How Dark the World Becomes (16 page)

I passed Hlontaa in a companionway and he didn’t say anything to me, but he looked at me with one of those half-smug, half-phony-sad “I told you so what do you expect from people like you it’s not your fault it’s just what you are” sort of looks that, if I weren’t on the job, if I didn’t have two little kids to think about, just might have gotten him the beating of his life. Instead, I continued to successfully control my violent urges.

Everyone—not just Hlontaa—assumed that the sabotage was by Human terrorists. They were probably right. First question a provost on a case will ask himself is “Who’s got a motive?” Who’s got a motive to go around blowing stuff up? Probably the people who are stuck with the shittiest end of the stick. It was like some sick experiment: show people paradise, then lock them out, and see what happens.

Speaking philosophically, of course. On a real-world level, if I could get my hands on the knuckleheads who blew the
Brukata
, they’d never blow another ship.

One hour post-docking, the purser’s staff had all the stateroom furniture secured, we were all strapped into our “wall” couches, the big wheel was locked down, and the tug started its long burn to slow us to orbital velocity. 

By then we could see Rakanka Highstation in the monitor, a silvery gray collection of components, none of which looked as if they exactly matched. That’s what happens when you keep adding shit to an orbital station over the course of eighty years. 

The main structural component was the spine, and it pointed straight “down” toward Rakanka. There were a couple different sets of counter-rotating wheels, as well as a bunch of non-moving structures, including big photovoltaic power panels, and some things that looked like the components of a gigantic virtual sensor array. 

Brukata
was in a parking orbit a couple klicks away. Even at a distance, you could tell she was hurt bad, her spine bent—probably broken—the big wheels no longer aligned, the J-field generator black and dead. There was some floating junk in between
Brukata
and Rakanka Highstation—you could see it sparkle now and then as the pieces slowly tumbled and caught bits of starlight or the colored glow of Rakanka itself—which suggested they’d moved the wreck away from the station after the explosion.

I would have, too. Lightning hardly ever strikes the same place twice, but when it does—well, the second time you get hit, you feel like a real idiot. 

There was a Co-Gozhak cruiser in a close parking orbit to the station, with most of its orange-and-black-striped troop pods detached—they were stuck to the station like tumors. The station was going to be crawling with Co-Gozhak combat infantry, probably in a really bad mood and inclined to look up every arriving passenger’s ass with a proctoscope.

“What happens now?” Marfoglia asked. She and both of the kids were looking at me, and the kids—who, unlike Marfoglia, seemed capable of feeling and expressing emotions other than indifference and anger—were frightened. 

“Plan B,” I answered. “Rakanka High will be thick with security now, and our travel documents won’t fool them.”

“Because we aren’t in their database,” Marfoglia said, and I nodded. She wasn’t stupid.

“That’s right. Those aren’t corporate stiffs over there now; those are real professionals. And we’re four people who aren’t in their database . . .
anywhere
. Fortunately, none of us—so far as we know—are actually wanted for anything under our real identities, so we go with Plan B: when all else fails, tell the truth. 

“We’ll show our real papers, and tell them we’re under ‘travel covers’ to get Barraki and Tweezaa home. The
e-Varokiim
do it all the time. The covers, we say, are partly to avoid publicity, but mostly because we’re worried about another attempt on their lives. The murder itself will have been in the flash dump from
K’Pook
when we broke J-space, so they’ll have that much in their database already.”

“But the travel covers—don’t the legal ones have to be registered with the authorities?” she asked.

“Sure, but bureaucracy grinds slow sometimes, especially on a backwater like the Crack. It’s easy to figure that the cover registration didn’t make it to the
K’Pook
’s data dump—some asshole forgot to forward the right form or something. Happens all the time. The important thing is, everything else lines up right in their database. Remember, they aren’t looking for
us
; they’re looking for saboteurs. They’re concerned about threats; we’ll just be anomalies.”

To be honest, I wasn’t as confident of all this as I sounded, but it was important that they be confident, because I figured I was a lot better actor than they were. The worst thing they could do was look nervous. Of course, I couldn’t tell them that, because that
would
make them nervous. 

I was plenty nervous, myself. If the plan to kill the two kids really did trace back to someone inside the Co-Gozhak provost corps, there might be a data dump with the ship listing Tweezaa and Barraki as fugitives. 

Or maybe not, since that would get them publicly into custody, and from there it would be tough to touch them. Well, not tough to touch them, but tough to do it without ramifications. How concerned were these guys about ramifications? If they really were imbedded in the Co-Gozhak, probably very concerned. 

So a more dangerous possibility was that the data dump just had us listed as “persons of interest.” Then they’d let us go on our way, but quietly inform somebody somewhere where we were, and then silencers would start to show up. 

I did the only reasonable thing under the circumstances. I took a nap.

*   *   *

The jolly boat off-loaded us at a fairly small cargo bay, the magnetic harnesses took us to an elevator, and that took us down to the body of one of the wheels, where there was gravity and we could unharness. Then we had to thread our way down a corridor to screening. 

The first things I noticed, once we got out of the elevator, were the big, grim-looking Zaschaan in the mottled gray fatigues of Co-Gozhak dirt soldiers. We passengers were in a line down the middle of the corridor, and there were Zaschaan on either side, every ten meters or so. They weren’t packing polite crowd-control weapons, either; they had room sweepers—selective fire 31mm “thud guns.” Not even the Zaschan were nuts enough to load sabot or HX grenades inside a pressure hull, so that meant either flexible baton rounds or multi-flechette canister, and, knowing Zaschaan, my money was on the canister. If these assholes started shooting in this corridor, as full as it was, in about twenty seconds anyone who wasn’t dead would be up to their knees in blood.

I’ll say one thing about using Zaschaan troopers as hall monitors—nobody tried to jump the line, and whatever bitching there was, it was subdued. The line was moving pretty slowly, and it gave me time to try to remember some of my pigeon Szawa. I was seven or eight years rusty, and even when I was using it regularly there weren’t a lot of subjects that I could converse about. Fortunately, there weren’t a lot of subjects which interested the average Zaschaan grunt. The next trooper on my right looked more bored than pissed off—and since those are usually the only two moods you get to choose between with these guys, I figured I had a winner.

“Hey, Corporal,” I said in Szawa, letting him know that I was enough on the ball to read the rank brassard on his shoulder. He looked at me—he had to look down a little—and I gestured at him and another of the soldiers. 

“Where the monkey grunts? Shit duty like this—job for them.”

Of course, I didn’t say monkey—I used the name of a small hairy animal from the Zaschaan home world known as a high-strung troublemaker, but monkey’s a close-enough translation.
Monkey grunt
was Zaschaan slang for Human soldiers. 

They say that the development of intelligence in a species is tied to communication, and I believe it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every intelligent species we know of has remarkably sophisticated facial expressions, provided you know how to read them. For a moment, the Zaschaan corporal looked like he wanted to spit. Instead, he belched—a low, smelly rumble of disdain—from his lower mouth, and then spoke from the upper one.

“Fuck you, monkey boy,” he answered, in the high-pitched nasal voice that always comes as a surprise at first, issuing from that massive body. But he was still bored rather than pissed off, so I grinned at him and shook my head.

“Zack corporal too big—hurt my ass.”

That got a rumbling grunt of a laugh from his lower mouth, and it tickled his curiosity a little, too.

“Where you learn Szawa?” he asked.

I held my right arm across my chest as if it were a rifle at port arms, my index and middle fingers extended like a two-barreled pistol. That was the Co-Gozhak tactical hand signal for an armed soldier. He nodded, but his eyes narrowed a little.

“Which side?”

I laughed, because it was a stupid question. 

“The one talks to Zacks in Szawa instead of pointy light.”

Pointy light
—laser fire—was more Zack soldier slang. He relaxed a little and nodded. 

“Monkey grunts got sent away,” he said, finally answering my original question.

“Lucky bastards,” I said. He looked at me without nodding.

“Maybe not so lucky,” he answered. “Couple monkey grunts the ones that blew up the C-lighter. Maybe more of them knew about it, but didn’t say anything. Maybe whole cohort goes some place dark, gets talked to long time.
Long
fucking time.”

Oh, great.

It had been almost ten years since two Human Co-Gozhak brigades mutinied and went rogue on Nishtaaka, but nobody in uniform had forgotten. Since then, almost all Co-Gozhak combat brigades had been made up of cohorts from different races, even though that made logistics and medical support a bitch, and unit cooperation . . . well . . . spotty. The thought that another Human cohort might have gone bad was just the sort of thing to drive the
Cottohazz
’s military brass ape shit. Any local commander’s first instinct would be to come down as hard as he could, as quickly as he could, just to cover his ass to the guys upstairs. It would go hard on the six hundred or so guys in the cohort, not because they’d done anything, but just because some dickless asshole would think he had to “take decisive action”—and nobody who mattered was going to shed any tears over a couple hundred monkey grunts.

“Anybody hurt on the C-lighter?” I asked. 

He nodded.

“Maybe dozen ship crew, three monkey grunts, and five brothers. All dead.”

Brothers—what Zaschaan dirt soldiers call the others in their cohort.

The line had been moving a step every now and then, and I’d edged a little past him. The gap had opened ahead of me and it was time to move along, catch up with Marfoglia and the two kids, who I saw were watching me carry on a Szawa conversation with the corporal in openmouthed surprise. We were also almost to the end of the line, to the interview rooms.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Brollo-Keetlun ah-Kap,” he answered. “You?”

“Aleksandr Sergeyevich Naradnyo,” I answered, like him using my patronymic. I couldn’t remember the last time I had. “My brothers call me Sasha,” I added. I didn’t offer my hand—Zaschaan don’t particularly like being touched.

“Sorry for your brothers, Brollo,” I said, and I meant it. It’s not like soldiers have a really great life or anything, and these were just five guys doing their job—five big, ugly, cranky guys, to be sure, but that wasn’t a capital offense last time I checked.

He nodded, and I walked ahead.

“Hey, fuck you, monkey boy,” he called after me, and it was about as friendly as Zaschaan get.

Without looking back, I patted the top of my head three times with my open right hand, another tactical hand signal—
take cover
in a combat situation, but between soldiers out of combat it just meant
keep your head down, pal.

I heard another rumble of laughter.

“Where did you learn their language?” Marfoglia demanded when I caught up.

“I’ll tell you when I know you better. Look sharp—showtime.” 

The door to one of the screening rooms opened and the Zaschaan senior sergeant at the head of the line waved us in. There was a Human seated at the table, wearing the black and red uniform of a Co-Gozhak provost corps captain, with two gold crescent-shaped gorgets dangling from chains around his neck. 

“I have all of our travel documents,” Marfoglia said in her cold, authoritative voice, with just the right touch of bitchy boredom. She was perfect—that’s the virtue of typecasting. When she handed over two sets of documents for each of us, the Human provo captain looked up, interested. His gorgets made a faint jingling sound as he reached for the documents.

“I am escorting the two e-Traak heirs home,” she went on. “Mr. Naradnyo is our security coordinator. These are our travel covers.”

Also very good—a minimum of words. Never explain anything until they ask for an explanation. Otherwise you look as if you’ve got a story all cooked up you’re dying to tell—which, of course, you do, and you are. 

The captain hand-scanned the codes on the documents, looked at his viewer for a moment, and then nodded and handed the documents back to Marfoglia.

“Very well, Dr. Marfoglia. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. We’re bringing a replacement vessel here, but it won’t be available for another eight days, I’m afraid. Of course, I will make sure that your party has priority reservations for Akaampta, but beyond that, I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do to expedite your travel.”

Of course, of all the things it was possible for the captain to have said, this was the one that we had never anticipated. Marfoglia hesitated.

“The travel cover . . . it’s in your database. Correct?” she asked.

He looked back down at his viewer and nodded.

“Yes. Everything is in order.”

“I only ask . . . ,” she said, stumbling, not quite sure what to say. “There was a problem earlier . . .”

He shrugged.

“Perhaps a cross-referencing error,” he offered. “It seems to have been corrected.”