by Steve Perry
Jo laughed. She looked at Kay. “The man is quoting RIW at us.”
Kay moved in a hair closer.
Dhama flinched at her move.
“What do you want to know?”
“All about who hired you and why.”
He looked away from Kay at Jo. “I can’t tell you that.”
“You do know, right?”
He shook his head. “Sorry. We can’t go down that road.”
Kay whickered. He snapped his gaze away from Jo to look at Kay.
“Wink? You out there?”
Wink came through the door. He held a popper in his hand.
“What are you doing?”
“In about five seconds, I’m going to hit you with a lovely cocktail, whose recipe I got from an old doc I used to know in Terran Intelligence.”
Dhama stared at him.
“What’s in it, you ask? Why, attend: a couple of tranquilizers, a barbiturate or two, some lionfish extract, a dab of psychedelic toad secretion . . . some other things I have lying around. It’s what ole Doc Auel liked to call zombie juice. Five minutes after you get it, you will tell us anything we want to know in as much detail as you can remember, and if you wake up in eight hours or so, you’ll have a terrific headache.”
“If I wake up?”
“Oh, yeah, there’s a nasty side effect I should mention. Now and then somebody particularly sensitive to zombie juice doesn’t wake up. They don’t die, at least not right away, but they enter a kind of trance, akin to a coma, and are pretty much nonresponsive from then on. We don’t know, for sure, because sometimes people do die down the line. I seem to recall the record for the coma is . . . thirty-odd years? Something like that.
“Hold him still, hey? I don’t want to be spewing this stuff all over the place—”
“That’s illegal!”
“So sue me.”
“Wait—! Don’t! I’ll tell you what you want to know!”
“You sure?”
“Yes!”
“Shit,” Wink said. “That was fifty, right?”
“You wish. It was a hundred,” Jo said.
“But he looks so steely-eyed and brave.”
“You should know better than to take my bets by now.”
Wink nodded. “I should. But the first win is going to be so sweet!”
“Good luck with that.” She turned back to Dhama.
He licked his lips, which looked particularly dry.
“First up. Who are you working for? Who hired you?”
“General John Allen.”
That caught them flat-footed.
“What? Why?”
“I’m supposed to make sure my side loses.”
Jo said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You are supposed to win, asshole. Because you are working for General Allen, too.”
Nobody had anything to say at all. They just stared.
TWENTY-SIX
Kay patrolled the perimeter of the base. Halfway through her sweep, she scented the approaching men. She stopped, waited until she could see them.
She recognized the troops; they were GU Army Special Ops, ten of them, in light armor. They had their weapons aimed, and they moved well.
It would be an odd coincidence if they just happened to be approaching the base where she was.
Coming for me. Why? How did they know where I would be?
That indicated a depth of surveillance that meant serious intent. Sat overfly? High-altitude drone, looking for a Vastalimi sig?
If she took off at full speed right now, she might be able to avoid being hit if they began firing, but the odds of success were not good.
She should have run the moment she caught their scents, but being around humans for years had made her more curious. What did they want?
Somebody in operations would have already spotted them on sensors or their own overfly; they weren’t wearing stealth gear. Help would already be coming.
They kept coming, slow but steadily. They were well within range but had not started shooting, and that would have been the smart thing had they intended to kill her; in fact, a drone strike would have been better still.
She could wait for them to get closer and attack, but her victory was unlikely.
She reasoned they weren’t intending to kill her yet.
She waited. The nearest soldier drew to about ten meters, then stopped.
“Don’t move,” he said.
“Had I wished to do that, I would already be gone,” she said. “You would not have seen me.”
He waved one hand, and the others formed a half circle.
“We have orders to arrest you,” he said. “There are another dozen troops blocking your possible escape.”
Not true about the troops, she thought.
“On what charge?”
“Need-to-know, and I don’t. We were told to bring you in alive if possible, but that if you made it necessary, we are empowered to use deadly force.”
She triggered her com. The carrier sig was live. Odd that it would be. “Let me see if I understand it correctly: You are a Galactic Union Army unit sent to arrest me on a charge you don’t know but are allowed to use deadly force if I resist?”
“That’s it. And we do know all about Vastalimi, so if you twitch funny, we will chop you down.”
“My people will want to check the legality of your order.”
“I am First Lieutenant Huss, and I am here under the direction of General John Allen.”
In her ear, Jo’s vox said, “Oh, shit! Don’t give them a reason to open up. We are almost there. Forty-five seconds.”
Kay didn’t allow the conversation with Jo to move her gaze away from the soldier’s face. “If you are lawfully empowered to collect me, I will accompany you.”
“On your knees, hands behind your back.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I have said that I will go with you, and if I do, I won’t try to escape. I will not allow myself to be bound like an animal so that you might feel safer.”
“I could shoot you right here.”
“You could. This conversation is being relayed to and recorded by my comrades in CFI. Did you assume that an alien wouldn’t be outfitted with a working communicator?”
A frown flitted over his face. “Fuck. Radio, you didn’t jam her transmissions?” he said.
“Sorry, Loot. Nobody told me I needed to worry about that, and you wanted our opchans working.”
“It’s your fucking job!”
“Too late now,” she said.
“I still have leave to kill you if you resist.”
“I am not resisting, I have said I would go with you. If your orders are legal.”
“I’m here pointing my weapon at you, you don’t need to worry about that part.”
“Shoot me, and perhaps you and your men will be legally covered. That will not stop my friends when they come for you.”
“You think that is going to scare me? I’m Special Ops.” He smiled.
– – – – – –
“Maybe this will do the trick,” Jo said from behind the GU soldiers.
That startled Huss. He turned to look. No doubt wondering how she had sneaked up behind them.
He saw fifteen others in combat gear arriving behind Jo, carbines leveled to cover him and his troops.
The GU unit looked uneasy. Their guns started to come up . . .
Huss waved them down. “Nobody moves!”
Jo said, “Good idea. Right now, Lieutenant, my unit’s best shooter has a bead on that bare spot between your helmet and your collar armor—not that your armor would stop the round anyhow. You shoot her, my sniper shoots you, and the rest of your troops will have to dance pretty good to av
oid being cut to fucking pieces. I wouldn’t want to swap boots.”
“You’d be guilty of murdering soldiers in the performance of their duties.”
“No. If you shoot a single round, I would be defending myself and my troops against an unprovoked assault by armed troops in a civilian venue. Truth-scan would verify my testimony.” There wasn’t any bluff in her tone.
Huss considered that. “The GU Army will fall on you like the wrath of God.”
“Surely it will. But you won’t be here to see it, and neither will your unit. Your call.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, “What do you want?”
“I want to see legal authorization for you to arrest my soldier. A Vastalimi’s word is better than ours, and if your warrant is legal and she says she’ll go along, she will. Anybody who attempts to bind her will surely die trying.”
“I have the warrant on my reader.”
“Show me.”
She approached him, held up her own reader. He waved his device at hers. There came transmission/reception beeps.
“Hold.” She opened the file and scanned it. It didn’t take long.
Everybody stood really still.
Generals in the GU had a certain amount of power, a broad military fiat, and that included dictates regarding civilians in a war zone, humans as well as alien species; but this was Earth, there wasn’t any war going on but the corporate one CFI was involved in, and as nearly as she could tell, nobody had declared martial law.
Junior had no legal cause to detain Kay. This was bullshit.
To be sure, she zipped a copy of the warrant to Gramps to run through the legal AI.
On her com, he said, “Stall him for a minute. I’ll get an injunction.”
“Stet that.” To Huss, she said, “On the face of it, your warrant is invalid,” she said.
“You a lawyer, Captain?”
“I know the applicable military statutes about arresting civilians. If General Allen has a problem with Kluthfem, he needs to make his case through civilian authorities.”
“I have my orders, fem, and a warrant issued by my commanding general. You can sort all the rest of it out after I deliver my prisoner.”
“She’s not your prisoner until I say she is. There is nothing to sort out.”
He waited a couple of seconds, then: “I can have an armored assault company here with cannons blazing in five minutes. I can make it rain fire and brimstone and turn this place into a burned-out crater. In the long run, fem, the Galactic Union Army is never outgunned.”
“That I know; however, in the long run, Lieutenant, all of us are dead. Some of us will get there before others. Twitch, and see who goes first.”
From her com: “Jo. Legal says the warrant is bogus. It’s some of Junior’s shit. We have a civilian cease-and-desist order on the way.”
“Lieutenant, my AI says your warrant is smoke and mirrors, and I have a C&D in transit. Now here is how I see it. You hold off for two minutes and I present you with the C&D, which according to the Rules of Engagement regarding civilians in this venue, you are legally bound to observe. You go back to General Allen, tell him you had no choice but to step off because we had more guns and the law on our side. He might piss and bitch, but he won’t give you any real shit because this whole thing is illegal, and he knows it. He won’t make an issue of it.
“He knows, I know, and you, being an officer and supposedly familiar with the Army’s ROE, should know it. If you didn’t before, you do now.”
He thought about that.
“Step away, or somebody gets to spend quality time cleaning up blood and bodies.”
“I’m a soldier. That’s part of the job.”
“I’m a soldier, too, and I have you by the short hairs. Give me a reason, and I’ll tear them out by the roots and feed them to you. That’s how it is. You can walk away on your own, or you can be carried away. That is your choice. You won’t be here to see what comes later.”
There was a long pause, and the longer it went, the less likely it was that the soldier would initiate a firefight.
“Show me the C&D,” he said.
Jo smiled.
– – – – – –
“Junior is in serious harassment mode,” Gramps said. “You think he knows we know he’s up to something? Going for a preemptive strike?”
Cutter leaned back in his chair. “Maybe.”
“You gonna call him on it?”
“I don’t see any point. We might be able to scream loud enough to get the mostly deaf UCMJ’s investigators to look our way, but we don’t have anything other than he overstepped his authority, and, so what? He gets a wrist slap. If we had given up Kay, we might have a case for false detention, but it didn’t happen, and again, it’s a so-what?
“We got a guy on ice who says Junior is in bed with the Bax and dicking around behind the scenes in a corporate war, but that’s not going to be enough to stir the pot. We need to know why, and we need proof.”
“Probably got some poor major or captain lined up to take the fall on the warrant and the Bax thing anyhow,” Gramps said.
“Tell me about that.”
Gramps shook his head. “Still, we might have to do something about him eventually.”
“I have an idea.”
“Why don’t I like the sound of that?”
Cutter shrugged. “There’s an element of personal risk involved. If I’m right, it’s not a problem.”
“And if you are wrong?”
He shrugged again. “Cue up Pachelbel’s Canon, and break out your dress blacks.”
Gramps shook his head. “Got to be another way.”
“We’ll see. First we have to get there. I’m working on it. We just have to remember we’re fighting on two fronts and make sure our backs are covered.”
“Fucking Junior.”
“Yep.”
Gramps blinked into a long stare. “Speak of the devil.”
Cutter looked at him.
“Incoming on one.”
Cutter waved at his com control, put it on speaker.
“That you, Cutter?”
“What do you want, Junior?”
“You get to keep your tame alien monster, but you need to understand that I am monitoring your moves. Any illegal activity on your part will be brought to the attention of the local civilian authorities, who have leave to deal with such in a heartbeat. You might want to consider backing off this little corporate dustup and going back to catching shoplifters at TotalMart, leave the soldiering to those qualified to do it.”
Gramps pointed at his ear and waggled his finger, the sign for “being recorded.”
Cutter nodded. Of course; both of them would be doing that.
“Is that a threat, General Allen?”
Junior laughed. “Of course not, merely a warning that criminal activities from a man drummed out of the service for the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians will not be tolerated. The GU Army never forgets, you know.”
“CFI does not engage in criminality. Watch all you want, we have nothing to hide.”
They were both talking for the recorders, and both of them knew it.
“We’ll see.”
Junior shut off the com at his end.
“What was that about? He didn’t really think you were going to lose it and start screaming, admit to something he could use?”
“He might be that stupid, but, no. He was just jabbing so we didn’t forget he was there.”
“He’s worried that you will somehow bring Morandan onto his plate again.”
“Maybe, but I think it’s about whatever he and Bax are up to. He doesn’t want us poking around in it. It can’t just be about the water.”
“Yeah, that always seemed kind of strange to me.”
“Exactly. But the war is almost done. Whatever it is, we don’t have much time left to find it.”
“I’ll see if I can stir up the AI,” Gramps said.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Gramps was waiting when the last of them filtered in. He said, “Our C-AI has been crunching everything that links ‘Bax’ and ‘water.’ It took a while because it’s a big secret and traditionally has been worth-your-life guarded, restricted to the priesthood.
“And surprise, surprise, it is about the water. It’s holy.”
“Holy water?” That from Gunny.
“Apparently. It turns out this ancient Terran water has some kind of mineral combination that’s passing rare. Something in Bax biochemistry gets activated when they drink it. For humans, you could drink ten liters, bathe in it, wash your underwear in it, and nothing would happen except you’d have to pee and you’d get wrinkled and have clean crotch cover. For Bax, it’s a euphoric chem that somehow puts them in touch, they believe, with their god. Their priests have been using the homegrown version for centuries.”
“Direct com to God? I can understand how that might be valuable.” That from Wink.
“It gets iffy here, but this is what the AI speculates: The natural stuff on the Bax homeworld started to run dry, and the artificial solution they came up with didn’t have quite the same kick. So they started searching for a new source and somehow stumbled across it here.
“It’s Stradivari’s crawfish.”
Gunny looked at Gramps. “Say what? Crawfish?”
He smiled at her.
“Oh, sheeit, Ah know that look! Forget Ah said that. Don’t tell me. Let’s just move on.”
“Stradivari was a master violin maker on Earth in the late 1600s. His instruments that survive are highly valued, prized for their unique tones. All of them are worth millions, some tens of millions.”
“Ten million for a fiddle? Wait, Ah don’t care. Don’t say it, just shut up. Get to the point!”
He kept on as if she hadn’t spoken: “There was, for years, some question as to why his in particular were so esteemed, and the assumption was that it wasn’t the wood, nor the construction, but the varnish he used.
“Varnish is—”
“Ah know what fuckin’ varnish is!”
