by T E Olivant
One good thing about the tiny plastic craft was that it was equipped with a full range of interstellar communications tech. Lu Tang put a call through to the cloud on Eritree.
“Hello.” The screen was still black even though he could hear his contact. Clearly they had chosen not to be seen. This did not worry the Augment too much: he had had plenty of reasons to keep his own face hidden over the centuries.
“It’s me,” Lu Tang said. “I have had to change my plans. They caught up with the starglider.”
“No they didn’t,” the voice said. “It was someone else. A Detective.”
“Ah,” Lu Tang was only half focused on the call. He was working out his trajectory. The life-raft’s maneuverability was limited and he would have to make sure his calculations were correct unless he wanted to end up as a streak of burning ash in the planet’s atmosphere. “I will still be able to make the exchange, as long as the people on Eritree don’t get scared off.”
“I will ensure that they do not. But you must be careful that your true mission is not discovered.”
“Of course,” Lu Tang said stiffly. The monotone voice was starting to annoy him. He was a God, not some child to be patronized.
“The Detective could be a problem. They have a reputation for a failure to follow orders. This could be costly. If they try to prevent you making the exchange then you will need to eliminate them.”
“Understood.”
“Remember, little God, this is your chance at redemption. If you fail we will find a new home for you. And it will not be as hospitable as Widdershins 3.”
Lu Tang felt his cheeks grow hot. An odd sensation. His augmented brain was not behaving optimally once more.
“I am having some… upgrade difficulties in the cerebellum,” Lu Tang said, biting down the temptation to keep his failings to himself. After all, if he could not trust the person who had freed him from prison, who could he trust?
“That is understandable. You have been placed under undue stress. When your mission is complete we will arrange for a full program of repairs.”
“Thank you,” he said, his cheeks growing redder at the desperation in his own voice.
“Once you have made the delivery of the portal drive you will await instructions for the next phase in our operations.”
Now Lu Tang paused, momentarily lost for words. “You do not intend for me to actually hand over the drive, do you?”
“Certainly.”
“But… But it is the only one of its kind. The Augments have guarded it for decades. And in the wrong hands it could be –”
“In the wrong hands it could be a terrible weapon. Yes, we are not ignorant of this fact. You might say it is the very reason for these actions. What harm will it do us if the humans destroy themselves?”
“Well, none,” Lu Tang said, trying to dispel the raging voice in his head that screamed this was all wrong. It was his imbalanced hormones, no doubt. He had to trust the voice on the call. He had never been able to trust anyone else in all his centuries of life. They must know what they were doing. The alternative was unthinkable.
“And besides,” the voice went on. “It will be the human’s greed for power that leads them to use the portal drive. If they destroy themselves while doing it, the blame would be with them.”
“Of course,” Lu Tang agreed, soothed by the voice’s logic. He could feel the twitch under his eye easing up just from talking to the voice.
“You will land on the planet and precede with the exchange as planned. If the Detective ship catches up with you before then you must eliminate them. The exchange is paramount. We must regain what has been stolen from us.”
“Yes.” Lu Tang whispered. This he knew with the sort of burning passion that the silly humans reserved for their false Gods. He had to find what had been lost. No, what had been ripped from him with a violence that left a decade’s worth of scars.
“Yes.” He said once more, but the caller had already clicked off. Lu Tang turned to stare out at the stars. It would all be over soon, he thought. One way or the other.
Chapter 19
Biddy had never really believed people when they said that things had moved in slow motion. But when Macleod had raised her weapon and shot Tibo in the chest it had been like time was in a fog. The big man toppled backwards like someone had given him a hard shove. Just a split second after the woman fired Biddy aimed for Macleod with her stungun.
The old woman dropped like a stone.
“Shit!” Phil said, pushing Biddy out of the way and reaching for a lethal firearm from his side.
“Don’t shoot her! She’s already down!” Biddy shouted at him, while at the same time running over to the starglider pilot.
Blood was oozing out of a wound on his chest even as Elvis’s large hand pushed down on it.
“The medical pack is on my back,” Elvis grunted to her, trying to put more pressure on the wound.
“Hold on Tibo,” Biddy said, reaching into the bag and pulling out anything she could find.
“It missed his heart,” Phil said. He had left Macleod and come to join them. “But she used a big bullet. It’s the size of the hole that’ll kill him.”
“He’s not going to die,” Biddy muttered, grabbing an insta-bandage.
“Liquid plastic first,” Phil said and Biddy grabbed the pack. She trusted that her bodyguard knew what to do with bullet wounds, having been both victim and cause of a few in his time.
Phil grabbed a dressing and Biddy sprayed on the liquid plastic. Tibo’s mouth made a horrible watery sound.
“His lung’s collapsed,” Elvis said. The big engineer’s hands were dripping red.
“I saw something here, hang on… Yes, an insta-breathe. Out of the way Elvis.”
It was a nasty looking bit of kit, with a covered needle at one end. She pulled off the plastic covering.
“Hands away guys.” Elvis and Phil stepped back and she slammed the insta-breathe downwards. The needle impaled the man’s lung and the oxygen mask closed neatly over his face. Biddy watched anxiously but after a few seconds there was a little color in his cheeks again.
“Should we be worried about the bullet?” Biddy asked.
Elvis took a look at the big guy’s back. “No exit wound. So it’s in there somewhere, probably not doing him any good. But we can’t get it out here. I think we’ve done everything we can for now. We need to get him back on board our ship.”
“Just one minute,” Biddy said, going over to the command console.
“He hasn’t got many left,” Elvis said, his voice harsh. Biddy tried not to look at the gore that covered his arms and clothing.
“I know. I just want to check there are no more nasty surprises.” She pressed a few buttons. “Looks like some sort of life-raft left the ship an hour before we turned up. The Augment is definitely long gone.”
“Then we should get his friend home.”
“Yes.” Biddy placed a call to the Black Maria. “I need Kenzie and Hastings down here with a stretcher.” She took a look at the Scotclan woman who was now snoring happily. “Make that two stretchers. It’s been a busy day.”
Francesca and Hastings got Tibo stabilized while Biddy and the rest of the crew cleaned up. By the time Biddy had washed the last of the blood from her hands, Tibo was under plastic wrap in the cruiser’s medical pod.
“He’ll need to see a proper Doctor,” Francesca told Biddy. “I can keep him stable, but no more. The bullet is too close to his heart for me to risk doing anything about it. This pod will stop it from moving about, but he’s still at risk. Will you be taking him to Eritree?”
Biddy nodded. “There’s not much choice. I won’t have his death on my hands and he needs to go to a hospital.”
“From what I hear it’s Macleod’s hands that are bloody, not yours.”
Biddy shrugged. News travelled fast on a spacecraft, and bad news travelled quickest of all. “She just went for him. I should never have allowed her onboard.”
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br /> “What are you going to do with her?”
“Lock her up for the moment. She’s still out cold. Then I’m going to call Scotclan and tell them just what I think of their Observer.”
“And what about the Augment?” Phil said from the doorway. He was staring at Tibo with one hand on his stungun, as if the guy was suddenly going to get up and attack someone.
“I’ve sent the logs of the starglider over to the Geek. If anyone can find the Augment, he can.”
Biddy turned away from Tibo’s blank face and gestured to Phil. “Can I have a word?”
Biddy made sure they were out of earshot before she spoke again. “Any idea what the hell Macleod was doing shooting that guy?”
Phil frowned. “Why would I know?”
“You’re the bodyguard. Weapons expert and all around badass. Do you think she was trying to kill him or not?”
“Oh, you mean like a warning shot? No, I think she wanted him dead. She aimed for his chest.”
Biddy chewed her lip. “That’s what I thought. Shit. I almost let someone commit murder right in front of me.”
“It was me that should have moved faster,” Phil said, his shoulders hitched upward in embarrassment. “I should have stopped her.”
“You were there to protect me, not Tibo. It wasn’t like any of us were expecting it.”
“You managed to stun her though.”
“I had my gun trained on her all along. I never trusted the old witch.”
Phil allowed himself a wry smile. “Then you did something right.”
Biddy rubbed her knuckles into her eye sockets. “Make sure someone’s guarding her cell at all times. I’m going to get to the bottom of all this before I get in touch with Scotclan. For that matter, put the whole ship on communications lock down. No one hears about this mess before we want them to, understood?”
“Understood.”
Chapter 20
The air in the plastic life-raft was stale and Lu Tang was painfully aware of the reek of his own sweat. It was getting uncomfortably hot. The life-raft was only meant to be used for a few hours before some kind rescuer arrived to save whoever was onboard. It was never meant to be luxurious.
The intimate size of the life-raft was not Lu Tang’s most pressing problem, however. The main issue with the tiny craft was that there was no way it could leave the orbit of Eritree. He had two choices: firstly, stick around in the gravity pull of the planet for a while until he could organize a rescue, and just hope that no one found him first or secondly, attempt to land on the planet below.
He had half hoped that the voice he had spoken to earlier might have come to his aid. But that was foolish. The voice knew that he was a God, and that he should be able to get out of these sorts of situations without seeking the assistance of anyone else. Such desperation was beneath him.
And yet… Lu Tang swallowed, his throat parched. And yet he was feeling a fog of self-pity just waiting to wash over him. His augmented hormones should have compensated for this, but they were behaving erratically. His bleak thoughts were threatening to envelop him.
Oxygen warning. A tinny computer-generated voice came from a speaker behind him. Oxygen warning. Less than twenty percent remaining.
All right, Lu Tang thought, that answers one question. He didn’t have time to hang around.
“Set a course to land on Eritree,” he said out loud, before realizing that the life-raft was not sophisticated enough to follow voice commands. He reached for the control console and tapped in some instructions.
He watched the stars spin in the blackness as the life-raft changed course. It was all very tranquil and silent in space. That would change soon enough. A craft like this could not really land on a planet. It just didn’t have the engines. It would have to crash.
Lu Tang checked his trajectory. Still a little off course. He made an adjustment. His aim was to land somewhere to the south of the mines. He might just manage to avoid the notice of any of his pursuers then. It was a long shot, but he knew he had to try.
Entering atmosphere. No shit, Lu Tang thought as the temperature readings went off the scale. The tiny craft began to vibrate, a small shudder at first that grew to a frenetic fit that jarred his every muscle. Sweat was streaming down his face. He clutched onto the arm rests in his seat and gritted his teeth. Nothing to do but endure.
Lu Tang closed his eyes. He tried to focus on the turmoil around him in an abstract way, considering vectors of travel and the mass involved. But for some reason he could only think about the fragility of his own body. The danger that he might not make it out of the life-raft. Despite what some of the humans believed, Augments were not immortal. His bones could shatter into pieces just like theirs. What would it feel like, after all these centuries, to finally die?
Thump! There was an almighty hit of pressure and Lu Tang nearly passed out.
The pod might have been rubbish in terms of maneuverability, but there was one thing it had been designed to do. Crash. Just before the tiny vessel hit the ground it blew up into a massive spherical balloon filled with cushioning foam. This meant that the crash landing on the planet felt like light kiss on the surface. Lu Tang grinned. Alive once more. He opened his eyes and hissed a ‘Yesss!’ into the air. He was elated, born along on his success like a surfer on a water planet riding atop an eternal wave.
That was until he tried to get out.
It turned out there was another problem with the life-raft. A crash landing was designed to be the last resort, an action only taken when there was no alternative. It had therefor been planned with only one objective in mind: to protect life. The people who made the life-raft knew that in that scenario the safest extraction from the crashed pod would be done by those on the outside, preferably those with the appropriate tools to dismantle a five-foot-thick mass of foam.
It was not designed to be opened from the inside. Lu Tang pressed more and more buttons, but eventually came to realize that he was trapped. Totally stuck, encased in foam that had set as hard as cement.
A laugh filled the life-raft and it took Lu Tang a second to realize that it came from his own throat.
“I’m bloody gift wrapped!” He snorted and laughed again. Eventually he got control of himself and readjusted his hormones to a more suitable level for the occasion.
He waited.
There was a beeping sound and the shielding cracked open like an egg. Lu Tang didn’t even have a chance to grab a weapon before the doors opened.
“You’re under arrest!”
Chapter 21
The Geek had found the life-raft before it even hit the ground. It didn’t take Biddy long to jump into one of the landing craft that were kept in the cargo hold for just this reason.
The life-raft’s descent had been erratic, like there was no one at the helm. Or it could have been that the flimsy ship was so poorly designed it couldn’t maneuver in any planetary atmosphere. Either way, it had been ludicrously easy to track it’s landing path.
By the time it reached the ground, Biddy and her bodyguard were already running across the surface to meet it. She should have probably waited for more backup, but the small landing craft didn’t have room and it would take hours to land the Black Maria. Better to get there before anything else could go wrong.
Phil had shot through the control mechanism for the pod as soon it landed. He trained his gun on the doors while Biddy prized them open.
“You’re under arrest!” she called out on autopilot while pointing her stun gun at the solitary figure inside.
“I can see that,” a grumpy voice said. It was then that she noticed that the Augment was still harnessed from his rocky descent. Trapped by the craft’s own safety measures. It was all she could do not to laugh aloud. A clammy, pale figure, already bound up for his arrest. It was hardly the menacing God she had been imagining for the past few weeks.
“Don’t move!” Phil shouted as he climbed into the life-raft, his gun still trained on the Augment.
&nb
sp; “Rather unnecessary, don’t you think,” the Augment snapped in reply.
“I’m going to undo the restraints and then I want you to put both hands on your head.” Biddy said, her voice steady. This was what she had been trained for. “Climb out when I tell you.”
The Augment did exactly as he was told. Biddy kept her stunner raised just in case, but even a God had to know when he was beaten. Exhilaration mixed with relief in her mind. After the events onboard the starglider, she was just glad that nobody had had to fire a weapon.
When he climbed out of the life-raft she finally got a good look at him. He had had some surgery done on his face to mitigate the scarring that the Augmentation process caused, but his true nature was easy enough to see if you knew what you were looking for. A jagged line of scar tissue down the right side of his neck indicated where they would have augmented the connections to his central nervous system. The outline of metal plates could just be discerned under his razor short hair to the right of his temple. The pinpoint holes along his brow that indicated where hundreds of injections had inserted tiny processors to control his hormones.
All the little things that told her she was not looking at a human being. She was staring at a God.
Biddy swallowed. “I am here to take you into custody on behalf of Scotclan.”
“Scotclan?”
“The interstellar law enforcement agency.”
“Ah, one of those. Well, you’ll just have to wait your turn.”
Biddy narrowed her eyes. “I didn’t come here to wait. Come over here and put on the restraints.”
The Augment simply shook his head. “Humans! When will you ever learn to stay out of the business of those that are infinitely older and wiser than you?”
“I think that when you commit a crime then you make it our business.”
Out of the corner of her eye Biddy caught sight of movement. It was Phil and he was raising his weapon once more. It wasn’t the non-lethal stunner either. Crap. If he hit the Augment with a shot from that he’d be dead before the week was out. Why did no one ever remember about the murder clause?