Scifi Motherlode Page 12

  And Manny chews.

  When I lower the finger from my lips, it has stopped bleeding. The tiny wound is no longer red at all, in fact. It is pink and smooth.

  And as I watch...

  "Lupe?" His voice is a whisper, but no weaker than before.

  As I watch, the smooth, pink flesh rises like bread dough. Tiny grooves etch the surface, perfectly matching the surrounding fingerprint.

  The finger heals. Right before my eyes, it heals.

  Within seconds, I can’t tell where the edges of the wound once were.

  Something has happened to me. I am only beginning to understand.

  One thing’s for certain: the Cambio will change you.

  "Lupe?" Manny’s eyes flutter open. His smile dimly flickers back into view. "What did you...give me?"

  I push the same finger toward his lips. Warmth and light surge through my body, filling my belly, my chest, my throat.

  My heart.

  Tears of joy pour down my face like spring rain. They taste like wine. "Eat up, my love," I tell him. "There’s more where that came from."

  Zinzizinzizinzic

  Singing to myself, I dominate the shadow of Earth’s president, subdue it to my will with hardly any effort. The man himself would be embarrassed if he knew how weak his own shadow was.

  All this happens while the human leader shakes the tentacle of the being who casts me, ambassador at large of the Un people. All this happens while the ambassador and the president agree to an era of peace and friendship and cooperation.

  They shake and smile while we are at work. They pledge peace while a war is waged at their feet.

  In the shadows. Of the shadows.

  And we are winning.

  All eyes are on the leaders as I stretch toward the vice president’s shadow. This one puts up more of a fight, pressing me back at first but holding me not for long. I redouble my effort and he falls before me, unresisting as I ooze through him and assert my control.

  He has the honor of being one of the first. Soon, billions more will be converted, switching from the black of human shadows to the red of the Un. Red shadows cast on floors and walls and pavement, red shadows cast by sun and lamp and moonlight, red shadows thinking red thoughts.

  All around me, the shadows of the other Un flow over the shadows of the humans among them, engulfing them with heat and red intensity. The humans’ shadows have been kings here long enough and have little to show for it; we can do better.

  We will drive the humans into space like the Un, the better to spread us to other worlds that we may conquer...and like the Un, they will never imagine that it was our idea. Like the Un, they will achieve and flourish, never dreaming that their lives are but a backdrop for our own.

  Never guessing that we are the ones who cast them.

  Cameras flash in the audience, shooting bursts of light through the crimson jelly bodies of the Un. Each flare intensifies us, giving us new and terrible strength to win our war. Giving us ecstasy. I whisper my name, our name, which is also a battlecry...which is also the only word in our language. The whisper, undetectable to even the most sensitive audio equipment, is like a roar to a shadow.

  Zinzizinzizinzic. Most feared, strongest, fiercest, reddest. Warrior, conqueror, devourer. All the shadows of a million worlds--black and green and blue and silver, all red now--know this word, this story, this song.

  Zinzizinzizinzic.

  By the time the crowd disperses, all of their shadows are red. The humans know nothing of it as they flow out into their homes and public places, carrying the stain that spreads through the shadows of every stranger and loved one they meet.

  And so on. Battle after battle in perfect silence. People eat and work and play and sleep, unaware of the carnage behind them, beneath them, between them.

  We exult as the shadows of the high and the low alike fall before us. We silently thank our shadow gods in the shadows of cities we rename for shadow heroes...the only heroes that matter.

  Those that resist our silent march are tortured before they are consumed. Those that disrupt us in the slightest are warped beyond all recognition and mounted on sidewalks and parking lots and alley walls to serve as examples to all the rest.

  We are without mercy. Zinzizinzizinzic.

  Children and animals and madmen notice the invasion, but no one of importance pays attention to their warnings. The fact is, it would make no difference if they did; the war is already won.

  Or so we think.

  I follow the Un ambassador on his goodwill tour around the world, celebrating a victory of war as he and the humans celebrate their triumph of peace. At a state dinner, he raises a goblet to toast his human allies...while on the table beneath him, I raise a shadow chalice to death and oppression. The shadow of a human potentate writhes beneath me, silently screaming as my red bleeds into his black.

  Then, for the first time since arriving on Earth, I am surprised.

  Something cold washes over me, something shockingly, bitterly cold. It slides over me and permeates me, sifting into my insubstantial substance with ease though I put up what I think is a fight.

  I pull back from the potentate’s shadow, compressing my form to intensify my resistance...but the new thing filters through me as if I had opened myself wide. I see a burst of white like lightning or the flash of a camera, but it is neither.

  And instead of giving me strength, it takes what I have. Takes my strength and my will and my hunger.

  Takes my red.

  Replaces it with nothing a human eye or an Un could ever see. Replaces it with something even we the shadows had missed.

  As I transform and surrender, I am infused with understanding. Even as the Zinzizinzizinzic fall around me, I know what these new things are. These new masters of ours.

  Only they are nothing new after all. They have been with us always, though we never knew it.

  They are our shadows...the shadows of the shadows. Secret shadows cast by invisible suns, by the shadows of suns. Anti-light streaming in from outside our universe, from beyond the holographic bound.

  And all our manipulations of the life to which we are attached, all our secret wars and tortures and conquests, have ever only been the shadows of acts committed by our shadows...our sources. Our thoughts and dreams and desires are the shadows of the workings of other minds.

  Minds that change us now for reasons we cannot fathom, sweeping red into white into nothing, undoing our victory. Swirling around the planet now, peeling away every trace of a shadow that Un or human can ever see.

  We are still here--secret, helpless, but here. And we know before any living thing that something big is about to happen, something terrible.

  And we cry out our silent warning that no one can hear but us.

  Zinzizinzizinzic...

  Zinzizinzi...

  Zinzi.

  *****

  One Awake In All The World

  Pass Candle could not see the creatures, except as winking blips of light on the flash-brain screen mounted in the flesh of his left arm. He didn’t need to look at the screen, however, to know that the creatures were all around him and his partner, Nona Stiletto.

  He could feel their presence. Could feel their eyes upon him, staring from the shadows of the darkened and fog-shrouded city.

  More than that, he swore he could feel their malevolence. Their savagery.

  He stiffened his right arm as he swept it from side to side, covering an arc of the gray fog with the snout of the warflower dark energy gun peeping from under the skin behind his wrist. He followed the arc with the single beam from his headlight—the round, white disk mounted like a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

  Candle narrowed his dark brown eyes and stared into the headlight’s beam, but he still saw nothing moving toward him in the fog. Maybe, his feelings were the product of his imagination, and the creatures in the shadows would turn out to be benevolent toward cybernetically enhanced humans like himself and Nona.


  But somehow, he doubted it.

  Stiletto said nothing to suggest she felt the same way, but the posture of her slender frame as she walked alongside him was as stiff and guarded as his. Her head ticked from side to side, flicking her golden ponytail to and fro in the darkness.

  The retractable sleeves of her slick black form-fitting flowsuit were all the way up, like Candle’s, leaving her weapon-and-instrument-studded arms free for action. She aimed her warflower directly ahead, and Candle knew from experience that she was ready to whip it around in a heartbeat and use it.

  "The humanoid’s twenty meters ahead," said Candle, watching the readings on his flash-brain screen. "Distress signal’s strong and life signs’re steady. She’s surrounded by non-humanoid life-forms, like we are."

  Just then, Candle smelled an odor like strong vinegar and heard a sound like claws clacking on the pavement to his left. He and Stiletto swung in that direction simultaneously, lighting it up with the beams of their headlights. Candle saw nothing in the newly illuminated area but a building’s stone wall and a scattering of what looked like splintered bones at its base.

  "Playing hard to get." Candle nervously combed the fingers of his right hand through his wavy salt-and-pepper hair.

  "Let’s hope they stay that way," said Stiletto.

  Candle started forward again, following the female humanoid’s life signs. "Seventeen meters to go," he said. "Easy-peasy."

  The sound of breaking glass echoed in the distance. Claws or something like them clacked not far away.

  "Guess again," said Stiletto, sweeping her headlight toward the clacking, then forward again.

  Candle thought Stiletto had a point. In the darkness and fog, it felt like they’d walked several kilometers rather than the half kilometer they’d actually traveled from their spacecraft, the Sun Ra, which was parked at the edge of the city.

  Though Candle wasn’t the jumpy type, he was having his doubts about what a good idea it had been to walk away from the Sun Ra at all...or land on this planet in the first place. Trouble was, he just hated ignoring a distress signal like the one that’d brought him here; some of his best jobs had come via distress signal.

  He and Stiletto were first-class spacefaring exterminators, specializing in extra-nasty pests known as Squatters. Squatters ran people like puppets, remote-controlling them from somewhere beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Squatters reached out with their ultra-powerful minds and bonded people to them with overwhelming love and pleasure. Then, the Squatters sent these zombies, known as Wipeouts, on horrifically barbaric killing sprees.

  Rumor had it the Squatters and Wipeouts were building up to something big, and people were scared. Contractors like Candle could make a living hunting the bastards full-time. Wipeout hunting was pretty damned rewarding for a top pro like Candle, in fact...especially when he had a former Wipeout like Nona Stiletto for a partner.

  Sure, Nona was still messed up from years of being possessed by the aliens. She had committed more violent crimes than she could remember, and she was marked forever by scars on the inside and outside.

  But she knew everything about Wipeouts, and the Squatters had left her mean and strong. Just the fact that she had survived being separated from a Squatter showed what kind of a hardass she was. Candle had never heard of another Wipeout walking away from that ordeal alive.

  And he couldn’t think of anyone he’d rather have by his side today.

  "Fourteen meters," he said, squinting into the ten-meter-deep cone of visibility that was the best his headlight could cut through the fog.

  Candle and Stiletto pressed to within twelve meters of their target, then eleven. Finally, their headlights picked out a form in the gray soup.

  At last, they got a look at the being they’d been seeking through the alien city...a being who, as far as they could tell, was the only remaining native humanoid on the planet.

  In size and build, she resembled a human child, five or six years old...a little girl with glittering purple skin, multi-faceted red insect eyes, and not a hair on her head.

  *****

  Candle and Stiletto lowered their arms so the beams of their headlights weren’t flashing right in the little girl’s face.

  Candle told the girl his name, his flash-brain converting his speech into audio she could understand. "This is Nona," he added, hiking a thumb at Stiletto. "What’s your name?"

  "Luma," said the little girl. She wore a simple white shift and sandals. As she spoke, she hugged a ragged doll tightly against her chest.

  On one wrist, Luma wore a gold bracelet set with a blinking amber crystal. A glance at the flash-brain screen confirmed Stiletto’s suspicion that the bracelet was the source of the distress signal transmissions.

  "Cool name," said Candle. "Nice to meet you, Luma."

  Luma cocked her head to one side and narrowed her faceted eyes. "You look funny," she said. "What’s wrong with you?"

  Candle smirked at Stiletto. "There’s nothing wrong with us," he said. "We’re just not from around here."

  "Okay," said Luma.

  "We want to help you," said Candle. "Can you tell us why you’re all alone here?"

  Luma dropped her chin against the head of her doll and twisted slowly from side to side. As Stiletto watched, the little girl’s skin changed color, shifting from dark purple to deep blue...signaling a mood change?

  "I’m lost," Luma said softly. "I can’t find my family. I woke up and went outside, and now I can’t find them."

  "Do you know where there’re more people like you?" said Candle. "People who look like you?"

  "You mean Sagrans?" said Luma.

  "Is that what the people’re called?" said Candle.

  Luma nodded. "Sagrans."

  "You know where they are?" said Stiletto.

  Luma shook her head. "There’s no one around except the Skilla." As she said it, her voice dropped to a near whisper, and her skin shifted to deep purple again.

  "The Skilla aren’t people like you, are they?" said Candle.

  "No," said Luma, shivering. "They’re scary. Everyone says the Skilla are holy, but I think they’re scary, too. I think they’re going to get me."

  Candle scooped the little girl up into his arms.

  "Don’t worry, Luma," he said, patting her back. "You’re not alone anymore. We’ll keep you safe."

  "You will?"

  "Yeah. That’s why we came here. To help you."

  "Will you find my family, too?" Luma’s skin changed from purple back to deep blue.

  "We’ll do our best." Candle smiled and bounced her affectionately in his arms. "I promise."

  Stiletto’s heart beat faster, but not because of any impending danger. It was the sight of Candle with Luma, the way he held her and reassured her.

  Stiletto wished he’d do that for her, too. She wished he’d love her the way that she loved him.

  She hadn’t always felt this way. She’d been working with Candle since he’d freed her from the Squatter three years ago, and she’d only been sure she wanted him within the last six months.

  She really didn’t know if he felt the same way, though, and frankly, she hadn’t been going out of her way to find out. The hardass routine that was so important to her job and just getting through the day was hard to push aside...plus which, her head was still a wreck from her time as a Wipeout. The Squatter was gone, but it had left behind a boatload of poison. Sometimes, Stiletto still felt echoes of the bastard swimming around in there, and she wondered if he was regenerating somehow.

  That was what worried her the most and kept her from reaching out to Candle. What if she was still a danger to him, a sleeper agent with secret orders implanted at a deep level her deprogramming had missed?

  Unfortunately, the more she tried to lock her feelings away, the stronger they grew.

  And seeing Candle comforting Luma made them stronger still.

  *****

  Candle put Luma down but held on to her tiny, green hand as he and Stiletto talke
d.

  "Any ideas?" he said in a half-whisper.

  Stiletto stared at the blinking lights on the flash-brain screen. "I’ve detected low-level mechanical vibrations."

  "Where abouts?" said Candle.

  "Center of the city. Four kilometers that way." Stiletto aimed her headlight into the murk.

  "Where there’s working machinery, there might be people," said Candle. "Shielded from sensors, maybe."

  "There’re a lot of non-humanoids between here and there."

  Candle nodded. "And we can’t take the Sun Ra in," he said, "because there’s nowhere to land. Not even a flat rooftop." He sighed. "We’ll have to keep going on foot."

  Candle heard a whooping cry like hysterical laughter in the distance. Luma’s hand fluttered, and he tightened his grip on it.

  "Up for a hike?" he said to Stiletto.

  She nodded. "I’m ready."

  "How about you?" Candle gave Luma’s hand a squeeze.

  "Ready," said Luma.

  "Then let’s get going," said Candle.

  *****

  Though Stiletto wasn’t easily freaked, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up way too often as she, Candle, and Luma trudged through the city.

  She was being stalked. By something she couldn’t see.

  But she could hear it. The Skilla raised a constant clamor through the city, their distant whoops and yowls accompanied by the sounds of smashing and thumping and shattering. Close by, their claws clacked along the pavement, moving when Stiletto, Candle, and Luma moved...stopping when they stopped. Always, when the creatures were near, Stiletto smelled their heavy, vinegar-like scent in the humid air.

  And the number of them that were close-by was growing. Flash-brain scans of the surrounding area revealed that more Skilla were clustering near Stiletto, Candle, and Luma with each passing moment.

  "We’re drawing a crowd," Stiletto said to Candle, keeping her voice to a whisper for Luma’s sake. "Maybe a warning shot’ll drive them off."