was very comfortable, light enough so he hardly noticed it was there. The barrel protruded just past the tip of his index finger.
“It’s not loaded,” Red said, “but you always check that for yourself, don’t take anybody’s word for it. Right there is where the magazine goes.”
Khadaji checked the slot. It was empty. Red handed him a plastic rectangle about the length of Khadaji’s little finger, but only half as thick. “It holds up to fifteen rounds, depending on what kind of dart you load. The power—compressed gas—is built into the magazine. This is stinger ammo—dull-nosed darts without chem. You know you’re hit if you get shot by one, but all it does is sting a little; no damage unless it hits an eye or something. Load it with the white end up.”
Khadaji obediently snapped the magazine into place. “That’s the eject button next to the magazine. Try it.” Khadaji touched the button and the magazine snapped out and fell onto the floor of the shooting range. Red bent to retrieve it. “You can reload in about three seconds.” He returned the magazine and Khadaji reloaded the weapon.
Khadaji dropped his hand next to his thigh and wiggled the fingers again. He had read about how to fire the weapon, there was a chem-sensitive trigger on the end of the barrel which would only react to certain kinds of epidermal tissue, specifically that of a fingernail. There was no safety, unless you wore a fingertip cover.
Red punched in a command on the range computer and a holoproj image lit up three or four meters out. A big man with a knife raised over his head running in place toward them. Khadaji laughed.
“Go ahead, shoot him,” Red ordered.
Khadaji nodded and snapped his hand up—and shot himself in the foot.
“Ah, shit! shit, shit, SHIT!”
Red leaned back against the stall support and laughed until tears flowed. “Felt that, did you?”
“Goddammit, that hurt!” Khadaji refrained from hopping around and holding his foot—barely.
“I forgot to mention that the firing mechanism is very sensitive.”
“You fishfucker,” Khadaji said, glaring at him.
“Ah, ah. You’ll remember it better now than if I’d just told you. You see why I always keep my index finger curled in now, don’t you?”
“I see.”
“How’s your foot?”
“I’ll live.”
“Good. Let’s try it again, only take it a little slower, what say?”
It was unlike any weapon Khadaji had ever used in the military. First, the shooting was “instinctive”—it was point-firing, there were no sights, no way to aim. You pointed
your finger at the target and that’s where your missile went. Which was what made it so fast, your target was never any further away in time than jabbing a finger at it.
A crazed woman waving a hand wand ran on a treadmill at him. Khadaji pointed his finger at her. A chime rang and a diode lit on the control panel. A hit.
“Where were you aiming?” Red looked at the board. “At the woman,” Khadaji said dryly. “Where at the woman? Her face? Chest? Left nipple?” “Her chest.”
“You missed, then. You hit her too low, almost at the navel.”
“So? I hit her, didn’t I?”
“Not good enough,” Red said. “You ever hear the story of the archers?”
“What’s an archer?”
“Bow shooter. Slings an aluminum shaft about a meter long using the power of a primitive spring—” “I know what a bow is,” Khadaji interrupted. “Yeah, well there was a contest and the best three archers in the state were shooting for a prize. The state’s ruler had a big holoproj of a fish hung for a target and the archers were set back a good distance, fifty or a hundred meters. So they shot, and one guy won. After the contest, the ruler called the three archers in one at a time and asked each archer what he’d been aiming at. The first guy said, ‘I was aiming at the fish.’ Second guy said, ‘I was aiming at the middle of the fish.’ The third shooter said, ‘I was aiming at the fish’s eye.’ You want to guess which archer won?” “Obviously the third archer,” Khadaji said. “Right. Because you only get as accurate as you try for.” He waved his right hand, showing Khadaji his own spetsdod. “These things have a range of about fifty meters, but are only effective for maybe half that. Combat range for a spetsdod is five to seven meters, that’s where you’ll do most of your shooting. You got somebody wearing a vest or padded ‘skins, your only target might be a hand or neck.” Red stopped talking and bent to pick up an empty magazine from the floor. He held it in the same hand as his spetsdod, then casually flipped it into the air downrange.
