They followed it, and halfway down a street in an abandoned warehouse section of the crumbling city the dog just stopped. Turned for a moment on its tail, circling and searching, nose to the ground… and then finally began to whimper. Crooning the same way it had when it knew the legionnaire was dead in the alley courtyard.
Puncher, hunched over and trying to look homeless for the sake of the few bands of Soshies that passed, knew something was up. Something not good. The SAB was killing his back.
But he didn’t mind. So it didn’t matter.
This one died here.
“Here?” asked Puncher incredulously. He turned and scanned the cracked and dirty sidewalk. “Are you sure, Baldur?” His voice was suddenly desperate because he didn’t want the dog to be sure. He wanted doubt.
The dog nodded once.
Sometimes doubt was the only faith you had left. And now there was none.
Baldur sat respectfully on his haunches. Watching the legionnaire scan the ground and try to find some sign that one of his own, a brother legionnaire, had shoved off right here. But there was nothing. No blood. No body. Nothing to indicate violence had been done. That life had been lost. A story ended here.
“How?” he asked, his voice raspy and dry. He needed to stop. He needed water. But he had to keep searching because there wasn’t much time left. Every second wasted was a second those who still lived were running out of.
Don’t know, thought the dog. Just… know.
Hours later they picked up the trail of Lopez and Beers, after going back and starting from square one in the alley courtyard.
Baldur worked hard, and it was Puncher who eventually had to stop and make them both drink. He pulled out the dog’s special bowl, a shiny, collapsible one, and poured some water into it. They drank in the shade of an old dead tree in a lifeless and beaten park where the homeless lived like nomads, unbothered by the destruction of the city. That day, yesterday, was hot. They drank, and in time they found the first site. The first place the Soshies had taken the two legionnaires and the marine to.
There was no one there now. The whole place was abandoned and dark.
Baldur worked the warren of rooms and corridors until they found the makeshift holding pen.
“Still alive when they left?” asked Puncher, standing there in the dark, SAB unlimbered and ready to light up any intruders.
They were, thought the dog. When they were here. But now gone.
“Gone,” echoed Puncher. “Still find?”
It occurred to the leej that he was modeling his speech patterns after Baldur’s simple prose.
Can, thought the dog. Can find.
And that night he followed the dog from place to place until they were both so tired they just lay down in a dark alley. The legionnaire took out a canister of repellent and put it down in a wide semicircle of spray around them. It would smell like piss and the stench of the long-term homeless. The Soshies wouldn’t want to get involved in that.
Don’t like, thought Baldur of the protective scent barrier as he lay down next to the legionnaire in the dark of the alley. The old dirty poncho covered them both for warmth as the moons went down and the air got cold.
“I know,” said Puncher. “Sorry.”
There was a long silence. Baldur shifted.
Bad days for your pack. I’m sorry.
Puncher patted the dog.
“Thank you,” he whispered. And then lay there listening to the dog fall asleep, thinking of the people waiting out there in the galaxy for a good word that would never come. In time he fell asleep. But only for a little while.
26
Rechs knew something was wrong when his head began to split. The monkey screeching, now echoing off all the walls of the immense chamber that encased the underground lake, rose to a high-pitched choral screaming of the damned. Even the moktaar pawed at their monkey skulls as if they felt their own heads splitting.
And despite all that, the enraged monkey-men came at him, leaping across the void of the broken span where once a rail system had crossed the vast underground lake. Rechs stumbled away, firing the scatterblaster to keep the closest back.
Above the din of screaming and the cacophonic blasts of his weapon he heard the mad shaman moktaar laughing insanely. The sound echoed out across the lake and, impossibly, in his mind. Chanting moktaar words of madness down here in the lost world beneath Detron.
Psionics, Rechs thought.
He’d encountered them before. Deep in some of the darkest recesses of the galaxy. Mental powers that affected reality. Even influenced space-time. The stuff of bad parlor tricks made frighteningly real. Levitation. Pyrokinesis. Bent spanners. Worse. It was rare, and the main parts of the galaxy thought it only existed in the entertainments. But those who’d studied it knew it lay out there, deep and hidden in the forgotten ruins of the galaxy.
Hidden why? Hidden because it frightened people. And because it was power, and power had to be protected.
Hidden deep because whatever form it took, of all the forms Rechs had seen it take, that’s where it was safest. Hidden like some spider that waited for things to fall into its web.
From his vantage point atop the shattered bridge Rechs saw a large shape moving out there in the water. Something massive just beneath the surface. It had the tail of a fish. And the face and torso of a woman. He saw it just for an instant as it leapt up out of the water, arcing over the surface and then diving back into the depths. Its sudden appearance had seemed unreal.
Except… maybe that wasn’t totally what had just happened. Rechs’s mind wondered at the thing. Maybe it wanted him to see something it thought he might like to see. His mind had seen a beautiful mermaid with beautiful red hair the color
