They stared when Marquoz plodded down a hallway. They always stared at a creature that looked mostly like a meter-high Tyrannosaurus rex wearing a vest and smoking a large cigar. He was used to it and ignored them.
The Com had expanded enormously in the past few centuries; it had also become far less totalitarian since the huge criminal-political drug syndicate had been broken centuries earlier. The old syndicate had carefully limited expansion so that frontier worlds were developed only at a pace which it could easily control and eventually take over. The discovery of a cure for their main hold on the leadership of those worlds—and the even greater shock at just how many worlds had been run by the power-mad hidden monarchs from their private little worlds of luxurious depravity—had caused a total reevaluation of the Com and the directions in which humanity had been going.
Hundreds of Com Worlds were seen to be totally stagnant; many were truly dying, their genetic breeding programs and mass mind-programming having bred populations resembling insect societies more than any past human ones, the billions toiling for the benefit of the ruling class and they for the syndicate. When the syndicate was broken so were most of the ruling classes, discovered simply because the drugs they needed were no longer available and they had to come to the Com or die.
Now there were new structures and new societies, some as bad or worse than those they replaced, but most at least slightly better and the attention of the Com spread outward toward more rapid expansion and the infusion of a new frontier spirit.
Over a thousand human worlds now spread over more than a tenth of the Milky Way galaxy. It was inevitable that they should finally meet others, and they had. The Com had by then encountered fourteen races, some so alien and incomprehensible that there could be little contact and no common ground; others, such as the centaurlike Rhone, with expanding cultures of their own. There had been some conflicts, a lot of misunderstanding, but growth had been positive, overall, and humanity had learned a lot about dealing with alien races. The Council of the Community of Worlds, or Com, had seven nonhuman members.
Of them all, however, the Chugach of Marquoz's own origin were probably the least well known. They had been found on the outer fringes of the Rhone empire by the Rhone, not humans. Their huge, hot desert world was at first thought to be uninhabited, a swirling, harsh sea of desert sands.
The Chugach lived far beneath those sands, where it was cool, near the bedrock and even in its cavities, where the water was, with great cities and grand castles lay. The Chugach swam in the sand like fish in water, and, since their lungs were not that different from those of humans and Rhone, it was still a mystery how they kept from suffocating. A non-spacefaring race that bred slowly would be virtually lost to most of the people of all races in the Com.
It had taken the semifeudal Chugach a while to get over the shock that they were not alone, nor even the lords of creation, but they'd made do. A collection of thousands of autonomous regions, that translated roughly as dukedoms yet seemed to have an almost Athenian democracy, they'd had no central government, no countries, nothing with which to deal.
But they had knowledge, talent, and skills the Com did not have. They produced intricate glass sculptures that were beautiful beyond belief; they had an almost supernatural way of transmuting substances without complex machinery, taking worthless sand and rock and providing pretty much what you wanted or needed. They had something to trade, and the Com had technology they lacked. Once a single dukedom had entered into a trade agreement with the Rhone, its neighbors had to follow or be left behind. The chain reaction permanently altered Marquoz's home world.
He didn't seem to care. He said he was a deposed duke, but it was well known that every Chugach who wasn't a duke claimed to be a deposed one. Nobody much understood him or his motives, and least of all was his almost total lack of concern for his home world. He'd roamed the Rhone empire as agent for a hundred small concerns, always seemed to have money and a knowledge of alien surroundings, and he got results. He seemed to have a sixth sense when something was wrong; he was drawn to trouble like a magnet, and he proved himself capable of handling what trouble he found.
So he was a natural for the Com Police, who recruited him to keep from being embarrassed by him. Marquoz was neither understood nor trusted by his human and nonhuman counterparts as the only Chugach in the Com Police. But he got results every time—and superiors up to the Council itself did not share prejudice against one so productive. He might not be understood, but there was no question that he was a capable friend.
He strode into the lab section with that air of confident authority he always wore, his cigar leaving a trail of blue-white puff-balls in the air behind him. He spotted a technician instantly as the boss of the section, and strode over to him.
The man was standing in front of a wall of transparent material more then twelve centimeters thick. Behind it were cells, cages really, in which sat, thoroughly bound, a middle-aged man, an elderly woman who looked like everybody's grandmother, and two fairly attractive young women, neither of whom looked to be much older than sixteen. All were naked; although securely bound, the cells contained nothing except the chairs to which they were bound—and even the chair was fashioned out of the material of the cell itself when it was molded.
Dr. Van Chu saw the dragon's reflection in the glass but didn't turn from observing the four people in the cells.
"Hello, Marquoz," he mumbled. "I figured you'd still be in debriefing."
"Oh, I took a break. You know how much respect I have for all that nonsense. I filed a report. I fail to see what repeating the story a few hundred times will add."
Van Chu chuckled. "Every little bit helps. You've dropped a nasty one in our laps this time. Worse than the last time. Can I persuade you to return home and have a mess of kids or whatever it is you people do and let us get some rest?"
Marquoz took the cigar in his long, thin fingers and snorted. The snort produced a small puff of smoke from his own mouth. Chugach did not need to carry cigar lighters.
"That'll be the day," the little dragon responded. "No, you're stuck with me, I'm afraid, as long as I'm having this much fun."
Now the lab man looked over and down at him, curiosity all over his face. "What makes you tick, Marquoz? How is shooting and getting shot at on alien worlds for alien races fun? Why not Chugach?"
That question had been asked many times, and he always gave the same answer. "You know that every race has its oddballs, Doc. The ones that don't fit, don't like the rules or things as they are. I'm the chief oddball Chugach. I'm a nut, I know I'm a nut, but I'm having fun and I'm useful so I stay a nut."
Van Chu let the matter drop. Suddenly dead serious, "You sure you got them all?" he asked, motioning toward the prisoners with his head.
Marquoz nodded. "Oh, yeah. On Parkatin, anyway. Who knows how many in other places? Our pigeon, Har Bateen, was dropped on a farm about twenty kilometers from town only the day before. We traced back his movements pretty easily. Apparently he just walked up to the nearest farmhouse—man, wife, one young kid—and pretended to be on his way from here to there. They were hospitable—and the first three he took over. We got none of them. Man, we did a drop on 'em and had that farmhouse surrounded in minutes, but they just wouldn't give up. We just about had to level it.
"He took their little roadster and drove into town the next day, checked into a small hotel in the sleazy section, near the spaceport. A busy lad: we found eight he'd gotten there including Grandma over there." He pointed with the cigar to the little old lady in the cell. "Then he went to the bar, took the madam there, then wandered out and over to us. These characters vary in their desire to live—Bateen himself was pretty meek and after we stunned him and put a vacuum suit on him he behaved real nice. The roomers tried to shoot it out; grandma just wasn't fleet of foot—tripped and knocked herself cold. The others we had to burn. Likewise the madam, although she'd infected the two girls, there, and they were still unsteady enough that we had 'em wrapped and ready to ship before they could do much."
"How'd you know they weren't what they appeared?" Van Chu pressed. "I mean, I'd never guess they were anything but what they seemed."
Marquoz chuckled. "They stink. Oh, not to you. Apparently not to anybody but a Chugach. Not an ordinary kind of stink; a really alien kind of thing, an odor like nobody's ever experienced before. I can't describe it to you—but I'm hoping you folks can figure it out and synthesize it so we can get detectors. This crap kind of gives you the creeps—you can't know who's who."
The lab chief shivered slightly and nodded agreement. "At least you can smell them. We can't even do that. The whole lab's paranoid now."
"Find out anything yet?"
Van Chu shrugged. "A great deal. A little. Nothing at all. When you are dealing with the previously unknown it all amounts to the same thing."
"I'm not one for philosophy, Doc. What do you know?" the dragon shot back impatiently.
Van Chu sighed. "Well, they are an entirely new form of intelligent life. You might call them an intelligent virus. They're rather amazing under the microscope. Come on over here."
They walked through to a research cubicle, and Van Chu made a few adjustments. The large screen in front of them flickered into life.
"That's the enemy, Marquoz," Van Chu said softly. "That's the Dreel."
The screen showed a honeycomb-like structure.
"Looks like every virus I've ever seen or been laid up with," the dragon commented.
"There is some resemblance," Van Chu admitted, "but look at them under closer magnification." He made a few adjustments on his console and the view closed in, blowing up to where they could just see one of the comb-like structures. "Notice the striations, the pattern of construction of the stalk?"
Marquoz just nodded.
Van Chu shifted the view to the next distinct entity. "You see? A different pattern. If I blow them up and compare them all the way to the atomic level, it will show that no two of them are exactly alike in a given organism. At least we believe so."
"You mean those things smaller than cells are all individuals?"
"No, not individuals like you or me. I believe it's a collective organism somehow intricately interconnected in a host, even if not physically attached. The collective acts as a single organism, not as a group. We believe that each individual viruslike organism contains some specific information. There are key members and subordinate ones, together they make up the sum total of what the Dreel in each host knows, and limit its capabilities. We suspect that if an individual Dreel needs information on a particular thing it doesn't have to look it up, merely inject or simply meet up with another Dreel who has that specific information."
Marquoz was fascinated. "You mean one knows all the math, another all the physics, and so forth?"
"Vastly oversimplified, I think, but you have the general idea," Van Chu replied. "Think of each Dreel organism as a book. Put a number of them together, each having specific bits of information and you have the knowledge a specialist would have in the field. Put a lot of those together—design your own, in fact—and you have a library. When all of the basics are added for full functioning, then somehow a librarian—a consciousness—simply appears. Then they breed themselves new units as necessary."
"Pretty nice. No education, no being born or growing up, just meet a host, duplicate the basics, get in, and there you are," the dragon noted. "Must eliminate a lot of hang-ups."
Van Chu chuckled. "I suppose. It's very different from anything we have ever seen. One wonders how they could have evolved, let alone progressed to a high enough state to be invading other areas of space."
"They wouldn't have to," Marquoz noted. "All they'd need would be, say, for one of our ships to land and get bit by a local animal. From what you say, within a few days they'd be the crew."
The scientist nodded agreement. "Yes, exactly. That fellow you captured over there—he is a Dreel. He is also Har Bateen, with a personal history going back to the day of his birth, and, most importantly, he knows that history. He knows everything Har Bateen ever knew. That's the most frightening thing. Were you not able to smell them out, there would be absolutely no way to tell them from the original. None."
"Tried talking to them?" the Chugach asked. "We had 'em so tightly wrapped on the way here that was impossible. We had no idea what we were dealing with, just that it had something to do with mixing blood. We couldn't afford to take chances."
"Oh, yes, we've talked to them. I can play the tapes if you like—or you can use the intercom and talk to them."
"Just a digest. I'm due back upstairs, remember. They'll have discovered that I'm missing by now and have an alarm out all over the place."
"How'd you manage it?"
Marquoz gave a throaty chuckle. "One advantage to being a strange alien organism. They don't know much about how or where I go to the bathroom, so they take my word for it."
Van Chu cleared his throat. "I see. Well, all I can tell you is that for quite a while they all insisted that they were ordinary humans and that they protested all the foul treatment. Bateen even claimed he thought the Gypsy was going to rob him and so just defended himself."
"Good story," the dragon admitted. "But no go."
The scientist shrugged. "He—they all—could talk their way out of anywhere but here. They didn't change their tune until we took the blood samples—remotely, of course—and started running the tests. Only then did Bateen admit—no, he proclaimed—himselfa Dreel, as he called them. He's incredibly arrogant. We're just so many animals to him; all we're good for is being hosts for the Dreel. He claims that they aren't even from this galaxy, and that they have been at this takeover bit so long that nobody can remember when it didn't happen. Holy mission stuff, as fanatical as this Fellowship business at the spaceports."
Marquoz sighed. "I hope he's just bluffing. I don't like the implications."
Van Chu looked down at him worriedly. "What do you mean?"
"Well, if I can smell 'em out other races probably can, too. A fair percentage, anyway, if they're intergalactic. That brings up the point that what they can't take by stealth they take by force—and an intergalactic flight is beyond any technology of ours I ever heard of."
The scientist looked a little frightened now. "You mean a war? A real interstellar war?"
"To the death," Marquoz agreed, "with the other side holding the cards. I think we'd better shut these folks down, if we can, as quickly as possible—and then make a deal if we can, which I doubt. When you make those detectors of yours, which you will, the Dreel will know their cover is blown, know we're onto them. I think we better know what we're up against fast."
The Chugach turned to go, but Van Chu called after him. "Ah . . . Marquoz?"
The dragon stopped and his large head turned slightly, fixing a single reptilian eye on the scientist. "Yeah?"
"How'd you happen to stumble onto all this? I know, you smelled them out—but how'd you, the one person able to smell that stink, happen to be on that particular backwater planet, in just the right place, to smell it?"
"It's simple," Marquoz responded dryly, heading for the door. "I'm an accident-prone."