Part 5 (1/2)

The Russian looked up over the rims of his reading gla.s.ses. ”Am I an American?”

”No, you're not Martin Luther King, Jr.,”his partner said. ”Seven. You'll never get this one.”

”Hmph.”The Russian set the pen down, considering his partner carefully. Considering the gloating smile. He frowned, feeling his eyebrows pull together. ”Am I Caucasian?”

”Yes. Eight.”

”Am I-” Hesitation, fingers through hair, a sunny smile as he played his victim onto the hook. ”Am I a fictional character?”

”Yes. d.a.m.n you.” That exasperated twist of the American's mouth told the Russian he had the answer. One more question, to be sure.

”Ten. Am I a spy?”

”No. You're an agent, you slick son of a b.i.t.c.h. A spy works for the other side. Put me out of my misery already.”

”The other side? Whatever happened to 'G.o.dless Soviet?'” No answer except a shrug and a sideways roll of the eyes. The Russian grinned, triumphant. ”Clever American. You very nearly had me stumped this time. Except you lied on one answer: not a communist?”

”I thought once I lured you down that backtrail I'd have you chasing red herrings until dinnertime. And how many communists dress in cashmere and drink guava juice for breakfast?”

”My friend, I never claimed to be a good communist. Detente is the art of compromise.”

”Ah. I thought it was the art of letting the other fellow have your way.”

The Russian answered with a shrug. ”Ten games to four. My turn. Your name begins with the letter B.”

Formidable.

Terrain.

The stench of rot strikes you like a train: it drives you to your knees and you blink, eyes watering, burning as you try to reconcile the realization that this thing is flesh with its sheer, absolute enormity.

I'm a biologist. This is-geology. What am I doing here?

Shattered buildings lie under its bulk. It oppresses, a fleshy tsunami, canyons and rifts red deep inside, oozing pestilence, maggots writhing in streams. Pseudopods. Trying to cla.s.sify, mind refusing. Rubbery ... skin? Is that a mouth? It looks like a crater.

Pulling the hood of your NBC suit over your face, you switch to internal oxygen. And then you stand and move forward (your tools spade and mattock rather than scalpel and forceps) to a.n.a.lyze the thing that fell from the sky.

Later, stripped of the red-daubed Tyvek, you lean forward in the pa.s.senger seat of a circling helicopter, finger numb on the shutter b.u.t.ton of a camera, listening to the autozoom, autofocus whir. ”Bring it lower.” The pilot obeys, although you're sure the fetor of the thing rotting thickens the air enough to trap the flimsy helicopter like a dragonfly in amber. Lower doesn't help: the scale of the thing's grey-blistered integument is too vast. You might as well try taxonomy on a watermelon held up to your eye. You think of the blind men and the elephant and you laugh underneath, because you know if you let the sound out it would bubble up like hysteria. It would be hysteria.

Ecological disaster, you think. This thing will foul Lake Michigan like a rotting buffalo in a water hole. You wonder about alien bacteria, viral propagation, impact on endangered species. And then you realize that the decaying latex plain you spiral was once Detroit Wayne County Metro Airport and with the realization comes comprehension: any impact you can imagine is just too f.u.c.king small.

”Take us up some.” The pilot does, and the scale starts making sense. Five red furrows like canyons run eerily parallel, and then another five, and then the vast ragged wound, the ma.s.sively torn section that can only look chewed, and-because you are a biologist, were a biologist before you were the President's science advisor, because you are a biologist-you think of shrikes and thorns, leopards and gazelles draped high in the overarching branches of convenient trees.

”Holy s.h.i.+t,” you whisper, and the helicopter shudders with the pilot's reaction to your outburst.

You raise your eyes to the azure sky. Because it must have been a meal too big even for whatever goes with the claws, the teeth that rove those craters, those canyons.

And predators don't cache kills unless they plan to return...

Gone to Flowers.

I close my eyes and try to feel my left hand.

I'd swear to G.o.d it still dangles on the end of my arm just as it did for the first twenty-four years of my life: taut sensation like a strand of razor-wire looped from elbow to fingertip tells me so, cutting the numb absence of flesh. I want to slap my right hand over the pain, expecting the hot trickle of blood between my fingers. Instead, they curl on the cold metal examining table I'm sitting on, my skinny body stripped to the waist and shrouded in a paper sheet for decency's sake-not that I have all that much to cover up.

”It itches.”

”I'm almost finished with the bandages,” the doctor, Captain Valens, answers. ”Not much to do for the itch, I'm afraid.”

”I've lived with worse.” My scowl tugs at scar tissue when I glance down. Captain Valens has laid his warm human hand on the gleaming steel of the prosthesis. He might as well touch the hand of a statue. From a point seven centimeters below the proximal end of my humerus, I will never feel anything but phantom pain again.

It must be antiseptic fumes making my eyes sting. The doctor grins at me. ”So, what do you think of my masterpiece, Corporal? Not exactly s.e.xy, but it works...”

He's wrong. Dull gleams ricochet off the curved surface as I rotate the wrist, close precise fingers into a fist. It has a sensual air, despite-or because of-its look of pure, seamless evil. The months I've spent with the prototypes and simulations, the days in surgery and the weeks of recovery, the puckered red scars ridging my spine: this is the payoff.

It's s.e.xy. Far s.e.xier than the rest of my fire-scarred body, and I hate it with the sort of ideological loathing that used to be reserved for nuclear weapons and enemy politicians. Which is hypocritical, given the money and metallurgy the Army has spent into my scrawny carca.s.s: after nine years in service and that last bad one, I'm less meat than metal.

I examine a stained pulmonary chart on the wall, but Valens picks up my distress. ”The prostheses will get better over the years,” he says like a mom who desperately wants her kid to like a dubious present. ”That's the next step from a prototype. We'll get a polymer skin on it to match the other one. h.e.l.l, someday you'll have sensitivity, heat, cold, you name it.”

I force a scorched jack-o'-lantern grin and give him the finger. ”Well, whad-daya know? It works.”

And then the door to the treatment room bangs open and I grab for my s.h.i.+rt as Gabe Castaign barges in, a young Yankee nurse caught up in his wake. He's still in uniform, still wearing his baby-blue beret. ”Sir!” she tries again, reaching for his sleeve without quite daring to grab him. ”You simply cannot just walk in here...”

”Maker!” The nurse falls back a pace. Gabe has that effect on people. ”You got the bandages off already? How does it feel?”

A s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.ton cracks in thirds between machine fingers: the one between my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Of course. I curse in French and try to be more careful. ”It feels like a G.o.dd.a.m.n train wreck strapped to my shoulder. But I'll get used to it.” Then I realize what his presence in Toronto must mean. My face goes slack in hope and the fear that that hope is in vain. ”Gabe-it's over? Tell me it's over.” I'm pleading, even knowing it doesn't have to mean ceasefire. He could have been recalled for security detail. They don't let tourists up the CN tower since the last round of bombings. b.l.o.o.d.y shame. b.l.o.o.d.y isolationists.

He glances at his boots, shrugs broad shoulders. Castaign looks the role his great-great-grandfather lived, brawny bear of a fur-trapping northerner with eyes like bay water and hair that would be tousled if it weren't clipped high and tight. Even kept short for a helmet, it curls some. ”Papers signed within the week. Nothing official yet, but peace has broken out.”

I hit him at chest level and he wraps his arms around me. A moment later he gasps. ”Ease off, Jenny!” He rubs his ribs as I back away. ”Remind me not to arm-wrestle you.”

I can't meet his eyes. ”Sorry.”

I'm sure they're looking at one another, Valens and Castaign, and I almost feel them reach the decision to go easy on me. Gabe drops a hand on my good shoulder, drawing my eye. ”Hey, it's just a bruise, eh? No sweat.”

I grin to show I'm trying, turning the damaged side of my face away, exquisitely aware of his touch. Stepping back is d.a.m.n hard. I manage. ”No sweat, Gabe.” His eyes are very blue. I look down to b.u.t.ton another b.u.t.ton, glad of the excuse. ”Let me get some clothes on, will ya?” To Valens: ”Can I go?”

”Off-campus? Sure, why not? Sign out.” Valens wads gauze into the biohazard bag and peels off his gloves.

”I'll meet you outside in ten minutes.” Gabe reverses his headlong charge with a flourish, bootsteps ringing on the speckled tile floor, still trailing that fl.u.s.tered nurse. And that is Captain Gabriel Castaign, CA.

I take a deep breath and finish b.u.t.toning my s.h.i.+rt.

It's more like seven minutes, but Gabe is already surrounded by his usual court: two second lieutenants and another noncom today, standing under bare trees and streetlights. A smaller population has been a mixed blessing: Canada's stayed more civilized than most of the world, but my generation went almost entirely to the military to keep it that way. Especially since the troubles down south closed the border: even the less-radical isolationists admit Detroit and Boston are uncomfortably close to home.

I'd lay odds that Gabe and I are the only ones here who've seen combat yet. Old joke: the difference between a second lieutenant and a private is the private has been promoted.