Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  The Ygnaza I'd punched stood itself up, adopting a quadrupedal posture as it moved away from the fight. This seemed to be their default posture, unless they needed the added strength of their lower arms for, say, opening a bulkhead door. Had it not been bipedal at the time, I probably wouldn't have toppled it. How could they simply go back to their control stations and ignore us? It probably said something about Ygnaza culture, but I had more pressing matters to think about, like Xiao's boot coming for my head. I rolled under it, punching a pressure point on his load bearing knee for all I was worth. Xiao bellowed something incoherent as his leg went from under him and he crashed to the floor plates. I tried to deliver a knockout blow, but Xiao caught my ankle and swung me into the tower. It's shell pealed like a massive bell as I struck it.

  "Do not hit the reactor *glug*," one of the Ygnaza called out. Their ability to mimic human speech without the requisite mouth parts would seem remarkable, if my head weren't busy ringing from being used as a hammer. I crawled towards the wall, the world still tumbling as my inner ear worked to right itself. Xiao stood and pulled his spear from the wall, drawing forth even more concrete chips.

  "I was hoping for a real fight," he said, lunging at me. I rolled to the side, the spear piercing the fiberglass insulation and cast iron casing of the coolant pipe. A stream of water poured out around the circumference of the spear. Xiao wrenched it free, with an audible crack as the pipe split. The stream of water became a frigid torrent gushing from the pipe and flowing through the grated floor.

  The Ygnaza began warbling and shrieking to each other. Splitting the coolant line of the reactor was probably a bad thing. I ran away from Xiao. There weren't many places to go in the room, most of the space was taken up by the tower, so I looped around behind it. In the back corner, I found a metal folding chair with a stack of magazines nearby, one of which had been discarded in haste. It was the only piece of furniture in the room. I snagged it as I passed, continuing my loop. Xiao had figured out my route, as he appeared in front of me, swinging the spear for where my chest would be. I ducked into a slide, swinging the chair edgewise into Xiao's kneecaps. Missing his swing and losing his balance, Xiao's spear impaled one of the Ygnaza, and the control panel behind it.

  For the first time, I spotted a recognizable reaction in the aliens: surprise. Somehow not comprehending the sudden sprouting of a metal rod from its midsection, the Ygnaza poked the rush of pus-green glop pouring from its body in disbelief. I rushed past Xiao as he and the alien were off-put. I heard the wrenching metal as Xiao freed his spear from the control panel and the alien. I knew he was coming about, and threw myself to the side to avoid his swing. Only I moved the wrong way.

  I expected Xiao to bring the sharp point about, alien glop and all. Instead, he hit me with the blunt end, his strength driving it through my body. The steel dowel erupted from my gut in a fountain of agony, closer to my left side than my middle. As I staggered about as stupefied as the Ygnaza had been, Xiao kicked the end of the spear, driving the point into the wall and pinning me in place. With blood gushing from the wound, and the pain wracking my body, panic was starting to set in. As Xiao grabbed the hair on the back of my head, that analytical part of my mind curled up in the fetal position and cried.

  Normally, I found dirty moves to be beneath me, but in the wake of being impaled, I was no longer above kicking Xiao in the balls. He bellowed in pain and staggered back, shouting profanity in several different languages. Still, pinned to the wall with a steel rod, there wasn't much I could do to follow up on the hit. Xiao loosed his foul language and regained most of his composure.

  I tapped the transmit button on my earpiece. "Shadowdemon to Delta," I sputtered, "Code red."

  "Some hero," Xiao said. "No matter. Now you bleed, and soon you die."

  "Say again?" Dad asked, worry creeping audibly into his voice.

  "Code red, I need--" I cried out in pain as Xiao twisted the spear, grinding it deeper into the wall.

  "You leave him alone!" Xiv shrieked, leaping on Xiao's back and pummeling his head with tiny clawed fists. More annoyed than injured, Xiao grabbed Xiv by the hair and threw the dragon boy. Xiv clung to the ceiling, still able to bend his neck far enough to look back at the giant.

  "What the hell are you?" Xiao asked. Xiv didn't answer, instead, he belched a stream of frost. From his expression, he already knew he could do that, but it was a shock to me. Xiao raised his arms in front of his face, but was soon coated in a layer of ice. That didn't last long. The creaking started immediately, followed moments later by the shattering of the ice shell. "Ha! Vermin, that didn't hurt." Xiv scrambled back along the ceiling as Xiao advanced with an evil grin. Spewing frost again, Xiv targeted the already near-frozen coolant surging from the broken pipe. Using the ample supply of water, he built up an ice wall between himself and Xiao. Xiao pounded his way through in two punches. He leapt back as Xiv unleashed a gout of flame in his direction.

  Seeing Xiao off-balance, I tangled my ankles with his, tripping him. The tower of muscle fell, his head bouncing off the wall as he crashed to the floor. Xiao lay ominously still. Before I could worry about whether we'd accidentally killed the man, the warbles between the Ygnaza had reached a fevered pitch. Many of their readouts were flashing a pus-green color and a lot of the needles looked far from their comfort zones. The Ygnaza who'd called for Xiao early was repeating one string of phonemes, gesturing urgently with one gracile arm. The gauges sank and the room went dark. Three seconds later, a dim red glow kicked in. The Ygnaza went quiet, their tense forms relaxing.

  "What happened?" Xiv asked.

  "They shut down the power," I stammered, barely able to string the words together. If the floor were not grated, I probably would have accumulated a large puddle of blood at my feet by now. The spear was just about the only thing holding me upright. "Prob...ably... to keep... from... blowing... up." I fought against the darkness encroaching on me again. The Ygnaza turned towards me, their alien eyes scrutinizing my situation.

  "Humans," their leader uttered, "Barbaric little things *glug*." The anatomically impossible suggestion I gave the Ygnaza was muttered using words my Dad would never have approved of. Their faces were so alien that I could not read their reaction, if they even had one.

  "Shadowdemon," Xiv said, "That's not a nice thing to say." A meek chuckle forced its way past my lips as I could no longer find the energy to even lift my head.

  "You're... a... good... kid... Xiv," I said. To most people, it would have been nigh inaudible, but Xiv could hear my earpiece from the other side of the hallway.

  "Don't-- Don't go," he said, lifting my head up so that I was looking him in the giant, creepy eyes. His pale blue third eyelids blinked away the first hint of a tear. "You can't go," he cried.

  "I... would... much... rather... stay..." The darkness overcame me.

  The term 'pipe dream' originally referred to the bizarre, incomprehensible dreams of someone high on opium. The twisted imagery can still be found in the dreams of those medicated with opiate derivatives. In this warped realm, I found myself again floating in a tube, watching Ygnaza sigils waltz on the walls with Cyrillic phrases as hate-filled, lidless eyes stared at me from behind red crystal lenses. Six-limbed aliens worked enigmatic control panels floating in space as Doctor Omicron assembled his tools. I was stretched out like a rubber band onto a table as Omicron started the autopsy. Carving me open, he began extracting parts, handing them to a blue-skinned Ygnaza and reading off nonsensical values. Masquerade scribbled these down urgently, eating each note paper as he finished writing.

  Reflected in the sky, I could see Xiv, pinned out like a lab animal as the army doctors poked about his insides, trying to see what made him tick. In the end, they decided it was a bomb, and called in a robot to detonate it. Two of Omicron's white-clad bots came in as the army left, smothering Xiv with their bodies before a muffled blast shook th
em slightly. Torquespiral approached my bedside, speaking in alien warbles. A steady beeping pushed at the pulsating fabric of my mind.

  It was a heart monitor.

  It took every iota of willpower I had to prise my eyelids open. I was in a tent, a field hospital of some kind. Its fabric walls were white, and a harsh florescent lamp hung from one of the poles. I was hooked to a mass of monitoring equipment and poked full of IVs, including a blood drip. From the way I lay there without a care or sensation, I'd been dosed with morphine. I wanted to wake up to someone pleasant, but found Agent Six seated in the corner of my curtained off space.

  "Status report: I think I lost the fight," I said.

  "Very funny," Agent Six said.

  I laughed, a quiet chuckle really, "You're not the one on morphine right now."

  "I'll go tell your dad you're awake," he said, standing and heading off. As he pushed past the curtain separating my area from the rest of the field hospital ward, a memory bubbled to the fore of my mind.

  "Impaled through the gut with a piece of rebar, he fought on until blood loss took him down," I muttered. I couldn't help but fixate on the similarity. Though Xiao's spear wasn't exactly rebar. It's got to be a mere coincidence, I never once rejected the reality of my injury. The curtain opened briefly, letting Dad slip inside. He was still in costume. Suddenly cognizant of the question, I reached up to my face and found a cloth mask taped to it. I laughed at the patent absurdity.

  "That sounded like a 'dosed up on opiates' laugh to me," Dad said.

  "I'm pretty sure I am."

  "When you get a chance, you should probably thank Minispell. By the time we got down to the power plant, you looked pretty dead. I couldn't even find a pulse. But she swore she could still sense life in you."

  "You'll have to remind her to stop by, I'm not sure I can go seek her out just yet."

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "What for?"

  "I didn't have much choice when I ordered you in there."

  "Remind me if I'm wrong, but you also told Agent Six to leave two sentries by our insertion point and he was the one who deviated from the plan."

  "Still..."

  "You would have sent whoever was available," I said.

  "You sound awfully calm. Are you sure you're my son?"

  "It's the morphine talking. I can't get mad with it in my system." My mind wandered through the events prior to losing consciousness. "During the fight, I tripped Xiao, and he hit his head. Is he...?"

  "He suffered a skull fracture, some short term amnesia. He doesn't recall fighting you."

  "Oh, thank God. I was afraid I'd killed him."

  "That... dragon boy, however..." Dad said.

  "Don't tell me something happened to Xiv. He kept Xiao from finishing me off."

  "He's a damn nuisance, keeps trying to break out."

  "Did you ask where he was trying to go?"

  After a pause, Dad let out a single laugh. "He wanted to see you."

  "Xiv's not a bad kid, but I think he's only a few weeks old."

  "Oh, really?"

  "He was grown in a Final Star lab of some sort. According to the cultists who had him prisoner, the Ygnaza were going to take care of him for them."

  "We didn't catch any cultists," Dad said.

  "I left them zip-tied by the water works."

  "We found a metal crate there, but no people."

  "They might have hid among the prisoners," I said.

  "We've already processed and released the Ygnaza's prisoners from the base. We weren't looking for Final Star cultists."

  "I'm sure they'll turn up. So, this is what you've been up to."

  "I went undercover to find this facility, but I couldn't get inside. Mission control decided we had to strike before too many people were sent off-world. I certainly didn't expect them to tap you to join in."

  "There's only so many ways I can perform my community service. I was due to help out."

  "Is your sister still a courier?"

  "Yep."

  "And your brother?"

  "Started that traineeship on the west coast he was so excited about."

  "So are things going well?"

  "Not really," I said. "I screwed up royally. I got captured and unmasked. After I was rescued, the fund moved sis and I to a safe house."

  "Who was it that caught you?"

  "Masquerade and Doctor Omicron."

  "I've never heard of Doctor Omicron, but luckily Masquerade is insane. Makes his credibility somewhat strained, if he even remembers clearly."

  "From what I've heard, Omicron is a far clearer-headed mercenary scientist."

  "Scientist in what field?"

  "Several, apparently."

  "Funny, I thought they didn't make multidisciplinary scientists anymore."

  "He's a bit old school. He predates Torquespiral."

  "You know what I noticed?"

  "What?"

  "More than half of this conversation has been shop talk. We haven't talked in months, and now that we are, its about the family business." Dad moved the chair Agent Six had been using closer to my hospital bed, seating himself in it. "Outside of the community, how's life been?"

  "I don't have a life outside the community," I said.

  "That's not healthy, not for anyone. You lose perspective and lose touch with the people we're supposed to be helping. Everyone needs some piece of normalcy."

  "I just don't connect with... well, the rest of the world."

  "Have you tried? Or have you used it as an excuse to avoid them?"

  "I... I didn't try."

  Dad sighed. "I was hoping none of you would turn out like me."

  "That doesn't make any sense."

  "I don't mean how I am today, I mean how I was at your age. I was part of an insular subculture, avoiding contact with the outside world. I thought I had nothing in common with the public, and nearly destroyed myself with my obstinance."

  "I thought you didn't become a hero until you married Mom."

  "I didn't."

  "So what are you talking about?"

  "I wasn't born with my powers. At your age, I was still an unpowered individual, and part of a street gang." Had I not been doped up with morphine, I might have gasped, or shown some indicator of the surprise that ran through me. "We got recruited to run security for an up-and-coming wannabe mastermind calling himself Hymnomancer, who specialized in sonics, and was trying to weaponize them. It paid better than anything we could pull down elsewhere, so for a while I was a professional henchman. Up until the point that Hymnomancer decided it was better to shoot through me than offer a warning. I got knocked into one of his experiments and left for dead. The building caught fire and was starting to come down when I woke up. Your mother was the one who dragged me out of there, despite almost getting caught in the collapse herself."

  "Is that when you two got together?"

  "No. She forgot about me, and I ended up in prison. That's when my powers started to manifest. Since I didn't have any murders on my record, I was offered a chance to join the Redemptioners program. I think someone realized that since I could absorb the cell doors, it'd be hard to keep me locked up."

  "I thought Redemptioners usually didn't survive their terms of service."

  "They don't. I'm on the small list of people who made it to their pardon. What I'm saying is, I know what it's like to feel like an outsider to the real world. It's not true, especially for you. It just takes a bit of effort to interact with regular people. Believe me, it does a world of good."

  Somehow I didn't believe him.

  Part 12

  They had to restrain Xiv from trying to give me a hug when they brought him to visit. I managed to explain to him tha
t his being locked up was a misunderstanding. It was a bit of a fib, but he agreed to behave to show us that he wasn't one of the bad guys. He was pretty much a small child, personality-wise at least. We didn't have a clue how old he was biologically. That was the problem with a unique creature who was at least half a clone of an extinct species. He seemed to trust me, and being calm and reasonable has worked thus far in securing his cooperation. I wasn't sure if I convinced anyone else to treat him like a person instead of a scientific curiosity, but I didn't have a whole lot of energy to argue.