The Vastalimi Gambit

by Steve Perry

  “Going to call your sister?”

  “Why would I? We have nothing new to report.”

  He shrugged.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “I am Drocmasc,” the Vastalimi said.

  Of the humans, Jo was likely the only one who could see a family resemblance among the three siblings. It was in the carriage, the facial features, maybe even the voices. It was plain to see with Droc and Leeth standing side by side, and had Kay been here, she would have fit right in. Of course, Jo had spent a lot of time with Kay.

  Droc looked at Em, who rattled off something in their language. Jo had but a few words of that, and hadn’t lit a translator, but it was apparent there was some kind of formality involved in the greeting. Interesting, since Kay had never been big on ceremonial greetings, considering them a waste of time.

  “Leeth tells us that you have found a cause for the disease?” That from Rags.

  “With the help of your medic, Wink Doctor,” Droc said. “He saw a trail we had not seen.”

  “Bet he loved that,” Gunny said.

  Droc continued: “The agent is not natural, nor a pathogen per se, but a kind of complicated poison that creates a toxin. The body’s defenses cannot overcome its own reactions. This lessens the worry about an epidemic.”

  “But makes it a crime,” Leeth added. “For which the perpetrators will be found and punished.”

  “This is what Kay and Doc are doing?” Jo asked.

  “Yes. They follow leads.”

  “And you don’t know where they are?” Rags said.

  “My sister prefers to do things her own way. She has not informed me of her movements, save generally. She will probably check in within a few days, at which time I can tell her that you have arrived.”

  “Or we can go look for her ourselves,” Cutter said. He wondered: If Kay had called her sister, wouldn’t Leeth have her com number?

  Maybe she just didn’t want to give it to her . . .

  “That would not be the wisest path. You are unfamiliar with our laws and social mores. Wandering around on your own could put you in no small amount of danger.”

  Jo saw all of her team grin at that though they kept those expressions close-lipped.

  “We have Mish here as a native guide.”

  Leeth looked at Em, rattled off a spate of Vastalimi, of which Jo caught three or four words.

  Em responded, her tone deferential but not overly so.

  “Still,” she said, switching to Basic, “half a dozen humans will cause a stir wherever they go. I would prefer that you keep an escort should you risk traveling around the city.”

  Cutter said, “Of course. We don’t want to be part of the problem.”

  Jo held her grin. They had no intention of allowing a tail to stay with them when they went looking for Kay and Wink. And if the local cops believed they would, that might make it easier to lose them.

  “We will take you to a place where you can stay,” Leeth said.

  Formentara said to Droc, “Any progress on a cure for the toxin?”

  He looked at her. “No, nor do we expect any. The goal is to catch those responsible and stop them from doing further harm. Those who have already been infected are dead or dying, and other than palliative care, there is nothing to be done for them. By the time we know, it is too late. Tzit dogoditi se.”

  Jo knew that phrase, she had heard Kay use it several times. Shit happens.

  She glanced at Rags. He gave her the tiniest of shrugs.

  Hard people, the Vastalimi.

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  Kay and Wink arrived at another big house, not as rustic as the hunting guide’s but large enough to get lost in. They were admitted by a servant and led down another tall and wide hall into a big room, again with vaulted ceilings. They really seemed to like that here.

  Instead of stuffed trophy animals or their heads, however, the hall and walls were home to paintings, with sculptures on stands here and there, including a couple of busts of Vastalimi, as well as quarter-sized statuettes of The People. All carefully lighted to show them to their best advantage.

  “You suppose all this art was done by Jares?”

  Kay shrugged. “Who can say? They look enough alike to have been rendered by the same hands.”

  “They any good? They look pretty good to me.”

  “They display a mastery of the craft. That statue of the pair of running vepar? Very dynamic and just slightly exaggerated anatomically, for effect. That twice-life-sized painting of the div macka? The big cat? It looks almost alive, the colors are vibrant, electric, and it is as good as any such illustration I have seen. This artist knows exactly what he is doing.”

  “Thank you,” came the voice from behind them.

  Wink turned and saw something he had not seen before:

  A fat Vastalimi.

  Not morbidly obese, but certainly carrying fifteen or twenty kilos of excess weight, most of it in the belly and hips. Huh. He hadn’t really thought about that before, but now that he saw this one, it struck him: These people were in better shape than any other intelligent species he’d been around.

  Jares caught Wink’s look. “I am Jares. I don’t hunt as much as I once did. Too much sitting in front of a canvas or a mound of clay these days. Makes staying fit hard.

  “Please, sit, have some refreshments. How may I assist a fem with such good taste in art? And a human? I don’t suppose you’d consider posing for me? I haven’t had a chance to sculpt a human before.”

  Kay said, “I suspect you know who we are and why we are here if our experiences of late are any indication.”

  Jares whickered. “Yes, that is so. Certain of my . . . ah . . . colleagues have contacted me. Let me echo them: You are growling at the wrong burrow, Kluth. None of us would do such a terrible thing.”

  “This from a Vastalimi who arranges assassination by Challenge?”

  He whickered again. “Allegedly arranged such assassinations, dear fem. If the Shadows had proof, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because I would be dead. Besides, my work has gained a certain favor among collectors; it provides all that I need or want. Even if I had once engaged in such illegal activity as you suggest? Those days would be behind me.”

  He looked at Wink. “I expect I could get a hundred thousand ND for a statue of you, maybe more. Pose for me, you can have half of what I get.”

  Wink shook his head. A human could make a good living on this world, assuming he lived long enough to collect the money . . .

  “Are we being recorded?” Jares asked.

  “Not by us,” Kay responded.

  “Then let us be candid, dear fem. Whoever has unleashed this plague upon the people is a monster. Those of us who have, from time to time, trodden upon paths less—shall we say—pristine, in realms not strictly legal, have certainly done things that most would shun. But even we have our standards, our ethics, and no Vastalimi in my acquaintance would lower him- or herself to such a vile depth.

  “It is perhaps natural to assume that those who pander to vices—drugs, sex, gambling and the like—would be where to seek one who’d inflict wholesale death upon his or her fellows: If you want a serpent, you go to where the serpents slither. However, in this case . . . ?”

  “Your reasoning seems specious. Kill one, kill a hundred, it is only a matter of numbers.”

  “Really? Then consider it from a different stance: It would be extremely bad for business. Such a heinous crime, if it has been determined that this is the case, will draw the most vigorous response from the Sena anything has drawn in my memory. They will turn over every rock, poke into every crack, dig up every buried bone looking for the perpetrators. Nobody who sells a cloudstik, accepts a wager on a game, sends out a paid companion would be safe from scrutiny. And in the looking, other things would certainly turn up that
many would prefer to stay hidden.

  “Who among us would call that down upon him- or herself? How stupid would you have to be to not-know what a scatstorm you’d create?”

  Kay nodded, and Wink found himself also doing so. Yeah. Somebody smart enough to create this killer infection and get it out there was not going to be categorized as “stupid” . . .

  “We have taken up too much of your time,” Kay said, as she came to her feet.

  “Not at all, dear fem. In this matter, I am as willing as any Vastalimi to help.” He looked at Wink. “If you remain on our world for a time, please consider my offer to become my model. It would be my honor to have you as a subject. Three-quarters of our fee?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Excellent!”

  As they walked away, Kay said quietly to Wink, “Better than your last offer.”

  “I’m not sure of that. Jares seems to have a big appetite. Who knows what he might do after the sculpture got done . . . ?”

  She whickered.

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  “So are we gonna go find Doc and Kay?”

  “Oh, yeah, Gunny, we are,” Rags said. He turned to Formentara. “No bugs?”

  “No.”

  Not “None that I can find.” Just “No.”

  “Okay. Here’s the deal: Em, can you secure a vehicle large enough to haul us around without being visible? As soon as possible?”

  “Of course. It might be tricky to make sure the Sena don’t know about it, but I still have some contacts here who can help. We will need at least two—we leave in one, go to a hidden location, and switch to the second. The first can continue on to lay a trail—Vastalimi are very good trackers, none better than the Shadows. If we bring that one to a place nearby where they might see it? They will be looking for that.”

  “Good. We’ll need a diversion for the watchers to get going. Gramps?”

  “How about Ah take care of that part?”

  Gramps looked at Gunny: “You still pissed off at me for shooting that APC on Far Bundaloh, ain’tcha?”

  “Look up ‘killjoy’ in the pedia, there’s a picture of you,” she said.

  “I thought you said that was next to the entry for ‘dirt.’”

  “Different picture, but still you.” She smiled. “Singh can help me, he needs to learn some more about the fog of war.”

  The young man smiled at her. “Sah.”

  “Fine,” Cutter said, “you can create the diversion. Formentara, can you rig up something so they think we’re still here?”

  Zhe stared at him as if he had turned into a giant roach. “Excuse me? To whom do you think you are talking?”

  Cutter grinned. “It was a joke.”

  “Not funny,” zhe said.

  “Your reaction was,” Jo said.

  “Remember that next time I tune you up—I might decide to give you a nervous tic.”

  “Let’s move it along,” Cutter said. “We have colleagues to find.”

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  “Now what?”

  Kay said, “Something is wrong here. Jares said it: This is too large a hammer to squash gnats. Some of the worst criminals would happily torture an enemy to a long and painful end, but none of those who have been killed by the infection seem important enough to justify such a wide-ranging attack.”

  “Maybe one of them really pissed somebody off?”

  She shook her head. “It does not make sense. It is too complicated—a couple of missiles that would take out a compound? Simple. If you wanted to hide it, you could fire a score of such rockets at different targets to cloud the investigation.

  “Vastalimi tend to be more direct about such things.”

  “But we don’t know that whoever did this was after just one person. Maybe they are crazy, and they just wanted to create a panic?”

  “Vastalimi don’t panic. Tzit dogoditi se. We all know this.”

  “Doesn’t rule out ‘crazy.’”

  “No. There are those who are mentally disturbed. And if it is truly random? That will make it almost impossible to find them. However, it does not feel like madness. There is a purpose here. Find out why, we can uncover who.”

  “Brings me back to my question: What now?”

  “There is one more possibility about which I have been thinking. You know the phrase that Demonde Gramps sometimes uses? ‘Follow the money’?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Perhaps somebody has made a profit from this infection, the deaths.”

  “Who? Undertakers? Insurance sellers?”

  She shrugged. “I cannot say, and while the idea of somebody’s doing this for money seems particularly outrageous, especially for a Vastalimi, it is something to be considered. We might be looking for a different kind of criminal altogether.”

  “You need to call your sister in on this?”

  “She would be able to find out such information, she’ll have access to banking records. However, there are others with access to these data.”

  “Anybody you know?”

  “Yes. I’ll put in a com to Jak.”

  “Jak.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just to make him dance because you can?”

  “That would be but an additional benefit.”

  He chuckled.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “We about ready?”

  Jo nodded. She accessed her aug and its chronometer. “Five minutes from . . . now.”

  “Formentara?”

  Zhe looked at the tracker zhe held in hir hand, half the size of hir palm. “I got Wink located. He’s way the hell and gone away from here, 394 kilometers to the northeast.”

  “You tried his com’s opchan?”

  “You enjoy insulting me, Colonel?”

  Rags grinned.

  “If they are on com, they are way out of range, assuming they are even using any of the usual bands or their own equipment.”

  “Just checking.”

  “You should check on people who need it.”

  Em said, “Our vehicle should be on-station. The escape window will be small and will close quickly.”

  Rags nodded. “Everybody set?”

  They were.

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  Gunny and Singh crouched behind a power transformer that routed energy for the area. The device, the size of a small van, was marked with a danger sigil, but there was no barrier around it, no fence, nothing.

  Singh had remarked upon this: “But is this not dangerous? Anybody could wander over here and accidentally hurt themselves. Or do as we are about to do.”

  “Yep. Ah asked Em about it. She said they don’t spend much time and energy protecting stupid folks from themselves. The symbol for danger should be enough.”

  “What if a passerby cannot read the sign?”

  “Tough shit. Improves the gene pool.”

  He nodded. “I understand that people sometimes take that to extremes. I remember a shipment of carbines we imported once. There was an imprint on the barrels, warning users not to point the muzzles in unsafe directions.”

  She chuckled. “Has to do with legal liability. You’d think anybody smart enough to pull a trigger would know what the gun was for, but apparently there are some who aren’t. Not that they’d be smart enough to read the fuckin’ warning and understand it, either, but there you go. All right. Let’s move.”

  The two of them came up and moved away from the transformer.

  They kept to the shadows, and there were plenty of those. They didn’t see anybody else on the street as they headed for an alley nearby.

  “Two minutes,” Gunny said quietly.

  “Stet that,” came Cutter’s voice in her earbud.

  “So here we have the basic ingredients in the art of di
straction,” Gunny said to Singh, as they walked toward the rendezvous point. “When in doubt, wait until dark, turn off the lights, and blow shit up. Gets people’s attention stat.”

  “Sah.”

  “Now, since we aren’t in a hostile situation with regard to our hosts here, we don’t want to cause a lot of damage. So the popper shorts out a switch on the transformer, don’t cost much to fix, but the neighborhood gets dark. Well, darker, since they keep things kinda dim around here anyhow.

  “And the light and noise from the spew-rocket draws their attention since it’ll be the only thing to look at, come the sudden darkness.”

  “And while they are looking at that, CFI sneaks away,” Singh said.

  “There you go. And Formentara will have rigged up something so they hear voices and see things behind the window shades. I expect it won’t take ’em long to catch on, but by then, we’re long gone, and we haven’t done much damage and probably broken no more’n a couple of minor laws.”

  “Still, I cannot imagine they will be happy with us, the Vastalimi police.”

  “You step onto a mat for a sparring match, and the other player smacks you in the nose, whose fault is that? You know what he intends to do, and you know what to do to prevent it. He hits you? You need to be better.”

  “Sah.”

  “Not our job to make ’em happy. They supposed to be watching us, so if we get away, and they miss it? Their fault. Everybody knows how tricky humans are.”

  Singh grinned. “Yes, sah.”

  She accessed her timer. “Got about a minute. Best we move along.”

  _ _ _ _ _ _

  The laser rocket had been programmed to emulate a series of explosive-artillery airbursts a couple of hundred meters up. It wouldn’t fool anybody for long, but the flashes and attendant booms! set to go thirty seconds after the transformer shut off power would be impossible to miss—and you wouldn’t be able to tear your gaze away for the duration. Like humans, Vastalimi eyes were attracted to motion, and a light in the darkness? They’d have to look at it.

  All they needed was thirty seconds to get clear, and once that happened, Jo knew, they were golden.