Trang Read online

Chapter 2

  Philippe woke up choking.

  Something was smothering him from the inside, like a signal flare had gone off in his lungs. He gasped for breath and was surprised when he succeeded.

  It was cold, whatever it was. Cold and sharp and choking and . . . minty?

  "George, you asshole!" came Shanti's voice. "He was waking up! You didn't have to bomb the poor bastard."

  "It's just aromatherapy," rumbled George.

  "It's fucking chemical warfare, you fucking—"

  But Philippe lost the thread of her invective when he began to sneeze. And cough. And gag. All at the same time, as every last speck of goo that had been resting harmlessly inside his sinuses began to flee whatever potent mix of menthol and vapor George had just pumped into his respiratory system.

  Finally Philippe's spasms began to settle. He looked up, only to see a square box flying at him. He raised his hands to stop it, but another fit of coughing seized him and he was too late.

  It landed in his lap with a gentle plop.

  A box of tissues.

  Philippe wiped his mouth and nose clear enough to take another breath in, and he managed, "We have to go back to Titan!" before another violent sneezing fit seized him.

  "Why do we have to go back to Titan?" Shanti asked, the moment he resumed normal breathing.

  Philippe sneezed again.

  Why do we have to go back to Titan? he wondered.

  He'd had a definite idea that going back was very important, but now he couldn't recollect why that was. Maybe it had just been a dream?

  He thought about it for a minute, and another conviction seized him with equal force: Going back to Titan would be a real bother. It was silly to want to go back. It wasn't reasonable.

  Indeed, it was so unreasonable that he couldn't even imagine why he had wanted to go back.

  He had passed out and now he was having delusional impulses. Had he had a stroke or something?

  Philippe took a look at George. The doctor didn't seem worried, and he probably would be worried if his patient was suffering from something serious, like a stroke.

  Of course, Philippe recalled, George would probably be delighted if his patient was suffering from a really interesting stroke.

  He looked around, wondering if something would either jog his memory, or more likely, confirm that his impulse to return to Titan had no basis in reality.

  Unsurprisingly, he was in a bed in the infirmary. He noted with an unconscious pleasure that he was the only patient and that, aside from some scrolls and the sinus-blasting tool that George had just tossed on a counter, all the medical equipment and supplies were neatly tucked away in the white cabinets and drawers. Philippe had disturbing memories of seeing the infirmary in much greater chaos, with supplies thrown everywhere and dark fluids smeared across the floor, but things had been quiet lately for George—which was unusual, since it seemed like the typical SFer's reaction to quiet was to go do something incredibly risky.

  He looked down and noticed a gray, square patch on his arm. It was about five centimeters across, with rounded corners, and it had an N written on it in a slightly lighter shade of gray.

  "What's that?" he asked, pointing to it.

  "That's what they didn't give you enough of," said George, furrowing his thick, black eyebrows. "It's neutralizer. I'm guessing they just followed the directions for an average SFer without taking into account your smaller mass, so they gave you too much dope. Then they assumed you'd metabolize it quicker than you did, so they didn't give you enough neutralizer.

  "I know you're thinking, 'Wouldn't a good doctor adjust the dosage?' but keep in mind that good doctors don't do patch-and-probes."

  "Don't neutralizers make your teeth fall out?" Philippe asked.

  George smiled, while behind him, Shanti rolled her eyes. Philippe's suspicion of technology was another value he did not share with the Special Forces. "You'd have to use them for a really long time before they'd neutralize enough nutrients to give you scurvy or rickets," the doctor said. "I'll give you a multivitamin once this patch comes off, just to be on the safe side."

  "That's great," said Shanti in a tone that indicated that the time for this nonsense was past. She put her hands on the bed and leaned close to Philippe's face. "Trang, why do you want us to go back to Titan?"

  Philippe fruitlessly groped for an answer. The sliding sensation began again, more strongly than before.

  This time, it felt like something was sliding into place, like a dislocated joint settling back into its socket.

  "The new soldiers."

  The words came out of Philippe's mouth almost of their own accord. The moment he heard them, he knew they were right.

  Of course! The new soldiers! Another bunch of hyperactive combat specialists were coming to screw up his diplomatic mission. More large, violent soldiers who had been carefully trained to kill things, when what he needed were people who would not kill things, who would defuse situations instead of blowing the heck out of everything.

  The Special Forces. That phrase had struck terror into Philippe's heart when he first discovered that his protective detail on the alien station would not be provided by the Union Police. It had confirmed a suspicion that not everyone in the Union brass wanted his mission to succeed, that even after years of remote communication, there was still on Earth a profound, almost primal fear of the aliens. Putting the Special Forces on the alien station instead of the Union Police had been a deliberate effort to sabotage diplomacy—and Philippe had spent his first few weeks on the station trying everything he could think of to get the SFers removed.

  He had failed, although his mission had not. The SFers he had come with had, with training and many long conversations, adjusted, but new ones—oh, no. He was going to have to have a very long talk with each and every one of them before they came on board.

  "I need to talk to them, like I did with you guys, to give them an idea of what to expect and how to behave on the station," he said.

  Shanti nodded. "Yeah, train them to be all diplomatic and shit, that's a good idea," she said. Then she snapped her fingers. "But you don't have to! I mean, you already have!"

  "How did I manage that?"

  "Virtual you did it—a VY has already trained them."

  Philippe closed his eyes and sighed. Her faith, her touching, childlike faith in technology. . . .

  "And how do we know that the VY did a good job?" he asked.

  Annoyance filled her voice. "I'm sure it was a standard VY. It got high marks for quality of information, I remember seeing that. So you think you can fucking relax about it?"

  Philippe's eyes snapped open. The SF's chain of command might be amorphous, but one thing was clear: Philippe, being DiploCorps, was not in it. When it came to security, he'd learned to let the SF take the lead, but in any other field, Shanti had no right to boss him.

  He stared at her for a moment. "High marks. From the people who need training, and who therefore are by definition unable to judge the quality of the information?"

  Shanti's eyes narrowed. "You know, I think I liked you better when you were doped up."

  "Of course you did. Please ask the Special Forces to send me a copy of the VY so that I can check and make sure he's not a virtual incompetent."

  She opened her mouth to protest. Philippe prepared himself to parry when a flat, emotionless voice sounded in his ear. "You have an all-station meeting in thirty minutes," it said.

  "My earplant just went off," he said, pointing at his left earlobe, which, like those of all the humans on the alien station, was distended by the hardware it contained. "I've got an all-station meeting in thirty minutes."

  "Should you go?" asked Shanti, her annoyance instantly forgotten. "Are you well enough? We can send Baby if you're not feeling up to it."

  "I'd rather go myself," said Philippe. He turned to George. "I feel fine now."

  The doctor grabbed a scroll off the counter and unrolled it.

  "Yeah, you
should be OK," he said, after consulting its contents. "Hang on a second."

  George fished something small out of a drawer and walked over to Philippe. He painlessly whipped off the old patch and slapped the new one on in one dexterous motion.

  Philippe looked at the new patch. It was black, and it had a V on it made out of multicolored happy faces.

  "Happy faces?" he asked George.

  "That means placebo," Shanti said, smirking.

  Philippe laughed, and then started to look around the room for his jacket. It had apparently been removed when he was out cold, leaving him in only his short-sleeved lonjons. He saw part of a dark blue wad sticking out from under the bed next to his.

  "Is that my jacket?" he asked, pained.

  "Oh, sorry," said Shanti, retrieving it and giving it a rough couple of shakes before tossing it to him. "We were in a hurry."

  Philippe nodded, accepting that he would be leaving this suit jacket behind. He fished his gloves and hood out of the wrinkled jacket's pocket. Then he protested uselessly as Shanti and George insisted on putting them on for him, sliding the long gloves up his arms and pressing them against the sleeves of his lonjons to make a seal impregnable to any alien toxins than he might come across in the common area, and attaching the hood to the back of the lonjons' neck where he could pull it over his head and face if need be. Although he looked like he was wearing nothing more than some kind of wet suit, he was now outfitted in the most advanced armor the Union could provide.

  He managed to stand up and walk without wobbling too excitingly, so he insisted on going to his room unaccompanied. There, he put on his other suit jacket and smoothed his hair once again. He walked out to go to his meeting feeling relaxed and just a tiny bit victorious.

  Then he looked down and wondered why his hands were shaking.

  He crammed them in his pockets and went on his way.

  There had never been a shortage of meetings on the alien station.

  During his time there, Philippe had met countless times with all nine of the different aliens species—

  Scratch that. Or, allow it: It all depended on how one defined a meeting.

  If only formal meetings, with schedules and agendas, counted, then Philippe had met countless times with only seven of the nine alien species.

  After all, no one had formal meetings with the bizarre and dangerous shape-shifter that Patch had named the Magic Man. When Philippe wanted to talk to that particular alien, he just had to hope that their paths would cross. If luck was with him and they did run into each other, then Philippe had to hope even more fervently that Magic Man would not ignore him.

  Even more elusive were the White Spiders. Running into them was not a challenge—they hung around everywhere in the station. But they did so in complete silence, utterly unresponsive to any invitation to discussion. Philippe's "meeting" with the White Spiders consisted of one conversation he had had with one White Spider. Once.

  Still, with seven other highly social species on the station, there was never a shortage of meetings—informal chats, one-on-ones, formal summits, group sessions, and even press conferences. There were days when it felt like all Philippe did on the station was attend meeting after meeting after meeting.

  Which was not all that different from the life of a diplomat on Earth.

  The all-station meetings, however, were something new, an experiment being conducted by the Hosts. These meetings, like Philippe's and Shanti's interrogations on Titan, were the result of a series of harrowing events that had taken place when the Cyclopes had attempted to conquer the Hosts' home world. The invasion had been stopped by the Magic Man, who had, in retaliation, conquered the Cyclopes planet—all by himself. To top things off, Kre-Pi-Twa-Ki-Tik-Nao, the reluctant Host messiah, had rematerialized after roughly 850 years spent in a kind of incorporeal half-life.

  That had been quite a day.

  Prior to the invasion, one of the Cyclopes' major complaints had been that, since the Hosts saw themselves as divinely ordained to run the station that they had built, they almost never accepted input from other species. That had, in fact, been a fairly accurate description of the Hosts' style of governance, although Philippe and nearly everyone else had assumed the complaint was merely a pretense to justify the Cyclopes attack.

  After all, there was really no rational reason for the Cyclopes to go to war over the governance of the Host station: The Hosts were more than willing to leave alone any species that did not wish to join those on the station. They required other species to do the same. And there was no practical way for any species to reach another without passing through the portals—all of which led to the Host station—and alerting everyone else to their nefarious intent.

  There was no reason to invade—unless a species was governed by paranoid, aggressive expansionists, which the Cyclopes apparently were. It had taken them a mere thirty years following the opening of the portal from the Cyclopes planet to the Host station to not only draw up an invasion scheme but also to develop a faster-than-light drive—a technical accomplishment no other species had ever gotten close to achieving—that would allow them reach the Host planet without using the portals.

  Thanks to the Magic Man, the invasion had failed miserably. It had, however, sufficiently rattled the Hosts' complacency that they had rethought their methods of governance and had begun holding all-station meetings. The meetings were designed to discuss matters of importance to the station as a whole, and input from other species was, for the first time, welcomed and even occasionally implemented.

  Not that the group Philippe now joined in the common area was entirely inclusive. The Cyclopes had no representatives there, ostensibly because they were now a subject people (although Philippe did not doubt that their attempted invasion of the Host planet had something to do with their exclusion). The Magic Man had been invited, both as the sole representative, and perhaps sole individual, of his own people and as the ruler of the Cyclopes. But he was not there—not as far as anyone could see, anyway. The Magic Man could break himself into tiny pieces and literally be two or a million places at once, so it was possible that he was attending the meeting in a form invisible to the naked eye. Given his usual disinterest in everything that went on at the station, however, chances were good that he was, in fact, absent.

  The meeting was being held because of the absence of a third species: the Blobbos. The small aliens, who looked like slugs that had been bedecked with salt, had once run around the station in ornate protective vehicles. They were gone now, having retreated back to their home planet, following what they considered an inexcusable series of violent events. The question now before the group was how to best convince them to return.

  So Philippe stood in an area that was marked off from the rest of the station by walls so low he could see over them. In contrast to the stark white of the Space Authority–built human living area, the walls and floor in the common area were brown and intriguingly soft, almost like they were constructed of membranes stretched over supports. The Hosts had designed their station's common area to accommodate the average alien, and the average alien was most certainly not bipedal. As a result, tables were low, spaces were open, and there was never any place to sit. This particular meeting place reminded Philippe of nothing so much as an especially large stall in a horse stable.

  Leading the meeting was the Host liaison to the Blobbos. Hosts needed space: Even when they stood on all six legs, as this one was doing now, they came up to Philippe's chest, and they were roughly two meters long. This particular Host was especially red, almost crimson in color, in contrast with the more common dark-orange tones of Max and Moritz, the two Host liaisons to the humans. Like them, this Host had black markings adorning the sides of his segmented body that, Philippe had recently learned, indicated his status as a priest.

  The expression on this Host's face—which was not really a face, more a combination of the way the Host held his body and adjusted his segments—was grim. The Blobbos had gone
from refusing invitations to talk to not responding at all.

  "Have they shared a specific set of demands since we last met?" asked a Pincushion. The alien, like all Pincushions, looked like a giant sea urchin. He wore orange and yellow "clothing"—clumps of some indeterminate substance worn on the ends of his purple spikes. New trends in Pincushion clothing were frequent and typically were a commentary on recent events of note. Baby usually had the scoop on the latest Pincushion fashions, and Philippe made a mental note to ask her about the new color combination.

  "No," said the Host liaison to the Blobbos. "They have offered no communication since their departure. We know nothing more than we did before."

  "It is nonsensical," said a Swimmer drone. "They disliked the Cyclopes' actions, but certainly the Cyclopes are no longer in a position to undertake such actions again."

  Philippe clenched his teeth. Comments like that—along with the attitude that only the Cyclopes had done something wrong—drove him insane. Denial is truly a universal coping strategy, he thought darkly to himself.

  He spoke. "When I was attacked by a Cyclops and my security experts killed my attacker, the Blobbos told me that they were unhappy with my people because of the killing, even though it was undertaken in self-defense. Perhaps they are dismayed by the Magic Man's response to the Cyclopes' attempted invasion of the Host planet."

  God knows I was.

  "Do you believe they are dismayed by his initial response, or do you believe they are dismayed by his current response?" asked a Snake Boy, writhing his long body as he spoke.

  "Perhaps both," Philippe replied. "Perhaps they fear what he might do in the future."

  "If the latter is true," said the Host, "and if they abstain from all communication, they will never know if their fears are realistic or if their fears are unrealistic. My people would like send communications on a regular basis through their portal to the Blobbos."

  "I would caution against sending unsolicited communications," said the Snake Boy. "In the past, with my people, the appearance of unsolicited communications generated intense panic."

  "I do know that," replied the Host. "Your people had never received an alien communication before, however. The Blobbos lived on this station for a long time. In addition, we mentioned that we might send communications to them, and they did not forbid it."

  The discussion went back and forth. Everyone sounded calm, but then again, everyone always sounded calm: The translation devices saw to that.

  They finally decided to have an unmanned communications probe sent through the Blobbos' portal on a regular, but not frequent, basis. The Hosts wanted to send the probe, but at Philippe's suggestion, the Swimmers took on that responsibility. The Swimmers—two cooperative aquatic species, whose small, brown remote-controlled drones roamed the station—had been entirely uninvolved in the invasion and takeover. In addition, they had a long history of providing generally accurate information to the station's residents, which might make the Blobbos more receptive to their overtures.

  With the decision made, the meeting began to break up. Philippe was glad to see that a few White Spiders once again had hung around the meeting. Although they had said nothing, they had stayed fairly close, clinging to a nearby table with their long, white, feathery legs rather than hanging from the high ceiling. Philippe was certain they had listened in.

  Philippe knew he was the only human on the station to have had a conversation with a White Spider, and he hadn't yet definitively eliminated the possibly that he was the only sentient being to have done so. Nonetheless, they seemed to be indicating more interest in the possibility of communicating with others, even if any actual communication lagged. The issue appeared to be cultural, not technical: The translation devices had worked fine during Philippe's friendly conversation with a White Spider. They simply chose not to talk.

  "I should tell everyone before you leave: We are adding to our staff on this station today, so there will be new humans to meet," Philippe said.

  "Are you reproducing?" asked the Pincushion.

  "Um, no," said Philippe, trying not to look embarrassed. The Pincushions very casually and quite publicly engaged in group reproductive activity—although, Philippe reminded himself, it was really more of a group renewal activity, in which Pincushions exchanged genetic material, a process that apparently did not give rise to little baby Pincushions. "These are mature humans, coming from Earth."

  He took his leave of the other representatives and walked over to Ofay, one of the SFers who had been assigned to guard him.

  "Do you know when the new soldiers are getting here?" he asked.

  "No idea," said Ofay with a shrug.

  "I was thinking of going to the café," Philippe mumbled as he slapped the com mike in his jacket collar. "Patch," he said, opening a channel to the second. "Patch, it's Trang. Do you know when the reinforcements are arriving?"

  "They're here now, guy," Patch's voice sounded in Philippe's earplant.

  "They're here?"

  "Um, yeah, the ship just docked."

  "Oh, fudge!" exclaimed Philippe.

  Patch laughed. "Language, guy!"

  Philippe hurried back home, but by the time he got there, the new soldiers had already gotten off the ship and dispersed. He spotted a couple of newcomers in the hallway and introduced himself, meeting a Pazzo and a Dick.

  Then he heard an unfamiliar voice coming out of the open door to Shanti's office, so he stuck his head in.

  Not bad, he thought.

  Shanti was standing next to another woman. She was a little shorter than Shanti, but gave the impression of being taller. Philippe wondered briefly why that was—being SFers, each woman stood like her spine had been fused to a flagpole. Then he realized that, by SF standards, the new woman was slender. No doubt she was physically strong, but she lacked the burly, muscular build that typified most SFers, be they male or female. Her body, in contrast, was a smooth hourglass. She was almost—perhaps not by civilian standards, and her bulky uniform wasn't helping—but almost, very nearly, quite close to being willowy.

  It had been a long time since Philippe had seen a woman like that.

  Her head was almost touching Shanti's—they were both looking at the same scroll, deep in a discussion of schedules, which, Philippe realized, meant that he could look at them for a little longer without seeming to ogle.

  The two faces complemented each other, each emphasizing the other's prettiness. The new woman had remarkable eyes—large, round, and black, surrounded by a thick fringe of lashes—but Shanti had good eyes, too—tilted in a way that could give her face a merry cast. Both had high cheekbones, although the new woman's face was more oval, while Shanti's was heart-shaped. Both had full mouths. Their noses were different, though: Shanti had a button, while the new woman's nose was decidedly Roman.

  They would probably make a good recruiting poster, Philippe thought. Or a calendar.

  Shanti looked up at him. "Hey," she said.

  Philippe snapped out of his reverie. "Hi."

  He turned to the new woman and smiled—experience had taught him that there was really no reason to expect Shanti to attend to social niceties like introducing people to each other. "Hello," he said, sticking his hand out. "I'm Philippe Trang of the DiploCorps."

  "It's a pleasure," said the woman, taking his hand in her own and shaking it. "I'm Princess."

  Her voice had that precise, clipped quality that once would have meant that she hailed from England. Nowadays, given how young she looked—Philippe would be surprised if she was twenty-five—her accent meant she was likely from South Asia. North Americans had defended their regional accents, but the British had taken their role as "Guardians of the Language" so seriously that they had pushed standard Union English with the standard Union accent down the throat of their schoolchildren with a maniacal vengeance. As a result, unless you were in a former Commonwealth state where schoolteachers clung to the old ways, you almost never heard the plethora of accents that were
so common in old virtual entertainments—no dropped hs, no clenched teeth, no twittering tones.

  Perhaps this standardization had improved communication and eradicated class and regional barriers the way its boosters claimed, but Philippe was hard-pressed to consider it progress. He liked Princess' accent. And her voice. And a number of other things about her.

  He snapped himself back to the moment.

  "So, you're Shanti's new second?" he asked.

  A voice exploded into his earplant.

  "Trang!" It was Sucre. "Trang! You've got to get out here now! I'm in the common area near the Cyclopes! You've got to get out here! One of them is down! A Cyclops is down!"

  Philippe slapped his mike. "Sucre, I will be there as soon as possible. Tell George as well." He slapped it off.

  He looked at Shanti, who had already dropped the scroll—she'd been commed in.

  "Go," she said.

  "What is it?" asked Princess, following Shanti out.

  "It's the Magic Man," said Shanti. "He's killed again."

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