Sly Mongoose (16 page)

“You’ve had a chance to talk to Heutzin your entire life. I need to talk to him now.” The crutch lowered to the ground. Pepper had balanced on one leg easily enough. It didn’t seem to hamper him as much as it should.

“I need to know how Luc found out that I led Cen into the debris field.” Timas paused. As an outsider, Pepper shouldn’t get as upset about what came up next as his parents did. “I need to talk to him about what I saw on the surface.”

“Which was?”

“Aliens,” Timas whispered.

Pepper looked at him like Timas might look at recycling scum. “Your father seems to think you were stressed, jumping at shadows.”

“I saw something,” Timas said.

“In tight situations, the mind gets overactive,” Pepper said. “You can’t trust it.”

“Yes, you’re right.” Another person who didn’t believe him. Timas let it go for now. He’d prove them wrong, somehow, someday soon, when he got back to the surface. “But please, just ask Heutzin why Luc knew what happened.”

“Only if you tell that guard when he wakes up not to panic, that I’m in the courtyard. There’ll be others I drugged. I prefer that my conversation with Heutzin be private for now.”

“Sure,” Timas mumbled. He’d shirk whatever duty required on the next visit to find the alien.

He’d get proof, even if it cost him his life.

He owed Cen that. He owed Cen a lot that he needed to fix. Including the fact that Cen’s killer wandered around Timas’s house at will.

H
eutzin looked like he knew groundsuits, Pepper thought. Greasy, burly, obviously used to working with heavy equipment. “The men outside knew I was coming,” he said.

“The Jaguar scouts, yes.” Pepper first encountered the warriors back in their country of Aztlan on New Anegada. Ressurected by aliens posing as gods, the so-called Azteca had certainly come far in their journey, taking to space and settling on Chilo, as well as habitats in orbit around New Anegada and Chilo. Many of them did their best to leave the memories of their ancestors’ vastly inhumane wars on New Anegada far behind.

Pepper had rather expected that the destruction of their alien gods at the hands of the Ragamuffins would’ve destroyed their culture. Instead they declared the aliens false gods, made the divine more abstract, and proved to be the Ragamuffins’ close allies against the League. Pepper would take allies that believed anything: from God, to gods, to Allah, to nothing. So long as they stood out of his way. “I told the scouts to expect you.” Pepper had left Katerina behind, no need for the Aeolians to hear about this.

Heutzin looked suspicious, and nervous. “What is it you had me called here for?”

Pepper leaned in on his crutch. “I need groundsuits.”

“Ollin and the pipiltin have already told us you are to get nothing.”

“Let me modify my request”—Pepper dropped his voice down so that he sounded soothing, but confident—“I want your junked suits and any spare parts I can buy. In return, I’ll give you several gold discs and an encrypted chip with enough of a credit line on it that you will be able to get all new spare parts, as well as whatever else you need to keep those few dozen suits you have left running.”

Pepper thought it an overly generous offer. The chit was reserved for bigger emergencies than this, the sort of thing Pepper could use to access a vast line of credit set up many years ago.

“Where is the chit?” Heutzin asked. He would know, like anyone else
in the city, how important securing guaranteed usability out of their groundsuits was. Pepper knew they could hardly afford to turn him down.

So why hadn’t he asked the pipiltin about this new offer of his?

Politicians. That’s what the pipiltin really were. And he didn’t trust them not to shoot themselves in the foot over some principle. Let the men on the ground like him and Heutzin work out what was really what.

Pepper moved over to a bench and kicked it over with the crutch. He had gotten used to having one arm and one leg. He’d even remapped his neural tissue to help adapt.

It would hamper him in a fight for sure, but at least he had balance back.

“There.” Pepper pointed out a long package.

Heutzin unwrapped it and then jumped back. “What is this?”

“A leg.” Pepper dismissed the grim joke that leaped to mind: that he was paying an arm and a leg, or at least a leg, for Heutzin’s services. “Deep in the center section of the thigh you’ll find your payment.”

“I can’t . . .” Heutzin stepped back even farther.

Pepper slapped the crutch into the flagstone behind him. “Don’t waste my time.”

“You called me here.”

“You came.” Pepper’s voice dropped, an instinctive response. But Heutzin looked harried and tired, and the whole deal was falling apart.

“What would you have a dockworker do, ignore a call from the grand house of a respected xocoyotzin?”

Pepper had to compose himself, pull in hard, and force himself to change tactics. This was not a place for action and intimidation.

He had to work people with words and deviousness.

Not something that came naturally.

“You love your city.” Pepper repositioned the crutch. “I can see that in you. And you love your people. Do you want us to disappear like Chaco just did?”

Heutzin sighed. “I know your bargain is one that helps us. But that isn’t all that is happening here. I know you are manipulating me: I’m a
simple
dockworker, not a stupid one. If the bargain is for our greater good, then will you mind if I tell the pipiltin your proposal?”

Pepper blinked. “I would mind. I would mind terribly.”

“I thought so. So I risk what little reputation I have, my livelihood, and possibly something more, by aiding you in whatever it is you are planning.”

Pepper grabbed Heutzin’s oil-stained shirt and yanked the man closer. “I want to walk again. Is that so hard for you to understand?”

Heutzin stared back at him. “Is that all?”

“I’m crippled, Heutzin, and at a tremendous disadvantage. It’s making me very irritable. And I’m dangerous when I’m irritable.”

“Now you’re making threats.”

“That was no threat. I am no threat. Had I been a threat you would know.” Pepper sat down next to his amputated leg. “Give me your knife.”

“What knife?”

Pepper cocked his head. Heutzin could keep a straight face. He liked that. “The one in your left pocket.”

Heutzin shrugged and pulled it out. Pepper opened it with a quick flick of his one hand and retrieved the chit and gold discs with several quick surgical cuts.

He dropped the bloody payment in Heutzin’s hands. “You’re no longer a simple dockworker now.”

Pepper wiped the blade on the fabric, rewrapped the leg, and stood back up, fumbling slightly with the crutch. He watched Heutzin nod, then back away. He paused at a notch in the courtyard wall near a pair of torches and tossed one of the gold discs into the middle of rotting grapes and bananas. “Thanks to this house’s gods, for their blessings.”

“You are all annoyingly superstitious,” Pepper said. “The boy’s ramblings, your obeisance to a notch in the wall. I thought you a stronger man than that.”

“Timas still refuses to change his story?” Heutzin turned back, concerned. “He will risk his family’s status.”

“He believes he saw aliens in the smog,” Pepper said. “He’s easily spooked.” He turned to hobble inside and rest. Enough intrigue for one night.

“Not spooked,” Heutzin said softly.

Pepper kept ambling along by crutch.

“The boy isn’t mad.” Heutzin’s voice rose. “Don’t dismiss him like that. There
are
things down there.”

Heutzin walked toward Pepper.

“Not just shadows in the mist?” Pepper said.

“I will never forget what I saw,” Heutzin said. “You talk as if we’re ignorant, but I worked the surface like Timas for years. I was the best. And I paid the greatest price for what I saw. So will Timas. When I returned speaking about things on the surface I was told to remain quiet. But I know what I saw. I even went out. I tried to find them. Almost died from running out of air. And they took it all from me. My suit, my life, my pride.

“Now I work on the docks, but only on the condition that I never blaspheme again. And if you say I told you this, I will lie and say it wasn’t so. But you see me, Pepper, a direct man who’s seen death and suffering and toil. You see me, and tell me if I don’t believe I saw something real down there.”

Pepper stared at him, watched his pupils dilate slightly, listened to the rhythm of his breathing. “You may believe that you saw something, that does not make it any more real.”

“It was a box.”

“What?”

“The creature, it just wafted out of the mist, running at me. It gave me a box, a steel box, and it pushed its helmet against mine and spoke to me. It asked me to open the box and just mail the letter inside.” Heutzin’s eyes were wide with his eagerness to be believed. “It said I would save many lives if I were to post that letter.”

“A physical letter?”

“The pipiltin said I was addled,” Heutzin spat.

“And the letter?”

“Just a random letter, someone talking about the damned weather. I didn’t understand that.”

Pepper blinked. The last detail sounded too jarring to be made-up. Made-up would be that the letter revealed something profound, not that it was useless. “Do you have the letter?”

“The pipiltin threw it away. But I have the box. I know it’s alien, it has
strange silver writing all over the sides. It’s loopy, with lots of circles inside circles.”

That sounded like Nesaru writing. The wrong kind of alien for the ones anyone on Yatapek would know much about.

It could be faked, but still . . . “Bring it.”

Heutzin tapped his forehead. “Of course. When I come with the parts.”

“Now.” Pepper looked at Heutzin. “Bring it to me now.”

And there was suddenly the faintest gleam of something in Heutzin’s eyes.

Relief that maybe, finally, someone believed him. And Pepper thought maybe, maybe there was something to the man’s story.

If true, it would mean they sat on top of one hell of a big target. Pepper watched the dockhand leave the courtyard and then set to burying his own leg in a patch of ground, underneath a set of flowers.

He was exhausted, and for a while he lay near the flowers, looking up through the clear dome at the stars. From down here, they looked peaceful, twinkling away. They didn’t look at all like they harbored the sheer malevolence and ill will he’d come to expect of the universe.

A small dart stung him.

Pepper looked at his good thigh and pulled it out. Normally he could accelerate his metabolism and burn through the sedative, but already exhaustion from healing and moving around had set in. He’d been teetering around all day.

He spotted the Jaguar scout who’d fired the dart.

Pepper picked up a crutch to throw, but then slumped to the ground. Fast-moving feet surrounded him, and then the edges of a reactive armor cape.

A man in an Aeolian helmet looked down at him. “I’m using nanofilament to bind your hand to your neck. Struggle and you’ll cut your own head off.”

Another Aeolian soldier tapped his helmet. “We have him. Get the ship warmed, we’re moving now before any of the locals get any bright ideas.”

T
he Aeolian soldiers had Pepper. They came for Katerina, and the moment Timas saw them he followed them out, Katerina just behind him. Pepper lolled in the back of the cart with Aeolians sitting alertly on either side, their feet dangling near the ground. One of them had his gun raised up as Timas stepped into the courtyard, tracking him.

Timas ignored the barrel and walked up to Pepper. “They captured you.”

Pepper straightened his head with effort, then slumped back again and groaned.

“What are you doing here, kid?” The faceless Aeolian with the gun raised it slightly. Timas stood up straight, as if standing before a large audience.

“Hey. Pepper! I wanted you to know who did this to you,” he spat.

Pepper didn’t turn.

“I did it. I helped them,” Timas yelled. “People like you don’t care about people like us, down here. But at least this once, you’ll remember the name when you get dragged back out.” It felt good to let this loose. Let this killer see what happened to people who didn’t care about the troubles they brought on others.

“And what do you think you accomplished?” Pepper shifted, and the cart squeaked.

“There are consequences to the things you do.” Timas stood triumphant in the early morning sunlight of the courtyard. He’d done something, a measure of payback. A measure of justice for what had happened to Cen. And in some small way, him.

“A butterfly flaps its wings and on the other side of the planet, a hurricane develops,” Pepper grunted. “Everything everyone does has consequences, kid, not just the things that the people you’re mad at do.”

“You kill people.” Timas pointed at him. “You killed Cen.”

“And what do you think will happen to this city when I’m gone? You think you’ll repel the Swarm without me? Remember this when your friends and family are screaming and dying all throughout this city of
yours.” Pepper leaned forward and snapped the next words out: “Remember that
you
chose to help get rid of me.”

Timas flinched. “You’re a bully.”

Pepper shook his head, very softly. “Just hold this conversation in your head, child. Keep flapping those little butterfly wings. You’re just as responsible as I am for anything that comes next.”

Child? He was no child. . . . Timas started to say something, but saw Heutzin carrying a dull black box with silver circles and loops scattered all over its sides. He cradled it in his left hand, walking quickly toward them. The dockhand looked at Pepper, concerned. “What’s going on?”

“Bring the box over.” Pepper paid no attention to Timas now.

“Hold it.” The nearest Aeolian soldier swung and aimed at Heutzin, who froze in place.

“It’s just a box. An empty box.”

“Not damn likely, you keep your distance. Back up.”

Heutzin did so. “He wanted me to show it to him.”