He shuts up at once, of course, and stops walking, leaning against a faux-brick wall and making a great show of staring at his fingers and touching them together the way that a mental patient on pyschotropes would do. The show apparently convinces the lizzies, who make the hissy snigger that does their race for a giggle and hurry out of the alley and down the street out of sight. For a moment Tomaso merely leans against the wall and breathes, hard at first, then slowly, trying to calm himself down and ignore the eater, whispering now of apples and fresh greens that seem to be close by, just beyond the wall, in fact. He straightens up, growing tense, remembering that when he was twisting Jack Mulligan’s mind he stumbled into a patch of memories about a garden, a lush vegetable garden in Porttown. At the end of the alley a three-dee block sign rattles in the wind: A to Z Enterprises.
He focuses his mind and sends it out, picking up a faint trace of Mulligan’s mind-print, but an old one and overlaid with two other psychic minds, one also faint, the other very much present. Although Mulligan indisputably stayed in this warehouse some time ago, he’s now gone. The other mind, however weak and untrained, suddenly notices him: he can feel a cold suspicion, then a hatred born of alarm. Hastily he throws up a block and hurries away, turning out of the alley and walking fast down the street that will lead him away from the gates of the port itself. He has no desire to wander too close to officialdom and have someone ask him for papers—not that his papers wouldn’t pass muster, mind, but anyone looking at them would be bound to pick up the vinegar stench that now hangs around him like a fog.
Still aware of that watching psionic mind, (and it seems to be female) he circles round to the other side of the warehouse and finds another alley that leads back to the wall. Although there are no visible alarms on top of the faux brick, in a shirt pocket he has a device, disguised as a credit chip, that can pick up traces of electronic or pulse fields, and he can feel its warning warmth through his shirt. At the rusty door on the loading dock he hesitates, wondering if killing the psychic inside might be more dangerous than it’s worth even as he reaches for the sonic lockpick he carries hidden inside his right sleeve. Before he can slide it free, he feels the clumsy touch of John Hancock’s mind, amplified by the device he left behind in the Rat Yard.
Great and almighty God, thy servant calls out >to thee< even in the depthswilderness. Harken, oh Lord > prayermine.
The Lord thy God hears
Almighty God, we
No genuine deity was ever more pleased by a worshipper’s offering than Tomaso is by this prospective blood sacrifice. Mulligan—it has to be Mulligan!
The Lord thy God is pleased. >More pleased ONCE| has spy in his hands. Whatyou desire as reward?
Whiskey rye whiskey rye whiskey we cry...
Manna, you dope! Its name: manna. God no give you lousy plain whiskey.
I grovel before thee, Lord of Hosts. Manna it is.
From behind him Tomaso hears one soft scrape, a boot-sole on plastocrete. Drawing his knife even as he thrusts out his right leg in a pivot, he swirls around to see two men, swathed in suncloaks, watching him from about three meters away. One of them has his right hand just out of the slit in the cloak, and he’s holding the squat gray nozzle of a spray-field laser carbine.
“Dunt leave much to chance, huh, dude?” Tomaso says.
“Mayor kind of wants to see you, pal. Drop the knife.”
Instead Tomaso hurls himself sideways, right off the loading dock, and rolls as he hits the ground. With his left hand he snaps the knife straight into the back of the man with the laser; with his right he draws a pistol of his own and fires. The edge of his enemy’s fire-field singes his cloak and sets it burning, but his own solid-beam shot drops the other with a scream. He rolls again, twisting up, ignoring the heat and the scorching pain along his side, and fires a second time, drilling a hole right through the second target’s helmet. By then the smoke is rising into his own helmet, choking him, making him gag, but he concentrates his mind as much as steadies his hands and pulls it free just in time, hurling the cloak down to burn on the plastocrete with one last exhalation of greasy black smoke up into the pink twilight, a beacon that’s bound to call attention from blocks around. Coughing and staggering, he staggers forward and grabs his knife free with a spurt of blood.
MINE!!!
A sensation rather than a word, the concept burns in his mind worse than the pain of his charred skin. The eater wants the corpses, wants to roil and welter in their blood, and so strong is the compulsion that he slits one man’s throat before he can stop himself. Of their own accord his infected hands reach for the red wetness.
“No! I won’t!”
He chokes again, realizing he’s spoken aloud, and stands there retching without quite vomiting for a long minute. His burned side throbs and stinks of charred cloth and flesh. From behind him someone coughs, a warning of infinite politeness.
The bloody knife still in his hand, Tomaso spins around and sees that he’s been watched, the entire time, most likely. Sitting in a door niche is an old man, egg-bald and dressed only in a yellow T-shirt, much too large for him, and a pair of filthy orange shorts. His mahogany-brown legs are thin as sticks and his bare feet, swollen with calluses.
“How long have you been there?” Tomaso hears his voice snap and snarl, but he’s furious with himself, that he could be so stupid as to overlook a sentient not more than five or six meters from him, especially one who emits no psionic signal whatsover.
“Long enough.”
The ancient eyes watch calmly from their nest of wrinkles as Tomaso strides over and raises the knife, watch unblinking, unsmiling, merely watch. Tomaso hesitates.
“Eating and being eaten.” The stiff, cracking voice is perfectly calm, conversational, really, as if he were discussing baseball scores. “The ultimate revolve of the wheel of life and death is eating and being eaten in turn.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nada.”
Again Tomaso hesitates, painfully aware that he has to hurry, should just kill the old man, this final witness, and run for the Rat Yard. The brown eyes watch, never moving from his face.
“Ah shit!” Tomaso turns on his heel and leaves him be.
As he races down the alley and out into the street, the pain in his side first flares, then ebbs with a feeling of oozing cold. The eater—all at once he realizes that the eater is busily munching up the burnt dead flesh and excreting some cooling, numbing fluid in return. He stops running, merely stands there on the sidewalk and gasps for breath while the eater does its work. When he glances back, the old man in the yellow T-shirt is gone, off at a public comm, most likely, calling the mysterious mayor of Porttown.
He should run for the cover of the Alliance Embassy. Tomaso knows it suddenly, knows that he’s failed, knows that begging asylum from his masters is his last chance at life, although he’s willing to bet they’ll turn him down. The H’Allevae dislike failure, very much indeed. In a specially treated and hollow molar at the back of his jaw lurks poison like the liqueur in the center of a chocolate, offering one good bite and then death. As his tongue touches the tooth, ever so lightly, he feels the eater panting in anticipation, drooling at the prospect of melting his body in one last orgasm of feeding before it too expires for lack of further food. It hates him now, he realizes, because by refusing to bathe in his victims’ blood he’s kept the eater from spreading to their corpses and thus doomed it to die with him.
The boy’s voice is screaming in his mind. He glances at his hands, expecting to find them bloody from the long banging on the metal door, but they are still the muscled heavy hands of a man who knows how to kill in an amazing variety of ways. He is free of the locked room with the endless waterfall rippling down but going nowhere. He will never go back to that room again. He makes up his mind about that right t
here and then.
Just under his breath he starts to laugh at a joke that only he can see. The punch line is this: even though he’s lived his life alone, he’s not going to die that way.
Chapter Seven
When his jerry-rigged expedition sets off again for the Rat Yard, Bates slaves the autodrive of his skimmer into the controls of the riot van ahead of him, then gets on the comm in earnest. He loads Akeli’s access code first, because from long experience he assumes that the PBI chief will wait to return his call, no matter how urgent things are. He is pleasantly surprised when in just a few seconds his comm unit beeps to let him know that Akeli is on the other end of the link.
“Bates, how fortuitous you should contact me so quickly.” On the viewer Akeli’s face is ashy-gray. “In the words of the old military joke, the excremental matter has impacted the mechanical air-circulation device. I have been on comm with the president for almost an hour. This amnesty plea on the part of the H’Allevae suspect is threatening to turn into an intersystem incident of the first degree.”
“And the first degree means troops?”
“Damn right.” Akeli scares himself into brief clarity. “Carli troops, if we don’t cover our ass just right.”
Bates makes a gargling sort of groan deep in his throat.
“The carli ambassador has apparently seen an opportunity to expand the carli sphere of influence,” Akeli goes on. “It seems that they have known for some time about the existence of a possibility of a first contact.”
“Damn Ka Pral! He’s been stringing me along, then.”
“I wouldn’t put it so harshly. He himself was under orders from the ambassador to maintain ambiguity. He contacted me personally to explain that fact and asked me to convey his regrets to you for any unavoidable deception he may have perpetrated. Frankly, I think the situation was unclear even to him until a few hours ago. But at any rate, the ambassador has declared the carli race to be, and I quote a translated title, Protectors of the Unknown and Helpless Ones.”
“Shee-it! And of course the Alliance protested.”
“Of course. And so the president...” Akeli pauses to gulp air like a rutting frog. “So the president claimed prior rights to offer protection, based on the presence of this alien sentient on our sovereign territory.”
“She aced them both out? I no savvy whether to swear or cheer. But where does the dead Hopper come in?”
“Both the carlis and our president have declared themselves unconvinced by the official explanation of his death. They have both offered amnesty to his head wife, or head widow now I suppose, as well as to the chief neuter in his bed-family. The Confederation is now demanding that they be turned over to a joint force of humans and carlis. If they aren’t removed from the embassy, of course, they will be tortured in a court of law to give evidence against their late husband.”
“Yeah, I know the Hopper idea of legal proceedings, thanks, but jeez, a joint force?”
“A joint force. That means carli marines on-world.”
Bates would like to swear, but he simply has no breath for it.
“You’ve got to find this alien with all celerity, Bates. We are postulating a margin of perhaps twenty hours. Not days, Bates—standard hours.”
“I hear you. Once the carlis have troops down here, they just might never take’em off again—unless maybe resinated into body slabs for that last long orbit around their sun.”
“That is indeed preying upon my mind. But once we have the alien under our protection, we will have a bargaining chip that cannot be ignored. For a share of mercantile rights with this new people, the carlis will doubtless agree that a squad of our troops would be sufficient protection for the widow and the ex-lover or whatever they would call the neuter now. Understand me? All celerity.”
“Yeah, I—” Bates suddenly smiles as the idea comes to him, or rather comes back to him, that simple little joke Lacey made earlier in this shared nightmare. “Oh hey, man, I got an idea.”
“Indeed? Something that will disallow a carli military presence on Hagar?”
“Something that’s going to keep any kind of troops out of Polar City for sure and probably off the rest of the planet, too, yeah. Uh, but look, this is got to be handled just right, or we’re going to have panic in the streets.” Bates hesitates, thinking fast. He cannot trust Akeli to put this idea in motion; the PBI boss is likely to panic himself and release the news too soon. “I got to do more research, man, before I can risk talking about it over comm like this. But I want you to do one thing for me, okay? I bet you got reporters swarming round you like flies.”
“Unfortunately your metaphor is entirely appropriate.”
“I want you to drop a couple of hints that there may be a medical emergency brewing in Polar City, something you don’t understand, but, and tell’em this exactly as I tell it to you: the doctors are working on it, and there’s no need for people to get upset.”
“Good God, Bates, if I attempt to reassure the populace in those vague terms, of course alarm and restiveness will ensue.”
“You got it, baby. That’s just what I want to happen, a lot of people wondering what’s coming down.”
“Myself included. What do you mean, medical emergency?”
“Told you, I got to do more research. But if I’m right, we can leak a story to the press, say by tomorrow morning, that’ll have the carlis running for their ships as fast as their furry little legs will take’em.”
“Oho! I begin to discern the drift of this scheme. Very well, I shall employ portentiousness and wiles.”
“Why the hell can’t you just use plain Merrkan, damn you? But yeah, I think you’re getting the point. Get on to it right away, man. It’s a lousy long shot, but jeezchrist, that’s all we got left to us now.”
Bates powers out with the punch of a toggle that makes his unit beep in protest.
“Sorry,” he says. “Call in to HQ, will you?”
An overexcited clerk on the Duty Desk switches him straight through to Parsons, who sounds remarkably wide-awake. No doubt the news he repeats gave him a good shot of adrenalin when he first heard it. Right after Bates left headquarters, an anonymous citizen phoned in to report two dead bodies lying in the gutter not far from A to Z Enterprises. One had his face blasted away with a laser, and the other was stabbed in the back and had his throat cut for good measure. Now that things have been cleaned up at the scene of the crime, two officers are working the neighborhood trying to find witnesses, most likely a futile job in Porttown but one that has to be done.
“Sounds like the killings are related to this assassin, yeah,” Bates says.
“Well, we’re pretty sure they are, el jefe.” Parsons sounds oddly hesitant. “Uh, once we had the corpses down at the coroner, we got another call.”
“Yeah? Same guy?”
“Nah. This one was a donna. Uh, she claimed to be calling for the Mayor of Porttown.”
“She-it! Think she was some kind of crank?”
“If she is, she’s sure the most convincing one I ever heard. Look, she told us that the Mayor had his own reasons for wanting this killer gone, and that he’s been like tracking him. Gave us a real clear description, told us what he’d been doing all day, the assassin I mean, not the Mayor. And here’s the clincher. She told us that there was another corpse in a hotel room in the Outworld Bazaar, and when I sent a pair of officers down there, sure enough, they found one. The dude’s throat was slit just like all the others.”
“You got that conversation on tape? Yeah? Good—feed it straight into the minicomp over this frequency. I’ll go over it good while we’re driving. I no suppose the Mayor’s secretary or whatever she is knows where this asshole is now.”
“She got a good idea. Someone saw him heading for the Rat Yard in a stolen van, she says.”
“Oh yeah? Swell! We’re almost there ourselves.”
“Sure hope it’s swell. She says he’s armed to the max.”
“Oh hell, man. I could fi
gure that out for myself.”
oOo
Curled up on the back seat of the Bentley, Nunks has fallen into a state halfway between trance and waking. Although he’s dimly aware of the outside world—the soft leather under him, the hum of the skimmer, Sam and Lacey’s voices coming from the front seat—most of his consciousness is focused on Mulligan. He has a double job, to maintain constant contact with the little brother while at the same time keeping his own signal so low that their psionic enemy will remain unaware of it. So intense is his concentration that they are almost to the Rat Yard before he realizes that Mrs. Bug has been trying to reach him for some time.
Sister! [surprise, relief] you knowwhat
Know. [guilty unease] My fault.
Sister! [joy, relief] You help/not help?
Help now. [regret, pronounced guilt]
I understand. You nowstay ready for contact. I nowwith friends. >>we come double-fast.>> You help>we triangulate.
No need mind tricks.
You know this manhim enemy? How?
I understand, sister. >say no more> >you stay in contactwith me >>guide ushole.>>
No need. Show you now> show you>.
Into Nunks’ mind comes an image, as clear and detailed as a holo, of a section of the Rat Yard. For a moment his sheer admiration of her talent muddles his concentration; then he grabs the image (metaphorically speaking, of course,) and tucks it into his memory. When he sends out a signal to thank her, she’s already gone, moving steadily across the Yard.
Nunks leans forward and taps Sam on the shoulder. After a lot of gesturing and a little help from Buddy, chiming in over the portable link, he finally makes Sam understand that he’s to follow Nunks’ gestural directions from now on. Behind them the caravan of police vehicles snakes after, matching their every move. Yet even as they race into the Rat Yard, Nunks aches with fear that they’re too late, because he can feel another psychic mind moving in from some new and unknown direction, a mind equally as strong as Mrs. Bug’s, but one raging and roiling in a blood-madness.
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