I am bunched to leap, and the lead flitter is coming lower, and I wonder if they realise how high I can jump. I am snarling. I am hurting.
But I am a Good Dog. I have only ever wanted to be a Good Dog.
I let the harness go, and my Big Dogs slide off my shoulders and fall away, and then the pain surges inside me and there is blood, and I am very weak.
My ears are full of the engines of the flitters and my nose is clogged with the scent of gunfire. When I feel a hand on my, though, I snarl a little and twist my head so I can see. Doctor Thea de Sejos is kneeling by me. She is speaking words I cannot hear over the noise, but I do not have to. Two words, short words, but bigger than all the other words I know. Good Dog, she says, even though she is sad, Good Dog.
I am a Good Dog, but I hurt so much. I hurt and I had a choice and I do not know if I made the right one.
Newcomers are approaching: strange smells, no fear. It is hard to lift my head from the ground, but I twist it until I can see them. Their guns are levelled at me – they are shouting at the doctor to move away and she does.
The leader of the newcomers, the not-enemies, she is familiar to me. She was with Master and Hart. Her name is Ellene Asanto. She was a civilian but now she is a soldier. I do not understand, but I do not think I need to.
Words, more words, but I am fading and so is the pain.
19
(redacted)
There’s a play, a very good play, where someone complains to an actor that they die a thousand deaths without really knowing death, without feeling its intensity. They’ll just come back, as the playwright says, in a different hat.
There I am in the second act, though, wearing the digital footprint equivalent of a false moustache. Except it’s not me, though. Not the woman whom Murray murdered.
The end of the Campeche campaign was a clusterfuck on a variety of levels. I was just starting to flex my muscles right then, and it taught me I really did not have the levels of influence and control I had imagined. Like countless politicians, I found that once something is in the public domain then the public will grab it like a dog with a ball and run with it who knows where.
Things got out that people wanted hidden. Truths were misinterpreted and misunderstood. Lies got halfway around the world before anyone could even suppress the truth. Pretty much every piece of dirty laundry I and Redmark and every other interested party hadn’t wanted aired in public – all for our own different reasons – was abruptly flapping in the breeze. And all those conspiracy theorists had a field day, even the lizard-people brigade.
The global headlines, in the glorious tradition of lowest common denominator idiocy, can be summed up as “Killer Military Assets Kill People Shock!” except it wasn’t that. It wasn’t the same as if Redmark had used missiles or bombs or guns. It wasn’t even the use of the chem weapons that were already unequivocally banned by global agreement. Yes, there were prosecutions and inquests being handed out like cigars after a birth, but that wasn’t what the public were screaming about. Whether they were against God or taking our jobs or a threat to the children, people wanted something done about the Bioforms. All of the Bioforms, from Rex and the experimental combat models down to Grandma Scoggins’ home defence dog-unit that she only ever took out once a week to carry the shopping.
And that was a problem for me, because by then I’d rather decided that they were the future.
Part III
The Hand That Feeds
20
Aslan
“Hey, swap you my briefs?” David Kahner dropped down into the next seat, grinning from ear to ear.
“Now I’m taking it that’s not a serious offer.” Keram John Aslan made room for him at the booth, locking the screen of his tablet.
“Hell no. I’ve already been headhunted three times and we’re not even on day one of the case.” Kahner was immaculate: sculpted hair that gleamed almost blue-back, flawless olive skin, a single gold stud earring. He wore the latest model smartglasses, his suit cost more than Aslan wanted to think about, and he wore it roguishly open collar, as though any moment he would be called out to a fashion shoot.
“You’re not even going in front of the cameras,” Aslan pointed out.
“Doesn’t matter, man. Besides, the big cameras, no, but boss says maybe interviews later. Interviews, chat shows, endorsements. People are interested in this thing, KJ. The ICC’s never had this level of take-up since Nuremburg. And that’s your case as much as mine.”
“Hold on, endorsements?” Aslan couldn’t tell if he was being serious. “You mean, like, ‘The International Criminal Court always drinks Pepsi Cola’?”
Kahner fished a dronecam out of his pocket and sent it up with a blink at his smart glasses, beaming up into its little camera with perfect pearly teeth. “Am I not telegenic, KJ? Am I not right on the brink of becoming the world’s media darling?”
“No,” Aslan told him sourly. “Nobody knows who you are and the press is full of pictures of that old goat Arnac, because he’s lead prosecutor.”
“Arnac said he’d cut me in on it, get me a few photocalls.” Kahner examined flawless nails.
“Arnac says a lot of things.”
“You’re just sore you’re not on the team.” Feeling a personal lack of diplomacy, Kahner spread his hands. “Which was a bad call, by the way. You paid your dues on the Caliphates prosecution.”
“I am still paying my dues over that.”
“Oy, still?”
Aslan nodded grimly. “Last week the cameras caught some guy by my car, and the whole car park was no-go for six hours. You don’t remember that?”
“I remember the fuss. I didn’t know that was you.” Kahner shook his head. “Still, shows you did good. They should have called you in for the Campeche team.”
“David, they had me front and centre on the Caliphates because they thought a good Muslim boy would catch less flak, which says a lot about how badly our employers understand… everything, probably. Which is kind of worrying.”
Kahner was obviously about to come out with some assurance about how it had all been his legal smarts and not his prayer habits, but Aslan waved it away. “You’ve got the spotlight now, David. You milk it for all it’s worth.”
Two espressos turned up then, and the pair of them stayed quiet until the waiter had gone. The bar wasn’t somewhere they’d be discussing anything confidential, but there was always the risk of an inadvertent slip that might end up in the press and kill off a promising legal career.
“The small fry seem to have gone well, anyway, all the ‘only-obeying-orders’ crowd. Thanks, I might say, to my immaculate case prep. Arnac can make a good speech, but he wouldn’t know what year it was if I didn’t email it to him daily,” Kahner drawled.
“So Murray’s next?”
Kahner grinned. “The old Master of Hounds himself, slippery bastard that he is.”
“It’s not going further?”
“Redmark’s board have had a fairly savage round of resignations,” Kahner noted, “and I know a bunch of corporations have had directors up before the House back in the States. But the trail runs cold, KJ. If there’s evidence to link the chem attacks to somebody on the board, it’s buried deeper than we’ve been able to dig. So, we’ve got Murray, who was basically right there on the ground making the decisions, using Redmark assets to run his own private war. The way they tell it, he was a twenty-first century Kurtz from that, what was it…?”
They chimed in together, Kahner with the film, Aslan with the book.
Kahner grinned again, but this time Aslan saw the nerves there. “We need Murray, KJ. It’s not even a matter of justice – although, God knows justice would be a fine thing to have a little of. We say Murray gave the orders to chemo-bomb wherever he thought the Anarchistas were getting their support from – and he had a pretty low threshold of proof, believe me. Murray’s orders set the dogs on people. Murray wiped out whole villages to cover his tracks, at the end. At the end, to hear the
m say it, he was nobody’s man but his own.”
“You’re going to play the dog pack angle, are you?” Aslan asked morosely.
“For all it’s worth.”
“You’re making my life more difficult, you know that?”
“Then you’re on the wrong side,” Kahner pointed out.
“Am I?”
“You know they only gave you the case because of your name, right?” and the grin was restored to its mocking perfection.
“Hilarious.” Aslan scowled. “They actually have some ‘Aslans’, you know? It’s what they called one of the experimental cat models, under the Multiform initiative. Never saw action, though. Unreliable. Even chipped to the eyeballs you can’t get cats to do what you want them to. Cats, I’ve got; got a few bear models, some freakish-looking lizards, some hive-mind critter things you don’t even want to think about. There’s a naval base on Malta that has some dolphinforms in the pen, even. But it’s mostly the dogs.”
“Murray’s dogs.”
“Murray had more than dogs,” Aslan reminded him. “And there are more dogs than just Murray’s. Seventeen hundred canine Bioforms in military service around the world so far, all locked in their barracks, and another thirteen hundred or so impounded out of private hands, pending judicial decision.”
“And you get to write up the defence. Who did you piss off to get that mess handed to you?”
“I asked for it. I asked to be on the team.” Aslan stared angrily at his coffee.
“What the hell, man?” Kahner was genuinely surprised. “You’re that desperate to kill your career, just sleep with Arnac’s wife or something.”
“They want to declare the Bioforms weapons,” Aslan stated. “They want to decommission them, just like they were nukes or guns.”
“They are weapons.”
“Never mind.” Aslan massaged his forehead. “You just go get Murray, leave my job to me.”
“You want to see the facilities first, sir, or just your… client?”
Aslan didn’t miss the calculated pause there: the staff here obviously didn’t think much of his brief.
The cells themselves were sunk into the ground, a subterranean complex open at the top, so that the dogs could run around their tiny yard with a little square of sky above. Around the buried cells there was a wall, and the wall was topped with wire. All the guards were armed, and although wardens with guns wasn’t a novel experience, these rifles could hold their own against last century’s big game hunters for bore.
Beside the cells, beyond the wall, there were the offices where the international bureaucracy that made this place possible was perpetrated. Aslan had driven out there in his little electric car and parked it up alongside the various makes and models driven by the guards and administrators. On the way over his mind had been full of righteous rhetoric. Now, with the sounds from the pit a constant backdrop, he felt decidedly less sure of himself.
They were dog-sounds, mostly: a very large number of big and angry dogs, except mixed into the animal snarling and barking were recognisable words: pleas, expletives, insults, threats.
It was his first taste of the reality behind the ideal he had offered to defend. It frightened him a great deal.
“Let me see the…” The what? “Let me see him.”
They led him inside, into the soundproofed normality of office space, cubicles and kitchenettes, terminals and copiers and water coolers. Busy clerks filed their reports and entered data and nobody looked up at the slender young lawyer from the ICC.
His guide held a door open for him, and Aslan stepped through and came face to face with the dog.
He swore and jumped back, and heard the laughter, knowing he was being hazed. His eyes never left the face of the creature in the room.
The place was set up like a prisoner’s visiting room, and he couldn’t work out whether that was someone’s poor-taste joke, or simply a lack of imagination. There was a transparent plastic screen between them, thick enough that looking through it was like looking through water. Even then, Aslan didn’t think it would be enough if the thing ran amok.
It was sitting like a man, but its vast, muscular frame practically filled that half of the room, hunched over with its head thrust forwards. It had cuffs on that looked like they were designed for King Kong, for which he was powerfully grateful. Its jaws were immense, upper and lower canines projecting slightly past its thick lips. One of its ears was mostly gone, just ragged scar tissue left. Its stare…
Its stare, like the way it sat, was human. For all the eyes were dog, round and brown, Aslan met its gaze and found something man-like looking out at him, trapped in that vast prison of engineered flesh.
“Sir, you don’t look them in the eye. That’s a challenge,” the man at his elbow was saying, but Aslan couldn’t look away. Carefully, he stepped into the room and lowered himself into the chair, bringing his tablet out. He made his every movement slow and telegraphed at first, worried that the creature opposite was a coiled spring that would go off at the first sudden move. He’d seen this one’s records, after all – those that had survived the mysterious data purges at Redmark’s end, anyway. There were a lot of dangerous dogs in the cage over here, but this one was something special.
“So, hello there,” he tried, though the force of that leaden stare was starting to wilt him. “You’re Rufus, is that right?” He was speaking as though the creature was a child. Or a dog, perhaps. He was speaking as though he didn’t expect it to understand him.
The dog made a rumbling noise deep in its chest. “Rex,” it said.
Aslan froze. “Did you…” He wanted to ask, Did you speak? as though he could blot out the fact of it. The voice had been deep enough to vibrate the plastic between them.
He got a grip on himself. “Did you say… Are you not Rufus?”
Again that single utterance. “Rex.”
Aslan swore and rooted through his files. The idiots have brought me the wrong one. “I… you fought in the Campeche? I thought you were the leader of Murray’s Multiform team.”
“Yes.”
He looked up again, finding the creature with its nose almost pressed to the screen.
“I was leader.” It spoke carefully, stressing the words strangely. “My squad was Honey, Dragon and Bees, but I was leader.”
Back to the notes. Murray only had the one Multiform pack, and the names of the rest checked out. Some clerk had mixed up the records, Aslan guessed. After all, nobody would have thought it was very important.
“Well then, hi, Rex. My name’s Keram. Keram John Aslan. I work for the International Criminal Court.”
Looking into that brutal, bestial face, his heart sank, because how could this thing ever be seen as anything other than a threat?
They’re going to exterminate them, Aslan knew then. From concentration camps to gas chambers. And the courts that were made to punish genocide are going to be making it happen.
21
Rex
This is the cage Bad Dogs go to.
There are one hundred and twenty-seven of us in this cage. It is a very big cage. Forty-three humans work here. They are scared of us; we can all smell it. They do not know we are scared of them, too. They have ways of hurting us, and they use them when they can, to remind us. Still they are scared. They are scared because they are not our masters, only our jailers.
We each have a little cage within the big one. The walls are bars, so we can see each other. It is never quiet. Always we are snarling at each other, snapping and growling, shouting and threatening. The whole cage-building echoes to us.
We are all dogs here. The other forms, the experimental ones, they are dealing with differently, behind different bars. And there are other dog cages in other places, but we are here. Here is where everything will be decided, we have heard. News runs wild through the cages: every little scrap of knowledge is fought over.
We are here because we are dangerous. I do not understand: they made us to be dangerous. I do
not see how they can be surprised when we were.
Many of us are military dogs, like me. Some fought in the same war I did. Others were in other battles, in other parts of the world. We exchange our war stories. Once you take away heat and cold, wet and dry, they all come down to the same thing. Other dogs were security. They lived in buildings and kept them safe. When we say enemy they say robbers. I like the idea of that kind of life. It sounds peaceful. But perhaps I would miss the fighting.
The air is rich with smells. I have never been near so many of my own kind before. Each one signs the air with his identity, his state of health, his mood. Some of us are ill here – more now than before. Many of us are unhappy. The unhappy and the ill dogs do not leave their small cages even for exercise.
We exercise. A score of us at a time are let out into a steep-walled yard to run and snarl and pace round and round under the tranquiliser guns and the tasers of the humans. I like exercise. Exercise and feeding are the only things that happen here, and feeding is dull and the food is bad. They have bad things in the food, and a lot of the dogs here have a sickness from them, that makes them sleepy and slow. Many of us late-end military models can metabolise this bad food quickly so that it does not affect us much.
We talk of many things. We talk of what we did before they locked us up here. We talk about fights we were in, or places we lived. We talk about our masters sometimes. We all had masters. We all miss them. None of us understand why our masters have sent us here. We must all be Bad Dogs.
That is not quite true. I understand a little. I understand that I was a Bad Dog. I was a Bad Dog because I chose to be a Good Dog in a way Master did not want. I know I deserve to be here.
It is when we talk, rather than shout and bark and snarl, that the humans fear us most. I do not understand that. To talk is human: why are we more frightening when we are human than when we are dog?
When we exercise, there are fights often. Today, when I go out, a big dog puts his face in mine and tries to push me down.
Dogs of War Page 12
