Chapter Eight
Screams filled my ears until we hit the surface of the Wanu River, hit it hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs, almost hard enough to knock me out. Muffled and remote underwater sounds replaced bedlam. Groggy and disoriented, I wasn’t sure which direction was up until my feet sank into the weeds and bottom muck. My right arm was useless and I still had the front of The’On’s tunic crumpled in my left fist. He floated limp beside me. I couldn’t let go, he’d drown. I pushed off from the bottom and kicked with my feet as hard as I could. I didn’t seem to be making any progress. I started feeling dizzy from oxygen starvation, could hardly keep my straining lungs from sucking in the Wanu River, when the water around me got lighter and then I broke surface.
Air! I vacuumed in a big, shuddering lungful and my vision cleared, sound came back—people crying for help, screaming in pain and fear, splashing into the water. I looked around, oriented myself. We were close to the river bank, near the base of Praha-Riz, but the river was deep like a canal, so we’d had enough water under us to absorb our fall. Folks after us hadn’t been as lucky, and lots were still falling from the shattered windows, tumbling down like an organic waterfall to land with soft thuds among the heaps of still-twitching bodies along the river bank. Only the first of us had been thrown far enough out to reach deeper water and avoid being crushed by the bodies cascading down afterwards.
It was hard treading water with just my legs, but I needed my one good arm to keep The’On’s head up. I wasn’t sure he was breathing but couldn’t do anything about it in the water so I started kicking us toward the bank. I hadn’t gone far when one of the Varoki pulling himself up out of the shallows noticed us.
“There, the Human! The one who killed the Guide!”
Killed Gaant! Me? Well, just about everyone who actually saw what happened was probably dead by now, so it made sense to just blame the closest Human. The Varoki groped in the shallow water and came up with a good sized rock, threw it but it fell several meters short. He started looking for another one and a couple of the dazed survivors on the bank started pointing and shouting as well, wading into the water toward us. I kicked harder, now pulling us away from the shore.
The river was too wide to swim this way. As it was I was already tiring and barely making headway, but I had to get away. Reason and calm words weren’t going to get me very far with the Varoki survivors on the bank. I stopped for a second and used my good hand to push the back of The’On’s collar into my mouth. I held it with my teeth and started kicking again and doing a half-assed back stroke with one arm. I made better progress but I could hardly keep my head above water and was having trouble breathing.
I got another twenty or thirty meters out but my breath came in ragged gasps and my legs were losing power. I needed to take a break, catch my breath, but couldn’t with The’On. I wasn’t sure I could make it back to shore even if the mob weren’t there, and I felt panic start to tighten my throat. I got a noseful of water by mistake and started choking. That’s when something hit me in the head from behind. Fortunately, it was a rescue float.
I let go of The’On’s collar, twisted around, and saw a commercial fishing boat about ten meters away, idling in the channel, with four Humans along the rail yelling in English to me. One of them held the line attached to the float. Problem: I was still coughing, still couldn’t manage to gulp down any air, and I’d pass out pretty soon unless I could. I wrapped my legs around The’On’s torso and grabbed for the float’s handholds with my good hand.
Got it!
I threw my chest over the float and coughed the water out of my lungs as the crew dragged us alongside. A great big guy bent over the rail, grabbed my good arm, and started lifting. He could have managed me, but I still had my legs wrapped around The’On and the extra weight stalled him. He struggled for a couple seconds and then growled.
“Let the leatherhead go, yeah?”
Leatherhead. That’s what Humans called Varoki sometimes. It’s what I used to call them, back before a lot of things happened to me.
“Drop him!” the fisherman repeated.
I shook my head. “He’s my friend.”
He let go and I splashed back into the water. “Fuck you, then. Drown with your leatherhead friend, yeah?”
One of the other fishermen started pulling in the line to recover the float but I hooked my good arm through one of the flexible loops and held on with what strength I had left.
“Let go!” the big fisherman said.
“Leave me the float,” I said. “At least give us a Goddamned chance!”
“I give you boathook is what,” he said and turned away from the rail. The fisherman who’d pulled the line taut looked at me, frowning but not angry. When the big guy reappeared with a nasty-looking all-metal boat hook, the three others started talking to him. Up until then we’d been talking English. I didn’t understand the language they argued in now, but I recognized it: Portuguese.
After maybe a minute of spirited argument the big guy lowered the boat hook, leaned over the rail, and looked at me. Since my one good arm was tangled in the rescue float and I was mostly out of the water, hanging from the rail by the rescue line, I was about as helpless as I could get. There wasn’t any point in giving him a tough-guy glare; I had nothing. But I wasn’t going to let go of The’On, no matter what. So I just looked back at him and after a couple seconds he shrugged.
He said something in Portuguese I couldn’t understand and walked away.
The other three fishermen pulled me and The’On over the rail and onto the deck.
I didn’t have much strength left but I’d at least recovered my breath. I checked The’On for a pulse. It was faint, even for a Varoki, but his plumbing was still working. He wasn’t breathing, though, so I started mouth-to-mouth and after about five good puffs he vomited river water and started coughing.
That’s about when a stabbing axe blade of pain reminded me how messed up my shoulder was. The fatigue, trauma, and reaction to the adrenaline high all came home at the same time and I passed out. Didn’t even feel myself go clunk against the deck.
* * *
I came to, felt the soft vibration of the boat’s electric motors through the metal deck, found my arm strapped against my body and the shoulder packed in ice. Shoulder felt different, too—still hurt, but in a different way. Propped up against a metal locker, I sat up straighter, looked for The’On. He was a couple meters away, lying on his stomach, still unconscious. Vomit stained the deck around his face—that alarming orangey-pink Varoki vomit that looks too much like blood—but he was breathing.
I squinted up my commlink and saw I was still recording on the locked channel. I cut it and commed Marr, subvocalizing to keep it private.
Sasha! Oh, thank God you’re alive! The feed just went out. I didn’t know—
<Yeah, I cut it to comm you. The’On’s hurt and I’m banged up a little, unconscious for a while, but we’re both alive. Have you heard from the others?>
The comms are blacked out in Praha-Riz below Level Two Hundred. You must be outside the effect radius.
<Yeah. My feed came in okay though, huh?>
From when the trouble started, yes. I could hardly watch, and when the window broke…
Her voice faltered and I could hear her crying softly. I tried to imagine what I’d have felt seeing that feed, knowing it was through her eyes and ears, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine it, or what I’d have done waiting to find out the rest. I got choked up myself.
<I’m okay, baby. I’m okay.>
The fishermen noticed the movement and the big guy started walking over.
<Got to deal with this, Hon’. Back soon. I love you.>
I love you, she answered, voice wavering.
I cut the link as he got to me and looked down.
“So, not dead, yeah?”
I touched my ice pack. “Sore as hell.”
“We pushed shoulder back in. Not good to leave it out like that. So you the Sasha fellow on the vid feed?”
“Probably.”
He looked over at The’On’s stationary form.
“So you like the leatherheads, yeah?”
“A couple of them. What’s the vid on me?”
He glanced over his shoulder where two of the crew in viewer glasses stood in the lee of the small superstructure. The big guy nodded at them.
“Still coming in, yeah? Different feeds, all show you standing there mouth open and dick in your hand when hell breaks loose. Feed-heads going on about what a mastermind you must be. You know, to arrange the whole thing and then look so stupid-surprised when it happened. You really that smart?”
“Do I look like it to you?” I asked.
“I think maybe I like you better if you did it.” Then he shrugged, as if letting go—letting go of the idea he’d rescued a Human outlaw who’d just masterminded the biggest and most brutal mass killing of Varoki big shots in history. Yeah, that’d be something to tell the grandkids someday. “My name—Cézar Ferraz,” he said. “Over there is—Hey! Dado!”
The brawny fisherman who’d pulled me in on the line looked up and then grinned and waved at me.
“Eduardo Socorro, call him Dado. He pulled you out, yeah?”
I nodded and waved back with my left hand.
“Other fellow’s Joäo Pacifico.”
The other one, shorter and wiry-looking, glanced up and waved once, as if to say leave him alone, and went back to his viewer.
“Other guy at the helm?” I asked and Ferraz nodded.
“Constancio, my partner. So you’re Sasha Naradnyo, yeah? What kinda name is Sasha? Sounds like a girl’s name.”
“Ukrainian, short for Aleksandr.”
“Short for Alexandre? We’d say Xandinho.”
“Can you get us back upriver to the Red Forest marina?” I asked. “We got a boat there I can use to lay low until I get a handle on this.”
“A boat? That’s nice. But no, we’re not gonna do that. River Watch already thick in there, diverting traffic. Be asking too many questions, yeah? We gonna get you to shore up here, at the commercial docks is what.” He turned back to the other two. “Joäozinho! Me jogar seu chapéu.” The short one took off his baggy black wool cap and threw it to Ferraz, who put it on my head and then pulled the bill down over my eyes.
“You’re Xandinho the fisherman at the dock, yeah? Mouth shut. One of us asks you a question, just nod. That way nobody wonders about some dangerous mastermind. This one we pulled out of the water alone,” he said, hooking a thumb toward The’On. “I commed for an ambulance, meet us up there. No drama, yeah?”
I wondered what a bunch of Portuguese fishermen were doing trolling the Wanu River, pulling out longjaws and blacksnaps they couldn’t even eat. I didn’t ask, though. It would have sounded ungrateful. These guys were getting me and The’On out of this, and with “no drama,” or at least as little as possible.
“Obrigado,” I said.
He frowned. “You know Português?”
“Couple words is all. Had a Brazilian girlfriend.”
“Brasileira? They crazy, yeah?”
“She did try to kill me once,” I admitted.
He nodded and looked back down the river at the towering form of Praha-Riz. “She got some company now.”
* * *
The’On was still unconscious when we got to the docks and I was getting nervous about that. We loaded him into the waiting ambulance, and I rode along to the trauma/med center in Katammu-Arc. Praha-Riz was closer, but the Varoki medic riding in back and working on The’On told me both med centers in Praha-Riz were closed to admissions except from inside the arc. They were swamped with injuries. He also said it looked like The’On might have a cranial fracture.
I commed Marr and brought her up to date on The’On, not bothering to subvocalize. Tweezaa got on the circuit as well.
Boti-Sash! Is Boti-On going to be all right?
“I don’t know, Hon’. The medic says he’s stable, and his color’s good, but I wish he’d wake up.”
I saw the video feed of you in the water, the feed from your eyes. I do not…
She trailed off. For a while the three of us just sat, commlinked but silent, overwhelmed by what had happened.
“Is there any word yet on Gaisaana-la, ah-Quan, or Borro?” I asked finally.
No, Marr answered. No news at all and Praha-Riz below the executive layer is still blacked out.
That didn’t sound good.
I have to go, she said. I’ll have someone waiting for you at the med center. I love you.
“I love you both,” I answered and we broke the link.
I considered my options as the ambulance made maddeningly slow progress through the ground traffic, which seemed thicker and more frenzied that usual. A flyer would have had us to the med center by then, but a call from some Human fisherman didn’t rate one. If they’d realized the unconscious Varoki was one of the highest-ranking diplomatic envoys from the Cottohazz Executive Council, things would have been different.
All I could see of the traffic was through a small rear window, but the faces on powerscoots and pedcycles looked nervous, frightened. The news from Praha-Riz had folks spooked, and for all they knew this could get worse before it got better.
So what was I going to do? Hiding out was pointless by now; the Munies would have locks on The’On’s and my commlinks if they were that interested in us, and it sounded like they might be. I could power down, go black and make a run for it, but how far would I get with a bum shoulder? Besides, I didn’t have any cash so I couldn’t use any transportation, buy food, do much of anything without using my e-nexus credit line, and then I’d pop right back onto the data grid. So I’d have to face the Munies and see what that led to, but unless they were into manufactured evidence I didn’t see they had much on me.
The bigger question was where was all this going and what was I going to do to keep Marr and Tweezaa alive? They were the targets, not me. Folks might not like me much, but I wasn’t likely to knock the Cottohazz off its foundations. Neither were they, when you got right down to it, but the opposition couldn’t count on that, so they were the high-threat targets.
The opposition…who was that now that Gaant, e-Bomaan, and the others were all dead? Was there an opposition anymore? Well, Tweezaa’s relatives were all still alive, still hungry for her chunk of the fortune, and a lot of Varoki were scared as hell that a Human had saved Tweezaa’s life and that would warp her or something. So there’d still be an opposition, but they were going to have to find a couple new evil geniuses, and that might slow them down for a while.
That was their problem, not mine. Mine came down to keeping Marr and Tweezaa—and now The’On as well—alive. When you looked at it that simply, the answer was pretty obvious.
By the time we got to emergency trauma receiving at Katammu-Arc the Munies were waiting but so was one of Marr’s Varoki counselors-on-retainer. If I’d been an uBakai citizen it would have gone tougher on me, but since I still held my Peezgtaan citizenship there were diplomatic niceties to observe. Without a counselor there the cops might have overlooked that.
Varoki trauma/med centers are different from Human ones: a lot less clean than the hospitals on Earth, or even the clinic I used to fund back on Peezgtaan, and sort of cluttered, with lots of equipment just lying around. To me they look more like vehicle repair shops than hospitals. The Munies waited outside the treatment room while a Varoki doc worked on my shoulder: scanned it and then studied some reference imagery—probably to brush up on how a Human shoulder was supposed to look when it wasn’t all screwed up.
“Oh, I understand!” he said after a couple minutes. “Your shoulder was dislocated but has been relocated. However, there is still considerable inflammation there, and your collar thing—collar bone I mean—is separated from your, um, what is it? That sort of flat wingy bone?” He consulted the diagram again. “Spacula. No, sca-pu-la. Collar bone and sca-pu-la. What an odd word.”
He ended up injecting a pain killer and some NAMS—nanomachines—programmed to repair the tissue damage and tamp down the inflammation. Other than that he fitted me with a sling and told me to try to keep the shoulder immobilized. Meanwhile Marr’s Varoki counselor was giving me The Word.
“Answer every question they pose unless I tell you it is an inappropriate inquiry. Answer as completely and as cooperatively as you can. After all, we have nothing to hide.”
He said this staring earnestly into my eyes, letting me know he thought we had everything to hide and I should lie my head off, but since we were being monitored he was speaking for the record. Nice to have people in your corner who believe in you.
“How’s e-Lotonaa? Is he conscious yet?” I asked the doc. It was strange calling The’On by name.
“I can only share patient information with his family.”
“I’m family,” I said.
The Varoki doctor looked at me for a long moment, ears spread in surprise. “Not remotely,” he said, which I thought was pretty narrow-minded of him.
Once the doc was done the Munies grilled me for almost an hour, asking the same questions over and over but phrased differently. They were trying to catch me in a lie, or maybe they just weren’t sure what else to ask but had to put in the time to show due diligence. I’d have felt some sympathy for them if I hadn’t been the object of the exercise. After all, they were in a tight spot, no doubt about it. Near as I could tell, everyone in the room before the mob entered was dead except for five people. I was relieved to hear from them that Gaisaana-la and ah-Quan were two of the other three, although ah-Quan was in pretty bad shape. I had to admit, all four of us surviving looked mighty suspicious, especially since only one guy out of probably twenty-five or thirty on the other side had.
The fact that the death toll included three uBakai wattaaks and four of the richest guys in the whole Cottohazz meant the heat was on the Munies to put somebody’s head up on a pike, and I was the obvious candidate. The only thing in my favor so far was that every second of recorded vid of the riot showed me as uninvolved except as a victim. But like Ferraz said back on the boat, that wasn’t stopping every feed-head on the float from claiming I had to be behind it all. What would most folks believe: their own eyes or their own prejudices?
I knew where I’d put my money.