Harelips. Scabrous faces. Seal-flipper arms, like that cadet who talked to me the night Zillif died. A host of antiphotogenic physical conditions that were never seen on mainstream Technocracy worlds. Such peculiarities were what made these people expendable enough to be Explorers… and what made news directors scream, "Shut down the cameras! Turn them off now!"
From then on, Festina Ramos ceased to have "positive news value." At least in the lard-headed nicey-nice mainstream, where reality isn’t supposed to be so real it upsets people.
Personally, I didn’t see much wrong with Ramos’s face as she bent over me in that dimly lit room. Yeah, sure, she had that birthmark. But so what? If the mainstream found it so precious ghastly they couldn’t bear to look… well, this wouldn’t be the first time I’d wondered how mainstreamers came by such stunted brains. Demoth people would never react with such horror. As far as I knew, our planet had never forced anyone into becoming an Explorer: first, because we weren’t so weak-kneed as to ostracize folks who were different, and second, because there was no blessed way the Vigil would let public hospitals deny anyone the cosmetic surgery needed to fix the problem.
Not that I thought Ramos had a problem. In my eyes she looked fair presentable — attractive, going on handsome, going on a sweet sight more — and what kind of fool couldn’t see that, birthmark or no? I pegged her age at late twenties, early thirties, though YouthBoost always makes it hard to be sure. Her skin was a shade and a half browner than mine, her dark hair short and unfussy, her eyes that piercing green. An intelligent, no-nonsense face, pursed with concern as she cradled my head in her lap.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"Sure." Would have sounded more convincing if I could move my lips, my jaw or my tongue… but everything was still muzzy from the stun-blast. The word came out less like, "Sure," and more like, "Uhhhr."
"I’ll take that for a yes," Ramos said. "Next question: are you Faye Smallwood? Because if you’re some criminal or alien spy, and I just shot two men who’d arrested you legitimately… well, won’t my face be red."
I bet she used that phrase a lot. Preemptively. Mock yourself before someone else does. I ignored it, and just said, "I’m Faye." The words blurred out to I ay, but Ramos understood.
"Glad I found you," she said. "The police have been searching everywhere. They’ll be pleased to have you back." She patted my cheek with a warm hand. "Hold on a second."
Setting my head down carefully, she moved to the unconscious Muscle. It didn’t take long for her to check his breathing and pulse, then roll him into recovery position. As an afterthought, she pried the stun-pistol from his clenched fingers and slipped it into her own belt.
"Stunners are Explorer weapons," she said, turning back to me. "I hate to see one in the hands of these dipshits." She paused, then gave a soft smile. "Dipshit is a technical term — at least I’m trying to make it one. Short for diplomat. Officially, these gentlemen belong to the fleet’s Diplomacy Corps… which is mostly a cover for the High Council’s dirty-tricks brigade." She knelt beside me again. "How are you feeling now?"
I tried to say, "Great." It didn’t work, but at least a sound came out of my throat.
"Don’t worry," Ramos told me. "You only caught a light dose. Ten minutes and you’ll be ready to break more knees."
Sliding her hands under my armpits, she hiked me up and wrestled my flop-fumbly body onto her shoulder. Her strength impressed me — Demoth’s gravity might be mild, but I know how much I weigh. Ramos was almost a full head shorter than I, but she slung me into a fireman’s carry and began moving toward the door.
"Sorry we can’t wait till you recover," she said with a grunt of exertion, "but I don’t know whether there are other dipshits in the neighborhood. Best if we aren’t caught hanging around." Lifting her feet high, she stepped over the Muscle’s body. "I don’t know what the bastards would do if they nabbed us — they’d think twice about messing with an admiral, even a lowly lieutenant one — but this team hasn’t shown any scruples so far. Someday I must find out how the Admiralty trains them to the very edge of homicidal non-sentience without actually pushing them over."
If you ask me, Mouth and Muscle had crossed the line as soon as they decided to strip-mine my brain; but I knew the League of Peoples didn’t see it that way. If the dipshits (good name) sincerely made their best efforts not to kill me, the League wouldn’t raise a stink if I happened to die anyway… or if I ended up a pith-headed vegetable. After all, the League let the Vigil plant a link-seed in my skull, despite the chance of stir-frying my cerebellum. In the College Vigilant, one professor told us, The League doesn’t mind if you risk other people’s lives, as long as you honestly believe there’s some chance for survival… and as long as you take the best precautions you know of. The League’s definition of sentience doesn’t require us to be intelligent, humane or non-exploitive; we just have to be careful.
And some folks still call the League "benevolent."
Ramos lugged me out the door into a room filled with humming cabinets of the electronic persuasion — probably equipment for jamming my link-seed connection, plus hologram projectors and who knows what else. One black box looks precious like another, especially when you’re hanging upside down over somebody’s shoulder. Anyway, I was mostly paying attention to a growing queasiness in my stomach: my nervous system was still too jangly to provide accurate feedback, but I could feel the grumbly-rumblies where Ramos’s shoulder dug into my gut.
Not good. I’d never bothered with la-di-dah manners, but it wouldn’t do to puke down an admiral’s leg.
We passed through another doorway into a room with wall-to-wall picture-carpet: currently showing a velveteen view of Demoth from orbit, half daylight, half night. As Ramos walked forward, her feet brushed over a moving image of ships docking at one of our space terminals. "This is a live broadcast," she said, tapping the picture with her toe. "The dipshits have their own sloop parked near your North Terminus. This is probably the view through the ship’s nose camera. Or should I say the boat’s nose camera? I take great pride in being the only admiral who doesn’t know the difference between a ship and a boat… and who doesn’t give a flying fuck either way. I wouldn’t even know it was a sloop if my crew hadn’t told me."
She stopped herself suddenly. "I hope you don’t mind me blathering like this — Explorers are trained to give running commentaries whenever we go on missions, and I still haven’t broken myself of the habit. If I weren’t making one-sided conversation with you, I’d probably be describing the furniture." Ramos lowered her voice to a dramatic near whisper. "We are moving through what seems to be an artificial chamber, surrounded by four-legged assemblages of unconfirmed purpose and origin… perhaps of religious significance." She gave a laugh and went back to her normal voice. "Or would you prefer I tell you about the dipshits?"
"Dipshits," I said. Which came out "ick-ick." Not a bad description for the Mouth and the Muscle when you think of it.
"Dipshits it is," Ramos said. "And I was talking about their sloop… which came to my attention as soon as I arrived at Demoth two hours ago. I was flying in my so-called ‘flagship’ — which has living quarters the size of a pup tent, and the surliest crew of Vac-heads in the entire fleet. The comm officer made some sulky remarks about a Diplomacy Corps ship lollygagging here, eighteen light-years from our nearest diplomatic mission… and I immediately suspected a team of bad-ass boys had come to town.