Trang (53 page)

Philippe stopped and turned to face
her. "So we have fourteen new SFers, including a new second, arriving on
this station, most likely later today."

Shanti nodded slowly.
"Yes," she said equally slowly.

Philippe turned around and started
walking again, not entirely sure where he was headed. He tripped.

"Stupid doorsill," he
muttered.

"Trang," Shanti's voice
was tense, "the doorsill is two meters behind you."

"Everything's fine," he
said, continuing to walk. "We just have fourteen new lethally trained
Special Forces soldiers, including a new command staffer, arriving on this
station, very shortly. On an alien station. On a diplomatic mission. So right
now, or in just a little bit, they're on Titan—"

He spun around to tell Shanti
something important, but he was surprised by how close the smooth, white floor
had gotten. He was even more surprised when it hit him.

Chapter 2

Philippe woke up choking.

Something was smothering him from
the inside, like a signal flare had gone off in his lungs. He gasped for breath
and was surprised when he succeeded.

It was cold, whatever it was. Cold
and sharp and choking and . . .
minty
?

"George, you asshole!"
came Shanti's voice. "He was waking up! You didn't have to bomb the poor
bastard."

"It's just aromatherapy,"
rumbled George.

"It's fucking chemical
warfare, you fucking—"

But Philippe lost the thread of her
invective when he began to sneeze. And cough. And gag. All at the same time, as
every last speck of goo that had been resting harmlessly inside his sinuses
began to flee whatever potent mix of menthol and vapor George had just pumped
into his respiratory system.

Finally Philippe's spasms began to
settle. He looked up, only to see a square box flying at him. He raised his
hands to stop it, but another fit of coughing seized him and he was too late.

It landed in his lap with a gentle
plop.

A box of tissues.

Philippe wiped his mouth and nose
clear enough to take another breath in, and he managed, "We have to go
back to Titan!" before another violent sneezing fit seized him.

"Why do we have to go back to
Titan?" Shanti asked, the moment he resumed normal breathing.

Philippe sneezed again.

Why do we have to go back to
Titan?
he wondered.

He'd had a definite idea that going
back was very important, but now he couldn't recollect why that was. Maybe it
had just been a dream?

He thought about it for a minute,
and another conviction seized him with equal force: Going back to Titan would
be a real bother. It was silly to want to go back. It wasn't reasonable.

Indeed, it was so unreasonable that
he couldn't even imagine why he had wanted to go back.

He had passed out and now he was
having delusional impulses. Had he had a stroke or something?

Philippe took a look at George. The
doctor didn't seem worried, and he probably would be worried if his patient was
suffering from something serious, like a stroke.

Of course, Philippe recalled,
George would probably be delighted if his patient was suffering from a really
interesting stroke.

He looked around, wondering if
something would either jog his memory, or more likely, confirm that his impulse
to return to Titan had no basis in reality.

Unsurprisingly, he was in a bed in
the infirmary. He noted with an unconscious pleasure that he was the only
patient and that, aside from some scrolls and the sinus-blasting tool that
George had just tossed on a counter, all the medical equipment and supplies
were neatly tucked away in the white cabinets and drawers. Philippe had
disturbing memories of seeing the infirmary in much greater chaos, with
supplies thrown everywhere and dark fluids smeared across the floor, but things
had been quiet lately for George—which was unusual, since it seemed like the
typical SFer's reaction to quiet was to go do something incredibly risky.

He looked down and noticed a gray,
square patch on his arm. It was about five centimeters across, with rounded
corners, and it had an
N
written on it in a slightly lighter shade of
gray.

"What's that?" he asked,
pointing to it.

"That's what they didn't give
you enough of," said George, furrowing his thick, black eyebrows.
"It's neutralizer. I'm guessing they just followed the directions for an
average SFer without taking into account your smaller mass, so they gave you
too much dope. Then they assumed you'd metabolize it quicker than you did, so
they didn't give you enough neutralizer.

"I know you're thinking,
'Wouldn't a good doctor adjust the dosage?' but keep in mind that good doctors
don't do patch-and-probes."

"Don't neutralizers make your
teeth fall out?" Philippe asked.

George smiled, while behind him,
Shanti rolled her eyes. Philippe's suspicion of technology was another value he
did not share with the Special Forces. "You'd have to use them for a
really long time before they'd neutralize enough nutrients to give you scurvy
or rickets," the doctor said. "I'll give you a multivitamin once this
patch comes off, just to be on the safe side."

"That's great," said
Shanti in a tone that indicated that the time for this nonsense was past. She
put her hands on the bed and leaned close to Philippe's face. "Trang, why
do you want us to go back to Titan?"

Philippe fruitlessly groped for an
answer. The sliding sensation began again, more strongly than before.

This time, it felt like something
was sliding into place, like a dislocated joint settling back into its socket.

"The new soldiers."

The words came out of Philippe's
mouth almost of their own accord. The moment he heard them, he knew they were
right
.

Of course! The new soldiers!
Another bunch of hyperactive combat specialists were coming to screw up his
diplomatic mission. More large, violent soldiers who had been carefully trained
to kill things, when what he needed were people who would
not
kill
things, who would defuse situations instead of blowing the heck out of
everything.

The Special Forces.
That
phrase had struck terror into Philippe's heart when he first discovered that
his protective detail on the alien station would not be provided by the Union
Police. It had confirmed a suspicion that not everyone in the Union brass
wanted his mission to succeed, that even after years of remote communication,
there was still on Earth a profound, almost primal fear of the aliens. Putting
the Special Forces on the alien station instead of the Union Police had been a
deliberate effort to sabotage diplomacy—and Philippe had spent his first few
weeks on the station trying everything he could think of to get the SFers
removed.

He had failed, although his mission
had not. The SFers he had come with had, with training and many long
conversations, adjusted, but new ones—oh, no. He was going to have to have a
very long talk with each and every one of them before they came on board.

"I need to talk to them, like
I did with you guys, to give them an idea of what to expect and how to behave
on the station," he said.

Shanti nodded. "Yeah, train
them to be all diplomatic and shit, that's a good idea," she said. Then
she snapped her fingers. "But you don't have to! I mean, you already
have!"

"How did I manage that?"

"Virtual you did it—a VY has
already trained them."

Philippe closed his eyes and
sighed. Her faith, her touching, childlike faith in technology. . . .

"And how do we know that the
VY did a good job?" he asked.

Annoyance filled her voice.
"I'm sure it was a standard VY. It got high marks for quality of
information, I remember seeing that. So you think you can fucking relax about
it?"

Philippe's eyes snapped open. The
SF's chain of command might be amorphous, but one thing was clear: Philippe,
being DiploCorps, was not in it. When it came to security, he'd learned to let
the SF take the lead, but in any other field, Shanti had no right to boss him.

He stared at her for a moment.
"High marks. From the people who need training, and who therefore are by
definition unable to judge the quality of the information?"

Shanti's eyes narrowed. "You
know, I think I liked you better when you were doped up."

"Of course you did. Please ask
the Special Forces to send me a copy of the VY so that I can check and make
sure he's not a virtual incompetent."

She opened her mouth to protest.
Philippe prepared himself to parry when a flat, emotionless voice sounded in
his ear. "You have an all-station meeting in thirty minutes," it
said.

"My earplant just went
off," he said, pointing at his left earlobe, which, like those of all the
humans on the alien station, was distended by the hardware it contained.
"I've got an all-station meeting in thirty minutes."

"Should you go?" asked
Shanti, her annoyance instantly forgotten. "Are you well enough? We can
send Baby if you're not feeling up to it."

"I'd rather go myself,"
said Philippe. He turned to George. "I feel fine now."

The doctor grabbed a scroll off the
counter and unrolled it.

"Yeah, you should be OK,"
he said, after consulting its contents. "Hang on a second."

George fished something small out
of a drawer and walked over to Philippe. He painlessly whipped off the old
patch and slapped the new one on in one dexterous motion.

Philippe looked at the new patch.
It was black, and it had a
V
on it made out of multicolored happy faces.

"Happy faces?" he asked
George.

"That means placebo,"
Shanti said, smirking.

Philippe laughed, and then started
to look around the room for his jacket. It had apparently been removed when he
was out cold, leaving him in only his short-sleeved lonjons. He saw part of a
dark blue wad sticking out from under the bed next to his.

"Is that my jacket?" he
asked, pained.

"Oh, sorry," said Shanti,
retrieving it and giving it a rough couple of shakes before tossing it to him.
"We were in a hurry."

Philippe nodded, accepting that he
would be leaving this suit jacket behind. He fished his gloves and hood out of
the wrinkled jacket's pocket. Then he protested uselessly as Shanti and George
insisted on putting them on for him, sliding the long gloves up his arms and pressing
them against the sleeves of his lonjons to make a seal impregnable to any alien
toxins than he might come across in the common area, and attaching the hood to
the back of the lonjons' neck where he could pull it over his head and face if
need be. Although he looked like he was wearing nothing more than some kind of
wet suit, he was now outfitted in the most advanced armor the Union could
provide.

He managed to stand up and walk
without wobbling too excitingly, so he insisted on going to his room unaccompanied.
There, he put on his other suit jacket and smoothed his hair once again. He
walked out to go to his meeting feeling relaxed and just a tiny bit victorious.

Then he looked down and wondered
why his hands were shaking.

He crammed them in his pockets and
went on his way.

There had never been a shortage of meetings on the alien
station.

During his time there, Philippe had
met countless times with all nine of the different aliens species—

Scratch that. Or, allow it: It all
depended on how one defined a meeting.

If only formal meetings, with
schedules and agendas, counted, then Philippe had met countless times with only
seven of the nine alien species.

After all, no one had formal
meetings with the bizarre and dangerous shape-shifter that Patch had named the
Magic Man. When Philippe wanted to talk to that particular alien, he just had
to hope that their paths would cross. If luck was with him and they did run
into each other, then Philippe had to hope even more fervently that Magic Man
would not ignore him.

Even more elusive were the White
Spiders. Running into them was not a challenge—they hung around everywhere in
the station. But they did so in complete silence, utterly unresponsive to any
invitation to discussion. Philippe's "meeting" with the White Spiders
consisted of one conversation he had had with one White Spider. Once.

Still, with seven other highly
social species on the station, there was never a shortage of meetings—informal
chats, one-on-ones, formal summits, group sessions, and even press conferences.
There were days when it felt like all Philippe did on the station was
attend
meeting after meeting after meeting.

Which was not all that different
from the life of a diplomat on Earth.

The all-station meetings, however,
were something new, an experiment being conducted by the Hosts. These meetings,
like Philippe's and Shanti's interrogations on Titan, were the result of a
series of harrowing events that had taken place when the Cyclopes had attempted
to conquer the Hosts' home world. The invasion had been stopped by the Magic
Man, who had, in retaliation, conquered the Cyclopes planet—all by himself. To
top things off, Kre-Pi-Twa-Ki-Tik-Nao, the reluctant Host messiah, had
rematerialized after roughly 850 years spent in a kind of incorporeal
half-life.