The Rats, the Bats & the Ugly Read online

  "Tell you what, Talbot Cartup, I'll save the Special Branch some trouble. My name is Janice Younna. You just get my name on that list. Please. Then I'll happily arrange you an interview, with Lynne or God in person, if you like. However, I will tell Lynne you are here. Let her decide whether she wants to talk to you or not."

  Three minutes later, the girl in the wheelchair came back. "Follow me, please," she said coolly. He walked along behind the wheelchair, with his bodyguards trailing, to an office in the back.

  The owner of INB sat at a tubular steel and glass desk, on a tubular steel chair. The steel was softer than the woman sitting on it. Talbot Cartup knew from her dossier that Lynne Stark was nearly his own age. But she was slim, unlined, and could have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. Her hair was undressed, merely long, thick and dark. She wore steel-rimmed glasses, too.

  "Talbot Cartup. And your goons. How nice. What brings you to Independent News Broadcasting?"

  Talbot Cartup gritted his teeth. "Stark, I need some cooperation from you. And I am going to get it. You can make it easy or hard for yourself."

  She raised her eyebrows at him. "What cooperation could the head of HAR's Internal Security require of me? And should I be calling my lawyers before I talk to you any further?"

  "I don't think you should, Stark. You want to play hardball with me, I'll play hardball right back. I want this live coverage of that piece on the front off your channel. I want this praise of Major Fitzhugh scrubbed. He had nothing to do with that attack. It was planned and coordinated by Lieutenant General Cartup-Kreutzler and his staff. I'm sure you've seen the article in the GBH Times. Fitzhugh is a traitor who took advantage of a long established secret project to try and cover his own treachery."

  She sat back in her chair. "I also saw the article in the Post tearing that press release to shreds. Most entertaining that while the general was supposed to be directing the most successful campaign of the war he was in fact in detention, having been arrested as drunk, disorderly and indecent."

  "That's a blatant lie! Those charges have been squa . . . dropped!"

  "Yes. A lot of people are asking questions about that," said Stark, dryly.

  He pushed himself forward, leaning over her desk. It was a good way of intimidating people. "Look, Stark. I'm not here to bandy words with you. Are you going to stop this reporting?"

  She didn't appear to even be slightly intimidated. "Let's imagine the answer was 'no.' What are you going to do about it?"

  "Shut you down." He thumped his meaty fist on the table. "By fair means or foul, Stark. See how well you can operate with only cripples for staff. The rest of them will be getting letters from the conscription board. And we'll be going into your finances, too. Let's see how well you can manage without advertising revenue."

  "Talbot Cartup, your attitude towards the handicapped doesn't sit too well with me, or the people of Harmony and Reason. And neither does your attitude to the freedom of the press." She stood up and glanced at a corner of the room. "Thank you for appearing live on our program, Talbot Cartup. And the answer is 'No.' INB will not be intimidated out of giving the people of HAR the coverage they want. And don't come back here without a warrant."

  * * *

  "This media circus certainly hasn't been helped by your making an idiot of yourself on TV, Talbot," said General Cartup-Kreutzler. "Now you've got to keep your hands off."

  "It's the kind of dirty trick I'm not going to forget and forgive in a hurry," snapped Talbot. He did not need his idiot brother-in-law telling him he'd botched it. He was painfully aware of the fact.

  "She's put the brakes, temporarily, on direct action. I'll get my men to work on the indirect harassment. Bug their phones, slow their mail, break into their apartments and cars and see what we can find. We'll plant something if we need to. But we're still going to get at her advertisers. The new upstart money may stick to her, here and there, but I wield a lot of influence with shareholders in a lot of the larger traditional companies. INB is pretty fragile, financially. And yes, HBC is going back to covering the sector, but I had a long and fruitful discussion with their editors. The public needs some kind of hero figure to lionize. So we agreed to have them shift attention to the parachute major who led his troops into the middle of the scorpiary. "

  "Van Klomp?" inquired the general.

  Talbot nodded. "I think that was the name, yes."

  "He's the man who got Lieutenant Colonel Jeebol out of trouble, and I believe he arranged for the MPs to actually capture that son of a bitch Fitzhugh."

  "Sounds like a good man," said Talbot, approvingly. "I think the army should make a fuss of him. Promotion. Medals. And then he can go back to doing display jumps at parades. Heaven knows how he got involved in the first place."

  "Fitzhugh called the paratroopers in," said General Cartup-Kreutzler. "I have no idea why. Probably just because the man's an idiot romantic. The paratroopers are purely a ceremonial unit. A volunteer unit. No conscripts. They've never been used in combat before, as they're mostly the sons of Shareholders. Some of the first families have kids in that unit. It's glamorous, without being dangerous."

  Talbot Cartup leaned back in the very comfortable armchair, trying to keep from sneering openly. His brother-in-law was about as dense as a man could get and still be a basically functional adult.

  "For Chr— Um. That's the reason right there. Romanticism had nothing to do with it. Fitzhugh's an anarchist. Vicious. He called them in thinking they'd mostly be killed."

  Talbot rose to his feet. "I'll get my staff onto drafting the paperwork. And let Van Klomp have some conscripts, enough to make into a second unit that can actually do some fighting. If we're going to build up his reputation, we'll have to keep some paratroopers in the fighting."

  "That should do," agreed Cartup-Kreutzler. "Seeing as it looks as if we'll only get our hands on Fitzhugh when he comes out of the hospital. That means he'll be a facing general court-martial, which will be open to the public. But if we've built up another hero by then . . . The public's attention span isn't very long anyway."

  Chapter 10

  George Bernard Shaw City, HAR Institute of Technology,

  in the skeletal remains of the great slowship that brought

  humans to Harmony and Reason.

  There was a realistic possibility that if someone stood behind this human, to provide the extra pair of hands, and it had slightly longer fur, and dyed it blue, that it could pass for a giant Jampad. Darleth found that faintly reassuring.

  Or, perhaps not. She'd been away from the People too long, when one these aliens started looking comforting! She knew that by the standards of his people, she was already insane. That was all right. Madness helped her cope with the aching pain of losing her clan-sibs. Jampad were not solitary creatures and kin-bonds were life-bonds. By her talk to the Korozhet-speaking aliens, it was not so with the little sharpnosed ones, or to a great degree with the ones like this two-legged tailless hairy one. The little fliers seemed to have some measure of it.

  But they were all alien . . . and she was alone on an alien world, twenty-eight light years from home, with the only interstellar FTL craft here belonging to the murderers of her kin.

  She had been a captive, live-food-to-be for the Magh' young. She'd been given a weapon by the alien enemies of the Korozhet, and had helped the small party gain its freedom by killing one of her clan-sibs' murderers. She was at least not live food any more, but she was still unsure as to what her status actually was. None of the species that called itself, if she had the pronunciation right, "Human," spoke any Korozhet. They certainly didn't speak Jampad!

  The room she'd been taken to was palatial, compared to the bare Magh' adobe feeding cell she'd been rescued from. It had running water. Their faucet concept, though rather different from Jampad systems, was ingenious. There was a soft covering on the floor. There were soft things which she assumed were for night nests . . . standing on the floor! It was, of course, too warm, but the furry
alien had taken a long look at her and had adjusted a device on the wall that sent a delicious stream of cold air spilling into the room.

  But the entry portal was undoubtedly sealed. She was still a prisoner. A prisoner on a world where her people's most deadly foe roamed free, believed to be allies.

  True, it was a feeble prison for an arboreal species. The skylight was only fifteen feet up. Hardly a hop.

  Still . . .

  The hairy one and several assistants were plainly trying to establish her diet and initiate communication. And if she got out, she had nowhere to go. The purpose of the Jampad expedition had been to alert this species to the danger of the species that farmed the Magh'. She might as well try to do that.

  Besides, she had not eaten for nearly two weeks. She was going to have to try alien food or die, soon. None of it smelled quite right, though.

  * * *

  "The protein analysis we've done from tissue off the wound covering suggests it has a very similar biochemistry to mammals. But it won't eat what we are certain are safe compounds like glucose. We're offering it exotic things now, to see if it'll give us some behavioral cue as to diet. If we can't feed it, it'll die."

  Dr. Liepsich shook his head at Mary-Lou Evans. "I do love your habit of stating the obvious, Mary-Lou. So Shakespearian." He drank more of his ubiquitous coffee. Liepsich's one human frailty was his addiction to caffeine.

  Mary-Lou didn't rise to the bait. If you worked with Len Liepsich, you had to get used to ignoring the physicist's gratuitous insults. That was just the way he was. He preferred it, of course, if you fought back, like Sanjay did. But that wasn't her nature.

  She also knew that he'd not slept for the last two days. It showed in his overbright eyes and even-more-abrasive-than-usual manner. "I'm worried, Len."

  "That is fairly obvious. So am I, but for an entirely different reason. I've had more alien technology to examine in the last two days than I have got my greasy little paws on in the last two years. It's giving me enough headaches, without worrying whether a potentially inimical alien eats din-dins."

  She knew him well enough to know that he certainly didn't mind having several tons of alien technology to examine. "So what is wrong with it?"

  "You're too clever for a biologist," he muttered. "It's wrong. It's . . . it's not alien enough. Same booby traps. Same metallurgical analyses."

  "It was looted from a captured Magh' scorpiary."

  "You know, you have a real gift for stating the obvious," he said, with a feigned look of amazement. "And that means it shouldn't be what it is. I wish I could talk to this alien, or examine some of its technology as well, to get a handle on all of this."

  "Well, according to this report—I must say this Van Klomp is very efficient for a soldier—the alien speaks Korozhet. We could ask them to translate. Or at least what it eats."

  "That's precisely what I don't want to do. Not in light of the technology of all this equipment that Van Klomp has sent us. I'm stashing a lot of bits where the prickles and the army won't find it, hopefully."

  It was fairly plain that he wasn't planning to explain why.

  * * *

  In the bowels of the Korozhet ship, in the slave quarters.

  Yetteth huddled on the metal rack that was his assigned sleeping nest in the slave quarters. It was at least high up, even if it had none of the other features that made a good nest. Right now he hugged himself in a vain quest for comfort. If he closed his eyes he could almost imagine himself in the tall-tree swamps of the Norheth clans. But there was no escaping from the smells.

  To a lifeform with as keen a sense of smell as the Jampad had, this was close to hell. He could close his nose but not cover the scent tendrils. And right now he needed to imagine the tall-tree swamps and their green-blue water. The Overphyle had confirmed that another Jampad was out there, on this, their latest farm. He had overheard them planning to kill it.

  The Overphyle liked having one of the Jampad as a slave, feeding them, cleaning their fecal pools. It ministered to their vanity. That was one of the reasons they'd not mindscrubbed him before the implant. The Overphyle felt that it asserted their dominance over the one species that had successfully resisted. Mind you, not all the slaves were mindscrubbed before being implanted. It was a good way of questioning them. And once they were implanted, the information could not be withheld.

  The siren clanged. Food ration. A slave was always hungry, and he dared not miss the revolting block of decaying slush that they gave him. He was weak enough as it was. And he would need every last bit of strength he could muster if he was to find any way to escape, although the thing they had put in his head said that that was impossible and wrong. But he couldn't stand by when the Overphyle were planning to murder one of the People.

  He climbed down the bunk stack. On the bottom tier a human female moaned weakly.

  "What is wrong?" he asked, in the language of the masters.

  The other woman, who sat stroking the moaning one's head, answered. "She was given the nerve-lash for making errors in the production line. She was going to spawn, and now the offspring is dead. It is poisoning her."

  Yetteth knew that "spawn" was the wrong word. The humans were live-bearers, as the People were. But Overphyle had no words for the biology of lesser creatures. And slaves were forbidden to speak other languages. "Is there anything I can do?"

  The human female who had been moaning began tossing about frantically, her alien eyes wide, seeing nothing, totally unaware of the other human's efforts to calm her. Her helper shook her head, a gesture that Yetteth had learned—oddly enough—that this species used to indicate the negative.

  Yetteth left. The door to the narrow chamber had opened and the meal-slot would disgorge his food soon. If he didn't collect it, it would be trodden underfoot by others fetching theirs. There seemed to be nothing else he could do for the woman, anyway. She was dying, if he was any judge of alien physiology. The Overphyle did not medicate or assist sick slaves. They either lived or died. If the disease appeared infectious, they just killed and burned the slave, and dumped the ash.

  It was the only way out of this huge metal prison, with the bars they had put into the prisoner's minds. You couldn't even think . . . easily, how much you hated them. Creatures of a low-order intelligence before they were implanted didn't appear to be able to think around it at all. The Nerba, for example, fawned on the Overphyle.

  Chapter 11

  General Cartup-Kreutzler's horsily decorated office,

  Military Headquarters.

  Considering that Major Tana Gainor was a mere lowly major in the presence of the colony's Security Chief and a general, you would have thought she'd look at least slightly ill at ease. But despite the non-regulation purplish lipstick, she remained perfectly poised. General Cartup-Kreutzler found that disturbing.

  She was a remarkably beautiful woman, even in uniform. The general might have been more interested, except for that poise. Self-confident, self-assured women made Cartup-Kreutzler uneasy.

  "Most of these charges are very close to the laugh-out-loud level, General."

  "I was told you could make anything stick, Major Gainor."

  She looked coolly at him. "For a fee, General, things can usually be arranged." She looked at the charge list again. "And it's going to be a high fee, General." She lowered her sooty eyelashes and looked at him speculatively. "Very high, indeed."

  "Cut the sales pitch, Tana," said Talbot. "And forget using him. He's my brother-in-law, and you don't want to get on the wrong side of me."

  "I've done my homework too, Talbot," she sniffed. "The general likes dim-witted and buxom blondes, of which I am the second and third but not the first."

  Talbot ignored his brother-in-law's squawk of outrage. "Let's talk business, Tana. How much do you need for a war chest? Fitzhugh is to go down like a lead brick. You dot every 'i' and cross every 't' on this one."

  "For this, I'll need plenty," she said. "Call it half a million up front and th
e same again when he's sentenced. And I might need the services of a few of your operatives, Talbot."

  General Cartup-Kreutzler choked. But Talbot took it in his stride. "Done. The money will be in your usual account."

  "Before I start working," she said, coolly. "I won't lift a finger otherwise."

  "Let's not forget who holds the whip hand here, Tana," said Talbot Cartup, heavily. "I've got you. I've got you pinned like a butterfly."

  She smiled. "But you need me for this. And you'll need me again. The JAG's department is getting more and more sticky by the day. But I can still work the system."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "If you must know, manipulate the roster of military judges and defense attorneys. I have . . . leverage. I'll handle the prosecution myself."

  * * *

  When the heavy outer door had swung shut behind the major, General Cartup-Kreutzler exhaled in a long shudder. "Just what have you got on her, Talbot?"

  His brother-in-law laughed. "You name it. She's pretty and comes from a wealthy family. You'd think we'd struggle to pin anything on her. But right from cheating on her bar exams, by sleeping with several of her oral examiners, to dealing in drugs . . . she's been there. And stay away from that body of hers. She uses it well, but never for nothing. You know the old chestnut about the whore with the soul of a high-born lady and a heart of gold? Well, this is high-born lady who is a hooker at heart, and would sell her soul for the gold. I nicked through Thom. She was one of his prime dealers. That woman is pure poison."

  "So long as she poisons Fitzhugh," said the general vindictively.

  "Oh, she will. Literally, if need be."

  Chapter 12

  Camp Marmian, some thirty miles from GBS City:

  a small and choice piece of barb-wire fenced hell,

  otherwise known as a transit camp.

  The camp's commanding officer looked at Chip; blinked. "But, according the records, Private Connolly, you are dead."