Ghosts of Punktown (3 page)

     “All right, then I’ll extend your temporary shelter in the VA Hospice until you can find an apartment. And of course you have a ten year pension, but frankly it’s limited in nature and you’re encouraged to make use of our resources here in searching for employment.”

     “Yes, ma’am.”

     “The mask, Corporal Stake. It’s because you’re afraid to upset the other returnees?”

     His stolen face – the face of a dead man, as if grafted on to replace his own obliterated countenance – gave her a sickly smile. “It’s to prevent the other returnees from wanting to lynch me.”

2

     “What are the goggles for?” She had smiled nervously when she asked it.

     “I damaged my eyes in the war,” he’d lied.

     The Blue War. The light of twin blue-white suns beating down through the jungle canopy, a jungle where every plant from tree to flower to the grass itself was a shade of blue. Blue like the flesh of the Ha Jiin themselves.

     The military surplus goggles were like those Cal Williams and many other soldiers had worn for night vision, or to see distantly, or to gaze through the walls of Ha Jinn structures. But when it had come time to shoot, it was through the lens of his sniper rifle’s scope that he had peered.

     Right now, he had adjusted the spectrum filter on his goggles. Right now, everything he saw was tinted blue.

     Cal paced the tiny apartment where he had been staying since his discharge from the VA Hospital. He had been returned to his own dimension a few months before all these others who were flooding back now, but it was being badly wounded that had won him that head start. The last treatment had erased the scars on his chest. They had assured him that everything without and within had been fully restored, but the skin of his chest still seemed too tightly drawn to him. As he paced he would occasionally rotate his arms in their sockets, or stretch them high above or far behind him, as if to loosen his confining, claustrophobic flesh.

     He hadn’t been looking for a job; not yet. He had his pension. He would live frugally, draw it out. It paid his rent. And it had paid for the young woman who lay on the bed he kept trying not to look at as he paced.

     He wore nothing but the goggles. His bare feet were stealthy as he padded, back and forth, like a tiger in its cage. There was one little window and he paused at it, nudged aside the shade to peek out at the city of Punktown. In the evening light, the hovercars swarming at ground level and helicars that drifted along the invisible web of navigation beams sparkled like scarabs. The lasers and holographs of advertisements strobed and flashed as if the city were full of bombings and firefights. And through his goggles, the entire city was blue, and even darker and more ominous than it would have been, like a metropolis built on the bottom of a deep arctic sea.

     Leaning against the window’s frame was the rifle he had bought last week from a black market source, along with the pistol he carried with him when he ventured onto the streets. He lifted the rifle now and couched it in his arms, a familiar and strangely soothing sensation. It was inferior to the one he had used over there, which had been able to fire both solid projectiles and beams. This rifle fired beams alone. And yet, in that area this weapon was a bit more advanced. He stepped away from the window and let the rifle’s barrel hold back the lip of the shade. He could fire a bolt of dark purple light right now, and i
t would pass through the windowpane without shattering or even scorching it. It was only one of the gun’s tricks.

     Through his goggles and through the rifle’s scope, he tracked one helicar for a moment before shifting to another. He increased the magnification, traced his gaze from window to window on the building directly across the broad street. At last, he lowered his view further and zoomed in on a man walking along the sidewalk. He zoomed until the man’s unaware face filled his vision. He was a wide-mouthed native Choom, even if the goggles made his face appear as if his skin were blue.

     Lowering his rifle a little, Cal twisted around and glanced over at the bed at last.

     The woman was of Asian lineage, with beautiful almond eyes and black hair down to her waist, tiny like the female Ha Jiin, but he had learned quickly not to be deceived by that. They were deadlier than the men.

     “What are the goggles for?” she had asked him.

     Lying there, staring at the ceiling and smiling a little as if to mock him, she was as blue-skinned as a Ha Jiin woman. Even though she wasn’t one.

     Cal dropped his gaze to the blood spattered and drying on his belly and legs. It looked black through the goggles. But then, he became conscious of something for the first time. The realization horrified him, and he almost dropped the rifle in setting it aside. He clawed the goggles off his head.

     Through their lenses, his own flesh had appeared blue to him, too.

3

     The giant’s head thrust up out of the earth, but Corporal Jeremy Stake knew there would also be an entire body below the surface, its form just as intricately covered in a mosaic of colorful tiles even if no one would ever see them. The giant’s mouth was open wide, and gave access to a metal spiral staircase that wound like a corkscrew down through the titanic body, down into the caverns below the jungle. There, in galleries of stone, writhed the bluish gases that the Ha Jiin worshipped as their ancestral spirits – but which the Earth Colonies had more practical uses for.

     Wisps of this vapor curled out of the giant’s gaping mouth like its last dying breath being expelled.

     The statue’s flesh was scaled in blue tiles. The eyes were almond-shaped. The way he looked at this moment, Stake himself might have been its model. Before embarking from his unit’s position, he had stared long and hard at a photo of a Ha Jiin that he kept on file in his palm comp. His fellow soldiers had helped him spray-dye his skin blue, and he had changed into a Ha Jiin uniform. One of his comrades had pointed a pistol at him and joked, “I don’t know, Stake...I think you’re one of them pretending to be one of us pretending to be one of them.”

     The face on his computer screen had no scars on its high cheekbones. No family members lost yet. But aside from the lack of a metallic red sheen to his dark pupils and hair, Stake had been thoroughly convincing as one of the enemy when he had set off alone into the lush blue forest.

     He waited, watching the head of the buried colossus, until he felt fairly safe in approaching it. Stake emerged from the undergrowth, and a moment later was ducking into the head’s dark maw, with its blended scents of earth and dampness and incense, and the subtle taint of the precious blue gas itself. But all of this barely masked the strongest, underlying note: the smell of countless dead bodies secreted deep beneath the forest.

     He descended the rust-scabbed metal staircase. In his right fist he carried a Ha Jiin pistol but it had been modified to fire silently, with Earth’s more advanced technology.

     At the bottom, copper pipes stained green with verdigris ran across the walls to glass globes, in which gas was burned to give off light. Three passages branched off from this chamber, but their entrances were covered by thick yellow curtains. Stake was very much on edge. Sometimes these caverns were utterly empty, except for the bodies of the dead – slotted into the honeycombs chiseled into the walls, slathered with a yellow mineral that crudely mummified their forms. Other times, members of the Ha Jiin clerical order would be down in the tunnels; maybe a solitary monk, or maybe an entire group. And then other times, the tunnels might have been converted into a base camp for a unit of Ha Jiin soldiers. It was frowned upon by their own kind, to take their battle into these places where only the dead were meant to be sheltered, but the Ha Jiin fighters knew that they were not the first to have desecrated the sacred netherworld. That the only way to protect it sometimes was to desecrate it themselves.

     Stake strained his ears beyond the soft hissing of gas through the pipes. A ghostly distant voice. A chant? So...he would not be alone this time.

     From his backpack he withdrew two narrow black devices speckled with faux rust, which he clipped to the railings at the base of the staircase. He activated an invisible field that ran across the bottom stair. It was a frequency that would not disrupt the anatomy of Earth humans, but would prove fatal to a Ha Jiin passing through it...either descending into the catacombs after him, or pursuing him should he need to make a quick retreat.

     Now Stake moved to the central curtain. A glance at his wrist scanner had told him there was only one person in the vicinity, down this passage. This person would have to be neutralized before he could assemble the teleportation apparatus stored in his backpack, which would allow the gases to be siphoned to the collection and processing station in the allied city of Di Noon. If it were a cleric, he’d flip a toggle on his gun and simply hit him with a gel capsule filled with a paralyzing drug. But if it were an armed fighter...

     Just beyond the curtain as he shifted it aside, the tunnel was full of the bluish mist. These days Stake was no longer queasy about inhaling it. At first, it had been thought that the gas had inorganic origins...until it had been determined that it was a byproduct of decomposition. In a way, the Ha Jiin were correct in deeming it the spirits of their ancestors. It was a trace of themselves, surviving them, lingering in the air.

     More glowing spheres set into the walls. Stake followed the chant, which wavered as if the person uttering it were underwater. He followed the blip of light on his wrist scanner.

     He turned down another branching hallway, ducking through a latticework of tree roots that had grown through cracks in the low ceiling. Peripherally, he kept aware of the holes dug into the walls to either side of him. Men, women, children. Dead for centuries, many of them. But it wasn’t the dead he feared. Some Ha Jiin soldiers wore a wrist device that deflected the probing of scans such as the one Stake used. And Ha Jiin soldiers, lying on their bellies in these honeycombs, had been known to fire rifles at scouts such as himself.

     A circular chamber opened beyond, the terminus of this particular passageway. From the threshold, Stake saw a man in a Ha Jiin soldier’s uniform squatting over a body on a wooden slab. His hands were working, working, back and forth with a moist sound. He mostly blocked the body before him, but Stake glimpsed the man’s hands and saw they were yellow. Stained with a mineral solution.

     Stake took his first stealthy steps into the room. His thumb paused on the toggle of his pistol. Life or death, at a simple flip of a switch.

     The hunkered soldier was not chanting so much as he was sobbing. And it was his heavy accent that had prevented Stake from understanding the word he sobbed, before.

     “Sorry,” the man was croaking in English, over and over as he slathered on the preserving mixture. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry...”

     Now Stake could better see the body that lay on the slab. Even partially covered in yellow pigment, he could tell that its flesh was not blue. The body was that of a dead Earth female. She had short hair like a boy’s, her features looked Asian, and she must have been about nineteen. Her Colonial Forces uniform lay folded nearby, where the man had removed it. He had
undressed
her. And in that moment, that was all Stake could think of. With gritted teeth, he stepped closer and pointed the gun.

     A pebble crunched under his boot. The Ha Jiin whirled around, his black eyes flashing laser red, and Stake shot him through the front of his throat.

     The man pitched back, eyes wide, across the bare legs of the yellow-painted Earth woman. He stared up at Stake, trying to mouth words, but only blood bubbled up over his lips. Stake didn’t need to read lips to understand the word he was mouthing. Over and over.

     The man had scars on his face – two horizontal raised bars on his right cheek, and three on his left cheek – to indicate the number of family members he had lost in the war. Family members he might have carried down into this very sepulcher, and coated with yellow mineral as he had been doing to this teenage girl he had killed.