by Jean Rabe
Ninn hesitated, and in that instant really took a look at the Aborigine. Since the day he’d appeared in her office, she’d considered him a frail old man, one step removed from a nursing home. The “old” part was still accurate, but there was nothing frail about him now. His eyes burned like coals, and thick ropy veins stood out on his neck, the envy of a bodybuilder. His jaw set, his thin lips worked, a faint singsong chant drifting out. She felt something emanating from him in pulses, power of some sort. The energy skittered through her, and she could feel her teeth. Old? Yeah. Slow? Yeah, he was that, too. Weak? Frail? No way in hell. He looked scary.
“Keebs—”
“Yeah, Mordred, we’re leaving.”
That sound she’d heard moments ago…of an angry wind slipping under a door…it returned and intensified as she slipped out the back door. The squawks and tweets from the nearby aviary, the shushing sound of the leaves in the breeze, the chatter from the crowd on the other side of the tree line…it drowned out all of that. The crescendo blotted out all the sound in the world, and then it abruptly stopped. Tentatively, the other noises returned.
Barega met her outside the kitchen a minute later.
She stopped herself from asking what happened to the ork, and whether Barega could teach her whatever he’d done in there. Instead, she pointed to another building, one that poked around the side of the Administration Centre that she’d originally sought. “We’re going there. Maybe we can get rid of the homing beacon riding around in my innards before Draye finds us again.”
“I hope there is something inside to sit upon,” Barega returned. “Old men lie if they tell you their feet do not hurt. And…what is the expression? Yes. My arms hurt like hell.”
Twenty-Six
The Doctor is Interested
The veterinarian—Dr. Aiden Kappa, by the embroidery on his shirt—was tall and had the silhouette of a dagger, with the broad shoulders of a swimmer that tapered down to his slim hips and faux-suede Wellies. Ninn waved Mordred at him and looked around the office. Besides him, it was empty; her audio receptors didn’t pick up anyone hiding behind the shelves and antique file drawers.
“Close the door,” she told Barega. “Lock it if there is one.”
She heard the latch flip.
The large room was the shape of a shoebox, twice as wide as Ninn was tall, and twice that in length, there were two other doors on the far wall, likely leading to examination rooms. Three desks were in a row along the near wall, each with a vet’s nameplate. The largest desk matched Kappa’s tag; he must be in charge.
“Where are the others?”
“We have five full-time veterinarians on staff. The others are on rounds because of the lockdown, making sure the animals are all right.” He looked down his long nose at her. Despite being human, he had a handful of inches on her. “But they’ll be back.” She noticed his eyes were a startling, almost unnatural green; probably dyed irises or top-of-the-line cybereyes that looked real. “If you’re looking for drugs, we don’t keep any here.”
“My friend there has two bullets in his arm.” Ninn had noted there were no exit wounds, so the rounds had stuck. Barega didn’t appear to have any other holes in him. “And his other arm is badly broken.”
“And for both of those counts he needs a hospital.” He pointed to her poorly bandaged wrist. “It looks like you could benefit from one as well.”
Ninn waved Mordred again for effect. “Yeah. Well, I don’t have time to go into it, but a hospital isn’t an option right now.”
Those startling green eyes widened. “You’re the two they’re looking for.”
She noted the scanner on the center desk, and quickly glanced around for surveillance. There had to be some, right? If there was, she didn’t see it with a cursory look. “Mordred,” she whispered. “Any video feeds in here?”
While she waited, she gestured with the gun, nodding Barega’s way. “My companion needs help, and you’re going to help him.”
“Or you’ll shoot me? And then who’ll help him?” His smug reply was a poor attempt to mask his worry; Ninn saw his bottom lip quiver, and his fingers tapped together nervously. A close look at him: didn’t see any obvious tech.
“But before you help him, you need to—”
“No video feeds in here, Keebs.”
“What? I need to what? Call for help? We both know no one’s going to hear me unless they’re passing by.”
“You need to remove my tattoos.” Ninn had figured out that was the only thing that might have a signature. Tarr had repaired her, not added anything—except the nanite tattoos. The dwarf wouldn’t have done anything else because she hadn’t been paid for anything else. “The nanites under my skin.”
“Your tattoos,” Dr. Kappa said. “Really?” The disbelief was thick in his voice. He glanced at Barega, then back at Ninn. “Your friend is bleeding like a stuck warthog and you want me to excise your tats.”
“Yeah,” Ninn said. Sounds filtered in through the windows, nothing alarming yet…birds, leaves rustling, no pounding footfalls or shouts. “I really need them out. And if you value your skin, you’ll do it.”
He let out a breath that whistled between his teeth. “I suppose I can do that here. The middle desk, it’s pretty empty. I suppose you’ll want me to get some pain killer for both of you.”
That sounded absolutely delicious, a little bit of numb would mollify that sweet spot in her soul.
“No,” she said. “No pain killer, nothing to knock me out.” She stepped over to Barega. “That arm working?” She indicated the one with the bullets. He didn’t answer, but he flexed his fingers, and she stuck Mordred in them. “My friend here will shoot you if you do anything funny.”
Ninn hopped up on a desk and lay down, staring at the ceiling, the faux wood uncomfortable and sticky from the summer heat against the back of her arms.
“Why do you want them removed? It’s nice work.” As the vet leaned over her, she noticed he had a small tat on the side of his neck, an all-too-familiar one.
She groaned. “RighteousRight.”
“You want the tats removed because of the Right?” Dr. Kappa made a hnnnnnnning sound. “Or because it’s easier to identify you? You’re pretty distinctive looking regardless.”
“Someone is tracking her,” Barega said. “Probably by the tattoos.”
Ninn grimaced. The vet didn’t need to know that.
“Possible,” Dr. Kappa returned. He reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a small kit, opened it and came up with a needle pack. “Difficult, quite. But possible. Nanotattoos are hard machines, and embed themselves as a lattice. They’re basically liquid crystal microdisplays that hang just under your skin. PAN commands make the tattoo do something. Some provide camouflage, like military fatigues, some change colors, in your case the nanotattoos move—and quite beautifully so, I would say. Preprogrammed animation, decorative.”
“How do you know so much about them? Ouch.”
“Sorry. No pain killer, as you said, so this is going to hurt.” He probed her cheek with a needle attached to a small coprocessor. “Well, some of our animals are tattooed, especially the ones we loan to other systems, and I usually do it, the tattooing. Sometimes I remove the tats if we sell the animals. We have five full-time veterinarians here, but I handle the tattooing. I worked in a tat parlor when I was going to uni.”
“I bet the Double-Rs don’t approve of tattoos. Except for those little neck things.”
“Tattoos? Sure. They’ve no problem with tattoos and body art.” Dr. Kappa rolled up his sleeve and held his arm above Ninn’s face. An artistic ЯɌ with red and blue scrollwork wrapped around his forearm. “Regular ink, sure. Nanotattoos, no way. I had a couple when I first went to meetings. I liked what I heard there, liked the people, and so I had the nanotattoos removed. Got this ink instead.” The vet turned and washed his hands in a small sink, put something on them and rubbed his palms furiously back and forth. “The Right believes putting anything forei
gn like that in your body is sacrilege.”
“They don’t like elves, either.”
The vet shrugged. “Some in the Right. The real radicals. Shades of the Klan, huh? But really it’s all about the additions. Like I said, I had a couple of nanotats when I worked at the parlor. I was particularly fond of a kangaroo that hopped up one arm and down the other.”
“But the Right—”
“Wouldn’t’ve liked it. Didn’t like it, actually. I joined them about a year after I finished vet school. A lot of what they say makes sense. Not everything, but a lot.”
“Tattoo, 1981,” Mordred cut in. “No more tats, Keebs.”
“So, a tattoo…just how the hell can they trace me with a drekkin’ tat?” Ninn knew Talon would have had the answer, and also probably a friend who could have removed all the nanites for her. How long was she going to beat herself up about him dying in the building fire? Until uber-resistent Alzheimer’s kicked in?
“They’d have to get the signature of the nanites from whoever put them in.”
That would be Dr. Tarr, and they could have got it out of her by roughing her up, maybe even torturing her. Or more likely she happily gave it to them, either she was an ally or easy to buy off. And they still killed her in the end to cut a loose end. Snip snip, as Draye and the dwarf were fond of saying.
“The more advanced tats can be changed—colors and patterns with a wireless device controlled by a commlink. Yours are preprogrammed, still having a signal. Someone searching the Matrix can find your signature. They’d have to be good, but it definitely could be done, even if the nanotattoo is in hidden mode.”
The vet poked Ninn harder, and she tried not to wince. She suspected he was trying to cause her pain. “Be a lot of trouble, I’m thinking, to find someone through a tat. Someone wants you awfully bad. But then that’s pretty evident by the bulletin circulated through the zoo, and the lockdown.” He shoved the needles in faster. “Stay still, and I’ll get rid of it for you. I’m basically vacuuming the nanites out. If I miss a few, it won’t matter; there won’t be enough of them left to give off a signature. In fact, the signature was disrupted the moment I sucked out the first one. I have a four-year-old daughter at home.”
By that comment, Ninn guessed the vet figured she was going to kill him.
“I should use a trauma patch, but I don’t have any in the office. They’re in the clinic two buildings over. Would mask the pain.”
“It’s fine,” Ninn said. “I probably won’t notice.” She really wanted to shout “ouch!”
“So, what did you do?” Dr. Kappa asked. “To get a group of Aces on your elf ass?”
Apparently the zoo bulletin hadn’t gone into detail. Ninn pulled her lips into a straight line, deciding whether to answer that.
“You and the Aborigine, what did you do?”
Barega started talking. In the span of the few minutes it took the vet to work on Ninn’s tattoos, he supplied a short version of everything. His description of Eli in the tunnel was graphic.
The vet seemed to take their entire story in stride. “I have serious issues with the Renaixement program,” Dr. Kappa said as he unwrapped the raincoat bandage from Ninn’s wrist. “I’ll need the clinic for this.” He nodded at Barega. “And definitely for your friend. You shouldn’t have been so pushy, elf. Should’ve gone there right away.”
“Pushy is her nature,” Mordred said.
“Couldn’t waste the footsteps,” Ninn said. “I needed the tats gone.” A pause: “You know about Renaixement?” She pushed off the desk with her good hand and started recording everything.
“A little.” The startling green eyes filled with ire.
“What do you know?”
“Spill,” Mordred said. “Make him spill, Keebs.”
“Only a little, I said. But enough for me to know Renaixement is nothing good.”
Twenty-Seven
Subterfuge Reborn
Dr. Kappa used trauma patches on Barega, working on the surgical table in the large-animal clinic room. The place was immaculate, state-of-the-art, and at the back of the building, the only room with a maglock on the inside. Ninn thought that odd, but perhaps it was important that people couldn’t just walk in during surgery on a lion or something. What was even odder was the lack of video surveillance. She’d noticed feeds throughout the rest of the clinic, and kept her hood up as they walked past. But there were no feeds in here, and Mordred confirmed it.
The gun was in her pocket now, unfolded; she’d decided the vet wasn’t a threat…at least not at the moment.
The koradji closed his eyes and his lips worked, and Ninn wondered if perhaps he was “dreaming.”
“About Renaixement,” Ninn prompted.
The doctor grimaced. “You are pushy.”
Desperate, Ninn thought.
“I had to look it up, the word,” Dr. Kappa began. “It’s Catalonian. An area in the north of Spain, southwest of France, on a good day about a hundred thousand or so people still speak it. The word translates as ‘rebirth’ or ‘reanimation,’ ‘revitalization,’ ‘revivification,’ all those sorts of things.”
“It explains your brother,” she told Barega. “Older than you, right? Looked young enough to be your granddaughter. Pretty revitalized. It might…maybe…explain some of the other entertainers. Maybe. But why have them killed?”
“Isn’t that what I hired you for, Nininiru?” The Aborigine gave her a stern look. “To discover?”
“And you think it’s ‘nothing good,’ eh?” Ninn turned back to Dr. Kappa and used his own words for it. “Nothing good?”
“Not when it involves the animals in this zoo.” He continued working on Barega while Ninn stared at the chrono on the wall. Her hand drifted down to touch Mordred, finding a little measure of comfort in the gun’s presence. She worried someone would come in here and she’d have to start shooting again—lefthanded. If Draye came with significant backup, it would be snip, snip. There was no other exit out of this room.
Dr. Kappa cleared his throat. “I don’t think anyone’s going to walk in on us. No surgeries scheduled today. My comm would buzz if there was an emergency. And Renaixement doesn’t use these rooms during zoo hours.”
Ninn still didn’t relax; she’d had enough people after her the past couple of days to make that impossible. A slip might help. Just one, if she could manage to find it. There had to be slips around here, all these meds.
“The Right burned my office, the whole building in the Cross. You hear about that fire the other night? AISE says I did it. The Double-Rs did it, magnesium. I’ve got a few ideas how to prove it, too.”
“Some elements of the Right are…militant. Some. There’s a rough pocket in the Cross, a couple of troublesome ratbags I have nothing good to say about. But more good folk than bad. It’s like any organization.” The vet spoke to Barega now, softly and Ninn decided not to overhear. She was recording everything anyway, and could play it back later if she felt the need. Better that she just sit and fume for a while. More good folk than bad…like any organization…like AISE? Really?
Several minutes later, Dr. Kappa helped the koradji off the table and onto a bench against the wall. “Not very comfortable, sorry,” he said. “No plush surfaces—germs, you understand.”
Barega nodded.
“Next?” The vet beckoned Ninn over. “Let’s see the wrist.”
She thought about telling him it was fine, not to worry about it. She wanted to get out of here. And go where? But it was easier to shoot with her right hand.
“About Renaixement,” she prodded again. “You said you know a little. Beyond what the word means.”
“Spill,” Mordred said. “And get him to do it while you and the Koori are still breathing.”
“Renaixement…” The vet used a stim patch and injected her with something that stung like the blazes. Then he motioned, and a medical drone came out of a cabinet and started working on her wrist.
“You didn’t use that on my fr
iend’s arm,” she said.
“Didn’t need to. Your friend has some magic in him. A little juice here, and I just helped augment what he was already working on. He’ll be apples soon enough. The bullets, though. I had to dig them out.”
“Renaixement,” she repeated.
“Yeah, Renaixement.” He continued working, offering her nothing for the pain. Payback, she figured, for waving a gun at him. “I began noticing things a while back,” he continued. “So I started recording things, copying a few files on micro drives. I’ve no tech inside me, you understand.”
“How righteous of you.”
“There were some healthy young animals marked for study, ‘Renaixement Therapy,’ the records listed. Healthy. Perfect. They were lumped in with old, diseased animals, and a few that had been born missing a limb or two. Usually an insalubrious animal…if we can’t correct it with a minimally invasive measure, behavior adjuster or the like…we set them aside for research. But the young, healthy animals. No. I looked into that.”
“And—”
“Why are you so interested?”
Barega chimed in again. “The Cross Slayer was both a man and an animal, or perhaps a man with animal parts grafted to him, and he had a Renaixement identifying number tattooed on his face. He looked like a mix of human and sea lion.”
The ears! Ninn had thought something familiar about the ears. They’d looked like a seal’s ears. She’d thought him perhaps part killer whale, but Barega was right. And the Slayer’s skin. It was covered with fine, black hair. Like a seal.
“What the hell,” she mused. “A seal. Listen, Doc, I need to access your system, look up Renaixement, the Moon Corporation. See what they’re doing to people, what they did to Ella.”
“Adoni,” Barega said. “My brother.”
“You won’t find anything. It was there, pieces of it, like a puzzle missing parts. Maybe I didn’t know how to look and put it all together. Doesn’t matter. Now it’s all gone. Maybe too many people looking where some higher-ups didn’t want anyone looking.”
