Dragon slides forward on his belly and the civilians fall back in a wave as though even being close to him will hurt them. He looks at them with his mobile eyes and gapes, showing them his teeth. Really, they are not very good teeth, not strong like mine, but they are very sharp.
My channel: Hold.
Dragon is poised over the cow and he hisses in frustration, demanding his share.
I can smell, though: there is a sharp scent to the cow flesh, and my database identifies it in a few seconds: a 4-hydroxycoumarin derivative.
My channel: This is a bad cow. It will make us sick.
Honey’s channel: Hrrm. Just a burst of static, but deliberate, to let us know she is thinking.
Dragon’s channel: Hrrm. The same.
Dragon and Honey know something I don’t. Probably Bees knows it as well. I am leader, though. I make the decisions.
I tell the humans, “This is a bad cow. Bring us a good cow.” Bad, good, those complicated words again. Does the cow care, after it is killed, whether it is bad or good to eat? Do they tell it, Good cow, before they end its life?
Honey repeats my words in Spanish.
There is a lot of talking amongst the humans, and some shouting. There is still crying from behind walls. There are still guns in their hands. They still stink of fear. I am still growling. Too many stimuli; too much circumstantial evidence of enemy presence.
Then more cow comes. This is good cow, dragged up by the same humans. They step back from it, their eyes on me.
They are afraid. They are bringing me good cow because they are afraid.
My channel: It is good that they are afraid…? I do not mean it to be a question, but at the moment everything I think comes out like that. I am feeling uncertain about everything.
Honey’s channel: It would be better if they would help us without being afraid.
Dragon’s channel: Never going to happen. He lunges forwards and tears into the cow, twisting and sawing to free a chunk of it.
Honey’s channel: Rex, I am connected to their satellite link and receiving data. The link has a very low bandwidth and I have access only to unprotected global data sources. I will require a large amount of time to accomplish what I need to.
Bees’ channel: Can you assist me?
Honey’s channel: Unknown. I am looking.
My channel: Assist with what?
Bees’ channel: Integrity at 89% (dead bird). That is what she means.
Dragon’s channel: Bees has a problem. We all have a problem. We are not meant to be here.
He does not mean in the village. He means in the world.
I tell them, Master will find us. Then everything will be well. I am hoping my feedback chip will reward me for trying to believe this, but it is as out of its element as I am.
Dragon hisses, alarming the humans. On his channel he says: Why all this? We should kill. We should eat. We should be free. Nothing good can come of being near live humans.
Honey doesn’t agree. Honey has hope for something she cannot put into words. Honey has sat down to concentrate on downloads and uploads over the pitiful satellite connection the humans have. I think that we could kill the humans and use their technology without interrupting. I think that we could hide nearby and link to their connection without being seen. I think that being here in their village is by far the most dangerous way that we could accomplish our self-set mission objectives, and I tell Honey this.
Honey’s channel: Rex, our mission objectives go beyond simply finding a connection. But she will not explain them to me. Again, I have to trust her. Again, I trust her.
I look at all the humans with their guns and their fear. “Return to your homes,” I instruct them. “There is no more to see here. Go about your business.” Then I get the words from Honey over her channel and repeat them, syllable for syllable, in my angry, growling voice. Every word I speak makes them more scared.
15
De Sejos
“I can’t believe you tried to poison them!” de Sejos hissed.
Blanco spread his hands. “And if they’d eaten the damned meat we’d be rid of them, and you’d be saying what a good idea it was.”
“No, no I wouldn’t. What do you even know about their biochemistry? I’m a doctor, Jose, and I don’t even know if they have a biochemistry! They could be all machine in there where it counts.”
They were in the church, tucked away in the vestry, trying very hard to be angry at each other without letting the monsters hear them. And probably they still could. Probably that dog-thing that was their leader could simply cock its cybernetic ears and hear every whispered conversation in Retorna.
“Thea, I think you’ve studied these creatures…?” Father Estevan offered, hands up for a little peace on holy ground. “Studied is too strong a phrase,” she told him. “When we heard they were using the dog packs, I found out what I could. I figured we’d be meeting them sooner or later. But this is cutting edge technology, and it’s proprietary – there are maybe three or four weapons labs that are turning these monsters out, and they don’t exactly publish their research in the reputable journals. But yes, I learned something.” “Because, well, ‘dog packs’, and obviously we have a handsome fellow out there that has more than a little hound in him,” Estevan said, “but the others…”
“The dogs were the first,” de Sejos confirmed. “They’ve been using engineered dog soldiers for almost a decade now.
Most of the pictures I saw weren’t as humanoid or as big as this one, but dogs come pre-wired, almost, to work with people. The way I read it, dogs ev— dogs see the world more like people than like wolves…”
“You can use the ‘e’-world, Thea,” Estevan said mildly.
“Mother Church has gone back and forth on the issue, I know, but I try to keep an open mind.”
Blanco snorted, but Thea nodded gratefully. “Anyway, once the dogs had been used as security and as soldiers, the labs started looking at other possibilities. This must be the first time some of these – what, breeds? Models? – have been used. They’ll each have a purpose, I’d guess.”
“I…” Estevan grimaced. “This probably won’t help things, but I think there may be more here than just those three.” At their wide-eyed looks, he explained, “We seem to have something of an infestation of bees. A lot of people have remarked on it. Only they don’t move like bees, and when someone brought me one in a bottle, it didn’t look like any indigenous species.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry, I always had something of an interest.”
“What did you do,” de Sejos asked him, “with the bee they brought you?”
“Oh, I let it go,” Estevan assured her hurriedly. “But, well, we suddenly have a lot of foreign bees, and I was wondering if they could…?”
“I don’t know,” de Sejos admitted. “I don’t think I read anything about bees.”
“My name is Legion…” the priest mused.
“If only you could just… drive them out,” Blanco said.
There was an edge of desperation in his voice. “What are we going to do? They’ll kill everyone here.”
“We don’t know what they want,” de Sejos countered.
At his exasperated look, she added, “I know, I know it’s not likely to be anything good. But right now all they’ve asked us for was food, and we have cattle. We have a great many head of cattle around here, enough to keep their bellies full for a long time. And they want our satellite link for some reason. So maybe they’re… lost?” She heard her own lack of conviction. “But the thing is, they haven’t just gone mad and slaughtered everyone.”
“Yet,” Blanco put in darkly.
“Yet,” she agreed. “So I think what it comes down to is not what they want, it’s what their masters want. I think they’re waiting for orders.”
“What orders?” he demanded.
She shrugged. “Well, we could ask them.”
>
Father Estevan had volunteered, but in the end it was de Sejos who steppe
d out into the evening light and crossed the bare ground to the three monstrous forms. The lizard creature had been down the well to guzzle their water, and now was lying apparently asleep. The bear sat, staring up at the clear sky. The dog had been lying down, but as she approached he abruptly rolled over and came up on all fours, staring at her.
Thea had always lived in houses with dogs. Her parents had never owned less than three at a time, and big dogs too, ex-racing greyhounds and Alsatians. She had always found some people’s skittishness about the animals an object of amusement. Now she felt it in her bones. The low growl of the animal went right through her at the precise pitch to turn her insides to water. She kept her eyes low, away from its stare, its slightly parted lips and the sharp teeth beyond.
“I wondered if I could talk to you,” she got out past the hammering in her chest.
She saw it shift forwards. Her downward gaze gave her an ideal opportunity to admire its front paws – no, its hands. They had claws on them that seemed more cat than dog: no imagination required to envisage them ripping into her. The smell of it was urine and sweat and blood.
“What do you want?”
She was in its shadow, virtually standing between its paws. Its carrion breath washed over her with each exhalation, but not with its words. The voice came from its throat without being shaped by lips, the Spanish oddly inflected: just another foreign tourist reading from a phrase book. With that understanding came the revelation that someone had given it that voice, to make it even more fearsome than it already was. No matter what the dog wanted to say, it would say it as a rumbling threat.
“I was curious.” She wondered what its vocabulary actually was, and how much it could understand. Was there a mind in there, like a human’s? All she’d read seemed to indicate that the Bioform soldiers had organic brains, not just computers inside them. “I wanted to ask questions.”
It leant closer, the blunt muzzle nudging her shoulder slightly. She had a moment of insanity where she was going to reach up to it, like she had to a soppy old bloodhound her parents had once owned, that liked its jowls scratching. Only Caesar wouldn’t take my hand off for doing it.
“What questions?”it growled, the sound vibrating through her, freezing her up and making it hard for her to breath.
“You…” Her voice was shaking despite herself.
“Who are you?”
“I… Please…”
“Please what?” the dog demanded.
“Please stand back from me. You’re frightening me,” she got out, though the words became a squeak at the end. When it didn’t immediately descend on her with tooth and claw, she added, “I’m sorry. It’s how they made you, I suppose.”
The dog was still and silent for what seemed like a long time, so that at last she risked looking up, and met its gaze. Its eyes were the most canine thing about it, just like the dogs she had known. Did it have some idea of the life it might have enjoyed, if not for the laboratory? Would it fetch sticks, if it had the choice? Go for walks and lie by the fire?
She could read a lot in there, but she knew she was inventing it. The creature before her was made in a weapons lab, more loyal than a robot and cheaper than a man.
But it shuffled back a few steps nonetheless.
“My name is Doctor Thea de Sejos,” she told it. “Do you know what a doctor is?”
“Yes.” It shuffled back and forth, and instead of the growl she heard a thin whine cut the air, so delicate a sound she could hardly believe it came from the massive beast in front of her. “I am Rex. I lead.”
Her breathing and her heartbeat were beginning to return to tolerable levels. “Hello Rex. Are you able to answer my questions?”
Again that whining, a sound that was all dog, all unhappy. Then it was turning away from her, shaking its heavy-jawed head. “Talk to Honey,” it told her. “Honey knows things.”
She stepped very carefully past Rex, feeling his mutely suffering eyes on her, and craned her neck to look at the bear.
“Excuse me,” she asked, “I assume you’re Honey.”
That massive, shaggy head peered down at her almost myopically. When it spoke – again a facility that owed nothing to any movements of lip or jaw – its voice was pleasant and female still, but of a modest volume. The discrepancy between what was seen and what was heard left de Sejos disoriented. She almost felt that if she looked down the bear’s cavernous throat she would see some well-dressed woman down in its belly, smiling her television-white smile.
De Sejos gathered her courage. “Can you tell me about Redmark?”
Neither tone nor body language offered any overt clues, and yet she still detected a wary edge when the bear said, “What do you want to know?” Its Spanish was far more natural than the dog’s. She could have closed her eyes and held her nose, and never imagined she was speaking to eight hundred kilos of bear.
“The logo is all over your kit,” de Sejos pointed out. “We know that you…” monsters, “that those like you have been brought to our country by contractors, Redmark and others. We know you are…” owned, “that you work only for them. Is it possible I could speak to your controller through you, to see…” The bear shifted slightly and de Sejos’s words died in her throat. After a long moment she finished, “to see what we could do for them.”
“No,” Honey said. Behind de Sejos, Rex whined again.
De Sejos stiffened, because the serpent monster had lifted its head, its eyes pivoting independently as it scanned its surroundings. One of them fixed on her and its thin, blue tongue lashed out. She took a deep breath.
“We are not involved in the war,” she said, speaking clearly in the hope that some human operator was using the creature’s ears. “We do not support the Anarchistas. Most of the people here, this is their home: they have nowhere else. I am a doctor, I was sent here by the government before the war. Redmark and the others, they’re working to support the government, right?”
The bear flowed up onto its hind legs – colossal, sun-eating – then dropped lazily down to all fours with a whuff! “No,” it said again, in that so-very-reasonable voice they’d given it.
“No, they’re not or…?” The dog was at her back, the serpent to one side and the bear was a mountain of hair and harness, claws and gun in front of her. Around them all, the air was busy with Estevan’s alien bees.
“No Redmark here,” the bear informed her.
“So you’re trying to get into contact, or…?” It had seemed like a perfectly logical deduction, but the bear growled, deep in its throat – its real throat, that had no part in that urbane, sophisticated voice.
“There is no contact with Redmark,” it stated, a little louder than its previous utterances. “I am monitoring all comms. There will be no contact with Redmark.”
Revelation clicked into place in de Sejos’s head: not a pleasant moment. A second before she had been surrounded by monsters, but at least they had notional leashes; at least there was a human face somewhere behind them that she might have negotiated with. Now the beasts were all around her, and it was worse than she had ever thought. They were wild. They might do anything.
And then the bear shook its head and scratched at its jaw. “Rex knows the smell of your hospital,”it remarked, as though apropos of nothing. “Rex recognises those injuries from other human habitations we have had contact with, when we were following orders. You have patients with strange burns and sicknesses, do you not, Doctor Thea de Sejos?”
De Sejos stared into the creature’s eyes, tiny in the vast breadth of its face. “Yes,” she admitted, “we do.”
The bear rumbled deep in its chest. “Then I do not think you want Redmark to come here either.”
16
Rex
I am woken by the sound of vehicles, many engines at least four miles away but closing. Moved by sudden hope I try to strain that part of me that Master’s words come in by. No use: it is not an arm or an ear, that I can push with it or focus on it. It is there or it is
not.
There are no words from Master. I can detect nothing on any of the short-range Redmark frequencies.
My ears twitch and triangulate. At least six vehicles, some larger, some smaller. My database suggests they are mostly civilian, with perhaps one armoured vehicle amongst them, from the sound. They are not anything that Redmark might use. They are not friends, therefore.
I wake the others.
Dragon is slow to wake: it is still night and he grumblingly sends me readouts from his hybrid metabolism monitor, highlighting core body temperature and cross-referencing that to the peak efficiency guidance in his database. I tell him to shut up and to shift to high-activity mode so he can generate his own heat.
Dragon’s channel: I will be very hungry. And: But I suppose we have lots of cows.
Honey is sitting up, shaking herself and yawning. She asks me for orders, and I send over a sound-capture of what I have heard.
By now, Honey can just hear the engines herself. She looks over my database references and scratches herself. Problematic, she decides.
I ask: You don’t know who they are?
Honey’s channel: The most recent information I have obtained from the satellite link suggests there are a number of possibilities. It may be actual Anarchistas, but currently they are said to be operating east of here. However, the confusion of the war has led to a number of bands of gunmen at large in the country. Some were armed by the Anarchistas, others by pro-government forces or criminal cartels. While the fighting is ongoing, there is no ready curb to their activities so long as they avoid the major combatants.
Honey uses a lot of long words, but they come with database tags so I always understand what she means.
Dragon’s channel: Nothing we need to deal with then.
Honey hrrms thoughtfully. Orders, Rex?
Retreat and prepare to unleash necessary force if pursued, I decide. These are good orders. I am being a good leader. Bees, wake up. High-activity mode.
Dogs of War Page 8
