Xenopath (29 page)

Sukara took a
breath. The girl wore her hair in a bob, with a straight-cut fringe,
and she was wearing a white Tigers' T-shirt. For a second, she knew
that the apparition before her was the ghost of her sister, come to
accompany her through a difficult time.

Then the notion
passed. The girl standing shyly before her was real, her smile
uncertain as she looked up at Sukara and rehearsed her words.

Sukara was about
to say, "I'm sorry. I'm busy at the moment. Not today—"

But the child
said in quick Thai, "I'm looking for a man called Vaughan. Dr
Rao said that he lived here."

Sukara nodded
warily. "That's right. But he's away at the moment."

The kid's face
seemed to crumple. She looked desperate. "Away? But when will he
be back? I've got to see him!"

Sukara recalled
what Jeff had told her about the case he was working on. "Who
are you?"

"My name is
Pham," the girl said.

Sukara's heart
kicked. She looked up and down the corridor, but no one was in sight.
"I'm Sukara," she said, then took the girl by the shoulder
and almost dragged her inside.

Pham's reaction
to the apartment would have been almost comical, if it hadn't been so
sad. She stared around her, goggling at the size of the lounge. For a
second, her quest to find Jeff seemed to be forgotten as she took in
the luxury in which other people lived.

Her big eyes
returned to Sukara, who smiled and sat the girl in a sunken bunker
and brought her a glass of Vitamilk.

Pham drank it
down quickly, leaving a thin white moustache across her top lip.

Sukara reached
out and touched the girl's shoulder. "Pham, Jeff told me about
you."

"Jeff is
Vaughan? What did he say?"

"About what
you saw in the amusement park, and that the killer is trying to find
you."

Pham sat, her
legs hanging over the side of the sofa, her feet not touching the
floor, and pulled a face so comical in its exaggerated despair that
Sukara had to smile.

"Where have
you been sleeping until now?" she asked.

The girl
shrugged. "In a park. The killer has been looking for me. He
beat up a friend of mine, a boy called Abdul. He nearly killed him.
Abdul told me about Vaughan—I thought he might be able to help
me."

It was strange,
but as she stared at the tiny girl on the sofa, the child's calm Thai
features overlaid any memory of Tiger's appearance that Sukara might
have retained. It was as if Pham had become Tiger, and the
transformation twisted something deep in Sukara's chest.

She reached out
and took the girl's hand. "It's okay. Don't worry. Jeff would
help you, if he were here. But he's gone to Mallory, working on the
case of the laser killer. He won't be back for a few days."

"But..."
Pham began.

"It's
okay," Sukara said, watching the child's expression as she went
on, "you don't think I'd send you back out there, do you?"

"You
mean...?" Pham looked around the lounge as if it were Aladdin's
cave. "I can stay here, with you?"

Sukara smiled.
"Would you like that?"

Pham appealed to
her with sudden, pathetic eagerness. "I'd be no trouble! I'd
cook and clean and shop for you. And I could sleep here—"
she thumped the cushion beside her with the ham of her small fist.
"I'd be very clean and quiet."

Sukara laughed.
She wanted to take the girl in her arms and hug her. She wondered if
her daughter would be as pretty as Pham.

"There's a
spare room, with a nice bed. You can have that until Jeff gets back
and sorts things out."

The girl stared
at her, open-mouthed.

Sukara said,
"Jeff told me that you left the factory where you worked, came
up here all alone." The parallels between Pham's story and
Tiger's brought a sudden pain to Sukara's chest; it was as if she
were reliving her own desperate loneliness in the days and weeks when
Tiger left her. "You were very brave."

Pham shrugged.
"I always wanted to see the upper levels," she said. "I
wanted to see the sky."

"You never
saw it before now?"

Pham shook her
head, and Sukara said, "So what do you think?"

Pham grinned.
"It goes on for ever and it's so big!"

Sukara laughed.
"And then you found yourself chased by a killer!"

Pham turned down
her bottom lip in a pantomime gesture of fear. She looked around the
lounge, then back to Sukara, and said, "What is Jeff doing on
Mallory?"

"He said he
had a lead. The Scheering people are doing something on the colony
world, and they don't want anyone finding out what it is. Jeff's gone
to find out what the big secret is."

"Does he
have any contacts on Mallory?"

Sukara looked at
the kid. That was a sophisticated question for a child of her age.
She nodded. "He has a couple of names, people he'll try to
find."

Pham nodded.

Sukara said,
"Jeff said that you were orphaned...?"

Matter-of-factly,
Pham nodded and said, "My parents were killed in a dropchute
accident three years ago. I've been working in the factory since I
was four."

Sukara stared at
the tiny parcel of skin and bone before her. "You're seven?"

Pham nodded
proudly. "Nearly eight," she said.

She looked about
five, or less, with her skinny brown legs sticking out from her baggy
shorts, and the T-shirt drooping from her shoulders as if on a
hanger.

Sukara frowned.
"What did you hope to find up here, Pham?"

The girl
shrugged. "I wanted to see the sky," she said. "Then 1
wanted to find work. I can work hard. After that I could find a small
place to live. But most of all I..." She stopped, as if
embarrassed, and shook her head avoiding Sukara's enquiring gaze.

"But most
of all, what?" Sukara prompted.

After a
hesitation, Pham said, "I wanted to see the Tigers play in their
new stadium."

Sukara nodded.
"That sounds like a good thing to do. I'll tell you what, why
don't we go to a game later in the week, okay? They play on Sunday,
don't they?"

Pham nodded and
smiled, and Sukara felt a sudden kick in her stomach that had nothing
to do with her own, biological child.

"Okay,
let's show you your new room, Pham," Sukara said, smiling as she
pictured Jeff's face when he came back to find Pham living with them.

Perhaps the
little girl would bring good luck with her, Sukara thought as she led
Pham to her room.

STARSHIP CARNAGE

Under the light
of an alien sun, with three moons sailing high overhead, Vaughan
stood on the blue grass of the mountain plain, arms raised above his
head.

The radical,
Weiss, levelled his laser pistol. "Who the hell are you?"
he said, "And what the fuck are you doing here?"

Vaughan glanced
at the carbonised remains of the two men on the blue grass, contorted
like melted plastic.

"I'm on
your side, Weiss. I'm an investigator, working for the widow of
Robert Kormier—"

"Kormier's
dead?"

"Along with
a colleague of his, Travers."

"Travers
too? Christ." Weiss was in his forties, thin faced and bald
headed. His eyes looked haunted, harried, and he hadn't shaved for a
few days. He wore a threadbare one-piece thermal suit, ripped at the
knees.

Vaughan took a
step forward, but Weiss twitched his laser level again. "Stay
there! How the hell do I know you're not working for Scheering?"

Vaughan nodded.
"That's reasonable. You don't. I'd be as wary, in your
situation." He paused, then went on, "Kormier and Travers
were murdered by an assassin on Earth a little under a week ago.
Around nine months ago, a woman called Dana Mulraney was killed—we
think by the same hired assassin. I suspect Scheering-Lassiter were
behind the murders."

Weiss was
watching him, his face pulled tight with suspicion. "I knew
about Dana. We were close. I worked with her up north. The bastards
are picking us off, one by one."

Vaughan said,
"Why did Scheering want Kormier dead?"

Weiss hesitated.
"Kormier worked for Scheering, but he didn't like what was
happening here. He contacted Eco-Col, told them what he suspected."

"The tusker
cull, right? Scheering's men were going over quota?"

Weiss sneered, a
facial tic drawing his right eye into an involuntary flutter. "Going
over quota? Listen, they're intent on eradicating every last
Grayson's Pachyderm on the planet." He stared at Vaughan, then
said, "We don't call them tuskers— that's what the farmers
call them. They were discovered by one of the original
explorers—Douglas Grayson."

Vaughan lowered
his arms, and to his relief Weiss was amenable. "Let's get this
right. It isn't a cull? Scheering's ordered the elimination of the
entire population?"

Weiss gave the
slightest nod. "You got it."

"Christ,
but if word got out..."

Weiss stared at
him, something almost like contempt in his gaze. "What do you
think we've been trying to do, for the past few months? As well as
saving the creatures, we've been trying to get Eco-Col to believe
us."

Vaughan said,
"You don't work for Eco-Col?"

"I did. So
did Jenna and a dozen others. When we found out that Scheering was
not only going over quota, but eradicating every last herd of
Grayson's... well, we went to our superiors and reported the
situation."

Vaughan shook
his head. "There should have been an outcry."

"Too right.
But it was a big claim, and Eco-Col were wary of accusing a respected
figure like Scheering of such a crime. They sent someone to
investigate."

"Don't tell
me—Travis, right?"

Weiss laughed,
bitterly. "Right. He came here, closely guarded, of course. He
monitored the cull, checked figures—all doctored by Scheering's
lackeys. Then we got to him. Kormier told Travers, proved to him that
Scheering wanted every last pachyderm dead. When Travers confronted
Scheering, told him that he was returning to Earth to make his
report... well, he effectively signed his own death warrant."

Vaughan asked
the obvious question, "So okay, but why the hell does Scheering
want to eradicate the animals?"

"Ostensibly,
because the pachyderms destroy crops every spring season, do millions
of dollars worth of damage. They got a culling quota from the
colonial authorities, permission to take out a hundred bulls every
year. They began the slaughter last year—only they didn't limit
themselves just to bulls, or to the agreed figure."

Vaughan thought
of the herd of slaughtered animals he'd seen that morning. "So
that's the ostensible reason." He paused. "What's the real
reason Scheering wants them out of the way?"

Weiss drew his
thin lips into a smile that suggested not the slightest trace of
humour. "Mallory's rich. The Scheering organisation mine ten per
cent of all the gold produced in the colonies, and twenty percent of
all the uranium."

Vaughan
shrugged. "So... how do the pachyderms stop them doing that?"

"Hear me
out. Mallory is Scheering's richest planet. It makes his fortune,
keeps all his fat shareholders in luxury. But if the truth got out,
then the colonial authorities would close the whole place down, order
an immediate evacuation." He finished with a smile, watching
Vaughan's slowly dawning comprehension.

"The
authorities would only do that if..." The idea was too much to
take in all at once.

Weiss was
nodding. "If any of the indigenous life forms were classified on
the Baumann scale as sentient."

Vaughan said,
"And the pachyderms qualify?"

"Well,
that's the odd thing. You see, not all of them do—that's why
the original explorers, and the xeno-zoological teams who followed
them, classified them as non-sentient."

"Wait a
minute—that's not possible. Some of the pachyderms are
intelligent, but some aren't?"

Weiss shrugged.
"I know. Crazy, but it's true. Look, who's to say that
intelligence evolves in the same way all over the galaxy? Here, only
certain creatures develop what we term as sentience, for whatever
reasons that might be. Fact remains, even if one in a hundred
pachyderms were registered as A1 sentient, that'd be enough to close
the planet down. And Scheering wouldn't be happy about that."

Vaughan thought
back to yesterday, when the leader of the herd he'd encountered on
the way south had seemed to lead him from the track towards the
cutting, as if it had intuited his need to avoid the militia.

Vaughan looked
up, past Weiss to the flank of the starship. "Larsen's covering
me, right?"

Something
hardened in the radical's eyes. "Jenna's dead." He gestured
to the twisted remains of Scheering's men. "They got her with
their first shot." He stared at Vaughan. "You haven't
answered my question—what are you doing here?"

"My
investigations on Earth led me to one of Scheering's executives, guy
called Denning. He was ordered to lead a team here, link up with
these two—" he nodded towards the bodies, "and bring
you in, dead or alive."

"So you
thought you'd get here before them, warn me?"

"That's
about it. I knew where you were holed up, but when I got to
Campbell's you'd headed out, followed by Scheering's men."

"We knew
they were watching us, but we figured they wouldn't make a move till
we headed for the starship."

"They were
ordered to keep you under surveillance, and only apprehend you if you
tried to reach the ship."

"You know a
hell of a lot about their operations," Weiss snapped, "for
someone not involved with Scheering,"

Slowly, so as
not to arouse suspicion, Vaughan reached into his jacket pocket and
produced his real ID card and his investigator's licence. He tossed
them across to Weiss.