bit conspicuous.
'I could have gotten her easy,' Jack Farmer groused.
He was a thirty-something hard case with cropped blond hair and a snub nose, and Harvey didn't like him.
He's trustworthy, and he's good at what he does. I just don't like him, because he's a son of a bitch. I suppose his mother loved him. Before he learned to talk, at least.
His partner was a woman named Anjali Guha, South Asian dark, athletic, and, in Harvey's opinion considerably smarter. Or at least less driven and obsessed, which was more important than sheer IQ. Your mind could do only what your emotions let it. Character was more important than the size of your vocabulary every time.
'The plan is to use her to get a chance at a lot more of them,' Harvey said patiently. 'We did use her…and through her, Adrienne Breze…to get Hajime.'
'She and her husband stepped into her grandfather's shoes,' Farmer said. 'Does that mean we used her, or she used us?'
Guha gave him a barbed glance. 'That's a distinction without a difference, Jack,' she said sharply. 'We got Adrienne Breze too, who is, was, a bigger fish.'
'Ellen Tarnowski got her,' Harvey pointed out, which made them both pout a little at being outclassed by an amateur.
'And anyway,' Guha went on, 'if you'd really intended to kill her, something would probably have happened to stop it. You'd have had a stroke, or a wasp would have stung you just as you were squeezing the trigger, or some tourists would have tripped over you, or you'd have been assaulted by a wild sheep that suddenly decided it was an arse-bandit queer for humans. You know how that works, yes, indeed, you do.'
'Yeah,' he said, half snarling with frustration. 'But I just want to exterminate them.'
Harvey sighed. 'You're around thirty on the scale, aren't you?'
The Alberman Scale ran from fully human at zero to absolute purebred Shadowspawn at a hundred; there were around a hundred and thirty-seven genes involved, mostly recessives. Professor Alberman had developed the scale and the automatic DNA sequencing test for the Council of Shadows, but both sides used it.
The Brotherhood operative was tanned, but he could still flush; thirty was more than twice the average in the general population. It took twenty-five or higher to use the Power consciously, not just have premonitions or the occasional tweaking of probabilities. Harvey was a twenty-seven.
'Yeah, I am. Your point?'
The point is that I keep having to remind you of things, Harvey thought. That's the problem with talking politics – which this is, down and dirty. People have to be continually mentally reinforced if you want them to absorb knowledge that contradicts what they want to hear; otherwise it just sort of slip-slides away, gets blurred down to the noise level of their viewpoint. It's a pain in the ass.
It wasn't an accident that Harvey was known as the Brotherhood's loose cannon.
'The point is that you'd have to exterminate the human race to get rid of the Shadowspawn genes,' Harvey went on patiently. 'Startin' with the ones like…oh, the three of us. Humans're too mixed; hell, being a stable Shadowspawn-human mix probably defines us as a species and has for twenty thousand years. If the bad guys hadn't spread their genes around during the Empire of Shadow, humans…mostly humans…probably wouldn't have been able to overthrow them in the first place. Why do you think we're the only surviving type of hominid? I suspect it's because they preferred fucking us to Neanderthals or the rest.'
I need to keep Farmer on-side. On the other hand, he's not stupid, exactly. He just filters out things that don't fit the story as he'd prefer it. Shit, that just makes him human. For that matter, Shadowspawn do that too.
'In fact,' he went on, 'if we weren't mixed, we'd probably be sitting around in caves splitting mammoth bones for the marrow and eating the lice out of one another's hair. Notice when civilization started?'
'When we overthrew them!'
'Yeah, which was just about the same time they finished diluting themselves until it was pretty hard to know who was them and who was us. A lot of the first pharaohs and kings and high priests and whatnot had a lot of Shadowspawn blood, judging from the way they acted. And if the Council Shadowspawn weren't mixed, they'd be less of a problem-they wouldn't be able to cooperate or care about long-term group interests even as much as they do.'
'We can kill all the purebred ones,' Farmer said stubbornly; he had the ghost of a Midwestern accent under the California. 'There aren't more than a few thousand of them. The ones in the Council clans, in their breeding program.'
Guha snorted as she snapped the last of the latches on the battered rifle case.
'Jack, back in Victorian times you would have been a purebred. Most of the original Order of the Black Dawn weren't any stronger than you when they discovered Mendel and Darwin and started to use the Power to reconcentrate the heritage. They let in anyone who could lift and turn a feather then. And even if we did get rid of the ones who think of themselves as Shadowspawn, the whole thing might happen again. The genes themselves are lucky. They want to recombine and they'd still be there.'
'Sort of like the One Ring,' Guha put in.
'Yeah, all we have to do is reeducate them,' Farmer jeered. 'They'll become members of PETA-People for the Eating of Anthropoids.'
Harvey checked the hidden compartment to make sure nothing was visible to the naked eye; it was a pity this wasn't Texas, where a gun rack was routine. Hiding was one thing the Brotherhood was very good at, though Farmer could probably simply tell a cop that these weren't the droids he was looking for and get away with it.
There was a cooler in the back of the pickup. He pulled out beers, a hefeweizen he'd picked up in Los Gatos, plus shaved-ham sandwiches on sourdough rolls, and handed them around.
'That's pretty much what I did with Adrian, Jack,' he said, biting into one and savoring the sharp-smoky- meaty flavors.
If hunger was the best sauce, danger survived came a close second; it made you horny too. Luckily that wasn't as big a nuisance when you were over sixty, though it didn't go away either.
'I got him around puberty and raised him,' he pointed out mildly. 'And he turned out all right.'
A lot more like a human being in the positive sense of the term than you, Jack, he thought to himself. I suspect if you were just a little higher on the Alberman, if you could feed and get any benefit from the blood and night-walk, you'd be off to the other side like a shot.
Guha nodded. 'And Adrian has killed more Shadowspawn than you've had beers, Jack, yes, indeed. He scares the hell out of me, but not like he's going to boil my eyeballs just for the fun of seeing me run around bumping into things.'
'Yup,' Harvey drawled. 'The problem with the Shadowspawn isn't really their instincts. Hell, I feel like killing people pretty often-who doesn't occasionally want to kick some asshole into oblivion? The problem is that the Order of the Black Dawn started as a bunch of black-path occultists. Just because they stopped worshiping Satan and started worshiping themselves after they found out why they could do what they did didn't make them any less assholes, and they raised their kids that way.'
Farmer took a swig of the beer and shrugged. 'So long as I get to kill the bastards, I'm satisfied. And you two give me more opportunities than I'd get if I stayed on the reservation. The Brotherhood's gotten too much like a fucking rabbit in the headlights, you ask me. The Council's planning to wreck the world and all they're doing is trying to build a bolt-hole so they can survive the apocalypse.'
Guha nodded. 'That's why I'm with you, Harvey. But I notice you don't tell Adrian about your little talks with Michiko- san,' she pointed out.
'I did my job too good. The boy's idealistic.'
They all chuckled. 'So,' Farmer said, 'what's your solution for the ones we can't reeducate?'
'Oh, we kill 'em all,' Harvey said cheerfully. 'And Tbilisi is goin' to be one fine opportunity for that. A lot more than Michiko and her hubby think. I got a project going along those lines. You guys in?'
'In,' Farmer said.
Guha shuddered. 'In. But it also means we'll have to walk into the biggest nest of them that's gathered for generations. With enough Power in the air to make all the molecules dance in their favor.'
