Second Contact (20 page)

When she got inside, a male at a desk read her body paint and asked, “What do you require, Shuttlecraft Pilot?”

“I seek Pshing, adjutant to Atvar, fleetlord of the conquest fleet,” she replied. “I am ordered to bring him into the presence of Reffet, fleetlord of the colonization fleet.” Her opinion was that Pshing and Reffet could have conferred perfectly well by radio or video link. No one, however, had asked her opinion.

“I will inform him that you have arrived,” the male said, and spoke into a microphone in front of his snout. He turned an eye in Nesseref’s direction. “He tells me to tell you he will be here directly.”

Maybe
directly
meant something different for Pshing from what it meant to Nesseref. In her view, he took his time. She could not tell him so, not when a word from him whispered onto Atvar or Reffet’s hearing diaphragm might blight her chances to advance. Such things were not supposed to happen, but they did. “Let us go,” she said crisply when he did arrive, “assuming, that is, that the shuttlecraft remains intact.”

She thought that might faze him, but it didn’t. “The odds favor us,” he said. “Even with smuggled weapons, the local Big Uglies are not outstanding soldiers. Some of them are suicidally courageous, which can make them difficult to defend against, but raw ferocity has its limits.”

“I suppose so,” she said, and then vented a little more exasperation: “Is this travel truly necessary, superior sir?”

“It is,” Pshing declared. “The Tosevites have grown altogether too good at intercepting and decrypting our communications.” Nesseref sighed silently; they’d used the same excuse in Warsaw. Pshing went on, “Details as to when and where ships from the colonization fleet are to land must for obvious reasons remain secure until the last possible moment.”

“Truth,” Nesseref said, however little she wanted to. “Very well, then—we had best be off, to take advantage of the next launch window.”

The landcruiser was even more crowded with two passengers than with one. The gunner kept bumping into Nesseref, which did nothing to improve her temper. More stones thudded into the machine as it made its slow way through Cairo.

Nothing had happened to the shuttlecraft while Nesseref was gone. Praising Emperors past, she lifted on schedule and delivered Pshing to his meeting with Reffet.

When she opened her belt pouch in her own quarters aboard the
13th Emperor Makkakap
later that day, she found a small vial that hadn’t been in there before. It was half full of finely ground brownish powder, and had a tiny note stuck to it.
A couple of tastes for when you get bored,
the note said.

Ginger,
Nesseref thought.
It has to be more ginger.
She supposed the landcruiser driver had slipped the Tosevite spice in there. It hadn’t got in there by itself, that was certain. It was, she knew, very much against regulations, even if males of the conquest fleet kept giving it to her. But she wasn’t bored right now. She thought about throwing it away, then didn’t. She hadn’t thrown away the first vial, either. She might get bored one of these days. Who could say?

Rance Auerbach wondered whether he hated the Lizards worse for wrecking his life or for patching him up after they’d shot him as full of holes as a colander. People said both shooting the enemy and caring for him if you captured him were the right ways to go about making war. He wondered if any of those people had ever gone through close to twenty years of continuous pain. Better he should have bled out on the Colorado prairie southeast of Denver than put up with this.

But he hadn’t bled out, which meant he still had the chance to pay the Lizards back for the unfavor they’d done by saving his life. “And I will get even with them, if it’s the last thing I ever do,” he muttered. Getting even with them as the last thing he ever did struck him as poetic justice. He would die happy if he could die knowing he’d hit them a good lick.

He sat down at the kitchen table, the closest thing to a desk his miserable little apartment boasted. His leg complained when he bent it to sit. It would complain again, a little louder, when he got up once more. He shifted on the chair a couple of times, and it half settled down.

He resumed the letter he’d begun the night before, writing,
And so I say again that I hope the Lizards never do figure out who blew up their ships. Let them fear all of us. Let them know we are all dangerous. And if they retaliate, kick ’em in the balls again.
He looked it over, nodded, and scrawled his signature. Then he put it in an envelope and stuck on an overseas airmail stamp.

“Let’s hear it for airmail,” he said, and clapped his hands together a couple of times. Telephones and telegrams and telexes were too easy to monitor. The mail, though, the mail went through. Nobody would bother opening one envelope among hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.

He started another letter, this one in German. He’d learned the language at West Point, then promptly forgotten it. Over the years, though, he’d brought it out of mothballs again, at least as far as reading and writing went. He knew a lot of people—classmates, men with whom he’d served when he could serve—and they knew people, too, people all over the world.

“Krauts better not hear me tryin’ to talk their lingo, though,” he said with a raspy chuckle. German and a Texas twang hadn’t gone together back at the Military Academy. They still didn’t: even less so now.

But he understood how the grammar worked, and he knew what he wanted to say. He also knew his correspondent would agree with him when he said the same sorts of things he had to his English friend. Yeah, the Nazis were bastards, but they had the right idea about the Lizards.

“Kick ’em in the balls,” he said aloud. “They don’t even have balls to kick.”

The colonization fleet would be bringing lady Lizards. You couldn’t very well have a colony—even the Lizards couldn’t—without both sexes being there. Rance imagined a Lizard in a frilly bra and fishnet stockings held up by a garter belt. He laughed like a loon, so hard that he had trouble getting enough air into his poor, battered chest cavity. He knew the Lizards didn’t really work that way; when the females weren’t in season, the males didn’t care. But it made a hell of a funny picture just the same.

He was addressing the envelope to his German associate when the telephone rang. It was back in the bedroom; getting to it took a while. Sometimes it would stop ringing just before he made it to the nightstand. He hated that. Even more, though, he hated making the long, painful trip—any trip for him was long and painful—to have a salesman try to get him to buy a new electric razor or a set of encyclopedias. He cussed those bastards up one side and down the other.

This time, the phone kept ringing long enough for him to answer it. “Hello?”

“Rance?” A woman’s voice. He raised an eyebrow. He didn’t get that many calls from women. “That you, Rance?”

“Who is this?” Whoever she was, she didn’t come from Texas. Her voice held the flat, harsh tones of the Midwestern farm belt. And then, even though he hadn’t heard it in more than fifteen years, he recognized it, or thought he did. “Christ!” he said, and sweat sprang out on his forehead that had nothing to do with either heat or pain—not physical pain, anyhow. “Penny?”

“It’s not the Easter Bunny, Rance; I’ll tell you that right now,” she answered. Now that Auerbach heard more than four words from her, he wondered how he’d known who she was by her voice. It spoke of a lot of cigarettes, a lot of booze, and probably a lot of hard times. She asked, “How are you doing, Rance?”

“Not too goddamn well,” he answered. The telephone trembled in his hand. If it hadn’t been for Penny Summers, he might not have lived after the Lizards shot him up. They’d known each other before the Lizards’ last big push toward Denver. The Race had scooped her up in Lamar, Colorado, before they wounded and captured him. Along with helping to keep him alive, she’d found ways to improve his morale no male nurse could have used. They’d stayed together for a while after the fighting ended, and then . . . “How much trouble are you in, Penny?”

Her breath caught. “How in God’s name did you know I’m in trouble?”

He laughed again, pulling pain and mirth from his chest at the same time. “If you weren’t, darling, you sure as hell wouldn’t be calling me.”

That should have struck her funny, too, but it didn’t. “Well, I’d be a liar if I said you was wrong.” Every word she spoke seemed chiseled from stone. Auerbach had grown very used to the lazy sounds of Texas English. Hearing those Kansas r’s again made the hair prickle up at the back of his neck.

He knew he had to say something. “Where are you calling from?” he asked. The question was innocuous enough that he didn’t have to deal with the larger one of whether he hated her for helping to keep him alive.

“I’m in Fort Worth,” she answered.

“Thought so,” he said. “The connection’s too good for a longdistance call. What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded harried and worn. “I don’t know if anybody can do anything. But I didn’t know who else to call.”

“That’s too bad,” Rance said. If, after so much time, she hadn’t been able to find anybody on whom she could rely . . . “You’re as big a loser as I am,” he blurted. He wouldn’t have said that to many people, no matter how down-and-out they might have seemed, not after he’d made the acquaintance of the Lizard machine gun. But the Lizards had blasted her father to red rags right before her eyes, and she didn’t sound as if she’d gone uphill since.

“Maybe I am,” she said. “Can I see you? I didn’t want to just knock on your door, but—” She broke off, then resumed: “Christ, I hate this.” She’d come a long way from the farm girl she’d been before the Lizards swept through western Kansas, and most of it down roads she wouldn’t have dreamt of traveling then.

More than anything else, that bitterness decided Auerbach. “Yeah, come on ahead,” he said: like called to like. “You know where I’m staying?”

“You’re in the phone book—if I found your number, I found your address, too,” Penny answered, which left him feeling foolish. “Thanks, Rance. I’ll be there in a little bit.” The line went dead.

Auerbach listened to the dial tone for a few seconds, then hung up the phone. “Jesus Christ,” he said, with more reverence than he was accustomed to using. In similar tones, he went on, “What the hell have I gone and done?”

He made his slow, creaky way out into the living room, where he stopped and looked around. The place wasn’t in the worst shape in the world. It wasn’t in the best, though, nor anywhere close. He shrugged. Penny didn’t sound as if she was in the best shape, either. And if she didn’t like the way he kept house, she could damn well leave.

Hobbling into the kitchen, he checked there, too. Bread on the counter, cold cuts in the refrigerator. He could make Penny sandwiches. If it meant he lived on oatmeal for a bit, till he had a hot day at the poker table or his next pension check came, then it did, that was all. And he had whiskey. He had plenty of whiskey. He didn’t need to check to be sure of that.

He waited. “Hurry up and wait,” he murmured, a phrase from his Army days. It still held truth. His heart thudded in his chest: more in the way of nerves than he’d known in years. He sat down. Maybe she wouldn’t come. Maybe she’d get lost. Maybe she’d change her mind, or maybe she was playing some sort of practical joke.

Footsteps in the hall: sharp, quick, authoritative. The whole building shook slightly; it had been run up after the fighting stopped, and run up as quickly and cheaply as possible. He doubted they were her footsteps. She hadn’t walked that way when he’d known her. But he hadn’t known her for a long time. The footsteps stopped in front of his door. The knock that followed had the same abrupt, staccato quality to it.

Auerbach heaved himself up and opened the door. Sure enough, Penny Summers stood in the hall, impatiently tapping her foot on the worn linoleum and sucking on a cigarette. He stared at her with a surprise that he realized was completely absurd. Of course she wouldn’t be the fresh-faced farm girl he’d more or less loved when he was young.

Her hair was cut short and dyed a brassy version of the blond it had been. Her skin stretched tight across her cheekbones and over her forehead. Powder didn’t hide crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and couldn’t cover the harsh lines that ran like gullies from beside her nose to the corners of her mouth. The flesh under her chin sagged. Her pale eyes were faded and wary.

She took a last drag on the cigarette, threw it down, and ground it out under the sole of her shoe. Then she leaned forward and pecked Rance on the lips. Her mouth tasted of smoke. “For God’s sake, darling, get me a drink,” she said.

“Water?” Auerbach asked as he limped back to the kitchen. She wasn’t young any more. She wasn’t sweet any more. Neither was he, but that had nothing to do with anything. He knew what he was. She’d just ruined some of his memories.

“Just ice,” she said. The couch creaked as she sat down. He carried the glass out to her, with one of his own in his other hand. Her skirt was short and tight and had ridden up quite a ways. She still had good legs, long and smooth and muscular.

“Mud in your eye,” he said, and drank. She knocked back her whiskey at a gulp. He looked at her. “What’s going on? And what do you think I can do about it? I can’t do much about anything.”

“You know people in the RAF.” It wasn’t a question; she spoke with assurance. “I got involved in a . . . business deal that didn’t quite turn out the way it was supposed to. Some folks are mad at me.” She gave an emphatic cough. Maybe some of the folks she meant had scales, not hair.

“What am I supposed to do about it?” But that wasn’t really what Auerbach wanted to ask. He wasn’t shy about coming out with it. He wasn’t shy about anything these days. “Come on, Penny—why should I give a damn? You walked out on me a long time ago, remember?”

“Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I should have been,” she said. Maybe she was buttering him up now, too, but he didn’t say anything. He just waited. She went on, “Once I did, though, I couldn’t make it like it never happened. So—will you let a couple of your friends over in England know I’m trying to make things right? And will you let me stay here for a little while, till the heat in Detroit dies down?”