Blue War: A Punktown Novel Read online

  “I had some questions for Mr. Bright,” Stake spoke up, “since he’s here, and since the Bluetown matter pertains to the cloning matter.”

  “Bright’s not here for your convenience, Stake; we just finished up another meeting before this one.”

  The owner of Bright Horizons held up a hand to Gale, then turned to the private investigator receptively. “Yes, Mr. Stake?”

  “Sir, mainly I just wanted to know what your thinking is at this point on what’s going on with your project. How a little condo village came to replicate Punktown, and how and why it whipped up those three clones.”

  “My thinking hasn’t changed much since the beginning of this disaster, Mr. Stake, and that’s why I’m open to any available resource at this point, myself. Where it still stands is that a virus, as yet unidentified, must have got into our computer system somehow, and the smart matter – instead of following the village blueprints – accessed a map or schematic of Punktown from another source instead. The media is saying a lot of irresponsible and hurtful things, like I’m doing this on purpose to develop Sinan to my advantage – but what advantage is that? Furious governments? Thousands of angry Ha Jiin and Jin Haa? What do I gain? Where’s the fortune to be made? There’s a fortune to be lost, that’s all!” At least Bright’s anxiety lessened the android look.

  Gale cut in, “Mr. Bright is upset enough already with all this hell, Stake, for you to be agitating him more. He has his people from Simulacrum Systems looking into the Bluetown problem, and the clones. You stick to the clones yourself; better yet, stick to whatever remains the clones originated from. I’m telling you, I have enough shit underfoot to have you getting in my way by overstepping your boundaries.”

  “With all respect, colonel,” Stake said, “Sinan has been opened to civilian colonization, commerce and tourism. Unless I pose a direct risk to security here, I’m not subject to your command. I –”

  Gale’s six-foot-four, rocket-domed body shot up out of its chair. He bellowed, “You fucking well are subject to my command, unless you want me to deny you further access to Bluetown! I’ll say this one more time: if you get into my hide, I’ll not only kick you off this base, but off the planet and clear out of this godforsaken dimension – do you get me?”

  Stake said mildly, “Sir, I appreciate that I’m being allowed to stay on the base, and make use of base property.”

  Gale glared at Henderson. “Base property?”

  “I’m letting him use a Harbinger. Without guns.”

  “Why don’t you just let him sleep in my quarters, too, while you’re at it? I’ll bunk with the men,” Gale said, reseating himself.

  Stake thought again of Ami Pattaya, and smirked.

  Gale sneered across the expanse of glossy table at the hired detective. “I know about you, Corporal Stake. Yeah. I know how you protected that Earth Killer bitch after she killed the two officers above you, and God knows how many other officers and infantry during the war. Just because she got all misty over pulling the trigger on Henderson here and two other guys when they had their guard down, you think she’s Jesus Christ’s kid sister. You kicked the shit out of a couple of your own men who you felt mistreated her.”

  “They did mistreat her.”

  “Poor thing. Poor fucking Ha Jiin sniper.”

  “Dom,” Henderson said in a low but meaningful tone. “Please. We’re getting personal here.”

  “Right. We wouldn’t want to get personal, huh? Personal with the enemy, Corporal Stake?” He snorted. “Who got the worse case of Stockholm syndrome after you captured her – the woman, or you? I can smell the way you think. The Ha Jiin are more down-to-earth than us corrupt Earthers. They’re better than us. Well here’s a little history about me, since I already know a little of yours. Did you know I spent five months in a POW camp?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “I was lucky it was at the end of the war, and they let us go with these dung-eating magnanimous smiles on their faces for the Earth Colonies media. But they sure weren’t smiling when they held us in that camp. You try lying with your hands cuffed behind your back and leg irons on your ankles for weeks at a time, maybe blindfolded all the while, too. Try sitting shackled on a stool for three or four days straight, shitting in your breeches, and if you start to fall off you get a rifle butt in the ear.”

  “I’m sorry about all that, sir. And you’re right, there were no saints. Never are.”

  “All I know is, your cute little Earth Killer friend never had it that bad, not even after she was out of your protection. You should remember whose side you were on, one of these days.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll try.”

  Gale made an abrupt, dismissing gesture that almost sent his coffee cup flying. “Get your buddy out of here, Henderson. I don’t want to look at him.”

  “Let’s go, Jer,” Henderson mumbled, rising.

  Stake nodded to David Bright on the way out. Bright just watched him with a pale, hopeless semblance of a face.

  In the hallway outside, Henderson sighed and sagged back against the wall. “See what I have to deal with here, Jer? I think they clone guys like Gale at officer factories.”

  “So where did you come from, then? The gypsies left you on the doorstep of the factory?”

  “I guess. Not that I don’t understand what Gale went through as a POW.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “He’s also getting a lot of heat about the virus that’s going through both the Jin Haa and Ha Jiin lately.”

  “Not the computer virus Bright was talking about?”

  “No, no – biological. A very potent STD. It sounds like something along the lines of mutstav six-seventy, and you know how bad that was in Punktown, and we had much better health services than these people do. Once it goes full-blown it has a one hundred percent death rate, turning a person’s brain to mush like spongiform encephalopathy.”

  “Like whatty-whatty?”

  “Prion disease. Mad cow disease?” When he saw none of these names rang a bell, Henderson simply continued, “Anyway, you either die screaming in pain or laughing like a loony. It was putting tension in these people even before the Bluetown thing. Paranoia and resentment being at such heights, the widespread attitude is that Earth Colonies sex tourists brought it to Sinan, and now it’s reached the general population.”

  “I’d heard there was a lot of disease rampant with the prosties, but I figured that was just business as usual. Didn’t know it was anything like a plague.”

  “Getting very plague-like. So all things considered, you can see why these people on both sides are ready to jump out of their skins. And Gale, too.”

  “What he needs is a nice soothing massage. I’ll see if I can talk to his girlfriend about it.”

  “Huh?”

  Stake smiled and walked away, leaving his friend watching after him.

  ***

  Stake wasn’t joking about wanting to talk to Ami Pattaya, only lying about what he wanted to talk about. He thought he’d like another look at the cloned child Henderson had dubbed Brian, and he was working his way through the Colonial Forces base’s maze of all but indistinguishable corridors when his wrist comp beeped him. He stepped to one side to let others pass as he took the call.

  An unfamiliar Jin Haa or Ha Jiin man’s face appeared on the tiny screen. Though they tended toward thinness and prominent cheekbones, this man’s face was especially thin, his cheekbones especially pronounced. And his lips curled away in a snarl of crooked teeth.

  “Fuck you!” the stranger roared. “Fuck you, asshole! You have your nose in my wife’s ass like a dog, huh? You think you fuck my wife again, huh? She is my wife! My wife, asshole!”

  Stake’s heart started thudding hard. “Look, sir, we just had some lunch together.”

  “Lunch? You lunch on her hole, huh? You lunch on her hole?”

  “Don’t talk like that. We didn’t do anything.”

  “You come here again, I kill you!”

 
“Okay, okay, I understand. You just don’t hurt her, understand?”

  “You don’t tell me what to do! She is my wife – I do what I want! I already hurt her. Hurt the bitch good!”

  Stake’s heart suddenly stopped its thudding, came to a dead halt. “You did what?”

  “You come here again, I kill both of you!”

  “I asked you what you did to her.”

  “I do anything I want to her. Fuck you, okay? Fuck you!”

  The stranger signed off. The screen went blank.

  Stake lifted his head slowly. He felt so icy at the core that he seemed to be frozen there against the wall. But it was only a moment. And then he was moving.

  NINE: BEATEN

  Having already found his way to Vein Rhi once before didn’t make the return trip any easier for Stake, but it was the time that frustrated him and not the remoteness. More than frustration, he felt a kind of mental paralysis brought on by an overload of sorrow and concern. Because being here on Sinan opened up a floodgate of memories, he recalled a conversation he had had with another soldier in the last year of his four year tour of duty. This man was a cloned soldier, one of many used during the Blue War, their units usually working independently of the “birther” units, as the clones called naturally born humans like Stake. Like all these soldiers, this one was bald, the skin of his head and face and entire body designed with blue camouflage like the uniforms they all wore. The clone’s grin had shone white and mocking in this mottled mask as he said, “Your fatal flaw, corporal, is you care about things too much. It makes you vulnerable, and vulnerable makes you weak. It’s one of the advantages I have over you – that is, besides greater strength and quicker reflexes, of course. My big advantage is I don’t give a blast about anything.”

  Without actually mimicking him, Stake had returned a grin rather like the man’s own. “I think you got that entirely backwards. If you don’t care about anything, that means you not only don’t care about killing the enemy, but you don’t care all that much for the lives of your friends – if you even consider them friends – or your own life, either. But I think caring makes me more dangerous than you, not less, because I always have something to fight for. See? Something to inspire me, to motivate me.”

  The soldier’s smile had turned cold then. “You saying that as a clone, I’m less than you?”

  “No. It isn’t just clones that feel the way you do. And I’m sure plenty of clones feel the way I do. It comes down to being human, however you got here. You either care about stuff or you don’t. But if I care about something and you get in my way...well, then we’ll see how weak I am, private.”

  Stake’s progress was stalled even more at the town’s rust-stained metal wall, as a group of men carrying poles with little hooks at the end prodded a group of slow moving yubos through the front gate. As a young soldier on Sinan, seeing yubos for the first time had made Stake think they were akin to the giraffe, with long necks drooping languidly amongst the foliage they fed on. But up close he had realized this long neck was too sinuous, and turned out to be a boneless appendage more like a single thick tentacle. The squarish head of the creature was actually rooted at the appendage’s base. There was a kind of eight-fingered hand at the end of the limb, two sets of four fingers in opposition to each other, which plucked fistfuls of leaves to cram into the beast’s mouth. Now Stake thought of the animals, which were used not only for labor but as a source of meat, as something more comparable to elephants. In addition to their other uses, the hands of slaughtered yubos were saved, sometimes hung inside houses as some kind of prosperity charm (plucking bounty from the heavens), and often seen pickled in big jars as a treat men liked to nibble on when drinking. Right at this moment, though, Stake was less interested in the animals as he was inclined to help the herdsmen by shoving the nose of the Harbinger into the rear quarters of the last yubo in line.

  Finally they were all through, and Stake swerved his car around them to pass ahead. The men at the front of the line hadn’t known he was back there, and he caught a glimpse of two of them turning their heads in surprise as he left them in his dust.

  The first time he had come, Stake had left his vehicle outside the city wall to minimize any fanfare and walked to the restaurant Tah Vein Rhi on foot. This time, he boldly drove right up to its open-faced front, got out, and stepped onto its platform, unmindful of the children who were racing to catch up with his vehicle. He recognized the waitress who was setting bowls of steaming soup in front of a couple seated at one of the cheap plastic tables. Stake said to her, “I’m looking for Thi Gonh. She was here with me yesterday, remember? Thi Gonh?”

  The woman was shaking her head in a seemingly universal gesture of incomprehension, or maybe she was telling him she wouldn’t reveal where the woman was living, didn’t want to become involved.

  “Look, is there a hospital in town? A clinic, a doctor? Doctor?” He made a sewing motion on his wrist, hoping the waitress didn’t send him to the local seamstress as a result.

  “I show you doctor!” a voice chirped in English behind him. Stake turned to see that some children stood panting excitedly around his idling helicar. “I show you doctor!”

  “Thanks. Get in,” Stake said, opening a door for the child. The others moved forward as well but he blocked them. “Hey, hey, come on, I don’t have time for this!” He lunged around to the pilot’s side and slipped in, raised the vehicle above the dirt street again. “Point me the way.”

  “There!” the boy cried, ecstatic with this adventure. “Go that way!”

  Stake glanced at the child as they took a turn onto another little street. For all he knew, this might be one of the children of Thi’s cousin Nhot, whom she said had announced the Earther’s presence the first time he had come to town. The boy’s English made him wonder, as Nhot spoke it so fluently. Stake was no better at their language now than he had been during the war, and at times like this he envied Henderson for long ago having had a translation chip implanted, which enabled him to speak and understand their language, and many others, like a native.

  “Go there!” his young passenger blurted again, pointing.

  If Thi’s husband had “hurt her good,” Stake hoped that she had sought medical attention. If he couldn’t find her in a physician’s care, he’d try the police station next, such as there might be in this town, but he didn’t want to attract the law’s attention to himself if he could help it. His greatest fear was that Thi might be home, either too shamed or too badly injured to seek out a doctor. Or maybe her husband wouldn’t permit it. Just imagining these scenarios caused Stake’s teeth to clamp so tightly together they seemed on the verge of cracking.

  Vein Rhi was far from the teeming bustle of Di Noon, but there were still enough hoverbikes, bicycles, leisurely pedestrians and children running out in the street when they saw his vehicle coming to greatly impede his progress. A diminutive mummy of an old woman shuffled across his path with such slowness and obliviousness to his presence that Stake hissed, “For the love of God!” He nearly made the decision to raise the Harbinger above the rooftops, but just after the woman had passed and he pushed onward again his miniature guide chirped, “Doctor over there, over there!”

  Turning into the indicated street, Stake spotted a tiny clinic or doctor’s office ahead. Like most of the homes and places of business in Ha Jiin and Jin Haa towns, its front room was open to the street, with a collapsible metal gate that could be drawn across and locked for the night. Stake could tell it was a clinic by the front room, which in this case was a waiting area. It was packed with Ha Jiin sitting in chairs or leaning against the walls for lack of a seat. There were even a number of people waiting out in the street itself. Babies bawling miserably. Old people shaking and spiritless as if this might be their last day as mortals. A pretty woman holding the side of her face, which had puffed up apparently from an infected, abscessed tooth. At first Stake thought she was Thi – her jaw swollen from a blow – and his heart leapt into his th
roat, but as he pulled the helicar up directly in front of the shabby little building he spotted her.

  She would have been better off with a bulging jaw, like the other woman. Even from the street, as Stake scrambled out of the vehicle, he could see that her eyes were swollen with shiny reddish-purple bruises, one eye barely slitted and the other completely closed. As he strode toward the waiting room, the child following along like a pet, he saw she had some bruises across her forehead, a bruise just under her chin, and a large especially dark bruise on her left upper arm that Stake knew could not be the result of a single blow. It was a place where she had been punched again, and again, and again.

  The girl seated beside Thi was lovely, doe-eyed, tall for a Ha Jiin and thin; Stake figured her to be fifteen or sixteen. He also figured her to be accompanying Thi, a relative or neighbor, since she didn’t appear ill herself and was sitting so close. The girl looked up at Stake first, as he stepped onto the waiting room’s floor. All the other patients had looked up at him, too. Thi was the last, raising her head slowly as if drunken half asleep.

  “Ga Noh,” she said softly. “Please go home. Please hurry go home.”

  “You’re coming with me,” Stake told her, voice tight. His heart had not only sunk back down from his throat but seemed to continue its descent, a bathysphere lowering steadily into cold darkness. “There’s a good hospital in Di Noon. They have Earth technology and you won’t have to sit all night before you get seen.”

  “No, please – I okay.”

  “I remember places like this. If you don’t see the doctor by closing time, well tough luck and try again tomorrow.” He extended his hand to her. “Come on.”

  “Oh,” said Thi, alarmed, looking past him. “Oh no, oh no...”