part0014

“We’ll be at the Harmonizer Headquarters in an hour,” Tarkos said, checking the controls. He turned and looked back at the strange human woman, now unconscious and laying in the autodoc bed that the ship had extruded. The controls of the autodoc blinked unhappily: they were uncertain of whether to attempt to remove the vicious implants in the woman’s cracked skull. Choosing caution, Tarkos had told the autodoc to keep her stable but attempt no repairs. In Paris, the doctors and machines would be far more sophisticated.

He had retrieved Bria, Yeats, and the mutilated woman after his escape from the Ulltrian trap. As their cruiser settled, steaming heat, onto the waving grass, Wicklepick had performed an extremely long request, transmitted also over radio so that Tarkos could hear, urging Bria to allow the Thrumpit to come with them. But Bria had asked Wicklepick to remain behind and, as a Galactic Citizen, make apologies and arrange for restitution to the Yanamamo. Fortunately, not one of their tribe had been hurt, though several homes had been destroyed during the short battle with the Ulltrian. The Thrumpit, seemingly proud to be deputized, agreed to the mission.

“On account, and conditional on the request, that I be made privy and partner to your endeavors to stop this Ulltrian menace that, it is no exaggeration to say, threatens all Galactic civilization, even were there only a handful of these creatures yet alive and acting in secret consort on worlds such as this, Earth, newest potential member to the Alliance that has so long afforded all its members the graces of a civilization that is, I do not hesitate to say, numinous in its achievements and sometimes beneficence, and which it is my duty to represent in its scholarly endeavors since I am the only member of the Galactic Science Academy that is present on Earth and witness to these events, the greater moiety of my duty being to—”

“Yes,” Bria interrupted. What she had assented to, or promised, Tarkos could not fathom.

Once aloft, Yeats paced the ship, except during their brief microgravity apogee, dividing her time between scowling at Bria and Tarkos, and looking with concern at the human woman. Tarkos felt intimidated by her scowl, but he felt some relief when, after they settled into their descent, Yeats looked at him, the scratches on his dirty armor, the blood caked on Bria’s fur, down at their patient, and then out at the horizon and Europe below them, and said, “Are we being invaded?”

“No,” Tarkos told her. “I don’t think so. Not yet.”

When the Pyrenees shot by under them, Tarkos stole some glances at Bria’s wounds. Two gaping cuts along her shoulder were visible to him. Seemingly indifferent to the oozing blood, his commander worked through diagnostic screens, assessing the damage to the hull of their cruiser. Tarkos wanted to tell her to climb into the spare autodoc, but he knew that his Commander would ignore him if he spoke of her wounds. She always found it impertinent if he showed any concern about her well being. So, without the commander’s notice or approval, he instead sent ahead an extra message to the ground crew waiting in Paris, letting them know that Bria also had suffered wounds. Then Tarkos took the opportunity to unstrap and walk back to Yeats’s side.

“What was that?” she said. “Wicklepick said it was an Ulltrian. Was that one of them? An Ulltrian?”

“You knew,” she said. “You knew it was there.”

“No. I absolutely did not. I never dreamed that one was on Earth.”

“Right,” she said. “You didn’t tell me and I guess I understand that. I’m not inside your Galactic Alliance elite. And I can’t be trusted.”

“That’s unfair,” Tarkos said. “I knew there were Ulltrians alive out in the Galaxy. But everyone knows that, after the attack on Neelee-ornor. But no one suspected one was here.”

She glared at him. “Do you understand what this means? You have to tell people. And when people know, the referendum will fail.”

Tarkos frowned. “You can’t tell people.”

“We have a right to know. Human beings have a right to know. This is our planet.”

“Agreed. But right now we are hunting them. Secrecy might help us. And we cannot just announce that Ulltrians are here. Most people don’t even understand the history. They won’t even be able to distinguish between Ulltrians and the species of the Alliance.”

“That’s not for you to decide!” Yeats shouted. Tarkos noticed in the corner of his eye that Bria flinched. But she did not turn around. No need to. With her ears, she heard every word of this conversation, and watched a translation stream through her eyes while she steered.

Yeats closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again she said, carefully. “It’s not for you to decide. People should know.”

Tarkos shook his head. “You have sworn to maintain security protocols. We have to know what’s happening before we know what to announce. And if there is any chance that keeping this secret will help us catch that Ulltrian, then we’ll have to keep this secret. And that is not for you or me to decide.”

Yeats looked down at the woman in the autodoc.

“This is what’s going to happen to all of us, isn’t it?”

“Not while Bria and I are alive.”

She touched the glass. “Why would they do this?”

“The Ulltrians… experiment with their prisoners.”

“What about revenge?” Yeats said. “Could they want revenge for their defeat in the great war?”

Tarkos shrugged. “We—humanity—weren’t involved in that war. So we’re a weird place to start. But I suspect it’s more than that. If their ideology—almost a religion, really—hasn’t changed, then these Ulltrians, like the old ones, want to spread life through the Galaxy—”

“Don’t we all?” Yeats interrupted.

Tarkos shook his head. “Not in the same way. The Ulltrians believed that they were on a kind of mission to accelerate evolution. They wanted to spread all organisms everywhere, let them fight it out on every planet, in every ecosystem. A kind of mad chaos of death and struggle and adaptation. All the clades mixed and fighting. Every species in the galaxy made into an invasive species. The KunPaTel weapons that they preferred weren’t just a way to attack enemies. It is a way of furthering their goals. It’s an… ideological weapon.”

“And what do they expect at the end of all this biological war?”

“They believed that at the end of millennia of such struggles, the Ulltrians would be victors, as the ultimate life form, top of the food chain. Only it was supposed to be a new food chain, that spanned the known universe.”

“That doesn’t explain why one of them is here,” Yeats said.

Tarkos nodded. “Maybe this is a good place to hide a few Ulltrians. It is likely a good place to steal life forms. We don’t have the kind of surveillance technology that is common in the Galaxy. The oldest forests in the galaxy have more cameras per square meter than London.”

Yeats nodded. “They have biological weapons, don’t they?”

“Each one of them is a biological weapon. The Ulltrians practiced radical genetic engineering: conscious adaptation was part of evolution too, as far as they were concerned. So Ulltrians are all highly modified. There’s nothing natural about them. They’re a nightmare that dreamed itself. Most have the ability to generate and spread bioweapons, with their own bodies. But I don’t think it has attacked Earth’s ecosystems yet. We would know.”

“I liked it more when Earth was under quarantine,” Yeats whispered. “We were safe then.”

Tarkos looked down at the horrible wreckage of the strange woman’s skull, and frowned. What could he say to that? In the war that started now, no planet was safe, whether it was quarantined or not.

No one wants to grow up. But no one has any choice about it.

Earth’s Harmonizer Headquarters rose up, a corkscrew shaped building, on the outskirts of Paris. Bria set their cruiser down on one of the landing platforms that stuck out, like a flower, from the fiftieth floor. Cold wind whipped through the small ship when they opened the door. Before the door’s ramp had hit the ground, Dr. Murakami sprung onto it, running.

Tarkos felt relief to see the familiar doctor. He suspected, for a moment, that she’d crossed the Atlantic just to examine Bria, but then he thought better of it. Murakami was the best human doctor in the Corp, he’d been told by Vice Commander McDonough. That meant she was one of the best on Earth. And she knew a lot about Galactic technology. Murakami went straight to the autodoc and scowled at what she saw.

“Dear god,” she said. “What butchery.”

Bria rose up and started down the ramp when Murakami pointed at her. “You, commander!” she shouted. “Don’t move.”

Bria turned, the brow of her top eyes knitted down in a threatening glare meant to convey she was about to take insult. Two medics, carrying lifters to put under the autodoc, backed down the ramp, giving the Sussurat room.

“Don’t give me your scowl. In medical matters you follow my orders. You’re a mess, and you might be dangerous to others. Who knows what diseases lurk in the claws of an Ulltrian? You will report to the medical center immediately.”

Bria growled and hissed some complaint in Sussurat. She dropped on all fours and walked down the ramp, shoving aside the waiting medics with her broad shoulders.

“She’ll go,” Tarkos said. “But please be respectful of her.”

“Respectful?” Murakami shouted. “Find me the virus or bacterium that is respectful, and I’ll change my bedside manner. Till then, you fly spaceships and I’ll heal the sick—got that, Harmonizer?” She paused, as if a thought struck her. “Tarkos. Amir Tarkos. Tarkos,” she said, as if reading off a roster. She patted her pockets, and then produced a big syringe. “Here. Good. I got it. Sit still. Second course of your cancer treatment.”

Tarkos froze, eyes wide with surprise, as Murakami came at his jugular with the hypodermic. He tried not to swallow as she injected what seemed a very long, slow quantity of nanotech. His throat burned as it went in.

“Good.” She pulled the needle and capped it, then shoved it in one of the many pockets on her white smock. She waved at the men below. “You lot, stop standing around, get this autodoc into the criticare suite. We’re going to have to map out what’s shoved down into this poor woman’s brain. I’ll have to call Petot. Best brain surgeon in Paris. In Europe. And she’s got a broken neck. You shake her and I’ll throw you off the landing platform.”

Tarkos and Yeats waited while the autodoc was secured, and then they followed the team down the ramp. Wind snapped Yeats’s hair into her face as they stepped out below the ship. She got the faraway stare of someone who received a message on her implant. “Ah. I’ve got to talk to some of the people from biologics. They have questions. Conor is calling in to talk with them too.”

She hurried off the platform, following some virtual map that only she could see.

Tarkos stood alone. The shouts and murmurs ended as the doors to the tower closed, to be replaced only by the sound of the wind whipping over the edge the platform, and the ticking of the hot hull of the Cruiser cooling above him. The view from the platform stunned him, now that he looked out toward the sunrise. All of Paris lay in the distance, a cream and gray lacework of human civilization at its most graceful.

He checked his duty roster. Seven hours of nothing. No one wanted to talk to him. They’d read his report, and now data analysis would proceed without him. At least until the morning. That meant he had the evening free. War had come to Earth, and he didn’t much feel like leaving the tower. But he had made a promise long ago that if he had a second free in Paris, he would use it.

“Well,” he said aloud, “I better get down there, or my mother is going to kill me.”

Tarkos stowed his armor, bathed in the Cruiser because that’s where his spare uniform hung, and then entered the tower, where curving halls circled each floor, opening onto glass walled offices with epic views of Paris. After a long search, he found a team of Kirt engineers and asked them to inspect his ship. The crablike Kirt, always precise but oddly polite in their own officious way, promised him to put the request into the queue last, and ensure later requests came after it. That was the most you could expect of a Kirt, and it had the advantage that they really meant it: no other ship would jump the repair list to get ahead of them.

“No ship lasts forever,” the engineer told Tarkos. “Some day it will be food for the recyclers.” Typical Kirt: they acted like optimists but always talked about the worst of things. Accustomed to this, Tarkos thanked the engineer and looked up directions to the infirmary.

He found Bria hunched up, hair erect, and with all four eyes squinting in an expression close to rage, while a young doctor pasted some white foam over Bria’s cuts with trembling hands. Sweat dripped down the doctor’s pale forehead. But Murakami watched the whole scene with a peaceful look of concentration. Someone had already shaved Bria’s fur around her gashes, and as she sat despondently on her haunches, Bria looked like a cat with a dozen tufts of fur torn away. Tarkos decided that his continued existence might depend upon not mentioning to Bria how mangy she really did look. He suspected that Bria was rather vain about her fur, in her own Sussurat way.

“Commander,” he said. “I am pleased to see you well.”

Bria only growled, perhaps suspecting sarcasm.

Murakami dismissed the young doctor, who fled the room, hand still clutching the medical foam dispenser. Murakami turned to her chart and made a note.

“Doctor,” Tarkos said. “How is our patient—our human patient?”

Murakami looked up at him and frowned. “Tarkos,” she said, as if reminding herself. “Well, someone did a crude butchery on her, not caring about the damage, trying to crack her brain. The technology is not my field. Quantum entanglement stuff.”

Tarkos nodded. “That might just solve one mystery. The woman said that she could hear them, and if she thought too hard then they could hear her. That’s the thing about quantum entanglement connections. They work both ways. They dug into her head, but now she can dig into theirs. Or at least into whatever system is entangled with her.”

“Well,” Murakami said, “that’s all beyond me. But the Corp found an exo-archeologist who had worked at one of the Ulltrian worlds, Dâk-Ull, to help us try to understand it.”

Tarkos turned to Bria. “I checked with the Executive earlier. They’re working with French police and with international intelligence agencies. So far, no one has record of the woman’s biometrics. So: no identification of her, yet.” He shook his head. “Here’s what I don’t understand. The Ulltrians come to Earth, grab this woman, and operate on her. Somehow she escapes. But she said to us they didn’t know she was here.”

Bria’s green pupils dilated, which often happened when she thought hard. After a moment, she said, “Maybe not from Earth.”

“Ulltrians harm her elsewhere. Didn’t know she was on Earth.”

Tarkos sighed in consternation. “That’s consistent with what she said. But how in the hell could it happen? How’d she get to Earth from off planet, leave no biometric records that we can track, and return with all that metal in her head?”

“Must ask her,” Bria said.

Tarkos turned back to Murakami. “Can you help her, Doc? Any chance you can get that stuff out of her, and make her whole? We want her well. But—and I’m sorry to put it this harsh way—but we also need to talk to her. Earth is in danger if there are Ulltrians here. Grave danger. We need her help.”

Murakami frowned and put her pad under her arm. “You want a miracle. Well, you’re lucky, because I’m the most likely person to deliver one. But we’ve got a whole suite of machines in her body right now fixing her internal bleeding and her neck fracture. She cannot be conscious and moving, not even talking, while that’s happening.”

“How long?” he asked.

“For the neck, thirty hours.” She nodded once, as if to finalize the estimate, and then turned so briskly that her pony tail swung wide behind her. She took fast strides out of the room, leaving Tarkos and Bria alone.

Bria stood slowly. Tarkos frowned in sympathy as she flinched from her many wounds. For a moment he imagined the absurdity of offering his arm to the giant predator. She’d likely bite him if he did.

“Commander, there’s something I want to ask you.” Tarkos hesitated, mouth open. He wanted a favor, but the Sussurat did not generally take kindly to requests for special leave. Bria turned her four eyes on him, dropping her head in a sign of slight impatience. She took a step forward, testing her legs, and hissed in pain.