Starfist FR - 03 - Recoil (42 page)

“Well, boss?” Fogel asked after Gobels had scored the tests.

“Where does it stand?”

“Seventy-five.”

“I thought so! A few points above a moron!”

“Umm. Look at these results. On the verbal comprehension it scored very low but on the perceptional reasoning it scored within the normal limits of its estimated age.” In the perceptional reasoning test Moses had been asked, among other things, to put together red and white blocks in a pattern according to a displayed model, find a common bond between pictures displayed in a row, and other tasks of similar complexity. He’d done very well on such tests. In the verbal comprehension tests Moses had been asked the meanings of words, how two concepts are alike, and questions about social situations, general knowledge, and so on. In those tests he had scored very low. “That is to be expected since it was not born into human society, and has been raised by religious fanatics.” Gobels rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe we should discount the VCI, or weight it differently.”

“Ah, a moron is a moron,” Fogel replied, looking at his watch. “What do you say we lock up here and go into town for some of that couscous at Mamma Leone’s place?” Mamma Leone’s was the only ethnic restaurant in Wellfordsville and the pair ate there whenever they were in town.

“All right. Give it another bottle of juice. Add a mild sedative and return it to the cage.”

“Aw, boss, it’ll only piss it out in there and make a mess!”

Fogel said.

“Let it. It’s its own bed. It can clean it up in the morning. Come on. If we’re going, let’s get going.”

Moses slept, and when he awakened he found the bright lights had been turned off and the lab illuminated by tiny nightlights placed at intervals along the wall where his cage sat. For once he awoke without noticeable pain anywhere in his body. He listened intently. No one was in the lab and, evidently, the living quarters attached to the laboratory were also empty because he could not hear the low voices or the music that usually emanated from there when Gobels and Fogel had retired for the night. He reached up and gripped one of the metal bars that formed his cage. It was loose. He had been working on it for several nights but that night, feeling much better, he was able to work it completely free. Once that bar was out, others followed until he’d made an opening big enough to crawl through. He found a window he could reach by standing on a bench. It was latched from the inside. He had no trouble figuring out how to release the latch. Then he squeezed himself through.

It was cold outside and Moses was naked, but that made no difference to him—he was free! He stood shivering in the pale moonlight. A dirt road twisted off among the trees. He reasoned that Gobels and Fogel were away. Fine. He’d follow the road, and if the headlights of a vehicle approached, he’d find cover in the woods.

Moses’s verbal comprehension might have tested low, but the Brattles had taught him Standard English and he knew what the word moron meant, and he resented Fogel’s use of that word to describe him. He also knew other words the Brattle boys had taught him, naughty words, and now he said them aloud in the quiet darkness. “Fuck you!” he said, shaking a tiny fist at the laboratory. “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

The Giddings Place, near Wellfordsville The moon was down when Treemonisha found herself startled awake by the most awful squalling coming from her chicken coop. “Damned foxes!” she snarled, leaping out of bed and thrusting her feet into the boots she always kept sitting ready on the floor. She grabbed the shotgun propped against the nightstand and shuffled to the front door. Standing on the porch, she broke open the breach and felt with her fingers that the gun was loaded. “I got a surprise for you,” she whispered, tiptoeing across the yard to the chicken coop. Holding a flashlight in her mouth, the shotgun under her right armpit, a finger on the trigger guard, she ripped open the henhouse gate, snatched the light out of her mouth, and shined it inside. At first she saw nothing but flapping wings and feathers. And then she saw it: a small child crouched shivering in a corner, its back up against the wall, its feet encased in droppings. Treemonisha blinked and shined the light full on the tiny figure. His eyes were closed tight in his strange little face; his arms were tightly wrapped around his knees. He was shivering uncontrollably. “Good God, child, what you doin’ in my henhouse?” was all Treemonisha could say at first. Then she said,

“Come on out of there now! Come on! Let me get you inside the house, boy, and out of this cold. Come on.” She transferred the shotgun to under her left arm and extended her hand toward the boy. There was something in Treemonisha’s voice that told him he could trust this mountain of a woman. “Don’t send me back!” he pleaded as she dragged him into the yard.

“Back where?”

Moses shrugged. “Back there!” He gestured toward the woods across the road from her house. Treemonisha shined the light over the boy. “Damned if you ain’t the strangest-lookin’ child I ever did see,” she exclaimed.

“What the hell they been doin’ to you, boy?” She examined the bruises and scabbed-over puncture wounds on the boy’s arms and legs. “Good Lord!” she gasped. “Boy, what is your name?”

“Moses. Exodus 2:10, ‘And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.’ ”

“Good God, what have I found here?” Treemonisha sighed, looking down hard on the little boy. In the east the sky was beginning to turn a bright red. She glanced at the sunrise and smiled. It’d be a nice day and now she had someone to talk to. “Moses?

Moses, eh? Well, Mr. Moses, I ain’t Pharaoh’s daughter and I didn’t find you in the bulrushes. I found you in the chickenshit!”

And she laughed, and there was something in that laugh, so different from Pensy Fogel’s, that made Moses laugh along with her. Treemonisha smiled down on her sleeping Moses—that was how she’d begun to think of him, as her Moses. She’d washed him, treated his wounds, and fed him a Wellfordsville breakfast—eggs, fried potatoes mixed with fresh onions, crisp bacon, toast, rich coffee—and he’d eaten as if he were starving. Now he slept in her deep feather bed. She knew he was not totally normal and suspected he had come from somewhere up north where disfigured babies were still being born. It was up there most of the bombs had been dropped during the conflict they called the Second American Civil War. No doubt that’s where the boy had come from, probably abandoned by his parents who had just given up trying to raise him as a normal child. She knew from the bruises and scars on his little body that someone had abused Moses terribly, and that made her very angry.

Treemonisha started at the loud, insistent knocking on her front door. “What the—” But instantly she knew that whoever it was, they were after her Moses. She sprang to her feet—no trace of the stiffness that belabored her ninety-odd-year-old bones—and went to the door. Cautiously, she opened it a crack. Outside stood two men.

“Good afternoon, madam,” one said. He held up an officiallooking identity disk. “I am Dr. Joseph Gobels and this is my escort, Mr. Fogel. We are from the Fargo Child Protective Services Bureau. We are looking for a missing child. Have you seen this one?” He nodded at Fogel, who stepped forward and thrust a trid image of Moses at Treemonisha. Now, Treemonisha Giddings was a good poker player. She shook her head, and her facial expression did not belie the instinctive terror that raced through her body alerting longdormant defensive systems. “Never seen him. Good day to you, gentlemen.” She made to close the door.

“Ah, one moment, please!” Gobels stuck his foot in the door.

“We know he’s here, Miz, ah, I didn’t catch your name?” When Treemonisha refused to answer, he rushed on, “You must give him to us or there will be very unpleasant consequences, madam!

There will be legal action and law enforcement involvement—”

Despite her advanced age, Treemonisha was a big, strong woman, as people are who live their entire lives on farms. She shoved the door hard and was rewarded by the pleasant sound of something breaking in Gobels’s foot. He screeched in pain and terror and stumbled backward into Fogel.

“How do you like it, you perverted bastard?” she shouted, and with her right arm she grasped the pump shotgun sitting just inside the door, worked a round into the chamber, and leveled it at the pair. This time her finger was inside the trigger guard. “Now git the hell off my property, you two, or I swear by God I’ll put a hole through you so big you can drive that landcar through it!”

The door slammed solidly shut behind the two as Fogel helped Gobels stumble back to their landcar. Once inside the vehicle, Fogel said, “Good thing we planted that tracer on the little shit, otherwise we’d never have found him.”

“We’ve got to get him back, Pensy!” Gobels raged, pounding the dashboard in frustration. “We’ve got to!”

“Well, goddamn, boss, how we going to do that? That old bitch’ll blast us for sure with that antique of hers! Besides, we can’t go to the authorities. Shit, we’d be in it up to our necks if they ever found out what we did with our specimen, didn’t turn him over like we were supposed to. Best we just wait. One of these days he’ll come out and we can snatch him, no problem.”

“We’ve got to get him, Pensy. Oh, goddamn, she broke my fucking foot!” Dr. Gobels groaned. “We’ve got to get him and right now! We are on the verge of the greatest scientific breakthrough since—”

“I don’t follow, boss.”

Gobels shook his head. “Remember those DNA samples we sent off to be run?”

“You got them back? You didn’t tell me?” Fogel looked hard at Gobels, a small flame of anger beginning to burn way down inside him.

“Well, I was going to. I am telling you! We’ve got to get him back and we’ve got to do it right soon!”

Fogel held up his hand. “Damn me if I’m going back to that place. No! Your specimen is not worth getting shot over!”

“It is if you’ll just listen to me for a second!” Gobels protested.

“Why, then?”

“The Skinks! I know what they are!”

Headquarters, Task Force Aguinaldo, Camp Swampy, Arsenault General Anders Aguinaldo stood at the window looking out into the rain. It would be light soon. Why, he wondered, did military crises always seem to occur during the hours of darkness?

He had just been awakened by the shift officer in the communications room. The flimsy he held loosely in one hand bore stupendous news.

Aguinaldo breathed deeply the fresh aroma of wet, growing things. A cool, damp breeze swept through the open window just as one of the ubiquitous flying insectlike creatures disintegrated in the electrical field that served as a window. That’s what they do, he mused silently. Skinks flared up when hit by a blaster, he reflected. “The more the merrier,” he whispered. Someone entered the room behind him. Aguinaldo did not need to turn around to see who it was. He held up the flimsy of the message that communications had delivered to him only a few minutes ago. “Read this, General,” he said without turning around.

Lieutenant General Pradesh Cumberland, Deputy Task Force Commander, took the message and read it. The rain drummed even harder on the roof. A flash of lightning stabbed through the air just over the trees. Aguinaldo counted silently, One thousand one, one thousand two, one thou—a clap of thunder rolled over the building.

“Buddha’s Blue Balls!” General Pradesh whispered behind Aguinaldo’s back. He meant the contents of the message in his hand, not the thunder. “That thing this ensign’s men captured was a Skink, no question about it. According to the string-ofpearls surveillance, there are plenty more where that one came from.”

Aguinaldo turned away from the window and grinned. “Our marching orders, General.”

“It’s dry on this Haulover place, I assume?” Pradesh grinned as he handed the flimsy back to his commander. Aguinaldo laughed outright. “I don’t know, and I don’t give a kwangduk’s scraggly ass! Get the staff and my commanders up here right now. We’ve got a long day ahead of us. Meanwhile, I’m going over to communications. I have a message of my own to send out.” He punched Pradesh lightly on the chest as he passed by. The mission Task Force Aguinaldo had been preparing for so hard and for so long was on. Comm Shack, Task Force Aguinaldo

“Goldie,” Aguinaldo shouted as he stepped into the task force communications center, “put your dirty pictures away, tell yer ne’er-do-well communicators to get their fingers out of each other’s asses, and get cracking!” “Goldie” was Lieutenant Nate Goldfarb, one of the three shift officers assigned to the communications center.

“Maybe I should have held that message up until after breakfast, General,” Goldfarb quipped. He had been the first to read the message so he knew what was coming.

“You knew precisely that this was going to happen,”

Aguinaldo replied. “I know because all you guys were pretending to be very busy when I came through the door just now. Not your usual posture, I regret to say.” He grinned at the enlisted communicators. “You warned them I was coming.” He chuckled as he sat at an empty console. The enlisted clerks grinned. Aguinaldo always poked lighthearted fun at them when he came in, a habit he’d developed since taking command of the task force. Another habit of his is that he did his own writing. Other officers would dictate their communications, then change them several times before sending them and raise hell if a clerk made a mistake trying to translate the verbal garbage that most of them passed off as military writing. Not Aguinaldo, he wrote his own message texts.

“Look over my shoulder as I write this, Goldie. You figure out the exact quadrant where this Haulover place is and address this directly to President Chang-Sturdevant, Ultra Secret, Eyes Only, NODIS. I don’t want any further distribution beyond the people it’s addressed to—and address them by name. Info addressees: The Honorable Marcus Berentus, Minister of War; General Alistair Cazombi, Chairman, Combined Chiefs. That’s it.”

“You don’t want to info anybody else, sir? Chief of Naval Operations? Chief of Army Staff? Commandant of the Marine Corps? Our staff, originating command who sent the alert message?”

“I trust the president and her highest military advisers to decide who among that Heptagon bunch needs to know what’s in here. They’re all a bunch of chairborne warriors back there; this needs to go to the fighting commands. But first the Old Lady. My staff and commanders are already coming up here. I’ll tell them personally. We’ll take care of the other commands with a separate message. I want you to attach this through a back channel to our fleet commander with my personal instructions to get it into a drone and on its way immediately. Naval liaison will know all about this when I get with the staff in a little while. All right, open your dictionary, I’m only a former enlisted Marine they kicked upstairs so he wouldn’t wreck the Corps. Here goes.