Blue War: A Punktown Novel Read online

“Dominic Gale! You know, the colonel?”

  “You’re dating the colonel?”

  Another mischievous grin. “Shh. He doesn’t like to share.” She started to duck into the bathroom again, but Stake sat up to call her back.

  “Ami, the Ha Jiin security captain I spoke to told me his people did some digging in the holes the clones were found in, and the remnants of clothing and gear were recovered. He said these were turned over to our people. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Yes – well, not really. Dom told me, but he said they couldn’t tell anything from it. Just a few shreds of uniform and a couple of pieces of equipment that could have belonged to any CF soldier.”

  “The Ha Jiin captain said it didn’t look like scraps of Colonial Forces uniform.”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I didn’t see it, but that’s what Dom said.” This time when she disappeared into the bathroom, he heard the shower come blasting on.

  Stake had just swung his legs over the side of the mattress when his wrist comp on the bedside table beeped him that a call was coming in. He scooped it up, slipped it on. When he positioned his face over the device at a certain angle, its transmission engaged not only his eyes but his brain, so that its screen became a virtual one and filled the front of his mind. Thus, the familiar face he saw looking back at him had an extra potent effect. He sucked in his breath at the sight of it.

  But his face was not so familiar to Thi Gonh, who looked confused as she stammered in imperfect English, “I am look for Jeremy Stake?”

  “Dung,” Stake muttered, knowing that he still retained much of Ami Pattaya’s appearance, minus the sleek curtain of hair. “Thi,” he told her, “it’s me – Jeremy. I’m on an investigation, so I’m under disguise.” He gestured awkwardly at his stolen countenance.

  Now a grin came over her face. She didn’t seem to make the connection between Stake’s ability and the fact that the mask he wore was of a beautiful woman. “Hello, Ga Noh!” she said.

  “Thi, I’m on Sinan, did you know that? I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Yes, I know, someone say that to Thi.”

  “Someone? Who was that?”

  “His name is Hin Yengun. He is big Ha Jiin soldier.”

  “Yengun? He told me he didn’t know you.”

  “Thi not know him. But soldier find Thi and say Ga Noh in Di Noon and look-look for Thi.”

  Now Stake smiled, too. “That son of a bitch.”

  The Ha Jiin woman’s forehead rumpled. “You angry at him?”

  “No. No, I’m glad he went to the trouble to do that!” Stake couldn’t believe it. They were talking to each other at last, after all the imaginary conversations he had held with her. His grin wouldn’t vanish. “Your English has gotten better,” he said – though it had been better yet in the imaginary conversations.

  “Sometime Thi’s farm sell to people in Jin Haa, and Earth companies in Di Noon, so Thi study English more.”

  “That’s great. But you have to stop referring to yourself by your name. You’ve got to say ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’ instead. Okay?”

  “Oh yes, yes. Sorry, Ga Noh. Thi means, ‘I study English more.’”

  He chuckled. “Very good.”

  One thing she hadn’t referred to herself as was “ban ta.” It meant “your lover,” and it was what she had called herself in moments of passion during their brief time together. It was also how she had signed her last correspondence to him, the text message she had sent this wrist comp a year ago. Well, she was married, after all, wasn’t she? Why should she call herself his lover now? Why should she be jealous to see him with this face on and his shirt off? At least her blue-skinned face truly appeared happy to be looking at his again, however altered it might be. Her smile made her eyes more slanted, dark and sparkling. He wasn’t so used to her smiles. She had been more solemn as a prisoner.

  “Ga Noh,” she said, more slowly and carefully, “you want see me now?”

  “See you? Yes. Yes, I’d like that.” He swallowed involuntarily.

  “But I have big problem, so big problem. Farm of mine...my farm...is all gone.” She spread her hands out horizontally to left and right in a leveling motion. “Blue City make my farm dis-ap-pear. Nothing left.” She wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “Ahh, Jesus, I’m so sorry to hear that, Thi. That’s what I was afraid had happened. I’ve heard that’s happening a lot.”

  “Yes, very bad, very hard for me. So if Ga Noh like to see me, come to town call Vein Rhi. Small town, where my family live. Daughter of my uncle.”

  “Your cousin?”

  “Yes, cousin. Daughter, brother of my father. I and husband live with cousin and husband.”

  “That’s nice, that she took you in. But Thi, your husband – he won’t mind if I come see you there? He doesn’t mind meeting me?”

  “Oh no, no!” she said emphatically, and even glanced back as if someone might come in on her. “Husband go to city Coo Lon today, talk to people owe him money. Need money very much now. If Ga Noh like to see me, hurry up come now, before husband back to Vein Rhi.”

  “I understand. So where is Vein Rhi?”

  “Small town, very small, inside forest. Your car will show you?”

  “Um, yeah, I’ll see if I can find it on my car’s system. If not, I’ll download a map off the net; it’s got to be there somewhere. I can always ask someone here at the base, too, if I need help.”

  “But hurry up soon, okay?”

  “I’m on my way. Where will I meet you there?”

  “Oh – soup bar name Tah Vein Rhi.”

  “Okay, great. I’ll do my best, Thi. If you need to cancel before I get there, just call me.”

  She laughed brightly, startling him. He had never heard it. “Hurry up Ga Noh look like me. Very like me.”

  Stake touched his cheek, which had stealthily rearranged its substance without his even sensing it, so intent had he been on his conversation. A high cheekbone under his fingertips, as if he were caressing her face. One lover’s face exchanged for another’s.

  “I remember good,” she said, grinning, and Stake thought he detected something extra contained within those words. Because it was while they had made love, of course, that he had gazed at her face most avidly, and mirrored her image most closely.

  “I’m coming now,” he said, grinning her own grin back at her. Then his smile faltered, as he heard sounds from the bathroom that indicated Ami Pattaya was about to emerge. “See you soon, Thi.” He broke the connection before she could say more, and before Ami could speak and be heard over his wrist comp. Lowering his arm, he turned to see the science chief emerge from the bathroom naked. She stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of him.

  “Jesus H. Christmas, will you stop scaring me?”

  Stake touched his reconfigured cheekbone again. “Sorry,” he stammered. “I was talking to someone on my wrist comp. Part of my investigation.”

  “You’re so pretty, but I like me better.” She started gathering up her things, bustling to be off quickly. “I’ll try to come by tomorrow if I can get away.”

  “Mm,” he grunted, noncommittal.

  Wriggling into her tight little dress (at least it was a scientific white), Ami said, “What’s the matter, do I make you nervous now? You seemed pretty intrigued half an hour ago. We’re both special, and I appreciate your gifts. Why do you think I came here?”

  “I do find you very intriguing, believe me,” he reassured her. “Very exotic.”

  “Well, I’m finding you a little distant. I mean, your body is uninhibited but emotionally you’re shy.”

  “I’m just distracted. Preoccupied.” Now that Thi’s face was imprinted on his mind, as if he had never disengaged from the wrist comp interface, he thought better of his entanglement with the science chief. “You know, I’m just thinking that if you’re dating Colonel Gale, maybe it’s not a good idea for us to be together like this.”

  “Why? Are you afraid?”r />
  “Guarded.”

  She sighed. “He’s guarded, too. See, this is why I can’t settle on one person.” The mutant pouted prettily. It looked like she practiced her charms in the mirror. “People think I must be complicated because I’m like this, but I really couldn’t be simpler. I just want to be happy. You should try it sometime.” With that, Ami crossed to his door looking like a child who’d been sent to bed without watching her favorite VT program. But before ducking out, she blew him another kiss.

  The moment she was gone, Stake scrambled for his clothing so fast that one might have thought a jealous lover was on the way in.

  ***

  Flying over Bluetown, its shadows stretching long as afternoon advanced, Stake saw a caravan of Ha Jiin people traveling down one of the broad streets, moving deeper into the city like fish swimming upstream. They were about twenty in number; either an extended family or several joined together. A plodding draft animal pulled a wagon. Even the animal lifted its head to watch him as he coasted above. Even its gaze seemed reproachful.

  There was something else moving along another avenue, and it took him a few moments to understand what he was seeing, even though he was well acquainted with carrion trees. The mangrove-like roots of these trees sucked up the decay of plants and animals from the forest floor, and when they required a more fertile ground for their feasting, they uprooted themselves and migrated as if on clusters of muscular tentacles. Carrion trees were the reason the Sinanese had taken to burying their dead in crypts beyond the reach of their hungry roots, but they had thrived during the Blue War. Stake recalled vividly the night he had ridden in the crown of one such tree as it waded through an extensive marsh system, when he had undertaken an infiltration operation ahead of the rest of his team. He remembered being surrounded by the tree’s bruised fruit with its stink of rotting meat. What he was seeing now was three bushy heads of these carrion trees, as they crawled slowly along in a line. Unwisely, they had ventured into the city from its border, and unless they should turn back they had a very long way to travel across the paved-over soil to reach the next rich pocket of compost. But maybe they felt at home in Bluetown, since they essentially did the same thing it did. The Carrion City, they should call it, Stake thought.

  He moved in the opposite direction of the wandering plants, leaving the edge of the city behind him.

  He had found Vein Rhi fairly easily in the Harbinger’s plotting system, and it was far enough into the forest to be safe from Bluetown’s advance for a while longer. When it was time to come in low, however, Stake could barely see the road through the foliage. Descending through this was like submerging into a sea, great fronds and leaves and branches swiping and slapping at his windscreen like churning waves. Something like a blue-striped lemur with a parrot beak leaped onto his hood, shrieked, then bounded away again. “Sorry,” he said.

  Now gliding low and stirring up a golden cloud of dust in his wake, Stake followed a narrow, winding dirt road that was hemmed in tightly by black tree trunks strangled with sapphire lianas like veins. Deep within the territory of the people he had once battled, without a weapon, was probably not the best time for his mind to wander, but it did nonetheless.

  As he had asked himself countless times, he was wondering why he had fallen in love with Thi Gonh, the Earth Killer.

  Sometimes soldiers came to embrace the enemy. It was something like a child trying to befriend the school bully, but more complex. It had to do with trying to reconcile the hatred you had for the enemy, and the fear. Because it was uncomfortable to hate and fear. You were taught that these were bad things, that killing was a bad thing, and then one day you were taught the opposite. Sometimes the impulse to reconcile went beyond embracement to loving the enemy. How many times had Stake seen a Ha Jiin design tattooed on a vet’s arm, a vet drinking Ha Jiin liquor, and he had even seen vets take a Jin Haa bride – not because she was of the allied race, he thought, but because she was as close to the enemy race as it was safe to lie. It was an intimate thing, having an enemy. In a war, you were as mated to them as your buddies. You needed each other, needed that relationship. And in time, this need could transmute into strange shapes.

  Whenever Stake had seen a vet with a Jin Haa woman as his wife, he had envied him. He would acutely remember the smell and taste of his beloved enemy’s blue skin, the satin of her hair under his palms, the slick warmth of her interior that – incompatible with him except as an accommodating space – killed the sperm that had so yearned to enter there.

  Occasionally Stake even wondered if his attraction to this enemy person was a distorted extension of the adversarial frisson between the sexes, man’s submerged terror of women as an alien species. The love/hate relationship with the mysterious, bleeding vagina. The delicious, intriguing fear of your female counterpart, like an alternate version of yourself, a creature from another dimension that you must face and try to merge with, make peace with instead of war.

  Opposites attract. Worlds collide. The exhilarating confusion of it all; the precious pain, the delirium and depression.

  Talk about a Blue War, thought Jeremy Stake.

  SEVEN: EARTH KILLER

  The hamlet of Vein Rhi, where Thi was living with her cousin, was entirely surrounded by a wall of riveted metal panels, their bright surfaces extensively marred with patches of rust. At first these rust blotches might have seemed random, until one looked again and realized the stains formed pictures of people, animals, town and country life, and a great deal of religious symbolism. This “rust art” was accomplished by painting a caustic agent onto the metal, and letting it corrode over time. The practice had been inspired several centuries earlier by a truly accidental mottling of rust discovered on the metal wall surrounding a prominent village. The rust stain had been thought to be a spontaneous rendering of the great prophet Ben Bhi Ben. Thus, Ben Bhi Ben’s image found its way into every instance of rust art. Especially fervid followers of Ben Bhi Ben’s teachings would vigorously rub their hands across his rust-caked image, rasping their palms against the scaly red stains until blood flowed. If their wounds grew infected as a result, and their faces became paralyzed with their mouths grimacing wide open, this was considered a blessing; they were thought to be “singing to the prophet” – despite the fact that not much more than a gurgle could be uttered through their locked open jaws, and death soon followed.

  Studying the wall around the hamlet as he climbed out of his helicar, and remembering about scraped palms and singing to the prophet, Stake snorted, “Religion.”

  Every time he stepped out of an air conditioned room or vehicle on Sinan was like his first exposure to its smothering heat, which he walked into like a solid wall. It stole his breath. Or was that anxiety? He started forward as if swimming through a boiling liquid.

  Approaching the wall, he took in one rust design in particular. He recognized it as a group of monks, a flock of birds rising from them as if released from their raised arms. He knew that there were clerics who had developed PSI abilities through arduous training, and could even command animals to do their bidding. During the war, captured Ha Jiin clerics had enticed birds through the windows of their cells, filled their tiny minds with messages, and sent them to seek out their brothers.

  As he passed through the open gate to Vein Rhi – and immediately drew the eyes of every person in his vicinity – Stake half wished he had retained Thi Gonh’s Ha Jiin features, though without blue dye for his skin and hair acceleration gel, it still would have been an incomplete and ineffectual disguise. He tried to appear to be staring straight ahead as he walked along a central dirt road, but out of the corner of his eyes he was scanning for a soup bar. Its sign would no doubt be in Ha Jiin characters, so he hoped Tah Vein Rhi was the only such institution in the little village.

  Two little boys with wire-sharp crewcuts ran up to him and jogged alongside, chattering like monkeys. He gave them just a quick glance and smile. Nonchalant, like he came to Ha Jiin villages all the time. Lik
e he belonged here.

  The boys gave up on him after a bit and hung back, still jabbering. He saw people openly pointing at him. Faces appearing at windows. Men watched him with immobile resentment, maybe resenting themselves also for being too polite in this time of truce to curse at him, or worse. An old woman with a shriveled face stepped out almost in front of him, as if in challenge. He met her eyes and smiled but her expression remained dour. Had she lost a husband or son or daughter in the war? Further along, he spotted what appeared to be a bar, with two much younger women loitering outside. They were the first Ha Jiin to smile at him, but then he judged them to be bar girls, prostitutes. They wore snugly-fitting white latex gloves, a look that Ha Jiin men found highly erotic. They were appraising him foot to head and he nodded at them, grateful for at least this much hospitality. One of them said something to him in her language but he pretended not to hear, walking onward.

  There. An open-faced little restaurant, with cheap plastic tables and chairs facing out onto the street. Stake spotted Thi Gonh seated at one of these, watching for him. She’d seen him, too, and gave a shy wave. He suppressed a grin as he quickened his pace and stepped up onto the restaurant’s raised floor. Thi didn’t rise from her chair, but what did he expect – a hug? – especially here with all these eyes burning into him, apparently the first Earth man to set foot in Vein Rhi since peacetime?

  “Ga Noh,” she said, beaming. Again, it was disorienting to see her smile like this. Disorienting to be seeing her in the flesh after eleven years. The last time he had been this close to her, it had been to say goodbye before she was transported away as a Colonial Forces prisoner on an air cavalry craft.

  “Hey,” he said awkwardly, seating himself opposite her with his forearms on the sticky table. He noticed a hat with a floppy brim and a scarf on the table beside her. Ha Jiin women working in the field or riding hoverbikes in the city wore such scarves over their lower faces to protect themselves from dust, exhaust and the burning rays of the dual suns, though he knew Thi’s accouterments had more to do with having arrived at the restaurant incognito.