The Fleet Book 2: Counter Attack (18 page)

As the medal fell back into place he felt a sudden tingling, as if the gold had carried some electric shock. Just nerves, he told himself firmly. His hand went unconsciously to stroke the medallion, but by the time he touched it the sensation was gone.

She blinked twice and untwisted her mouth. “I know more about the trade than you ever will, even if you are on the first ship. It’s only a matter of time. And if you’ve had a chance to walk around at all you know that Efrichen is ripe. After dark only the rateri friends are on the streets. Go out and look for yourself.”

Diego smiled slowly, unpleasantly. “I don’t have to. I believe you.”

Jurgen, he thought. Where the hell is Jurgen? Ships or ship? Diego was completely lost except for a single salient fact. He wasn’t just a narc and this wasn’t any old police action. For a moment he wished that he could get Zoe to tell him more, but it was obvious that if he tried to get more information she would begin to suspect his story. It was the contact he needed, Jurgen who was one of their own.

“Jurgen just came in,” Zoe hissed, then disappeared into a swirl of bodies.

Trying not to look obvious Diego turned his head toward the door. Jurgen looked just like the picture, the midnight blue snake undulating across his body, just matching his hair in the dim light. A shadow made to work in the shadows, Diego thought, unlike himself who was a creature of light, or at least ash pale umbra.

The crowd pressed between the tables, flowing in its own patterns that swallowed bits of the room and spit them up again, reformed. Jurgen’s dark presence was obscured behind tangerine and topaz, wine and lapis-studded draperies. Then the rhythms of the music changed and the rainbow horde swirled once again. Jurgen was now seated at the table just behind his. Slowly Diego’s contact raised his eyes from the glass in front of him and met Diego’s gaze.

Diego swallowed hard and wished he’d ordered a beer, something to quench the dryness. The eyes that had bored into him had never belonged to the Commander of the twenty-third. Slowly, casually, he made his way over to Jurgen’s table and took the empty chair at his contact’s elbow.

“Jurgen,” he stated. No need for a question.

Indigo lights played in unnaturally dark hair as Jurgen turned to face Diego. His face split into something that Diego thought had once been meant as a smile.

“I didn’t know they’d send a baby,” Jurgen said softly, then frowned. “I thought I was worth more than that.”

“Sein himself sent me,” Diego countered.

Jurgen laughed unpleasantly. “That’s because he knew nobody else would take the job, I guess. Get some stinking green ensign who can’t even wipe his own butt yet, let alone bring me back. Anyone who knew better wouldn’t bother trying. Good old Sein. Got to give the guy credit.”

Jurgen slid his thumb over the polished wooden edge of the table, following the deeply carved snake and leaf pattern that seemed more appropriate for a monastery or a museum. Two tiny ampules appeared in his hand, flourished like a stage magician with a dove.

“It only
looks
primitive,” he said, offering one of the capsules to Diego. “Go ahead, take it. The best there is, perfectly refined, without anything added. No zombie charms here.”

Diego flinched and drew into himself. He’d heard plenty about rateri but had never been this close to it. Lying in Jurgen’s palm the two capsules seemed very small and innocent. Pale yellow, just like the headache medicine he used to get for the migraines when he took his quals. Fascinated and repelled, he couldn’t pull his eyes away.

Suddenly Jurgen closed his fist and crushed the capsules. Yellow liquid glittered against his skin for a moment arid then disappeared. “It’s absorbed through the skin,” Jurgen said softly, smiling.

Diego swallowed hard and gripped the carved edge of the table as the room began to revolve slowly around him. The snakes of wood joined other snakes as each of the tattoos and carvings, embroideries, and paintings came to life. Even the violet tattoo on his own body began to slither across his skin, dry and soft, very slow.

He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. Only more snakes, feeding off his own death. The woman with the hydra hands. She must have known. And Jurgen was laughing in front of him as the poison struck home, waiting for him to die.

“So I see Zoe already offered hospitality. I should have known. She has such exquisite manners, don’t you think?”

The voice thundered in his head and echoed around the room. The club had expanded in at least two dimensions and it no longer seemed so crowded. Snakes, living and writhing, filled all the new space, but Diego didn’t find them disturbing. If anything they were an alien comfort, each one vaguely connected to him as if they were both intelligent and telepathic. Happy, that was it. They were all happy. All the snakes and all the people. Both slithered over each other in some rateri-aided symbiosis that rendered the club, the other addicts, and the Khalia all together harmless.

Time itself yawned in front of Diego, and he looked down into the abyss of his own history. Himself at the Port Officer’s Children’s School, then the Academy and learning how to ski on Volkstaad and experimenting with falling in love with Emily Clarke when they were fourteen. Not looking, really, Diego decided. It was more as if time didn’t make any distinction between the Diego of now and the one who was fourteen and ten and twenty and six. All of them existed at once, each one demanded attention and the clamor was overwhelming.

Diego tried to listen to them all, look at them through himself and from the rateri eyes. Together the pictures showed one single, overwhelming scene and Diego was so sad that he was tempted to cry. His whole life, everything he had ever wanted or dreamed had been dry and dull, always perfectly anticipated and predictable. Grey shot through each time frame, the storm cloud topped mountains merging with his cadet-grey uniform blending to the grey water of Lake Remembrance where he and Emily had half succeeded in seducing each other.

Compared to Diego, to the time held in the layers of glistening polish on the wooden table, the people around him were beautifully vivid. The feathered masks came alive as quasi-human birds hovered over the club and his own metallic snake turned to catch the glitter of the scattered light. The scents that had been unpleasant moments ago fractured, and alone each was redolent of humanity and history and a vitality that seemed to have passed Diego Bach without a glance.

The livingness of it called out to him and he wanted it, like he had wanted a last perfect run down Mt. Coatl, the way he had wanted warmth and food and hot soup, waiting to be rescued. He understood Jurgen now, knew why he had gone over. Ultimately there was no choice, not when he knew what it meant to live like the dead for twenty-three years and to suddenly wake up. Eyes fully open and aware, there was no way he could turn back any more than Jurgen could. It was worth death. It was even worth dishonor. His life to this moment. had been the meaningless jerking of a marionette.

In his frenzy of understanding Diego sought Jurgen, to let him know that there was no enmity anymore. But the dark man with the midnight snake had vanished. In truth, beyond the immediate swirl of colors and the faint memory of music, the club had vanished as well. The Tandeleistrasse lay against the grey dawn battened against the assault of those still out on the street.

Diego was not the only one lying on the picturesque sidewalk under the soft yellow illumination of an antique streetlight. He watched unmoving as one by one the lights went out as the day began. Images of the night before coalesced in his clearing head, and his first reaction was sorrow. It had all seemed so easy, so beautiful in the club when all he had to do was reach out and touch the life around him. Understanding Jurgen had opened him to an understanding of himself that didn’t dissipate with the morning.

A soft moaning nearby penetrated his thoughts and he turned just slightly to see Jurgen sitting with his back against the light pole. In the harsh early light Diego saw the plain marks of age and anguish mixed with the clear signs of rateri addiction mixed on his face. He moaned again, this time nearly inaudibly, and dragged himself closer to Diego. The iridescent black-purple feathers that hung from the shoulders of his jacket seemed incongruously jaunty, the only hint at the gaiety of the night before.

“You’re from Sein?” Jurgen asked haltingly, stumbling over the words.

Diego nodded, unable to pronounce the words. This Jurgen had a different voice, heavier and not so arrogant as the man he had met at the club. Then Jurgen grabbed the light pole and pulled himself up. “Come on,” he said thickly. ”We’ve got to be out of here before the catchers come.” He made a weak gesture at Diego.

Bach honestly tried to get up and honestly failed on the first attempt. It wasn’t like any hangover he’d ever had. His head felt perfectly clear and his body was absolutely limp. It took two more tries before he was even able to sit up, by which time Jurgen was already staggering along the wall, hauling himself hand over hand against the rough cut stone.

“Move,” he commanded sharply. “Don’t care how just do it.”

Diego never did figure out
just how he managed to drag himself to his knees, to force one palm out in front of the other on the sidewalk, pushing with legs that were one step removed from gel. He noticed one or two others who were making as good an attempt to leave as he was, and a few more who lay with fearful recognition in their eyes.

The questions churned in the back of his mind but Diego kept most of his concentration on getting out of the Tandeleistrasse. Just why could wait for a minute or two, for when Jurgen was able to tell him. Suddenly he thought to wonder if it had been the same Jurgen after all, or if in the rateri dream he had seen whatever he expected to see. Only that was too simple, and that was assuming Zoe was far more than what she appeared.
Keep an open mind,
he told himself severely. Never underestimate the enemy, and never assume that because someone appears friendly he is. Or she.

They rounded the comer and passed through the wide wrought iron gate just before the star Efrin blazed over the horizon. Diego glanced back to see what looked like people in blue-grey uniforms picking up those addicts who hadn’t been able to move. Only there was something wrong about
the
people
in uniform, something that from this distance he couldn’t quite define. They weren’t right somehow, that much was certain.

“Let’s stop,” Diego gasped. “Here.” He indicated a pastry shop across the street with a nod. The white and pink and brown cakes on their individual lace doilies were making his stomach contract painfully.

“Won’t serve us,” Jurgen mumbled without looking back. “Soon.”

Soon turned out to be only half a block more. Jurgen stumbled up steps scrubbed a glistening white and fumbled with an old-style key in a brass plate. Once inside he led Diego up the stairs.

It wasn’t as pleasant as Diego had imagined the night before. The building was obviously clean, reeking of disinfectant like a hospital ward, and appointed with about as much charm. Jurgen opened another door at the top of the stairs and disappeared in darkness.

There was no window in this room, Diego noted with distaste. It wasn’t any larger than his own temp quarters in the union hall and it wasn’t particularly more personal either. Which was reasonable. If Jurgen was an addict then nothing besides rateri really mattered.

If it hadn’t been for the matter of the ship Diego would have left then and there. He had stopped thinking of Jurgen, whatever his real name had once been, as a fellow officer, an Intelligence operative. Now he was only a broken fool stranded out on Efrichen. The drug weakness was wearing off rapidly now and movement was no longer difficult. Diego almost felt good again, all the more reason to get out of this pit, get something decent to eat and report in. Then go home.

Jurgen flopped on the disheveled sleeping platform and smiled evilly. “I have a trade for you,” he said thickly. “Money. I need money, maybe a new ident.” He fingered a microreel card carefully. “The reports. Everything.”

“I thought you’d gone over,” Diego said slowly. “With their ship.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear.” Jurgen said harshly. “They had to send a baby. You can’t even keep your fingers dry. Anyway, trade. The reports, everything you and Sein and everyone else wants to know for fifty bigs. In small negotiables, jewels, collectables. Nothing in the system and nothing traceable, you understand?”

Diego nodded.

“We’ll meet back at the club. You bring my payment, I bring this. Deal?”

Diego hesitated. “I don’t know that’s any good,” he said finally. “I could pay you and that tape could be blank, or full of garbage or something. I want to see what I’m getting before I hand over that much.”

Jurgen chuckled. “Maybe you aren’t such a baby. But I’d need security. Because you could run off without paying me and take the goodies with you. All that word of honor shit doesn’t mean I trust you at all.”

Diego thought quickly, then unfastened the St. Barbara medal and held it clenched in his fist. “This for security? It isn’t worth quite fifty on the open market, but it is gold. And it’s worth a lot more than that to me.”

“Sentimentality. What would we do without sentimentality? It’s only one of our weaknesses. That’s why we’re going to lose in the end, you know. Not because the Khalia are smarter than we are, or stronger, or even meaner. It’s because they couldn’t care less.”

Diego leaned forward and snatched the card at the same time be dropped the medal. It fell against the tangled sheets.

“What makes you so sure I wouldn’t kill you?” Diego asked as he turned away. The question had really been directed at himself and he didn’t know he had spoken aloud until he heard Jurgen answer.

“The same reason you’ll come back for this,” Jurgen said. “Sentimentality. And nerve. I’ll bet you’ve never killed anyone, and you’re not going to start now. Not the same as a ship. Crossing the line.”

Diego left. It seemed longer going back to the union hall, maybe because he couldn’t get Jurgen out of his mind or maybe because he couldn’t ignore the openly hostile stares on the street. When he returned to his union cubby he tossed the reel aside and spent the better part of an hour washing the bitter memories from his skin. Then he ate a hideously overpriced sausage dish with a respectable glass of beer before he felt ready to face Jurgen’s tape.