Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi Page B

of it, and an hour later, she started looking good.
    Once we finished with Lisa's front settings, we sat around and fed her. I had a bowl of tailings mud that I drizzled into her mouth to speed her integration process. When we weren't feeding her, we watched the dog. Jaak had shoved it into a makeshift cage in one corner of our common room. It lay there like it was dead.
    Lisa said, "I ran its DNA. It really is a dog."
    "Bunbaum believe you?"
    She gave me a dirty look. "What do you think?"
    I laughed. At SesCo, tactical defense responders were expected to be fast, flexible, and deadly, but the reality was our SOP was always the same: drop nukes on intruders, slag the leftovers to melt so they couldn't regrow, hit the beaches for vacation. We were independent and trusted as far as tactical decisions went, but there was no way SesCo was going to believe its slag soldiers had found a dog in their tailings mountains.
    Lisa nodded. "He wanted to know how the hell a dog could live out here. Then he wanted to know why we didn't catch it sooner. Wanted to know what he pays us for." She pushed her short blond hair off her face and eyed the animal. "I should have slagged it."
    "What's he want us to do?"
    "It's not in the manual. He's calling back."
    I studied the limp animal. "I want to know how it was surviving. Dogs are meat eaters, right?"
    "Maybe some of the engineers were giving it meat. Like Jaak did."
    Jaak shook his head. "I don't think so. The sucker threw up my arm almost right after he ate it." He wiggled his new stump where it was rapidly regrowing. "I don't think we're compatible for it."
    I asked, "But we could eat it, right?"
    Lisa laughed and took a spoonful of tailings. "We can eat anything. We're the top of the food chain."
    "Weird how it can't eat us."
    "You've probably got more mercury and lead running through your blood than any pre-weeviltech animal ever could have had."
    "That's bad?"
    "Used to be poison."
    "Weird."
    Jaak said, "I think I might have broken it when I put it in the cage." He studied it seriously. "It's not moving like it was before. And I heard something snap when I stuffed it in."
    "So?"
    Jaak shrugged. "I don't think it's healing."
    The dog did look kind of beat up. It just lay there, its sides going up and down like a bellows. Its eyes were half-open, but didn't seem to be focused on any of us. When Jaak made a sudden movement, it twitched for a second, but it didn't get up. It didn't even growl.
    Jaak said, "I never thought an animal could be so fragile."
    "You're fragile, too. That's not such a big surprise."
    "Yeah, but I only broke a couple bones on it, and now look at it. It just lies there and pants."
    Lisa frowned thoughtfully. "It doesn't heal." She climbed awkwardly to her feet and went to peer into the cage. Her voice was excited. "It really is a dog. Just like we used to be. It could take weeks for it to heal. One broken bone, and it's done for."
    She reached a razored hand into the cage and sliced a thin wound into its shank. Blood oozed out, and kept oozing. It took minutes for it to begin clotting. The dog lay still and panted, clearly wasted.
    She laughed. "It's hard to believe we ever lived long enough to evolve out of that. If you chop off its legs, they won't regrow." She cocked her head, fascinated. "It's as delicate as rock. You break it, and it never comes back together." She reached out to stroke the matted fur of the animal. "It's as easy to kill as the hunter."
    The comm buzzed. Jaak went to answer.
    Lisa and I stared at the dog, our own little window into pre-history.
    Jaak came back into the room. "Bunbaum's flying out a biologist to take a look at it."
    "You mean a bio-engineer," I corrected him.
    "Nope. Biologist. Bunbaum said they study animals."
    Lisa sat down. I checked her blades to see if she'd knocked anything loose. "There's a dead-end job."
    "I guess they grow them out of DNA. Study what they do. Behavior, shit like that."
    "Who hires them?"
    Jaak shrugged.