Andrea Cort 03: War of the Marionettes Page 2

  I’m sorry counselor but it wouldn’t be up to me to tell you even if I knew I outrank you I could give you a direct order

  you could Hammersmith agreed I still hope you wouldn’t the Porrinyard said he seems to inspire loyalty the man’s a good administrator if you show him respect he’ll provide as much tactical support as you require if not he’ll bite your head off maybe we’d get along after all what’s his take on the Villani he’s a hardliner backing the course position all the way I already knew the cores official position but it wouldn’t hurt to triangulate the ambassador’s meaning that the Villani ballet is an atrocity that it’s increasing poll on human beings is not an interesting phenomenon but a dangerous cultural contamination that the young people who come here to participate or not visionaries but deluded wannabe suicides and that the Confederacy will be fully justified if it eventually resorts to a military solution to stop it that’s a pretty hostile position for a so called ambassador I know is he just parroting the party line or does he really believe it he once said in public that if he thought he could get away with it he’d call in the Confederate fleet and sterilized the entire biosphere the Porrinyard s turned chilly that kind of talk doesn’t exactly endear him to me or to me Hammersmith said and yet you’ll note that he’s still here hi Petra this to a pretty young Embassy worker slight round-faced with spiky light brown hair and a toothy smile who was coming out of what I assumed to be the Embassy’s main building just as Hammersmith escorted us in through the same door she was friendly enough to spare some of her cheer for us the important visitors when she recognized me and had to force herself to maintain eye contact I winced not everyone knows my past but there’s always one wherever I go this one would certainly make sure the information was disseminated throughout the Embassy’s staff by this evening it wasn’t going to make things easier one narrow hallway and one gallery

  closed office doors later we reached the end of the line a reception area manned by an embassy regular standing and attention the wall bore the Confederate seal and a massive bar relief map of flan

  the regions were color-coded by terrain and ecosystem with deserts predominating rain forests and wetlands hugging the world’s three landlocked seas red stars marked the sights of the various off world embassies green stars sights important to the Villani the biggest star pulsing to express its special significance accompanied the word amphitheater I could make out a little buzz every time that star pulsed but I don’t know whether this was extra emphasis of the site’s importance or just a kink in the display the name tag on the attendant identified him as one Clifford Dunbar third level environmental specialist haver on I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you Hammersmith moaned don’t tell me sorry I thought of tomorrow’s ballet got a more churned up than usual he says he won’t see more than one person at a time Dunbar glanced at the Porrinyards and either recognized them as a linked pair or remembered being told to expect one I’m sorry but I don’t know how that would apply to you two my guess is he meant bodies so would I set the Porrinyards who had always been aware that their enhancement made some people uncomfortable Dunbar regarded me next the Ambassador is different that’s good so am i I’ve heard that he thumbed a toggle at his podium and the map behind him clicked revealing a doorway into a chamber much dimmer than this one I spared a last look at the Porrinyard s who nodded back before proceeding alone into the chamber within the room was a dark it smelled of sweat and other things the air was not entirely clear but wispy with some kind of vapor something that was sweet and too thick to be enjoyed as the perfume it could have been in lesser concentration the windowless walls were stark unencumbered by art or any other reminders from home ambassador Walter coid was first visible as a shadowy mass of flesh sprawled flat on the floor on the opposite end of the room I saw him in profile which was just fine with me as he was naked and a full frontal view might have been too much to digest during my first impression holographic updates orbited his pudgy form like satellites the largest showed an infamous natural amphitheater in another desert thousands of kilometers away an amphitheater that was already filling up with the Villani who had traveled from every corner of this planet to take part in tomorrow’s big event from the shadows they cast local time must have been near sunset frequent cuts to an aerial view being taken from a skimmer inconstant overpass established the human and other offworld onlookers beginning to come together on the ridge above them an entire black sea of lonnie heads Bob than the valleys opposite rim flailing their whips and appreciation of the Holy Ones chosen to participate in the carnage set to begin with tomorrow’s dawn Croix regarded the site with simmering hatred it wasn’t just obvious it was the engine that powered him granted I could not pretend moral superiority I had gallons of blood on my hands I killed as a child and I’ve killed as an adult and I’ve hated some of the people I’ve had to deal with over the years enough to want to kill again but I don’t think I’ve ever looked upon any living creature with the special kind of hatred Freud reserved for the Villani it was the kind of hate that keeps a man alive when dying would be a more pleasant alternative cried spoke in a voice like grinding glass you are counselor Andrea Court I am forgive my condition I cannot wear clothing it bothers me there was nothing erotic about Kreutz nudity the flesh sagged from what must have been a muscular frame once upon a time not so much the physique of a man who’d gone to seed as one who’ve grown too tired to fight anything including gravity the curlicues of hair on his back and shoulders captured the light of the revolving hollows making those images look like ruins overgrown with weeds he said I can’t say I appreciate the lack of advanced word this is a tremendously sensitive political situation here if your errand here is as important as you say that’s one thing but it’s too tremendous and inconvenience having to pull my people off other assignments at the busiest time of the year if this is only about sightseeing a sightseeing trip would not be classified sir you wouldn’t be the first dip core functionary to concoct an official excuse for a close-up view of our little annual Massacre not me you’re not even curious I’m afraid that I’ve seen enough carnage for one lifetime I’ve heard that he kept his eyes fixed on the aerial view of the Fulani dancers casting shadows as black and as fluid as themselves but you still came just in time to see the show coincidence sir he rumbled meanwhile by this time tomorrow that Valley will be occupied by 0000000

  Fulani before they are done with their so-called great ballet that Valley will be hip deep in blood and corpses if there weren’t 70 stupid human children among those monsters eager to die as well do you know what I’d call that a good start the answering Rumble might have been as close as Kroy could come to laughter you agree then no sir you didn’t ask me my opinion you just asked me to guess yours what is your opinion aside from the observation that some people are not improved by nudity I haven’t seen enough on this world to make up my mind but if you saw things during your time on this planet that led you to the conclusion that the Villani deserved to be wiped out to the very last bug you would have the courtesy to admit that you’d come around to that way of thinking that’s not my purpose here ambassador he rumbled again then what is your purpose here as I said classified he shifted position moving himself in stages until he faced me his spread thighs giving me clear view of one more thing I would rather not have seen most of the time at the receiving end of such a sight I would have said something dismissive about the anatomy but there was nothing sexual about the moment no perverse pleasure in exposing himself to a stranger just sad defiance and an open admission of the central torment of his life I’ve been told that you’re an arrogant unfriendly bitch that’s the general consensus I also hear that you’re a monster also true and that the Corps owns you even more than it owns the rest of us that you’ll never be free of them what about that I let that pass the Corps only thinks it owns me now so if the Corps ever decided to back my position on the Villani maintaining eye contact with the bastard was suddenly not so difficult I am not having that conversation with you si
r his nod was not directed at me but at himself a wry acknowledgment that he had just received the response he’d expected after a moment he raised his right hand his left shoulder and began to scratch the loose skin there with fingernails long enough to catch under loose scabs and tear them loose it’s my job Andreea court to give you any support you require the trade-off is that you have to make yourself available to any agenda I might have as long as it does not conflict with yours any legal agenda sir there’s a civilian visitor here one Derek Schiff he arrived on Vlad two days before you did demanding the Embassy’s assistance in finding his runaway daughter the over 1

  million dance pilgrims on Vlad were scattered to every corner of the globe they were all invested in cutting off all connection with their respective pasts my stomach lurched at the thought of having to question even a fraction of them in search of a girl who might not even be here and would not want to be found in any event wait a minute Freud was not silenced by my attempt to cut him off we get a lot of correspondence from people who think their missing loved ones might be among the pilgrims and believed that we have the time and the inclination to look for them but Schiff is here and Schiff has pulled strings and the only way to make him leave me alone was to promise that we’d put one of our people on the case as soon as one could be spared this was beyond outrageous my official job description within the dip core power structure was prosecutor at large a title that allows me to pick my own agenda without fear of being drafted for anybody else’s there was no way on vlad or on new london or anywhere that a half-crazy entirely naked career ambassador had the right to disrupt my mission here just because he found the plight of one anguished father inconvenient I have my own urgent business sir more important than one missing girl I’m not insisting on results I just want you to meet with this ship once get any information he wants to give you and assure him that you’ll fold his agenda into your own if you prefer you can never let it bother you again honestly I’m beyond caring but if you want any support from my people you’ll do this one little thing so I’m not bothered with it again I have enough nightmares to think about so did I a little girl sitting on a killing floor her soul tainted her hands red with blood

  the other nightmares that followed imprisonment rape killing to live escaping one set of taskmasters by selling herself to another the revelation only a few months passed that everything she’d been told about her origins was a lie and then there was that one terrible Spectre looming over everything the real reason I was here bigger than all of it the threatened extinction of the human race

  CHAPTER 2

  Schiff

  Current intelligence placed Derek Schiff half a world away making himself a pest to the humans and aliens gathered above the eastern rim of the amphitheatre I had to give this shift person credit for efficiency after all the amphitheatre was the one place where he could be guaranteed the opportunity to question representatives of each of the alien races studying Valon he could make a pest of himself pressing them about the whereabouts of his daughter without having to navigate all the various levels of bureaucracy people in power place between themselves and the people who come to them with inconvenient requests but if that was the be-all and end-all of his plan it wouldn’t do him much good the ballet was after all the one thing all those diplomats and scientists had come to this world to study it only happened once per local year and it began tomorrow the diplomatic community would be far

  too busy pursuing its agenda to worry about his I resented being made the one who had to go through the formality of pretending to give a shit so we were back in the air headed for the amphitheater less than 20 minutes after my meeting with the scowling nude man hammersmith skimmer was a battered ruthless model open to the Skye but protected from wind shear and elements by an ionic shield that all but erased any sense of motion its original ivory color was still visible in spots though much of it was dull brown thanks to the layers of dust that nobody traveling the deserts of LAN would have spent much time bothering to wipe off but the cargo bed was large enough to accommodate our satchels with room left over so the Porrinyard s and I could stretch out in the passenger seats and enjoy a few minutes of relative privacy while Hammersmith was segregated at the controls Ocean pioneered wasted no time so it’s true what they say about Kroy did he really meet you naked buck I said he had the bad taste to look intrigued does it look good on him at least I’m afraid not from his reputation I was hoping for an exotic noble savage rippling with muscles and covered with scars of the sort the adventure stories always stranded locales filled with danger and intrigue the poor nerds had always been faithful to me except with each other an act that given their shared mind qualified as masturbation but it was impossible to stop them from erotic reverie your horniness is showing love not Mya horniness my rich fantasy life Freud’s neither exotic nor noble nor savage he’s just too traumatized by whatever happened to him to wear underwear they side together up until now I would have supposed that traumatic experiences would make you wear more underwear not less as armour in case of threats to that region the landscape speeding by beneath us grew dustier flatter than spiked year as we hopped over a range of sawtooth mountains on the other side of that divide the vagaries of planetary climate transformed what had desert into a rainforest of some kind shrouded by Tufts of fog a sprawling lake caught Vons Sun and reflected it back at us in marbles of beaded light the Porrinyard said and this Derek Schiff I recognized that tone in their shared voice and knew that it might promise trouble they had always been more driven by compassion than I was probably because their dual nature made them twice as human we can’t afford to get distracted by him not even if we can help especially not been loved not when it will take more time than we can afford they stared at me knowing that I meant it knowing also that it had always been their responsibility to keep me tethered to my better nature he’s looking for his daughter so I’m not sure I’m capable of telling a worried father that we plan to help him when we intend no such thing and I’m not sure you are either we have to love we don’t have time to worry about one family I know that the Porrinyard said but how can you say no when you don’t even know what you’ve been sent here to stop and that was the hell of it we had no ready answer to anything just about one year ago during an eventful week I spent on and around the planet Zanna the AI source had warned me of some unspecified disaster that threatened annihilation for two sentient races one of them humanity they told me that I could not prevent the disaster it would happen no matter what I did either way the loss of life would be horrific but if I made the wrong decision both species were doomed to total extinction if I made the right decision one of the two would emerge with a few scattered survivors and the chance to rise again my relationship with the AI source is best defined by their refusal to also tell me where I’d have to go and what I’d have to do fine total extinction thanks for helping my arrival on Vaughn was based on nothing more than an educated guess based on something else the AI source had said to me this on the day I first entered their service look back to the moment of your personal nightmare find out what else was happening elsewhere in the universe at that time and be assured it’s not just synchronicity there’s a pattern it was of course next to impossible to figure out synchronicity when dealing with interstellar distances but I’d crunch the dates and run the numbers and managed to figure out that the massacre on Bo CAI had taken place at the exact same time as a prior year’s Villani ballet but now that I was here I had no idea what to do next this side mission for Derek Schiff was the closest I’d come to receiving direction could it be that simple love could it really come down to one missing girl probably not but it could come down to us not being the kind of people who would fail her I snorted you mean humanity survives if we pass some kind of moral test we see now that you are special alone out of the races in the universe in your willingness to sacrifice blah blah blah I refuse to believe that it’s too mawkish to believe I know but it’s also all I have we flew into the hemisphere now experiencing night
and there was no way of seeing what kind of terrain passed by below us nothing’s shown up word neither artificial light nor reflection of stars speckled Skye 12 years ago when the ballet was just a bizarre alien ritual fascinating enough to render the hollows in new wrecks scientists took of its annual performances hot commodities on 000000

  worlds nobody cared about the morality of the

  thing a bunch of alien bugs slaughtering themselves for heart how fascinating and if you’re getting up anyway please go to the kitchen and get me some chips but then a strange human woman named adora showed up determined to perform and died with the natives she called the ballet their grand artifact a gift to the universe that would not make its full importance known until the final ballet was danced many thousands of years from now she also claimed to have spotted a critical error in the Villani performance one that only she could correct it made no sense there shouldn’t have been any way for any untrained human being to communicate her intentions to the Villani since decades of constant work by ten sentient races hadn’t managed to progress our mutual understanding of the Villani language much passed the baby talk stage but Isadora had found a way to equip herself with those surgical enhancements and demonstrated an understanding of Villani communication that dwarfed anything anybody in the multi world translation project had ever accomplished ambassador DS use natural reaction was to yank her out of the ballet and take her into protective custody for her own good 30 human beings died when the Villani stormed his embassy in response Isadora escaped and joined the ballet in progress dying as she claimed she was meant to becoming famous throughout known space as a sort of tragic heroine not long after that the dance pilgrims determined to follow in their idols footsteps began to arrive on Vlad first in groups of one or two or three and then by the tens of thousands there were now over a million of them in various locations all across flan earlier today before our arrival at the embassy hammersmith had taken us to their largest settlement a seaside city they called Nureyev there were tens of thousands of them dancing an odd formulation on the salt flats near their tents and shanties they’d all been born human but most of them had undergone surgical enhancements like Isadora’s in order to equip their bodies for vani dance so human was something they’d all left behind at various removes many still looked normal enough as long as they were not dancing their enhancements manifesting to the naked eye as unnatural grace and athleticism but I’d also seen a woman whose arms and legs looked like they followed the standard model until some urge struck her and she waved those limbs and loops and whorls as long as 30 meters I’d seen a man corkscrew his spine three full revolutions before extending his neck a distance longer than I was tall and waving his head around like a flag at the end of a stick I’d seen others who had discarded human appearance even as something to wear between performances and who were now torsos waving serpentine black whips based on the Villani model there were even a couple who had had themselves transformed into counterfeit Villani identical to the indigenes except for size they had human brains inside those big black heads but no faces no capacity for speech nothing to tether them to the species that had given them birth it had been impossible to watch any of them working their enhancements struggling to pass whatever standards the Villani required of those who wanted acceptance into the Villani ballet without feeling aw at their dedication and uneasy nausea over the question of whether they qualified as miracles or abominations like Isadora before them they all believed that they had become part of something bigger than themselves they all believed that they were changing the shape of the future they all said that human speech was too coarse to convey the necessary concepts that we as human beings didn’t have enough vocabulary to build the vocabulary I could only reserve judgment wishing that I’d ever known that kind of certainty now hammersmith said you may want to take a look over the side i steeled myself for vertigo and complied even as he banked the vehicle to provide the best possible view it was not hard to find the bright crescent of light breaking the darkness below smaller dots clustered around it like glow flies attracted to flame if I squinted I could also make out starlight reflected off what I took to be a body of water it twinkled more than a proper starscape does an optical quirk I attributed to the distorting effects of wave action the Porrinyard s who possessed a better night vision than most people got right what I just gotten completely wrong that’s the amphitheatre isn’t it that big brightly lit area must be all the observers setting up their recording equipment that’s right Hammersmith said if it’s like passed years down there the general mood among the onlookers is on the wrong side of panic nobody’s going to get any sleep tonight