by John Scalzi
“How did you do that?” Six whispered between panting breaths of agony.
“I have good ears,” Lee said.
Six had nothing to say to that or anything else.
Lee grabbed the shotgun, checked the load and then moved quickly to position herself by the door. Less than twenty seconds later, the door burst open and a man came through, sidearm at the ready. Lee dropped him with a shot in the abdomen and then pivoted to get a second man in the doorway square in the chest. She dropped the spent shotgun, picked up the sidearm, checked the clip and went through the door.
There was a hallway with another doorway five meters down. Lee grabbed the second dead man, dragged him down the hallway with her, kicked open the door and hurled the corpse through. She waited until the second shotgun report and then shot the man still holding the shotgun. He went down. Lee resighted and aimed at the PDA sitting on a table, blowing it to pieces. She went into the room and looked at the chair to find Hughes, naked, restrained and understandably anxious.
“Private Hughes,” she said. “How are you?”
“Ready to get the fuck out of this chair, Lieutenant,” Hughes said.
Lee reached over to the table that held surgical instruments and then cut through Hughes’s bonds. Hughes pulled the blindfold over her head and looked at her naked lieutenant, blinking.
“This was not what I was expecting the first thing I would see to be,” Hughes said, to Lee.
“Knock it off,” Lee said, and pointed toward the corpse of the man she’d flung through the door. “Check him for a sidearm and let’s get out of here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hughes said, and moved to the corpse.
“What did this one call himself?” Lee said, pointing to the man who held the shotgun.
“One,” Hughes said. “But he never called himself it. I didn’t even know he was a he until right now. Someone calling himself Two called him that.” She found the sidearm, checked its load.
“Right,” Lee said. “I killed three more, including that one and one called Six. So that’s four dead and at least two still alive.”
“Are we going to wait around to meet them?” Hughes asked. “Because I’d prefer not.”
“We agree,” Lee said. “Come on.” They went to the door; Hughes took point. The two of them made their way back down the hall, toward the direction Lee had come from. Another door lay five meters past the door of her room; they opened it and found it empty except for a chair and a spray of gray matter and fluid on the bar floor.
“Jefferson,” Lee said. Hughes nodded, unhappy, and they continued onward.
A final door stood near a stairwell. The two banged through and found a small office with a PDA on a desk and very little else.
“This was Two’s room,” Lee said.
“Where did the son of a bitch get to?” Hughes asked
“I think I scared him off when I set a friend of his on fire,” Lee said. She picked up the PDA. “Watch the door,” she said to Hughes.
On the PDA were a series of video files of Lee, Hughes and Jefferson as well as other documents Lee didn’t bother with. She swiped past all of them to look for the PDA’s file system for a specific program. “Here it is,” she said, and pressed the button that appeared on the screen.
Lee’s BrainPal suddenly came alive with a long queue of increasingly urgent messages from her sergeant, her captain and the Tubingen itself.
Hughes, who apparently received a similar queue of urgent messages, smiled. “Nice to know we were missed.”
“Make sure they know where we are,” Lee said. “And make sure that if I tell them to, they’ll flatten this place into the ground.”
“You got it, ma’am,” Hughes said.
The two of them moved out of the office and went up the stairs, Lee taking the PDA with her and tucking it under an arm. The stairs emptied out into another short corridor that looked like a wing of a hotel. The two soldiers stalked through it carefully, turned a dogleg and were confronted by a closed door. Lee nodded to Hughes, who opened it and pushed through.
They came through the side of a lobby filled with lumpy-looking older people in ordinary clothing and very attractive younger people wearing almost nothing at all.
“Where the hell are we?” Hughes said.
Lee laughed. “Holy shit,” she said. “It was a brothel!”
The lobby quieted as the brothel workers and their potential clients got a look at Lee and Hughes.
“What?” Hughes said, finally, not dropping her weapon. “You all act like you’ve never seen a naked woman before.”
* * *
“I don’t think I can tell this story again any differently than I’ve already told it the last three times, ma’am,” Lee said, to Colonel Liz Egan. Egan, as she understood it, was some sort of liaison for the State Department, which had taken considerable interest in her abduction and escape.
“I just need to know if there’s any additional detail you can give me regarding this Two person,” Egan said.
“No, ma’am,” Lee said. “I never saw him or heard him except as a heavily treated voice over that PDA. You have all the files I made, and you have all the files on the PDA I took. There really is nothing else I can tell you about him.”
“Her,” Egan said.
“Beg pardon, ma’am?” Lee said.
“Her,” Egan said. “We’re pretty sure Two was Elyssia Gorham, the manager of the Lotus Flower, that brothel you found yourselves in. The office you found the PDA in was hers, and she would be able to keep anyone out of the basement level you were in. The rooms the three of you were held in were private function rooms for clients who either liked rougher pleasures or wanted special event rooms which would be built up and torn down quickly. That also explains the signal blockers. The sort of people who would rent those rooms would want to be assured of their privacy. In all it made it a perfect place to stash the three of you.”
“Do we know who drugged us in the first place?” Lee asked.
“We tracked it down to the bartender at the hofbräuhaus,” Egan said. “He said he was offered a month’s salary to drop the drugs in your drink. He needed the money, apparently. It’s a good thing he has it, since now he’s been fired.”
“I didn’t think we could be drugged,” Lee said. “That’s supposed to be one of the benefits of SmartBlood.”
“You can’t be drugged with anything biological,” Egan said. “Whatever you were drugged with was designed with SmartBlood in mind. It’s something we’ll be needing to look out for in the future. It’s already been noted to CDF Research and Development.”
“Good,” Lee said.
“On the subject of SmartBlood, that was some good thinking on your part to incapacitate your captor,” Egan said. “The idea to map your surroundings with sound is also clear thinking. You’ve been recommended for commendation for both actions. No promotion, sorry.”
“Thank you, but I’m not really concerned about a commendation or a promotion,” Lee said. “I want to know more about the people who killed Jefferson. When they were interrogating me, they were asking me a lot of questions about what I knew about separatist movements and groups wanting to align their colonies with the Earth instead of the Colonial Union. I don’t know anything about that, but it got one of my people killed. I want to know more.”
“There’s nothing really to say,” Egan said. “These are strange times for the Colonial Union. We’re busy trying to bring the Earth back into the fold, and in the meantime our colonies are trying to deal with events as best as they can. There’s no organized separatist movement, and the Earth isn’t actively trying to recruit any colonies. As far as we can tell, these all are the works of isolated groups. The one here on Zhong Guo was just a bit more organized.”
“Ah,” Lee said. She knew when she was being lied to, but she also knew when not to say anything about it.
Egan stood, Lee rising to follow her. “In any event, Lieutenant, it’s nothing I want you to worry
about right now. Your commendation comes with two weeks of shore leave at your leisure. May I suggest you take it someplace other than Zhong Guo. And that you stay out of hofbräuhauses for the time being.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lee said. “Good advice.” She saluted and watched Egan walk away. Then she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the ship around her.
EPISODE NINE
The Observers
“Lieutenant Wilson,” Ambassador Ode Abumwe said. “Come in. Sit down, please.”
Harry Wilson entered Abumwe’s stateroom on the new Clarke, which was even smaller and less comfortable than it had been on their previous spaceship. “This is cozy,” he said, as he sat.
“If by ‘cozy’ you mean ‘almost insultingly cramped,’ then yes, that’s exactly what it is,” Abumwe said. “If you actually meant ‘cozy,’ then you should have better standards of personal comfort.”
“I did in fact mean the first of those,” Wilson assured her.
“Yes, well,” Abumwe said. “When you have your spaceship shot out from under you and your replacement starship is half a century old and put together with baling wire and gum, you make do with what you have.” She motioned to her walls. “Captain Coloma tells me that this is actually one of the more spacious personal quarters on the ship. Larger than hers, even. I don’t know if that’s true.”
“I have an officer’s berth,” Wilson said. “I think it’s about a third of the size of this stateroom. I can turn around in it, but I can’t extend both of my arms out in opposite directions. Hart’s is even smaller and he’s got a roommate. They’re either going to kill each other or start sleeping together simply as a defensive maneuver.”
“It’s a good thing Mr. Schmidt is using his vacation time, then,” Abumwe said.
“It is,” Wilson agreed. “He told me he planned to spend it in a hotel room, by himself for a change.”
“The romance of the diplomatic life, Lieutenant Wilson,” Abumwe said.
“We are living the dream, ma’am,” Wilson said.
Abumwe stared at Wilson for a moment, as if she were slightly disbelieving the two of them had actually just made a commiserating joke together. Wilson wouldn’t have blamed her if she was. The two of them had not really gotten along for nearly all the time he had been assigned to her mission group. She was acerbic and forbidding; he was sarcastic and aggravating; and both of them were aware that in the larger scheme of things they were hanging on to the bottom rung of the diplomatic ladder. But the last several weeks had been odd times for everyone. If the two of them still weren’t what you could call friendly, at the very least they realized that circumstances had put them both on the same side, against most of the rest of the universe.
“Tell me, Wilson, do you remember the time when you reminded me we had something in common?” Abumwe asked the lieutenant.
Wilson frowned, trying to remember. “Sure,” he said, after a minute. “We’re both from Earth.”
Abumwe nodded. “Right,” she said. “You lived there for seventy-five years before joining the Colonial Defense Forces. I emigrated when I was a child.”
“I seem to recall you not being particularly pleased that I reminded you of the connection,” Wilson said.
Abumwe shrugged. “You made the connection right as the Earth and the Colonial Union had their falling-out,” she said. “I thought you were making some sort of implication.”
“I wasn’t trying to recruit you, I swear,” Wilson said, risking a little levity.
“I wasn’t under the impression you were,” Abumwe said. “I simply thought you were making a joke in terrible taste.”
“Ah,” Wilson said. “Got it.”
“But as it turns out, this shared connection has landed us an unusual assignment,” Abumwe said. She picked up her PDA, activated it and pressed at the screen. An instant later, Wilson’s BrainPal pinged and a note popped up in his field of vision; Abumwe had sent him a file.
Wilson unpacked and quickly scanned the file, closing his eyes to focus. After a minute, he smiled. “The Earthlings are coming,” he said.
“That’s right,” Abumwe said. “The Colonial Union is worried that the Earth still has a lack of confidence in the transparency of our dealings with it. It’s worried that the Earth will eventually decide to go it alone, or even worse, start negotiations with the Conclave to join its ranks. So as a gesture of goodwill, it’s going to allow a party of observers unimpeded access to one of its current set of diplomatic negotiations. They’ve selected our upcoming trade talks with the Burfinor. I am told that the secretary herself believes that my personal connection with the Earth—and the connection of my staff, meaning you—will have a meaningful positive impact on the relationship between the Colonial Union and the Earth.”
“And you believe that line?” Wilson said, opening his eyes.
“Of course not,” Abumwe said. “We were picked because our negotiations with the Burfinor are inconsequential. It looks good because we’re trading for the Burfinor’s biomedical technology, which will be impressive if you’ve never seen something like it before, and the Earth people haven’t. But it’s not something that’s particularly sensitive. So it doesn’t matter if the Earth people watch what we do. The bit about you and me having a history with Earth is just show.”
“Do we know if these people are actually from Earth?” Wilson asked. “Captain Coloma and I had a run-in with fake Earthlings not too long ago. The CDF was passing off former soldiers as representatives from Earth in order to find a spy. We’ve gotten played before, ma’am. We need to know whether we’re being played again, and if so, what for.”
Abumwe smiled, which was a rare enough thing that Wilson took special note of it. “You and I had the same thought on this, which is why I ran this past some of my own people at Phoenix Station,” she said. “Everything I can see about these people checks out. But then again I don’t have the same familiarity with Earth that you do, so there might be something I’m missing. You have the entire file on all five members of the observer mission. Go through it and let me know if something stands out for you.”
“Got it,” Wilson said. “Might as well let my personal history actually work for us.”
“Yes,” Abumwe said. “And another thing, Wilson. You left Earth only a decade ago. You’re still close enough to how people from Earth think and do things that you can give us insight into their state of mind regarding the Colonial Union and their relationship to us.”
“Well, that depends,” Wilson said. “I’m from the United States. If the observers are from elsewhere, I’m not going to be any more useful than anyone else.”
“One of them is, I think,” Abumwe said. “It’s in the files. Go ahead and see. If there is, then make friends with that one.”
“All right,” Wilson said. “This is the part where I officially note to you that I am supposed to be doing other work for you on this mission, specifically examining the equipment the Burfinor are giving us.”
“Of course,” Abumwe said, slightly irritated. “Do your actual job, and do this. In fact, combine the two and invite one of the observers to help you run your tests. We will score additional transparency points for that. All the while you’ll be learning things from them.”
“Spying on them,” Wilson said.
“I prefer the term ‘observing,’” Abumwe said. “After all, they will be observing us. There’s no reason not to return the favor.”
* * *
The humans from Earth constituted a carefully selected group, the members chosen to represent the entire planet, not only a single continent or political group or interest. From Europe, there was Franz Meyer, an economist and author. South America yielded Luiza Carvalho, a lawyer and diplomat. From Africa, Thierry Bourkou, an engineer. North America offered Danielle Lowen, a doctor. Asia presented Liu Cong, a diplomat who was the head of the observer mission.
Ambassador Abumwe welcomed them warmly to the Clarke, introduced Captain Coloma and Executiv
e Officer Neva Balla and made introductions of her own staff. Wilson was introduced last of all, as the liaison between the observer mission and Abumwe. “Whatever you want or whatever questions you have, Wilson is here for you,” Abumwe said.
Wilson nodded and shook hands with Liu and, as agreed to by Abumwe, addressed him in standard Chinese. “Welcome to our ship, and I look forward to assisting you however I may,” he said, to the diplomat.
Liu smiled, glanced over to Abumwe and then turned his attention back to Wilson. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said. “I was not made aware that you spoke anything other than English.”
Wilson waited for his BrainPal to translate and then thought up a response; his BrainPal translated it and gave him the pronunciation, which he then attempted. “I don’t,” he said. “The computer in my head is able to translate what you say and offers me a response in the same language. So you may talk to me in whatever language you like. However, I ask that you let me respond in English, because I am sure I am mangling your language right now.”
Liu laughed. “Indeed you are,” he said, in unaccented English. “Your pronunciation is terrible. But I appreciate the effort. Can you do the same trick for my colleagues?”
Wilson could and did, conversing briefly in Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic and German before bringing his attention to Lowen.
“I don’t believe I need to do the translation trick with you,” he said to her.
“Répétez, s’il vous plaît?” Lowen said.
“Uh,” Wilson said, and scrambled to respond in French.
“No, no, I’m just messing with you,” Lowen said, quickly. “I’m from Colorado.”
“We’ve known each other thirty seconds and already I can tell you’re difficult, Ms. Lowen,” Wilson said, testing.
“I prefer to think of it as challenging, Lieutenant Wilson,” Lowen said. “I assumed you’d be able to handle it.”
“I don’t mind,” Wilson assured her.
“You sound midwesterny to me,” Lowen said. “Maybe Ohio?”
