Drakon Read online

  "Ah, I'm Stephen Fischer," he said.

  There seemed to be a lump in his throat, making it a little difficult to talk. That wasn't the only lump, either. He wavered between annoyance—he'd been out of his teens for a decade and a half—and delight. There'd been nothing since the divorce and not much for the year before it.

  "Gwendolyn Ingolfsson," she said. For a moment she stared at his extended hand and then took it. That was another surprise; her hand was hard, like smooth articulated wood. A jock's hand. The nails were trimmed very close.

  "Would you like to join me for dinner?" he said.

  "Yes."

  Silence fell for a moment. A waiter came over with another place-setting and a menu; her head tracked him smoothly, then turned back to Fischer.

  "What would you like?" he went on, trying not to burble and feeling sweat break out under his collar. And I'm goddamned nervous too. Events were out of control, and normally he didn't like that. To hell with control.

  "I'm hungry. Several dishes."

  The green eyes bored into his. He called the waiter over, ran down the menu; Fernways had a small selection, but it was all good. Food arrived; the woman—Gwendolyn, odd name—began to eat, neatly but enormously. His eyes widened. She was not gaunt, but the figure under the loose fabric was obviously the product of heavy exercise club investment, real sweat equity. How could she eat like this?

  She looked up from finishing off her twelve-ounce porterhouse. "Tell me about yourself," she said; the accent seemed a little less notable.

  Fischer loosened his tie and talked; through the dinner, through dessert—she had two—through coffee and brandy. Somehow he never got around to asking the questions, beyond "New in town?" and "Where are you from?" Clipped answers: "Yes" and "Born in Italy."

  "So," he said at last, trying desperately not to squeak. "Would you like a nightcap? At, ah, at my place?"

  She smiled, showing very white teeth. "Yes."

  ***

  Christ, I may never move again. She'd taken his hand the minute they walked into the little studio apartment and led him straight to the bed. Naked she didn't look like a model; more like an Olympic pent-athlete, if they'd come in a non-flat-chested variety. His memory blurred into impossibilities.

  I couldn't have done all that.

  She wasn't in the bed. He could tell it by the feel, even before he saw the light of his computer monitor on. That was the clicking sound, the keyboard.

  It was a moment before what he was watching made any sense. Gwen was sitting, eyes glued to the screen; it was logged on to the Internet. Text was scrolling by at far above reading speed through his 28.8 modem. Her hands poised over the keys; every few seconds they would strike in a blur of speed, too fast for him to see individual keystrokes at all. And not loudly, a precise controlled tapping giving exactly as much force as needed. There was an encyclopedia open on the desk beside the machine. When the high-speed modem was exchanging data, she flipped through the pages. No, stared at each page for about three seconds, then flipped it over.

  She's reading. The conviction hit him like cold water, and he gasped. Her head turned slightly. He gasped again when she rose and turned to face him.

  "You've been watching me, Stephen," she said . . . sadly?

  The accent was much less noticeable now. She walked over to the bed, barely visible in the faint blue glow of the monitor.

  "I'm sorry you did that."

  "What . . . look, what the hell were you doing with my computer?"

  "Stephen, when do you expect someone to call?"

  He bunked in bewilderment. His stomach lurched.

  "Call?"

  "Call you here."

  "Maybe nobody this weekend. Come off it, I want some answers."

  She put out a hand—

  ***

  Gwen finished flushing the soiled sheet down the toilet in pieces of suitable size, then looked thoughtfully at the body hanging by its heels from the shower head, draining.

  No, it wouldn't fit—even butchered. And the spirit of chaos alone knew what would happen if she blocked the drains. She walked out into the kitchenette and took a quick look inside the refrigerator.

  Yes. If she put all the food on the counter, then disarticulated the limbs, the whole body should fit nicely, with the head in the freezer. At maximum refrigeration, it would be some time before the smell became obvious to humans. Let's see, skull, torso, each limb in two sections, she decided, and went to work with a regretful sigh.

  "I'll have to be more subtle," she reproached herself, as she finished packing the refrigerator. "I can't go on leaving a trail like this."

  Besides, Stephen had been . . . yes, sweet. Killing him had been almost as unpleasant as putting down a servus. She hadn't taken pleasure from a human since her youth, back when they'd been common, before the modified type completely superseded them. Interesting. Stephen might have been very useful, too, if she hadn't been careless. Too risky once he'd become suspicious, though. Wild humans were very difficult to condition properly; it would take weeks of work before she could be sure of one. A servus's emotions could be played like a violin, and of course they were raised to accept the Draka. Humans varied wildly, and at best their susceptibility to pheromonal controls was spotty.

  The problem was that she was simply not used to pretense. Unlearning habits as ingrained as hers wasn't going to be easy, even with survival at stake. She'd have to understand the humans here, not just their nature but their culture.

  Gwen fixed herself a snack of raw vegetables and cold cuts and took the plate back into the bedroom. She would eat the perishables first, then the canned goods; that ought to last her for a few days. Throttling back on her metabolism was possible, but it made her sluggish and couldn't be reversed immediately in an emergency when she needed burst speed and strength. Nothing came free; her system was packed with extra capacities and they all required fuel. There was always the dead human, of course . . . But no. Granted that it wasn't exactly cannibalism, she'd still have to be considerably more rushed before thinking seriously about that. There were plenty of food vendors about, if she was cautious.

  Stephen Fischer had kept very complete records of his life on the little perscomp. Between that and the print books and the CD-ROMs, and what she could access from this net, the weekend should be far from wasted. By its end she should know better how to judge when someone would show up to investigate, in plenty of time to move along. With luck, she might be able to stay here a week or so.

  A permanent nest would be more difficult. I'm going to need a front, she knew. Subtle. Be more subtle next time.

  ***

  Dr. Mary Chen clipped the X rays to the lighted background glass. For comparison, she had a normal arm's prints next to them, and a shot of a gorilla's she'd gotten from the primatology people over at the University.

  The woman beside her bent close to the film, whistling silently. "Oh, now this is really, really interesting," she said, adjusting her glasses.

  The professor used a pen from her blouse pocket—she wore a plastic protector—to trace the lines of the bones.

  "Look at the ratio of the radius and ulna to the upper arm," she said. "Definitely nonhuman, far too long, but it's not exactly like any of the other higher primates. And this gap here, not pongoid at all. Hmmm."

  She pushed up the glasses again and peered at the film with her nose almost touching it. "From the wrist and hand, this isn't a knuckle-walker. Palm, more probably. The hand is extremely human in structure, except that the bones are more robust, but the wrist isn't like anything I've ever seen. It's almost as if it's been structurally reenforced."

  "There's heavy callus on the palm," the doctor confirmed.

  Pure technical interest, Chen thought. She didn't seem to see the implications, which had been keeping the Medical Examiner awake every night for the past three. She sipped at the cold tea in its paper cup and grimaced. Caffeine wasn't working anymore. She yawned.

  "I'd say it was p
robably some sort of baboon," the primatologist said. "Though the thumb structure is wrong, more like a hominid. And it's far too large; the size is more gorilloid. But it's more like a baboon than anything else I can think of."

  She beamed at Chen. "Dr. Chen, do you realize what this means?"

  She nodded jerkily.

  "An entirely new species! Fascinating. And"—her voice dropped conspiratorially—"first publication."

  "No publication until I give explicit, written authorization," she said sharply. This woman is a complete space cadet. "And I'll want a written release to that effect."

  The academic's face dropped a little. "It'll take months even for a preliminary report anyway," she said. "Oh, all right. And you'll get full credit."

  Chen nodded and turned to the cooler. The room was dark except for the lights behind the display panel; it was well after normal hours. She turned on the overheads and pulled out the long tray, unsealing the plastic wrap around the arm.

  "Oh, wonderful." The scientist bent over it, pulling on surgical gloves, and clicked on a recorder. "Specimen is—"

  Scary as hell, she thought, as the other woman kept on talking into the little machine. Scary as hell. And not just because it was so weird. There were implants in it. Something in the bone like embedded fibers, fibers that dulled her best bone saw; they'd had to use a metal-cutting saw, and change to a new blade every few seconds.

  She waited until the preliminary examination was complete. "The next step would be genetic analysis, I'd say."

  "Oh, certainly, Dr. Chen," the professor agreed. "With a comparative analysis, we can pinpoint the evolutionary divergence." She shook her head. "Where could a species like this have hidden itself? It must be quite large—" she stepped back and considered "—I'd say in the four- to five-hundred-pound range. Even a relict population in some out-of-the-way area . . . fascinating! Where did you say you acquired it?"

  "I didn't," Chen said.

  Very out of the way, she thought. Wherever it comes from, twenty people died when it arrived. She remembered the warehouse, its floor awash with blood. Mary Chen had never limited her training in observation and deduction strictly to her work. What followed was obvious. Something had come from somewhere, along with this arm. Something with human-sized heels, that used a knife sharper than a laser scalpel. And if one can . . . come . . . here, then others can.

  The primatologist was speaking into her hand-held recorder again. Chen wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

  ***

  "You're not going to enjoy this," Chen's voice said. "I thought I'd give you some warning."

  Carmaggio shifted his feet to the corner of his desk and looked with displeasure at the pound or so of skin hanging over his belt under the shirt. I don't enjoy looking at that, either, he thought, cradling the receiver, the cinnamon danish and the coffee mug simultaneously. Sure, he was past the middle forties, but that didn't mean he had to let everything go. On the other hand, regular hours were a joke in police work; and the number of donuts and greasy deli sandwiches he'd shoveled into his face made him queasy when he thought about it. He prodded at the roll with a finger. Not too bad. And he'd stopped smoking, after all. He tried to convince himself he'd done it for his health, and failed. It was just too much of a hassle, with all the nonsmoking areas.

  I ought to spend more time in the gym. God knew it could scarcely cut into his social life.

  "All right, break my heart," he said. "Start with the arm."

  A long moment of silence. "I didn't have the facilities for that, so I called in a favor over at NYU."

  "What do they say?"

  "They don't say anything; they run in circles and throw their hands in the air and shout." Flatly: "Okay, basically it is a baboon. Only it's not." Unwillingly: "The DNA is congruent with Gelada baboons—mostly. Ethiopian mountain baboon, fairly rare. About fifty percent matchup. The remainder's . . . mixed. Leopard. Canine. And, ah . . . human."

  Carmaggio took his feet down from the desk and sighed, rubbing his forehead and dredging up things he'd seen on nature documentaries and old copies of Popular Science. "Something escaped from a lab?"

  "You've been watching too many bad movies. Putting a firefly gene in a tomato or correcting cystic fibrosis is one thing. Playing Frankenstein is something else. We'll do things like . . . that . . . someday, but not for a long time. Hell, the human genome project isn't finished yet."

  "What about the arm, then?"

  "I don't know. I just don't know."

  He'd always wanted to have Chen-the-omniscient admit that. Somehow it wasn't very satisfying. "All right, let's look at this from a cop point of view. The fucking arm is academic, we'll leave it with the academic types. We're cops, let's do the cop things."

  "Nothing mysterious about cause-of-death for most of the Jamaicans. It's all in the autopsy stuff I'm sending up. Loss of blood from radical wounding, consistent with a knife about eighteen inches long. Or blunt injury trauma; in plain English, crushed skulls, frontal bone driven into the brain, two cases of massive perforation of the heart and lungs by rib fragments. Several injured postmortem by a very powerful kick to back of the head—more crushed skulls, and crushed and severed upper spinals. Whoever did it was making extremely sure."

  "Good work."

  "That's the basics. You want to hear my opinion?"

  He waited. Chen continued. "The tissue damage from the knife is as weird as the rest of it. It was sharp. Razor sharp, scalpel sharp. There are cut hairs on those bodies; it didn't haggle or chop, it just sliced through hair and skin and clothing, plus the odd gold chain. And it stayed that sharp while it went slamming through major bones, sharp and completely rigid. A thin blade, Henry, not a tanto knife or a machete. From the marks on the bones, about as wide as a fingernail at maximum."

  "Hmmm." A real knife-fighter didn't put a razor edge on his weapon. That made it too likely to turn on bone or even gristle. Really thin blades were too whippy for use. "Keep it coming."

  "The blunt injuries? It's impossible, but whoever did that stuff did it barehanded. Kicking and punching and . . . slapping. They slapped people on the side of the head and knocked their skulls in. A couple of those dreadlockers shot each other, but they didn't hit whoever was doing them enough to slow him down. We're not talking Kung Foolishness here. What with the arm, I checked up. A gorilla's about fifteen times as strong as a human being. Whoever did this is about halfway to that level. Freak strong."

  Henry made an affirmative noise and nodded, taking another bite of the danish. The posses were about as bad as they thought they were. If somebody, or even a dozen somebodies, had killed twenty of them, he didn't want to meet the ones who'd done it. Not without a lot of backup.

  "The one with his head blown off?"

  "That's got me completely baffled. The entry wound in the forehead is cauterized, as if someone had burned through with a welding torch. Then the brain was cooked—flash cooked, the explosion was steam. There's a bit of very finely divided metallic copper there too, God knows why."

  Chen paused. "Now, what about the skin from under Marley Man's nails?" she asked. A forensics question; police business, not the Medical Examiners.

  "We sent it over to Quantico." The FBI lab there did favors for local police departments. "They ran a microsatellite DNA analysis. Caucasian—Northwest European—and female. The hair's natural dark red. No DNA matches in any of the databases, but that just means she hasn't served in the armed forces or been sent to jail since the early nineties."

  Carmaggio sighed. It had been the first honest—well, honestly bizarre—evidence to turn up so far. Except.

  "Except?"

  "They did a full comparative DNA run. It—I quote: 'Nonhuman. About a ninety-four percent correspondence. That's less like us than a chimp. A mammal, a primate, but not human, strictly speaking. Whatever it was, it couldn't interbreed with us; gross differences in the number of chromosomes.

  "Different? Different how?"

  "I
asked. They told me that we don't know what most of our own genes do." After a moment: "Then they told me not to send them any more practical jokes. I think the Fed was scared, Chen."

  "What's going in the report?"

  He took a deep breath. "We're going to tell our esteemed Chief of Detectives that a drug deal went sour and all Marley Man's posse got wasted, knife and club and gunshot wounds. Some animal remains were found at the site. We've got the DNA make on a person who might or might not have been at the crime site at the time of the murders. We're questioning all the usual suspects; if you lined up all the people who wanted Marley Man dead, it'd stretch to Jersey. Send me your stuff, I'll edit it that way, and attach it to my report."

  "You're going to hush this up?"

  "No, I'm going to keep my credibility and yours," he said. "Hell, it's an official report, not the Bible."

  Back in Nam once, he'd been on a patrol that went into some bad bush right after an artillery fire mission. A lot of craters, a lot of busted-up trees, and one arm—still in its black pajamas—by the side of the trail. The loot had reported it in as a stepped-on kill, confirmed, and three probables. Which was fair enough, since Charlie did try to carry away as many of his dead as he could. Only he'd learned from a radioman back at the firebase that about six more patrols had reported the same arm; so that one unfortunate Vietcong had turned into about a platoon's worth of casualties. And the sucker might not have died in the first place.

  Ever since then, he'd thought of definite-sounding official reports as being sort of elastic. Not necessarily completely divorced from reality, but not necessarily having any close relationship to it, either.

  "Henry, we can't hush this up. Think of what it means. There could be—"

  "Look, shut up, will you? The problem with unbelievable evidence is that nobody will believe it. And if we push it on people, they won't believe us about anything. That's twenty years of experience talking, and you will listen. I'm betting that whoever . . . hell, whatever . . . did this number on Marley Man's boys is going to do something else. And I'm going to find them."

  ***