Nanuli awoke to the realization that she was surrounded by warmth. She wiggled her fingers, relieved to find them all present and accounted for. She stretched her legs, flexed her toes. Could she be dead, in heaven? She'd thoroughly expected to lose her feet, even her hands to frostbite.
A panel over her head slid back to admit a strange greenish light. Over her stood a chestnut-haired young man in a white lab coat. "Greetings, Nanuli Akakievna." He pronounced her patronymic with the soft Russian "k" instead of the glottalized "k" of Georgian. "I am Vladilen Ivanovich."
He extended a hand to her, helped her sit up. With astonishment she realized that her hand was no longer that of an old woman, wrinkled and bony. The skin was firm under toned muscles like it hadn't since the first bloom of her youth.
"Where am I?" Her voice sounded strange in her ears, too strong and clear.
"A secret installation in the Caucasus mountains. You were in pretty bad shape when we found you, and you've been out for a few days while we got you back on the mend."
"How's Mahmood?"
"The Chechen?" Vladilen Ivanovich frowned. "The tissue damage was so extensive that he'll be regenerating for another two or three weeks. In your case, the nannites were able to repair the damaged cells, but his hands and lower legs were so far gone that gangrene had set in and we had to amputate."
"Nannites?" Comprehension sank through. "This is GalTech! What is GalTech doing here?" Surprise gave way to anger. "We were told that it was too expensive for us mountain-folk to afford."
Vladilen Ivanovich scratched at that goatee of his which made Nanuli think of Nikolai Bulganin. "It's a long story. How about you get dressed and freshened up, and we talk about it over a meal in quarters more suitable for humans."
He retreated to the door on the far side of the room, leaving her alone in this room full of equipment whose sinuous lines made her nerves uneasy. She should have welcomed the privacy for the sake of modesty, yet something in her hindbrain wailed at the loss of the one human contact in this place that Was Not Human.
It made her even more uneasy to discover that the clothes lying neatly folded beside the capsule were just her size. How had he known?
Stop worrying, she told herself. The man is a medical professional, not some kind of voyeur.
And it did feel good to change from the ragged travel clothes, even if they were no longer crusted with filth. The nannites must have cleaned them while mending her flesh, but they weren't able to reweave cloth. Even if they had, she would still have been glad to exchange the coarse camouflage pants and shirt for this outfit. She would have felt comfortable wearing it on a trip to Tbilisi, before the war, but even in this setting it didn't make her feel overdressed.
A man with taste, too.
Dressed and hair brushed, she stepped through the door. Vladilen Ivanovich looked up from a computer. A human computer, not one of those weird alien machines that made her skin twitch. Nanuli could even recognize the corporate logo on the monitor.
"Shall we go upstairs?" He extended his arm.
Together they walked through a maze of corridors and spiral ramps, all lit in that same blue-green light. Although there was some recognizably human technology, mostly computers, comm equipment and the data cables to connect them, the rest was of the same style as the stuff in the capsule room. Now and again she would glimpse short, hairy figures that put her in mind of the legendary wild men of the high mountain forests in Caucasian legend.
Indowy. One of the Galactic species. Nanuli had heard about them in those halcyon days when the Posleen invasion was a threat to prepare for, not a nightmare actuality with everything gone wrong. They were supposed to be geniuses with technology, but the peoples of the Caucasus certainly hadn't seen much in the way of that technology these Indowy were supposed to be making to defend humanity.
"They're very shy around humans," Vladilen Ivanovich explained when she asked. "Only a few of them can actually work in close contact with us, although this clan seems to do better than those I worked with in Stalingrad before it fell." There was a catch in his voice.
Nanuli noted his choice of name for that city -- not the meaningless "Volgograd," but "Stalingrad". Although there had been motions to return it to that name, nothing had come of them before the Posleen invasion had made them a historical footnote.
They climbed a set of metal stairs -- how good it felt to be able to climb them briskly -- and opened a door. The unearthly blue light gave way to proper white, although from no visible bulbs or florescent tubes. It was as though the ceilings themselves glowed with light the color of a sunny day. Nanuli relaxed and only then did she realize just how tense she'd become.
The rooms were handsomely furnished, although clearly to a Russian taste rather than Georgian. Beyond the front room lay a dining room with a table already set. The luxury was a bit unnerving -- to have so much food before her, to be able to eat her fill and not have to worry about taking more than her share, or going hungry later.
Vladilen Ivanovich helped her to a seat. "My apologies for the poor fare. Vegetables and fruits are easy enough since the Indowy set up a hydroponic garden as part of the waste reclamation system, but meat is a serious problem. The salvagees cannot be relied upon to prepare anything fit to eat, and because of taboos the Indowy will not even handle meat for someone else's table, or tend animals destined for slaughter. I've had them even take offense over mushrooms."
"Mushrooms?" Nanuli frowned, trying to imagine why. Especially since those taboos clearly did not extend to cheese, not with a khachapuri, a Georgian cheese pie, right in front of her.
"Near as I understand, it's cytological. Mushrooms have no cell walls, so they would seem closer to animal tissue. Yet another reason to suspect that Indowy vegetarianism is a cultural taboo. Their dentition and jaw structure more typical of an omnivore than an obligate herbivore like a sheep or a horse, but you'll get to see that for yourself as the installation's medical officer."
Nanuli hardly heard his lecture about comparative biology and his theories about the various Galactic species, of how the Darhel had to be carnivores because of their sharp teeth and lack of cheeks, of the dozen reasons why the Posleen had to be a biological weapon designed for some forgotten war and run wild to destroy everything. Her mind was busy gnawing at how Mahmood would respond to her new assignment when he got out of regen. This was hardly the place or the time for her to tell her host that she had obligations elsewhere. Yet the longer she left Vladilen Ivanovich thinking that she had no other claims on her, the worse the news would sound when it came out.
And come out it would, Nanuli knew for a certainty. The food sat sour on her stomach, and even the bottle of Georgian wine, a fine red Khvanchkara, couldn't entirely raise her spirits. She should have welcomed it, after having nothing since the fall of Gori but the fiery moonshine vodka of Upper Svaneti.
I should be happy. I'm safe, in comfortable surroundings and being wined and dined by an intelligent, articulate man. All my infirmities have been healed and I have a challenging job ahead of me.
She decided it was grief, the backlog of loss that she'd had no time to mourn in the weeks and months when the necessities of survival had consumed all her energy. Even in the highest fastness of Upper Svaneti, in Ushguli and Kala where the Posleen rarely braved the treacherous mountain trails, she had been continually busy tending the various hurts and illnesses of the people who had extended their hospitality to her. Now for the first time since the fall of Gori, no pressing needs demanded her attention.
But mourning would have to be delayed a little longer yet, since Vladilen Ivanovich had one more thing to do when dinner was finished. "I'd like to show you around our facilities, so that you'll have a better sense of where to go if we have trouble. And it will give you a chance to meet at least some of the senior members of Clan Tk'shvi." He gave her a wry smile. "I think you'll find it somewhat easier to pronounce Indowy names than I have. The consonant clusters do seem more like those of Georgian than Russian."
"No doubt." Why did that assumption irritate her?
Vladilen Ivanovich led the way through the rest of the human residential quarters. "Your personal quarters will be in the wing over there. I had Khalool's team outfit it for you, but if you find anything not to your tastes, don't hesitate to ring him up. He speaks and reads Russian, and his pagecode on the facility LAN is KhL922. By the way, Khalool is actually what they call a transfer-neuter, rather than a true male, but the first Russians to work with Indowy agreed that giving transfer-neuters honorary masculine grammar was more acceptable than the possible offensive connotations of using the neuter gender to refer to a sophant."
Nanuli nodded dutifully and tucked it away for future reference. Grammatical gender had always been one of the more difficult parts of Russian to keep track of, since Georgian had no such system, just a single third-person-singular pronoun doing duty for he, she and it. And none of the agreement of adjective and noun for gender, or gendered forms for the past tense of a verb, all of which she always had to make a special effort to remember when speaking Russian.
They descended several levels, past rows of doors, most closed but a few opening onto workshops and laboratories. There were more than a few bullet holes in the walls. The few people she saw were crouched and furtive, and they appeared to be dressed in rags. Their movements reminded her of those half-seen movements on the higher mountain trails, when she had thought they were being followed by locals but Mahmood had forbidden her to try to contact them.
"What is wrong with those people?"
Vladilen Ivanovich shook his head. "A lot of the salvagees are pretty badly damaged, even after they've been through the regen tank with my special mods. But I'm so desperate for fighters that I program them as best I can and send them out to patrol the trails and harass the poski. Most of them have pretty severe control problems, so I have to keep them away from the Indowy. I can't afford an attack and a panic, especially not while I need every Indowy technician I can spare on cracking that fabricator we captured from the Posleen."
"We?"
"Actually the last of the mafiosi who set this place up and smuggled the Indowy in here. Chechens, a treacherous lot but damned good mountain warriors when they aren't busy sticking people up. How they got that thing away from the centaurs and up here, I can't speculate, but it's here. From what they let slip before they fell out and started fighting among themselves, I think it makes those railguns the poski use."
Nanuli nodded. Memories returned unbidden of the horrors of the flight from Gori, of the Georgian Army trying to hold the lines with Soviet-made T-72 tanks, only to have them ripped apart like so many tin cans.
But she could also see the possibilities. "If you could get it to make them on a human scale, we could arm the entire Caucasus. Ship them up to Forward Firebase Grozny, instead of worn-out AK's and reloaded ammunition."
She had not expected Vladilen Ivanovich's expression to darken so quickly. "And reveal ourselves to the poski? Or worse yet, the Darhel? They'd love nothing more than to discover survivors of an Indowy clan reported as exterminated to the last soul. It's risky enough sending the salvagees out to patrol the high trails and set ambushes for the poski, without advertising ourselves far and wide."
Nanuli flushed with embarrassment, averted her eyes. What had possessed her, to go babbling with enthusiasm when she knew almost nothing about the subject? She was a mature woman, a professional, not an adolescent.
Vladilen Ivanovich made no further comment, just led her on down until the white lighting gave way to that eye-twisting blue-green glow. Strange odors wafted through the ventilation system, some spicy, some oily and others unidentifiable except as alien. Still she got no more than glimpses of the Indowy, many of them ducking out of sight behind equipment as the humans passed. Yet it was enough to give her an impression of vast numbers, even hundreds. All the time Vladilen Ivanovich talked about the grid scheme by which each corridor, each workshop, each residential block and refectory could be located so that she could respond to calls rapidly.
And then she got her first face-to-face meeting with an Indowy. It was in a sparsely-furnished room that Nanuli immediately decided had to be an office, although she could not say exactly about the place gave her that impression.
More interesting was the Indowy himself. At first glance he looked like nothing more than a tubby child, just short of puberty. But the greenish fur that covered his body recalled the legends of the wild folk of the high mountains, while a closer look at his batlike face made Nanuli's stomach clench. Yet those wide eyes took her full-circle, right back to the impression that she was dealing with a goggle-eyed child. Like her grandchildren, or little Soselo.
Vladilen Ivanovich inclined his torso in a half-bow, almost Japanese. "I see you, Clan Chief Dgvei."
The Indowy responded in accented Russian, albeit in a pitch high enough to reinforce that impression of a young child, however it clashed with the being's grave manner. "I see you, Academician Vladilen Ivanovich."
Galactic protocol satisfied, Vladilen Ivanovich introduced Nanuli and explained her new role. It bothered Nanuli to hear him describing her as a permanent addition to the staff. Yet she couldn't find a way to inject a clarification without sounding like she were contradicting him, and from what little she knew of protocol-riddled Galactic society, she suspected that would not do well for either human's standing in the eyes of the Indowy.
And all of us depend on their technical skills to keep this place going.
The Indowy clan chief responded with a lengthy greeting in very formal Russian, the sort that hadn't seen use since the fall of the Romanov tsars. Some of those words Nanuli hadn't even seen used in pre-Revolutionary Russian literature, and had to guess their meanings from their context. However, most of it seemed to be ceremonial, so she merely needed to nod and smile. Vladilen Ivanovich had warned that the Indowy considered it crude in the extreme to display one's teeth, so she carefully kept her lips sealed.
She'd been ready to write off the promises of co-operation as simply more ceremony, until the little alien led the way out of his office. Even what little Nanuli knew of Galactic society was enough to tell her that this was a significant honor.
The sight of their leader accompanying the humans must have given the Indowy courage, for they no longer ducked behind cover, although many of them trembled with visible fear and more than a few averted or even closed their eyes. Still, enough remained at their workbenches, mending human devices or operating alien equipment, that she was put in mind of a children's TV show she'd watched with her grandchildren, back in Soviet days, of Grandfather Frost's workshops at the North Pole where cheerful little magic folk made toys to give all the good boys and girls of the world on New Year's Day.
She decided to risk an inquiry, gestured to some of the most incomprehensible machinery. "Are some of those devices the GalTech manufacturing systems we were told about?"
"Unfortunately we are able to produce only the simplest of Galactic technology." The clan leader's thin voice quavered in regret. "Although we were able to preserve enough of our tools, many of our finest dashon mentats and sohon masters perished on Diess, and it will take years to train their replacements. Perhaps even generations."
There was nothing for Nanuli to do but nod politely, make some generic condolence for their losses. She intuited that asking for an explanation would only lead to an infinite regression of such questions. It was at best tangential to her duties, and might well impinge upon matters proprietary to the clan.
The tour continued through several more levels of workshops and living quarters. Although much of the decor was clearly Indowy work, Nanuli couldn't miss the occasional sign of earlier human work, in particular the hammer-and-sickle emblems high up on some of the support pillars.
When they went down the last level, Nanuli fully expected yet another maze of workshops. Instead they opened the metal doors to reveal an enormous expanse of enclosed area, so big that the hordes of Indowy scurrying around on the floor beneath the catwalk looked like so many tiny green ants. Maybe the chamber had been a gymnasium at one time, or a motor pool, given the big sliding door on the far wall. Whatever, it now had become an enormous workshop, filled with a mixture of the sinuous Indowy equipment and boxy human computers, all centered upon the lumpy piece of machinery in the middle, big and bulky as a T-72 but nothing so comprehensible.
"The Posleen fabricator?"
"Exactly." Vladilen Ivanovich beamed, only at the last minute remembering he was in the presence of the Indowy clan chief and closing his lips over that toothy grin. "We have over half the surviving members of Clan Tk'shvi working on it, including all the senior technical experts. For the most part trying to crack the control systems and get it to respond to our commands. Once we do that, it'll be just a matter of providing the proper chemical feedstocks and we'll be able to turn out all the guns and ammunition we want. Maybe even be able to modify it to turn out other things of more immediate use, although Mk'orktei's team suspects that will require completely recoding the computers from the ground up."
There was nothing for Nanuli to do but nod and make agreeable noises of appreciation. For certain nothing in her background gave her the wherewithal to understand what they were talking about.
The tour completed, Vladilen Ivanovich escorted her back up to the human living quarters at the top of the complex. As he took her to the door of her private apartment, he pressed a bottle of vodka in her hand.
"I think you'll need this."
Nanuli spent the next day crying her eyes out and drinking. But once she had all those months of stored-up grief washed out of her system, she settled into her new role and the routine that went with it. Other than meals, during which they chatted about various oddities of Galactic civilization, Nanuli saw very little of Vladilen Ivanovich. He responded to questions about his work with convoluted technical jargon and made it plain that she was not welcome in his private labs.
He had his research projects, and she had her medical responsibilities. She set her first priority as learning Indowy physiology and medicine. That proved harder than she'd anticipated because whoever had translated the source documents into Russian had clearly been neither a native speaker nor trained in the field. She doubted that asking for a translation into her native Georgian would produce anything more useful.
Some things were easy enough; for instance, the digestive tract was almost elegant in its human-like simplicity, with none of the various enlarged pouches and complications one saw in animals like sheep or horses. But other things were bewilderingly different, if the translation could be trusted. For instance, a single large organ just under the stomach seemed to do double-duty for both liver and pancreas, although their equivalent of the Islets of Langerhans appeared to be part of a gland that otherwise corresponded to the adrenal but was located at the base of the spine instead of being paired and over the kidneys. A small sac on the bottom of the "livancreas" which she first took to be the gall bladder revealed itself to be their spleen-equivalent, once she realized that Indowy blood was green and used a chemical completely unlike hemoglobin for oxygen transport.
Fortunately she had almost no Indowy patients. Earthly diseases could find no hold on their metabolism, and their manufacturing processes, unlike those of Soviet and post-Soviet factories, created few industrial accidents. What few incidental injuries she saw, mostly scrapes and bruises from excessive haste in getting to and from workplaces, she was able to treat quickly according to the electronic "cheat sheet" that came with the multi-species diagnostic device included in the Indowy-made medkit she was given to replace the ruins of her own.
Not so the salvagees, who provided her with most of her work. Almost every day one or more of them would come back from patrol with injuries serious enough to require attention, but not enough for another trip to one of Vladilen Ivanovich's modified regen capsules. If the weather was too bad for them to go outside on patrol-and-harass missions, she could count on them to fight among themselves, which was almost worse.
She had been there almost two weeks when the emergency call came. She was studying at the time, or attempting to. A chance remark in the reproductive section of the Indowy physiology manual had led her to track down some references on Galactic law relating to Indowy inheritance procedures, a course of action that might have provided a welcome distraction but instead only led to further frustration. She set aside the bound flimsies and hurried down to the salvagees' levels, fully expecting to have to break up a fight.
A crack of gunfire carried through the closed doors, and Nanuli flinched. Vladilen Ivanovich had said that he conditioned even the most severely damaged salvagees so that they wouldn't shoot at each other, even if he couldn't keep them from going at it with teeth and fingernails. Was his programming coming unglued and those wrecks reverting to bestial madness?
She walked into the room to find a Posleen lying in the middle of the floor, its head blown almost clear off its neck. A feral from the lack of any gear harness, but that wouldn't make it any less deadly, particularly when facing an enemy with not much more wit. The remains of two salvagees lay beside it, probably beyond even Vladilen Ivanovich's skills from the way their whole torsos had literally been torn open by the Posleen's claws. The rest huddled in small groups, whining and gabbling in broken Russian.
"What the hell happened here?" Nanuli strode across the room to face the most intelligent-looking salvagee, one who actually could eat with a spoon and was almost fit for polite company.
"Boss want poska, us bring poska." The poor creature looked at the dead Posleen, then to his fellows. "Poska look dead, then it wake up, tear up everybody."
Nanuli knew better than even bother to ask them why in God's name Vladilen Ivanovich would order them to capture a Posleen, even a dead one, and bring it inside the compound. No, she'd need to ask the man himself. She ordered the salvagee to bring the Boss up. In the meantime, she had patients to tend, those who'd just taken superficial bites and clawings she could disinfect and cover with dressings.
Five minutes later Vladilen Ivanovich burst into the room, red-faced and scowling. Before he could even say a word, she glared directly at him. "This is quite a mess you've made here, ordering these poor lost souls to bring in a Posleen for some hare-brained project of yours. They thought they'd killed it, but the damned thing must've only been stunned, because it came back around and killed two of them."
Vladilen Ivanovich spread his hands in a protestation of innocence. "They had directions on how to kill it to cause minimal damage--"
"And of course the instructions were probably too complicated for them to understand and carry out." Nanuli rested a hand on the shoulder of the salvagee whose wounds she had just finished spraying with quick-heal. "What do you need a Posleen corpse for, anyway?"
"A long-term project of mine." Vladilen Ivanovich gestured for the salvagees to gather up the remains of both the Posleen and their slaughtered fellows.
Although Nanuli had doubts about her ability to follow his technical jargon, she refused to let him dodge the question. "Just what kind of long-term project are you up to?"
"You are aware that the Posleen are resistant to every known poison and chemical agent."
"Of course I am." Nanuli had to restrain the urge to snap the words out. "I am from Gori, in case you've forgotten. When First Army was routed at Mtskheti, north of Tbilisi, they threw everything in the Soviet-legacy chemical stockpile at them. If Moscow had left us Georgians any nukes, they would've used those too. I suppose you think that you can come up with something that everyone else has overlooked, Academician Biochemical Genius with Three Doctorates and 200-plus IQ?"
No sooner than she'd said those words, she regretted them. This was no way to speak to one's host, and Vladilen Ivanovich had never boasted about his degrees or his ability to max out every intelligence test known to humanity, just joked ruefully about them one evening over too much vodka after he'd had a truly frustrating series of failed experiments.
When Vladilen Ivanovich did speak, there was no anger in his voice, only old pain. "No, no, Nanuli Akakievna. Not at all. My daughter was four years old when she found a can of drain cleaner under the kitchen sink. We gave her everything Soviet medicine could do, but it was too late. I swore that I would find some way to make sure that nobody else's little girl would have to die that way. When I discovered that the Posleen had been genetically engineered to be resistant to every known poison, I knew that I had to find their secret and give it to humanity." His eyes glowed with the excitement of the prophet in the rapture of a messianic vision.
"Are you sure that's wise?" Nanuli moistened her lips, considered how to phrase her objection in a language not her own. "What if the change were to make us into ravening conquerors like them? We could gain life to lose our very souls."
Vladilen Ivanovich gave her a smile that came far too close to patronization for Nanuli's comfort. "I'm quite sure that the gene complex for poison resistance can be separated from the ones that drive their aggression."
"And in the meantime you've killed two innocent men--"
"Not at all, Nanuli Akakievna. I'm already taking them down to the regen lab. With my latest mods on the system, that poska would've had to eat them to keep me from bringing them back."
"But they're dead--"
"Oh, the Crabs would have a hissy-fit if they knew I'd figured out how to change the parameters to override their lockouts and restart biological systems, but they're a squeamish bunch who'd be Posleen fodder right now if it weren't for our soldiers holding the line for them. Too good to fight, but not too good to die." Vladilen Ivanovich curled his lip in disdain.
Nanuli nodded, unable to put words to her unease. How many times had she heard someone in the depths of remorse say, "I'd do anything to bring them back"? For Vladilen Ivanovich it wasn't a figure of speech, but a technological problem to be solved. Only should it be solved, or was death still a misfortune that should be meekly accepted once it did overtake a person?
They were now arriving at the chamber in which the regen/rejuve capsules were located. The salvagees laid their fallen fellows into the two empty ones. On the far wall, the third hummed away, continuing its work on Mahmood Dudayev's extensive frostbite injuries.
Or so Vladilen Ivanovich had told her. Nanuli watched closely as the master bioengineer tapped commands into the special control consoles he'd had the Indowy rig for the capsules. When he wasn't looking, she compared them to the ones showing on Mahmood's.
Only when they were safely outside that room, clear of the range over which the Darhel-made AIDs incorporated into the capsules could pick up her voice, did she confront Vladilen Ivanovich.
"What are you doing to Mahmood?"
"As I told you before, he had far more extensive frostbite damage--"
"I saw the program you have in that thing. You're giving him the same mind-control programming you've given the salvagees. You told me it was just to replace function lost to brain damage, not frostbite."
"Do you think I want an al-Qaeda fighter running around loose here?" When Nanuli gave him a blank look of incomprehension, Vladilen Ivanovich continued in the slow, careful tones of a parent speaking to an upset child. "Those men are not only trained in every form of unconventional warfare. They are also religious fanatics who consider us to be only slightly less dangerous than the Posleen, and thus lower on their priorities for destruction. They were planning a major terrorist attack on the Americans for September of '01, and only shelved it because the Galactics showed up. I endured far too much from those Chechen gangsters, and I do not intend to relive that nightmare as long as I have the power to prevent it."
"Then why didn't you use your nasty little modifications to debase me as well?"
He rested a hand on her shoulder in a patronizing gesture. "Nanuli Akakievna, they are not 'nasty,' but a work in progress. Eventually I hope to have a completely selective process in which I can restore full function no matter how extensive the damage, or impose controls to remove objectionable elements such as religious fanaticism. In the meantime, even if your personality profile hadn't been completely oriented to saving life, I needed your complex skills unimpaired--"
"More than you need a competent fighter who might actually be able to organize your debased horde into a real combat force, instead of a pack of orc-wannabes?" How could Nanuli explain the transformation she'd watched Mahmood undergo as they'd fled along the trails, or the Chechen tradition of hospitality hardly less strong than that of the Georgians?
Vladilen Ivanovich stood stiff and unmoved, his pale blue eyes cold as the heart of a high-mountain glacier. Nanuli could tell that his resolution was born not of pride, or even the fear of having lived with cutthroat Chechen mafiosi, but from the pain of having lost first his youngest son, and then his wife, to the Chechen rebellions and terrorism of the 1990's. Mere words would not move him, but there might be other possibilities.
Nanuli had steadily ignored or deliberately misunderstood Vladilen Ivanovich's various attempts to hit on her, the sly little passes and double entendres. Not that she was frigid, for she had enjoyed many years of marital bliss, but she no more intended to betray Irakli now that he was dead than she would have during his lifetime. But with the humanity of a man she owed her life hanging in the balance...
The shower was set as hot as Nanuli dared without scalding herself. She'd scrubbed herself from head to toe three times already, and if she scrubbed much more certain places were going to end up raw. Yet she still couldn't get his touch off her.
No, it was not the memory of his touch, she decided as she toweled herself off and wrapped herself in a bathrobe. It was shame, the sense that she had made a whore of herself. She told herself that she'd given herself to Vladilen Ivanovich only to repay her life-debt to Mahmood, but she couldn't shake the sense that she was rationalizing.
She stalked through the rooms of her private apartment, searching through the papers and general clutter that had built up over the past weeks. Behind a row of books she found what she had been looking for. There was not much vodka left, but it would be enough to wash the memories out of her mind.
Vladilen Ivanovich kept his promise; Mahmood emerged from the regen capsule two days later, standing straight and tall as a man, not a debased salvagee. Nanuli considered telling the Chechen of the Russian's original plans, but the words stuck in her throat.
Perhaps he still suspected, for he set to finishing his rehabilitation with a fierceness that worried Nanuli. He refused to join her and Vladilen Ivanovich for meals, preferring to fix his own meals according to his religion's purity laws. He insisted upon creating a firing range on one of the human levels, ostensibly to train some fire discipline into the salvagees and get them to stop accidentally shooting each other on patrol. When he pulled Nanuli in as well, she knew he had other plans.
She met his summons with the same gentle but firm insistence she had used on the trail. "I am a doctor, sworn to save lives, not take them."
This time he was adamant. "I'm not asking you to kill people, just the centaurs."
Nanuli started to argue, then realized the question of Posleen personhood was fundamentally a religious issue, and they'd agreed not to discuss religious matters so long as the survival of all the Caucasian peoples depended upon Christian and Muslim working together. Anyway, if she balked, he could always throw at her the fact that she'd joined him in eating that Posleen in the snowstorm. If Posleen were people rather than monsters, she would be as guilty of cannibalism as if she had eaten human flesh.
Still, the marksmanship lessons did have the advantage of getting her out of the residential area and away from Vladilen Ivanovich. He was bringing work up to the common area, lingering around in hopes of encountering her. She could hardly speak to the man without it turning into an argument, especially now that he'd taken to addressing her by the familiar ty rather than the formal vy. How long would she have to refuse to reciprocate before he figured out that she was not going to become his permanent mistress?
Not that Mahmood was getting along with him any better. Every day brought a fresh quarrel, especially after Mahmood discovered their growing successes with the fabricator. They'd nearly come to blows over the question of establishing arms shipments to the holdouts at Grozny.
That's the only thing that keeps him here, Nanuli realized one day during a particularly loud and angry shouting match, something about a radio transmission to Grozny about the railgun fabricator and how it could have been intercepted by Posleen. He wants take a shipment of weapons to replace the ones we lost with the rest of the caravan, and he's not going to take off as long as there's a possibility of getting it.
The door banged open and the Chechen stalked through, his whole body bristling with fury. "This has gone far enough."
He shoved a set of camo into her hand. "Put this on. We're getting out of here."
Nanuli stared at him. "What?"
"You sure as hell can't travel overland in that outfit." He jabbed a finger at her skirt and stylish pumps. "And we are not staying one more day under that man's roof. That is final. So get changed, now."
Such was the authority in his command voice that Nanuli started unbuttoning her blouse before she even realized that he didn't mean she had to do it on the spot. She ducked into the privacy of a sheltered alcove and finished changing.
Mahmood had already selected weapons and appropriate ammunition. "Now that he's rejuved you, you can carry a full load as well as your medkit."
Nanuli whuffed at the burden, but her strength held. "Why now? The salvagees are saying the Posleen are on the move again."
"For starters, how much Galactic law do you know?"
Nanuli shrugged. "I've read a little."
"Try this. There are some very specific Galactic laws establishing Earth as a human-only reserve, and prohibiting any Indowy settlement, on pain of death. Individual technicians and small teams are granted temporary visas to perform specific duties that cannot be accomplished by humans, but no long-term settlements and absolutely no reproductively complete groups. Both stipulations are being flagrantly violated here, in case you haven't noticed in spite of having attended a birth."
At the memory of helping the female craftsman give birth to one after another tiny infant, each no bigger than a kitten, Nanuli flinched. "But the Galactics can't kill. That's why they need us--"
"Exactly. And any organized human force that knows and refuses to stand everyone in this compound against the wall is in breach of Galactic law."
"But we didn't bring the Indowy here, the mafiya did--"
"Doesn't matter. As long as we're here, we're guilty. And you can't get a sharp lawyer to talk your way around Galactic law the way you might be able to talk a medical review board out of revoking your license for aiding and abetting unethical medical experiments by whining that you didn't know what he was doing."
"The salvagees? Most of them would be dead without his techniques."
"His blasphemies, you mean. Life is for Allah alone to bestow, and those who presume upon His will can only produce abomination. And yes, I know how you spared me from that man's meddling, for which I owe you my life. But he's making monsters, bestial cannibals. That's why we never found any settlements on the way up here. The damned salvagees hunted everyone down and ate them, when they weren't hunting and eating Posleen. That's what happened to whoever it was we buried, right before the snowstorm. They only do it when they're on patrol, but that Russian has to know what they're up to."
"Oh my God." Nanuli's voice was a tiny squeak in her own ears.
By that point they were almost to the back exit. Nanuli hated it, since the only way to get to it was by crossing a slender catwalk suspended over the main environmental plant. She dreaded looking down at the huge tanks in which sludge was separated and the nutrients fed into the hydroponics tanks, while heavy metals were recovered to become feedstocks for Indowy manufacturing. Even if the hundred-meter fall didn't kill a person, they'd drown or be poisoned before the Indowy technicians could pull them out.
"Just hold it right there." Vladilen Ivanovich stalked across the catwalk, a Nagan auto-pistol in hand.
Mahmood held his ground. "We know what you're doing, Academician Voronsky. And we know why the Crabs sent you back in disgrace from America."
Voronsky? Nanuli blinked, recalling the photographs of a portly man with wispy white hair, hiding behind his hat as he hurried to the plane, escorted by US federal agents. But she'd known that Vladilen Ivanovich had to be a rejuvie, had to be older than herself, just by little things he'd said here and there during the past month.
Vladilen Ivanovich clicked off the safety, pointed the pistol directly at them. "You're not going anywhere, either of you."
Nanuli's gut clenched. He wouldn't even have to destroy them, just wound them badly enough to turn them into two more debased salvagees.
"Honored Academician!" The Indowy's cry was at the very limit of human hearing, and loud enough to make ears hurt even over the constant rumble of the equipment below.
Vladilen Ivanovich hesitated, turned. "What is it?"
"The stone fill barrier has been breached and the Posleen are invading the fabricator laboratory. There are thousands of them, coming as fast as they can get through the door."
Nanuli recalled the size of that door. Not a good situation.
"Son of a bitch!" Vladilen Ivanovich howled in fury. "You betrayed me!" He raised the pistol, squeezed the trigger. The pistol barked, accompaniment for his near-incoherent epithets against Chechens.
A stream of blood burst forth from Mahmood's chest, followed moments later by another. At the third he fell backwards against the slender wire railing of the catwalk, overbalanced and tumbled off toward the huge sludge tank below.
"You killed him!" Nanuli didn't even remember raising the AK. It was over before she even realized she'd pulled the trigger.
She landed one round in his chest, near the shoulder. The rest went wild, the barrel of her weapon drawn upward by the force of her earlier shots. He fell like a rag doll, crimson spreading across the white of his lab coat.
Then the clip was spent and she stood staring at the result of her handiwork. This was no alien Posleen she had just killed, but a human being, whatever his crimes. What sort of doctor was she, to slaughter him like that?
But there was no time to contemplate, for already the doors below were buckling, giving way to admit a stream of yellow centaurs, their knives out and flashing as they butchered their game. Terrified Indowy scrambled across the floor, up ladders set in the walls in hope of getting to some meager safety, at least until the Posleen made their way to the upper levels in other parts of the complex.
Nanuli knew what she had to do. "This way!" She gestured with the AK in her hand to the door on the far side of the catwalk.
The first few hesitated at the bloodstained body, but the sight of the Posleen streaming in from every direction gave them decision. These were Indowy who had survived the slaughter of over 99% of their clan on Diess and knew what would happen if they hesitated. They scrambled over Vladilen Ivanovich, heedless of the red smears that now decorated their fur.
Nanuli threw open the door, flung herself to one side as the Indowy stampeded into the tunnel, dozens, even hundreds of them. How many she couldn't even begin to guess.
And as quickly as it had begun, the flood trickled off. Already the Posleen were pouring across the entire room, grabbing at the ladders and shaking them to knock loose the last few Indowy desperately fleeing for the marginal safety of the escape route. A few more intelligent Posleen actually tried to scramble up the ladders, gripping the rungs with all four taloned feet. However the ladders were no Indowy construction, but human work from when this was a Soviet military installation, and the bolts pulled right out of the rock under their weight, sending them crashing down onto their fellows.
Some of the salvagees must have been fighting as well, because Nanuli could hear gunfire, both human-made AK's and Posleen weapons. Here and there they must have hit important equipment, for there were the sharp thuds of explosions.
Not a bad idea. Nanuli grabbed a grenade from the satchel Mahmood had given her, armed it and flung it in the direction of one of the big sludge tanks. Hoping the explosion would slow the Posleen from figuring out how to get up to the catwalk, she plunged into the tunnel and hauled the door closed behind her.
Nothing to do but run. There was an enormous *whud* behind her, then the bangs and cracks of secondary explosions. She was almost to the top when there was a particularly large one. She felt heat on her back and looked over her shoulder just in time to see a ball of orange cloud come rushing toward her. She was certain that this was her last mortal moment when instead the cloud of flame halted, replaced by a fountain of dust and a wind that lifted her from her feet to fling her the rest of the way out to land in the snow beyond the opening.
"The tunnel has collapsed behind us." The Indowy spoke in a matter-of-fact voice, the tone one might use to say that it was raining.
As Stalin hovered between life and death, incapacitated by a stroke, the members of his Politburo gathered around his deathbed. Many of them spoke respectfully, even pleadingly, to this man they'd served and dreaded and adored. But Beria openly sneered at the fallen tyrant, mocking him in front of the others. Only when Stalin opened his eyes would Beria resume the posture of the fawning sycophant.
As his life trickled away, Stalin's breathing grew steadily more labored, as though he were choking. His eyes opened one last time, yellow with fury, and glared at those around him. Summoning the remainder of his strength, he raised his left arm to point in wordless imprecation, and took one last strangled breath before his spirit tore free of his mortal flesh.
No sooner than the dictator's body had begun to cool, Beria called for his car and hurried back to the Kremlin, leaving the other senior government officials standing in bewilderment.