Shadow Puppets Read online

  "You fight dirty."

  "I fight like a girl."

  "And if you stay with me, we'll probably end up dying together."

  "No we won't," said Petra.

  "I'm not immortal, as you well know."

  "But you are smarter than Achilles. And luckier. And taller. And nicer."

  "The new improved human."

  She looked at him thoughtfully. "You know, now that you're tall, we could probably travel as man and wife."

  Bean sighed. "I'm not going to marry you."

  "Just as camouflage."

  It had begun as hints but now it was quite open, her desire to marry him. "I'm not going to have children," he said. "My species ends with me."

  "I think that's pretty selfish of you. What if the first homo sapiens had felt that way? We'd all still be neanderthals, and when the Buggers came they would have blasted us all to bits and that would be that."

  "We didn't evolve from neanderthals," said Bean.

  "Well, it's a good thing we have that little fact squared away," said Petra.

  "And I didn't evolve at all. I was manufactured. Genetically created."

  "Still in the image of God," said Petra.

  "Sister Carlotta could say those things, but it's not funny coming from you."

  "Yes it is," said Petra.

  "Not to me."

  "I don't think I want to have your babies, if they might inherit your sense of humor."

  "That's a relief." Only it wasn't. Because he was attracted to her and she knew it. More than that. He truly cared about her, liked being with her. She was his friend. If he weren't going to die, if he wanted to have a family, if he had any interest in marrying, she was the only female human that he would even consider. But that was the trouble--she was human, and he was not.

  After a few moments of silence, she leaned her head on his shoulder and held his hand. "Thank you," she murmured.

  "For what I don't know."

  "For letting me save your life."

  "When did that happen?" asked Bean.

  "As long as you have to look out for me," said Petra, "you won't die."

  "So you're coming along with me, increasing our risk of being identified and allowing Achilles to get his two worst nemeses with one well-placed bomb, in order to save my life?"

  "That's right, genius boy," said Petra.

  "I don't even like you, you know." At this moment, he was annoyed enough that the statement was almost true.

  "As long as you love me, I don't mind."

  And he suspected that her lie, too, was almost true.

  2

  SURIYAWONG'S KNIFE

  From: Salaam%[email protected]

  To: Watcher%[email protected]

  Re: What you asked

  My Dear Mr. Wiggin/Locke,

  Philosophically speaking, all guests in a Muslim home are treated as sacred visitors sent by God and under his care. In practice, for two extremely talented, famous, and unpredictable persons who are hated by one powerful non-Muslim figure and aided by another, this is a very dangerous part of the world, particularly if they seek to remain both hidden and free. I do not believe they will be foolish enough to seek refuge in a Muslim country.

  I regret to tell you, however, that your interest and mine do not coincide on this matter, so despite our occasional cooperation in the past, I most certainly will not tell you whether I encounter them or hear news of them.

  Your accomplishments are many, and I have helped you in the past and will in the future. But when Ender led us in fighting the Formics these friends were beside me. Where were you?

  Respectfully yours,

  Alai

  Suriyawong opened his orders and was not surprised. He had led missions inside China before, but always for the purpose of sabotage or intelligence gathering, or "involuntary high officer force reduction," Peter's mostly-ironic euphemism for assassination. The fact that this assignment had been to capture rather than kill suggested that it was a person who was not Chinese. Suriyawong had rather hoped it might be one of the leaders of a conquered country--the deposed prime minister of India, for instance, or the captive prime minister of Suriyawong's native Thailand.

  He had even entertained, briefly, the thought that it might be one of his own family.

  But it made sense that Peter was taking this risk, not for someone of mere political or symbolic value, but for the enemy who had put the world into this strange and desperate situation.

  Achilles. Erstwhile gimp-legged cripple, frequent murderer, fulltime psychotic, and warmonger extraordinaire, Achilles had a knack for finding out just what the leaders of nations aspired for and promising them a way to get it. So far he had convinced a faction in the Russian government, the heads of the Indian and Pakistani governments, and various leaders in other lands to do his bidding. When Russia found him a liability, he had fled to India where he already had friends waiting for him. When India and Pakistan were both doing exactly what he had arranged for them to do, he betrayed them using his connections inside China.

  The next move, of course, would have been to betray his friends in China and jump ahead of them to a position of even greater power. But the ruling coterie in China was every bit as cynical as Achilles and recognized his pattern of behavior, so not all that long after he had made China the world's only effective superpower, they arrested him.

  If the Chinese were so smart, why wasn't Peter? Hadn't Peter himself said, "When Achilles is most useful and loyal to you, that is when he has most certainly betrayed you"? So why was he thinking he could use this monstrous boy?

  Or had Achilles managed to convince Peter, despite all the proof that Achilles kept no promises, that this time he would remain loyal to an ally?

  I should kill him, thought Suriyawong. In fact, I will. I will report to Peter that Achilles died in the chaos of the rescue. Then the world will be a safer place.

  It's not as if Suriyawong hadn't killed dangerous enemies before. And from what Bean and Petra had told him, Achilles was by definition a dangerous enemy, especially to anyone who had ever been kind to him.

  "If you've ever seen him in a condition of weakness or helplessness or defeat," Bean had said, "he can't bear for you to stay alive. I don't think it's personal. He doesn't have to kill you with his own hands or watch you die or anything like that. He just has to know that you no longer live in the same world with him."

  "So the most dangerous thing you can do," Petra had said, "is to save him, because the very fact that you saw that he needed saving is your death sentence in his mind."

  Had they never explained this to Peter?

  Of course they had. So in sending Suriyawong to rescue Achilles, Peter knew that he was, in effect, signing Suriyawong's death warrant.

  No doubt Peter imagined that he was going to control Achilles, and therefore Suriyawong would be in no danger.

  But Achilles had killed the surgeon who repaired his gimp leg, and the girl who had once declined to kill him when he was at her mercy. He had killed the nun who found him on the streets of Rotterdam and got him an education and a chance at Battle School.

  To have Achilles's gratitude was clearly a terminal disease. Peter had no power to make Suriyawong immune. Achilles never left a good deed unpunished, however long it might take, however convoluted the path to vengeance might be.

  I should kill him, thought Suriyawong, or he will surely kill me.

  He's not a soldier, he's a prisoner. To kill him would be murder, even in a war.

  But if I don't kill him, he's bound to kill me. May a man not defend himself?

  Besides, he's the one who masterminded the plan that put my people into subjugation to the Chinese, destroying a nation that had never been conquered, not by the Burmese, not by colonizing Europeans, not by the Japanese in the Second World War, not by the Communists in their day. For Thailand alone he deserves to die, not to mention all his other murders and betrayals.

  But if a soldier does not obey orders,
killing only as he is ordered to kill, then what is he worth to his commander? What cause does he serve? Not even his own survival, for in such an army no officer would be able to count on his men, no soldier on his companions.

  Maybe I'll be lucky, and his vehicle will blow up with him inside.

  Those were the thoughts he wrestled with as they flew below radar, brushing the crests of the waves of the China Sea.

  They skimmed over the beach so quickly there was barely time to register the fact, as the onboard computers made the assault craft jog left and right, jerk upward and then drift down again, avoiding obstacles on the ground while trying to stay below radar. Their choppers were thoroughly masked, and the onboard disinfo pretended to all watching satellites that they were anything other than what they actually were. Before long they reached a certain road and turned north, then west, zipping over what Peter's intelligence sources had tagged as checkpoint number three. The men at that checkpoint would radio a warning to the convoy transporting Achilles, of course, but they wouldn't have finished the first sentence before...

  Suriyawong's pilot spotted the convoy.

  "Armor and troop transport fore and aft," he said.

  "Take out all support vehicles."

  "What if the prisoner has been put in one of the support vehicles?"

  "Then there will be a tragic death by friendly fire," said Suriyawong.

  The soldiers understood, or at least thought they understood--Suriyawong was going through the motions of rescuing the prisoner, but if the prisoner died he would not mind.

  This was not, strictly speaking, true, or at least not at this moment. Suriyawong simply trusted the Chinese soldiers to go absolutely by the book. The convoy was merely a show of force to keep any local crowds or rebels or rogue military groups from attempting to interfere. They had not contemplated the possibility of--or even a motive for--a rescue from some outside force. Certainly not from the tiny commando force of the Hegemon.

  Only a half dozen Chinese soldiers were able to get out of the vehicles before the Hegemony missiles blew them up. Suriyawong's soldiers were already firing before they leapt from the settling choppers, and he knew that in moments all resistance would be over.

  But the prison van carrying Achilles was undisturbed. No one had emerged from it, not even the drivers.

  Violating protocol, Suriyawong jumped down from the command chopper and walked toward the back of the prison van. He stood close as the soldier assigned to blow the door slapped on the unlocking charge and detonated it. There was a loud pop, but no backblast at all as the explosive tore open the latch.

  The door jogged open a couple of centimeters.

  Suriyawong extended an arm to stop the other soldiers from going into the van to rescue the prisoner.

  Instead he opened the door only far enough to toss his own combat knife onto the floor of the van. Then he pushed the door back into place and stood back, waving his men back also.

  The van rocked and lurched from some violent activity inside it. Two guns went off. The door flew open as a body collapsed backward into the dirt at their feet.

  Be Achilles, thought Suriyawong, looking down at the Chinese officer who was trying to gather his entrails with his hands. Suriyawong had the irrational thought that the man ought really to wash his organs before jamming them back into his abdomen. It was so unsanitary.

  A tall young man in prison pajamas appeared in the van door, holding a bloody combat knife in his hand.

  You don't look like much, Achilles, thought Suriyawong. But then, you don't have to look all that impressive when you've just killed your guards with a knife you didn't expect someone to throw on the floor at your feet.

  "All dead inside?" asked Suriyawong.

  A soldier would have answered yes or no, along with a count of the living and dead. But Achilles hadn't been a soldier in Battle School for more than a few days. He didn't have the reflexes of military discipline.

  "Very nearly," said Achilles. "Whose stupid idea was it to throw me a knife instead of opening the mossin' door and blasting the hell out of those guys?"

  "Check to see if they're dead," Suriyawong said to his nearby men. Moments later they reported that all convoy personnel had been killed. That was essential if the Hegemon was to be able to preserve the fiction that it was not a Hegemony force that had carried out this raid.

  "Choppers, in twenty," said Suriyawong.

  At once his men scrambled to the choppers.

  Suriyawong turned to Achilles. "My commander respectfully invites you to allow us to transport you out of China."

  "And if I refuse?"

  "If you have your own resources in country, then I will bid you good-bye with my commander's compliments."

  This was not at all what Peter's orders said, but Suriyawong knew what he was doing.

  "Very well," said Achilles. "Go away and leave me here."

  Suriyawong immediately jogged toward his command chopper.

  "Wait," called Achilles.

  "Ten seconds," Suriyawong called over his shoulder. He jumped inside and turned around. Sure enough, Achilles was close behind, reaching out a hand to be taken up into the bird.

  "I'm glad you chose to come with us," said Suriyawong.

  Achilles found a seat and strapped himself into it. "I assume your commander is Bean and you're Suriyawong," said Achilles.

  The chopper lifted off and began to fly by a different route toward the coast.

  "My commander is the Hegemon," said Suriyawong. "You are his guest."

  Achilles smiled placidly and silently looked around at the soldiers who had just carried out his rescue.

  "What if I had been in one of the other vehicles?" said Achilles. "If I had been in charge of this convoy, there's no chance the prisoner would have been in the obvious place."

  "But you were not commanding the convoy," said Suriyawong.

  Achilles's smile broadened a little. "So what was that business with tossing in a knife? How did you know my hands would even be free to get the thing?"

  "I assumed that you would have arranged to have free hands," said Suriyawong.

  "Why? I didn't know you were coming."

  "Begging your pardon, sir," said Suriyawong. "But whatever was or wasn't coming, you would have had your hands free."

  "Those were your orders from Peter Wiggin?"

  "No sir, that was my judgment in battle," said Suriyawong. It galled him to address Achilles as "sir," but if this little play was to have a happy ending, this was Suriyawong's role for the moment.

  "What kind of rescue is this, where you toss the prisoner a knife and stand and wait to see what happens?"

  "There were too many variables if we flung open the door," said Suriyawong. "Too great a danger of your being killed in the crossfire."

  Achilles said nothing, just looked at the opposite wall of the chopper.

  "Besides," said Suriyawong. "This was not a rescue operation."

  "What was it, target practice? Chinese skeet?"

  "An offer of transportation to an invited guest of the Hegemon," said Suriyawong. "And the loan of a knife."

  Achilles held up the bloody thing, dangling it from the point. "Yours?" he asked.

  "Unless you want to clean it," said Suriyawong.

  Achilles handed it to him. Suriyawong took out his cleaning kit and wiped down the blade, then began to polish it.

  "You wanted me to die," said Achilles quietly.

  "I expected you to solve your own problems," said Suriyawong, "without getting any of my men killed. And since you accomplished it, I believe my decision has proven to be, if not the best course of action, at least a valid one."

  "I never thought I'd be rescued by Thais," said Achilles. "Killed by them, yes, but not saved."

  "You saved yourself," said Suriyawong coldly. "No one here saved you. We opened the door for you and I lent you my knife. I assumed you might not have a knife, and the loan of mine might speed up your victory so you would not delay our
return flight."

  "You're a strange kind of boy," said Achilles.

  "I was not tested for normality before I was entrusted with this mission," said Suriyawong. "But I have no doubt that I would fail such a test."

  Achilles laughed. Suriyawong allowed himself a slight smile.

  He tried not to guess what thoughts the inscrutable faces of his soldiers might be hiding. Their families, too, had been caught up in the Chinese conquest of Thailand. They, too, had cause to hate Achilles, and it had to gall them to watch Suriyawong sucking up to him.

  For a good cause, men--I'm saving our lives as best I can by keeping Achilles from thinking of us as his rescuers, by making sure he believes that none of us ever saw him or even thought of him as helpless.

  "Well?" said Achilles. "Don't you have any questions?"

  "Yes," said Suriyawong. "Did you already have breakfast or are you hungry?"

  "I never eat breakfast," said Achilles.

  "Killing people makes me hungry," said Suriyawong. "I thought you might want a snack of some kind."

  Now he caught a couple of the men glancing at him, only their eyes barely moving, but it was enough that Suriyawong knew they were reacting to what he said. Killing makes him hungry? Absurd. Now they must know that he was lying to Achilles. It was important to Suriyawong that his men know he was lying without him having to tell them. Otherwise he might lose their trust. They might believe he had really given himself to the service of this monster.

  Achilles did eat, after a while. Then he slept.

  Suriyawong did not trust his sleep. Achilles no doubt had mastered the art of seeming to be asleep so he could hear the conversations of others. So Suriyawong talked no more than was necessary to debrief his men and get a full count of the personnel from the convoy that they had killed.

  Only when Achilles got off the chopper to pee at the airfield on Guam did Suriyawong risk sending a quick message to Ribeirao Preto. There was one person who had to know that Achilles was coming to stay with the Hegemon: Virlomi, the Indian Battle-Schooler who had escaped from Achilles in Hyderabad and had become the goddess guarding a bridge in eastern India until Suriyawong had rescued her. If she was in Ribeirao Preto when Achilles got there, her life would be in danger.

  And that was very sad for Suriyawong, because it would mean he would not see Virlomi for a long time, and he had recently decided that he loved her and wanted to marry her when they both grew up.