How Dark the World Becomes (25 page)

Her
Marines.

TWENTY

Our ears popped a lot on the way down the Needle, and the four-hour ride was time enough to gradually accustom our bodies to the higher atmospheric pressure at the surface. K’Tok was nothing like Peezgtaan. We got a good look at it, riding the Needle down, and it was beautiful—deep blue water oceans, thousands of miles of lush green rain forest, with brown and gray and white mountain ranges bursting out of the jungle canopy. There were probably deserts and savannah and badlands and all that other stuff as well, but near the equator we mostly saw open ocean and dense rainforest. Life didn’t have to hide down in a crack here—it turned its face up to the sky without fear and gave it a great big grin. Made me grin, too. 

Oh, yeah, one more interesting difference from Peezgtaan—there was no Human enclave. I’d scanned the planetary profile when we got the word we were heading down, and I’d been surprised to see the population breakdown by race and nationality: 61% Varoki of uZmataanki nationality, 32% Varoki of uBakai nationality, 5% other Varoki of various nationalities, 2% Zaschaan and Katami of various nationalities. Not one Human permanent resident. 

You had to wonder who fenced all the stolen goods. Or stole them in the first place.

There were scattered clouds down below, thicker right underneath us, so that the Needle seemed to disappear into them. We passed through the clouds, and then rain lashed the view ports when we broke through, no more than a couple thousand meters above the surface. K’Tok Downstation was in a broad valley, surrounded distantly on three sides by jungle-covered mountains and, more closely, by sprawling habitation—industrial parks mixed with residential areas, commercial centers, and a clot of stately, official-looking buildings fairly close by Needledown. 

The plantary profile listed T’tokl-Heem as the name of the city sprawling around Needledown—it was the main commercial center on the planet and also the administrative capital of the uZmataanki colony. Judging from the extent of the settlement’s footprint coming down from orbit, T’tokl-Heem was a fair-sized city, for a colony world; I’d guess there were upwards of a hundred thousand folks living there. As we got lower, I couldn’t help but notice that, the rain notwithstanding, there were scattered columns of thick black smoke curling upwards from a couple neighborhoods in the city. Other than that, though, it didn’t look too bad. 

Things look different from the air than they do on the ground.

We stepped out of the capsule’s air lock and right away got a nose full of K’Tok. It was hot and wet, the air filled with that earthy smell of growth and decay that’s common to the tropics everywhere. It didn’t stink like I remembered Nishtaaka had, though. There’d always been a smell of sour milk, rotting meat, and something else unpleasant I couldn’t put my finger on. I should have been used to it, because you get a whiff of it on Peezgtaan often enough as well, that odor of alien proteins and funky chemical reactions that your body instinctively knows just aren’t right. It was funny, but I didn’t get that here—maybe because the smell was laced with a hint of burning synthetics, and in my experience that’s the odor of trouble. 

The thing is, we weren’t outside. We were still inside K’Tok Downstation, and the air conditioners should have lowered the temp and humidity as well as filtered out a lot of those smells. So that meant the environmental system wasn’t working, which the big tower fans scattered around, hooked up to snaking, tangled temporary power lines, confirmed. I saw a lot of portable terminals, so the central data systems must have been down as well. The downport staff looked short-handed, sweaty, and flustered. Some of them looked worried, and a few were outright scared. 

There was security everywhere—more guns than data clickers, that’s for sure. Security was provided by a mix of folks—downstation corporate rent-a-cops with AZ Kagataan corporate logos on their jump suits, uZmataanki troops from the local colonial authority, and some of the imported Co-Gozhak MPs Gasiri’s task force had brought. All of them were Varoki, of course, the different groups distinguishable by their uniforms and, to a degree, by their attitudes, although they were all pretty edgy looking. I wouldn’t have minded seeing a bunch of Gasiri’s Marines right about then—or even a platoon of Zack dirt soldiers, when you got right down to it. Zacks may not be great conversationalists, but they don’t spook very easily. These guys were spooked.

Other quick impressions: overflowing trash containers. Carpet stained and sticky. Broken furniture in the waiting areas which no one had cleaned up. The faint, distant, musical tinkle of auto-fire flechettes hitting metal.

If Gasiri had known what was going on down here, I doubt she would have sent us down the Needle. Her reasoning was that the rescued civilians and ship’s crew, along with the captive uZmataanki Marines, would be safer down here than in either her cruiser or one of the nearly empty unarmed transports, since there was no telling when or if more uZmataanki warships might show up. Of all the odds and ends of rescued friend and foe, only Joe Lee Ping had remained aboard the
Fitz
. His testimony might be needed on short notice. But as to the rest of us, better to ground us and let the local Co-Gozhak commander look after us. 

It had sounded reasonable in orbit. 

There were thirty-four of us: the eighteen surviving uHoko crewmen, seven uZmataanki Marines, four of Gasiri’s Marines guarding them, the four of us from Long Shot, and Gasiri’s executive officer—Lieutenant Commander Fong-Ramirez—with orders to deliver a face-only report to Commanding General,
Cottohazz
Ground Forces, K’Tok, although when they talked about the ground general, they called him COGCOG-K’Tok. First time I heard it, I said, “And coo-coo-kachoo to you, too,” but the naval ensign I was talking to just looked blank. 

I guess we’d had our share of acronyms and buzz words in the Army as well. We’d have called him “the CG, K’Tok,” but that didn’t sound so tight-assed to me; it sounded squared away. There’s a big difference between being tight-assed and being squared away. 

Honest. 

But ground security at Needledown didn’t look like it was either of those things . . . Well, I guess you could argue for tight-assed, in the sense that the pucker factor was right up near the top of the scale.

They had already processed us at K’Tok Highstation, so the ground staff and security goons just waved us through, which I thought was pretty sloppy. A Varoki MP captain met us at the end of the concourse and explained the situation in aGavoosh to Fong-Ramirez. One of the Marines translated for the sergeant in charge of the security detail, and since we were standing about as close to her and her Marines as we could get, Marfoglia didn’t need to repeat it for me. 

A bus was waiting outside to take us to the Co-Gozhak headquarters compound, where we’d be processed more carefully. Simple enough. We all tramped down the nearly empty corridors to the main entrance, shuffled through the security gates one at a time under the big
AZ
Kagataan Welcomes You To K’Tok
banner—in aZmataan—and came out into light rain. The bus—also an AZ Kagataan corporate charter—was at the curb, with a hard gun-car in front of it and another behind it. As we hit the street, we all stopped and just looked around for a while, mouths open. 

There was a lot of trash in the streets, a lot of broken windows, and I saw two burned-out ground transports, one of them rolled over on its side. When people don’t bother to clean that stuff up, it’s generally a bad sign.

But what really creeped us all out was the silence. There wasn’t one moving vehicle in sight, not one pedestrian. Everyone wasn’t dead, so that meant they were staying inside, and folks don’t do that without a pretty good reason.

The Marine sergeant—Wataski was her name—broke the spell. 

“Okay, people, you’ve had your ‘oh shit’ moment. Now let’s get these detainees on the bus.
Pronto, muchachos.
”

She was supposedly just talking to the three Marines in her guard detail, but all of us got the message.

*   *   *

All during the ride across the city, I kept expecting our four-vehicle convoy to be attacked, but it wasn’t. A couple times we stopped and I could see the Varoki MP NCO, up at the front with Fong-Ramirez, talking by secure comm to the convoy commander. Then we’d start up again, sometimes continuing, sometimes turning at the next corner, and once backing up and turning down a side street. 

Once when we turned I saw a manned roadblock down the street we’d been following—a couple spikey-bars across the street, a combat walker in an alley but with its autogun mount visible and covering the street, and four or five uniformed grunts out there on duty. The grunts didn’t look like insurgents; they looked like colonial regular troops. No one was shooting, but we were avoiding them.

I’d herded Marfoglia, Barraki, and Tweezaa onto the bus and parked us in two rows of seats almost at the back and near the rear exit door, with Marfoglia and I sitting in the window seats and the kids in the aisle seats. Marfoglia and I would shelter them from any broken glass that way. I’d done all that, but my attention was on what was going on outside. Now I looked at them. 

Both kids had been pretty sick from the anti-allergy and anti-viral shots we’d gotten the previous day, and they still looked rocky. They hadn’t bothered me or Marfoglia that much, and as I looked around, I noticed that the Marines standing in the aisle seemed to be in better shape than the Varoki sitting in the seats. No telling with body chemistry.

I looked back at the kids. They weren’t just sick; they were pretty scared, too. 

“Why are we turning?” Barraki asked, once my glance let him know that I’d mentally returned to the interior of the bus.

“Are those insurgents down there?” Marfoglia asked, looking at the roadblock.

I shrugged. I didn’t think so, but I wasn’t sure.

“No. They are local troops,” I heard a voice say, and one of the Varoki sitting in the row ahead of us turned and looked at us. He was in the plain yellow jumpsuit they’d given all the captive uZmataanki Marines, and he had a single-piece soft conforming bandage covering most of one side of his face and head—a burn-graft sustainer compress, from the looks of it.

“We trained with them, before . . .” His voiced trailed off and he looked around, unsure what word to use. War? Unpleasantness? Sneak attack? Atrocity? Mistake? Finally, he just tilted his head to one side—a shrug. Before
this
. 

“Hey, Curley!” one of the Marine guards standing in the center aisle said sharply, pointing to the wounded Varoki Marine to make it clear which of the prisoners he was talking to. “Zip it,
hombre
.” 

Most of the Varoki on the bus—not just the prisoners—looked at the Marine with a mix of surprise and resentment. At least some of the uHoka crewmen had entertained the notion that we might all be united in brotherhood by common adversity, regardless of race or nationality. But calling a hairless Varoki “Curley” was not much different than calling him a leather-head, and everybody on the bus knew it. Sergeant Wataski shot the Marine a sharp look, but the rifleman’s defiant glare remained intact.

Hard to blame him; he’d lost friends. Hard to blame the Varoki Marine, either. It’s not as if anyone had asked his opinion before charging off to war, and he’d lost friends, too, probably a lot more of them. Hard to blame anyone on the bus, or anyone down at that roadblock. Hard to blame Gasiri, or even the dead captains of the dead uZmataanki cruisers, carrying out orders from their government and high command. But here we were, going down this waterslide of blood, picking up speed every second, and the fact that there didn’t seem to be anyone handy to blame wasn’t making the ride any more fun.

*   *   *

aGavoosh is a heavy, guttural language, very well-suited to angry rants. Since I don’t speak it, I let Marfoglia do all the ranting while I looked around the deputy attaché for something-or-other’s office. It was messy, like everything else I’d seen on K’Tok. All the comforting administrative routines were crumbling, and that’s probably one of the things that made the paper pushers so cranky, but it didn’t explain all of it. 

I mean, here this guy was, a Varoki, a cultural attaché of some sort for the
Cottohazz
, pressed into emergency refugee management, with anti-government insurgents all over the place and a nice little side war going on between the uBakai and uZmataanki. Here we were, two Humans taking care of a couple Varoki kids in trouble. And they weren’t just any Varoki kids; these were the e-Traak heirs, and he knew it. Up in orbit, the only remaining functional—and loyal—
Cottohazz
warship in the star system was Human-manned. You’d think this guy would be interested in helping us, or would at least pretend to be. But no. 

So I let Marfoglia do the yelling, because even though I knew yelling wasn’t going to budge this guy, it let her blow off some steam, which I figured was good for her mental health. Besides, all the steam she vented at this jerk was steam that wouldn’t vent my way. 

I studied the guy while he sat there and took everything Marfoglia dished out, and from the way he flushed now and then, his ears back against his skull, I figure she must have been dishing it pretty good. But he wasn’t moving. He didn’t like being yelled at, but it was just a temporary discomfort; this too would pass.

What makes an official of the
Cottohazz
so uninterested in apparent loyalty and/or service to it?

What makes a Varoki so uninterested in helping the scions of a wealthy and powerful Varoki mercantile clan?

The paranoid answer is that he was being paid not to help us, and believe me, there’s a lot to be said for paranoia. I just wasn’t buying it today. He didn’t act like a guy who was on the take; guys on the take usually make excuses, or try to feed you a line of bull. This guy acted like he honestly just didn’t give a damn. 

How far did he think that was going to get him in his career? Not very far. So the question was, why didn’t he give a damn about
that
?