TangleRoot (Star Sojourner Book 6) (18 page)

“You don't want to do that,” I said.

“I don't?”

“I've already done a preliminary investigation on bristra…Blackroot. I can assist your lab team in further studies. It's what you want, isn't it? Further studies?”
You slimy bastard!
I thought. “In return –”

“In return?” Al said. “
Marone e mia
, he told Tracy,”he's still got a pair of brass balls. Get the fuck inside!" He pushed me toward the estate.

I reached for Sophia's hand and squeezed it.

Al broke my grip with a fist and pushed Sophia toward Tracy, who grabbed her. “Lock her in a guest room.”

“You know the deal, Al,” I said. “You don't hurt Sophia, and I'm your pet serf. I want to see her every day to know that she's all right.”

“You mother fucker, you're
still
telling me what to do? This is what you'll see every day.” He made a fist and hit me across the face. I staggered back, but kept my feet. “It still holds.” I put a hand to my stinging cheek. “I don't see her, I don't work.”

Al glanced around at the watching men. “Get the fuck inside!” He pushed me.

I could have killed him with a tel blow to his brain stem. But I couldn't handle all the others. I looked at Sophia, then turned and strode toward the building. I have only killed when it was absolutely necessary, but Al was on my short list, if and when the opportunity presented itself. I owed the world a favor.

“Come in,” Don Rastelli said in a voice rough with age. His hair was white, his jowls sagged in a broad face. “Sit down.” He motioned to a chair across from his desk in the dark, gloomy office. A fog of cigar smoke hung in the air. The bitter smell was in my throat. Two men sat in shadows along a wall. I was flanked by Zach and Vito. Al walked behind me. An aria I didn't recognize emanated softly from wall speakers.

I sank into the cushioned chair. I hadn't slept or eaten since the night before, when Sophia and I were captured on the beach. There was too much on my mind for gentle sleep to be invited in.

“I would offer you a glass of
vino,
” Rastelli said, “but it's early in the morning. Demi tasse?”

I shook my head. “What did you want to see me about?”

Al stepped forward. “Show some respect.”

Rastelli raised a hand. “
Va bene
,” he told Al. “It's all right.” He scratched his cheek. “You see before you,” he told me, “an old man.”

Here it comes,
I thought.
Give me back my youth.

“I can be very generous when I am given what I want. Money no longer interests me. My family, and my friends, they're all provided for.”

“If you want to know how long it will take to locate and extract the bristra longevity element, and make it available to humans, I'd just be guessing.”

“Then give me your best guess,” he said.

“A year. Five years.” I shrugged. “It's an alien species. It doesn't have the same morphology as lifeforms that developed on Earth.”

Rastelli rubbed his lips and looked at Al. Al straightened, prepared to do the don's bidding, I think. “My biologist from the Los Alamos Lab,” Rastelli said, “has been given everything she needs to study this…lifeform, as you call it.” He shifted stiffly in his chair. “I would like you to look over my lab and tell me if there is anything else you need for your work.”

Freedom,
I thought, but didn't say. Instead, I just nodded.

Rastelli leaned forward in his chair. “I am curious about one thing. If you had entered my lab last night, what were your intentions?”

“Either steal the bristra or destroy it.”

He studied me. “I can understand stealing it. But to destroy it…” He shook his head. “This makes no sense to me.”

That's because you're a degenerate,
I thought. “Bristra,” I said, “is a dangerous opportunistic plant/animal that would ravage the land if it were set free. It moves fast and it destroys all life in its path, including humans. You have roots in your lab, Don Rastelli, that have already produced spores. If these spores get loose, the wind will carry them far and wide.” I tapped the desk. “Is that enough reason for you?”

Al kicked a leg of my chair.

“What if I can assure you,” Rastelli rubbed his chin, “that we will take all necessary precautions and this root will never get free?”

“I saw your list of customers, Don. One slip by any of them, and it will be too late. The spores will produce wild roots, and they will quickly mature and produce more roots. It can easily become an apocalyptic event.”

Rastelli looked at Al. “
Ma che cosa
…?”

“A disaster, Godfather,” Al explained.

Rastelli shrugged. “There are always two sides to every coin,” he told me. “This plant/animal, as you call it, can also extend life.” He leaned forward. His eyes became intense. “For how long?”

“I don't know. I hadn't completed the preliminary studies when your
capo
kidnapped my daughter and my girlfriend, and forced me to leave my work.”

“That was unfortunate,” Rastelli said, “but suppose we put it behind us?”

Fuck you!
I thought and rubbed my tired eyes. “So you intend to hold me and Sophia here until I find a cure for old age? Is that the plan?”

“You and your
comare
will be treated well.” He traced a finger across the desk. “You will be given everything you ask for, except –”

“Our freedom.”

He raised his hands and smiled. “That would be a foolish wish to grant you. You understand?”

I sat back. “Only too well. Will you personally see to it that Sophia is cared for?”

He nodded. “On the souls of my children.”

I glanced at Al. During an earlier run-in with him, Al had sworn on the souls of his children that he'd let me live, but my tel probe had caught his thought of my demise.

The only ace I had was that Joe and the team knew our location, and our situation. “Are we finished?” I asked the don.

His features hardened. “I will tell you when we are finished. Now you tell me, how much more time before you have a drug that I can take?” He tapped his chest hard.

That bad,
I thought. Maybe a heart condition. “First,” I said, “I have to determine how each individual gene protein trigger interacts independently from each other, and then each variant in every possible combination. And remember, it has an alien morphology. I wouldn't want to inject you with it and find that the side effect was death.” Let him chew on that!

He looked at Al.

Al shrugged.

Rastelli rubbed a hand across his chest and stood up.

The two tags in the corner got to their feet. Al and Zach and Vito moved closer.

“Get up!” Al told me.

I did.

“Alberto,” the don said, “is the police captain waiting to see me?”

“He is, Godfather.”

Rastelli nodded. “Then we are finished,” he told me. “I expect reports on the progress of your work, say once a week.”

“If there is progress,” I told him, turned and walked out the door, followed by my entourage.

“This one will be trouble,” I heard the don tell the tags in the corner.

You got that right!
I thought.

* * *

I sat alone in the lab and studied a tank of mature bristra. Whenever I tapped the glass, yellow flowers sprang open along its sides, enticing the prey closer. The brown spores rolled, ready to catch a wind for flight.

Spirit,
I sent,
it would be a big help if you would tell me just a little bit more about your great creation…Spirit?
I guess he was too busy creating more of his natural wonders.

I am here, Jules. You humans have jokes about genies in bottles who grant wishes. I am beginning to feel like your personal genie. What do you require of me this time, master?

I'm in a mess here, Spirit. I need to know –

Oh?

I took a breath.
I need to know what potent element is in bristra cells that causes them to jump back to the juvenile state and how I can isolate it.

With your primitive instruments, that will not be easy.

Is it doable?

Probably, but your process of doing clinical tests could take Earth years.

I don't care, Spirit. I just want to make it look good until Joe and the team can get us out of here. Before I leave, I intend to destroy every last root!

Every last root?

Well, maybe just a cutting that I can really study at the Los Alamos Lab.

Why am I not surprised?

Probably because you know I'm an astrobiologist and this is a fascinating lifeform. Dangerous, but fascinating. One of your more gifted children.

And it will never be set free from your lab?

Never! I can vouch for that.

I seem to recall South American killer bees.

That was different. I intend to destroy the spores as they develop. No spores. No new roots in wild areas.

So in the end, you are also intrigued by the possibility of eternal life.

I'm intrigued by the study of the root, Spirit.

Eternal life. What's the Terran term you often use? It's not in the lard.

In the lard?

Oh, in the yard.

Spirit, what the hell are you talking about?

I have it! It's not in the cards. Know this, Jules, Great Mind does not incorporate eternal life into His Plan. The kwaiis must move on to new lifebinds. Your long-lived jellyfish do not really live forever, and neither does bristra. New lifebinds await us all. Even myself.

But bristra can extend a lifebind?

It can. In the end, what good comes from that? There is much more that will be learned by moving on.

We humans are afraid of death, Spirit. We cling to our lifebinds.

Because you Terrans don't really understand the geth state.

I've been very close to it, when Great Mind pulled me back from Priest's dying hold on my kwaii. It was frightening.

The undiscovered country? It wasn't your time. You have many more messes to get into.

Thanks for that!

You are welcome, as you would say.

Spirit, I'm ready to take notes.

Then I will give them.

It was hours later, and copious notes later, that Norma, from my own bio team back at Los Alamos, entered the lab. I saved the notes on the comp in a private file that said BLOCK AUTHORS, and turned to her.

“I've been hesitating to enter the lab,” she said in her sultry voice, and shook her blond curls. Norma was young, beautiful, and very ambitious. She had always focused on creds too much and knew exactly how to use her feminine wiles for her own objectives. Her slim body and oversized breasts, those beguiling wide blue eyes, that translucent skin, dotted with freckles on an upturned nose, her full, fuck-me lips, drew tags to her like moths to fire. I always wondered why she became a biologist and not a high-end prostitute.

“Why hesitate?” I asked. “You have something you feel guilty about?”

She began to widen her eyes and I turned back to the tank of bristra. At least they were overtly dangerous.

“I know the way you feel about me, Jules, but we have to work together.”

“We don't have to like it.”

She came closer. I smelled her perfume. “You know,” she said, “I always thought you were one of the best-looking men I've ever met.” She put her hand on my shoulder.

I looked at it and she took it off.

“Is that why you betrayed my trust by contacting the Mafia and getting my daughter and girlfriend kidnapped?” I turned on the stool to face her. “I suppose it's a good thing you didn't consider me ugly. Only God knows what you would've done.”

Her eyes narrowed to blue chips. “I'll show you my notes and we can proceed from there.”

“Yes,” I said. “Let's do.”

You show me yours,
I thought,
but you don't get to see mine.

I sat in Terran JoeBoss' den, a strange lair with no bones from past meals piled on the fuzzy thing spread across it, and no cache of meat and fat drying in a corner for coming meals. I glanced up. I am not with comfort inside the Terran burrows with their flimsy overheads. Their see-throughs along the walls shut out the cool night breezes with its many aromas. I do not think Terrans smell the outside or see the small animals that dash through the night. They are so far away from the earthly joys of our Nature mother.

I sniffed the empty chair beside me and the fuzzy thing beneath me. Salty water leaked from my eyes as I smelled my Terran cub's left-behind aroma. I wiped my eyes with a paw and searched my belly pouch for the Earth sugary rolls that tasted sweeter than a dire flapper's gall bladder and crunchy as its flapper bones. They gave me comfort in my liver to eat them, like the warm sun on my back as I swam in Kresthaven's northern seas.

Then I remembered. I had lost all the Earth bars in the ocean.
Ten Gods,
I thought,
this is a small thing compared to the loss of my Terran cub and his female! Sweeter than candy, my love for my Jules cubfriend.

“Are you crying, Huff?” the bat asked me.

I shook my snout. “No. I am leaking water from my head for my Julescub.”

“Watch out your brains don't leak out with it,” the chance said.

I nodded. “I will.”

“Enough, Chancey,” Joe said in a harsh voice. He studied a piece of paper on the table and rubbed his chin. “Would be nice if one of our elite commando teams would go in and rescue them.”

“The Seals or Delta Force?” the bat asked.

“Or both,” the chance said.

Joe shook his head up and down. I had come to learn that this was another way to say
Yes.
“Unfortunately, there's no proof of a federal criminal offense. It's a missing person's case.”

“What about the WCIA?” the chance asked.

Now Joe shook his head the other way. “Even if they had the authority to go in, there are families living in the compound.” He leaned his forepaws on the table. “Nobody wants women and children caught in a crossfire, Chancey, not the CIA, the WCIA, the FBI, the commando teams, or the SWAT teams. Two members of our team disappeared on a night dive. That's all we've got.” He tilted his head toward me. “And an alien who isn't known for his astute judgment as an eyewitness.”

“Which leaves only us,” the chance said.

“Which leaves us,” Joe repeated and rubbed his eyes, a human gesture that meant
I am tired or I am sad or I don't know what to do.
“The local police department and the politicians are in Don Rastelli's pocket.”

I put a forepaw on the table. “I will help, JoeBoss,” I said, “in any way that I can, to free my Terran Jules friend and his female.”

The bat reached over and patted my paw. “We all want to see that, Huff.”

“Fortunately,” JoeBoss said, “none of the Mafiosi on Equus ever saw us face to face. Huff, you say they didn't see you on the beach when they captured Jules and Sophia? Is that right?”

“That is right, but what they did was wrong!” I shook my head from side to side in that human gesture. “I hid beyond the lights and behind the ice.” The memory of how the Al One had hit Jules and made him go into their burrow ached in my liver, and water dripped again from my eyes. “I could crush the skinny Al One with a forepaw and squeeze the red liquid out of his evil body!”

“Take it easy, Huff,” the bat said.

JoeBoss stared at a glass in the wall. I wondered what his human eyes saw through it. “This goes no further,” he said wearily and lifted a hand as though to hold down his words. “A friend in the WCIA agreed to tap the compound's comlinks for us.”

“That's a plus!” the chance said.

“Once a week,” JoeBoss said, “the compound calls for a laundry pickup and delivery. My WCIA buddy is in contact with the company that services them.”

The bat leaned back and folded his front paws on the table. “Is that when we go in?”

“This has to be a surgical mission,” JoeBoss said. “We go in with the truck, make the delivery and pick up the dirty laundry.”

The chance smiled. “And among the diapers…” he chuckled. When's the next delivery and pickup, boss?"

“Thursday. Two days from now. We'll fly to Southampton tomorrow morning and take a hovair to the laundry company, You Soil, We Toil.”

“Oh, cute!” the chance said.

Joe studied the paper. “This is a blueprint of the compound we got from the building department. Study it. Commit it to memory.”

“If there were only some way,” the bat said, “that we could get in touch with Jules and Sophia.”

Joe glanced at me.

I lifted my snout and waited.

“Huff,” Joe said, “Jules tells me that you have some latent tel abilities.”

“Does he tell you that?” I asked. “From where does he tell you?”

“Never mind.” JoeBoss let out a long breath of air. “Your mission, Huff, is to swim to the beach and get as close as you can to the compound without alerting their guard dogs.”

“I will rub myself with dead fish and move as silently as the doplestriker of the ice!”

JoeBoss' brows came together over his nose. “Damn good idea, Huff. Tomorrow night, when you're as close to the building as you can get, try to project thoughts to Jules. Just tell him over and over that on Thursday afternoon, to look for a laundry truck. That will be our rescue vehicle.”

“Should I tell him,” I asked, “to just look, or to find it?”

JoeBoss hit the table with a curled forepaw. “Yes, Huff! To find it.”

“How does Jules put up with him?” the chance asked.

“Sometimes,” JoeBoss said, “I don't know how either one of them puts up with the other. I only hope Jules knows where they're holding Sophia.” He stared up at the overhang of his burrow and ran his paw over his lips. “Someone at the compound might want to know what happened to the usual pickup and delivery crew. Our story is that they had an accident with their truck and we were asked to cover for them. If they call the laundry company, the manager is ready to confirm the story.”

“We'll do our best, boss,” the bat said in a soft voice.

“That kid,” JoeBoss said, “will make me old before my time.”

“What kid?” I asked and looked around. “How can a kid make you old before you are old?”

“With Jules,” JoeBoss said, “it's a piece of cake.”

A piece of cake,
I thought. So sweet. As sweet as Earth candy rolls. I drooled and licked my lips. “Is your female,” I asked JoeBoss, “baking us a piece of cake?”

JoeBoss stared at me.

“Now, boss,” the bat put a hand on his forearm, “think of Huff as a kid.”

“Just two kids,” Joe said, and rubbed his eyes again.

I looked around and under the table, but could see no kids. Perhaps they were beyond the dark glass. I opened my snout to ask, but bat moved his head from side to side. I knew the meaning was
No, don't talk.

Ten Gods,
I prayed,
in two days let me see my Terran cub again and his female. Keep them safe, please, I beseech you, inside the bag of dirty diapers.