by L. A. Graf
“Useless things,” Vegas answered. Behind him, Lydia sank to the ground with the levpa cradled in her lap, singing a baby rhyme Sikes had once heard Buck sing to Vessna. “Cheap labor to begin with, they’re now useless things that breed like anir’na and no longer do as they’re told.” Vegas fitted his finger across the trigger and raised the pistol shoulder high. “Without the ship, what good are they?”
Seeing the Overseer’s hand contract, Sikes threw himself at the outstretched arm. He didn’t hope for much, really, just deflection enough to keep George from taking a faceful of saltwater, maybe even a chance to knock the gun into the moat. Instead, he slammed into Vegas as though he’d jumped against a parked car and gained a splash of salty spray and a hard cuff across his face as a result. Head ringing, the inside of his mouth tasting sickly of blood, Sikes locked hands on the fist twisted in the front of his jacket and tried to blink his eyes clear.
“You’re as bad as them,” Vegas sneered, voice thick with disgust. He threw Sikes to the ground at his feet and planted one foot atop his rib cage. “Sansol in your mind. And, worse yet, cha’dikav.”
“Yes,” a tiny voice said from somewhere out in the darkness, “cha’dikav.” Sikes wanted to look up and locate Lydia’s delicate tones, but couldn’t lift his head to do it. “The only worthwhile thing you could ever let us be.” She took a long, wailing breath, and the levpa echoed her with a sigh. “Roos, my baby,” Lydia sang gently to her child. “For me . . . roos kleezantsun.”
Vegas turned his head, eyes flashing wide and white, as Sikes felt himself spiraling helplessly down into numbness. The last thing he remembered was the Overseer’s hoarse, abortive roar, then the sudden lifting of the weight atop his chest, and the glistening cloud of shell pink blood that misted the air where Ross Vegas used to stand.
C H A P T E R 2 8
GEORGE WASN’T SURE the lions would ever recover.
Three tawny cats snarled and paced uneasily in their cages, while the darker-maned male stood and roared at the crowd that had crammed inside the heated shelter with them. Humans and Tenctonese and one very quiet levpa filled the small building to capacity. It was a good thing a zookeeper had arrived to let the two shy leopards out into their fenced enclosure, clearing the space in their cage for Lydia and her child, or they would all be stuffed into the building’s office.
As it was, the tiny room was still crowded. George and Susan sat huddled for warmth on the cat-musky couch, while David Jordan tipped back the chair at the battered keeper’s desk. Sikes took up most of the floor between them, sitting against the wall with his leg outstretched, a heap of used, wet towels beside him, and a cocoon of woolen blankets swathing him from neck to toe. His knee bulged like a pumpkin under the heavy cloth, packed in plastic bags of frozen lion chow that Susan had found in the shelter’s freezer. All the zoo’s vet had been able to do was rip the human’s pants leg open for comfort and order him not to move.
“Well, I think we have this covered.” David Jordan hung up the phone after a long and mostly incomprehensible conversation with some higher-up in Washington. He swung around to face them. “We’ll release the news about Ann Arbor’s attack and Vegas’s capture simultaneously, and keep our mouths shut for now about the exact role of the levpa.”
George frowned, remembering another FBI agent who’d tried keeping secrets from Newcomers. “You’re not going to tell anyone about it?”
“Oh, we’ll mention it.” Jordan jerked a thumb out toward the crowd of zookeepers and police watching the levpa through the open door of the leopard cage. “I couldn’t keep those guys quiet about something this weird. If we don’t explain it, the next thing you know there’ll be a story about killer alien dogs in the Midnight Star. But we’ll just emphasize its tracking ability and obedience to its master’s orders. After all, Vegas was the real murderer.”
“Then how are you going to explain Vegas’s death?” Bruises mottled the pale skin under Sikes’s closed eyes, but his voice was still sarcastic. “Say the levpa munched him when the food ran out?”
Jordan scrubbed a hand through his dark hair. “No. We’ll say it killed Vegas when he attacked its—uh—first owner from the ship. People know how loyal dogs can be. They’ll believe that.”
Susan made a dubious noise, her hand tightening around George’s bandaged wrist. “But no Tenctonese will.”
George answered before Jordan could. “We Tenctonese know what Lydia’s role really was without needing to humiliate her in public. It’s the humans we must keep from mindless panic.”
“Speaking of mindless panic—” Sikes opened his eyes to glare across the room at George. “Did you have to throw me into this building so damn hard? It sure as hell didn’t do my knee any good.”
“The lion—”
“—was sitting across the enclosure, counting its toenails and waiting for the levpa to leave!”
George frowned at his partner. “Matthew, you were wet, cold, and nearly unconscious. You needed to get warm as soon as possible.”
“Yeah, right.” Sikes leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes again. “I just hope you remembered to call me an ambulance this time.”
“It’s on its way.” Jen Protzberg came through the office door, blowing warmth onto her fingers. In the hallway behind her, a body bag rustled as it was loaded onto a gurney and wheeled away. George bit down on a smile. It was good to know that L.A. wasn’t the only city where the coroner’s people arrived before the paramedics.
Protzberg leaned a hip against the desk and regarded Jordan quizzically. “So, what’s the official word on Lydia Vegas? Do we charge her for killing her husband?”
The FBI agent developed a sudden interest in his watchband. “This is your jurisdiction, Captain. I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to run it.”
“In other words, the feds don’t want her.” Protzberg drummed faintly pink-stained fingers on the desk, then speared a look across at George. “You and Sikes are our only witnesses. What are you willing to testify to?”
George’s mouth tightened to a flat, uneasy line. The warm pressure of Susan’s hand around his wrist told him what she thought he should do, but his oath as an officer of the law officially required something else. Before he could decide how to resolve the conflict, Sikes saved him the trouble.
“As far as I’m concerned,” the human said flatly, “she sicced her kid on Vegas to save my life.”
Protzberg snorted, and even Jordan looked a little dubious, but Susan smiled down at Sikes. “That’s what I think, too.”
“Matthew.” George pinched unhappily at the bridge of his nose. “We both know Lydia wasn’t thinking about you when she gave that order to the levpa. She was distraught and angry and worried about this creature she thinks of as her child.”
Sikes shrugged, then clenched his teeth as if even that slight movement had been painful. “I don’t care why she did it, George, she still saved my life. And yours, too, for that matter. That’s all I’m going to tell a jury.”
“But—” George paused, weighing Lydia’s previous thefts against her help in tracking Vegas, her outright murder of her husband against the years of suffering he’d caused her. At last he sighed. “Very well. Given her background as a mistreated spouse, no jury in the world would convict her, anyway.”
Jen Protzberg nodded once, then slid off the desk as a siren wailed to a stop outside the shelter. From farther away, George heard the wolf pack howl back at it. “We’ll file it as justifiable homicide, then, and close the book on the whole case. That’ll make the city comptroller happy.” She gave George a crooked smile. “And I won’t have to put up with any of you guys coming back out here for a trial.”
“You’ll still have to get a judge to rule on custody for the levpa,” George reminded her. “It’s safe as long as it’s with Lydia, but it’s still potentially dangerous. Some other kleezantsun might decide to kill her and use it the way Ross Vegas did.”
Jordan cleared his throat. “T
he FBI will be filing some motions on that point. When my boss found out how well that thing can track—”
Paramedics interrupted him, swarming into the office armed with stretchers and leg braces and infrared lamps. George entertained a brief hope of getting his feet warm and dry at last, then lost it when he and Susan were evicted to make room for more medical equipment. They left Sikes cursing in Tenctonese behind them and joined the crowd of zookeepers outside the leopard cage.
Two vets worked inside, stitching up the gashes in the levpa’s bare pink skin. The beast ignored them stoically, resting its bandaged, eyeless face in Lydia Vegas’s blood-stained lap. Spray-on dressings covered most of the raw sores where Sikes had shot it with the water gun.
George went to join the competent blond woman Golitko had found to organize the zoo’s cleanup operation, leaving Susan to keep watch through the bars. “How badly is the levpa hurt?” he asked her.
“The vets think it’ll survive, but it’ll need some surgery on its face.” She watched a zookeeper release the bad-tempered male lion back into the enclosure now that the police officers had cleared it. He was still roaring. “They want to wait a couple days before they operate, so it can rest and regenerate a little blood.”
George considered the significance of that statement. “Does that mean you’re willing to keep the levpa here?”
“Willing?” The blond woman glanced up at him in quiet amusement. “Mr. Francisco, you’re looking at the first and only alien animal on Earth. Any zoo on the planet would trade its pandas for a chance to examine it.” She waved a hand at the two intent vets in the cage. “I’ve already got those two planning more metabolic tests and kinesiology studies than I’ve got budget for. I just hope we can come up with the right diet to meet its nutritional requirements.”
“Levpa aren’t fussy,” George assured her, his mouth twisting wryly. “They’ll eat anything a Tenctonese would eat—raw lion chow, wood chips, a bucket of live crickets or earthworms for variety.” He glanced in at the gaunt linnaum in the cage. “Lydia will be able to tell you. I assume she’s staying here with it.”
The zoo official nodded. “We’re already setting up a cot in the rhino shelter for her. We’ll transfer them both over there as soon as we get the heat turned back on.” She glanced at her watch. “I’d better run out and prepare a press statement so we don’t get deluged with reporters when the FBI releases the news. And the local TV stations will probably want film coverage—”
George left her to her planning, and went to stand behind Susan. She smiled up over her shoulder at him, her blue eyes a little misty. “Look, George, The levpa will do anything Lydia asks it to, no matter how badly it hurts.”
“That must be why the kleezantsun never kept them on the same ships as their birth mothers.” George slid his arms around her, sighing as she tucked her own warmer hands into his. “I seem to remember hearing rumors of a slave revolt on Ylime, where the sansol turned the levpa against their masters. Now I know how they—”
“George!”
The fierce bellow from the hallway broke the soft chatter in the shelter. Even the levpa raised his head alertly. Lydia stroked it and whispered something, and it lay back down with a sigh. Then she looked up at George through the bars, and laid a shushing finger across her lips.
“I wish . . .” he grumbled, and strode out into the hall with Susan trailing behind him. Sikes had already been loaded onto a stretcher and now blocked the doorway where his paramedics had apparently left him for the moment.
“Matthew.” George shouldered past a knot of police and knelt beside his partner. “What’s the matter now?”
“Keys, George.” Sikes had managed to twist an arm through the stretcher restraints and was trying to dig something out of his pocket. “Dammit, I can’t have dropped the keys!”
George frowned as Dave Jordan pushed through the crowd to join them. “What do you need keys for? You’re going to the hospital, not back to the hotel.”
“Not my keys.” Sikes fished out a ring with three keys and a silver swastika dangling from it and held it out on the tip of one finger. “Darren Pickett’s.”
“Vegas’s Purist accomplice?” The FBI agent frowned. “We’ve already got an APB out on him. Why do we need his keys?”
Sikes grunted. “Because he’s evaded us about a hundred times before, and I’m really tired of running into him out in L.A.”
Enlightened at last, George reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and wrapped the keys carefully inside it. He handed them to Jordan, who still looked baffled. “Don’t touch them,” George warned. “You want the strongest smell to be Pickett’s.”
“Smell—” Jordan glanced over his shoulder and down toward the leopard cage. “You mean—”
“That’s right.” Despite his blue-gray pallor, Sikes grinned maliciously up from his stretcher. “Forget your APB. Let Lydia’s kid find him for you.”
C H A P T E R 2 9
THE HUGE HOTEL ballroom roared with the combined applause of Newcomers and humans. Television cameras panned up and down the proceedings, and halogens bright enough to sear the back of your brain spotlighted a pleased but startled George on the tall and distant podium at the front of the long room. Snorting with disgust, Sikes let the doors swing closed on all the shouting and crutched his way back to Cathy on the sunlit balcony.
“Christ! That’s the fourth ovation.” He flopped onto the backless bench next to her, stacking both crutches under his braced and bandaged leg to keep it slightly elevated. “They wouldn’t be applauding like that if they’d heard the speech he had originally.”
Cathy smiled and slipped an arm behind his head to brush his hair away from his temple. “Matt,” she scolded gently.
“If you ask me, they’re all just happy this damn symposium is finally over.”
“Oh, hush. It was a wonderful speech.” Cathy had sat through it for both of them when Sikes finally gave up on finding a comfortable chair and went out to the balcony for the duration. “You should be proud of George.”
“Yeah, well . . .” He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about George blabbing the whole story to the world at large and tried to tell himself it wasn’t his concern. But he couldn’t help worrying how knowledge of Ross Vegas and the levpa could hurt Newcomer acceptance, and it rankled him to think how the people he cared about might still be put in danger because of everything he’d gone through this weekend. “Your speech was better,” he finally grumbled, “and they didn’t give you four standing ovations.”
“You didn’t even hear my speech,” Cathy pointed out, stroking his cheek with a sigh.
He leaned into her touch and smiled slightly. “But it’s the duty of Newcomers and humans alike to share their knowledge with the rest of the community.”
She pulled back, her eyes narrowed in a suspicious frown, and the ballroom doors across the balcony swept open with a swell of lights and sudden sound.
A flurry of dancing photographers proceeded the wall of people that poured out of the auditorium, snapping pictures, then darting away like mosquitoes on a sultry day. George, his hand clasped with Susan’s, looked shocked and embarrassed to be in the midst of it all, but Sikes knew his partner well enough to recognize the sheen of pleasure in the alien’s dark spots. Maybe going public with this excursion into alien-human cooperation hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.
Using his crutches as a lever, Sikes pulled himself upright without Cathy’s help and hobbled over to meet the Franciscos. George looked a little surprised to see him, as though he’d forgotten all about his crippled partner waiting damn near all morning in a cold as hell lobby filled with know-nothing reporters and Newcomer groupies. Sikes hopped into position beside the Newcomer, crudely matching their speeds, and grumbled bluntly, “Let’s go, George. We’re gonna miss the plane.”
“But, Matthew—”
“Detective Francisco!” A trim, bearded man with a microphone and a severe suit elbowed Sikes aside to push in
front of the Newcomer. “Do you feel Lydia Vegas and her child should have the right to return to Los Angeles if they choose?”
“They don’t want to go back,” Sikes said, then swatted George with one crutch. “Come on, George!”
“What Mrs. Vegas chooses to do will depend on the court’s final decision,” George explained, ignoring his partner except to reach back and firmly snag the flailing crutch. “For now, she’s expressed satisfaction with staying at the Pittsburgh Zoo with her child.” Trying to wrench back control of his crutch, Sikes hopped awkwardly along behind George and cursed.
“Is it true the Pittsburgh Public Safety Department has already used Baby Vegas to track down a wanted criminal?” another voice from the morass called.
George nodded to someone on his left, Newcomer hearing letting him unerringly locate the voice in the crowd. “Darren Pickett is an accessory to some of Mr. Vegas’s activities, but we don’t know yet what he might be charged with. Captain Protzberg has brought him in for questioning.” He tipped a warning frown at Sikes over one shoulder. “Hit me with that thing again,” he whispered, dropping his hold on the crutch, “and I’ll break your other leg.” Sikes caught his balance with a grunt, but didn’t object to the threat.
“Detective Francisco, Emma Bovary tells me that you, Mrs. Francisco, Detective Sikes, and Dr. Frankel have been, well, sharing a hotel room since—”
“That’s it!” Sikes nailed the short, mustachioed reporter who’d asked that with a searing glare and scythed a crutch back and forth through the crowd to clear them an exit. “We’ve got a plane to catch,” he shouted to everyone, “and Detective Francisco doesn’t want to be responsible for pissing off his partner any further by making us miss our flight, does he, Detective Francisco?”
George’s face fell. “But—”
The bearded reporter in the well-cut suit tugged on Sikes’s jacket sleeve. “You can use my limo to get to the airport,” he suggested in a conspiratorial whisper.
