Pet Noir

by Katharine Kerr

  oOo

  John Hancock comes back just as the others are cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Del has saved his share of the food in the skillet; although she offers to put it on a plate for him, he waves her away and eats straight from the pan while he talks, more or less between bites but usually with his mouth full. Mulligan has a hard time watching him.

  “I talked to God, all right. I laid my head down on the sacred altar, just like he taught me, and talked to him. He wants to buy this white boy, all right. He’s real pleased we got him.”

  Mulligan’s stomach churns from more than squeamishness about John’s table manners. Wild Man and Bizzer exchange a glance, a sly, sideways thing of conspiracy.

  “Just what he going to pay us?” Wild Man says.

  “Booze, like the last time. But oh yeah, we got the name wrong. It’s manna, he says. Manna from heaven, man.”

  “No enough.” Wild Man stands up.

  “What?” John lays the pan to one side and glares up at him. “What got into you, you bastard? You no can argue with God.”

  “Damn right I can. When you was gone we found out God cheated us. Remember that old jewel he gave us? It was glass, no a real jewel at all.”

  Wiping his hands on his shorts John rises to face him. Del scoops up the baby and falls back to stand out of the way near Mulligan; Blue-Beak Bizzer hesitates for a moment, then joins them. Mulligan realizes that the stakes of this argument have just gone very high.

  “Now, you listen to me, man.” Wild Man pokes at the air with one dirty finger to emphasize his points. “We got out the jewel God gave us. We took a good look at it, and it was glass, nada but glass.”

  “Bull shee-it. It’s a jewel.”

  “No. Glass.”

  “Jewel, I say.”

  “You say wrong.” With a triumphant flourish Wild Man pulls a long splinter out of the pocket of his overalls. “You see this? It’s all that’s left of that old fake jewel.”

  “Gimme that!”

  When John snatches the fragment, it slices his fingers, and blood wells. With an oath he throws it straight at Wild Man, who ducks with a surprising grace.

  “Look what you made me do!”

  “It cut because it’s glass. No be a jewel. You got cheated by God, and I no going to do what you say no more.”

  With a howl of rage John jumps him. Writhing, swearing, biting, shoving, and snarling more than punching each other, they fall to the floor and roll around, crunching through heaps of trash, twisting dangerously near the fire, then heaving themselves clear just in time. Del watches in doe-eyed indifference, bouncing the baby in her arms to keep him quiet, her head cocked a little to one side as Wild Man manages to pin John under him and get his hands round her man’s neck. For a moment John gasps, chokes, and struggles wildly, then goes limp. When Wild Man relaxes the grip, John twists, grabs, and throws him off in one smoothly calculated motion. He gets Wild Man down on his stomach and straddles him, then grabs his hair in one massive hand and begins to bang his face into the plastocrete while Wild Man howls for mercy.

  “You going to do what I say, muhfugger?”

  “I will, I will.”

  “You sorry you argued with me?”

  “I’m sorry, real sorry.”

  “All right!”

  John lets him go and rolls free. Del yawns, patting the baby on the back and staring out into space as she watches someone that no one else can see.

  “He always wins,” she remarks to this someone. “Dunt know why they bother. He always wins.”

  Whimpering to himself the Wild Man limps over to the water drum and grabs a rag from a nearby heap to clean his wounds. Bizzer starts to help him, then hesitates, staring at John, waiting until the newly reconfirmed leader jerks his thumb in Wild Man’s direction.

  “Go git his face washed. God wants to get this white boy real soon. We’ve wasted too much time already.”

  No enough, Mulligan thinks, no enough by half, man. When he sends his mind out, he can sense Nunks, still keeping his signal low to avoid being picked up by the enemy. He can feel his mentor closing in fast, but he’s still a long way away.

  oOo

  “Nunks?” Lacey says. “You sure this is the right place?”

  Nunks shrugs, turning both palms upward as if to say that he hopes so. Lacey’s beginning to get nervous; she’s acutely aware that both Sam and Bates have trusted her and Nunks blindly up until now, and that this faith is beginning to turn to skepticism. What they see is certainly unprepossessing enough, a slanted rise of crumbling white wall surrounded by wind-worn lumps of dirty brown rubble, a dozen or so boulders scattered randomly, and a rusty metal hulk, about twenty meters high, that looks like it was once the fuselage of a shuttle or perhaps even an antique airplane. Bates trots over, followed by a police being with her arms full of equipment.

  “Okay, Lacey, here’s the procedure. I’m issuing you guys standard riot gear: helmets with comm links and IR visors—it’s going to be dark in there—and reflec vests and stun guns. Do you want some of my guys to go down with you?”

  At Bates' question, Nunks looks up and shakes his head in a vigorous no. Although there is no way that the police helmet is going to fit over even one half of his bifurcate skull, he is busily lacing an enormous reflec vest over his coveralls.

  “Nah, but thanks, chief. I think you better deploy your people up here, look around for another entrance, maybe. But you might leave someone here and tell’em to be ready to shoot if we come back out in a hurry. Something just might be chasing us.”

  “My thought exactly, yeah.” Bates pauses, squinting into the rubble. “Uh, where is this entrance, anyway?”

  With a wave of one enormous hand, Nunks gestures for them to follow and strides off, heading round the tattered fuselage to a long moraine of miscellaneous rubble. He hesitates, then pounces, knocking away a scatter of trash to reveal a round hatch sunk flush with the ground and embossed with the usual NASA. The lift bar is so shiny and clean that it’s obvious someone uses the hatch all the time.

  “Jeez,” Bates says. “A tunnel? I’m sure glad I’m no going down there with you guys.”

  Lacey and Sam exchange a slight smile at his expense. As long-time spacers, they are more than used to crawling through access tubes from one bubble compartment of ship to another. Nunks, however, makes a sighing sort of noise that Lacey interprets as distaste or even fear, although it’s hard for her to imagine Nunks being afraid of anything.

  “Think you’re going to fit down there?” she says to him.

  He shrugs again, then bends down and grabs the lift bar to pull the hatch, made of solid metal and weighing at least forty kilograms, open in one smooth gesture. Metal stairs lead down into darkness. Lacey snaps her IR visor down and draws the stun gun, which she’ll carry at least until they’re out of Bates’ sight. She suspects that sooner rather than later she’ll want her laser pistol at the ready.

  “Okay, gang. Might as well get on with it, huh? I’ll go first, then Nunks, and then you, Sam. Keep your eyes open back there, will you? Nunks, you put one hand on my shoulder so you can steer me, okay? You’re the one who can find Mulligan.”

  Yet, once they’ve all clattered down to the smooth flat floor below, Lacey realizes that they can find Mulligan’s captors even without psionics, because a clear trail, polished by many feet, leads straight down the middle of the filthy tunnel. Through the infra-red visor she sees this trail glow a dull coppery orange, still slightly warm from a living being who passed this way not very long ago at all. Smiling to herself, she adjusts the mouthpiece of her comm link.

  “Okay, chief, we’re right on track. Am I coming in clear?”

  “Sure are.” Bates’ voice crackles in her ear. “Keep in touch, will you? Good hunting and good luck.”

  oOo

  “Think he can walk?” Wild Man says.

  “No savvy.” His mouth skewed with thought, John Hancock considers Mulligan for a moment. “You hit him awful hard.”
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  “Can you walk, white boy?” The Wild Man pokes Mulligan in the ribs with the toe of his boot.

  “No for long.” Mulligan is speaking the simple truth: after a long couple of hours awake, he feels his head pounding again, and his vision, blurring. “You damn near cracked my skull.”

  The Wild Man laughs and pantomimes swinging at someone’s head with a pipe.

  “Better carry him, then,” John says.

  “Where we taking him?”

  “To the temple. Only place I can think of. God never did finish telling me what to do. It must be a test of faith or something. Go get the cart.”

  The cart turns out to be an old-fashioned, bright red wheelbarrow, the sort you actually have to push, no doubt a relic from the days before the colony laid in its superconducting network. Between them John and the Wild Man sling Mulligan in like a stuffed sack with his head resting near the handles and his legs sticking ignominiously in the air.

  “Maybe I can walk,” Mulligan says. “Part of the way, anyway.”

  “Nah. No can have you die on us. We want to get our manna.”

  They haven’t gone more than a hundred bone-jouncing meters before Mulligan decides that his chances of survival would be much better if he were on his feet, but nothing he can say changes John Hancock’s mind. With Blue-Beak Bizzer doing the pushing, they hurry through a web of tunnels, turning so often and so randomly that Mulligan is hopelessly lost after five minutes. At one point, when he tries to contact Nunks, he feels another psychic mind searching for him, a hungry mind whose cold touch hits him like the snap of teeth. He shuts down fast and tries to concentrate on nothing more than the swings and snakes of the tunnels, and the sudden openings into rooms. On and on they go, jouncing and rattling, until at last he loses even that awareness as the universe shrinks down to his pain and nothing more.

  Eventually they come to a small half-round room where the bluish-gray plastocrete is all neatly swept and polished. In the middle stands an upside-down metal drum, covered with a stained white cloth, that supports another crystal, this one long and flat—the holy altar, he assumes, and most likely some kind of psionic amplifier. John confirms his guess by first genuflecting, then kneeling down and laying his head on the crystal for a few seconds. To one side is an opaque plastic door, blocked with chunks of rubble; to the other, a pair of what Mulligan takes to be grav platform shafts. Instead, they turn out to be antique electric elevators. Apparently their solar pack is still sending power, because when John comes over and presses the button, a pair of doors slide open.

  “Dump him in and send him up,” John says. “And God says he’ll send our manna down in the other one.”

  With a certain amount of care Blue-Beak and the Wild Man arrange Mulligan on the floor of the cage. If he weren’t in such pain, Mulligan would laugh aloud, thinking how grotesque it is that he should go to his death in an elevator, that he’s rising to meet God in more ways than one. As it is, his head hurts so badly that he’s beginning to think of the assassin’s knife as a mercy. The two crazies step out, and John poises his finger over the button.

  “Vaya con Dios.” And he punches it hard.

  With the lurch and creak of ancient machinery the cage crawls upward. Mulligan summons a little energy and tries searching for signal ahead of him. This time, he makes contact. Even in his muddled state the strength of the psionic mind he touches shocks him.

  Okay, God, who are you?

  You see soon enough. No fear/I not kill you.

  Why not?

  I need a hostage. >You see why/few seconds>

  With one last groan the elevator jerks to a stop. As the doors slide open, Mulligan picks up the smell of rancid vinegar cutting through the mustiness of the air.

  “Never thought God would look like a spacer, did you?” The voice is oddly pleasant, with a desperate kind of humor in it. “Welcome to Heaven, panchito.”

  The man who steps into the cage is wearing a baggy gray jumpsuit of the sort common to baggage-handlers and other low-level port workers. He is blond, well-muscled, and he’d be handsome, in a way, if half his face weren’t oddly stiff, the corner of the mouth frozen in a twist, one eyebrow peaked high and unevenly. His walk is also peculiar, all spraddle-legged and shambling, as if his testicles pained him. Mulligan’s first thought is that he’s suffered some kind of cerebral hemorrhage.

  Not a stroke. Skin problem/infection? Maybe. You’re my ticket to a doctor. >Gonna trade you right across the board> >>medical care and a safe passage off this Goddamn planet>> >>>never wanna see the filthy place again>>>

  [surprise] [relief]

  But Mulligan is sending false signal, using the last bit of his strength to hide his real reaction, that for all that this dude is a smooth liar, he’s a liar none the less. The only thing he can read in his captor’s mind is blood-lust.

  oOo

  After about ten minutes of following the heat-trace through the long, straight tunnel, Nunks suddenly grabs Lacey by the shoulder and shakes her. Her first thought is that he’s going claustrophobic on her, but with hand gestures and a certain amount of stomping up and down he manages to convince her that something terrible’s happened, and to convey that while Mulligan is still alive, they have to hurry if they’re going to keep him that way. Without needing to say one word to each other, she and Sam both shove their stun guns into their vest pockets and draw their lasers.

  “Let’s go,” Lacey says. “Now! Vamos, man!”

  Sam moves up to the front, and side by side they head off at a fast jog. Nunks comes panting along behind.

  As the tunnel curves around to their right, they begin to pass sliding doors, some half-open, most shut, and here and there a side tunnel winds off, but always the glowing track leads them straight on, growing brighter and brighter until at last they see a blaze of light ahead of them. They slow down to a walk to catch their breath.

  “Someone’s campfire,” Sam whispers. “Hard to look at the damn thing through this visor.”

  “Yeah.” Lacey pushes hers back. After a brief moment of utter disorientation, she can see the outline of a doorway and beyond it a wood fire burning. “Nunks, is Mulligan in there?”

  With a moan and a clench of his hands, Nunks shakes his head no.

  “Somehow I knew everything was going too easy so far,” Sam mutters.

  Lacey nods her agreement, then walks on, keeping to the wall and moving as quietly as she can. With Sam right beside her she charges into the room and aims, laser hand braced over the opposite wrist.

  “Freeze!”

  A woman is crouched in terror by the fire, a baby in her arms, Carol’s patients Del and J.J., Lacey assumes. Since the room is otherwise empty, she feels profoundly ridiculous and lowers the laser. At the sight of Nunks, looming in the doorway, Del screams and cowers back.

  “All right, you,” Lacey snaps. “No one’s going to hurt you if you tell me the truth. Where’s the blond dude?”

  “They took him to God. God’s going to buy him.”

  “What?”

  “Just what I say, girl.” She rises to her knees and glares in a pathetic attempt at hauteur. “Dunt you go telling me what to do, white trash.”

  “Yeah?” When she raises the laser again, Del cringes back. “I said, where is he?”

  “I told you, they took him to God. I no savvy where God lives. Only John knows that.”

  Nunks steps forward, pointing to Del and nodding his head in a vigorous yes.

  “Hey man,” Lacey says. “You mean she’s telling the truth?”

  Nunks nods again, but he waggles his hands in a despairing sort of gesture, trying to tell her something that she can’t decipher.

  “Come on, guys,” Sam says. “Wherever he is, he’s no here.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Lacey turns her back on the fire and lowers the visor to peer at the various ways out of the room. Down one side tunnel the bright track is visibly stronger. “Bet they went that way.”

  “No they dint,�
� Del says with obviously desperate bravado. “Went back that way there.”

  “Nunks?”

  Nunks points to the way Lacey originally chose.

  “Uh huh. Listen, kid,” this last to Del. “If I was you, I’d get the hell out of here right now and surrender to the police.”

  Del grabs a piece of broken crockery from the floor and heaves it in her general direction. Ducking, Lacey leads her troop on down the tunnel. As they break into a jog, she flips on the comm unit in her helmet. The first channel is a babble of voices, squad leaders announcing their position, requesting orders, or describing the terrain around them. The second one she tries, however, carries only a hiss and Bates’ rumbling voice, talking to someone named Sergeant Nagura.

  “What do you mean, movement?” Bates is saying. “Is there someone up there or not?”

  “Can’t tell, chief.” Nagura’s voice is female and human. “All we can see is something moving up in the old control room. It might just be a dog or something. There’s some wild ones out here.”

  “Shit.” Bates sounds personally offended by this canine possibility. “Okay, but keep an eye on it, will you, and get yourself some cover.”

  “Will do, chief. Out.”

  “Bates?” Lacey cuts in quickly, before he can shut the channel down. “Lacey here.”

  “Damn well about time. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Following down a trail. Sorry. We’ve been distracted, kind of. Look, we found where they were holding Mulligan, but they’ve taken him away. I don’t know where, but the donna we found was babbling something about God.”

  “Jeez, but what the hell can we expect? Anyone we find out here is crazy, remember? Have you found another trail?”

  “Sure did. Real recent, judging from how bright it is under IR.”