Posleen FanFic Read online

  A crack of gunfire carried through the closed doors, and Nanuli flinched. Vladilen Ivanovich had said that he conditioned even the most severely damaged salvagees so that they wouldn't shoot at each other, even if he couldn't keep them from going at it with teeth and fingernails. Was his programming coming unglued and those wrecks reverting to bestial madness?

  She walked into the room to find a Posleen lying in the middle of the floor, its head blown almost clear off its neck. A feral from the lack of any gear harness, but that wouldn't make it any less deadly, particularly when facing an enemy with not much more wit. The remains of two salvagees lay beside it, probably beyond even Vladilen Ivanovich's skills from the way their whole torsos had literally been torn open by the Posleen's claws. The rest huddled in small groups, whining and gabbling in broken Russian.

  "What the hell happened here?" Nanuli strode across the room to face the most intelligent-looking salvagee, one who actually could eat with a spoon and was almost fit for polite company.

  "Boss want poska, us bring poska." The poor creature looked at the dead Posleen, then to his fellows. "Poska look dead, then it wake up, tear up everybody."

  Nanuli knew better than even bother to ask them why in God's name Vladilen Ivanovich would order them to capture a Posleen, even a dead one, and bring it inside the compound. No, she'd need to ask the man himself. She ordered the salvagee to bring the Boss up. In the meantime, she had patients to tend, those who'd just taken superficial bites and clawings she could disinfect and cover with dressings.

  Five minutes later Vladilen Ivanovich burst into the room, red-faced and scowling. Before he could even say a word, she glared directly at him. "This is quite a mess you've made here, ordering these poor lost souls to bring in a Posleen for some hare-brained project of yours. They thought they'd killed it, but the damned thing must've only been stunned, because it came back around and killed two of them."

  Vladilen Ivanovich spread his hands in a protestation of innocence. "They had directions on how to kill it to cause minimal damage--"

  "And of course the instructions were probably too complicated for them to understand and carry out." Nanuli rested a hand on the shoulder of the salvagee whose wounds she had just finished spraying with quick-heal. "What do you need a Posleen corpse for, anyway?"

  "A long-term project of mine." Vladilen Ivanovich gestured for the salvagees to gather up the remains of both the Posleen and their slaughtered fellows.

  Although Nanuli had doubts about her ability to follow his technical jargon, she refused to let him dodge the question. "Just what kind of long-term project are you up to?"

  "You are aware that the Posleen are resistant to every known poison and chemical agent."

  "Of course I am." Nanuli had to restrain the urge to snap the words out. "I am from Gori, in case you've forgotten. When First Army was routed at Mtskheti, north of Tbilisi, they threw everything in the Soviet-legacy chemical stockpile at them. If Moscow had left us Georgians any nukes, they would've used those too. I suppose you think that you can come up with something that everyone else has overlooked, Academician Biochemical Genius with Three Doctorates and 200-plus IQ?"

  No sooner than she'd said those words, she regretted them. This was no way to speak to one's host, and Vladilen Ivanovich had never boasted about his degrees or his ability to max out every intelligence test known to humanity, just joked ruefully about them one evening over too much vodka after he'd had a truly frustrating series of failed experiments.

  When Vladilen Ivanovich did speak, there was no anger in his voice, only old pain. "No, no, Nanuli Akakievna. Not at all. My daughter was four years old when she found a can of drain cleaner under the kitchen sink. We gave her everything Soviet medicine could do, but it was too late. I swore that I would find some way to make sure that nobody else's little girl would have to die that way. When I discovered that the Posleen had been genetically engineered to be resistant to every known poison, I knew that I had to find their secret and give it to humanity." His eyes glowed with the excitement of the prophet in the rapture of a messianic vision.

  "Are you sure that's wise?" Nanuli moistened her lips, considered how to phrase her objection in a language not her own. "What if the change were to make us into ravening conquerors like them? We could gain life to lose our very souls."

  Vladilen Ivanovich gave her a smile that came far too close to patronization for Nanuli's comfort. "I'm quite sure that the gene complex for poison resistance can be separated from the ones that drive their aggression."

  "And in the meantime you've killed two innocent men--"

  "Not at all, Nanuli Akakievna. I'm already taking them down to the regen lab. With my latest mods on the system, that poska would've had to eat them to keep me from bringing them back."

  "But they're dead--"

  "Oh, the Crabs would have a hissy-fit if they knew I'd figured out how to change the parameters to override their lockouts and restart biological systems, but they're a squeamish bunch who'd be Posleen fodder right now if it weren't for our soldiers holding the line for them. Too good to fight, but not too good to die." Vladilen Ivanovich curled his lip in disdain.

  Nanuli nodded, unable to put words to her unease. How many times had she heard someone in the depths of remorse say, "I'd do anything to bring them back"? For Vladilen Ivanovich it wasn't a figure of speech, but a technological problem to be solved. Only should it be solved, or was death still a misfortune that should be meekly accepted once it did overtake a person?

  They were now arriving at the chamber in which the regen/rejuve capsules were located. The salvagees laid their fallen fellows into the two empty ones. On the far wall, the third hummed away, continuing its work on Mahmood Dudayev's extensive frostbite injuries.

  Or so Vladilen Ivanovich had told her. Nanuli watched closely as the master bioengineer tapped commands into the special control consoles he'd had the Indowy rig for the capsules. When he wasn't looking, she compared them to the ones showing on Mahmood's.

  Only when they were safely outside that room, clear of the range over which the Darhel-made AIDs incorporated into the capsules could pick up her voice, did she confront Vladilen Ivanovich.

  "What are you doing to Mahmood?"

  "As I told you before, he had far more extensive frostbite damage--"

  "I saw the program you have in that thing. You're giving him the same mind-control programming you've given the salvagees. You told me it was just to replace function lost to brain damage, not frostbite."

  "Do you think I want an al-Qaeda fighter running around loose here?" When Nanuli gave him a blank look of incomprehension, Vladilen Ivanovich continued in the slow, careful tones of a parent speaking to an upset child. "Those men are not only trained in every form of unconventional warfare. They are also religious fanatics who consider us to be only slightly less dangerous than the Posleen, and thus lower on their priorities for destruction. They were planning a major terrorist attack on the Americans for September of '01, and only shelved it because the Galactics showed up. I endured far too much from those Chechen gangsters, and I do not intend to relive that nightmare as long as I have the power to prevent it."

  "Then why didn't you use your nasty little modifications to debase me as well?"

  He rested a hand on her shoulder in a patronizing gesture. "Nanuli Akakievna, they are not 'nasty,' but a work in progress. Eventually I hope to have a completely selective process in which I can restore full function no matter how extensive the damage, or impose controls to remove objectionable elements such as religious fanaticism. In the meantime, even if your personality profile hadn't been completely oriented to saving life, I needed your complex skills unimpaired--"

  "More than you need a competent fighter who might actually be able to organize your debased horde into a real combat force, instead of a pack of orc-wannabes?" How could Nanuli explain the transformation she'd watched Mahmood undergo as they'd fled along the trails, or the Chechen tradition of hospitality hardly less st
rong than that of the Georgians?

  Vladilen Ivanovich stood stiff and unmoved, his pale blue eyes cold as the heart of a high-mountain glacier. Nanuli could tell that his resolution was born not of pride, or even the fear of having lived with cutthroat Chechen mafiosi, but from the pain of having lost first his youngest son, and then his wife, to the Chechen rebellions and terrorism of the 1990's. Mere words would not move him, but there might be other possibilities.

  Nanuli had steadily ignored or deliberately misunderstood Vladilen Ivanovich's various attempts to hit on her, the sly little passes and double entendres. Not that she was frigid, for she had enjoyed many years of marital bliss, but she no more intended to betray Irakli now that he was dead than she would have during his lifetime. But with the humanity of a man she owed her life hanging in the balance...

  * * *

  The shower was set as hot as Nanuli dared without scalding herself. She'd scrubbed herself from head to toe three times already, and if she scrubbed much more certain places were going to end up raw. Yet she still couldn't get his touch off her.

  No, it was not the memory of his touch, she decided as she toweled herself off and wrapped herself in a bathrobe. It was shame, the sense that she had made a whore of herself. She told herself that she'd given herself to Vladilen Ivanovich only to repay her life-debt to Mahmood, but she couldn't shake the sense that she was rationalizing.

  She stalked through the rooms of her private apartment, searching through the papers and general clutter that had built up over the past weeks. Behind a row of books she found what she had been looking for. There was not much vodka left, but it would be enough to wash the memories out of her mind.

  * * *

  Vladilen Ivanovich kept his promise; Mahmood emerged from the regen capsule two days later, standing straight and tall as a man, not a debased salvagee. Nanuli considered telling the Chechen of the Russian's original plans, but the words stuck in her throat.

  Perhaps he still suspected, for he set to finishing his rehabilitation with a fierceness that worried Nanuli. He refused to join her and Vladilen Ivanovich for meals, preferring to fix his own meals according to his religion's purity laws. He insisted upon creating a firing range on one of the human levels, ostensibly to train some fire discipline into the salvagees and get them to stop accidentally shooting each other on patrol. When he pulled Nanuli in as well, she knew he had other plans.

  She met his summons with the same gentle but firm insistence she had used on the trail. "I am a doctor, sworn to save lives, not take them."

  This time he was adamant. "I'm not asking you to kill people, just the centaurs."

  Nanuli started to argue, then realized the question of Posleen personhood was fundamentally a religious issue, and they'd agreed not to discuss religious matters so long as the survival of all the Caucasian peoples depended upon Christian and Muslim working together. Anyway, if she balked, he could always throw at her the fact that she'd joined him in eating that Posleen in the snowstorm. If Posleen were people rather than monsters, she would be as guilty of cannibalism as if she had eaten human flesh.

  Still, the marksmanship lessons did have the advantage of getting her out of the residential area and away from Vladilen Ivanovich. He was bringing work up to the common area, lingering around in hopes of encountering her. She could hardly speak to the man without it turning into an argument, especially now that he'd taken to addressing her by the familiar ty rather than the formal vy. How long would she have to refuse to reciprocate before he figured out that she was not going to become his permanent mistress?

  Not that Mahmood was getting along with him any better. Every day brought a fresh quarrel, especially after Mahmood discovered their growing successes with the fabricator. They'd nearly come to blows over the question of establishing arms shipments to the holdouts at Grozny.

  That's the only thing that keeps him here, Nanuli realized one day during a particularly loud and angry shouting match, something about a radio transmission to Grozny about the railgun fabricator and how it could have been intercepted by Posleen. He wants take a shipment of weapons to replace the ones we lost with the rest of the caravan, and he's not going to take off as long as there's a possibility of getting it.

  The door banged open and the Chechen stalked through, his whole body bristling with fury. "This has gone far enough."

  He shoved a set of camo into her hand. "Put this on. We're getting out of here."

  Nanuli stared at him. "What?"

  "You sure as hell can't travel overland in that outfit." He jabbed a finger at her skirt and stylish pumps. "And we are not staying one more day under that man's roof. That is final. So get changed, now."

  Such was the authority in his command voice that Nanuli started unbuttoning her blouse before she even realized that he didn't mean she had to do it on the spot. She ducked into the privacy of a sheltered alcove and finished changing.

  Mahmood had already selected weapons and appropriate ammunition. "Now that he's rejuved you, you can carry a full load as well as your medkit."

  Nanuli whuffed at the burden, but her strength held. "Why now? The salvagees are saying the Posleen are on the move again."

  "For starters, how much Galactic law do you know?"

  Nanuli shrugged. "I've read a little."

  "Try this. There are some very specific Galactic laws establishing Earth as a human-only reserve, and prohibiting any Indowy settlement, on pain of death. Individual technicians and small teams are granted temporary visas to perform specific duties that cannot be accomplished by humans, but no long-term settlements and absolutely no reproductively complete groups. Both stipulations are being flagrantly violated here, in case you haven't noticed in spite of having attended a birth."

  At the memory of helping the female craftsman give birth to one after another tiny infant, each no bigger than a kitten, Nanuli flinched. "But the Galactics can't kill. That's why they need us--"

  "Exactly. And any organized human force that knows and refuses to stand everyone in this compound against the wall is in breach of Galactic law."

  "But we didn't bring the Indowy here, the mafiya did--"

  "Doesn't matter. As long as we're here, we're guilty. And you can't get a sharp lawyer to talk your way around Galactic law the way you might be able to talk a medical review board out of revoking your license for aiding and abetting unethical medical experiments by whining that you didn't know what he was doing."

  "The salvagees? Most of them would be dead without his techniques."

  "His blasphemies, you mean. Life is for Allah alone to bestow, and those who presume upon His will can only produce abomination. And yes, I know how you spared me from that man's meddling, for which I owe you my life. But he's making monsters, bestial cannibals. That's why we never found any settlements on the way up here. The damned salvagees hunted everyone down and ate them, when they weren't hunting and eating Posleen. That's what happened to whoever it was we buried, right before the snowstorm. They only do it when they're on patrol, but that Russian has to know what they're up to."

  "Oh my God." Nanuli's voice was a tiny squeak in her own ears.

  By that point they were almost to the back exit. Nanuli hated it, since the only way to get to it was by crossing a slender catwalk suspended over the main environmental plant. She dreaded looking down at the huge tanks in which sludge was separated and the nutrients fed into the hydroponics tanks, while heavy metals were recovered to become feedstocks for Indowy manufacturing. Even if the hundred-meter fall didn't kill a person, they'd drown or be poisoned before the Indowy technicians could pull them out.

  "Just hold it right there." Vladilen Ivanovich stalked across the catwalk, a Nagan auto-pistol in hand.

  Mahmood held his ground. "We know what you're doing, Academician Voronsky. And we know why the Crabs sent you back in disgrace from America."

  Voronsky? Nanuli blinked, recalling the photographs of a portly man with wispy white hair, hiding behind his hat as he hurried
to the plane, escorted by US federal agents. But she'd known that Vladilen Ivanovich had to be a rejuvie, had to be older than herself, just by little things he'd said here and there during the past month.

  Vladilen Ivanovich clicked off the safety, pointed the pistol directly at them. "You're not going anywhere, either of you."

  Nanuli's gut clenched. He wouldn't even have to destroy them, just wound them badly enough to turn them into two more debased salvagees.

  "Honored Academician!" The Indowy's cry was at the very limit of human hearing, and loud enough to make ears hurt even over the constant rumble of the equipment below.

  Vladilen Ivanovich hesitated, turned. "What is it?"

  "The stone fill barrier has been breached and the Posleen are invading the fabricator laboratory. There are thousands of them, coming as fast as they can get through the door."

  Nanuli recalled the size of that door. Not a good situation.

  "Son of a bitch!" Vladilen Ivanovich howled in fury. "You betrayed me!" He raised the pistol, squeezed the trigger. The pistol barked, accompaniment for his near-incoherent epithets against Chechens.

  A stream of blood burst forth from Mahmood's chest, followed moments later by another. At the third he fell backwards against the slender wire railing of the catwalk, overbalanced and tumbled off toward the huge sludge tank below.

  "You killed him!" Nanuli didn't even remember raising the AK. It was over before she even realized she'd pulled the trigger.

  She landed one round in his chest, near the shoulder. The rest went wild, the barrel of her weapon drawn upward by the force of her earlier shots. He fell like a rag doll, crimson spreading across the white of his lab coat.

  Then the clip was spent and she stood staring at the result of her handiwork. This was no alien Posleen she had just killed, but a human being, whatever his crimes. What sort of doctor was she, to slaughter him like that?

  But there was no time to contemplate, for already the doors below were buckling, giving way to admit a stream of yellow centaurs, their knives out and flashing as they butchered their game. Terrified Indowy scrambled across the floor, up ladders set in the walls in hope of getting to some meager safety, at least until the Posleen made their way to the upper levels in other parts of the complex.