Blue War: A Punktown Novel Read online

“Hey, Jer,” his friend said.

  “Rick, I need you to arrange a pod for me.”

  “A pod? What do you mean?”

  “Goin’ back to Paxton,

  Must be my favorite hell.”

  “I need to go back to Punktown,” Stake said.

  TWELVE: MY FAVORITE HELL

  Jeremy Stake’s battered hovercar sat on the same street the next day, this time with the bouncy but caustic song Cop Show by Frankie Dystopia playing on the sound system.

  “You think they’re so real

  And they’re braver than most,

  But they’re just a bunch of actors

  Chasing phantoms and ghosts.”

  He was staring at the building he had been staring at yesterday, except this time it stood erect, and its lights glowed against the wet gray sky.

  Across the street from him, a holographic billboard opened in the air like a curtain, played a trailer for a new action movie, then folded up again and was gone. Atop the roof of one of the buildings bounced a gigantic holographic ball of flesh marbled with blue veins, representing the hundred-fifty-pound sphere who was the star of the hit sitcom Buddy Balloon. The street itself was congested with vehicles of every stripe, from hovercars to the occasional wheeled conveyance. Higher up, helicars drifted between the city towers like gnats, these towers made from a variety of materials and in a variety of generally somber colors.

  The building Stake was parked in front of wasn’t all that large, however. Just five stories, but longish, with a flat roof. There was an antennae array atop the roof like a cluster of thin metal spires. The building looked blackened, scorched, along its left lower section, and all its windows – formerly with panes of invisible force – had been sealed up with metal sheets.

  So this was Ginger Street, then. Longtime resident of this city though he may be, Stake was still not familiar with the whole of it. Could anyone be? Previously he had been using Punktown to orient himself in Bluetown; now he was using Bluetown to orient himself in Punktown.

  A mutant less extreme than the star of Buddy Balloon, but unsettling enough with its face sucked inward along its midline so that it had only a single milky eye and a pinhole for a mouth, tapped on Stake’s window to beg for a handout. He barely registered the being, and it moved along quickly enough. In the slum of Tin Town, mutants were so abundant that they wouldn’t think to appeal to the sympathy of strangers. Stake would know; it was where he had grown up, his late mother herself a mutant. She had not possessed a gift like Stake’s. Her affliction had been more fixed: her eyes spread almost to the sides of her head, their pupils as reflective as chrome, and she had no nails on her fingers or toes. If there were other marks upon her body, only Stake’s father, who hadn’t been a mutant, had known of them. As a boy, Stake had not found his mother’s eyes eerie. They had shone at him in the dark reassuringly, like twin stars, when she had put him to bed. And his father had not found her appearance disturbing, either. He had told her she was beautiful. Stake had loved his father for that.

  Stake put thoughts of his parents out of his head. Such thoughts made him feel as lost as they were – his mother’s affliction having taken her early, his father maybe dead or maybe undead, submerged in his drugs. No, Stake couldn’t afford to feel nebulous right now. He needed to be here. In fact, even now he noticed that a car had pulled up to the curb ahead of him and a man was approaching the door to the building with the antennae array on its roof. Stake slipped out of his hovercar and came up on the man from behind.

  “Hello – Mr. Kabbazah?”

  The man spun around, thin and with dark features that presently expressed alarm. “Please don’t sneak up on me! Are you Mr. Stake?”

  “Yes, I am. Sorry about that.” Stake shook the property owner’s hand.

  “I was just going inside to put on the lights; there’s still a power connection. Briefly I was renting out the offices as storage space, and for a few years I rented out the first two floors to a group of artists for studios and apartments, but I stopped last year. There’s been no one renting since.”

  “Why is that?”

  Kabbazah met Stake’s eyes unhappily. “I was afraid someone would be hurt and I’d be sued. I won’t lie to you, Mr. Stake; this place is a thorn in my side. I’ve been meaning to tear it down and just sell the plot for a while now.”

  “What’s the problem with it?”

  “We’ll get to that.” The man turned back to the task of unlocking the front door. “It might seem unwise of me to discourage a potential buyer, but like I say, I have to be honest. And it’s not like I can hide the conditions here – they speak for themselves.”

  The man opened the door by punching in a key code, and Stake followed him into a dark corridor. More key punching just inside the door and a train of lights along the ceiling sputtered awake groggily. The long corridor was familiar to Stake. His gaze traveled down its left-hand side, which was even more charred on the interior.

  “There was a fire?” He pointed.

  Kabbazah sighed. He’d been about to lead Stake in the opposite direction. “Yes, quite a few years ago, but the structure is sound enough in that sense. I should have painted or resurfaced it, but frankly, I just can’t deal with this beast. The artists said they’d paint it over for me, for a break on their rent, but they never got around to it.”

  “Can I go look down that end first?” Stake asked. When Kabbazah sighed again, Stake smiled apologetically and explained, “I really need to determine the structure’s integrity for myself before I can consider a purchase.”

  “Very well.” Kabbazah brushed past him to lead the way toward that familiar door. “But if I were you, I’d tear this whole building down and put up a new one instead. Though that might not affect the rift at all.”

  “The rift?”

  “You’ll see.” Of the doors to individual suites or offices spaced along the hallway, Kabbazah went directly to the one Stake wanted: second to last in the row. Stake didn’t have to direct him further. So the fire had begun in there. The landlord punched in a third code. It didn’t take. He sighed and tried it again. A beat of hesitation, and the door slid aside with a jittery raspiness. Inside, Kabbazah tried to bring up the ceiling lights but couldn’t.

  “That’s okay,” Stake told him, pulling a tiny flashlight with a wide, powerful beam out of his jacket pocket. Kabbazah arched one eyebrow at him as Stake stepped past, sweeping the broad beam around the large room. As he moved about, a thin layer of ashy broken matter crunched under his shoes.

  The windowless room had been partially stripped, but was not as barren as its corresponding room in Bluetown. There were still work counters, and some of these still had shattered equipment heaped upon them. Twisted metal wall shelves. Several cubicles containing desks buckled by intense heat, the skeletons of padded chairs scattered about the floor. He accidentally kicked a broken coffee mug from his path.

  “So what was this place?”

  “I was renting it to a little research group that were taking government contracts. They were young, just starting out, so they had new ideas and they came cheaper for the government.”

  “Research into what?”

  “Quantum teleportation, mostly, as I understand it.”

  “Quantum teleportation has been around for a long time,” Stake said. Though it was only in the past few decades that it had just about replaced the use of starcraft as the means by which citizens of the Earth Colonies could travel from world to world, it had been in use to some extent for much longer than that.

  “I suppose the government wanted to find an improved process, maybe something more economical. Obviously, my tenants weren’t in a position to tell me much about their work.”

  Stake walked across the center of the sprawling room toward a certain section of wall. He almost expected the carbonized floor to collapse under his feet to reveal three large, circular holes beneath its surface. When he reached the wall, he played his light across it. Its burnt condition had
partly obliterated a large symbol there. A long crack in the wall also jagged through the symbol like a lightning bolt.

  “What was the name of their outfit?” Stake asked.

  “Ah, they called themselves Wonky Science.”

  Stake nodded. WS.

  He looked about him some more, noted an air vent blown into its duct where he could imagine a ball of fire had blasted through, as if seeking its way out of the building for more oxygen to feed it. Thinking of the outside of the building made him remember the antennas on the roof, and he asked his guide about them.

  “Yeah, that was their stuff. Part of their matter transmission system.”

  Stake turned his attention to a framework bolted into the ceiling and floor that once might have supported the barriers of a clean room environment. Or would that have been the teleportation chamber itself? He stepped into the space. There was uneven scorching along the back wall, and for a moment his mind made him believe he saw three human shadows burnt into the wall, but they lost their shape upon further scrutiny. He stepped out of the former enclosure, approached the far left side of the room.

  “Be careful for that corner, over there. Shine your light.” Kabbazah was pointing.

  When Stake aimed his beam in the direction Kabbazah indicated, he saw that there was something moving slowly through the air. A small object with a black surface that became somewhat shiny and translucent in the torch’s glare. Floating like a large soap bubble was a creature closely resembling a jellyfish, its bell black, trailing a spaghetti of bluish tendrils fine as spun glass. “Jesus,” Stake whispered. It was an immature bender.

  This corner was crisped midnight black, the meeting of the walls and the floor itself split with cracks. But there was more. Stake moved his beam back and forth slightly and saw that the air in the corner had a wrinkly, rippled quality, like heat shimmering above a hot road. As the jellyfish drifted through these ripples, it looked as though it were swimming in water.

  “Some of their apparatus exploded, and a little rift was left there.”

  “What would happen if I stepped into it?” Stake envisioned being sucked into the ether, his qubits – the quantum bits of information that made up his being – scattered throughout the multiverse for all of eternity.

  “One of those idiotic artist kids admitted to me that some of the others were hacking their way in here to party, and they’d stand in that corner to make themselves feel strange. It gave them a drugged sensation, though they had headaches afterwards. They told this kid they saw pictures in their heads, flashes of another planet. I evicted the whole group of them after that, and changed the key code. This warped little spot is what makes it hard for me to rent this place or sell it to a respectable buyer. That’s why I suggest you have the building demolished – if that helps get rid of the effect.”

  “I’d have to consult someone about that,” Stake murmured, stepping back a little as the tiny bender shifted direction, but it didn’t seem to want to leave the vicinity of the corner. “I guess the best people to talk to about this rift would be the Wonky Science researchers themselves. Do you have their names?”

  “Oh, I’d have to look that up. It’s been years.” The man dug a little palm comp out of his jacket’s inner pocket.

  “How many years?”

  “Ah, it would be almost seventeen years ago, now. I’ve owned this place for nineteen, so yeah – seventeen years ago I rented this suite to them. And about a year after that was the mishap, and the start of all my headaches with this sorry bit of real estate.” Kabbazah was obviously torn between unburdening himself of this property and unburdening his complaints about it to a sympathetic ear. He was tapping at the palm comp’s miniature keys, the glow of its screen casting bluish light on his face. “I should never have rented this place out for business space, and stuck to apartments like my other properties.”

  Stake watched him. “No luck yet?”

  “I thought I still had some names in here. But I should warn you, most of them were killed in the blast.”

  “Huh,” Stake said. He looked over his shoulder again at the larval bender. “That creature – you ever seen a bigger version in this building?”

  “No, just little ones, in this one room. They seem to come and go.”

  “That’s good,” Stake muttered. He supposed if Kabbazah had run into an adult bender, he wouldn’t be standing here right now.

  “Okay, here are two of them, anyway. These are the ones whose names were on the lease.” The landlord tilted the screen Stake’s way. He copied the first name and number into his wrist comp, though he doubted the number would still be viable after all these years. The man’s name was Dink Argosax. “And the other.” The landlord flicked to the number for a Timothy Leung, which Stake again took down.

  Finished, Stake turned back to regard the mirage-like rippling corner. “Did the fire department see this? The Health Agency?”

  “The fire was put out, the structure is legally stable, and they weren’t happy with the anomaly but it didn’t seem to pose any definite threat,” Kabbazah said defensively.

  “These things happen,” Stake said.

  “Hey, if the health agents condemned every building that had a definite health risk, a quarter of Punktown would be homeless.”

  I know a city with plenty of room they could move to, Stake thought. “The visions these artist kids were seeing,” he said. “Were they of a planet with two suns? Jungles of blue vegetation?”

  Kabbazah blinked at Stake warily. “Have you been speaking to other people? What sort of game are you playing here, Mr. Stake? If that really is your name.”

  “It’s my name. I just like to do my homework, Mr. Kabbazah, before I invest my money.”

  “Well I suggest you leave now so I can do my homework into you. I don’t mean to be rude, and I would very much like to get this property off my hands at last, but I don’t want anyone being dishonest with me.”

  “I can understand that, sir.”

  The man led Stake out of the ruined business suite and sealed the door after them. As he preceded Stake through the hallway, he asked, “Are you a reporter? A health agent?”

  “I’m sorry – I’m a private investigator. I tell you since you’ll find that out if you look me up on the net.”

  “Wonderful. Wonderful. And why did you come here, then?”

  “I’m investigating the remains of three bodies found on the world Sinan. After what you’ve shown me, I suspect that those bodies were teleported from this building, the space you rented to Wonky Science.”

  At the building’s door, Kabbazah faced Stake again. “Why didn’t you just tell me that in the beginning instead of getting my hopes up about selling this accursed place?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t think you’d let me in to see it.”

  “Well thanks for dragging me here on a rainy day like this. I hope you saw what you wanted to see.”

  Stake stepped out into a chilly and increasing drizzle, wishing he’d brought his porkpie hat with him, but then he’d thought he’d look too much like a private detective and not enough like a prospective property buyer. “Yes,” he said to Kabbazah. “I did.”

  ***

  He sat in a café instead of his car, munching on a falafel sandwich and drinking espresso as he watched the storm intensify through the front windows. Lightning flickered, and one bolt connected with the spire of a black tower with a tapered summit. Stake imagined that as the storm raged the veil between dimensions grew ragged, torn, and that he might glimpse Sinan’s twin bluish suns if he watched long enough for a gap in the inky clouds.

  Stake had called up his check on the table’s ordering screen and was about to punch in his credit number when a call came over his wrist comp. He was surprised to be confronted by Colonel Dominic Gale, with his bullet-like head and strip of goatee, calling all the way from Sinan; the wonders of science. Seeing him made Stake wonder perversely how Ami Pattaya was doing. “Hello, colonel.”

  “Stak
e, I hear you’re in Punktown.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well I just wanted to make it known to you that I’m not putting your extradimensional commutes on my budget here. You can just take that out of the money Rick Henderson is foolish enough to pay you.”

  Ouch. Stake had hoped not to have to absorb that cost. He considered telling Gale that the trip was relevant to his investigation, but decided not to clue Gale in, and was glad he hadn’t gotten into details with Rick, either. He trusted Henderson but he could be too honest for his own good. “As you wish, colonel,” he said.

  “What are you doing there, anyway? Are you finished here?”

  Is that what you’d like? Stake wondered. “Some pressing personal business.”

  “Well, if you can’t afford to zap back here then you just be advised to stay where you are, because like I said, the CF is not paying for your little personal errands.”

  “Understood, colonel.”

  Stake was tempted to ask the CF base commander about the rags of uniform and items of equipment that Yengun had seen recovered from the pits in which the clones had been formed. Yengun had said they didn’t look like military uniforms, but Ami claimed the colonel had described them that way to her. Nevertheless, Stake decided not to ask Gale directly about the matter just yet. He now felt there was a good possibility that Gale knew the remains were not those of MIAs, and this would account for his lack of support in Henderson’s investigation. So far he had not blocked Stake’s efforts, no doubt confident that the private detective wouldn’t be able to discover much, but Stake feared that if he pressed Gale now the colonel would prevent him from returning to Sinan and the CF base.

  “And would you mind not doing that, for Chrissakes?” the officer growled.

  “Sir?” Stake’s thoughts had drifted.

  “Copying me, you blasting Tin Town freak.” And Gale then cut their connection.

  Stake rubbed at his face with his hand, grateful that at least he hadn’t been able to imitate that awful goatee.

  What was he to believe now? Could it really be that Gale knew the bodies were not those of Blue War soldiers? But if he did, why wouldn’t he want that fact made known? Had no one else ever thought to check the building in Punktown that corresponded to the building in Bluetown in which the trio of clones had been discovered? Was it simply due to people not being able to think of the remains as anything but the bodies of MIAs?