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The People of Sand and Slag
by Paolo Bacigalupi
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Science Fiction
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Fictionwise, Inc.
www.Fictionwise.com
Copyright ©2004 by Paolo Bacigalupi
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 2004
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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“Hostile movement! Well inside the perimeter! Well inside!"
I stripped off my Immersive Response goggles as adrenaline surged through me. The virtual cityscape I'd been about to raze disappeared, replaced by our monitoring room's many views of SesCo's mining operations. On one screen, the red phosphorescent tracery of an intruder skated across a terrain map, a hot blip like blood spattering its way toward Pit 8.
Jaak was already out of the monitoring room. I ran for my gear.
I caught up with Jaak in the equipment room as he grabbed a TS-101 and slashbangs and dragged his impact exoskeleton over his tattooed body. He draped bandoleers of surgepacks over his massive shoulders and ran for the outer locks. I strapped on my own exoskeleton, pulled my 101 from its rack, checked its charge, and followed.
Lisa was already in the HEV, its turbofans screaming like banshees when the hatch dilated. Sentry centaurs leveled their 101's at me, then relaxed as friend/foe data spilled into their heads-up displays. I bolted across the tarmac, my skin pricking under blasts of icy Montana wind and the jet wash of Hentasa Mark V engines. Overhead, the clouds glowed orange with light from SesCo's mining bots.
“Come on, Chen! Move! Move! Move!"
I dove into the hunter. The ship leaped into the sky. It banked, throwing me against a bulkhead, then the Hentasas cycled wide and the hunter punched forward. The HEV's hatch slid shut. The wind howl muted.
I struggled forward to the flight cocoon and peered over Jaak's and Lisa's shoulders to the landscape beyond.
“Have a good game?” Lisa asked.
I scowled. “I was about to win. I made it to Paris."
We cut through the mists over the catchment lakes, skimming inches above the water, and then we hit the far shore. The hunter lurched as its anti-collision software jerked us away from the roughening terrain. Lisa overrode the computers and forced the ship back down against the soil, driving us so low I could have reached out and dragged my hands through the broken scree as we screamed over it.
Alarms yowled. Jaak shut them off as Lisa pushed the hunter lower. Ahead, a tailings ridge loomed. We ripped up its face and dropped sickeningly into the next valley. The Hentasas shuddered as Lisa forced them to the edge of their design buffer. We hurtled up and over another ridge. Ahead, the ragged cutscape of mined mountains stretched to the horizon. We dipped again into mist and skimmed low over another catchment lake, leaving choppy wake in the thick golden waters.
Jaak studied the hunter's scanners. “I've got it.” He grinned. “It's moving, but slow."
“Contact in one minute,” Lisa said. “He hasn't launched any countermeasures."
I watched the intruder on the tracking screens as they displayed real-time data fed to us from SesCo's satellites. “It's not even a masked target. We could have dropped a mini on it from base if we'd known he wasn't going to play hide-and-seek."
“Could have finished your game,” Lisa said.
“We could still nuke him.” Jaak suggested.
I shook my head. “No, let's take a look. Vaporizing him won't leave us anything and Bunbaum will want to know what we used the hunter for."
“Thirty seconds."
“He wouldn't care if someone hadn't taken the hunter on a joyride to Cancun."
Lisa shrugged. “I wanted to swim. It was either that, or rip off your kneecaps."
The hunter lunged over another series of ridges.
Jaak studied his monitor. “Target's moving away. He's still slow. We'll get him."
“Fifteen seconds to drop,” Lisa said. She unstrapped and switched the hunter to software. We all ran for the hatch as the HEV yanked itself skyward, its auto pilot desperate to tear away from the screaming hazard of the rocks beneath its belly.
We plunged out the hatch, one, two, three, falling like Icarus. We slammed into the ground at hundreds of kilometers per hour. Our exoskeletons shattered like glass, flinging leaves into the sky. The shards fluttered down around us, black metallic petals absorbing our enemy's radar and heat detection while we rolled to jarred vulnerable stops in muddy scree.
The hunter blew over the ridge, Hentasas shrieking, a blazing target. I dragged myself upright and ran for the ridge, my feet churning through yellow tailings mud and rags of jaundiced snow. Behind me, Jaak was down with smashed arms. The leaves of his exoskeleton marked his roll path, a long trail of black shimmering metal. Lisa lay a hundred yards away, her femur rammed through her thigh like a bright white exclamation mark.
I reached the top of the ridge and stared down into the valley.
Nothing.
I dialed up the magnification of my helmet. The monotonous slopes of more tailings rubble spread out below me. Boulders, some as large as our HEV, some cracked and shattered by high explosives, shared the slopes with the unstable yellow shale and fine grit of waste materials from SesCo's operations.
Jaak slipped up beside me, followed a moment later by Lisa, her flight suit's leg torn and bloodied. She wiped yellow mud off her face and ate it as she studied the valley below. “Anything?"
I shook my head. “Nothing yet. You okay?"
“Clean break."
Jaak pointed. “There!"
Down in the valley, something was running, flushed by the hunter. It slipped along a shallow creek, viscous with tailings acid. The ship herded it toward us. Nothing. No missile fire. No slag. Just the running creature. A mass of tangled hair. Quadrupedal. Splattered with mud.
“Some kind of bio-job?” I wondered.
“It doesn't have any hands,” Lisa murmured.
“No equipment either."
Jaak muttered. “What kind of sick bastard makes a bio-job without hands?"
I searched the nearby ridgelines. “Decoy, maybe?"
Jaak checked his scanner data, piped in from the hunter's more aggressive instruments. “I don't think so. Can we put the hunter up higher? I want to look around."
At Lisa's command, the hunter rose, allowing its sensors a fuller reach. The howl of its turbofans became muted as it gained altitude.
Jaak waited as more data spat into his heads-up display. “Nope, nothing. And no new alerts from any of the perimeter stations, either. We're alone."
Lisa shook her head. “We should have just dropped a mini on it from base."
Down in the valley, the bio-job's headlong run slowed to a trot. It seemed unaware of us. Closer now, we could make out its shape: A shaggy quadruped with a tail. Dreadlocked hair dangled from its shanks like ornaments, tagged with tailings mud clods. It was stained around its legs from the acids of the catchment ponds, as though it had forded streams of urine.
“That's one ugly bio-job,” I said.
Lisa shouldered her 101. “Bio-melt when I'm done with it."
“Wait!” Jaak said. “Don't slag it!"
Lisa glanced over at him, irritated. “What now?"
“That's not a bio-job at all.” Jaak
whispered. “That's a dog."
He stood suddenly and jumped over the hillside, running headlong down the scree toward the animal.
“Wait!” Lisa called, but Jaak was already fully exposed and blurring to his top speed.
The animal took one look at Jaak, whooping and hollering as he came roaring down the slope, then turned and ran. It was no match for Jaak. Half a minute later he overtook the animal.
Lisa and I exchanged glances. “Well,” she said, “it's awfully slow if it's a bio-job. I've seen centaurs walk faster."
By the time we caught up with Jaak and the animal, Jaak had it cornered in a dull gully. The animal stood in the center of a trickling ditch of sludgy water, shaking and growling and baring its teeth at us as we surrounded it. It tried to break around us, but Jaak kept it corralled easily.
Up close, the animal seemed even more pathetic than from a distance, a good thirty kilos of snarling mange. Its paws were slashed and bloody and patches of fur were torn away, revealing festering chemical burns underneath.
“I'll be damned,” I breathed, staring at the animal. “It really looks like a dog."
Jaak grinned. “It's like finding a goddamn dinosaur."
“How could it live out here?” Lisa's arm swept the horizon. “There's nothing to live on. It's got to be modified.” She studied it closely, then glanced at Jaak. “Are you sure nothing's coming in on the perimeter? This isn't some kind of decoy?"
Jaak shook his head. “Nothing. Not even a peep."
I leaned in toward the creature. It bared its teeth in a rictus of hatred. “It's pretty beat up. Maybe it's the real thing."
Jaak said, “Oh yeah, it's the real thing all right. I saw a dog in a zoo once. I'm telling you, this is a dog."
Lisa shook her head. “It can't be. It would be dead, if it were a real dog."
Jaak just grinned and shook his head. “No way. Look at it.” He reached out to push the hair out of the animal's face so that we could see its muzzle.
The animal lunged and its teeth sank into Jaak's arm. It shook his arm violently, growling as Jaak stared down at the creature latched onto his flesh. It yanked its head back and forth, trying to tear Jaak's arm off. Blood spurted around its muzzle as its teeth found Jaak's arteries.
Jaak laughed. His bleeding stopped. “Damn. Check that out.” He lifted his arm until the animal dangled fully out of the stream, dripping. “I got me a pet."
The dog swung from the thick bough of Jaak's arm. It tried to shake his arm once again, but its movements were ineffectual now that it hung off the ground. Even Lisa smiled.
“Must be a bummer to wake up and find out you're at the end of your evolutionary curve."
The dog growled, determined to hang on.
Jaak laughed and drew his monomol knife. “Here you go, doggy.” He sliced his arm off, leaving it in the bewildered animal's mouth.
Lisa cocked her head. “You think we could make some kind of money on it?"
Jaak watched as the dog devoured his severed arm. “I read somewhere that they used to eat dogs. I wonder what they taste like."
I checked the time in my heads-up display. We'd already killed an hour on an exercise that wasn't giving any bonuses. “Get your dog, Jaak, and get it on the hunter. We aren't going to eat it before we call Bunbaum."
“He'll probably call it company property,” Jaak groused.
“Yeah, that's the way it always goes. But we still have to report. Might as well keep the evidence, since we didn't nuke it."
We ate sand for dinner. Outside the security bunker, the mining robots rumbled back and forth, ripping deeper into the earth, turning it into a mush of tailings and rock acid that they left in exposed ponds when they hit the water table, or piled into thousand-foot mountainscapes of waste soil. It was comforting to hear those machines cruising back and forth all day. Just you and the bots and the profits, and if nothing got bombed while you were on duty, there was always a nice bonus.
After dinner we sat around and sharpened Lisa's skin, implanting blades along her limbs so that she was like a razor from all directions. She'd considered monomol blades, but it was too easy to take a limb off accidentally, and we lost enough body parts as it was without adding to the mayhem. That kind of garbage was for people who didn't have to work: aesthetes from New York City and California.
Lisa had a DermDecora kit for the sharpening. She'd bought it last time we'd gone on vacation and spent extra to get it, instead of getting one of the cheap knock-offs that were cropping up. We worked on cutting her skin down to the bone and setting the blades. A friend of ours in L.A said that he just held DermDecora parties so everyone could do their modifications and help out with the hard-to-reach places.
Lisa had done my glowspine, a sweet tracery of lime landing lights that ran from my tailbone to the base of my skull, so I didn't mind helping her out, but Jaak, who did all of his modification with an old-time scar and tattoo shop in Hawaii, wasn't so pleased. It was a little frustrating because her flesh kept trying to close before we had the blades set, but eventually we got the hang of it, and an hour later, she started looking good.
Once we finished with Lisa's front settings, we sat around and fed her. I had a bowl of tailings mud that I drizzled into her mouth to speed her integration process. When we were weren't feeding her, we watched the dog. Jaak had shoved it into a makeshift cage in one corner of our common room. It lay there like it was dead.
Lisa said, “I ran its DNA. It really is a dog."
“Bunbaum believe you?"
She gave me a dirty look. “What do you think?"
I laughed. At SesCo, tactical defense responders were expected to be fast, flexible, and deadly, but the reality was our SOP was always the same: drop nukes on intruders, slag the leftovers to melt so they couldn't regrow, hit the beaches for vacation. We were independent and trusted as far as tactical decisions went, but there was no way SesCo was going to believe its slag soldiers had found a dog in their tailings mountains.
Lisa nodded. “He wanted to know how the hell a dog could live out here. Then he wanted to know why we didn't catch it sooner. Wanted to know what he pays us for.” She pushed her short blond hair off her face and eyed the animal. “I should have slagged it."
“What's he want us to do?"
“It's not in the manual. He's calling back."
I studied the limp animal. “I want to know how it was surviving. Dogs are meat eaters, right?"
“Maybe some of the engineers were giving it meat. Like Jaak did."
Jaak shook his head. “I don't think so. The sucker threw up my arm almost right after he ate it.” He wiggled his new stump where it was rapidly regrowing. “I don't think we're compatible for it."
I asked, “But we could eat it, right?"
Lisa laughed and took a spoonful of tailings. “We can eat anything. We're the top of the food chain."
“Weird how it can't eat us."
“You've probably got more mercury and lead running through your blood than any pre-weeviltech animal ever could have had."
“That's bad?"
“Used to be poison."
“Weird."
Jaak said, “I think I might have broken it when I put it in the cage.” He studied it seriously. “It's not moving like it was before. And I heard something snap when I stuffed it in."
“So?"
Jaak shrugged. “I don't think it's healing."
The dog did look kind of beat up. It just lay there, its sides going up and down like a bellows. Its eyes were half-open, but didn't seem to be focused on any of us. When Jaak made a sudden movement, it twitched for a second, but it didn't get up. It didn't even growl.
Jaak said, “I never thought an animal could be so fragile."
“You're fragile, too. That's not such a big surprise."
“Yeah, but I only broke a couple bones on it, and now look at it. It just lies there and pants."
Lisa frowned thoughtfully. “It doesn't heal.” She climbed awkwardly t
o her feet and went to peer into the cage. Her voice was excited. “It really is a dog. Just like we used to be. It could take weeks for it to heal. One broken bone, and it's done for."
She reached a razored hand into the cage and sliced a thin wound into its shank. Blood oozed out, and kept oozing. It took minutes for it to begin clotting. The dog lay still and panted, clearly wasted.
She laughed. “It's hard to believe we ever lived long enough to evolve out of that. If you chop off its legs, they won't regrow.” She cocked her head, fascinated. “It's as delicate as rock. You break it, and it never comes back together.” She reached out to stroke the matted fur of the animal. “It's as easy to kill as the hunter."
The comm buzzed. Jaak went to answer.
Lisa and I stared at the dog, our own little window into pre-history.
Jaak came back into the room. “Bunbaum's flying out a biologist to take a look at it."
“You mean a bio-engineer,” I corrected him.
“Nope. Biologist. Bunbaum said they study animals."
Lisa sat down. I checked her blades to see if she'd knocked anything loose. “There's a dead-end job."
“I guess they grow them out of DNA. Study what they do. Behavior, shit like that."
“Who hires them?"
Jaak shrugged. “Pau Foundation has three of them on staff. Origin of life guys. That's who's sending out this one. Mushi-something. Didn't get his name."
“Origin of life?"
“Sure, you know, what makes us tick. What makes us alive. Stuff like that."
I poured a handful of tailings mud into Lisa's mouth. She gobbled it gratefully. “Mud makes us tick,” I said.
Jaak nodded at the dog. “It doesn't make that dog tick."
We all looked at the dog. “It's hard to tell what makes it tick."
Lin Musharraf was a short guy with black hair and a hooked nose that dominated his face. He had carved his skin with swirling patterns of glow implants, so he stood out as cobalt spirals in the darkness as he jumped down from his chartered HEV.
The centaurs went wild about the unauthorized visitor and corralled him right up against his ship. They were all over him and his DNA kit, sniffing him, running their scanners over his case, pointing their 101's into his glowing face and snarling at him.