Rumble in the Library!

by Vincent Cleaver

  ***

  Whenever I don't have enough information, I go to the library. The Golden Harbor Municipal Library dates back to Landing Day. It was originally a personal gift from the Emperor to one of his trusted servants who had retired and founded a colony on the edge of things. Given the nature of the library and the librarians, I've always wondered about that. If I wanted to plant a spy in a loyal but popular general's household, to mind him, that's a good way to go about it. The physical building is as old as the original colony, though of course it's been expanded on over the centuries.

  It was pretty slow at the Muni. Some previously unheard of holy day for librarians, or some such. The new recruits and librarians third-class had the duty, and when the cat's away, the mice will play. A couple of kids with more imagination than sense had set up some bunting as a makeshift slide from the railing of the rotunda down to the main desk. It looked like fun, but I had work to do. I started with the scene of the crime and even retrieved my book from days ago. Then I branched out from there and hit pay dirt with Jeppiwazi's comprehensive master piece, 'Sapient Species of the (2nd) Empire and Adjacent States'. A real page-turner and eye-opener.

  The turtle had lied to me. It was a lie of omission, but still. The big bad alien I'd been calling Jaw-Some is a species well-known to the Turtles, and possibly almost extinct- the invaders, the outsiders that brought the 2nd Empire down, albeit indirectly. Their name for themselves translates as 'The Hungry Ones', and the Haroo called them the Dominators, or simply The Eaters. A predator species with bad hygiene and worse table manners, they conquered and enslaved subject species. They also ate them.

  No, I wasn't very surprised by that one, either.

  It did explain, somewhat, its hatred of Turtles in general, but not Arnie. He was playing at something, some internal thing, and I had a feeling that I needed to know.

  I had lost that paper folding from the starfish's apartment, but I found directions for folding another one in a book not far from where they had their fight. What else I learned gave me an idea for why Jaw-Some was so interested in the Library. I folded a couple of 'alien butterflies' while the shadows got longer and I got hungry.

  Golden Harbor is my adopted home town, and the Muni is my second home here. Once or thrice I've been here overnight, accidentally-on-purpose. I sneak in water and protein blocks, the byproduct of human starship life support systems all over the human expansion. They don't taste great, but they're my comfort food anyway. Taste isn't a prime consideration when you're hungry, and the algae and mycoprotein is good for you, fuel for the body. A little honey helps, but I didn't have any. Besides, my mind was three hundred light years away, on Tiamat.

  Refugees and orphans happen in every war. There was nothing special about the little red and gold three-ling we found in a burned-out village. She'd been on her own for a while, gone feral, but she ate the food we put out for her. She much more was afraid of Blockhead, our Dragon liaison, than she was of us apes, which seemed to indicate that either her folks got burned out by loyalist forces for helping us, or had been forced to evac as part of the scorched earth policy. Six of one, half dozen of the other, I suppose. She adopted us and walked with us for a little while, totally against regs. I got used to her, or she got under my skin. My little sister.

  I still don't understand how that happened. In the Verge, there just aren't all that many dragons, not like living among them day to day on Heartland or Tienshan, you see. The rest of my squad accused me of turning her into my dog, which makes even less sense. We don't go in for house pets, at least not among the Old Refugee families. Maybe that was it. I grew up in a family that kept Remembrance Day and made it Remembrance Week. My parents survived the Food Riots and the twelve bad years between That Day of Dragons and 'Good Words', before the Liberation War, when things were pretty ugly in the kleptocracy that is the Republic of Venus. After that came the rearmament, and twenty-five years of a good war has meant that the Verge has prospered. A rising tide lifts all boats.

  I was restless, and was doing some isometrics and Tae Chi when Arnie found me in the nearly deserted library. I was caught up in it, the muscle tone and muscle memory weren't there anymore, and he snuck up on me. "Are you 'Rocky', maybe planning to run up and down the great steps, human?"

  I spun around and tumbled forwards, coming up off my knees into a crouch, winded but with my fists at the ready, arms bent and blocking attacks to my chest. I wobbled and stood up straight, shaking my head. "Physical skills take something like a thousand repetitions to really 'take', and even my speed and cardio are way down. Darn!" I added with my biggest shit eating grin. "I guess I'll have to go with plan B."

  "Which does not involve 'going toe-to-toe' with a Big Ugly?" Arnie was showing amusement in the manner of his species. Dragons hissed; Turtles stuck their tongues out, tasting the air drowsily with their eyes half-slitted, as if sunning themselves.

  "I'm gonna shoot the bastard through the head from 60 meters." It was not a joke. I had a kill-zone and kill-shot all scoped out in my head. "Make him come to me."

  "That can be arranged," Arnie said. "But I'm afraid I have old business with his kind."

  "Old, old business? Which is?"

  Arnie blinked rapidly at me, but otherwise he was expressionless. "Who do you serve, Human? What interests, what agendas?"

  Almost, I answered him honestly, but I lied instead. "Myself, turtle; you know that; I'm all about looking out for number one."

  "You lie very well, up here," the terminator turtle said, touching the fractal hand to his head, "but you fool yourself. You never lie, in here," and Arnie touched his belly. A turtles's heart lies in a line, three redundant and simple in-line blood pumps, with a nearly infinite capacity to regenerate from trauma. Any one of them can shut down and be isolated while it was regrown, three hearts in one, complexity within simplicity. Further proof that the universe loves their shiny shells.

  I heard the first patter of rainfall on the roof. It was not as late in the day as it seemed, just dark out. I didn't know what to say to Arnie, and at that moment he let me off the hook. "You're here past closing time, it seems. We closed early today, to get ready for Landing Day, don't you know."

  Now he was the one lying. They had done all their preparations already. But, looking out into the rotunda, I saw that displays had been moved and space opened up. I hadn't been paying enough attention. Tarps covered what looked like replicas of dismounted Haroo Second Empire antipersonnel particle cannons. I whistled. "Those look very deadly, and uh, authentic..."

  "They do, don't they?"

  "Are you going to tell me or not Arnie?"

  The terminator turtle smiled in the manner of his species and started to speak. Then front door of the library was blown to splinters, and Jaw-Some made a grand entrance. We crouched down behind the railing

  "Wow, he really is as dumb as he looks, isn't he?" I stage-whispered.

  "Smart enough to go to ground and stay put. We forced his hand this afternoon. The starship captain he'd made arrangements with lifted for Ahdweedah," a non-Turtle world far, far away and in the direction of the Dominator homeworld, "an hour ago. He needs transportation, and he needs it now."

  "Are you saying that there's a starship in the library?"

  "No, just directions to one; plus a key, if you will."

  "Arnie..."

  "Don't worry, he's not getting it."

  The Eater stomped up the grand staircase, and made for the scene of his argument and the murder a few days ago. He waved a melted looking device, not the beam-wand thing, but obviously also made by the starfish or his people.

  "What did you do to piss this guy off?"

  "We killed them with our kindness," Arnie said absently. "The invasion failed, but there was internal conflict. We needed time, and we didn't want to kill any more of the slaves operating their warships, or living among them in their cities. So our biological engineers took some naturally occurring viruses and improved on them. Three of them, which went
through their population and, in combination, rendered over half of their population sterile. Since two fertile couples were needed for a successful pregnancy, their population fell off dramatically in the space of a few generations. While we tore our civilization apart, their subject species rose up and finished the job we had started."

  I didn't see what Jaw-Some was looking for, I was frankly too busy chewing on what Arnie had just told me. The Eater fell to tearing up some more of the library though, so evidently whatever he was looking for wasn't there. And then Arnie stood up and walked a couple of steps towards him.

  They looked at each other for something like ten seconds. Then Jaw-Some took a black cylinder off of his belt, twisted it and threw it at the turtle, roaring and hooting. The thing turned into a fog of red lights and didn't so much hit Arnie as wrap itself around him. The terminator turtle's clang seemed to be melting away, and the Eater strode towards my friend almost reverently.

  "You suicidal son of a bitch," I muttered, stepping between them and wishing that I was somewhere else- anywhere else. "Hey! You big ugly, stupid steaming pile of-"

  "Do not interrupt your betters," Jaw-Some said, or rather a voder on his belt translated something which he screeched. You could have dropped me with a fly swatter. Then I danced back out of the way as he turned and swiped at me. "I'll take care of you later," he added, but he paused, looking past me at the table where I'd been working- at the paper foldings.

  "Hey! You! I know where the starship is!"

  I had his attention.

  "There is no starship- the Watcher tricked me..." he looked behind him at Arnie, whose clang was nearly gone. "But it was almost worth the trip."

  "Yeah? Well, you're wrong. I can show you, but it's gonna cost you!"

  "What if I just don't kill you? And what about your friend here?"

  "Who cares? I got expenses. You don't want it, I'll sell it to my people and be a hero." I smiled. "From what I hear, Second Empire tech was pretty hot shit. Hey, it's the only reason I've stuck it out in this moldy old pile of stone for the better part of a year!"

  He stepped towards me and then again. "You will give me the starship!"

  I had him. I turned and ran.

  The Eater lumbered after me, but more cautiously this time. Last time I just barely stayed ahead of him, but this time we were playing cat and mouse for real. Only I was a mouse that needed to let him almost catch him, because I couldn't afford to let him loose interest. But the quarter-ton of teeth and sharp hooves was surprisingly quiet in the darkened library, and the storm-sounds were loud. Between the crash of thunder, I realized that Jaw-Some was no longer on my trail through the stacks, and I doubled back. I was a dozen meters from Arnie when there was a creak to my right and the shelf toppled over. I threw myself prone, pelted by falling books, and scrambled back through the tunnel between the leaning shelf. I almost went right into his snapping jaws.

  "Not so fast, little morsel. You have something to tell me before I eat you!"

  "Now why would I help you with that, exactly?" This thing really needed to join megalomaniacs anonymous.

  "Because I'd let you live a little bit longer?" Jaw-Some kicked at the shelf, removing a half meter of my hiding place. A splinter of structural plastic about fifteen centimeters long fell in front of me, jagged and unwieldy but it would have to do. "I can make it quick, for a price. That is the best deal you're going to-" He kicked again and I shoved the point of the plastic shard into his leg, just above the hooves. While he was distracted, I ran some more.

  My personal philosophy is that life is so much simpler if you don't let honor keep you from doing what you need to do. Sometimes standing and fighting gets you dead, quickly, and yet that's exactly what we did, in the mutiny on Tiamat. The alternative to standing and fighting was bugging out and letting the Admirals turn the planet and the people below us into glass, and we told them "Hell no!"

  However, this wasn't about being able to live with yourself, it was about staying alive. I will freely admit that at this point I just ran away blindly. The Eater stumbled along on two and a half legs, but he ran me down and got to the top of the main stairs to the rotunda before me. There was no more bargaining. I think, if Jaw-Some was thinking any more than I was at that point, that he had decided to just have a taste, and then get the information out of me before I bled to death. He took a step towards me as I backed away, snapped his jaws, and then another step...

  There was cloth under my left hand, from a banner that hadn't been completely hung. I didn't even think, I grabbed it and went over the railing, just in time. I fell and swung around screaming. As I swung back, Jaw-Some leaned down and snapped at me again, but he couldn't reach far enough over the railing. When I swung away, I felt something give, and looked below for a soft spot to land. So that was how I saw Librarian 2nd Class Alwekoo with his picked crew at the two working antipersonnel cannon, just as they opened fire.

  I'd never been so close to the business end of one of these things before. The particle beams crisscrossed in his chest, putting entirely too much energy into Jaw-Some's upper body. Flesh roasted, and then the water deep inside flashed into steam under too much pressure and blew out. The cooked meat smell was delicious. What was left of the Eater tumbled down into the open space in the rotunda with a loud wet crunching sound. The body kicked some more and voided itself. The three eyes stayed on me until awareness faded away from them.

  ***

  Arnie was still alive; without the clang, but very much still alive. Two younger librarians half-carried him down the great staircase. He looked passing pleased with himself, the turtle did. "I thought that you didn't like amusement rides?"

  "Do you see this face?" I said, pointing. "For future reference, this is not a happy face!" I grabbed him in a bear hug and the two kids just stood back and grinned, turtle-fashion.

  "Ack! Don't break me!"

  I let go and looked him over. "What the fuck, Arnie? What the hell was that? And why are you still alive?"

  "All very good questions," mused the terminator turtle. "The thing he threw at me was an anti-super soldier weapon of some kind. A cyber-phage, if you will. Typical of the Eaters; it ate my cybernetics. But not the nanotech of my fractal manipulator. That was a much later upgrade, experimental." Arnie was quiet, remembering things that were.

  All power and glory to the Second Empire of the Haroo.

  "So you'll live?"

  "Until I die." Arnie saw my confusion and took pity on me. "The synthetic organs that kept me alive this long are gone now. I'll live out the natural balance of my life and I won't outlive any more of my children or grandchildren, or... great-grandchildren." He reached over and squeezed the shoulder of one of the youngsters with one of his, now two, fractal hands. They were skinnier but serviceable. He held them up to me. "These are all that is left, and they don't have any agendas of their own."

  "But... the 'clang' did?"

  "Yes. For over a thousand years I have had the Imperial Command Authority. I inherited it from a daisey-chain of my superiors but I was the last link. I had no choice but to implement contingencies created by emperors long dead. Now I get to choose things for myself, again." Arnie closed his eyes and let out a long sigh. "It's good to be alive."

  "Amen to that, brother turtle."

  ***

  I had a report to file, but I decided to drop by the Consulate in person. The storm didn't bother me much at all. Something about almond-shaped green eyes with flecks of gold. I meant to ask Magda if she was hungry and see where things went from there. Instead she ushered me into the Consuls' office without a word. I expected the fading old dragon, but when I saw who was sitting behind the desk, I gave up on a nice quiet evening for two.

  "Report." The spy master was a woman who had been in Covenant Intelligence since before there even was a Covenant. Her family has had a long history of Machiavellian intrigue.

  "Well, there was a rumble at the Library-"

  "Cute, Anderson, but I already know
something about that. I came here about the other matter?"

  "That old wreck, under the bay? It may not be a wreck after all."

  My control officer smiled. "Interesting."

  I gave her rest of my report and thought about the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."