by K. W. Jeter
Quieter beyond the doors, like stepping from the street into a church sanctuary. Quieter, but with that nervous buzz in the air that couldn’t be picked up by listening, but only detected on the skin.
There were people standing at the far end of the corridor, their faces lit by the dim illumination from an isolation window. Sikes could see George and his son, Buck, the teenager holding the baby in his arms.
“George . . .” He put his hand on George’s arm. “Are you all right? When I heard, I thought—”
George turned away from the window. “I’m okay. Buck and I weren’t infected.” He nodded toward the glass. “It’s Susan and Emily.”
In the little room, sealed off from them, two forms lay on raised hospital beds. Sikes recognized George’s wife; the smaller figure beyond her was their older daughter. Batteries of medical equipment were ranged next to the beds’ chrome rails; above, the green glow of a monitor screen tracked the dual lines of each patient’s heartbeats. In the limited spectrum of the room’s UV lights, a human doctor, clipboard in hand, watched the vital signs’ readouts, while a Newcomer lab technician drew a sample of pink blood from Susan’s arm.
“Flowers came to the house . . .” George looked shattered, the worse that Sikes had ever seen him. He rubbed the side of his face with one hand. “I should’ve been more careful . . . but I just didn’t think . . . I didn’t think that . . .” His voice dropped. “I shouldn’t have let Susan and Emily go near them . . .”
“Dad . . . come on . . .” Buck cradled Vessna in one arm; he laid his other hand on his father’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault.”
The human doctor came through the room’s air-lock chamber. “Mr. Francisco . . .” George nodded mutely. “We’ve got them on full life support systems now. Most of the signs are holding—it seems the intensive ultraviolet and the increased nitrogen levels are keeping your wife and daughter fairly stable.” He took the stethoscope from around his neck and stuffed it into the wide pocket of his hospital jacket. “But well be keeping a real close eye on them.”
“Whatever you can do . . .”
“We’re working on it. The lab’s rushing through some tests right now; then we’ll have a better idea of where to go next. For right now, you just gotta hang in there. Okay?”
Buck turned from the window. “Can we go inside?”
“Should be okay. I wouldn’t recommend taking the baby in, though—there might be some factor she’d still be vulnerable to.”
“Here, I’ll take her,” said Cathy. “You go on in.” She held out her arms, but Vessna wailed in sudden alarm, her small hands clutching her brother’s shirt.
“She knows something is wrong.” George stroked his daughter’s brow. “She’ll only let Buck or me hold her.”
“You go ahead.” Buck folded the baby’s blanket around her. “I’ll take her out to the waiting room.”
Sikes stopped George at the door to the sealed room. “If there’s anything I can do . . .”
The tension still hung between them, an invisible barrier that neither could step through. “Thank you, Matthew.” He turned away, pulling open the outer door.
The doctor had headed down the corridor. Sikes caught up with him.
“Look, uh . . . how is it, really?” Sikes kept his voice low, so the others wouldn’t hear. “I mean, on the level.”
The doctor shrugged. “Wish I could tell you. But I can’t.”
“Is there a specialist or somebody we could call in?”
“I am the specialist. I’ve done nothing but Newcomer pathology for the last four years. But you have to remember—we started from scratch with these people only six years ago; human medicine goes back centuries. There’s just stuff about them we’re still finding out.”
“Sorry . . .” Sikes glanced over his shoulder, then back to the doctor. “But they’re going to be all right, aren’t they? They got ’em here in time, and all?”
The doctor’s name was Quinn; it was on the little nameplate on his jacket. “They’re listed in critical condition. I don’t think you should get the family’s hopes up too much. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”
Sikes watched the doctor walking away, then turned and headed slowly back to the others.
Cathy was watching at the window, her face close to the glass. Inside, the lab technician had finished taking a blood sample from Emily, he nodded to George, then left by a door on the other side.
Standing next to Cathy, Sikes could see Susan’s face. She sensed her husband’s presence as he stood beside the bed, gazing down at her. Her eyelids fluttered open. The single word her lips formed could not be heard through the glass. George signaled to her, with his finger to his lips, that she shouldn’t tire herself. With tender grace, he touched his fist to the corner of her brow. Her eyes closed, her face relaxing into sleep.
Sikes heard footsteps. Captain Grazer was coming down the corridor.
“How are they?” Grazer was unshaven, with no tie, his jacket rumpled.
He shook his head. “Not good.”
“The guard at the door said something about a lab being put together, what the hell’s that all about?”
Cathy spoke up. “That’s my project. I’m putting together a team to try and find an antitoxin. The hospital’s giving me the working space.”
Grazer’s attention had already zipped by her. He turned to Sikes. “We got a report on the flowers. The handwriting on the note was Parris’s. He must’ve sent them on their way to the Franciscos before he was killed.”
“Wait a minute,” said Cathy. “What about the bacteria?”
“Good question.” Grazer shook his head. “Right now we have to assume whoever killed Parris has it.”
“Great.” Sikes looked over his shoulder, at George standing closer to his wife and child. “That’s a real happy thought, all right.”
Rawling came back to the car parked at the far edge of the hospital lot, and slid in on the passenger side. “Yeah, they’re in there.” He handed Guerin one of the cardboard cups of coffee, from the convenience store on the next block over. Guerin had sent him there to use the pay phone, rather than have him go into the hospital and nose around. That would have been too risky, with all the police around. A description of the bogus delivery man might already have been posted. “The cop’s wife and his little girl—ambulance brought ’em in a coupla hours ago.” He peeled the plastic lid off and took a sip of the steaming liquid.
“That’s good,” said Guerin. The coffee had been sitting on the burner too long; it tasted like kerosene. “That worked out real well.” Most of the visitors’ lot was empty. He could see right across the spaces to the brightly lit emergency entrance. “I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah, well, I still don’t see what was the point.” Rawling still had a bit of the sulks. “I mean, if they’re all going to be dead in a few weeks, why go out of our way to dick around with this one?”
“Diversion; distraction. If you knew more about military strategy, you’d understand. It can be very useful to keep your enemy occupied on one front while you proceed on another.”
Rawling kept silent; he knew when he was outgunned.
It had gone well. Guerin sipped the rank coffee and reflected on the operation. The notion of continuing Parris’s campaign of retribution had been his own inspiration. He had ostensibly left Parris on good terms, promising him that Bryant and the other Purists would be amenable to his monetary demands. And also promising to take care of the Newcomer detective who had so incurred his wrath; that was why Parris had gone ahead and given Guerin the bacteria culture, to go prepare the basket of flowers to be delivered to the Francisco home. Parris had been so intent on settling his obsessive scores that he hadn’t thought twice about writing out the card to be tucked in with the tainted blooms. There was a lesson there, about not letting one’s anger muddle one’s cold, careful thought processes . . .
“Beats me why you wanted to drag our butts out here, anyway.” Rawling had alrea
dy gulped down half his coffee. “If all I wound up doing was using the friggin’ telephone—hell, I could’ve done that from back at headquarters.”
Guerin knew that his own thoughts were quite free from anger. They moved along with precise calculation.
“Actually,” he said, “there’s something else I need you to do for me. This was just a stop along the way.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“All in good time . . .”
He had already come to his decision about Rawling. All that remained was to implement it.
There was a stretch of road, out by the abandoned freeway construction, that Guerin had already found useful, more than once. A steep embankment rolled down to a deep culvert, screened from view by a tangle of broken cement and twisted rebar. In a place like that, where everybody passed by but nobody stopped, inconvenient things could be lost. Lost for a long time, until they were hardly worth identifying.
Guerin pitched his coffee out the side window, then reached down and turned the key in the ignition. His jacket sagged with the weight of the metal tucked inside.
C H A P T E R 1 4
THE CLOTHES HE took from the native life-form fit adequately, the light woven fabric tight across Ahpossno’s shoulders. The shirt had some kind of embroidery on the front, which he had been able to recognize as crude representations of the desert’s thorn-bearing vegetation and the round globe of the moon in the sky. He had wondered if this was military insignia, perhaps for a night-ranging land strike force, then had decided it was merely decorative. There were small metal triangles on the points of the shirt’s exaggerated collar as well, of the same silvery stuff as on the toes of the boots he removed from the native. The boots were harder to get on, but he managed. His Chekkah uniform had been torn when the native had started struggling, a button from the sleeve ripped off and lost in the darkness beyond the roadside. He’d stowed the uniform back in the shuttle craft.
No great difficulty presented itself in the operation of the native’s vehicle. The device’s unsophisticated combustion-based engine had been left running, sending its clattering noise across the vacant landscape. The control mechanisms were relatively easy to figure out, a large directional wheel and simple pedals for acceleration and braking. Metal ground together angrily until he worked out the synchronization of the third pedal and the obvious gearbox.
The desert rolled past him. Ahpossno knew that the road led to a major population center; he could already see the telltale lights ahead, a dim glow on the horizon. A communication device set into the vehicle’s control panel emitted voices; he listened to them, absorbing the cadences of the native speech.
One other vehicle appeared, a much larger one, a container transport of some variety. Heading in the opposite direction, toward Ahpossno’s vehicle—the native operator visible behind the windshield caused a loud horn alarm to sound, and Ahpossno swerved away from the center of the road to avoid a collision. Another datum, the function of the line painted along the road’s length, was added to his rapidly growing store of information.
When he got past the outskirts of the city, he abandoned the vehicle. There would be more observers here, and his errors in the vehicle’s operation would alert them to his presence. It would be best to proceed on foot, to preserve—for now—the secrecy of his mission.
The buildings around him, as he walked down a narrow, poorly lit street, looked dilapidated and fallen into decay. Boards covered broken windows, the shards of glass glittering on the pavement below.
From the street’s gutter, he retrieved a crumpled wad of paper. Unfolding it, he saw the familiar letters and words of the Tenctonese language; they spelled out a command to ingest a specific beverage. A comely Tenctonese female, wearing virtually nothing, smiled and held up a bottle of brown glass. It was possibly a drug, similar to holy gas; the words made reference to the pleasure that ensued from its use. Ahpossno made a mental note to investigate the matter further, when his mission had been successfully concluded. Perhaps on this planet, additional technologies for the control of slaves had been devised.
Behind a large street-level window, other communication devices had been left operating. They were more sophisticated, with a visual as well as audible component. Ahpossno leaned close to the metal grille protecting the window, listening to the words that spilled out along with the images.
Another female, not a Tenctonese, but one of the planet’s natives, smiled and held up something that resembled a ritual funeral urn. He repeated the words she spoke. “Capodimonte vase.” The words came easily; part of his training for the mission had been in the rapid assimilation of languages. “A real bargain. Call now.” Bit by bit, the pieces would link up, and the meaning behind them.
Another communication device in the window, a smaller one, showed no color in its image. Ahpossno strained to pick out its voices through the glass. A native male, hands raised in the air, faced a female with something in her hand that looked like a weapon. Oddly, the male did not seem apprehensive.
“You really think you’re going to get away with this?” He repeated the male’s words; a rising inflection at the end seemed to indicate an interrogative mode.
There was no time to watch for confirmation of that hypothesis. A sudden beeping, so faint that it was at the edge of his sensory detection, sounded in the street’s quiet. He looked down at the ring on his right hand; a tiny diode set into the metal blinked red.
He turned away from the window, holding the ring out before him. The sound grew louder until his upraised hand pointed toward a darkened alley branching off the street.
A Tenctonese male, dressed in greasy rags, pushed a metal cart filled with what looked like rubble, crumpled aluminum cylinders with bright-colored lettering, and tattered plastic bags.
Ahpossno silenced the ring with a stroke of his finger. The individual hadn’t spotted him. The other’s senses were obviously muddled by intoxication, bleary eyes in a slack-jawed face, his gait stumbling and inept, as though the metal cart served as much to hold him upright as to carry his meager possessions. As Ahpossno watched, the individual tilted his head back, draining the contents of a pasteboard carton; a thick white fluid dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He tossed the empty carton away, then shuffled on.
The individual turned in to the darkness of the alley, pushing the cart before him. He wasn’t aware of Ahpossno’s approach from behind, knew nothing of the other’s presence until he had been pulled away from the cart and slammed against the damp brick wall.
“Whuh . . .” The individual’s head lolled, eyes dazed. “Jesus Crise . . .”
Ahpossno paid no attention to the mumblings. He left the individual slumped against the wall while he searched through the cart. He threw the yellowing papers and empty cans to either side.
At the bottom of the cart, he found what he knew would be there. Hidden in a cardboard box stuffed with rags—Ahpossno drew out a black steel cube, its weight filling his hand. A reddish orange light pulsed from the single aperture in its side, beneath the familiar Tenctonese lettering.
“Hey!” Alarm focused the other’s eyes. “Gimme that!” He lunged toward the cube, rag-swaddled arms straining past Ahpossno’s shoulder, blackened fingers clawing futilely.
He didn’t need to understand the individual’s word. With a sweep of one arm, Ahpossno racked him back against the alley wall. Holding the individual pinned by the throat, with his other hand he tore back one dirty sleeve, revealing the blue Overseer tattoo on the wrist.
“Kleezantsun . . .”
“I didn’t do anything wrong!” The individual cringed before him. “I never hurt anybody!”
More native words. Ahpossno rocked the other’s head to one side with a backhand slap. [“You carry the ship’s beacon—and you live in filth such as this?”] He gestured at the rags, shiny with grease and dirt.
Confusion muddled the fear in the other’s eyes. The individual watched as Ahpossno held up his right arm. His left hand rolled ba
ck the sleeve of the stolen shirt, then peeled back a flap of artificial skin. From beneath the disguise, the red and blue Chekkah tattoo leapt firelike into the dark.
There was no more fear or confusion; only awe. “Your Excellency . . .”
Ahpossno made a first attempt with the words he had absorbed from the native communication devices. “Where are the other Overseers?”
This one shook his head. “I don’t know . . .”
He needed Tenctonese to fully express his anger and contempt. [“Why aren’t you organized?”]
The other stared back at him through an addled fog.
Ahpossno restrained himself from the pleasure of killing one who had failed so miserably in his duties. [“I’ve come to arrange the recovery of our slaves.”]
“The slaves . . . You want the slaves?” The other broke into drunken laughter. “You’re too late! They’ll all be dead!” He found the Tenctonese words. [“All of us . . . We’ll all be dead . . .”]
The greasy rags wadded into Ahpossno’s fists, but the individual wriggled out of his grasp. From the pile of rubbish still left in the cart, the individual pulled out one of the cheaply printed sheafs of paper, this one not yellowed like the others.
“Look . . .” And then in Tenctonese: [“Look!”] He waved the paper before him.
Ahpossno grabbed the paper and examined it. The printed words meant nothing to him yet, but there were pictures. A small picture, obviously posed, of a Tenctonese male, dressed in the clothing of this planet. And then a larger picture of what could be just discerned as two Tenctonese females, a woman and an adolescent, in narrow beds surrounded by various pieces of equipment. A native and a Tenctonese, in white outfits, attended to the two unconscious figures.
[“What is this?”] Ahpossno pointed to the larger photo. [“What does it mean?”]
“They’re sick—they’ve been infected.” The other translated a few of the words into Tenctonese. “The humans have a bacteria—they’re going to kill us all with it.”
