Blue War: A Punktown Novel Read online

  “Who can say?” Yengun said. “Just a shell. Keep quiet now. Everyone alert.”

  “She told me they’re sleeping,” Nha said. “Not to worry...they’re sleeping.”

  Yengun again gave his man a weighty look, then switched his attention to the elderly woman. She was staring into the nearest open window, almost quaking with fear or with the force of the impressions that bombarded her. Yengun nodded to the others, and the first scout climbed in over the window’s sill.

  They found themselves in a long hallway, lined with windows on one side and far-spaced closed doors on the other. Just like the building’s exterior, the interior appeared as if it had been heavily coated in blue paint with a scratchy rough texture. No one spoke now; even the old woman seemed to have the good sense to keep quiet. She pointed down the left end of the hall, and they advanced. The specific door she indicated was second to last in the row. One could tell by looking at it that it was sealed shut. Yengun nodded to another man with an assault engine. This man lined up his weapon with the door’s seam, and it emitted a bright white ray from one of its muzzles. A sizzling sound, then a thin black smoke started unraveling into the air. The others stepped back a bit. The scent reminded Yengun very much of an unpleasant smell from his war days. The smell of burning bone.

  The hinges were fused shut, so the commando traced his beam along all four edges. When he was finished, another man stepped forward and stomped the door with his boot. A crunching sound of resistance. Several more stomps, and the door fell inward. A thick mist had been trapped in the windowless room beyond, and it flowed out of the doorway like spirits released from a tomb.

  Right away, Yengun activated a flashlight on his gun, wading ahead of the others into the mist. He flicked the beam this way and that. The fog was so thick underfoot that he nearly dropped into a hole in the floor, but he caught himself and angled the light down sharply. It flashed back at him, reflected from the surface of a pool.

  As the mist continued to disperse, Yengun made out three large holes in the floor of the sizable and otherwise featureless room. These holes did not look broken in the blue-colored floor so much as melted, perhaps, their edges rounded and grooved, giving them the appearance of organic orifices. The three cavities were filled with water. Or was it water? It had the biting acidic smell of the fluids that ran off from the Blue City into the jungle.

  Yengun and the others inched closer, aimed their beams down directly into the pools. The old woman was babbling softly in agitation, hanging back and clinging to Nha’s arm.

  “What...dear gods, what is that?” one soldier asked, scrunching up his face in confusion, revulsion.

  There was a shape in each of the liquid-filled pits, down deep in the earth below the thick crust of the floor. Threads like strands of web – or better, like veins – grew out of the edges of that blue rind. These hundreds or thousands of thin blue strands trailed down into the pools, connecting with the three dark shapes that the beams illuminated.

  “Looks like a fossil,” one man reported. The small figure, curled like a fetus, was entirely blue, rough as a statue carved out of pumice, and its outline was strangely distorted besides.

  “This one’s dead,” a second man said, about a second figure. It was not a petrified thing, however. Its infant-sized body appeared soft, and yet horribly deformed, like a fruit rotted on the vine. The myriad blue veins seemed to pierce or at least grow directly into its flesh.

  Yengun played his beam over the face of the relatively larger figure nestled at the bottom of the third flooded shaft. He could tell from subtle differences in its face that it was not a being native to this world of Sinan. But more obvious than that was the color of its naked skin. The skin was a whitish peach color, not blue like his own.

  This third creature looked perfect in form. No distortions. No...

  Yengun’s breath caught in his throat. He heard the old witch mumbling, mumbling.

  He had seen the eyeballs shifting back and forth under their thin lids, as the creature at the bottom of the third pool dreamed.

  ONE: LOV 69

  The men and women sheltering in the gloom of the Legion of Veterans Post 69 ranged in age from early thirties to there-are-still-people-alive-from-that-war? The bartender was a veteran of the Red War, which had cost him an arm, replaced with a black prosthesis like something grafted on from a giant beetle. Watt was a Choom, one of the indigenous people of this planet Oasis, though most of the Earth people in the colony city dubbed Punktown had been born here, too, as had their parents and even grandparents. To all appearances Watt was human, aside from the wide mouth carved back to his ears, giving his broad face a bit of a frog-like aspect. He was, however, rather more dangerous-looking than a frog.

  Seated in the post were a couple of Punktown servicemen who had been deployed to the world of Echo, part of a raid on the colony city of Oracle. A group of Red Jihad extremists had captured and sabotaged the atmosphere control facilities there, resulting in the death of thirty-seven thousand colonists. One of these vets, named Isaiah, cried a lot when he’d had a few Knickersons too many, recounting the numbers of suffocated children he had seen throughout the colony, strewn everywhere like placid-faced dolls.

  There were the brothers Bobby and Wally, slouched over the bar in shiny blue jackets and faded baseball hats, all covered in glittering pins and embroidered patches indicating that they’d been crewmen aboard two military starcraft in the same fleet. They were withered and cantankerous and intent on claiming their explosive space battles made every other vet’s war look like a picnic in the park. Gnome-like Bobby frequently came close to blows with younger vets, infantrymen bristling at the suggestion that their ground combat could be less hellish than what this old-timer had experienced from inside his massive warship. They always restrained themselves, however, having heard that his brother Wally had once smashed the jaw of a drunken vet twenty years younger than himself, in this very bar. Not to mention that Watt was quick to break up trouble, and that plastic beetle claw could grip you by the back of the neck good and hard on your way out the door.

  Two black men with shaved skulls, a branded insignia on their foreheads and metallic silver bar code on the back of their necks, had been coming in to sit at one end of the bar for a few months now. No one knew what war or conflict they’d been in, and they didn’t volunteer it. Maybe Watt knew, but he was discreet. They spoke to no one, not even each other, just sipped their Zubs and watched the big VT screens mounted on the walls. Their polished domes reflected the blue of a holographic sign that read: “Zub...for a mellow buz!”

  Then there was Jeremy Stake. His engagement, known as the Blue War, had ended eleven years ago when he’d finished a four-year stint at the age of twenty-three. For whatever reasons others did not come here, and for whatever reasons he did, Stake was one of the few Blue War vets who favored this murky little post. “For a mellow buz,” he murmured to himself, eyeing the two black men as he lifted his own beer of that brand. It was as good a reason as any, he supposed, for his presence here. Buzz, he thought. It should say buzz. But then, the beer would have to be called Zzub, wouldn’t it? Such was the way he rested his mind, when taking a break from the more taxing puzzles his line of work entailed.

  “Jer,” Watt said to him, coming close.

  Stake looked up at the Choom. “Heh?”

  Watt tapped his forehead with the claws of his prosthesis.

  Stake reached up to his own forehead, felt its flesh with his fingertips. Raised areas, like thick ridges of scar tissue. Like a raised, branded insignia. Like the insignia on the heads of the black vets he had been idly spying on. “Dung,” he muttered, making sure he didn’t look at them again. He had forgotten himself. It got away from him sometimes. The beer had made him too mellow. Well, the effect would pass, just like the buzz.

  One VT, sound muted, was playing a game show wherein schoolgirls of Japanese descent, wearing nothing but mouse ears on their heads and painted-on whiskers, scurried through
a giant maze while male contestants tried to shoot their quick naked bodies with paint guns. Stake loathed GiggleMiceGo!, but could seldom take his eyes off it when it was on. The other VT had its sound on, and was tuned as usual to an all-military channel. Currently a documentary on the training of troops for the Red War was playing. Trainees were marching along while their tough drill instructor kept pace. The soldiers were shouting a politically correct Colonial Forces chant:

  “I respect all cultures, clans and creeds

  But mess with me I’ll make you bleed!

  Sound off...sound off!

  One, two, three, four

  One, two – three, four!”

  One branded black vet was watching GiggleMiceGo!, the other the documentary. Peripherally, despite his avoiding them now, Stake saw the two men turn their heads to face the door behind him. He saw Watt look that way, too. He swivelled on his stool.

  Everyone was looking at the man who had just walked in, because he was in full Colonial Forces uniform. At LOV 69, uniforms were reserved for holiday parades. And funerals. Furthermore, the man was a captain. But it was Stake alone who recognized him, after his mellow brain sharpened up a bit.

  Captain Rick Henderson seemed to be having a rougher time spotting Stake, though. He knew it was because he had unintentionally begun taking on the physical characteristics of one of the branded vets. He raised his hand to catch Henderson’s attention. The tall man hesitated a moment, squinting into the cigarette haze, then smiled and approached the bar.

  “I must be having a war flashback,” Stake said, slipping off his stool to stand and shake the officer’s hand.

  “Tell me about it,” grumbled another vet at the bar, hunched over an ashtray.

  “What’s this?” Rick asked, pointing to the raised symbol on Stake’s forehead.

  Stake tilted his head toward the two black vets, and Henderson gave them a look. “Ohh.”

  The Colonial Forces captain was familiar with Stake’s gift. During the Blue War, when the captain had been a mere private and Stake had been a corporal, they had been part of a deep penetration team, venturing far behind enemy lines. Stake’s ability to radically alter his features had come in handy then. Henderson knew he still utilized this ability in his current line of work as a hired investigator. But he also knew that Stake was a mutant, born to a mutant mother in the Punktown slum of Tin Town. It was not only a gift that Stake had never asked for, but one which could slip from his control if he let his guard down, and looked too long at another person’s face. So Henderson well understood why his old friend’s eyes darted only briefly to his own, ever in motion. Stake claimed this was why he seldom missed much about his surroundings. He claimed it was a trait that had kept him alive in dangerous situations, during the war and since.

  They settled in together at the bar. Henderson asked, “Can you handle another round, or should we make it coffee? Or something stronger?” He was referring to the pills bartenders often stocked and sold to customers if they wanted to drive their helicar home instead of into the side of a building, these pills swiftly counteracting the effects of such intoxicating agents as alcohol and anodyne gas.

  “Ahh...how about coffee?” Stake ventured.

  “Sounds like a good idea.” Henderson nodded to Watt.

  “Wow, Rick,” the investigator said, shaking his head. “I haven’t seen you face-to-face in years.”

  “I still haven’t seen your face yet,” Henderson joked. He meant that his old friend’s features still bore a fading resemblance to one of the black men, though his skin’s pigmentation had not managed to darken to the same degree, despite a good try. When Stake’s features did reshape themselves to what he called his “factory settings,” his face would have an almost mask-like quality of blandness, blankness. This neutral state was not too broad or too thin in shape, too hard or too soft in its lines, too masculine or too feminine; deceptively solid, but a living veil of smoke over the bone beneath. Under close scrutiny in certain light one might discern the grainy look of his skin, smooth in texture though it might be, these grains being chromatophores that to a more subtle extent enabled his skin to alter its hue like the flesh of an octopus. In fact, Henderson had once seen a VT program about the Ido-Malayan mimic octopus, that could change not only its color patterns but configure its body to resemble a flatfish, or a poisonous lion fish, or a banded sea snake. It had right away put him in mind of Jeremy Stake.

  Stake asked him, “How’d you find me here?”

  “I remembered you hung out in a veterans’ post, but I didn’t know which one. I’ve just been to two others that are closer to your apartment.”

  “Yeah, I dunno, the number 69 appeals to me for some reason.”

  Henderson smiled. “That I can understand. Anyway, I’ve been trying to reach you since last night. Do you have your phones switched off?” He nodded his head at Stake’s wrist comp.

  “I like to rest my mind between cases.”

  “How are you supposed to get more cases if you don’t pick up your calls?”

  “Potential clients leave messages.”

  “I know; I’ve left a half dozen myself.”

  “So are you a potential client, Rick?”

  “As a matter of fact, I guess you could say I am. Yeah.”

  Stake appraised the man with a sobering eye. “You stationed on Oasis now?”

  “No. I came here just for you.”

  “It must be a hell of a case.”

  “Tell me about it,” Henderson said, mimicking the drunk a few stools over. He sighed, and looked into the coffee Watt had just set down in front of him, as if searching through the rising steam for his reflection in the black surface.

  “Are you serious, Rick?” Stake was making his own potion lighter and sweeter. “What’s the problem? What can I do?”

  “Shh,” Henderson told him. “Can’t you see I’m working through something here?”

  “Working through what?”

  “I’m wondering if I’m making a mistake coming to see you.”

  “Will you just tell me?”

  Henderson blew out a long breath. It dispersed the occluding steam. “You know, when I was a kid I had a pet salamander named Brian. I guess you could call him a salamander, or a newt; he was a Tikkihotto amphibian. He had eyes just like them, in fact – all these little eye feelers. We had him a good five years, I think. Sometimes when it was quiet and I was doing my homework, or late at night, I’d hear this one tiny little glub. It was an air bubble rising from his mouth. It kind of reminded me that he wasn’t just alive when I was looking at him; he was alive all the time. When he was alone in the house, in his aquarium, he was living his life. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “So far.”

  “You wouldn’t think something like that would have a personality at all, let alone affection, but there was something strange. For whatever reason, Brian would never crawl into my hand, or my brother Paul’s hand. Never do it. But my mom could do the same thing and he’d get right into her palm. And then he didn’t want to leave; she had to practically dump him back into the water. Well, even though he wasn’t as fond of me as he seemed to be of my mom, I cried the day we found him dead in his aquarium. Old, shriveled up.”

  “Hm,” was all Stake could say. Waiting for more. Did his friend mean he, Stake, was the salamander? Still here in Punktown, alive, when Henderson was off involved in his own life? More than just some shadowy war memory?

  “Ten years after Brian died,” Henderson went on, “I shot a Ha Jiin man in the face with my pistol, from a few feet away. First man I killed, just a week after my nineteenth birthday. I’m the same person who loved a stupid little newt, and wept when he died. The same guy who shot a man in the face. And killed a lot of other people, after that day.”

  Stake didn’t know exactly what Henderson was getting at, but he reassured him, “You’re still that same person, Rick. That part of you didn’t die in the war. I bet you’d cry again today, if you had a pet f
or five years and found it dead.”

  “I think you’re right. But I’d also shoot a man in the face today, if he was pointing a gun at me.”

  “Okay, look, I really don’t understand where you’re going with this.”

  “I’m saying I hate to ask you to come back to Sinan with me. I know it did to you what it did to me. I know that’s why you sit in this room, alone at this bar, with a beer in front of you and other ex-soldiers around you, close but not too close. Just like then, you don’t want to get too close because you don’t want to cry when they die. Maybe from old age now instead of a bullet, but it’s still pretty much the...”

  “Wait.” Stake held a hand up. “Wait. You’re asking me to go to Sinan with you?”

  “Yes. That’s where I’m stationed now. For the past two months.”

  Stake’s expression became very grave. “Is this about Thi?”

  “No, no – it doesn’t have anything to do with her. Haven’t you seen it on the news, Jer? Bluetown?”

  “Bluetown. This is about Bluetown, then?”

  “For starters, it is.”

  Stake had indeed seen it on the news. It would surprise no one who knew him – not that many did – that he should keenly follow any news about Sinan. Generally, there wasn’t much to be seen in the popular media, however, because Sinan was more than just another planet. It was another planet in another dimension. It was, to date, the only extradimensional world that the Earth Colonies had ever engaged in war. And that was the other reason there wasn’t much to be heard about it in the news. Old wars brought bad memories. What had needed to be done there was done, and most Earth colonists on their many far-flung worlds preferred to relegate Sinan to its unseen realm. Hadn’t Stake tried to do the same? But again, at cross-purposes with himself, he always pricked up his ears at the merest mention of it. And the news about Bluetown was hard to miss.

  “So is that why you were stationed there – to look into that?” Stake asked.

  “Yes. I’ll tell you what you may already know, and what you may not. A company called Bright Horizons has been working with the Jin Haa, creating little condo-type village complexes, in and around the city of Di Noon. Bright Horizons is a Punktown-based operation, owned by a David Bright. He’s created similar complexes for dwelling and business on a good many colonized worlds. The process he uses for these projects was developed by a biotech team he acquired called Simulacrum Systems. They use a quasi-organic process, where the buildings are actually grown rather than built, according to a blueprint programmed right into the smart matter itself.”