Posleen FanFic Read online

  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 po
ssibilities. "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 und
er 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.