Trident's Forge (17 page)

“We don't have thirty children at a time,” Mei said gently. “Could you and Theresa feed thirty hungry mouths? Teach thirty thirsty little brains?”

“We would try.”

“And fail,” Mei said matter of factly. She wasn't wrong, as difficult as it was for him to admit. “They kept four today. Usually they only keep two, and one of those dies anyway.”

“From what?”

Mei shrugged. “No sickbay to go to here.”

“Don't they have healers?” Benson asked. Mei gave him a pleading look.

“They… do their best.”

Right, Benson thought. Treat fevers with bloodletting. Got a headache? Drill holes in the skull to let out evil spirits. That sort of thing.

Mei seemed to follow his line of thought. “We were not any better for a long time.”

“Sorry, I'm just having some trouble with the idea of a ninety plus percent infant mortality rate. Picking and choosing which ones deserve to live.”

“It's not different from the Ark,” Mei said. “You left all of the unwanted back on Earth to die in Nibiru. Only the beautiful people got their tickets.”

“That's not fair. That was about survival. This is very different from the Ark,” Benson said defensively. “We don't kill babies if they don't turn out the way we like them.”

“No, you kill them before they ever become babies. You make big batches of embryos, pick out the good ones, throw out the rest. No ‘bad' babies ever get made at all.”

“That's not the same thing.”

“
Is
the same thing,” she insisted “Only difference is time. Time you have because of technology. They have to make the same choice without it.” She drew a lazy spiral in the dirt with her finger. “I'm not saying it's good or bad, they just do their best. It's just as much about survival for them as it was for you.”

“
Us
, Mei. You're the product of those ‘beautiful people' too.”

Mei angrily grunted her response to the jab.

“These people,” Benson said, changing the subject. “You respect them a great deal, don't you?” Mei nodded. “But you're a mother. How do you deal with seeing what we just saw?”

“You think of them like babies. That's not right. Think of them like…” Mei paused, searching for the right word.

“Like fish fry?” Benson offered.

Mei shrugged, conceding that she couldn't think of a better term. “They're not babies for another year. The ones that survive get a name then. Then they love them just like we do.” She looked up at the stars and was quiet for a long moment. She loved looking at the stars. He did not.

“Why'd they keep more of them?” Benson asked, trying to get the conversation going again.

“Hmm?” Mei looked back down to him.

“You said they kept four this time instead of two. Why?”

She spread an arm across to where the battle had taken place. “Because they lost a lot today. Too many, can't feed them. Too few, can't work the fields or defend the village from raiders. Everything in balance.”

Benson nodded. After spending the first three and a half decades of his life locked up inside a self-sufficient metal tube, he knew a thing or two about maintaining balance.

“Esa and I can't conceive.”

The words hung in the air. Benson was as surprised by them as Mei was. He hadn't planned to say them, they just sort of rushed out. The silence between them stretched on uncomfortably. Under different circumstances, Benson would've called it a pregnant pause, but…

“How long?” Mei finally asked.

“Since the showdown with Kimura. The doc isn't sure if it was the radiation poisoning from the nuke or the chemo and nanites after, but my shit is busted.”

“You mean you can't, ah–” Mei's eyes darted down to his crotch, then back to his face.

Benson put up his hands in defense of his virility. “Oh, no, all the plumbing works, thank God, but there's no fish in the tanks. It could've been worse. They've already had to cut two tumors out of me.”

“Can't the crew do something?”

“Eventually, maybe. But all our geneticists and techs are working overtime right now trying to get our food to grow on the surface instead of turning into sludge. My testicles are alarmingly low on their priority list at the moment.”

Mei leaned in and hugged him tightly. “I'm sorry.”

Benson fought back unexpected tears. “It's OK.”

“It's not OK,” she said. “You saved every family at the cost of having your own.”

“The thought had occurred to me,” Benson agreed. “Who were the two people who took the infants?”

“The parents,” Mei said.

“The parents? But the mother–”

Mei shook her head. “Not mother, bearer. They carry the babies, but they're not parents.”

It was Benson's turn to look at her funny. “How does that work, exactly?”

Mei paused for a long time, considering. Finally, she started again. “As far as I can tell, there are two genders, but not like men and women.”

“Then what are they like?”

“It's complicated. They all go through both, one when they're younger, then the other when they become elders. They call it the transition.”

That raised Benson's eyebrows. “They're both men and women at different times?”

“No. Well, sort of. It's like they go through puberty twice. What looks like old age, faded colors and smaller build, is just them transitioning to the other gender. The young and elders pair off, but to have children, they need a bearer. The bearers actually carry the children until they are ready to be born, but they aren't parents. They have eggs laid in them.”

“That's… really gross,” Benson said.

“It's not their fault, Benson-san. It's their nature. And bearers don't come along in every brood.”

“Is that why this was the first time I've seen any of these ‘bearers' after being here for four days?” Benson asked.

“Fewer of them are born. They are precious.”

“So they're treated like a commodity,” Benson said scornfully. “Hoarded like sex slaves.”

Mei shook her head. “So quick to judge. Don't be in such a hurry. Learn, absorb, consider. Then decide.”

The Atlantians returned to the surface. The two parents, whatever that meant, carried their quartet of newborns. Behind them, the limp, pale body of the bearer was carried by four others, held high in a position of reverence while the procession softly chanted. Kexx spotted the two of them sitting on the ground and peeled away from the rest.

“Benson-san,” he said, a lingual artifact he'd almost certainly picked up from Mei.

“Just Benson is fine, Kexx. Look, I'm really sorry about the, um, misunderstanding down there.”

Kexx waved him off, a very human gesture. He'd picked up a lot from his teacher. Did “he” really apply? Benson didn't know what to think.

“We'll talk about it later. Rest now. We wake with the light and go to work.”

The old detective nestled in Benson's brain screamed to keep going. Not to let the trail get cold. To start working immediately while his memory was still fresh, the scene undisturbed, and the evidence untampered with.

His exhausted, early middle-aged body which had just been through combat for the first time in years, on the other hand, thought Kexx's suggestion held plenty of merit.

“That sounds lovely,” Benson said.

The lanky alien nodded, then walked away, silent as a ghost. It was a useful skill in a partner, but Benson still couldn't help be a little unsettled by it. He glanced at Mei.

“I don't suppose you've got any whisky back at the shelter?”

“No,” Mei puffed up with pride. “We have sake.”

“That'll do.”

T
heresa stood
at the edge of the landing strip and watched the blinking red and green lights grow against the night sky as the shuttle settled in for its final approach. Deputy Administrator Merick stood next to her, along with most of the rest of the council, business leaders, an emergency response team, and at least a couple of thousand curious onlookers.

“Word's gotten out,” she said.

“Hard to keep something this big secret, I'm afraid,” Merick said.

“Wish I had a couple more constables for crowd control.”

“Probably unnecessary. I doubt our enemy has any sleeper agents hiding in
this
crowd.”

“Our enemy?” Theresa repeated. “We don't know that our people were being targeted. It could have been a tribal dispute for all we know.”

Merick shrugged off the point. “A semantic distinction at best. Don't forget, chief, we're out here to welcome home corpses.”

Theresa had more to say, but let it go as the shuttle glided in to land on the improvised runway. Usually, the pilots would simply flip the engines over to their VTOL configuration and set down vertically on the pad. However, there were no qualified pilots aboard, the crew having been the first casualties of the battle. The shuttle was coming in on autopilot. Most of the shuttle's fuel reserve had been burned up in the unplanned maneuvers over the Atlantian village, giving the autopilot only one shot at a safe landing before the tanks went dry.

Even though she knew the shuttle was coming in at over two hundred kph, Theresa couldn't help but think it was just hanging in the night like a balloon. It was just so damned big, her mind had trouble believing it could fly at all.

Soon though, the rear wheels screeched against the tarmac and the shuttle leveled out. Theresa's hands shot up to protect her ears as the shuttle's thrust-reversers snapped into place and the engines ramped up to full power with a deafening roar, throwing out ringed cones of blue flame. In a shockingly short distance, the shuttle bled off almost all of its speed until it rolled to a stop near the end of the runway.

The large cargo-loading platform at the center of the fuselage dropped down, covered in bodies. Theresa recognized Korolev standing among the stretchers. He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted loud enough to be heard over the dying engines. “Bring the defibrillator.”

Theresa grabbed Dr Russell and headed for the platform. She skidded to a stop next to Korolev and the expedition's medic hunched over a body covered in shredded clothes and blood-soaked gauze and bandages. Theresa gasped when she finally recognized the face hiding under the dirt, dried blood, and tangled hair.

“Valmassoi,” she said just as she was shoved out of the way by a medic.

“What's the story?” Russell asked Korolev.

“No pulse.”

“How long?”

“A couple minutes ago. I don't understand, he's been stable the whole flight.”

Russell nodded and retrieved a small white box from her kit. She pulled out the two contact patches, ripped off the protective plastic, and then slapped them into position on Valmassoi's chest and side. The box went through a short diagnostic to ensure that it wasn't about to shock a live person to death. A high pitch rose as its capacitor charged for the jolt until the “Ready” button turned green. In a calm synthetic voice, the defibrillator instructed everyone to step back, then delivered the shock.

Valmassoi's limp body went rigid for an instant, arching his back before going slack again. The process repeated twice more, increasing the voltage each time, but the result was unchanged.

“He's not responding. Bring the cart over,” Russell ordered. One of Shambhala's few electric quad cars backed up to the platform and Theresa and Korolev loaded Valmassoi's stretcher onto the back. “I'll be back as soon as I can,” Russell said. But even as the car pulled away toward the city's hospital, Theresa knew the gesture was merely a formality.

“He's going on the Clock,” she said, still using Ark slang to mark a death. “Where's Atwood? We're going to need to debrief all of you as soon as possible.”

“They didn't tell you?” Korolev shook his head, then pointed at one of the five sheets lying on the platform. Theresa knelt down and reached to pull the sheet back, but Korolev put his hand on her wrist. “I wouldn't. It's not pretty.”

Theresa ignored him and yanked the sheet back, then immediately wished she hadn't. Atwood's head lay sideways, her throat shredded so that Theresa could see white spots of exposed spine. It looked like her neck had been torn apart by some wild animal. Korolev was right; it wasn't pretty.

Theresa covered her mouth as she replaced the sheet, then took a moment to collect herself. “What happened to her?”

“I was locked away when it happened, but I was told she got caught out in the open when the villager warriors' line collapsed. Her rifle didn't make her any friends among the invaders. Hamilton and DeSanto were on the roofs sniping the crap out of them, and the rest of us had fallen back into the temple. She was the only one they could get at and they swarmed her. Their spears and knives couldn't get through her riot gear, so they attacked the only exposed skin they could find.” Korolev drew his thumb across his throat to illustrate the point.

“DeSanto and Hamilton?” Theresa asked, nodding toward the other sheets.

“No, they're alive. DeSanto should be good in a couple days, physically at least. But Hamilton broke his ankle jumping off a roof. He'll be out of commission for weeks.”

Theresa nodded and glanced back down at Atwood's body. “We were in class together, you know. We were sort of friends. Not real close. We fought over a boy once. Bryan always said she was one of the best Zero arrows he ever flew against.”

“She was. Dislocated his shoulder once with a massive hit from above. I didn't see most of the attack, but everyone said she fought like an animal. She didn't abandon her position even after her rifle went dry. She killed a lot of them, made them pretty mad in the process.”

Theresa stood up and straightened her shirt. “Who attacked us out there, Pavel?”

“I have no idea, ma'am.”

“Well then we have our work cut out for us. C'mon, I need you to tell me everything you saw and everything Bryan told you.”

O
nce news
of Administrator Valmassoi's death became public, Shambhala went wild. Theresa and her constables spent most of the rest of the night running around the city asking protestors to disband. Sometimes, they had to ask pretty hard.

“It's 0340, Hallstead,” Korolev said to one of the more pigheaded of the provocateurs. “And you're drunk.”

“Says you,” Yvonne Hallstead said without slurring. However, the effort of controlling her tongue overwhelmed what little spare operating capacity her inebriated brain had and caused her to sway like a gyroscope losing its spin.

Theresa grabbed her forearm to steady her, but Hallstead twisted her skinny arm away.

“Get'chur hands offa me,” she said through a gaunt face and angular mouth. Theresa remembered this one. She was a computer tech and former crew member who'd been given the boot years earlier when she'd been caught fiddling with pharmacy records to get extra pain meds, which then ended up in the hands of “recreational users.” A real winner. Theresa gave the rest of the hangers-on in her little protest circle a pained expression. Most of them had the good sense to look embarrassed for their choice of spokesperson.

Sensing the tide turning against her, Hallstead looked around accusingly. “Oh, I see. Just because I had a couple've beers, y'all think I'm spouting shit, huh? Well I didn't carve up Valmassery.”

“Valmassoi,” Korolev corrected.

“That's what I said. Anyway, I didn't do Valmasonry, those fan-headed fish-lizards done it.”

“Who was buying your drinks tonight, Yvonne?” Theresa asked.

“What's that s-posed t' mean?”

“It's supposed to mean that I know you've run up a pretty big tab with Marinello's and they're not taking your credit at the moment. So I'm confused how you came to be so drunk outside their bar.”

“My money's as good as anybody's.”

“When you've got any, sure,” Korolev quipped.

“I pays my bills!” she shouted. “And I don't like your tone, con-stable,” Hallstead said, infinitely more proud of her wordplay than it justified.

The rest of the circle unraveled and evaporated into the streets. Theresa was exhausted and running very low on patience. “Here's the deal, Yvonne, you're drunk and disorderly. I can arrest you right now if I want to cause you trouble. But I don't, so I'm giving you the choice. You can sleep it off in your own bed, or in one of my cells. But you're going to choose right now.”

Korolev moved in for his turn as good cop. “C'mon, Yvonne. Go have a lay down. I'm sure Juanita is worried sick.”

“Yeah,” Hallstead said slowly, unwinding a thought. “Yeah, you're right. Gotta work in the morning anyway.”

“You have a new job?” Theresa asked.

“I'm an independent contractor, thank you very much, Mrs Patronizing.” Without another word, she staggered off in the general direction of her house.

“Juanita isn't worried sick, is she?” Theresa asked.

“The only thing she's worried about is Yvonne catching her in bed with Raul Galveston. I'd almost feel bad for her if she wasn't such a dipshit.” Korolev looked at Theresa's face. “Everything OK, chief? What are you thinking?”

“I'm thinking I'm exhausted. Aren't you tired? You haven't stopped since getting off the shuttle.”

“I grabbed some rack time on the flight back.”

“Right after being in combat, you mean?”

Korolev shrugged. “I'm trying not to think about it too much. It helps to keep busy.”

Theresa bobbed her head, only half listening. “Doesn't any of this seem strange to you?”

“You mean standing on an alien world, harassing drunks at four in the morning? Or something else?”

Theresa smirked. “It's all relative, I suppose. I mean tonight.”

“What part?”

“All of it. Our shuttle comes home days ahead of schedule to a crowd of thousands? ‘Spontaneous' protests pop up all over town in the dead of night, led by the likes of Yvonne Hallstead?”

“Our leader was assassinated by aliens. That's going to get a rise out of anybody.”

“Yeah, but
Hallstead
? She's not exactly a political activist, is she? She couldn't even pronounce Valmassoi's name.”

“She was pretty drunk. You know how ideas get stuck in people's heads when they've been hitting the sauce.”

“Sure, but who stuck it in there?” she asked.

Korolev put up a finger. “Just a second.” He disappeared into the bar's back entrance, leaving Theresa alone with her thoughts. Maybe her conversation with Bryan had left her paranoid, jumping at shadows. But she couldn't help but feel like the whole thing, from the crowds at the landing strip to the protests, didn't feel too “spontaneous.”

Korolev stepped back out from the alley. “Maya says Yvonne paid off her tab tonight. That's why they started serving her again.”

“When?”

“Just after the shuttle landed.”

Theresa's eyes rolled. “And she paid cash or some other untraceable barter, I bet.”

Korolev nodded. “All cash.”

“Of course.”

“You think she stole it?”

Theresa shook her head. “No. Hallstead's history means she knows we're keeping a close eye on her, it wouldn't be worth the risk. I think an anonymous donor chose tonight to mint themselves a loyal patriot. Probably more than one of them.”

“The person who hired on her services as a contractor?”

“That would make sense,” Theresa said.

“Why, though?”

“That's the question, isn't it? C'mon, we both need to sleep.”

“You go on ahead, chief. I'm going to walk Maya home.”

Theresa cocked an eyebrow. “Are you now?”

“It's not like that. She's a little shook up from the protests and wants an escort back to her house is all.”

Theresa smiled and put a hand on his cheek. “Pavel, you're adorable. A little thick, but adorable. Just make sure once you're done ‘escorting' her that you actually get some sleep tonight, OK?”

“OK…” Korolev said uncertainly. “Goodnight, chief.”

“Goodnight.” She watched him return to the back entrance, then turned and walked down the wide radial street toward the Beehive. There was end-of-shift paperwork to submit. Funny, she thought, the only paper she'd ever seen was in the museum, but the name still stuck. Even out here, trillions of miles from the world of their birth, humans were still creatures of habit.

She'd picked up a few of her own habits over the years. Theresa had been a constable for most of her adult life before taking over as chief so her husband could go play ball with kids of all ages. It was a pretty good arrangement, actually. Coaching suited his temperament better, since shouting at the top of one's lungs wasn't only tolerated, but expected. Bryan had many fine qualities, but Zen-like calm was not among them. Besides, she'd been angling for the job since before they'd started dating. It was one of the reasons they'd started dating, if she was going to be honest with herself.

After more than a decade in law enforcement, Theresa felt like she had good habits. First among them was knowing the only way to let out the pus was to keep picking at the scab. Tomorrow, once she'd had a chance to sober up, she was going to have a chat with dear Yvonne Hallstead and see if she could find out who her new benefactor was.

Second among her habits was knowing how to keep her inquiries quiet until she had enough evidence. But that required people who understood the need for discretion. On a whim, Theresa turned away from the path to the Beehive and headed down one of the concentric roads, to the high-rent housing district.