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wolf-faced ghouloon trooper crouched where he sat, cradling a particle-beam rifle and gnawing on a human
arm.
"Never," he said softly, getting to his feet and strolling with his hands thrust into his overcoat
pockets. He attracted a few glances. By local standards six-foot, crop-haired blonds with his build in neat
business suits were exotic.
The problem was the asymmetry of the positions. Ken looked at the glossy of the Draka's face
again; his equipment had extrapolated it to a 3-D image and matched it against the files. This had to be one
of the old ones; subtle clues in the bone structure marked it as the first or second generation of drakensis.
Centuries old, then. Unbelievably experienced. And not limited by fear of detection. It wanted to be
detected, to call the ghoul-horde through to feast.
"I can't let that paralyze me," he murmured.
An anchoring beacon wasn't all that difficult to make. The first expedition through a planetary
surface-level molehole on Samothrace had managed to cobble one together from the equipment they'd
brought. Then they'd broadcast until a new molehole was latched on—giving the USS a whole new
Samothrace, in a solar system humans had never visited. As far as they could tell, in that continuum Earth
had been scoured free of life sometime in the twenty-first century. Spaceborne instruments could scan a
planet fairly closely, even across 4.2 light-years. The oxygen content of that Earth's atmosphere had
dropped far enough to make it plain even the algae in the oceans were gone.
So the Draka here could mess up the landscape as much as it needed to. The more the better, in
fact—it increased the possibility of a unidirectional lock-on by the drakensis scientists working from the
other side.
I'm only constrained in what I do, he thought meditatively.
"How much does this policeman have figured out?" he asked himself.
Once he'd let the locals know, there was no going back. And they'd be exposed; he'd have to push
them to the front, give the minimum of backup. The less he interacted directly with the snake, the better. At
all costs.
"Well, Lieutenant Carmaggio," he said to himself, "you wanted some answers. I hope you enjoy
them."
Kenneth Lafarge smiled. The panhandler who'd been about to approach the slumming businessman
turned on his heel and lurched away.
The snake is acting through locals. I can too.
***
There were three other people in Carmaggio's apartment: Jesus Rodriguez, Mary Chen, and the
FBI agent, Finch. It was cramped in the living room. Unlike a lot of the Department, he believed in living
where he worked, which meant paying New York rents for zero space. It was an old four-story walkup,
mostly new immigrants from Russia and a few old ladies in black who passed the time of day with him on
the stairs in Neapolitan dialect.
"We don't have enough for an arrest," Carmaggio said.
"That's an understatement," Finch said. "Not with the evidence gone into a black hole."
The FBI agent fiddled with the buttons of her jacket and looked out the apartment window; it had a
beautiful view of the fire escape on the building next door. "When will she arrive?"
Carmaggio shrugged. "Sometime in the spring, that's the earliest the paperwork will be ready. We
don't know if she plans to come here personally at all. I've got a friend in Belway, but I can't badger her for
the information. That's the impression I got, though."
He opened a folder. "But this company of Ingolfsson's has bought up or leased a lot of property.
Close on twenty million dollars' worth, including the warehouse where Marley Man got wasted."
Silence fell for a long moment. The medical examiner broke it.
"We've got to face up to something," she said. "Henry, Ms. Finch . . . we've got to realize what
we're facing."
"Which is?" Henry said. You're the one with the fancy education. You tell me.
Chen looked down at her hands, twisting the fingers together. "The genetics . . . nobody can alter
mammalian heredity like that. Nobody. I did some discreet research. And nobody will be able to do it for a
long time; fifty years, conservative estimate."
Henry grunted and looked away. "Hell," he said. "I never even watched Star Trek much."
Finch gave a violent shake of her head. "We can't afford to get ourselves caught up on labels," she
said. "I think that's what the people at the Other Place—Langley," she amplified, "Bureau slang for
Langley—I think that's what they've done. It isn't ours, so it must be the Japanese or whatever. The more
layers of committees they have to filter their data through, the more officially acceptable it'll get."
Henry nodded. That was how bureaucracies functioned; they were set up to hammer information
into a few acceptable categories, and they did just that—no matter how much violence got done to the data
in the process. He'd seen enough men die in Vietnam because the raw intelligence conflicted with the
approved version of reality.
"Okay," he said quietly, "we've got National Enquirer stuff here, only for real. Does that mean the
spooks are right? We should back off and let official channels handle it? Concealing the information we've
got is almost certainly an indictable offense."
Jesus Rodriguez spoke. "Like the lady said, I think they'll be looking for the wrong thing. And
patron—the stakes are high."
Chen looked up. "The . . . whatever it was . . . came armed. They killed and killed again. That
doesn't argue for 'we come in peace,' Henry."
Her face went extremely blank. "And I don't care to be blackmailed. That sort of thing was what
my parents took a very risky boat trip to avoid. So I'm not altogether convinced of the unarguable wisdom
of the duly constituted authorities, right now."
Finch winced slightly. "Since Andrews and Debrowski came back from the Bahamas," she said,
looking down at her hands, "there's been a fair amount of traffic that way. At a much higher level. Not
those two. Whole delegations."
You didn't send wet-work specialists to negotiate, really. Even the sort of fairly sophisticated [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]