“Stinger’s creation. All the creations are Stinger.”
Rick walked away and bent over the gutter. His stomach seethed, but nothing would come up. Cody said, “You all right?”
Rick spat out saliva that tasted like battery acid. “Oh yeah,” he managed. “I see freaks like that every day, man. Don’t you?” He straightened up, drew in air that reeked of burning rubber, and held out his hand toward Cody. “The gun. Give it here.”
Cody gave it to him, and Rick broke open the extra box of bullets in his pocket and reloaded the chambers. Daufin aimed the flashlight at her face and looked into the light until her eyes were dazzled, then she waved her hand through the beam. “It’s a flashlight,” Cody told her. “Works on a battery, like my motor’s headlamp.”
“I understand the principle. A portable power source, yes?”
“That’s right.”
She nodded and returned her attention to the light. She was used to the harsh illumination by now, but when she’d first seen it—in the house of Jessie, Tom, and Ray—the light had had a startlingly ugly underglow that lit the human faces in nightmare colors. This hard incandescence was very much different from the soft light in the abode of ritual. She placed her fingers close to the bulb and could feel a prickly heat sliding into her skin—a sensation the human beings probably paid little attention to. “This drove Stinger away,” she said. “Not the percussion-cap weapon.”
“What?” Cody asked.
“This power source drove Stinger away,” she repeated. “The flashlight.”
“It’s just a light, that’s all.” Rick pushed the last bullet in and snapped the cylinder shut. “It can’t hurt anybody.”
“Can’t hurt a human, maybe not. I know this power source is designed to aid human visual perception, but it blinded Stinger. Maybe gave physical pain too. I saw the reaction.”
“Only thing it was reactin’ to was bullets,” Cody told her. “Pump enough shells into its damned head, and it’ll sure as hell react!” He kept watch on the doorway, where a pool of slime shimmered on the porch’s boards.
Daufin didn’t answer. There was something in the light that hurt Stinger, something that didn’t affect humans. Maybe it was the heat, or the composition of the light itself, something in the physical and microscopic disturbance of matter along the illuminating beam. The humans might not realize it, but this light was a weapon much more powerful than the flimsy percussion-cap noisemaker.
“What did you mean, ‘Stinger’s creation’?” Rick asked the little girl. The street inflections had dropped from his accent. “Was it Stinger or wasn’t it?”
“It was … and was not,” she answered. “It was created and is controlled by Stinger, but Stinger remains underground.”
“You mean Stinger built that thing and made it look like Mrs. Stellenberg?” Cody asked.
“Yes. What you saw was a living mechanism. Stinger will construct what is needed.”
“Needed for what?” Rick clicked on the .38’s safety and eased the pistol into his waistband.
“Needed to find me,” Daufin said. “Stinger will use whatever raw materials are available for the constructions. Stinger’s digging underneath the streets, coming up into the abodes, and gathering raw materials.”
“Human bodies,” Rick said.
“Correct. When Stinger seizes the necessary raw material, sensory signals are returned through organic filaments that connect Stinger with machines on the interstellar vehicle.” She motioned through the haze toward the pyramid. “The machines were built by Stinger’s masters, and they translate the signals into physical reality.” She realized from their blank stares that they weren’t comprehending, so she made a fast mental scan through the Britannica’s pages again. “Like a baseball game on teeah-veeah,” she said. “The pictures are taken apart at their source, and put back together again at their destination. Only, in this case, Stinger has a choice of how to recombine the signals, to make creations that are stronger and faster than the originals.”
“Yeah,” Cody said, beginning to understand. “Uglier too.”
“The creations are powered by Stinger’s lifeforce,” she went on. “In essence, they are Stinger, because they think with the same brain. Like a hundred teeah-veeah sets in a hundred different rooms, all tuned to the same baseball game. Stinger remains physically underground, but the creations allow Stinger’s sight and brain to be in many places at the same time.”
“You never told me why it’s after you,” Cody prodded.
“I escaped from a prison world,” she said. “I entered the body of a guard and stole a garbage scow. That’s what they construct there. Stinger’s masters want me returned to”—here she encountered another difficulty of translation—“Rock Seven,” was the best she could do.
“Sounds like a radio station,” Rick said.
“Rock Seven is an approximate name. It does not translate. Nothing can live there outside the prison.” A grim smile crept across her mouth, and the eyes in the child’s face looked very old. “It’s a caldron of murderers, the diseased, plunderers, and pirates—and even criminals like me.”
Cody wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but he had to ask: “What crime did you do?”
“I sang. Stinger’s masters decreed that to be against the law on my world.”
“You sang? Is that all? What’s so bad about that?”
“It was the song.” Now Daufin’s eyes had a glint of steel in them. “The song stirred destruction. It was an old song, one almost forgotten. But I knew it, and I had to sing it. If I didn’t, all my tribe would die.” Her eyes narrowed, and the flesh seemed to tighten across the facial bones. For an instant Cody and Rick thought they could see another face behind Stevie Hammond’s; this one was leather tough, frightening in its intensity. It was the face of a warrior, not a child. “I’ll get home,” she vowed quietly. “I’m not a savior, and I never asked to be. But I’ll get home or I’ll die trying, and Rock Seven will never hold me. Never.” She sensed a cold pulse of power sweep slowly past her, and she turned toward the pyramid. Cody and Rick had felt it too, but to them it was just a little cool breath of air. Her heartbeat thudded faster, because she knew what it was, and what it searched for.
“It ends here,” Daufin said. “Right here. I’ve escaped from Rock Seven twice before. Twice before they sent Stingers after me and took me back. They kept me alive because they wanted to ‘study’ me.” She smiled bitterly, and there was rage in it too. “An indignity—a needle to watch your bowels move, a chemical to malform your dreams. Nothing is sacred, nothing is private. Your life is measured in reactions to pain, freezing, and burning.” Her hands curled into fists at her sides. “You are twisted until the screams run out. And all that time of ‘studying’ you know your world is being eaten away to the heart.” Her voice cracked, and for a few seconds she trembled but could not speak. Then: “When they’re done, they’ll search for new worlds to ravage. One of them might be Earth.” She glanced at Cody and Rick, then back through the murk at Stinger’s ship. “It ends here, with my death or Stinger’s.”
“What do you mean, ‘one of them might be Earth’?” Cody asked.
She drew in a long breath, and had to tell the humans what she knew to be true. “Stinger is not only a bounty hunter of escaped criminals. Stinger hunts planets for bounty as well. When Stinger returns to Rock Seven, a report will be given on this planet’s inhabitants, technological levels, and defense systems. According to that report, Earth may be added to the list of planets scheduled for invasion by”—a translation problem—”the House of Fists. Stinger’s masters. I don’t think it will be very long before they send the first fleet.”
“Christ!” Cody said. “What do we have that they want?”
“Life,” Daufin answered bluntly. “All life but their own is repugnant to the House of Fists. They can’t stand knowing that somewhere a life form flourishes without their permission. They will come here, take prisoners for study, gather whatever miner
als might strike their interest, and either introduce a disease into the ecosystem or conduct mass executions. That is their pleasure and purpose of existence.”
“Sounds like real party-down dudes.” Rick looked around, his hand on the .38’s grip. The smoke had closed in, and he could see no cars nor people anywhere. “Lockett, you’d better get her off the street. You don’t want any more surprises popping up.”
“Right. But if that damned thing can bust up through the ground, where can I take her that’s safe?”
“What is that?” Daufin pointed, and Cody and Rick saw the faint glow of the apartment building’s lights through the haze.
“The ’Gade fortress. It’s built pretty tough,” Cody said. “About the only place around here that’s worth a damn.”
“Stinger won’t like those lights,” Daufin told them. “I think that’s a safe structure.” If any Earth structure was really safe, she thought.
Rick said, “I’m heading back across the river. A lot of people over there are holed up in the church.” He looked at Daufin again; the defiant face-behind-the-face had gone away, and she looked like an ordinary little girl again. “Colonel Rhodes and the sheriff are looking for you. They were over at the clinic about twenty minutes ago, but I heard them say they were going to the Creech house. Know where that is?” he asked Cody.
“Yeah. Dodge Creech’s house. It’s not too far from here.” Without any weapons, though, he didn’t care to go cruising the streets with her. There was no telling what might slither out of one of the dark houses. “I’m gonna get her up to the fort first. Then I’ll hunt Vance down.”
“Okay. You two watch your backs.”
Rick started to stride away, but Cody called, “Hey! Hold on!” and Rick paused. “You didn’t have to come down in that hole,” Cody said. This was one of the strangest moments of his life, standing on Renegade territory after dark with the leader of the Rattlers about eight feet away and a creature from another world beside him. He felt a drifty, dreaming sensation, and if there wasn’t a puddle of slime on the Cat Lady’s porch and blood squishing in his boot from his clawed ankle, he might not believe it had ever happened. “I appreciate it.”
Thanks from a ’Gade—especially from Cody Lockett—was in its own way even more bizarre than the circumstances. Rick shrugged. “Wasn’t a big thing.” His rope-scorched hands would tell him later that it had been.
“I think it was. Hey, did you mean what you said about your sister?”
“No,” Rick said firmly. A spark of the old anger resurfaced. “You get Miranda out of your head. Understand?”
“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.” Back to business, Cody thought.
“You will. Shitkicker.” They locked stares for a few seconds, like two bulldogs that refused to give an inch of ground, and then Rick backed away into the cracked street. He turned abruptly, disdainfully, and walked into the haze.
“I won’t. Spitball,” Cody said quietly. Then he glanced at Daufin. “Bet they don’t have motorcycles where you come from, huh?”
“Undoubtedly,” she answered.
“Then you can tell your people all about ’em, ’cause that’s what you’re about to ride on.” He went to the Honda, got on, and kickstarted the engine. “Climb on behind me and hold tight.” She did, nervous about the machine’s vibration and the noise, and Cody wheeled the cycle away from the Cat Lady’s house and sped toward Travis Street.
41
Blue-eyed and Smiling
“MAYBE IT DIDN’T MEAN this place,” Vance whispered shakily. “Maybe it meant somewhere else.”
“No, I don’t think so.” Rhodes spoke in a normal voice. There was no need for whispering, because Stinger had to know they were waiting in Creech’s den. He aimed his flashlight at the hole in the floor. There was no movement, no sign of life—in whatever form—down in the darkness. “What time is it?” he asked Tom.
“Almost twenty till two,” Tom answered, checking his watch in the beam of his own flashlight. Jessie stood beside him, her hair in sweat-damp curls and a fine layer of dust on her face. Rhodes had asked them to come, to see what they were dealing with, but he’d warned them not to say anything about Daufin. David Gunniston stood on the other side of the colonel, the younger man’s face still ashen with shock but his eyes alert and his hand on the butt of the .45 he’d taken from Vance’s gun cabinet. Vance had a Winchester repeating rifle, and Rhodes held the shotgun loaded with tear-gas shells at his side.
“Bastard’s making us wait,” Rhodes said. They’d been here for almost thirty minutes, long enough to drink the thermos of cold coffee they’d gotten from Sue Mullinax at the Brandin’ Iron. “Trying to make us sweat a little.”
“It’s doing a damned good job,” Jessie said as she wiped her face with her forearm. “One thing I want to know: if Stinger’s somehow making … what did you call them?”
“Replicants.”
“If Stinger’s making replicants, what’s happening to the real people?”
“Killed, most likely. Maybe stored like lab specimens. I don’t know.” He glanced at her and managed a faint smile. “We’ll have to ask when it shows up.”
“If it shows up.” Vance had backed away from the hole, and stood pressed against the wall. His shirt stuck to him like glue-dipped wallpaper, and sweat dripped from his chin. “Listen … if it looks like Dodge, I’m gonna have to be excused. I don’t think I can take that again.”
“Just don’t start blasting with that rifle. I’m not sure it’d do much good anyway.” Rhodes kept rubbing the hand-shaped bruise on his arm.
Vance snorted. “Mister, it’d do me a hell of a lot of good!”
“Colonel?” Gunniston bent down at the rim of the hole. “Listen!”
They all heard it: a thick, wet sound, like boots slogging in a swamp. Something moving through the slime-walled tunnel, Rhodes knew. Coming closer. “Get back,” he told Gunny, and the younger man scrabbled away from the edge. Vance cocked the Winchester, and Rhodes darted a warning glance at him.
The sounds stopped. Silence fell.
Rhodes and Tom kept their lights aimed at the hole. From below, a man’s voice drifted up: “Put your lights out, folks. I’m picking up some real bad vibes.”
It was a mellow, laid-back voice. No one recognized it but Vance, who had heard it often enough. His face bleached fishbelly gray, and his body mashed harder against the wall.
“Do it,” Rhodes said. He turned off his flashlight, and so did Tom. Now the only illumination in the room was the dusty yellow glow of the remaining oil-burning lanterns. “All right. You can come up now.”
“Oh no. Not yet, pardner. Throw them down to me.”
It can’t stand electric light, Rhodes thought. No, more than that: it’s afraid of electric light. He tossed his flashlight into the hole and nodded for Gunniston and Tom to do the same. A moment later there came the snapping sounds of the flashlights being broken apart.
“That’s it. You can come up,” Rhodes said.
“I can come up anywhere and anytime I fucking please,” the voice replied. “Haven’t you figured that out by now?” There was a pause. “If you have any more of these up there, you’ll be very sorry.”
“Those are all we brought.”
“They’re little pieces of nothing anyway, aren’t they? I can break them with my breath.” The voice was jaunty, confident now that the flashlights were destroyed. A quiet thud and a scuttling noise followed. Rhodes figured the thing had just leapt up and pulled itself into the basement. Then another thud, and one hand caught the edge of the hole. Saw-blade fingernails gouged into the broken wood, and the creature’s head rose into view.
Jessie gripped Tom’s hand with a strength that popped his knuckles. Vance gave a feeble moan.
It was Mack Cade’s face, blue-eyed and smiling like a choirboy. He was hatless, his thin blond hair plastered to his skull. His tan had faded to a sickly yellow hue. He pulled himself up with one-armed ease, got his knees on the hole’s
edge, and stood up.
Vance almost passed out, and the only reason he did not was the knowledge that he would be unconscious on the floor with that god-awful thing standing ten feet away.
“Oh … Jesus,” Gunniston whispered.
“Everybody stay where you are,” Rhodes said, as calmly as he could. He swallowed; his insides had given a savage twist. “Just take it easy.”
“Yeah,” the creature with Mack Cade’s smile said. “Hang loose.”
In the lamplight, they all could see it much too clearly. Mack Cade had a left arm, but his right one was squashed and melted into something that had grown from his chest. It was a black-streaked lump of meat with a flat, almost reptilian head on a squat and muscular neck. In that head were slanted amber eyes, and two stubby, deformed legs dangled from the bony wedges of its shoulders.
Jessie knew what it was: a dog. One of Cade’s Dobermans, implanted in the thing’s chest like a bizarre Siamese twin.
The gold chains around Cade’s neck were now part of his flesh too, braided in and out of his skin. The cold blue eyes moved slowly from one figure to the next. The dog’s head, splotched with patterns of human flesh and Doberman hide, writhed as if in profound agony, and around the lump of its body the folds of Cade’s wine-red shirt crackled like waxy paper. “Wow,” the Cade mouth said, and lamplight sparked off the close-packed rows of needle teeth. “You came to party, didn’t you, Ed Vance?” The thing’s gaze speared him. “I thought you were the head honcho.”
Vance couldn’t speak. Rhodes took a deep breath and said, “He’s not. I am.”
“Yeah?” The eyes fixed on him. The dog’s mouth stretched open and showed more silver needles. On each paw were two serrated metal hooks. The creature took two strides toward Rhodes, and the colonel felt panic rise up like a scream but he locked his knees and did not retreat.
Stinger stopped about three feet away. The eyes narrowed. “You. I know you, don’t I?” The squashed Doberman’s head made a low groan, and the jaws snapped wantonly. “You’re Colonel Matt Rhodes United States Air Force. Right?”