"It"s not a story." He peered at Flint. "The story, as you call it, has lots of personal twists and turns, which I"m not going to tell you. Let"s just say that our new mummies and daddies weren"t always vetted well."
Flint wasn"t in the mood for a sob story, but he didn"t know how to easily shut Norton down. "Then this lovely woman walks into our lives. Not all of our lives, but enough of them. She tells us how much money we can get from the Martian government, how the laws had changed, and how the Multicultural Tribunals favor people like us, people who"ve suffered for no apparent reason. All she needed was a little money to get the case prepped."
Flint stared at him. Norton let his arms drop.
"You know how this ends, right? How she took our money?"
"I don"t know what it has to do with me," Flint said.
"Yes, you do." Norton started to cross his arms and then stopped.
The movement put Flint on alert. Norton was going to try to something. This close to the c.o.c.kpit, he was probably going to try to take over the ship.
"You said you know who she is," Norton said, "and if you know that, you know why she was there. Do you know why she had no flesh on her bones?"
A shiver ran down Flint"s back. Norton knew how Jrgen died.
Flint leaned his chair until the back hit the console. He hoped the move seemed natural. "No, I don"t know why."
Norton smiled ever so slowly. That smile had probably been the last thing Jrgen had seen before she died. "She took everything from us, coming back over and over again with new pet.i.tions, seemingly real refiles of the case, court doc.u.ments that seemed to pertain to us. And we paid each time, her fees, just to keep her going."
Flint"s left arm wasn"t in Norton"s view. Flint slowly reached back under the console.
"She skinned us clean. I thought it only fair to do the same to her." Norton spoke calmly, as if everyone killed and then desecrated the corpse.
"Why are you telling me this?" Flint made himself sound nervous. Norton wanted him to be afraid, so Flint pretended to be afraid.
"So that when I ask you to turn this ship around, you"ll do it."
"And then what?" Flint said. "You know what you just told me, right?"
Norton shrugged. "No one"s going to pay attention. No one cares. It was thirty years ago, she was a crook, and I can confess all I want. There"s no evidence. I cut it all off."
Flint"s fingers found his laser pistol. "A confession counts."
"And now you"ll tell me that the c.o.c.kpit"s system recorded it, and that the courts can use it against me." Norton smiled. "So? They have to arrest me first."
He took a step toward Flint. Flint raised the laser pistol. "Stay back."
Norton stopped. He raised his hands.
Flint stood slowly. He felt the top of the console, pressed the intercom b.u.t.ton. "Would you all come in here, please? I need help with Mr. Norton."
"They can"t do anything," Norton said. "Especially since I"ll have control of this ship by the time they get here."
"You know what I wonder?" Flint said. "How did they find you, of all people? I would have thought you would have been the hardest survivor to find."
Norton"s smile was small and chilling-one of the most chilling smiles Flint had ever seen. "It"s hard to get my revenge from the Outlying Colonies."
Flint felt a shiver as he understood the implications of that. "You"ve killed others, haven"t you?"
"Let"s just say your gun doesn"t frighten me. I"ve been in this situation before."
Flint hit the silent emergency controls on the c.o.c.kpit console. Now no one could fly the Emmeline Emmeline but him. "You planned this crisis with the Disty?" but him. "You planned this crisis with the Disty?"
Norton"s smile grew wider. "I wish I"d been that smart. This entire thing has simply been a bonus. When I"m done, the Disty will destroy Sahara Dome. And that"ll be a marvelous thing."
Then Norton lifted his right fist and opened it slowly. On his palm, a white disc rested.
"Do you know what this is?" he asked.
Flint shook his head.
"It"s my guarantee that no one saves Sahara Dome. It"s a concussion bomb."
Flint started. His system had searched Norton when he had come aboard and found nothing. Flint would have a.s.sumed that the police had searched him as well when they picked him up.
"Only at this range," Norton was saying, "you and I won"t survive it."
Flint frowned. He could have his system scan again, but if this little device avoided detection the first time, he had a hunch it wouldn"t register on the scans a second time either.
"This lovely yacht of yours won"t survive it," Norton"s smile faded. "Unless, of course, you hand me the gun."
"Why would I do that?" Flint asked.
"So that we can turn around, you and your six little friends can live, and this all ends without any bloodshed."
"Except for people on Mars." Flint said.
Norton nodded. "Except for them."
Flint"s heart was beating hard.
Norton"s thumb hovered over the disc. "Shoot me, and I will press down on this little device here. So. Wouldn"t you rather live?"
"Yes." Flint stepped away from the console and lowered his laser pistol ever so slightly. "I"d much rather live."
58.
Iona Gennefort crouched on the curb, near the pile of bodies. She felt numb, overwhelmed, and completely responsible. So many dead, just because she had allowed the trains to pa.s.s through Wells. She had had no idea that would happen; if she had, she would have stopped the trains outside the Dome, just like the other cities had.
But unlike them, she had had no examples and no guidance. The Disty hadn"t talked with her, and no one else seemed to know the intricacies of the Disty fear of death-if, indeed, fear was what it could be called.
Now she was in Wells"s Disty section with her a.s.sistant, two police officers, and the medical examiner. The claustrophobic streets, with their narrow walkways and the low rooftops from the various buildings, seemed wider without the Disty.
But it was still unusually dark here, even though the Dome lighting was in midday. And the silence was unnerving. Gennefort had been here a dozen times before, and the noise-the constant conversation, the continued rustling of various Disty going from place to place, even the scratching they called music-had been the predominant feature. After the claustrophobic streets, of course.
The medical examiner, a small man who had enhancements that left his chocolate-brown head hairless, looked even more exhausted than she felt. He stood beside her, staring at the corpses, looking defeated.
"I don"t know what they are," he said. "Or even how they died."
Gennefort leaned toward them. They were smaller than regular Disty, which made them the size of a four-year-old human child. They were thinner too, but Gennefort didn"t think that was natural; it looked to her untrained eye like they simply hadn"t been fed well.
"What killed them?" she asked.
They didn"t look trampled like the other Disty she saw. Besides, these bodies were in an orderly pile, as if someone had gathered them here.
The medical examiner picked up a small hand and showed Gennefort the palm. The ridges in the center had turned a bright blue.
She shook her head. "What"s that?"
"I field-tested it," he said. "It"s just cayenne, but to the Disty, that"s poison."
"Poison?" she asked. "This was deliberate?"
The medical examiner nodded.
"In the middle of all that panic, someone had time to poison these-what are they? Children?"
"I thought you didn"t know how they died," said Shing Eccles, Gennefort"s a.s.sistant. Eccles was a small man as well, but he was the brightest person Gennefort had ever known. If he had been with her in that control tower, she had a hunch she might have made a different decision.
"I know what they died of," the medical examiner said, "but I"m not sure how it was administered. Judging from the hands, I would guess they administered it themselves."
Gennefort felt a ripple of shock run through her. She leaned away from the hand that the medical examiner still held and looked at the body closest to her. The large eyes were open and had tiny blue lines running through the pupil. The entire face had a slight bluish tinge.
This death couldn"t have been pleasant.
"Why?" she asked.
The medical examiner shook his head. "The Disty have never let us handle their bodies here. They let the Death Squads do it, so I"ve never even worked on a dead Disty. I"ve seen some, read about the intricacies of autopsying them, but I"ve never done it myself."
"You"d think there"d been enough death around here today to make something like this impossible," Gennefort said.
Eccles sighed. "I think these are hatchlings."
Gennefort looked at him. He was staring at the pile just like she had been. "The genderless Disty. I thought they were a myth made up to startle the humans."
"Apparently not," Eccles said. "But even I"m not sure."
"It would explain a lot of things," the medical examiner said. "It would. . ."
A red cloud fell across Gennefort"s vision, and she stopped listening to the examiner. An emergency notification. She stood, wiped her hands on her pants even though she had touched nothing, and stepped into the middle of the street.
Her head brushed a nearby ledge, and she had to duck to make certain she didn"t walk into a building"s jutting corner.
She answered the notice. "What?"
The voice of another of her a.s.sistants filled her head. "The Disty have contacted us. They believe they have a way to decontaminate the Dome."
"You"re kidding," she said.
"They"ll let us know for certain in a few hours. Until then, we"re to separate Disty bodies from human corpses, and mark on some kind of map where the deaths occurred. They say it"s going to take a while, but they believe they can repair this whole thing."
"That"s great news," she said.
"Except," her a.s.sistant added, "they want us to guarantee that no graves lurk beneath our soil."
Gennefort winced. In the hours since this mess began, she had learned how the crisis started. It still didn"t make complete sense to her. She was beginning to realize how very little she had known about the Disty. It was quite a shock to her.
Before, she had always thought she understood them and did more than tolerate them, as so many other humans had.
"How can we make that guarantee?" she asked. "I"m sure Sahara Dome didn"t know about that ma.s.s grave."
"They won"t do anything until we make the guarantee," her a.s.sistant said.
Gennefort sighed. For a moment, she contemplated using imaging equipment to see what was beneath the surface of the Dome. But even if that were possible-and she wasn"t sure it was, especially as deep as Sahara Dome"s ma.s.s grave had been found-it would only work on open ground. So much of Wells was built up; there were only a few parks, and because of the Disty influence, very few open s.p.a.ces outside of the human areas.
For all she knew, there could be graves hidden beneath the buildings all over Wells. The Dome had a frontier history, as so many Domes on Mars had.
But they needed the decontamination. They needed life to return to normal. The entire Dome would die without it. No one could do business with them as things stood at the moment.
No one could even send food.
"Guarantee it," she said.
"What?" her a.s.sistant sounded shocked.
"Do your best to keep the guarantee unofficial," Gennefort said, and signed off. Then she leaned against the Disty building, and felt the flimsy structure shift ever so slightly.
She hoped this decision wouldn"t backfire on her as badly or as quickly as the last one had.
She hoped if bodies were ever discovered in the sand that provided Wells"s base, she was no longer mayor of Wells City.
In fact, she hoped she was long dead.
She never wanted to live through anything like this again.
59.