So Long Been Dreaming (50 page)

We were ordered out to make sure The League got here first to offer these humans membership, before any aliens could get here. The Azteca attacked before any negotiations were finalized. Now things were messy. A rumour had spread that the Azteca were results of some alien human breeding program, recreating the culture in order to gain extraordinarily loyal and dangerous human fighters for their own use.

This is all I know.

All four of us are strapped across from each other in the pod, waiting as the heat builds up, looking past each other.

The virtual panorama on the floor screen flickers off.

The buffeting ceases. We’re still alive.

“Hello,” says a small voice deep inside my inner ear. It’s the dry and bored monotone of an artificial intelligence transmitting its way into my mechanical armor. “I am riding shotgun for you. Got about a minute and thirteen seconds left until you hit dirt, and congratulations, you have just passed the highest probability zone of being shot down by automated Azteca fire.”

Which is why it is just now downloading itself into my armor. No sense in its wasting its time on me until it knows for sure this body made it to ground.

“Name’s Tai Thirteen Crimson Velvet. Call me Velvet,” the voice says. “Lady on your left is Paige, man across is Steven. On your right is Smith. Smith has augmented ears for congenital deafness. If you get hit by anything with a good electromagnetic pulse, it’ll wipe his hearing chips and he’ll back to being deaf. Just so you know.”

All the information we need comes to us from the Tais. Tactical artificial intelligences. Little cybernetic ghosts. They give us the real orders, the real info, so that if we get into trouble they can scramble, leave, and we won’t be the wiser about the big picture. This is why we know so little about our part in this liberation.

These are tactics learned from many alien encounters. There were creatures that could just suck shit right out of your brain and figure out what your plans were. Humanity had to adapt. Tais were one of many different tactics The League used just to keep humanity alive in a hostile universe.

“Take a deep breath and close your eyes,” the Tai orders. “Time to peel.”

The pod explodes. The sides rip back and vaporize themselves. I open my eyes to see the actual island of New Anegada directly below me. My heart hammers as we plummet.

The green land rushes faster and faster toward me until the Tai whispers “Okay” and the chute slides out of the back of my exoskeleton.

There are no explosions, no shots fired at me; just a calm blue sky and lush green forest below my feet, the rippling blue ocean up ahead. The chute canopy overhead is invisible in a variety of spectra, including the visible.

A minute later, my feet hit turf.

I’m on the ground and I have no clue what’s going to happen next.

I’m expecting shots. But I only hear wind rustling through palm fronds and the distant foaming sound of waves breaking over reef. I’m expecting Aztec priest-warriors wearing gaudily coloured feathers to fan out and attack us. Instead, I’m facing a large three-storey concrete building painted bright yellow and pink.

It’s got terracotta shingling.

I’m expecting anything, but what I get is a man with his back against a mango tree, chewing a stem of grass, looking straight at me.

“Is this a friendly?” I subvocalize to the Tai.

“Okay,” the Tai says, ignoring my question. “Your regular weaponry is locked under my command. You have a tanglegun in your left pocket, if you need to use that. This is a police action, we’re not here to kill anyone. There are no hostiles on this side of the mountain range. We’re just here to talk and gather information from the New Anegada locals. HQ has brokered a meeting between some high level locals and an Azteca representative at this spot.”

“This is a friendly, then?” I ask again.

“Yes.”

I look down. The extendable cannon I have aimed at the man is primed, but useless because it will not fire in a friendly situation. So I let go of the trigger.

“Go ahead,” the Tai orders. “We’re here to gather information and any confirmations about who the Azteca are, where they came from, and what, if anything, these people can do to help us. I am recording everything back up to Orbital HQ. I’ll prompt you as needed. If you do this well, you’ll be promoted. So will I.”

The cannon swings back up under my arm to fasten itself to the back of my exoskeleton armor. It’s a smooth lubricated slide. A whisper. I hear the cannons of the other soldiers from the pod withdraw in similar fashion. They’re all fanned out behind me, facing into the jungle, covering the man in front of me and glancing up at the sky, just in case.

The man by the mango tree pulls the stem of grass out of his mouth and stands up.

“So,” he says to me. “We get invade, or what?”

I have no idea how to respond. I stand there, still, waiting for someone besides me to do something.

“You speak English?” The man asks. His brown eyes twinkle. He has a deep tan that is almost the colour of oak, and short, tightly-curled hair. He’s wearing a cream-coloured suit. With no shoes on.

I nod.

“You looking for Bouschulte, right?” He says, the words so quick they blend into each and I stumble over the accent. He ambles over to us. Someone’s booted feet shift just behind me. If anything goes wrong, I have backup.

I speak my first word.

“What?”

“You. Looking. For. Bouschulte.” The man repeats himself as if I’m slow. He looks frustrated for a second. “He up in he house.”

“What is. . . .” I swallow, “a bouschulte?”

“It a name. Frederick Bouschulte. If you have a Azteca name like ‘Acolmiztli’ or some stupidness like that, and you hiding with us, you don’t keep calling you-self ‘Acolmiztli.’ Seen?”

“Seen.” I agree out of sheer panic. The Tai in my head is still silent. I wouldn’t mind some assistance. The man’s accent is hard and I still haven’t been given any damned orders. “Tai,” I subvocalize. “Damnit, where are you?”

The man reaches out to touch my face, then stops when I flinch.

“You eye them, chineeman: you do that to fit in with them?”

“It. . . .” was done a long time ago. Far away. “An old tradition my forefathers continued.” I’d been too young to protest the removal of my eye folds.

A tiger-striped cat tiptoes out from behind the building and sits down. It starts to lick its tail, working hard at ignoring the five people on the grass before it.

“What you name?”

“Kiyoshi,” I say.

“Well, Kiyoshi, let we get on with this so-call invasion, eh?”

My Tai wasn’t being quiet, I realize, it was gone. And looking around at the panicked faces of the three other soldiers with whom I fell out of the sky, I realize theirs are dead too. We’re on our own. That was sudden. The Tais must have sensed an attack and bailed.

We might be just one step away from getting slaughtered.

The panicked feeling that follows that thought comes and goes swiftly. Old training takes over. Yes, the Tais make the decisions, but we have training. We’re still mobile representatives of The League. We’re still soldiers. We can still do something.

I grab the man’s shoulder with one hand, aim the tangle gun right dead in the middle of his forehead with the other. At this range, the tangle gun is lethal.

“What’s going on?” I hiss. “Tell me what is going on!”

He snaps loose of me, shrugging my armored arm aside as if it were only a nuisance. The motion is quick enough I have trouble following it. There is, surprisingly enough, a small knife now shoved up between the joints in my armor.

Smith aims his tangle gun at us, but it’s an empty gesture. He’s too far away. We no longer have superior weaponry to a barefoot man with a knife.

“You conquest failing.”

“There is no fucking conquest,” Steve snaps from behind me. “We’re here to save you from the Azteca. “

“Yeah man, so I hear. But first thing: seeing that we been making do for a few hundred years already, you might wonder what we know that you ain’t figure out yet. Second thing: you here to tell us what to do, right? Because you assume we don’t know what we doing. You want tell us what to do, how to think. That is mental conquest, friend. Mental.”

A boom shakes the air. Paige looks up at the sky. None of us can see anything, but I shiver anyway.

“Any of you able to contact anyone?” Paige asks us.

We all try. Shake our heads. We’re cut off.

“Come inside with me now,” our new host says. “Drop you weapon to the ground. You don’t need them.”

For some reason, without the Tais, the three soldiers are looking at me. Command structure has returned to our small unit. Ironic how we fall into the old patterns. This is what it would have been like in The League before the Xenowars. Only then it wasn’t The League, just scattered groups of space-faring humans spreading throughout the wormhole systems.

I have a decision to make.

“Do you have any way that we can communicate to our superiors?” I ask.

The man nods.

“That we do,” he says.

Into the rabbit hole, I decide, and nod. I give the order and we drop our tangle guns and the blade near my ribs disappears just as abruptly as it had appeared. I still want to know how it got under my armor.

“I name Jami,” the man in the cream suit says, shaking my hand. “Jami ‘Manicou’ Derrick.”

Jami turns around, and we follow the barefoot, dapper man into the concrete-block house. We troop past the cat, which is now working on cleaning an extended furry back leg.

Jami asks us if we read much. He wants to know about some old book none of us have ever read, or heard of, or care about right now. He tells us it has an interesting moral to it.

He laughs gently at our ignorance, our focus on what is going on right now. He takes off his tie and suit jacket and hangs them off the back of a canvas chair.

“You going wish you know these things,” he laughs at us. “You should have wait and talk with everyone longer. So now, it a mess. The League trying to come in and reshape everything to be just the way it wants, and it ain’t that easy.”

The door creaks open and we look straight into the face of the enemy.

The Azteca reclines in a leather chair while an elderly black woman in a bright red and yellow patterned shawl carefully snips at his flat hair. Much to my amazement, her skin is even darker than Smith’s, who still stands behind me, clearing his throat slightly to let me know he’s there. It is an adjustment, I remind myself. Almost everyone on this planet is some shade darker than myself. I am the stranger.

A red cape drapes around the Azteca’s knees where his hands rest, gently crossed over each other. The gold plug in his nose glints in the light streaming through a large opened window, and his jade earrings gleam as he slightly turns his head to regard us.

Blue eye shadow swirls around the crinkled edges of his eyes. His black-smeared lips twitch.

“The League has arrived,” he pronounces, looking at our uniforms. “What do you think of our conquerors, Jami?”

Jami is leaning against the concrete wall, arms folded, looking at the small ensemble in the room. “Centuries ago the first conquerors of Tenochtitlan arrive in small numbers,” Jami smiles sadly at us. “They had armor and superior technology. The League only got the small number and the armor.”