Sly Mongoose (6 page)

Timas had the feeling that a lot of yelling at him lay ahead.

Y
ou told her
what?
” No one shouted at Timas quite like his dad. Right now Ollin had hit a new level of fury.

Timas kept his shoulders back and bit his lip to concentrate. From behind him Katerina spoke up. “He couldn’t have hid what he knew from me, we can spot the physiological responses to lies.”

That didn’t help as much as Katerina might have thought. Timas wondered if the statement came from her and not the people behind her. He winced as Ollin completely ignored her and pointed at him. “You disappoint me.”

One of the pipiltin, Camaxtli, raised his hand to shake Ollin’s shoulder. “Ollin, go easy, the girl is right. You can’t take their envoys at face value. She looks like a girl, but you know she embodies their whole city, and is more than she appears. Your son was mismatched.”

Ollin shrugged the hand off. “That’s true. I should know better.” The five pipiltin nodded, except Tenoch. His face remained sour and he hovered near the back of the group.

Timas frowned. His dad gave that up too easily. His anger blew right over before the pipiltin, when normally Ollin held on to a point like a snapwrench. It wasn’t an act, was it? Had his dad purposefully used him to reveal to the Aeolians that the strange man was alive and here?

The pipiltin gathered around Ollin, Timas, and Katerina.

Ollin stepped back into the elders, as if his voice was one of theirs. “My son brings an interesting offer from the Aeolians, however. A refit of the cuatetl, and all we have to do is give up this man.”

Ollin
had
been playing a game, Timas realized. He’d used his own son to leak the information.

“But who is the man?” Camaxtli asked. The oldest at eighty years he took the lead naturally, but with careful, slow words. “The Aeolians are looking for him, but that doesn’t mean we should give him up so easily. He does have rights.”

Katerina stepped into the center of everyone’s focus. “He does have rights. We intend to ensure he gets a fair trial for the crimes he committed,
but we are very serious about his return to one of the Aeolian cities. He has information about a threat to Chilo’s cities. We need it verified.”

“We knuckle under to the Aeolians again,” Necalli grunted from the back. “Is there anything new here?”

The conversation began, the old men debating whether to give in. Necalli’s anger at being forced around was joined by Tenoch and a tentative-sounding Eztli. Only Ohtli seemed to imitate Camaxtli’s calm. But Timas felt that he watched a predetermined debate, whether with angry or calm words. The cuatetl needed to be fixed. They had a chance to fix it.

Yet they also had Yatapek pride and a desire to keep independent of demands handed to them by outsiders. Timas saw Camaxtli acknowledge that, defusing some of Necalli’s sharp words.

Ollin cleared his throat. “The man in question expects the Aeolians to come talk to him in person. He’s hoping to explain what happened.”

“You could have said from the start.” Camaxtli shook his head. “Ollin, quit playing games.”

“Games?” Ollin spread his arms. Timas marveled at his dad’s easy acting. “Games? I was quarantined with the man. He said they would come for him.”

“You let us babble on long enough,” Camaxtli said.

Ollin smiled. “I am no pipiltin, it’s not my place to decide these things.”

Another game, Timas thought. Ollin had used the long argument to see what the various pipiltin thought before he revealed all his information. Always gears within gears, his dad, like a machine. Timas thought Ollin would probably do better as an Aeolian than here on Yatapek.

“The man’s in a secure location.” Camaxtli stared at Ollin. “You’ll be revealing that to
her
and the Aeolians watching through her?”

“Blindfold her,” Ollin said.

Katerina looked around the group. “If you’re going to do that, then I’d like you to bring Ollin and his son along.”

“I’ve been, there’s no need for me to return.” Ollin moved toward the back of the group, as if using them for a shield.

“The vote is up.” Katerina ran a hand through her hair, adjusted her collar, and then focused on them all again. “The majority of us model
that you will be less likely to cause trouble with a valued family member with you.”

“We can be trusted without a semi-hostage.” Camaxtli’s usually calm manner disintegrated for a moment as he snapped the words out. Even he felt annoyed at being handed orders by the outsiders.

“Just the same.” Katerina folded her arms. Her silver eye glinted in the dome-filtered early sunlight. “We’ll have one.”

Several of the elders walked out of the courtyard, grumbling in disgust.

But in the end, what else could they do? Camaxtli led the way. Katerina followed after Timas wrapped a long piece of cloth carefully around her head and over her eyes, and then took her hand. It felt smooth and dry, and she squeezed it as he pulled her along with him out through the courtyard, whispering to her to let her know of obstacles coming up.

The group drifted its way away from the atrium and down the roads into the heart of the farm areas.

They had the man imprisoned in a belowground grain silo. Several Jaguar scouts, ex-xocoyotzin who served as the city’s defenders and police, stood outside guarding the doors. They raised long steel macuahuitl with razored spikes, more formal than functional, as they had guns strapped to holsters on their waists. They lowered their weapons when they realized who approached.

“Go on through.”

Down the dimly lit steps and into the central storage room more guards stepped forward, then lowered their macuahuitl and nodded them through.

The man they all sought lay on a cot. Long dreadlocks lay on the pillow. His dark brown face matched the dark blankets.

Timas let go of Katerina’s hand and unwrapped the long piece of cloth that blindfolded her. “Here we are.”

Katerina cocked her head. “Juan Smith?”

The man stirred under blankets. “Yes?” Juan opened his gray eyes and looked at them all. Scarred cheeks crinkled as he grimaced.

He pulled the blanket down with his left hand, revealing his whole other arm to be a recently amputated stump.

“Shit.” Katerina put a hand over her mouth as the word popped out. “Couldn’t his arm be saved?”

“We don’t have the same medical facilities you take for granted.” Camaxtli helped the man sit up. Timas realized that he was missing a leg as well.

The man saw his stare. “What do you expect? I punched through the dome and lived to tell about it. No one had time to move me to a better hospital. I’ve survived worse.”

“Yes, sorry.” Timas looked politely downward. This man before him seemed to be some sort of a proud warrior, like Timas’s own great forefathers from New Anegada.

Juan looked around the room and smiled at Katerina. “A big welcome to the Aeolian crowd. I take it you dragged your sorry ass all the way down here just for me.”

Katerina frowned at the mild insult. “You are wanted for the murders aboard the
Sheikh Professional
, and endangering cities in the form of a deorbiting projectile. We also want further information about the . . . threat you discussed while deorbiting.”

The pipiltin murmured.

Juan and Katerina faced off against each other in the crowded and warming room. Then the man chuckled. “Fair enough, I should elaborate. I did send only the compressed, quick version.”

“Thank you. Meanwhile, since we’ve identified you, the airship I came in on is being readied for the return trip to Eupatoria. There we’ll bring you to trial. Understand that while you don’t have any formal legal counsel, this isn’t a trial right now, and you are under no obligation to say anything at all.”

“I understand.”

“So, is your name Juan Smith, of Rydr’s World?” Katerina leaned forward, presumably to look at his eyes the same way she had at Timas’s when he slipped up to reveal what he knew about the man.

“No.”

Katerina looked flustered. “No?”

“As I said, no.” The man used his one good arm to move himself
around so that his one leg touched the ground. He sat ramrod straight, like an emperor receiving his subjects.

“If that isn’t your name, what is?”

“Pepper.” The man reached out and shook her hand.

Katerina let her arm swing slowly back to her side when he finished. “Pepper. We’re running queries on that.”

“You do that. Look under
mongoose-men
. New Anegada’s mongoose-men. I’m a Ragamuffin.” Pepper rested his hand on his remaining right thigh with a grimace.

Timas looked over at Ollin. If Pepper was one of the planet New Anegada’s elite military men, the mongoose-men, then something strange was going on. New Anegada allied itself with all the cities in Chilo’s atmosphere; the planet’s peoples had settled Chilo initially. All the cities here depended on the New Anegadans to protect the planet.

Trying this man could complicate a much-needed relationship. Timas saw one of Ollin’s hands curl into a frustrated fist.

“This is an extraordinary claim for us to hear,” Katerina said. “Pepper is someone who goes back a long way.”

Pepper shrugged. “I have no reason to lie.”

“We’re working on voiceprints.”

“I can change those, but you should get some decent matches from all I’ve said so far,” Pepper said. “And I’m going to explain some more things, because I need to catch you all up pretty quickly before some real shit hits the fan.”

Shit hitting the fan
. Timas would have to remember that phrase, if nothing else, when he left the room.

Pepper looked around at all of them. “I was coming back from a mission, on the
Sheikh Professional
. They’d picked me up, and two days in, that’s when the zombies attacked.”

Ollin cleared his throat. “That’s the second time you’ve said that. We’ve kept the Aeolians at a distance from you, you seem agitated about them.”

“What?” Pepper looked at Katerina. “Aeolians are fine, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Zombies,” Ollin repeated. Everyone in the room glanced around with an uncomfortable pause. Hundreds of thousands of Aeolians would be seeing this right now. “We call the Aeolian representatives that visit us ‘zombies,’ you know, because they take orders and move slowly around and take forever to answer questions because they have to vote on it.”

Pepper shook his head. “Hell no, son, that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is groaning, stumbling, dumb-as-fuck, old-school zombies.”

T
he shell of the tiny, black vacuumball Pepper sat in hissed and cracked. Only an eggshell’s width lay between him and whatever lay outside. The ball had flown a million miles in three days, with Pepper curled up and festering inside by himself. In a device made only for emergency escapes from destroyed ships.

A welcome sound, the cracking. But it came two days too soon. Pepper tensed as the shell split open with a wet, sticky rip.

“Welcome aboard the
Sheikh
.” The woman on the other side had her hair pulled back in cornrows and tied off in tight braids. After skulking about the other side of the DMZ, Pepper had to admit he enjoyed hearing a New Anegadan accent again. He relaxed as he heard more New Anegadan voices behind her.

The people aboard the
Sheikh
came from a piece of the Caribbean that had picked itself up from the mother planet and held together for centuries now. They had made the exodus light-years away to New Anegada, where the members of the Black Starliner Corporation once hoped to silently create a world of their own. But as the BSC faded away into the loose-knit community of Carribean descendants known as Ragamuffins, they found themselves growing into larger players in the greater game.

“We snagged you up to save the original pickup fuel,” the woman said. “The Ragamuffin Dread Council go pay us beaucoup digits for altering course and snagging you instead of them sending a whole ship out just for you.”

The ad hoc representative democracy of the Dread Council guided Ragamuffin security, and they’d sent a safe ship for Pepper. Since humanity rose up against the alien races that once dominated the Forty-Eight worlds they’d gotten more involved in things like this, with Pepper eagerly offering himself up as one of their nastiest tools.

He looked at the woman. “Glad you picked me up. I once got trapped in one of those balls for longer than I’d care to talk about.”

Pepper pushed past the broken pieces of the vacuumball and took her offered hand. His long trench coat brushed against the edges.

“I heard about that story,” she said. “I’d have gone insane.”

He had. For part of that. Before landing on New Anegada and rededicating himself to action: any action, as long as there was movement and things didn’t get in his way. It was why he volunteered over and over again to pass through the DMZ and get into the League worlds. If he ever slowed down, he would face himself again like he had in that pod, once. Even this last taste of being trapped in one again had pushed him too close to the edge. He had too much blood, too many sins, and too long a history to sit down and consider it. Men like him needed to stay one step ahead of themselves.

Hopefully there would be things to do soon. Upstream among the League worlds ships disappeared, gathering somewhere Pepper couldn’t find, no matter how many heads he cracked. And many of his most reliable informants had also gone to ground.

The last time the League got that organized they’d tried to invade New Anegada and unify the free human race.

Fifty years ago. Craters still dotted New Anegada from that struggle. A lot of leading League officials lay dead by Pepper’s hands as well. A reminder to them that the cost of invading New Anegada wasn’t worth it.

Pepper had a gut feeling that the League needed reminding again as he stepped into the confines of a cargo hold. Typically a tight area, after three days in a vacuumball, it felt like the inside of a cathedral. This cargo hold was a traditional pie-shaped segment of the ship’s cylinder. Number fifteen, according to the large numbers painted on the walls.