The grunt’s dun bodysuit was dry already. The fabric looked silky-thin, but I knew those suits could withstand close proximity grenade blasts and worse. I’d known people who had tested that out.
The orphid’s head rose without a neck from square shoulders, the slit of its mouth a narrow line drawn directly between a pair of red eyes. Clustered around the lower part of its face were more bulbous ticks, smaller versions of those attached to the recharge pod.
There was no way of reading the grunt’s expression, but I knew already from that first click-response that the creature was on the point of shooting me on the spot.
“I...” I said, then tailed off. That panic in my chest again. This was it. The end. I’d come so close to home and the grunt was going to kill me.
This had been my first run, and would almost certainly be my last.
Then the grunt’s head rocked from side to side and its eyes phased to green. “!¡
familiarity
¡! Dodge?”
Instantly, the panic eased as the orphid stopped exuding its terror-inducing phreak-vapours into the night air.
I stared. I had no idea how the thing had recognised me. Back in the Ipp, we used to come across grunt patrols all the time. They were usually a bit stand-offish, but sometimes we would chat with them, keep things friendly. Maybe that was the explanation: maybe I had met this grunt before. I started to nod, then–
“Dodge. !¡
compliance-breach indignation
¡! No transit approval.”
Grunts, particularly watcher-bound orphids like this one, felt a very strict moral attachment to rules and duty. Nest-mother Sol had taught us that it was programmed into every cell in their bodies. If the rules said I shouldn’t be there, then my presence was an outrage of high order, a disjoint in the universe that had to be addressed. The grunt would feel that in its body as a physical wrong.
And it was pointing a gun at me now, some sleek chlick design with a wide muzzle, its stock plugged into a hub embedded in the alien’s wrist.
I played dumb, my strong suit. It was my only suit, right then. “What? !¡
confusion | surprise
¡!” Lying in click takes a lot of practice; it’s tough packing enough sincerity into a few taps and gasps.
I held my left arm up, palm towards the grunt, wrist exposed in the universal gesture of compliance. Standard procedure: the grunt was duty-bound to follow through. It flipped out a scanner and swept the device across my wrist.
“!¡
puzzlement
¡!”
The grunt looked at me, and then again at the scanner, then made another sweep.
“Dodge... !¡
confusion | compliance | non-confrontation
¡!”
“Dodge? I said. “!¡
innocent confusion
¡! Who’s Dodge?”
I lowered my arm. The scan had read my pids, tiny personal identifier bugs running through my bloodstream. Just like click language, the pids never lie. Unless they’ve been stolen.
“!¡
confusion | contradiction
¡! Dodge?” The grunt stared at me. I could almost see written across the poor thing’s face the inner battle between what the scanner and its own senses conveyed.
I did nothing for a breath, then another, and then the grunt stepped back. The scanner said I was licensed to be out and that I could pass. The protocols must be followed.
I walked through the checkpoint, safe. With a line of stolen pid-seed taped to my inner thigh.
T
HE
I
PP WAS
home to me then, familiar territory. As soon as I passed through the checkpoint I felt the weight lifting, peeling back from me like a discarded skin. The Indigenous Peoples’ Preserve was somewhere we could feel safe, where people lived alongside a rag-tag assortment of aliens who chose to live away from their designated zones for a variety of reasons.
There were no striplights here, but my eyes adjusted quickly. I felt like a fox prowling his territory. I felt something surging in my chest, building.
My first run outside the Ipp after curfew, and I had survived!
I turned onto Grape Street, expecting to find a ribald welcome from Hannie and the other hookers. Instead, my legs went from under me and suddenly I was winded, my head bagged in a fetid hessian sack, and I had the weight of at least one assailant pinning me to the ground.
Before I could even gather my breath I was hoisted over someone’s shoulder. “!¡
alertness | silence
¡!”
I recognised the click, and knew immediately to stay quiet, and then blackness descended.
A
SHORT TIME
later I was naked, being sprayed by a hose with some kind of acrid-smelling liquid. I was cold and sore, and my inner thighs stung from where the stolen pid-seed had been ripped from my skin. I didn’t know where I was, but it wasn’t back at the nest.
At the other end of the hose was Divine, a muscular slab of a woman with spiky bleached hair and skin far paler than I’d seen on any other human.
To Divine’s left stood nest-mother Sol, her arms folded, her eyes hard.
“Sloppy, Dodge,” she said. “!¡
disappointment | reassessment
¡! Very sloppy.”
I didn’t know what to say. I still didn’t understand how I’d gone from the buzz of a successful run to this.
“That grunt,” she went on. “You thought it was a bit distracted, a bit stupid, eh? !¡
hostility | derision
¡! Is that what you thought, eh? Eh?”
I half-nodded, then stopped.
“It was wired,” said Sol. “All the time you thought it was being slow, it was listening to the voices, watching the visual overlays, tasting the prompts from its bonded watcher. What did we tell you, Dodge, eh? !¡
chiding
¡! What did we tell you?”
Don’t trust anything... don’t get over-confident
.
Another cold blast from Divine’s hose caught me in the belly, making me gasp and ball up.
“You really wanted to lead them right back to the nest?”
There was no correct answer, so I held quiet and concentrated on not being sick from the cold and the fumes of the disinfectant in the water.
“How many buds were there?” demanded Sol. “Were you counting? Eh?”
Watch everything, count everything, look out for any change. You never know how they’re going to get you. All you can do is stay on your toes. I knew all that. It had been drummed into me often enough. I thought hard. “Twenty-nine,” I said. “!¡
embarrassment | shame
¡! On the pod. Another sixteen I could see on the orphid.”
“And how many when you’d passed...?”
I didn’t know. I hadn’t checked. I’d still been tripping on the phreak vapours the grunt had been exuding.
“Just one bud,” said Sol, more softly now. “It bursts as you go past. !¡
talking-to-child/imbecile
¡! Its spores latch onto you, stick to you, float in the air above you and follow you. One bud and you’re labelled, traced, tracked...”
I slumped. I’d let my guard slip. My first raid out on my own and I’d nearly been caught, but worse, I’d nearly betrayed the whole nest.
I nodded towards Divine. “The disinfectant?” I asked. “That’s got rid of them? Am I clean?”
Sol shook her head. “No,” she said, “we already cleaned you up with a fumigant while you were unconscious. This is just to make you remember.”
She nodded, and Divine blasted me once more, cold and hard, and I retched and heaved and vowed never to let my guard slip again.
Chapter Two
I
LEARNED MY
lesson well.
It was more than a year before I was caught a second time, and by then Sol had come to depend on me. I was sharp, I never let my attention lapse; every time I went out beyond the Ipp I learned something new, something we could use. I was the man.
But first, before we were caught again, there was a girl...
T
HE FIRST TIME
I saw her was on the way to Precept Square. You know how it is. You’re out and someone catches your eye. There’s a glance, and then maybe another glance. She was definitely a two-glances kind of girl.
There on a corner, arguing with a sweet plantain vendor, she had an intensity that stood out, even from a distance. She was slight, probably only rising to my shoulders at most. She wore a ragged, grubby one-piece and knee-high combat boots. Her hair was honey-brown, cut in wedges, uneven bangs sweeping across eyes that were a vivid blue against her walnut skin.
I’m filling in the details, I know.
I couldn’t see all that from the back of Vechko’s wagon as we approached the square along one of the side-streets open for human traffic. At the time it was just a glance – slight, animated, gesturing; and then another – skin tone, hair, ass, boots.
Vechko was delivering ales to a beer tent on Precept South-West, and pretty soon he had pulled up the horses and we were hauling kegs off the wagon and rolling them round to the canopied holding area behind the tent.
Precept Square was thronged with the pre-curfew rush, mostly grunts and slaves, but with a scattering of indigenes out from the Ipps like us. After a time, Ruth, Divine and I paused from the keg-rolling to watch the world going by.
Out in the middle of the square, the crowd thickened around a boxing ring; humans, trogs and assorted aliens cheered and hollered as a brawny man with steel knuckle spikes flayed the flesh off a species I’d never seen before. Above the ring, a family flock of flitterjacks hung on the breeze to watch, and a scattering of sentinels hovered to record the action.
The human fighter’s opponent seemed oblivious to its shredded body, the tattered flesh hanging in ribbons from its silver bones. It kept lashing out with skinny limbs, catching the man repeatedly in the gut and chin. There was blood in various shades of red everywhere.
“You should fight,” Ruth told Divine, running a hand over the blonde woman’s heavily-muscled upper arm.
“I do,” said Divine, in a voice so low I could barely hear.
“I mean prize-fighting,” said Ruth. “!¡
getting-aroused | flirting
¡! You’d be good.”
I’d seen Divine fighting, more than once. On one phreak run, when we’d been couriering bootleg pharmaceuticals for some gang-boss out of a neighbouring Ipp Sol owed favours to, we’d been ambushed by three orphid grunts. Divine had taken them all out before the rest of us even had time to react: a kick rupturing one orphid’s midriff, and a head-mash disposing of the other two. It had been over in seconds.
But Ruth meant something else: something sexy and glamorous, and potentially one of the more lucrative things someone from the Ipps could get into.
“You want me to spoil my looks? !¡
flattered | interested
¡!”
We stood and they flirted and my mind wandered back to the girl on the street corner with the honeyed hair who seemed to speak as much in gesture as in words and didn’t seem to realise that she was on a thoroughfare forbidden to humans.
The clocktower chimed the fifth, and I clicked, “!¡
alert
¡!”
I dipped my head low and slipped away into the crowd. Out there, in the thick of it, I had never felt more lost, more anonymous. All around me there were grunts and commensals of many varieties, mostly orphids and craniates, but there were many others too. Some were obvious artificials, hard to tell if they were vehicle or machine or sentient mechanical; others were aliens with mechanical inserts, or mechanicals with biological inserts.
Almost immediately, I staggered up against a being shrouded in a flowing grey cloak. The feel of its body as we collided was like jelly with hard rods embedded in it; its eyes were grids of metal and crystal, set in rows around the crown of its fungus-scabbed head. It shrieked and shrilled at my clumsiness, the clicks I could decipher packed with violent outrage at my gall, before the thing was distracted, staggering into a pair of blob-headed craniates. Its balance was clearly upset, either by planet-side gravity or some phreak brew from one of the stalls, or a combination of the two.
I checked myself over, head swirling from the panicked phreaks exuded by the clumsy alien. There was no sign of any tracer deposited on me by the being, or by any of the others I had brushed against in the crowd. These days we had scanners to warn us of such things, devices I’d seen the grunts using and had subsequently found a supplier for. This development was one of the many reasons Sol had come to trust me after my inauspicious start.
Just then I saw Sol ahead of me, cutting past the crowd around the boxing ring, a white scarf wrapped like a turban around her bald head. She walked in a straight line, and I took an arc, and we converged at the transit station at the northern end of the square.
There were grunts here, armed with some kind of automatic gun plugged into their arms. Beyond them, in the foyer of the station, I could see chlicks and watchers and several species I didn’t even have names for. The diversity, and the bustle and the barrage of talk and clicks and cries, of phreaks and other scents... it was all quite staggering, even now that I was more accustomed to the alien zones of the city.
There were no indigenes here. Transit was out of bounds for the likes of us.
Just then, a shrouded figure emerged from the station and I knew this was the sign. The figure was a chlick. From what I could see of its scarred, wrinkled face, it must be ancient, and chlicks could live for a very long time indeed. Its entourage of four, trailing a short distance behind, was human, though, and as they emerged from the station a visible wave of outrage passed through the alien crowd, accompanied by a jangling chorus of clicked “!¡
compliance-breach indignation
¡!” “!¡
outrage
¡!” “!¡
confrontation | address-wrongdoing
¡!” “!¡
protocol-abuse anger
¡!”
I didn’t have time to wonder how the chlick had brought the four humans this far. That wasn’t any of my business. My concern was getting them out of here alive.
Divine was the first to move. I hadn’t even noticed that she and Ruth had joined us. She slipped between two grunts, who were too busy exchanging indignant clicks to get to her in time. Almost immediately, she reached the first human and hugged him.