The Vastalimi Gambit

by Steve Perry

  CFI had been down this road a few times.

  The GU Army hadn’t sent over a rep yet. Buried somewhere in all the briefing material was the report on them, but Cutter hadn’t bothered to find and read it yet. It didn’t really matter, at least at this point. They were HQed near the big mines and not close, but it was only a matter of time. The local commander would know what was going on in his or her backyard, and either somebody would come to call or he’d get a com telling him to report to the base ASAP for a chat. Regular Army didn’t have much use for private military, but fuck ’em—he had enough of that organization when they had set his unit up for a snafu not their fault. The uplevel dicks had pissed on a bunch of good officers to make sure nobody came after their guilty asses. Only reason he had been allowed to retire instead of being court-martialed and sent away was because he had friends among the generals who owed him. They knew he was getting screwed, but their influence only extended so far.

  We can keep you out of the stockade, Rags, but we can’t keep you in the Army.

  No point in dragging that up, done was done, and in the end, he was doing okay . . .

  Maybe it was time to break out the bourbon and have his daily drink a little early, hey?

  No. It could wait. Not the least reason being that he didn’t want to wait. One drink, expensive booze over ice, to be enjoyed, not used as a crutch . . .

  The incoming com chimed. The sig said the caller was Colonel Sett, Galactic Union Army HQ . . .

  Speak of the devil . . .

  Sett? That name sounded familiar. Sett . . . ?

  Cutter waved his hand at the com. The threedee image of a man looking at the camera appeared over the com, quarter scale. “Cutter here.”

  Even as he said the words, he recognized the face. It was still lean and angular, dark-skinned and the hair shaved or depilated, a few more wrinkles here and there. And it had been First Lieutenant Sett the last time he had seen him.

  “Mica Sett,” Cutter said. “How the hell are you?”

  The man grinned. “Other than being posted to the asshole of the galaxy, I’m doin’ jest fahn, Rags.”

  “How long has it been? Fifteen years?”

  Sett nodded. “About that. The Aleutians, that little revolution that took down General Papirósa.”

  “Yep, what a clusterfuck that was. So, asshole of the galaxy, but a full bird colonel?”

  Cutter didn’t ask the next question: Was Sett sent here as punishment that would wind down his career, or because it was a necessary posting on his track to keep going? Sometimes with the Army, you couldn’t see what they had in mind: A rathole in the middle of nowhere could be a curse or a blessing, depending.

  Sett must have known what he was thinking. He said, “And if I don’t screw it up, a good shot at general within two years if my sources can be believed. The politicians have been convinced by the GU Army lobbyists that we need more boots on the ground. More boots, more freshly minted generals to direct them how to step. Better me than some others.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. Been a long time coming. Uh, Rags, you aren’t going to be part of the problem, are you?”

  “Not if I can help it. I’m here to protect the root-growers from bandits.”

  “Yeah, we know about that. I sent patrols out, but we are stretched pretty thin here, I can’t afford to keep troops with every van on the road.”

  “What they hired us for. We keep the trucks from being jacked until we can figure out who is doing it.”

  “At which time, you will give me all the particulars so that I can stop them.”

  “Well, of course, Mica. Absolutely.”

  They both grinned at that. He could chop the bad guys into fine soyburger as long as he wasn’t too loud and obvious about it, Cutter knew. Within the ROE, there was a lot of leeway, and as long as he didn’t make the local commander look bad, nobody gave a toad’s ass. And if he could make him look good? So much the better.

  Never hurt to have TotalMart call up your commander and allow that you were a fine fellow well met.

  Sett didn’t speak to Cutter’s history, nor did Cutter expect that he would. Sett would know what had happened, the Army underground com being what it was. No point in bringing up bad memories.

  “Seriously, Rags, I need to keep a low profile here. I come away from this posting without any fuss, my name shows up on the lists. I get the star holograms, I wind up a Systems Commander somewhere comfortable, nice bump in pay, the usual perks, a good place to park until we get another shooting war.”

  “Not my job to screw that up,” Cutter said. “This should be a by-the-numbers operation. The opposition hasn’t thrown anything at us we can’t handle, and unless they up their game, we’ll run them down and be done here, a few weeks, maybe less.”

  Sett nodded. “You will keep me in the circuit?”

  “Sure. Nothing to report yet, but soon as we get something, I’ll pass it along.”

  “Thanks. You were always a stand-up soldier. I have to run; base command is like being nibbled to death by ladybugs. Maybe we can get together and clink glasses.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Good talking to you,” Sett said.

  After they disconnected, Cutter smiled to himself. He and Mica Sett had met as lieutenants together a lifetime ago, bumped into each other a few times since. They hadn’t been best buddies, only had a nodding acquaintance, different platoons, working soldiers in the same action; still, Sett would cut him a little slack based on that. The good old days always seemed better in distant memory than they had actually been at the time.

  Not that he thought he would need much slack. This didn’t look to be complicated as an op; at least not so far. And better that the local army commander was inclined to give you a break than not. Take what you could get.

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  Formentara said, “If you would.” Zhe gestured toward the table.

  Jo nodded and reclined on the padded support. The field hummed as she entered it, and Formentara began waving hir hands over the control panel, initiating the system’s reader. The room smelled faintly like patchouli, but even with her augmented senses, Jo couldn’t nail down the source of the pleasant odor.

  Formentara went into hir work trance.

  Jo never forgot how lucky she was to have somebody with such outlandishly good skill adjusting her augs. Formentara was a genius, second to nobody when it came to this. Not only did zhe create new augs that went from luxury to necessity in short order, zhe was the best there was at maintaining installations. The level of complexity in somebody with more than a few augs was mind-numbingly complicated because of the imperfection of cybernetic interfaces. Your biology suffered, hormone systems, major organs, the balance of this and that, they were all prey to damage. Most if it was minor, but it added up over time. Some if it could be repaired, but some of it could not be.

  Somebody with one major aug up and running lopped around five years off his or her life span. Five augs, could be twenty-five years. Aug hogs who ran twenty systems? They were pretty much fated to live fast, die young, and leave hideous corpses. You could be superwoman, but you paid the price, and the run wasn’t long.

  Jo currently had fourteen augs. Which meant that she could expect to live to be seventy, maybe eighty, out of a normal span of 150 years. That was the cost, and because of who she was and how she had come to be that way, she had elected to pay it. That’s how it went. Nobody lives forever.

  But when she’d come under Formentara’s care, that had gotten her a snort. “Camel cark!” No reason she couldn’t live out a normal span if a technomedic kept things balanced properly.

  And how many technomedics could properly balance that many systems? Jo had asked.

  Counting Formentara hirself? Two. Maybe three . . .

  “Okay, that’s it,”
Formentara said, breaking into Jo’s memory. “All done.”

  “Everything okay?”

  Zhe laughed. “You are kidding, right? Of course everything is okay. You forget who you are talking to here?”

  Jo sat up.

  Formentara’s smile seemed a little forced, and Jo’s ability to read such things was also augmented. She had inbuilt stress analyzers. Lies were pretty easy. Fugue was a little harder.

  “What?”

  “What ‘what’?” Formentara said.

  “Listen, you know how good my microexpression reader is, you installed it. What?”

  Formentara nodded. “Hoist on my own petard.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means I should have known you’d pick it up.” Zhe paused. “You are running out of room, Jo. You are balanced now, but . . .”

  Jo nodded. “So if you come up with some neat new toy, I can’t have it?”

  “I didn’t say that. But there are limits to what even I can manage. Two, maybe three more, that’s it. What that means is, you will have to be more careful in your choices. Once you hit the limit, I’m not going to give you any more.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m not sure you do, but that’s the deal, remember.”

  “Yes.”

  And it made sense; everything had a limit, even the edge of the universe was out there somewhere. She couldn’t be immune to that.

  As a soldier, Jo’s combatware was useful, and she had more of that than anybody she knew still walking around. Some of the others—com, proprioceptives, high-end sensories—were icing on the cake. Being tended by Formentara was priceless, and if she decided to sneak off and get another aug elsewhere, that would be elective suicide—it might take a couple of decades, but she’d be going down, no question.

  If Formentara couldn’t keep her stable, nobody could.

  Of course, she could be KIA on any op—that was part of the risk.

  She had good reasons why she had started along this road. And the pull to keep going farther was an addiction, as much as a chemhead’s lust for drugs or a wirehead’s hunger for juice.

  To be stronger, faster, smarter, more impervious to pain or injury, able to do what no ordinary human could do? It was a powerful draw. How many humans could play hand-to-hand with a Vastalimi and hold their own? How many could see into the red or violet, hear radio waves, stand on one foot with their eyes closed for as long as they wanted?

  Not many.

  Mostly, she didn’t think about it. Now and then, it shone through her mind. The candle that burns brighter burns out faster. She’d accepted that. But once Formentara had told her she could have both? It was a miracle. She’d be foolish to give that up.

  Still . . .

  “Well. I’ll just get more picky,” she said.

  “Maybe I won’t come up with anything else you’ll want.”

  They both grinned at that one.

  “That might be. What are you working on?”

  “Ultimate orgasmware,” zhe said.

  “Shit you are!”

  Formentara laughed. “Well. I could if I wanted.”

  “Every male in the galaxy would want to buy that one. And more than a few fems, too. You could retire a multibillionaire in a couple of weeks.”

  “I could. But where would the fun be in that? I already have more money than I know what to do with. Why would I need more?

  “Okay, you’re done. Come back for a recheck next month.”

  “Yeshir.”

  FIVE

  Wink was a good medic, better than many, but his expertise was in meatball surgery and battlefield vectors. He could take care of the problems that arose in a small military unit most of the time. Injuries, diseases, allergies, what usually afflicted troops on an active operation. Cuts, breaks, burns, bullet wounds, STDs, flu, neuroses and psychoses, malfunctioning augs, a boxcar of things. What the machines couldn’t DX, he could usually manage on his own. He had enough training to know how to isolate and treat unknown bugs on an alien world that rarely affected humans, a decent knowledge of field epidemiology; but he was not a number cruncher who could program a shitload of esoteric information into a computer and have it spit out a miracle cure for something that a million other scientists had tried to do and failed.

  Still, there was the chance that his eyes might spot something the Vastalimi Healers had missed, if only because they didn’t look at things the way humans did.

  But as he looked at the Holographic Impious Particle microscope’s scan, he didn’t see anything that pointed him in a direction. He had already viewed dozens of tissue samples, and if there was an unknown bug in them, he hadn’t spotted it.

  The old Vastalimi, Luque, had given him the run of the lab, and while he got more than a few curious looks as he poked around, nobody had bothered him. Luque ran a tight ship, and any of the employees who wanted to cause trouble apparently didn’t last long. Just as well. He didn’t want to use that as-I-stand phrase if he didn’t have to.

  Not as if Wink was averse to risks; he had danced with Death more than a few times, and while he didn’t tell people, some of them knew: He enjoyed it. But there was the dance and there was suicide, and he wasn’t suicidal. Fighting with Vastalimi might as well be that for most humans. Maybe Jo could keep up with one, all her augs. He couldn’t, and he knew it.

  He looked at the scan again. A view into the depths of a brain cell, and each organelle was accounted for, there weren’t any anomalies not in the catalogue. Nothing missing, nothing that shouldn’t be there.

  You could compare every bit of this or that against what it was supposed to look like in an ideal state and see how it stacked up. Some parts were perfect, others less so, but there weren’t any foreign invaders who didn’t belong—no tiny sharks swimming in the Cytoplasm Seas, no dragons dug into the periplasmic caves.

  Surely, if something was too small for the HIP scope to detect, it would be too small to do what the illness was doing to the Vastalimi?

  If it was an infective agent at all . . .

  Wink rubbed at his eyes. If the Vastalimi researchers hadn’t seen it, he wasn’t apt to, either; they saw farther into the red and violet than humans by a considerable margin, and the problem wasn’t fresh eyes, human or otherwise.

  No, they were missing something, there was a blind spot, and the nature of such things was that if you knew what it was, it wouldn’t be a blind spot . . .

  He’d have to talk to Kay about it, but his feeling was that she was probably onto something when she said it felt artificial. The Vastalimi had lived on this planet for millions of years, and pretty much any pathogen that could have arisen naturally had, as far as Wink could tell. Sometimes you figured out what something wasn’t rather than what it was, and what was left was your answer.

  And sometimes you didn’t find an answer at all.

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  “Got a visitor,” Gramps said. “Probably you want to see him.”

  Cutter, bored with background reports he had put off reading and not unhappy to find another reason to put them off a while longer, said, “Send him in.”

  “Best of the afternoon, Colonel, sah.”

  “Singh? I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  The young man, all of twenty or so, approached, back straight, to stand in front of Cutter’s desk.

  “At ease, Singh, have a seat.”

  He did so.

  “So you’ve come to take me up on my offer.”

  “Yes, sah. You do not seem surprised to see me.”

  “Yes and no. I know you were loyal to the Rajah despite his, um . . . behavior. But I heard he died. So on the one hand, you could have stayed on Ananda and not had that complication any longer. Then again, with him gone, you would be free to work where you wish if your hitch was up.
<
br />   “Long way from there to here.”

  “And it took most of my savings to afford the trip.”

  Cutter smiled. How great it must be to be young and enthusiastic enough to pack everything into a shipping trunk and space halfway across the galaxy, hoping there’d be a job when you got there. Surely the gods did sometimes watch out for fools and children . . .

  “Well, as it happens, we are always on the lookout for loyal and experienced troops. I know about the loyalty, and while you haven’t had as much time in the field as we normally prefer, I also know the quality of your training was first-rate, given as how it came from us. And that you can pull a trigger when it needs to be pulled.

  “Go see Gunny. She’ll find you a bunk and get you squared away.”

  The boy’s face lit up in pure joy.

  “Thank you, sah! My debt is boundless!”

  Cutter shook his head. “You’ll earn your pay, Singh, and Gunny will work your ass ragged.” But from the boy’s smile, Cutter knew that hard work wasn’t any kind of impediment, not even on his pradar . . .

  SIX

  As they finished their midday meal, still-warm foof-rats with a pungent blood sauce, Droc said, “So, how are things? As you recall them?”

  She picked a bit of meat from between two teeth with her forefinger’s claw, flicked it onto the plate. “Mostly. Many of the faces are different, but the flow seems to be the same.”

  “Your meal was acceptable?”

  “Quite tasty. So much for the canard about bolnica food being uniformly awful.”

  “Well-fed patients behave better. Can’t have them getting up to go seek prey because the food stinks.”

  She nodded. “I do find it somewhat odd that I haven’t gotten any Challenges,” she said. “It has been several days, and I expected at least a few.”

  “Disappointed?” Droc gave her the briefest of smiles.