“Take a look at these anomalies, gals.” Snow Leopard dumped a fresh load of datacards on the table. They spilled over onto the floor. Spawn had cranked it out. Her sensors and probes mapped all of Coldmark, and anything that did not compute was highlighted for human attention. There were a whole lot of things that did not compute.
“Thanks, Snow Leopard. I was wondering what to do this evening.”
“Anybody want any dox?”
I slipped another card into the screen and went back to work, mechanically, hardly thinking about it.
“Look at this.” Priestess slid her screen over to me. A view from above, a rocky field, a half-naked girl lying on her belly, stones scattered all around her. A ragged circle of Coldmarkers surrounded her. One of them had an arm back, ready to hurl another stone.
“It’s not her,” I replied. “The hair color is wrong, the…”
“I know it’s not her,” Priestess insisted. “But look at those people! Stoning! What kind of subhumans are they? How can people act like this?”
I did not answer her. I slid her screen back to her, and continued scanning my own. If they tried to do that to us, I thought, we’d burn them alive. Much more civilized than stoning.
“In my world,” Priestess said, “the strong protect the weak. In my world, you can walk in the night without fear. In my world, we worship life, and protect it. And if you’re a ConFree citizen, you need fear only the Gods. And if you’re with the Legion, you don’t even need to fear the Gods.” Priestess scanned her screen, talking as she worked. Nobody else said anything. The faint clicking of fingers on control tabs continued, and the flickering of light from the screens, and Priestess’s voice, almost hypnotic, wove a spell around us all.
I knew she came from a Legion world. People like that were different. I never set my standards that high.
“In my world, we enforce justice, not laws. In my world, people care for each other. And if you call for help, everyone comes. Everyone!” She punched another image onto her screen, her face pale, her eyes blazing.
“It all flows from the past,” Priestess said quietly. “I could shoot before I could read. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now. First things first, my father said. We had an arsenal full of weapons. Every family had an arsenal like that. We didn’t need it, but it was there. If the situation ever changed back again, to the way it used to be, somebody would have to deal with a lot of armed and angry citizens.”
“Was that a Legion world?” Warhound asked.
“Yes. It didn’t used to be. We had an elected government, once, that decided they didn’t want to step down from power. They had made our world a paradise for criminals and lawyers. Finally they tried to disarm the citizenry that had elected them. My father told me about it.”
“What happened?”
“The people stormed the capitol and the Government called out the troops. That’s what it came to in the end. The citizens against the army, on the steps of the capitol. But it was a people’s army. They refused to fire on the people, and the people stormed the capitol, and killed every last one of those treacherous political rats. Then they went after the lawyers and the judges. They killed them all. All of them. Now we’re a Legion world. Criminals and lawyers know better than to target us.” Priestess was definitely Legion. I began to realize why she had left her quiet, safe, perfect little Legion world. She would have looked up to the stars, breathing cold air, and made a vow.
“So why’d you leave?” Psycho had to ask.
Priestess hesitated. It was almost like asking why she had joined the Legion. Finally she replied. “I wanted to help. I just wanted to help.”
Psycho did not pursue it. Even he could tell that she was sincere. But Boudicca spoke up. “You are helping, Priestess. We all are. It won’t make much difference to this trash world, but it will make a difference to Valkyrie, when we find her. And we will!” She said it with such absolute, fierce conviction that she almost had me convinced.
We went back to our screens.
Chapter 15: Something Evil
“Anybody know where we are?” Nobody answered Warhound. The temperature was plummeting as night fell. Glacial winds whistled through the vast slums of Coldmark City and plastic and paper trash drifted lazily in the air. The natives shivered in threadbare cloaks and huddled around fires of burning garbage. It would snow soon, and the suffering of the people would increase.
We had no time to worry about them; we had our own problems. Four of us, bundled up in USICOM coldcoats, trotted through the back alleys of Old City, the nastiest part of Coldmark. Massive, crumbling prefabs towered all around us, peeling from age, caked in generations of accumulated dirt. The Old City was the original Coldmark. It had long ago disintegrated, and now served as the home of the most desperate elements of Coldmark’s increasingly desperate society.
“Here!” Coolhand led us. We darted into the next alley. I could barely see, and we did not dare use any lights or night vision gear. I followed Coolhand’s tall, unmistakable figure, with Warhound and Priestess just behind me. Before dropping us off, our aircar had darted through alleys so narrow, we left a trail of destruction in our wake. Overhead another Legion aircar lit up the Old Town with a sky full of deceptor bursts. We wanted to pass as USICOM types to the casual observer, so there were no comtops this time. It limited us. I felt naked.
Somewhere back there a Systie aircar had, hopefully, just lost us. In a few moments our own aircar would pop out of the other side of Old Town, and the only way for the Systies to find us would be to flood the area with troops. Somehow, I did not believe the natives would be overly cooperative with the Systies.
“Left! Here!” The street was slippery with slime and refuse. We passed another miserable group of Coldmarkers, gathered around a pitiful little fire. They all held out their hands, palms open. Three little street urchins exploded out of the group, running toward us, palms out.
“Credit-food! Credit-food! Credit-food!” An insane chant. Priestess stopped. She gaped at a shrunken, wrinkled old woman sitting by the fire, her face pinched with untreated advanced age and hunger and longing, her hand out to Priestess. Sensing weakness, the kids latched onto Priestess, seizing her legs, thrusting their open palms toward her face.
“Credit-food! Credit-food, pretty girl! Rich girl! We die from hunger, rich girl! Credit-food!”
“Move it, Priestess!” Warhound seized her by an arm, tearing her away from the kids, pulling her into the next alley. She came, running silently.
“This is it!” Coolhand paused by an open doorway in a tall, featureless building; it looked like a warehouse. The number 78 was scrawled crudely in white paint on the wall by the doorway, over a pile of fresh garbage.
Coolhand stepped into the doorway. I followed him, cautiously. I caught a movement to my right. I whipped the mini over to cover it and when my eyes adjusted to the dark I found the barrel of my handgun was hovering a few mils from the forehead of a very surprised Coldmarker. He sat on the floor against the wall, wrapped in a cloak, his empty hands exposed. He was young and had dark brown skin and glittering black eyes. He looked far too alert to suit me. Warhound and Priestess popped into the doorway.
“Apartment 2010?” I asked him, keeping the mini centered on his forehead.
“Second floor,” he gasped, pointing a trembling finger up a staircase. “To the left.”