Cottonwood

by R. Lee Smith

  “Give him up, Dad, or I’ll shoot him right out of your arms.” Piotr aimed his own weapon coolly—a Flamespitter, with chemical-laced bullets that pierced the chitin and set fires in yang’ti blood. He bared his human teeth in a grin. “Give him up. My orders are to take you alive and I guess that means all of you, but only until you give me shit. Give him up.”

  T’aki’s fingers dug in around Sanford’s chest-plate. He could feel the pounding of the little heart against his shell, drumming harmony with his own. “Father, no! Father, please! Make them let me stay with you! Make them!”

  “You got to the count of three and then I take him anyway and I pop his eyes out. One. Two.”

  Sanford clutched T’aki’s head under his hand, breathed once, despairingly, and held him out.

  “Good choice,” Piotr said, as Sanford watched his son be dangled upside-down, his feet bound together and tethered. Struggling, terrified, the boy’s muscles spasmed and vented a spray of fear-bright piss to run down into his own face. He started squalling, as much from shame as anything, and all the soldiers laughed. “All right, all right, take the little shit outside before it ruins the carpet. We’re guests in this house, boys.”

  All laughed again. Sarah shook.

  “Now you, Dad, and remember: If you fight, we kill the kid. We’ll bring him right back in here and stomp him flat in front of you.”

  “You bastard!” Sarah shouted, and was at once restrained by soldiers. She surged against their pull regardless, fighting forward as if there were anything at all she could do if she reached him. “Stomp on a three year-old? You sick son of a bitch!”

  Piotr slapped her without looking at her. When he saw Sanford flinch, his head cocked. He grinned, pulled Sarah up by the hair and punched her. This time, Sanford kept still. The human lost interest, dropped his victim and gave a nod to his men.

  Sanford was forced to his knees, his ankles bound to a hobbling-stick, and his wrists shackled behind him. He did not resist.

  “We’ve got a long ride ahead of us,” Piotr said, strolling over to pick up T’aki’s spaceship where the boy had dropped it. He opened the pilot’s pit, chuckled, and snapped it shut. “Want to say goodbye to your sister before we go?”

  The hope in Sarah’s eyes was awful to see—born crippled and quick to die. Blood ran down her cheeks like tears. “You…You’re lying.”

  “She’s in back, lying down. Boys, take our pretty Pollyanna back to see her sister.” And he laughed, but as Sarah was dragged into the hallway, his laughter stopped. He came to stand with Sanford, tossing the toy from hand to hand, studying him with a thoughtful expression. “You’re a long, long way from home, bug. And you’re a damned funny thing for her to bring to meet the family.”

  The cry that rose from the rear of the house lacked the surprise necessary to be a scream. It swelled and hung, a ghastly sound of grief and horror and awful knowing that had no words, not even the sister’s name. Then weeping, broken weeping.

  “Sir?” One of the soldiers came to the door. In one hand, he held Sanford’s Annihilator. In the other, the one thing it had all been for.

  “Well, shut my mouth.” Piotr took the gun and dropped the Fortesque Freeship. The wing broke off again. He kicked the toy indifferently away, turning the weapon over in his hands. “I think I’m getting the picture. Forget bricks, the old man is going to shit kittens. What did she promise you, bug? Better food? Clean water? Were the two of you going to start the revolution that meant freedom for all your bug friends? Huh? And what is this?” He took the code-bank, laughed, and handed both items back. “Make sure that’s everything and load it up. I need to call van Meyer. Somehow I don’t think we’re headed back to Cottonwood just yet.”

  He walked away, pausing to pat Sarah’s cheek as she was pulled into the room, and another soldier stepped up. He raised his weapon, brought it down hard on Sanford’s neck, and darkness took him. Darkness and the sound of tears.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It was a long drive and a quiet one. The soldiers talked some, laughed some, but even they seemed tired, their adrenaline spent, anxious now to be done with it. They left the rain in the north and drove through the night into the sunrise of a clear day. They stopped only once, to transfer from the van to a helicopter, and their journey continued out over the water. With the sun up, Sanford could see the ocean, Earth’s ocean, just as he remembered it. And he could see Sarah’s face, Sarah’s eyes, staring hollowly into nothing.

  From the pilot’s pit, Piotr watched them in smirking silence. At length, he rose and came into the hold. He sat on the bench beside Sanford, close enough to press his thigh to Sanford’s thigh, his arm to Sanford’s arm, but it was Sarah he was grinning at, Sarah he wanted to see.

  “They say the best a man can ever get is tight virgin pussy,” he said, as Sarah watched the tide swell and break below her. “But they never had a good gut-stab. Hot, squirming, bucking, writhing…and the sounds they make! Like rabbits in a snare.”

  Sarah ignored him, lost in her thoughts.

  “Your sister lived four hours after the first cut. I had her five times.” He raised a hand, fingers splayed, waited, and then reached across and grabbed Sarah’s chin. He forced her to look at him, and grinned again. “I’m hoping you and I can break those records.”

  “My sister wasn’t with you at the end,” Sarah said. Her voice was steady, calm, like her eyes. “She was with me. I won’t be with you either.”

  Piotr laughed, contemptuous but puzzled. He let her go. “Van Meyer has a few questions for you, little girl. He may even let me ask them. When he’s heard what you have to say, you’re mine and we finally get to have our date. Now you might not think that’s much incentive, but then, you just remember your little bug friends here. The harder you make it for us, the harder we can make it for them.”

  Sarah’s eyes met Sanford’s in a touch he could almost feel, as if his whole body were like hers, receptive and alive. In that shared silence, he told her there was no one life, no two, equal to all those that would be devastated by the secrets she held. ‘No matter what they do,’ he thought, and he saw that she understood.

  “Let’s practice, shall we?” Piotr pulled out a small gun and pushed it tight against Sanford’s head. He thumbed the hammer-switch back, held up the code-bank. “What is this? Where did you get it? How did you get it out of the lab without anyone seeing you?”

  Sarah said nothing.

  “I’m going to blow his brains out, beautiful. Then I’m going to bring the little one up and sit him in those brains and ask you again.”

  Sarah’s eyes made water. She said nothing.

  Piotr shook his head and looked at him as though he were a friend, still with the gun to his head. “See how much she cares, bug?”

  “Yes,” said Sanford softly.

  Piotr holstered his weapon. “You think about it, little girl. You think hard. Because you want to die with my cock in your guts, believe me. That way is just a few hours. Other ways I know take weeks.” He leaned out to look through the pilot’s window as the vehicle began to descend, then grinned again. “Almost home now. You thinking yet, Pollyanna?”

  “I’m thinking,” she said. “I’m afraid my answer is still fuck you. That’s not very original,” she added, her weariness adding a note of sincerity to the apology. “But it’s all you deserve and, frankly, probably all you’d understand because you have shit for brains.”

  One of the soldiers up front turned around and looked at them, whispered, smothered a laugh.

  Piotr gazed at her, nodding a little, not quite smiling. “You’re damned lucky I have the orders I do,” he said. “But you remember those words, beautiful, because I am going to make you eat them.” He got up, moving back into the pilot’s pit, and left them alone.

  Sanford looked at her, his Sarah, and watched her make her silent tears. There were things he wanted to tell her—that it wasn’t her fault, that he regretted none of it, that she was in him as deep as T�
�aki and his own father and that would never change—but these were not things to share with the soldiers of IBI. He said none of them and only hoped she heard them anyway.

  The floating city was below them now—perhaps the same one where Sanford had been taken on his first day a prisoner, perhaps not. He could see humans on the deck, waving them into position as the helicopter came down. When he looked up, through the blur of the spinning propellers that were this vehicle’s crude means of flight, he could see part of the ship. The hatchway was still open, but it seemed to be intact. He wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or not, to know that they had come this close and it might have all worked out. Maybe it would have been best if he’d seen the hull torn open and scaffolding built up around the areas the humans had dismantled—if there had been no hope after all, in other words—because, damn him, it still did not feel over.

  The helicopter bumped onto the deck. The propellers whined themselves to a stop. The pilots unfastened their harnesses and the soldiers readied their weapons. Sarah wiped her face on her shoulders and straightened her back. He clicked at her softly. She made herself smile at him.

  The side door opened. The briny-rot stink of the sea struck him, just as he remembered it. Piotr showed his gun and waved them out. They went, docile as livestock in slaughter-pens, and stood before the man Sanford guessed to be their true leader.

  “Miss Fowler,” the leader said at last, and it was a voice Sanford knew: the dark voice from the telephone, the man to whom Sarah had made her apologies on the night of the feast, the man who had perhaps ordered her crippling. “Welcome to my headquarters. My home, I might say, although I do not spend so much time here as I would like. So much to do, nee? So much requiring me to oversee. But home is where the heart is, ja? Mine is here. I like to call it Camp Zero. You see?” He spread his arms, indicating the vastness of the floating city on every side of him, all of it lying in the shadow of the ship overhead. The dark man smiled. “There is nothing here.”

  The humans brought T’aki out on a tether, dragging him over the ground by his feet, and dropped him struggling and squalling into a kennel. They took it away, T’aki’s cries echoing and receding until he could not hear them anymore. His son.

  The dark man watched him the entire time. Not his men. Not Sarah. Not T’aki in his kennel, but only Sanford. When the deck was quiet once more, he turned his attention back to Sarah.

  “I don’t know whether to be disappointed in you, nee, or impressed. You have surprised me, Miss Fowler. Surprise. Not in thirty years or more does this happen.”

  Sarah did not respond.

  The dark man came forward to look at Sanford. His human eyes were clear and cold; his face, deeply creased and weathered, impervious to the age that sat on it.

  “Where are you thinking to take the bug, I wonder? Who are you thinking to play show and tell? To your sister, eh? To mailroom slut? I thought you smarter than that.” He glanced to see what effect his words had, but Sarah just stared into empty air, lightly shaking. The dark man returned his gaze to Sanford, pensive. “What is it you think he know? Why this bug, of all of them?”

  ‘Come a little closer,’ thought Sanford, and flexed his toes on the hard concrete floor. The hobbles on his legs prevented a lethal kick, but he could still bite. His barbed throat palps could catch and hold that leathery skin; one good yank would have the head clean away and the body dropping lifeless to the ground. ‘Lean in to mock me, dark man. I will kill you if I can kill no one else.’

  The dark man remained just beyond the threshold of his reach. “Little one is your child, nee?” he asked, boring that stare now into Sanford. “You know where we take him? To one-by-one meter box. Air through holes. Protein drink through tube, cold and bitter. Pipes under vents in bottom of box to take away waste. No light. No voice. No touch. He will be the first we so experiment upon. I really don’t know what it do to him.”

  Sanford spat chaw. One of the soldiers slammed a gun into his back. Another picked him up again, black chaw dripping down his chest-plate.

  “You wish him to come to your cell instead?” the dark man continued. He held out his hand, was given the code-bank, and held it up. “Tell me what this is. Tell me what it does, and I give to you your son once a week, three hours, for the rest of your life. Ah, but show me what it does, show me, bug, and he lives with you in that cell forever. Never take away again.”

  Sanford said nothing, did nothing, thought only, ‘Come a little closer, human.’

  “Nee? Perhaps you.” The dark man moved on to Sarah, not hesitating to stand close to her. He ran his fingers along her cheeks, tenderly cleaning them of helpless tears. “From the beginning, I see that you care too much. Ah well. In the village where I am born, was born also an idiot-boy. Sweet as sunrise, kind to all. He keep scorpions and beetles for pets. He loves everything, nee? When we wish to hurt him, we have only to kill his beetles, his scorpions. We crush them, and oh, how he cry.” He glanced back at Sanford, his gaze incurious, wanting only for Sarah to see him looking. “Will you cry, Miss Fowler, when you think of little bug in his box calling out for Father, Father? Will you cry when you think of this bug in his cell, never to see his son? What will you do to give them three hours together every week, eh?”

  He raised the code-bank. Sarah looked at it, trembling.

  “You steal this from me,” the dark man said quietly. “But I will forgive you if you only tell me how. You may think I cannot forgive, but I can. Even you, dear child. What does it do? How many guns did you take and give to bug in Cottonwood? Tell me. You will never be free again, but your life can still be easy…or very, very hard.”

  She did not answer.

  The dark man stepped back and nodded. Piotr came in at once and drove the butt of his gun playfully into her belly. Sarah doubled over, coughing.

  The two humans exchanged sudden startled glances.

  The dark man caught Sarah by her shoulder and pushed her upright. He took her shirt and pulled it roughly up, out of the waist of her pants.

  The two men stared together at her smooth and unmarked stomach.

  “Miss Fowler,” the leader said after a long moment. “You surprise me again.”

  “What the fuck!”

  “Ja, ja.” The dark man glanced at the code-bank, turning it over in his hands, introspective. “I think we go inside now. I feel we have much more to discuss.”

  Sanford saw no choice but to walk.

  Through the same doors where they had taken T’aki, into a narrow hall, then to a lift and down, below the decks and into the heart of the floating city. The corridors here were grey and sterile; the men who occupied them, much the same. It reminded him unpleasantly of the hospital place where they had kept Sarah, a place not of healing but of experimentation, only here, appearances did not deceive. They showed no surprise to see him, but all gave Sarah curious looks, as if they had never imagined a human presence in this place…but were intrigued by the possibilities.

  The dark man brought them to armored doors, which opened at a swipe from his plastic card. He beckoned them in behind him, into a vast room with bright lights—a technician’s bay of some sort, with metal-and-glass display cases occupying much of the center space. The rest of the room was used as a storehouse filled with crates, each one meticulously labeled, some with pictures fastened to better display the contents for which they had no real human word: yang’ti weapons, yang’ti computer consoles, yang’ti food dispensers and water recycler parts. Every piece stripped away from the cargo hold of the ship was here, or seemed to be, useless to humans but hoarded all the same. What they could not make work, they had packed away; what they could not bring themselves to pack, they had broken open for study at their primitive work stations.

  Sarah saw it before he did. His gaze still wandered over the broken yang’ti machinery, idly identifying this or that useless device and mentally fitting them together again, when she gasped. He looked and uttered a sharp skree of sheer surprise.
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br />   At the end of this room, behind a window, in another little cell all its own, was an escape pod. How they’d raised it, brought it here—how they’d fit it in that room, by Ko’vi!—all beyond his imagining. It stood there, its surface scored by unknown equipment, but still sound, almost seeming to look back at him. The dark eyes of its windows were clean and ready, unblinking. ‘Take me home,’ it seemed to say.

  The dark man set the code-bank on a technician’s table. It sat on its side, a black circle on a shiny metal surface, with the pod framed behind it. Were it not for the glass, the humans, the hobbles, Sanford could have put a hand on each of them at the same time.

  “I see you admire my collection,” the dark man said. “And this, my crown jewel. We find twelve so far. Some, we dismantle, try to fit together again. Some, we cut into, to study like the carcass of bug. This one, I keep whole. I like to look at it.”

  And he did, gazing reflexively into the glass, his hands clasped behind his back in stately imitation of Sanford and Sarah in their binders. “So far, we cannot copy design. But we are closer than we were, nee?” He smiled at Sanford, a cold and calculating smile. “Soon, your secrets will no more elude us, and we shall make our own. Just think of it. It withstands even the pressures at the ocean’s floor, yet is capable of flight in our atmosphere, perhaps even of flight through space. It is invulnerable to all bullets, to most missiles, to all temperature changes. This is my war machine and I am five years, they say, perhaps only three, from achieving it.”

  Now he looked at Sarah and found her already staring back at him in horror.

  “But, another day, nee?” The dark man gave the code-bank a pat and left it there, turning towards his captives with a smile. “I wanted you to see my treasures, while you think about your little one in his lonely box. There is much you could do to help me, bug. Many hours to hold your small son, good food and clean water to give him, even television, comfortable bed, books to read. This can be Hell…but it doesn’t have to be.”