Blue War: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Ami had been right about another group of exorcists, and thus a second riot, outside the Earth Colonies embassy. The embassy did not have a barrier of energy, and a single terrorist had made it as far as the front steps of the building before detonating the five grenades strapped to his body. Sinanese people were not typically suicidal when it came to political causes, but it had been determined that the man at the embassy and the three at the military base had all been diagnosed with the deadly STD that was rampant on either side of the Neutral Zone. During some interviews of common citizens who had witnessed the embassy protest, one angry young Jin Haa man said in English, “Don’t you know? The Earth devils have brought the plague with them and spread it by design, just like the Blue City! They have exhausted the gas that comes from the dead in our tunnels, and we were not dying at a rate fast enough to supply more of their precious sinon gas! And so they are killing us off to make the gas plentiful again!”

  Wow, Stake thought. What a horrible thought that was.

  The chief ambassador to the Jin Haa nation, Margaret Valsalva, was being interviewed all over the place. There was even footage of the embassy protest at which a huge holographic screen had opened in the air, and Valsalva’s disembodied head had addressed the crowd, urging them to be peaceful and disband, assuring them that the spread of the organic city was being tackled by the finest minds the Earth Colonies could assemble.

  Not feeling all that fine a mind, Stake watched as the death toll was revised through the evening, settling on a total of four dead terrorists, five policemen and twelve citizens killed by the explosion at the embassy. Policemen injured with stones and other objects, and rioters suffering broken bones due to beatings by police, had been administered to at local hospitals, not to mention several CF soldiers injured in the explosions at their base.

  The militia had erected barricades outside the embassy building and Colonial Forces base. In the case of the military compound, that meant Stake was now at the center of a barrier within a barrier – though right about now he felt he was locked outside a double barrier instead.

  Finally, after hours of distraction, Rick Henderson found enough free time in the midst of the turmoil to call Stake back. “Have you seen the reason why the sudden step up in the level of protest, Jer?”

  Yes. That was another aspect of the extensive VT coverage he had been soaking in. “The new development in Bluetown – yeah.”

  “I’m going out there in the morning to see it for myself. Make sure you’re ready. I’m bringing you with me, whether Gale likes it or not.”

  FIFTEEN: THE BENEATH

  Before their party left for Bluetown, Stake asked for a suit of camouflage like the soldiers wore so he wouldn’t ruin his clothes. He was given one without any problems. Good; he’d been hoping to come by a uniform by some means or other. One never knew when it might come in handy. Seeing this, David Bright asked for a uniform, too. In his case, his concern for his expensive five-piece suit was more reasonable.

  Seeing the two civilians in their camouflage, Colonel Dominic Gale said to Henderson, “What the blast, Rick? Is this a tourist outing or what?”

  Bright spoke up edgily before Henderson could. “This situation concerns me, colonel, in case you hadn’t seen the effigies of me they’re parading through the streets of two nations.”

  “I’m talking more about the snoop.” Gale jutted his goateed chin toward Stake.

  “We’ve been through that, Dom,” Henderson said. “There’s no harm in using every available resource, is there?”

  “Resource,” Gale snorted. He switched his hot gaze to Bright’s bodyguard. The seven-foot KeeZee just glowered right back at him. He was the only one in the party not wearing camouflage, his natty black suit and black turtleneck an odd match for his monkey wrench head and amber-beaded dreadlocks. The alien’s sharp-cornered jacket was unfastened and Stake had glimpsed the holster of a sidearm in there, besides the pump-action shotgun he carried in his hands. Gale broke their eye contact first, turning away to board the troop transport craft that would fly them out to Bluetown.

  The last person to board, running to catch up, was the outpost’s science chief Ami Pattaya. Stake would have expected her to wear a short skirt and heels on even a mountain climbing expedition, but she was in camouflage herself. Still, she managed to make a fashion statement of it, her pants tight across her rear, of course, and a ponytail hanging out the back of the camouflage cap she wore. It made her look adorable, and Stake decided he needed a cap, too. He took note that Henderson and Gale were wearing them as well.

  Ami wedged herself in beside Stake. Gale was up front, and glanced back at them, but the man seemed to be perpetually boiling inside his own skin and so it was hard for Stake to judge if he were any more angry to see them sitting together. When Gale turned forward again, Ami gave Stake’s thigh a quick squeeze.

  The flier touched down on Jin Haa land, though one wouldn’t know it anymore from the way it had been transmogrified. Specifically, this was the spot upon which Bright’s Simulacrum Systems team had thought to grow the condominium complex that had instead developed into Bluetown. The epicenter of the runaway process. It was also the center from which a new, secondary development was spreading.

  Looking out the windows as those up front began to file out, Ami said, “You can see it’s a good thing this village project was so remote. If it had been closer to Di Noon, Bluetown would already be flattening it.”

  “Why so remote?”

  Bright heard them talking and cut in, “Their government was trying to give people the incentive to get over the war and settle closer to the border of the Neutral Zone, so it initiated this program, offering housing and land that the people could farm, and the government would split the profits from the crops with them. It was to be a kind of commune for serfs, and there would have been more of them along the border, if...well, if things had gone as planned.”

  The passengers toward the back were last to disembark, and Stake fumbled around as if he’d dropped something, stalling. He was relieved that Ami didn’t wait for him, getting swept along with the rest. One of the last out, Stake snatched up a camouflage cap that a lingering soldier had placed on his seat while he was busy taking down his assault engine from an overhead compartment. Stake folded the cap’s bill and stuck it in his back pocket.

  Stepping out of the flier and looking about, the private investigator saw two incongruous trailers parked by a curb, where the Simulacrum Systems team had set up shop in their efforts to halt the city’s growth. There was also a group of Colonial Forces soldiers already on the scene, assigned to protect the Simulacrum Systems personnel from disgruntled natives. The sergeant of this unit approached Gale, while David Bright went to confer with several techs who had emerged from the twin vehicles.

  As Henderson came beside Stake, he said, “Well, as you can see, this is the center of Punktown itself, so Bluetown’s radiating outward from the same point.”

  Stake shook his head, turning in a circle. “No...no it isn’t. You aren’t the lifetime Punktowner that I am, Rick. It’s close, but we’re about two blocks over from the center.”

  “Yeah? Are you sure you’re talking about the geographical center of Punktown and not just the historical center?”

  “They’re one and the same: Salem Street.” Stake pointed. “And that’s over that way.” He started off in the indicated direction, Henderson sticking with him and Ami hurrying over to make it three. They walked briskly for a fair distance, until Ami looked fidgety at leaving the others behind, but Henderson was intrigued and nodded in recognition.

  “Jesus, you’re right. This would be the center, wouldn’t it? Salem Street.”

  “It’s incredible, huh?” Stake said, stopping to scuff the toe of his shoe against the street. The original was surfaced with cobblestones, and the effect had been reproduced by the smart matter, looking like the blue-scaled hide of some immense slumbering dragon upon which they moved like mites. The actual Salem Stree
t was a fairly intact remnant of the preexistent Choom town upon which the Earth colonists had superimposed Punktown, and so it retained the cobblestones and some of its brick architecture for a quaint, historical effect. Salem Street took the form of an open mall lined with upscale shops, always thronged with pedestrians but closed to vehicular traffic. Decorative trees were spaced along the sidewalks, though here the receptacles meant to hold them were empty. Here, most of the shop windows were blind blue panes of coral. Ahead, a fountain that sprayed no water.

  Henderson pointed out one of the buildings facing onto the mall. “And that would be Beantown – one of my favorite coffee shops in the city.”

  “Looks like it’s closed for the season.”

  “I don’t get it, then. Why would Bright’s process start creating Punktown at the place it did, instead of at the proper center?”

  “Hey!” Gale called to them gruffly from behind, snorting like a workhorse as he strode to catch up. “Where the hell are you boys headed off to? We’ve got a momfuck train to catch!”

  “Boys?” Stake muttered to Ami.

  “That probably slipped out,” she whispered. “He calls me his ‘pretty boy.’”

  “I didn’t realize he was so, uh, affectionate.”

  “In his own way. But I like your way. I guess you don’t like me too much anymore, though, huh?”

  “I told you, it isn’t that I don’t like you. I’ve just got – other stuff on my mind.”

  “You men, always so serious tramping around with your scowls and your guns.”

  “Hey, you’re out here tramping around in the same uniform with us.”

  “Well, boys will be boys.”

  Red-faced from more than just the exertion of walking, Colonel Gale led them back to where Simulacrum Systems had set up camp, and to the nearby opening of a subway kiosk. There, he turned to glower at the others, looking like the attendant of an elevator to Hell.

  ***

  Appropriately, the reconnaissance party descended into a section of subway that in Punktown was called the Blue Line.

  There were eight soldiers; four up front, four in the rear, with Gale and Henderson, Stake and Ami, Bright and his bodyguard, and one Simulacrum Systems tech buffered in between. The soldiers had powerful flashlights clipped to their chests, their beams set wide to illuminate the path for the others. Stake felt like a member of a spelunking expedition. Either that, or a team of archaeologists venturing into some buried tomb.

  They reached the bottom of one flight of steps, turned onto a landing and descended another. At its bottom, they stepped into a subway station with an arched ceiling, its ends vanishing into deep murk. It echoed their movements and voices eerily. Frames for video ad displays and tube schedules remained blank. Tiled walls that were supposed to be enamel smooth were instead scratchy and rough, making Stake think of a sunken ship with its interior caked in rust, and they were the fish floating through it.

  Ami came to a bench near the edge of the platform and sat down on it. “Why these benches but no furniture inside the buildings up there?”

  “The benches would be bolted to the platform, not mobile like furniture in your office or apartment,” said the Simulacrum Systems tech. He was a young Tikkihotto man named Cali, his head shaved to a dark stubble and his eye tendrils rippling restlessly. “They’re more a part of the basic structure. That’s all I can figure.”

  Ami stood and approached the wide trench in which the tubes would run above their repulsor tracks, resting a hand against one of the station’s thick hexagonal support columns as if afraid she might topple into an abyss. She looked up and down the tunnel in both directions. “So what’s the next development going to be?” she said. “I expect to see a train made from smart matter come out of the darkness at any second.”

  “But what would be aboard it?” Stake asked her.

  “The ghosts from the Jin Haa burial tunnels, I guess.”

  “See here?” Cali said, calling the others to him, a bit further down the station.

  When they advanced with their lights, they could see that to the left the tunnel had collapsed and debris choked off its mouth. Stake was reminded of photos he had seen of Punktown’s subways after the two great earthquakes it had suffered within his lifetime. As a result of those catastrophes, some of Punktown’s tube stations had been cut off and left abandoned, now serving as a home for mutants, a wayward gang of Bedbugs who called themselves the Dimensionals, and bands of rebellious robot laborers that had taken shelter down there in the aftermath of the Union War. As unsettling as this subterranean realm was, Stake figured it was infinitely safer than the one it had patterned itself after.

  David Bright was looking at the ceiling, the walls, the floor, with increasing dismay but also with a kind of awe, as if he had brought all this about with god-like powers he hadn’t realized he possessed. “I just can’t believe this. I can’t believe it.”

  Motioning toward the cave-in, Cali explained, “We don’t understand the delay...why Bluetown didn’t start replicating the lowers levels of Punktown – the Subtown district, and the subway and sewer networks – until now. The program or command for that was either in queue, or this section was meant to grow at the same rate as the city itself but got delayed by a glitch, or who knows what.”

  Ami said, “You’ve used your initiation systems in attempts to transmit new orders to the smart matter. During one of those links, might it have accessed a second map or blueprint of Punktown, other than the one that initially sparked Bluetown, and now it’s adding that onto the first?”

  “No, I really think it meant to get around to this all along. A stratum of living cells had to have been waiting under the floor of the calcified cells to commence this secondary process.” Cali sighed. “However it came about, you can see from the structural damage that these new lower levels can’t always support the upper structures, enormous as they are, the same way Punktown can. Yes, the buildings have already grown downward to produce basements – some of them multiple stories deep – and they’ve sent down piles to root themselves, like the originals. But these piles often have to go hundreds of feet deep, and if the smart matter encounters stone in its way that’s too large to envelop, then that halts the smart matter’s progress. And as tough as smart matter is, it just isn’t as strong as the material these piles and other support structures would be. We’ve already seen some buildings up there topple for lack of support, but now that’s increased as the earth gets hollowed out beneath them. Some of these skyscrapers are dropping straight down. So there’s no way we’re going to see an unadulterated replica of Subtown and the subways, the way we’re seeing things duplicated topside.”

  Stake walked to the foot of an unmoving escalator, gazed up at its top where it was obstructed by more rubble – this being a mix of fragmented blue material, earth, and stone.

  “But it’s going to try, and try, and try,” David Bright groaned. “It’s going to keep trying to copy the lower levels.”

  “So it would seem,” Cali said. “And that’s almost nine hundred tube stations. In Punktown, twelve thousand subway cars transport ten million passengers every day over repulsor tracks that, if you were going to ride them all without a stop, would take you a day and a half to travel.” He walked on, gesturing at the ceiling as he continued. “And let’s not forget Subtown. It doesn’t cover as much ground as the city above it, but it covers enough. The upper subway system is at the same level as Subtown’s streets, but the secondary, lower subway system is several hundred feet below the surface, bored through granite bedrock, so I don’t think Bluetown is going to manage to burrow that deep in most places. It can’t penetrate the bedrock. That’s something, at least.”

  Stake cut in, “If Bluetown’s progress can be stopped by a strong enough barrier, then, has anyone thought about putting up a wall around the city to contain it?”

  Gale said, “And how do you think we could achieve that? A wall strong enough to do that would have to be high, thic
k, and deeply rooted. Bluetown is advancing every minute. By the time you’ve laid down one section of wall, Bluetown would have grown past it on either side.”

  “This way, people,” Cali told them, directing them down the other end of the tunnel. Two of the four soldiers up front wore full-head helmets with visual enhancement, plus blue camouflaged body armor. They swept their lights and guns from side to side as if cutting a swath through high grass.

  Stake was still pondering the idea of blocking Bluetown, and trailing behind Gale asked, “How about an energy barrier, then? Like the one around the base?”

  Gale glanced back at him as if at an addled transient begging for a handout. “Do you really think you’re going to come up with something that hasn’t occurred to us, Stake? Yes, you can set up a field to cut off the smart matter, if it’s strong enough and penetrates the ground far enough. At least, you could until the blasting city started digging itself this deep. But you run into the same problem as a solid barrier! Even incomplete, this city is so huge that you can’t just run one energy wall around it – you need to space out God knows how many individual transmission posts. How can you get all those in place, and link them up, when this thing never stops gaining ground?”

  “I should think you’d at least want to cut off one part, as wide a part as you can manage, even if the city grows past the barrier on the sides. Then you cut off another part. And another. Finally you link all the parts. The wall isn’t even, it isn’t pretty, but...”

  “Are you fucking listening to me? This city is vast. Think of the manpower, the energy that would need to be generated, the coordination...and listen to the sound of your idea. Do you stop a lava flow by putting a cinder block in its path here, and another one a half mile down the road, and on and on? The lava will go around it, between it. By the time you finish your raggedy wall, the lava has got where it wanted to go.”