He broke away from me, stumbling over my legs, and swiped at his mouth. “Christ, Vashti.”
“Well, hell. Figured I might as well experiment before I get thrown in a cell. Maybe Moira and I can share. We can role-play drill sergeant and raw recruit; you think that’d distract her?”
His gaze on me was wounded, accusatory. “Do you want me to fuck you? Is that it? If that’s what it takes—damn it—what would Lasse say?”
I lolled my head in the direction of his voice. “He’s not here, is he?”
“The vote’s coming up again, don’t you care?”
I half rolled, half rose out of the chair. “How do you think it’ll go if we get busted for trying to start our own armed forces?” I hiked up my kurta and untied the drawstring of my trousers. “Don’t you think I’ve gone over all of it?” A lazy shimmy shook the garment down to my ankles; I sighed with pleasure at the caress of air on my bare legs.
András threw me a desperate look, one hand going to the first frog on his sherwani.
I stepped out of the puddle of fabric. “What are you doing?”
“I thought we were—” Even the poor light could not hide the resignation on his face.
“Oh.” I began to chuckle. Somewhere it hurt, the thought that sex with me repulsed him, but the distaste evident in his very posture tickled me. “András, you’d sacrifice your virtue for the good of Ubastis—”
“For you.”
“But even the not-inconsiderable charm of you in my bed is going to stop me.”
“Vashti—you’re going to make me go through that again?” He hurled himself into a stride that took him from one end of the balcony to the other in two paces. “When we found you at Wadjet we thought you were dead.”
“I’m not going to die.” I tipped him what I hoped was a saucy look. “I have too many motherfuckers to prove wrong.”
“Idiot. Do you want me to call in Evaluation? Do you want to get hauled off to D Block too?”
I picked up the trousers, careful of my balance. Cuff to cuff, inside seam to inside seam, I aligned them, then folded them against my belly.
“Dear András,” I said gently. “I’m tired.”
He stopped in mid-pace, arms crossed in a barricade against his chest, not looking at me.
“I’m tired of hate. I’m tired of always masturbating over vengeance and never daring the thing itself. Do you know . . . he’s not even buried here. We can’t bury him on Ubastis. We can’t scatter his ashes. But visitors can go to the museum on Lazarette 1 and gawk at my husband’s corpse.”
“Burial is an obsolete notion,” he said.
“Let me go, András.”
Now he did look at me, light trembling in his eyes. “I won’t.”
It was not until his second dinner visit that I felt up to any further discussion of the subject. I filled the sweating carafe of tea in front of him at least twice, and chattered about what Bibi had done at the Child Center that day, about the tomato harvest, about the meal I had prepared for the three of us. His gaze followed me while the furrows in his brow deepened. Bibi flirted blatantly with him, beaming through a glaze of strawberry pulp whenever he spoke to her.
“Before too much longer, we’ll be producing our own nori film downside,” I said. “You’ll be eating sushi every night, if you want.” I collected the plates, leaning across the table to swipe at Bibi’s face. “Better than mine, though, I hope. I’ve always wanted to learn how to make sushi, so I thought I’d . . .”
His eyes had tracked to the wall where the rifles hung.
“What if she’s right?” he asked finally.
I did not have to ask who. “Full-scale militarization will come sooner or later. So far Ubastis has survived on the good will of galactic law and massive private bank.”
“So you agree with her? Then why this—this viddie-style adolescent behavior?”
“I agree with her on that point,” I said. “But why the Beasts? If UBI needs to introduce a military into the system, why not recruit from within? Or initiate applications, academies, as was done with the Wave Teams? Hell, Second Wave was practically its own legion.”
“Would it have been that way if Undset hadn’t started out in the Novus Rangers?”
“I don’t think so . . .” I sat down again, plates cradled unthinkingly to my chest. I chewed on my lower lip as I thought. “Look, Lasse got Patrol & Rescue started, didn’t he?”
“And thank Christ for it.”
“Drawing on his own experience in the Rangers—and Moira as good as asked me to be the head, the figurehead, what-have-you, of this military—”
“One would think she’d’ve tried to get you to be on better terms with her pet—”
Realization was not a nova inside my head, as some might think, but rather a shadow glimpsed behind the pane of denial. Ugly, frightening, inchoate.
Who had Moira called first when the Beast had seized in Q? It was not beyond her, I thought, to have caused the oxygen to go off-line. Not beyond her to try to kill her pet in order to get me to save it.
Oh, she knew me too well. Beast or no Beast, she knew how tightly the bond of saving a life would chain me. I remembered raging against Moira for casting the stones of temptation in my road. Other, dread possibilities began to suggest themselves to me.
“She did try.” The calm I had treasured over the past few days was evaporating like a curtain cloud in the sun. Without pausing to lift Bibi down from her chair, I crossed the room to the computer and keyed in my access to the Source.
I heard Bibi thunder across the floor, felt the impact as she careened into me and grabbed my leg, but all my focus centered on the nex I needed. Rangers, I nexed. Systems: Thetan and Cissokho. Designation/Company/Government: Novus. Time frame: I frowned. Twenty-five years? Fifty? What the hell, I thought, and asked for the last century.
András came up behind me and watched the introductory blurb unfurl. A mini-vid played out in hologram dimensions across the surface of the computer, while a mellifluous, manly voice extolled the virtues of the Novus Rangers. Lean-faced men and women in parade dress stood at attention in front of a bunch of miner’s kids goggling up at them. One little girl held up a dolly to one of the riflemen, who took it, giving her an absolutely beautiful, crow’s-feet-crinkling smile.
“It’s me, Mommy!” Bibi crowed.
I feathered my fingers through her hair. “It could be you, Berry-face.”
The image segued into one of the same rifleman, now holding the little girl on his shoulder, seemingly looming through space, the two of them gazing in cheerful wonder at the effulgent bodies around them. “Novus Rangers,” intoned the narrator. “Making the star systems safe for your children.”
The viddie winked out, to Bibi’s loud disappointment. The basic prompt flashed up, waiting for my request. I hoisted the protesting toddler to my hip and, one-handed, asked for a list of Rangers. All units. Name, rank, genetic designation.
Scrolls and scrolls of text poured past my eyes. Somehow I had accessed the roll of the deceased—it suited my purpose just as well.
Just, Omar, Ranger Recruit. 2500-2525. EN.
“E, N?” I asked András.
“Enhancement designation,” he said. “Enchancement, Nil. A Natch.”
Nighthorse, Bisilka, Ranger Recruit. 2500-2527. EN.
Yared, Arkady, Ranger Apprentice. 2503-2536. EN.
Lal, Ghumini, Midship. 2503-2546. EN.
“Natches don’t have the longest lifespans,” András murmured.
“No,” I said. “We don’t. Likely these were all violent deaths, or deaths by misadventure. We’re . . . risk-takers.”
You went in there to die.
Bibi fought to get down, and won. She wandered back to the table and, I suspected, stole András’s dessert. I let her. The names streamed.
Polyakov, Vasil, Sub-Lieutenant. 2517-2567. EN.
Watanabe, Hoshiko, Sub-Lieutenant. 2519-2565. EB.
“Enhancement, Base: recombinant pr
oteins for DNA repair. Simplest genetic precaution against radiation damage,” András said.
“What about serotonin receptors? Modulated testosterone? I thought those were all part of the Base Enhanced system. Minimal aggression necessary for colonization of space, and all that.”
“That’s ES. Enhanced, Standard. Radiation protection is the baseline. It’s all I have.”
I shot him a look, surprised out of my immersion. He shrugged, half a smile twisting his mouth. “It explains my temper, doesn’t it?”
“And here I thought all your manly beauty’d been engineered.”
“Oh, I can claim that as all my own.”
Ousdal, Børge, Commander. 2422-2467. EN.
Abdellatif, Lara, Commander. 2425-2464. EB.
Raskovic, Laila, Captain, 2428-2469. EN.
And there he was. My breath caught in my throat.
Undset, Lasse, Captain. 2430-2477. Disch. Date 2455. EN.
“András . . . none of these people have been Enhanced for modulated aggression levels.” I glanced at him over my shoulder. “What about people in P&R? Do you know?”
He shrugged. “There’re some Natches. More Base Enhanced, like me. And the rest Standard Enhanced, with cosmetic variants.”
Aggression control. Hair and eye color selected via familial preference. The more aggression control someone with a weapon had, the greater chance that weapon would be used only as a last resort.
I scrolled past Lasse’s name, reading so many others. EN. EN. EB. EN. “How do the Standard Enhanced P&R officers do?”
“Well—they’re very good at organization. Supplies. Liaisons. You see a lot of them as Quartermasters, Techs. Working with the GPS systems.”
“And combat?”
“Now, how much real combat does P&R see? Not much.” Most of the engagements P&R saw were of a fairly mild nature; the majority of interlopers, when apprehended, submitted quietly. “What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure.” Reluctantly I backed out of the Novus Rangers files. The Source sigil, an elegant opaline spiral, coalesced over the computer, waiting on my command. “Can you get into any of the files of the most recent military that used Beasts?”
“The last legal military, yeah.” He leaned in and keyed in a request for GrailCom Mining. He disabled the requisite intro advertisement, and, like a surgeon with his scalpel, laid open an eyesore of a file dense with text, all detailing the composition of the employed security and martial service.
Gamma Force. Omikron Force. Rho Force. Nine others, comprised of squads of twenty Beasts each, designated as Nickel, Caesium, Titanium, Argon, Osmium, Ferrum. I pointed toward the Captains’ names. “Nex those.”
All of the Captains were registered as Natches.
“András,” I said. White from the text screen seared my vision. “Nex the other P&R officers through the UBI Net. It’s closed; the Source won’t be able to mark it. Find out—find out if any unusual visitors’ve dropped downside. And find out if somehow they’ve contacted any Natches.”
“There’s maybe three hundred registered Natches on Ubastis.”
“Then you’d better get busy.”
“That’s a lot of work, Vash. I don’t know what you’re looking for, but you do. If killing him works, what good is this research?”
“I’m looking for some kind of establishment between Beast and Natch. You’re quite capable of drawing conclusions,” I said crisply and punched the log-off. “Nice try, András. But my job here is to cut it off at the root.”
His jaw set. “What happens if you fail? What happens if you don’t kill him? What if something goes wrong and you come back to us a cripple?”
“I won’t fail.”
“But what if you do? What’s your plan then?”
“What will happen is that—” I wavered a moment. Images of the bleak halls of Lazarette 5 rose in my mind’s eye. Softcuffs restraining my wrists in a demure front stack—like any of the squatters we had taken down. And the hours of dissection of every belief I held dear under stares of mingled prurience and pity. My sin had been survival . . .
“What will happen—if I don’t come back a cripple—is that my guns will be taken away from me and I’ll be sent to re-education, again.”
“They’ll eventually let you out of re-ed,” András said.
“But they won’t give me back my guns.”
He made an exasperated noise. “So you won’t get to shoot your dinosaurs anymore, big fucking deal.”
It took a few minutes to collect myself and respond civilly—as I had in front of that damned hearing. “I realize it may seem frivolous to so many people. But I think you know as well as I do that what I do has immense scientific merit.”
“Chip them instead. Nikki Aslan in Arzachel has logged over two thousand specimens.”
“I know, I read her journal every week.”
“See? You could do something that has ‘immense scientific merit’ even if you can’t kill them.”
My restraint slipped. “Who the hell’s side are you on, anyway?”
With a dagger look at me, he turned his back and moved to the table. Bibi held up her arms and he swung her into a practiced embrace. She settled on his hip, smearing red on his shirt.
So comfortable already! Was this sensation the sour pain of jealousy? As if I hadn’t seen the two of them like that a dozen times before, as if ‘Unca Ander’ hadn’t been part of her life from her conception.
As if I hadn’t told myself for days now that Bibi would be better off without me.
András fiddled with my baby’s hair for a moment, tucking fine strands behind her ears. “I’m on your side, Vash,” he said finally. “More than you know.”
I made a sound of encouragement, not trusting my words.
“This is where you and I part on opinions,” he continued. “I happen to be guilty of the heresy that says your worth trumps whatever bloody discoveries you can rip out of an alien’s body.”
“Aliens! We’re the aliens—”
He stopped me with a raised hand. “Don’t sidetrack. This is why I want time, you see? No settlement yet. So that we can study without these hurry-up methods.”
“I know you’re not saying my research is faulty.”
“Not in a thousand years. But don’t you see, if it were less violent, we might gain more support?”
“And if it were more violent,” I said in a grumble, “maybe people would back off.”
Still holding Bibi, András moved over to me and put his arm around my shoulders.
“You can’t re-educate a whole colony,” he said, giving me a little squeeze.
“Sure you can.” For a moment I laid my head on his shoulder and allowed myself to savor our trio. “But then you don’t call it re-education. You call it war.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mustering the calm to confront the Beast again was a different story altogether. Should’ve got laced up before I came down here, I thought. I popped a piece of virulently colored candy—a gift from Caspian—into my mouth while I waited for the guard to open the door.
No waltzing through with my palm-print on half-a-dozen doors this time; no, now a Patrol & Rescue sergeant, armed with a foam-thrower, escorted me down to the violent offender section of D-block. Here the smugglers, squatters, black space runners were kept until Lazarette 2 reached its perigee above New Albuquerque.
“He’s been absolutely quiet,” the sergeant said as we turned a corner. “No tantrums, no demands. Not like the others we get in here. ‘I wanna see my agent! I’ve connections! My father’s very highly placed in the Commonwealth, and when he hears about this—!’” She rolled an eye back at me. “I told that one the only time his dad was highly placed was when his mama let him ride on top.” She chuckled. “I had to clean up his cell after that, but it was worth it.”
I chuckled with her. “I always enjoyed it when they tried to liberate me from the oppressors here.”
“Ya Allah, don’t I know it—”
“You know, beckoning you over . . . ‘Psst–psst–hey, honey, you get me out of here, and I’ll take you with me.’”
“‘What’s a beautiful girl like you wanna wear all those clothes for? You come with me, I’ll treat you like a queen—you’ll never have to put that stupid towel on your head again.’”
We glanced at each other. The twinkle fled from her kohl-lined eyes and a sneer twisted her mouth. She slapped her hand against the foam-thrower.
“Nothing a buttstroke to the mouth won’t fix,” I said.
She looked at me again, startled, and then laughed. “Fuckin’ A, Commander. Out in the bush, anyway.”
Her badge read Z. Ismail. I found myself wondering what her level of Enhancement was.
The last door slid open. I bit down on the candy and shards of tangerine-flavored sugar filled my mouth. The sash around my waist held the remote snug. I rubbed my hand over my belly, as if to quell an itch or a moment of indigestion, and was reassured by the discoid lump beneath the fabric.
From where I stood the whole room was visible, the aisle running the length of his cell, the long white resin bench facing the cell’s opening, the black pupils of the security cams. And, through the mesh of charged filament, I saw the Beast himself.
Someone had found—or made—sherwani and kamiz that fit him, in a pleasant shade of ash-purple. Seated, he looked almost civilized, a little hunched, elbows on knees, hands clasped together. Against the salt-white of the floor his bare feet, turned in slightly, were the color of dark tahini. His head was bowed, gaze fixed on the floor, the occiput exposed to an edge, a blow.
I felt Z. Ismail’s regard. “He can’t see us,” she said. “And he can’t hear us. We’ve got the damper on.” Nonchalantly she walked right up to the cell and pressed the top button in the column of controls. “Prisoner 42-C, as per UBI law, I am informing you that you have a visitor.”
I saw the shoulders move in a long sigh.
“Has he had any another visitors?”
Archangel Page 14
