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Authors: Vernor Vinge

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BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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She stood at her full height and her gray eyes were level with mine. “It is hard for me to believe. Hjalmar Kekkonen holds the Chair of Biology at New London University. Hjalmar Kekkonen was the first commander of the Draeling Mercenary Division. Could anyone so brilliant act so stupidly?” Her flat sarcasm became honest anger. “I did my part, sir! Your appearance on Shima was undetected. But since you arrived you’ve been so ‘noisy’ that nothing could disguise your presence from my superiors in Earthpol.”
Ah, so this was the cop Samuelson had bought. I should have guessed. She seemed typical of the egotistical squirts Earthpol uses. “Listen, Miss Whoever-you-are, I was thoroughly briefed. I’ve worn native textiles, I’ve eaten the stuff they call food here, I’ve even washed in gunk that makes me
smell
like a local. Look at this place—I don’t have a single scrap of comfort.”
“Well then, what is that?” She pointed at the coruscating pile of my
‘mam’ri.
“You know damn well what it is. I told you I’ve been briefed. I’ve only used it on a Hammel base. Without that much analysis, the job would take years.”
“Professor Kekkonen, you have been briefed by fools. We in the Earth Police can detect such activity easily—even from the other side of Shima.” She began refastening the black robe. “Come with us now.” You can always spot Earthgov types; the imperative is their favorite mode.
I sat down, propped my heels on the edge of the lab bench. “Why?” I asked mildly. Earthgov people irritate easy, too. Her face turned even paler as I spoke.
“It may be that Miss Tsumo hasn’t made things clear, sir.” I did a double take. It was the cop’s native driver speaking English. The gook’s accent was perfect, though he spoke half again as fast as a human would. It was as if some malevolent Disney had put the voice of Donald Duck in the mouth of a shark.
“Professor, you are here working for a group of the greatest Shiman governments. Twenty minutes ago, Miss Tsumo’s managers made discovery of this fact. At any minute the Earth Police will order our governments to give you up. Our people all want to help you, but they have knowledge of the power of Earth. They will attempt to do what they are ordered. For the next five minutes, I have authority to take you from here—but after that it will probably be too late.”
The gook made a hell of a lot more sense than the Tsumo character. The sooner we holed up someplace new, the better. I swung my feet off the bench and grabbed the heavy black robe Tsumo held out to me. She kept silent, her face expressionless. I’ve met Earthcops before. In their own way, some of them are imaginative—even likeable. But this creature had all the personality of a five-day-old corpse.
The native driver turned to my guards and began whistling. They called in some ranking officer who inspected a sheaf of papers the driver had with him. I had just finished with the robe and veil combination when the commanding officer waved us all toward the door. We piled down the stairs and through the exit. Outside, there was no activity beyond the usual sentries that patrolled the perimeter.
As the driver entered the blue and orange car, I crawled onto the narrow bench behind the front seat. The car sank under my weight. I mass nearly one hundred kilos and that’s a lot more than the average Shiman. The driver turned the ignition, and the kerosene-eating engine turned over a couple of times, died. Tsumo got into the front seat and shut the door.
Still no alarms.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead and looked out the grimy window. Shima’s sun had set behind the smog bank but here and there across the city lingered small patches of gold where the sun’s rays fell directly on the ground. Something was moving through the sky from the south. A native aircraft? But Shiman fliers all had wings. The cigar-shaped flier moved rapidly toward the city. Its surface was studded with turrets—vaguely reminiscent of the gun blisters on a Mitchell bomber. God, this place brought back memories. The vehicle crossed a patch of sunlit ground. Its shadow was at least two thousand meters long.
I tapped Tsumo on the shoulder and pointed at the object that now hovered over the estuary beyond the city.
She glanced briefly into the sky, then turned to the native. “Sirbat,” she said. “Hurry. Earthpol is already here.” Sirbat—if that was the native’s name—twisted the starter again and again. Finally the engine kicked over and stayed lit. Somehow all those whirling pieces of metal meshed and we were rolling toward the main gate. Sirbat leaned forward and punched a button on the dash. It was the car radio. The voice from the speaker was more resonant, more deliberate than is usual with Shimans.
Sirbat said, “The voice says, ‘See the power of Earth over your city,’” The speaker paused as if to give everyone time to look up and see the airborne scrap heap over the estuary. Tsumo twisted about to face me. “That’s the Earthpol ‘flagship.’ We tried to imagine what the Shimans
would view as the warcraft of an advanced technology, and that’s what we came up with. In a way, it’s impressive.”
I grunted. “Only a demented two-year-old could be impressed.” Sirbat hissed, his lips curling back from his fangs. He had no chance to speak though, because we were rapidly coming up on the main gate. Sirbat slammed on the brakes. I was leaning against the front dash when we finally screeched to a stop beside the armored vehicle which guarded the gateway’s steel doors.
Sirbat waved his papers out the window, and screamed impatiently. The turret man on the tank had aimed his machine gun at us, but I noticed he was looking back over his shoulder at the Earthpol flagship. The gunner’s lips were peeled back in anger—or fear. Perhaps the floating mountain
was
somehow awesome to the Shiman psyche. I tried briefly to remember how I had felt about aircraft, back before the turn of the millennium.
Tsumo unobtrusively turned off the car radio, as a guard came over and snatched the clearance papers from Sirbat. The two natives began arguing over the authorization. From the tank, I could hear another radio. It wasn’t the voice from the flagship. This sounded agitated and entirely Shiman. Apparently Earthpol was broadcasting on selected civilian frequencies. Score one against their side. If we could just get past this checkpoint before Earthpol made its ultimatum.
The guard waved to the tank pilot, who disappeared inside his vehicle. Ahead of us electric motors whined and the massive steel door swung back. Our sports car was already blasting forward as Sirbat reached out of the window and plucked his authorization from the guard’s claws.
THE CITY’S STREETS WERE NARROW, CROWDED, BUT SIRBAT ZIPPED OUR CAR from lane to lane like we were the only car around. Worst of all, Sirbat was the most conservative driver in that madhouse. I haven’t moved so fast since the last time I was on skis. The buildings to right and left were a dirty gray blur. Ahead of us, though, things stood still long enough to get some sort of perspective. We were heading downtown—toward the river. Over the roofs of the tenements, and through a maze of wires and antennas, I could still see the bulk of the Earthpol flagship.
I grabbed wildly for support as the car screeched diagonally through an intersection. Seconds later we crashed around another corner and I could see all the way to the edge of the estuary.
Sirbat summarized the Earthpol announcement coming from the car radio. “He says he’s Admiral Ohara—”
“—that would be Sergeant Oharasan,” said Tsumo.
“—and he orders Berelesk to turn over the person-eater and doer of crimes, Hjalmar Kekkonen. If not, destruction will come from the sky.”
Several seconds passed. Then the entire sky flashed red. Straight ahead that color was eye-searingly bright as a threadlike ray of red-whiteness flickered from flagship to bay. A shockwave-driven cloud of steam exploded where the beam touched water. Sirbat applied the brakes and we ran up over the curb, finally came to a stop against a utility pole. The shock wave was visible as it whipped up the canyon of the street. It smashed over our car, shattering the front windshield.
Even before the car shuddered to a stop, Sirbat was out. And Tsumo wasn’t far behind. The Shiman quickly ripped the identification tags from the rear windshield and replaced them with—counterfeits?
In those seconds the city was quiet, Earthpol’s gentle persuasion still echoing through the minds of its inhabitants. Tsumo looked up and down the street. “I hope you see now why we had to run. By now the city and national armies are probably on the hunt for us. Once cowed, the Shimans are dedicated in their servility.”
I pulled the black veil of my robe more tightly down over my head and swore. “So? What now? This place can’t be more than four kilometers from the lab. We’re still dead ducks.”
Tsumo frowned. “Dead—ducks?” she said. “What dialect do you speak?”
“English, damn it!” Youngsters are always complaining about my language.
Sirbat hustled around the rear of the sports car to the sidewalk. “Go quick,” he said and grasped my wrist with bone-crushing force. “I hear police coming.” As we ran toward a narrow alley, I glanced up the street. The place was right out of the dark ages. I’d like to take some of these young romantics and stuff them into a real, old-fashioned slum like that one. The buildings were better than three stories high, and crushed up against each other. Windows and tiny balconies competed in endless complication for open air. Fresh-laundered rags hung from lines stretched between the buildings—to become filthy in the sooty air. The stench of garbage was the only detail the scene seemed to lack.
The moment of stunned shock passed. Some Shimans ran wildly around while others sat and gnawed at the curbing. This was panic, and it made their previous behavior look tame. The buildings were emptying, and the screams of the trampled went right through the walls. If we had been just ten meters farther away from that alley, we’d never have made it.
We huddled near the end of the hot cramped alley amid the crumbling remains of a couple of skeletons, and listened to the cries from
beyond. Now I could hear the police sirens, too—at least that’s what I assumed the bass
boohoohoo
to be. I turned my head and saw that it was just centimeters from the saurian immensity of Sirbat’s fangs.
The Shiman spoke. “You may be all right. At one time I had good knowledge of this part of the city. There is a place we may use long enough for you to make good on your agreement with Shima.” I opened my mouth to tell this nightmare he was an idiot if he thought I could make progress with nothing more than paper and pencil. But he was already running back the way we had come. I glanced at Tsumo. She sat motionless against the rotting wall of the alley. Her face wasn’t visible behind the thick veil, but I could imagine the flat, hostile glare in her gray eyes. The look that sank a thousand ships.
I drew the sticker from my sleeve and tested its edge. There was no telling who would come back for us. I wouldn’t have put anything past our toothy friend—and Earthpol was as bad.
What a screwed-up mess. Why had I ever let Samuelson persuade me to leave New London? A guy could get killed here.
SUNRISE. THE DISK BLAZED PALE ORANGE THROUGH THE FOG, AND MOMENTARILY the world seemed clean, bright.
Silence. For those few seconds the muted sounds of the city died. The sun’s warmth pressed upon the ground, penetrated the moist turf, and brought a call of life—and death—to those below.
The Shimans stood tense, and the silence stretched on: Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Then:
A faint wail. The sound was joined by another, and another, till a hundred voices, all faint but together loud, climbed through the register and echoed off nearby hills.
The dying had discovered their mouths.
Near the middle of the green field, one cross among the thousands wavered and fell.
It was the first.
The fog blurred the exact form of the grayish creatures that spilled from the newly opened graves. As grave after grave burst open, the wailing screams died and a new sound grew—the low, buzzing hum of tiny jaws opening and closing, grinding and tearing. The writhing gray mass spread toward the edge of the field, and the ground it passed over was left brown, bare. A million mouths. They ate anything green, anything soft—each other. The horde reached the hedgework. There it split into a hundred feelers that searched back and forth through the intricate twisting of the maze. Where the hedge wall was narrow or low, the mouths began to eat their way through.
A command was given, and all along the crest of the hill the machine scatterguns
whirred, spraying a dozen streams of birdshot down on those points where the horde was breaking out. The poisoned shot killed instantly, by the thousands. And tens of thousands were attracted by the newly dead into the field of fire.
Only the creatures which avoided the simplest branches of the maze escaped death by nerve poison. And most of those survivors ran blindly into dead ends, where claymore mines blasted their bodies apart.
Only the smartest, fastest thousand of the original million reached the upper end of the maze. These had grown fat since they climbed from their fathers
’
graves, yet they still moved forward faster than a man can walk. Not a blade of grass survived their passage.
BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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