You went in there to die.
He grated a laugh. “We can’t. We’re bonded to you. Beast to Natch, the way it’s always been.”
I twisted to gape at him, still shuddering with tears. That drunken night with András, sifting through P&R records, old military records, looking for some connection between Beast and Natch: I’d been right.
“And we’re not letting go of you until you listen to us. You’ve listened to the living and the dead on this planet, but you won’t listen to us.”
“I hate you.”
“You hate yourself.”
With a futile gesture I wiped my face with both hands. The rain kept falling. “All right. Say what you need to say.” I’d lost. I’d failed. I started to sob again, which made me cough.
“That woman your governor’s married to brought us down here for a war.”
“She said she could use you—ten thousand of you.” Beautiful Moira, all emerald and amethyst, and hard as diamond, telling me from her cell that I could save the world.
“She thought she could. We’ve had our own spies.”
“Wait—what war?” I asked.
“Did you Integral innocents really think you could keep your untouchable colonist status forever?”
“It’s a point of law in the Commonwealth Articles. The convention of—”
He made a disgusted noise, and his hand moved inadvertently in my hair. Any pain in my scalp had dulled to an aching pressure, compared to my other injuries, but I pulled back anyway. “Think you could let go of me now?”
“No. Fuck, no. And have you pull some move on us after you’ve said you’d behave? You think we’re a murderous shit-spawn, you think we’re fucking stupid as well?”
“I’m cold. You ripped my clothes off.” I wrapped my arms around myself. The rain had thinned, but the breeze was draining the heat from my body.
“Too goddamn bad.” His gaze dropped to my breasts. “Hell, we wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway.”
“Keep talking,” I said through gritted teeth.
“We don’t know how Undset handled you. Must’ve been a better man than us.”
“Count on it.”
He sawed out a laugh. “You can’t be cold with a temper like that.”
I looked at him narrowly. He stared back, and after a couple of seconds the sneer vanished from his face. The split in his lip had begun to crust over.
“Are you,” I said softly—and still, despite my spits of anger, close to tears—“being such a bastard because you pity me?”
He looked away. “The People’s Party is going to bring military force straight to this planet and beat whoever’s left into submission. They’ve been looking long and hard for an excuse. If they can’t find one, they’ll manufacture one.”
This did not sound outside of the realm of probability, given what I knew of the People’s Party. Denial makes one obstinate, however. “The verdict is only in a matter of weeks. How if it goes their way? Wouldn’t they be happy with that?”
“All that verdict is going do is open up settlement. It doesn’t give the People’s Party any more power. Just as many Pokies are going to get in. There’ll be a whole new wave of regulations.”
“They want to cut right through it.”
“Isn’t that what anyone wants? And you cut a knot with an axe, or a knife, or you torch it, or in the end you rip it apart with your bare hands.”
The tightness on my scalp slackened, and I realized he’d released me. I stayed where I was. “So what are you going to rip apart with your bare hands?”
“We’re here to protect you, Commander. We were sent to protect you.”
“Prove it.”
He grinned. “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
I let that one slide. I watched the raindrops pock the water. Ran my fingers beneath the surface and watched them turn as brown as the Beast’s. I felt as empty as a reed with the pith scraped out of it. “How long have they been planning this?”
“For years.”
“Did my husband know?”
“Commander Loren—why do you think we’re here?”
I bit my lips hard, squeezed shut my eyes. Willed myself to breathe smoothly instead of in those jagged hitching inhales. “No, no. How. How are you here?”
So he told me, the two of us sitting in the shallow end of the lake, while the clouds blew to rags overhead and the early afternoon sun showed its face. The air warmed enough for the little aquatic saurians to creep from their dens, and soon they were bobbing on the water’s surface once more, their scaly skins beaded with iridescence.
From the way the Beast spoke, Mustaine held untellable horrors, and he did not try to sketch me any picture. He told me only of the plan to get free of the prison and find a new home. A home where the most stable of the clutches would be free of both the crucible of war and the urn of other humans’ censure. That home should be Ubastis. So through their spies and connections on the outside, the key movers of the plot had concluded that one of the most accessible and influential people would be that near-legendary figure, the leader of the Second Wave, Captain Lasse Undset.
And then he’d been murdered, which threw their plans into turmoil. So they turned to the wife of New Albuquerque’s governor, a woman known for her amoral and ambitious nature. Traits that made her vulnerable.
Over the span of more than two years their contacts and supporters had seduced Moira Ximenez into believing that a military was exactly the next step in the development of Ubastis, and that one of the ways to implement that would be to import Beasts from Mustaine.
“Mustaine blew up,” I said.
“Yes. Because we blew it up.” He read the shock in my face and smiled. “Best way to cover our tracks.”
“That’s . . . that’s pretty fucking decisive.” I started to shake my head, then winced at the pain the sudden movement caused. “But now you tell me that war is coming. And you’re trying to seduce me the way your people got to Moira?” Moira, who was facing a long list of charges for her folly.
“Our plan was Moira first. She was a way to get to you,” he said. “You’re more important.”
I tottered to my feet. I could not move my left arm. My body was a mass of aches and horrible stabbings, but I pushed past them to focus on the Beast. “To get to me?”
He stayed where he was, looking mildly up at me. “Yes,” he said. “You were our mission. To convince you. Win you over to our side. Your husband knew war would be coming, and he knew we would be valuable.”
“DR. LOREN! DR. VASHTI LOREN!” A loudhailer, from the Skipjack crew. The dark craft heeled into sight over the southern edge of the arboros, engines dully roaring. The flat blare drove the goobies skyward again with a rush of chilly, pungent air. “THIS IS CAPTAIN KÁRPÁTI OF PATROL & RESCUE. SHOW YOURSELF IF YOU ARE ALIVE AND CAPABLE! SHOW YOURSELF IF YOU ARE ALIVE AND CAPABLE!”
“They miss us,” the Beast said, with a little twist of his mouth.
“I told András what I planned,” I said. Wearily I slogged out further into the lake and waved my right arm over my head. Here, come get me, I fucked up again.
A heave of water behind me. “What did you tell him?” His voice low with anger again, but whether the anger was for me or others I could not tell.
“I told him I was going to eradicate the problem of you by killing you.”
“And he let you come out? Knowing that was suicide? What kind of people look after you?”
The incredulity in his voice made me face him. Soaked in sweat, rain, and lake, his clothes stuck so completely to him as to render him naked. In my exhaustion he looked bigger than ever.
Suddenly I felt very small. “Never. I can’t kill myself. I’m the one who looks after people. After the whole damn planet.”
He wiped water from his eyes with the heel of his hand and looked down at the hole in his shirt, pressed his fingers to the open wound below. It was almost in the exact spot where the Beast of four years ago had
knifed Lasse. I had struck a couple of centimeters too far to his left and missed the large intestine, and only skewered his oblique muscles. “And you think you’re not important.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“DR. LOREN! SHOW YOURSELF IF YOU ARE ALIVE AND CAPABLE!" The Skipjack hove into view again and howled right over us. Displaced air from the exhaust lashed the treetops, blew the shallows down flat to the silty floor. The blast knocked me off balance, and I reeled into the Beast. He seized me by the upper arm, and this time I had no knife.
“THIS IS CAPTAIN KÁRPÁTI OF PATROL & RESCUE! STEP AWAY FROM DR. LOREN IMMEDIATELY! STEP AWAY OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON!”
I swore, but heard nothing. The Beast caught my head; I instantly tensed, my lips skinning back from my teeth, but he only tilted my face so that I looked up at him. I could not hear him, only the loudhailer’s bellow, András’s tinny voice once more telling the Beast to step away. His lips moved.
I squinted at him, thinking I hadn’t read those lips correctly.
The Beast put his mouth to my ear. Even while the Skipjack banked in its gyre above, blasting us with wind and noise, the brush of his lips against my skin sent a shiver twisting through me.
“We look out for you now,” he said.
“You’re early,” I said to András. I felt dull and stupid, and when a medtech had tried to wrap me in a thermal blanket, I pushed feebly at her. András took the blanket and laid it across my shoulders.
“You called us in, remember? For your party jackers?”
I struggled to rebuild my memory of the morning. The horrible conversation with Zhádāo. The squatters. The Bucha gun. Bodies strewn on the gravelly sand.
“Even for a Skipjack that was fast. You were on your way here.”
He shrugged. “There was the off chance I might be able to save your ass. Since you wouldn’t let me talk you out of it.”
How if I hadn’t missed? I wondered an hour later. Wrapped in thermal blankets, plied with hot broth, the Beast and I endured the fussing of Patrol & Rescue. At my request András and his company had not cuffed the Beast, or shot him full of tranquilizers. They did subject both of us to a lengthy medical exam wherein András discovered I had a broken finger, a torn rotator cuff, and a completely shredded knee. Bruises everywhere. The other medical tech clucked over the Beast, telling him to lie down on antibacterial sheeting, cutting away his sodden shirt, applying pressure with a sterile dressing. At every order from the tech, the Beast looked at me for confirmation until I snapped at him to just do whatever the tech directed. He bore the probing fingers patiently, dark eyes focused on the hazy sky. He ignored the injections of local anesthesia and antibiotics, but when I gasped in pain as András removed the exhausted knee brace, his lip curled, and he half-rose from the ground.
“Oh, only you get to smack her around?” András said.
“You should see the other guy,” he rumbled, but he lay back down.
“You got a bruised kidney,” the tech said to the Beast. She was a small woman, smaller than me, with broad hands and long, almond-shaped eyes. “And this puncture—very clean edge. Very little bruising. This was not done by an animal or a rock! How’d this happen?”
“A knife,” the Beast said.
“A knife! Was it one of those—those people who attacked you?”
The rain had rinsed away the bloodstains and signs of struggle, but not the corpses. Three body bags lay in a tidy row on the beach some fifty meters away from the campsite. Patrol & Rescue had confiscated the weapons of both the invading party and our safari. All my lovely rifles had been tagged and crated, and I would have to go through the embarrassing and time-consuming process of requesting them back. They did not know about Joop’s knife, at the bottom of the lake.
“I stabbed him,” I said.
“You!” The tech dropped back on her knees, her mouth open. “You stabbed him? How could you do that?”
I forced myself to meet her eyes. “Citizen, I’m sorry. I’ll turn myself into the educators the first chance I have.”
“She also killed two of those men you helped seal into the bags.”
I twisted to see Bearce standing behind my stool, his expression one of avid appetite. He held a viddie-play in one hand and the reflections wormed across his eyes. “My God, Dr. Loren, you realize no one will believe this?”
“Good.” I put my face in my hand—the one without the broken finger. I could not force all the new data to coalesce. All the bits crowded me, a jumble of disparate sets. The Beast—not my enemy? Lasse—part of a conspiracy to install a military for Ubastis? And me, not dead. Still alive, with the taste of grit and the chemical wash of an electrolyte drip in my mouth.
“They’ll think it’s all effex. My career is completely spaced.” He sounded anything but unhappy. “Look at this. Look at this.” He dropped down beside me and pushed the viddie-play into my non-working hand.
There we were, the Beast and I, in small: confronting each other on the cliff. The view was from directly overhead—I was a frenzied little figure, all gold and black, while the Beast was bigger, sleeker, slower. The LED Beast dropped on the LED me; dazzlingly clear, my breasts flashed into view as my shirt was ripped away.
Bearce’s finger intruded, tapping the little screen. “That’s bank, right there, that shot. I can get them to zoom in and you’ll have hordes of adoring fans the moment it goes up to the Source.”
“Let me look at that.” András yanked it out of my hands and hit minute playback. “Uh-huh. I see.” He snapped the viddie-play shut. “I’m sorry, sir, we’re going to have to confiscate this.”
“What the hell—you can’t do that!”
“You jacked into our satellite system to get those shots, didn’t you? Unless you were flying around over their heads, or remoted an aero-cam after the two of them. And as far as I remember, you were too busy getting in our way, taking good retina of those poor bastards over there.”
Bearce’s handsome face went pale beneath his sunburn. “And I’ve got some pretty good retina on you right now, Captain, I—”
“Stop it,” I said. “It doesn’t make any damn difference. If he uploads all of it, they can see how we treat interlopers here.”
“And the People’s Party can see how badly you need outside government,” said the Beast.
“You automatically assume that’s the conclusion—” Bearce reached across me for the player, which András handed to the P&R tech tending to the Beast. She caught it clumsily, looking from András to Bearce to me.
The Beast propped himself up. His smile broke open the scab on his lip. “How much are they paying you?”
“How much—what?” Bearce leaned forward, as if interested, albeit perplexed, and drove the point of his elbow into my knee. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand? I was asked by Commander Undset’s agent himself to come down. I would have been a fool not to. But I’m not being paid.”
I felt the blood draining from my face. A whimper escaped me, and Bearce actually ground his elbow into the cartilage. My vision fogged.
“Or is it good old-fashioned blackmail?” the Beast continued. “They got something nasty on the muckraker himself? Necrophilia? Meat-eating?”
Bearce glanced at me. “Oh, hey!” he said, and pushed away from me—with one final gouge. “Dr. Loren, are you okay?”
A hiss through clenched teeth was all I could manage. I jerked my chin at the Beast, to say go on, go on!
He caught my meaning with one liquid flash of his eyes, and smiled even more at Bearce. “Dr. Loren’s just a little excited. We’re still talking about you, Mr. Reporter. Did you drop planetside with your orders in place, or did they contact you afterwards?”
András had been listening to this byplay with a deepening scowl. “Vashti, what the hell is your big friend talking about?”
Bearce was sitting back on his heels, his face pleasantly composed—but no smile around his eyes, now. “Yeah, I’d sure like the answer to that, too. Tech, you might
want to do a search for any lumps on his skull.”
My hands clamped on the edge of my seat. Exhaustion and pain had leached away my strength. I felt myself sliding, and locked my elbows. The whole world felt as if it might tilt over at any second. “How many other satellites of ours have you accessed?”
“Oh, my God,” András said, looking almost as sick as I felt. He surged to his feet and nudged Bearce’s shoulder. “On your knees, Mr. Bearce.”
“What the hell—?”
“Knees apart and put your hands on your head. Santiago! Get cuffs over here, yallah!”
“This is a terrible mistake—”
I closed my eyes. From far away I heard the Beast: “Don’t faint, Doctor.”
Bearce began talking quickly. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I understand what it’s like to live in a hostile environment, Captain Kárpáti—András—I assure you I would never do anything to jeopardize—ow! Jesus, take it easy with those things!”
If it weren’t for my knee, I would have walked away. Leave everyone behind and sip my broth at the water’s edge. Poor András had his work lined up for him, to record a report on all the dead, on everyone in my party, on all arrests made. How could this have turned out so badly? Goddammit, was the Beast right? And, torture of tortures, had Lasse been a part of a scheme that could affect Ubastis so greatly?
I did not know what to believe. I did not know, any longer, what I knew.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After the medicos determined I was not in danger of imminent death, I was allowed to stay in my apartment the first sixteen hours back. On the condition that I report to the medbay the next day, I was even allowed to keep my daughter for that time.
That night Bibi would not stop jumping in her crib. From the other room I heard the sound of her feet hitting the mattress, thud—thud—thud—thud. When I stuck my head in her room, she was holding onto the top rail, grinning around her pacifier as if she’d won a prize.
“All right, Noodle,” I said to her. “Mama runs out on you, the least she can do is give you more cuddles when she gets yanked back from the brink of stupidity.”
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