by Steve Perry
“And you are?”
“My name does not matter.”
“Then you should have no problem giving it to me. And better that we should talk face-to-face.”
“I won’t give you my name, nor will we meet can I help it. Two of my kind to whom you recently spoke face-to-face are dead. I have no desire to join them.”
“I killed neither of them.”
“All the same, they are dead, and certainly due to that contact. Death rides on Vastalimi shoulders.”
So, Booterik’s thinly veiled reference to his sibling Zeth’s being dead could be so if this Rel was telling the truth.
“So Zeth is dead. How did he die?”
There was a long pause. “I understand it was suicide.”
Kay nodded to herself. Yes. That made sense. Under stress, Rel were quicker to do that than many species. Or it could have been murder, to keep him quiet.
“It was you who told Zeth the location of the kidnapped human fem.”
“No. I told someone else, who told someone, who probably told Zeth. I did not know Zeth.”
Yes, she could see such a possibility. What one Rel knew was apt to be shared with others, which was likely how Zeth learned of it. They were herd creatures; among themselves, they were quick to talk about anything and everything. Which was why she went looking there in the first place.
“How did you come to learn this information?”
“By way of a human native.”
“The human’s name?”
“I—I need assurances.”
“What assurances?”
“That if I help you, you will not hunt me.”
Kay considered the comment. Augmented Rel. Those who didn’t roll over and show their bellies immediately? How very strange. “You bargain with me? Have you forgotten who I am?”
“I know what you are. And I know, too, what the word of a Vastalimi means. Give it, or I discom and run.”
“And you believe I won’t find you?”
“Eventually. It might take years.”
“Or days.”
“Yes. But that is my offer.”
The Rel did not matter, only what she knew. “All right, done. If you give me information—and if it turns out to be true and useful—I won’t hunt you.”
“The human’s name is Brahmaputra Siddhartha. He is the manager of the TotalMart in Dep-by-the-Sea.”
“How did he come to reveal this information?”
“By accident.”
“Explain.”
“I worked for TotalMart as a contract accountant, and Bram Sid was my employer there. While balancing ledgers, I came across a file that was out of place. When I read it, I found the information about the Rajah’s daughter. It was thinly disguised—’R.’s daughter, being held at the lodge, under guard.’ Like that. I mentioned it to my lover.”
And her lover could not keep it to himself, Rel being what they were. It spread from there.
“Is that all you know of it?”
“It is.”
“Then we are done,” Kay said. “Graze free.”
The Rel broke the connection.
They could find out her name, of course. If she worked for TotalMart, there would be records, and Cutter Colonel had deep connections with TotalMart. But why would she bother? The CFI team could verify it if they wished. The Rel was but a tool, history of no import. And Kay had given her word, which was important.
This was most clever, the planting of false information. It was done by somebody who knew that Rel were quick to mouth, who knew that it would be too good not to share. And by someone who knew that it was likely a Vastalimi hunting for information would eventually speak to one of the Rel who had it. Most clever.
Perhaps they had made this information available elsewhere, as well.
It seemed an elaborate and complicated effort to set up a trap. Of course, it had worked, if not as well as they doubtless wished.
Certainly it was not done by some half-witted kidnapper looking to make money; no, this opponent was smart and, so far, had been ahead of them. That was good. One wanted a decent match. There was no real joy in a fight against a markedly inferior opponent.
She needed to speak to the colonel.
~ * ~
Once more, the core group sat in the conference room. Jo glanced at Cutter, who nodded. She began:
“Kay has information that the false lead we followed to the hunting lodge was a plant, and that the source was one Brahmaputra Siddhartha, who manages a TotalMart in Dep-by-the-Sea. At six million inhabitants, Dep is the second-largest city in New Mumbai. It is north of here, located between Lake Dep and the Kali Sea. Bram Sid is a local by birth.”
“Any confirmation?” Gramps asked.
“We can confirm the identity of the source and a possible connection to the Rel who steered us wrong.”
“TotalMart?” That from Gunny. “The same TotalMart who we do a whole shitload of our business for?”
Cutter said, “Yep. Check your flatscreens, you will find everything the corporation knows about Bram Sid.”
“Why would he be involved in this?” Wink asked.
Jo said, “We’ll be taking a little run up the coast to speak to M. Sid later this afternoon to find out.”
Jo said, “Formentara also has some news for us.” She looked at hir.
“My reports are that Booterik had his augmentation surgery done four days before he died, at a facility also in Dep-by-the-Sea, by an ajnabi—an offworlder—arrived here but two weeks earlier. This programmer is human, ostensibly from Filay the Moon, in the Filay System. Goes by the name ‘Gee.’ Local augmentors says this is the only person who has the capabilities outside myself.”
“Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it?” That from Gramps.
It was a rhetorical question.
“What’s the drill?” Wink asked.
Jo said, “We pay M. Sid a visit. You bring some of your happy juice and administer it so he wants to play nice and come along to answer our questions truthfully. If he did it, we squeeze him until Indira pops loose. If somebody put him up to it, we find them and do the same.”
Jo looked at Cutter, who raised one hand in a continue-on gesture.
“The TM is one of the midsized plenipotentiary stores, a Zanzibar-Design, with many small, specialty-shop fronts linked together. Two kilometers by two kilometers under-roof, nineteen thousand full-time employees, most of whom live in cheap housing on the premises.
“They are a main stop on the maglev line, have their own airport and spaceport, complete with customs. In addition to employee housing, there are hotels, hospitals, banks, fire department, wooded parks, entertainment, restaurants. Got a two-hundred-person security force, power stations, dedicated water supply—it’s essentially a town owned by the corporation, and it draws shoppers from New Mumbai, Pahal, and the Kali Islands. On an average day, there will be more than a hundred thousand customers cycling through this place.”
“And this guy is the manager of all that?” Gunny said. “What kind of money does a job like that pay?”
“With commissions, I’d guess 2.5, maybe 3 million noodle a year,” Gramps said.
“Doesn’t seem like somebody who’d want to get into kidnapping for the money,” Wink said.
“No, it doesn’t,” Jo said. “And we’ll have to be careful. It’s not a good idea to let their security know we are coming—we don’t want word to get to M. Sid and have him decide it’s a great time to take a vacation. If we get in trouble, the colonel can pull some strings, but better we avoid that.
“Formentara and Kay will go see the augmentor. Gunny, Gramps, Wink, and I will find the manager.”
“Two-hundred-person security?” Gramps said.
“They won’t all be on duty; besides, we’ll give them something else to think about.”
Cutter said, “Something not too expensive, please. We don’t want to piss off the golden goose here.”
“I have just the thing,” Jo said.<
br />
~ * ~
TWENTY-FIVE
“Never fails to amaze me, looking at one of these monsters from the air,” Wink said.
It was a huge building, segmented-eplast construction with channels and drains, so if part of it collapsed, not all of it would, and with all the infrastructure you’d expect, just like Jo had said: roads, a monorail station, air- and hopperports, a spaceport over there.
Big money in big stores, and TotalMart was the largest shark in the galactic-shopping food chain by far, everybody else running a far distant second. Other sentient species would sometimes look at such a place and shake their heads: Can you believe what those humans do?
Jo said, “Security requires that customers leave their hardware at the door when they enter. We won’t, we have the proper licenses, courtesy of the Rajah, but that means they will be keeping a closer eye on us. At least for a while.”
Wink nodded to himself. Of course. Mercenaries who could carry, you bet you’d keep a careful watch on them. In the land of the unarmed, the man with a rock was king.
“We have Formentara’s toy,” Jo continued, “so that should give security something else to keep ‘em occupied.”
“If it works,” Gramps said.
Formentara smiled sweetly at him but didn’t say anything.
Gramps smiled in return. Hard to ruffle hir feathers. Everything Formentara came up with always worked.
“We are in the landing slave’s grip,” Nancy said. “Fifteen minutes until they park us.”
Gunny said, “I knew a guy, ex-Army, worked security for the system-megastore grand opening on Zand, place was twice the size of this one. They had a doorbuster sale on agro-dins, and 90 percent of what they do on Zand is farming, so they were lined up for days, camping.
“Twenty-six people were killed, nine of them security, dozens seriously injured when they let shoppers enter. Guy I knew said it was the scariest engagement he’d ever been in. Security was limited to the use of LTL hardware only— zappers, puke spray, hand sonics, like that. Said once the crowd surged, it rolled over them like a tsunami, nothing slowed ‘em down.”
“Sad way to go,” Gramps said, “in a store, stomped by some farmer shoving to get a cheap hay baler.”
“No Screamers installed?” That from Formentara. “No stupesonics? No seizure flashers?”
Gunny said, “My guy said they had Screamers, but elected not to use them. Bad PR to lay fifty thousand customers out in pools of their own urine.”
“And twenty-six people dead is good PR?” Wink said.
“All about the money,” Jo said. “Cheaper to pay off the survivors and families of that many than to alienate a few hundred thousand possible repeat customers. Cost of doing business.”
Kay said something Wink didn’t catch.
“Say what?” he said.
“I said ‘Humans.’” You could have etched diamond with her tone.
Yeah, that about summed it up.
“How would you have handled it on your world?” Wink asked.
“On Vast, we do not have these places. If we allowed them, there would be no such riot. Such things are not permitted.”
“You’d have used the Screamers?” That from Gunny.
“No. We would have used lethal weapons and continued doing so until the illegal activity ceased. The customers would have known that.”
“You’d have killed maybe thousands of Vastalimi, just like that?”
“If that is what it took. They would have been responsible for their own fates.”
Gunny shook her head. “Hard-asses on your world.”
“We value life differently than humans do.”
“No shit,” Wink said.
Jo looked at Kay. “You’ve heard some of our stories about our first killings. Would you care to share yours? We have a few minutes.”
~ * ~
Kay looked at Jo Captain.
“The first person I killed, or the first human?”
Kay saw the teeth revealed in smiles, indicating amusement.
Even after years, she still had to overcome her instinctive reaction to that—it didn’t mean the same thing as it did on her homeworld. Vastalimi smiles didn’t reveal the teeth.
Many things among the humans were that way. Such an odd mix of predator and prey, they were.
“Person will do,” Jo said.
Kay allowed the memory to surface:
“I was dijete. This does not translate exactly into Basic, it is a phase of late cubhood. A period older than babies, younger than fully grown, during which we were still called by our den-noms.
“We were twelve standard years, and on Seoba. This is a ritual trek of two months, undergone during dijete. You are taken to a reach and left with nothing save what you brought into the world at your birth.
“Our pack, comprised of three different family litters, roamed the South Reach of Travnjaka, the Great Grassland. Mostly, we hunted vepar, large, tusked rodents half again our size.
“By that day, there were still fifteen in my pack, down from twenty.”
“Down from twenty? Five dropped out?” Formentara asked.
Kay looked at the speaker.
“Five were dead on the trek. Two from wounds incurred hunting vepar, one from an attack by a div macka, something like a Terran liger. One stepped into a serpent burrow, broke her leg, and chose izvaditi utrobu—suicide.”
“Suicide? How?” Jo asked.
“Disembowelment by her own claws.”
“Nice. And the fifth?” From Wink.
“The fifth disappeared, and we did not know what happened to her. There are several large predator species who live in the grass. Probably killed and eaten by one.”
“Tough playground.” That from Gramps.
“It was a cold and gray evening, we smelled snow coming, and we were closing in on a pair of young vepar when Blue Eyes had a zrelost seizure.”
She saw that none of them knew this term, either.
She explained: “Blue Eyes was male, and the seizure was due to the sudden and unexpected onset of sexual maturity.
“Normally, the Vastalimi do not Blossom until their fourteenth season. The first rising in males is overwhelmingly powerful, and in society, he would have been restrained and given to a mature female trained in the ways of safe release. Because he was early, and we were far into the grass, this was not possible.
“Gripped by conjunction-lust, Blue Eyes attacked fem Tawny.
“None of the fems were mature enough to accept Blue Eyes that way. Males who have lost control drive to their climax without thought for their partner. Zrelost-driven intercourse can result in injury for even an incautious, mature female. In cubs, it can be fatal. The claws and teeth dig deep, the member thrusts to the hilt.
“Blue Eyes knew this intellectually, of course, but the Blossom is impossible to resist. He was crazed with hormones and not in his right mind.
“I was the first to reach him as he clawed and attempted to mount Tawny. I killed him.”
“Killed him? You didn’t try, I don’t know, restraints? Knocking him cold?” That from Wink.
Kay offered a slight turn of her head. “We were on Seoba. We were five hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement. We had no means of communication, no tools other than our own claws and fangs, no way to hold him. Blue Eyes’ zrelost Blossom might have lasted thirty hours. Trying to restrain a maddened male would have likely resulted in serious injury or death to some of the pack. We might have knocked him out, but an attempt that failed might result in a fatal injury to one of us. It was the safest way.”
No one said anything for a few seconds. Then Jo said, “And what happened to Tawny? Was she hurt by the attack?”
“Minor injuries, a few bruises, some scratches.”
“Something, at least.”
Kay looked at her. “It was the proper response.”
“And how did you feel about this?”
“Blue Eyes was my littermate. We had
grown up together, with our three sibs.”
They all looked at her.
“He was your brother!” That from Formentara.
“It was unfortunate; but it was the proper response in the circumstances.”
