Seconds later, the door to the warehouse burst open. The remaining suit and at least two of the surviving guards were there, guns at the ready. Humph couldn’t help but grin as he fired the revolver; the Webley-Fosbery was an old, accurate gun, and it struck true. The bullet hit the power pack of the jammed shock-gun, breaching it; both guns exploded brilliantly. The blast was enough to momentarily blind Humph and knock him onto his ass. When he was able to right himself, he and Harry peered over the edge of the dumpster at the same time. Where the suit, guards, and door used to be was now only a ragged, smoldering hole the size of an aircar.
“How the hell did you do that?” Harry’s jaw hung open in awe of the impromptu destruction. “I mean, finding me and then the thing with the crane and blowing up the guns?”
Humph shrugged, helping Harry to his feet as he stood up. “Just winged it, kid. It ain’t exactly my first rodeo. C’mon, we need to get out of here before the ‘boss’ shows up.” They hoofed it to where Humph’s stolen aircar was still waiting; there was some fresh graffiti on it, a quick one-color tag of what looked like a gang-sign, but otherwise it looked undisturbed. Once they were in the air, Humph made sure not to beeline straight back to the ship graveyard; still, they had to hurry. The clock was ticking and if Lori actually did what she was supposed to, she’d be in the wind in the next half an hour. He had some questions for her, if his suspicions had any merit.
“Why’d you come after me?” Harry had a look on his face like a puppy that had been caught rummaging in the garbage.
“What are you talking about?” Humph asked, annoyed. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well…I overheard you and Lori. Talking about ditching me and running off. I figured that you didn’t want me around anymore; she sure doesn’t.” He looked down at the floorboards. “So I made a call, or tried to. Those guys in the suits grabbed me right after, and you know the rest.”
Humph couldn’t take his hands off the controls to smack himself—or Harry—in the head, but at that moment, he dearly wanted to. “Aw good Christ, kid…” he groaned. “Look, I tried to explain. Lemme try it again, this time you’re sober, maybe you’ll get it. Three things. One: You’re stuck with me, I’m stuck with you, because whatever is going on around here, it’s gonna take both of us to figure out enough to get these bastards off us. Whoever they are, they’re huge. Whatever it is you somehow got yourself into, it’s huge. They killed an entire Fang space station just to keep us from getting help. But that means somehow, something we know or can figure out is dangerous to them. You got that part?”
Slowly, Harry nodded.
“OK. Two: Lori is a Lorelei. At best, they’re cold bitches, and she has a real hard case against Norms. Don’t worry about her; it’s better if neither of us is involved with her, anyways. That dame is trouble with a capital ‘t’; if anything’s true, that most certainly is.”
“Yeah, I suppose. What’s the last thing?”
“The last thing is we haven’t been paid yet. And the job ain’t done till the Boggart gets paid. Right, partner?” Humph turned to give Harry the full-on toothy grin, Boggart style.
Harry returned the grin, his spirits evidently lifted. “You got it, partner.”
***
The pair arrived back at the ship graveyard after taking a circuitous route; Humph was a lot more careful than the goons that had nabbed Harry, and was continually checking to make sure that they weren’t being followed. They ditched the stolen aircar and the guard’s uniform several blocks away and continued on foot, just to be sure. Finally they made it back to the ship they had set up sanctuary in; Humph could see light very faintly past the edges of the tarp. When they were less than half a dozen paces away, Lori stepped out. She instantly looked alarmed.
“Stop!”
It was too late; before either of them could react, the ground gave way under Harry’s feet; flailing around, he hooked Humph’s collar, dragging the Boggart down after him. They both landed in a very uncomfortable pile at the bottom of the hole. At least there aren’t any spikes. Or saw blades. Or snakes. Or all of the above.
“Ow,” Humph croaked out. The hole was about six feet deep, and hastily dug; the corners had been squared, though, so whoever had dug the trap at least knew what they were doing.
“You’re sitting on my chest and you weigh a ton!” Harry was somewhere underneath him; it took them a few moments to untangle their arms and legs, stand up, and dust off.
“Lori, you mind telling me what the hell is going on?” Humph was in no mood for this nonsense; they didn’t have time to be screwing around, since the goons could show back up here and take them all out in short order. He looked up; Lori was peering over the edge of the hole. Then her face was joined by two more; one rather desiccated, the other slowly changing from fur-covered to average Norm-looking. “Sonofabitch.”
“Really, the first thing you can think to say to me after all of this is a dog joke? You’re losing your touch, boss.” Fred was scratching his chin as the last of the fur receded, his face now back to its usual unremarkable self.
“Well, we’ve always known I had the brains in this operation. Get it? Huh, get it?” Skinny Jim had the “helmet” from his bot suit under one arm, elbowing Fred with the other.
“If you two jokers are done, I’d very much like to get out of this hole. Today. Right now.”
“It’s the boss, all right. Bitch, bitch, bitch,” Skinny Jim quipped, reaching down and throwing Humph the end of a rope. “I swear, here we are, turning up, protecting his fair damsel, fortifying the castle, and all he can think is to complain.”
Humph hauled himself out, and offered Harry a hand to help him scramble up the dirt wall. “Glad to see you idiots,” he said gruffly. “Dammit, I thought you might have gotten fragged when I couldn’t raise you.”
“Aww, see now? He cares!” Skinny Jim clapped the bot head back on. “You weren’t nearly as hard to keep track of, boss. Whoever is behind this really didn’t give a rat’s ass about us, you and pretty boy there were who they wanted. All we had to do is get to Fred’s hideout, and sit tight, and watch the news.”
Fred nodded solemnly. “Once we saw where all the shit was going down, we knew you had to be in the middle of it. We got the general loc, then I sniffed you out. Took awhile; the ol’ nose is a bit off after a century of smelling deadheads. Anyways, tracked you here from the flophouse where all the killing got done. Water Wench here gave us the rundown, then told us you’d gone after the kid, so we hunkered down to wait.”
“I’ve got one other question.” Humph looked back to see Harry climbing out of the pit. “Why dig the hole?”
Both of them shrugged. “We were bored, and it seemed like the thing to do.” Jim hooked a thumb back at Fred. “Besides, someone had to bury their treats.” There was a light clang as Fred slapped the back of Jim’s helmet.
“Well, can’t argue with that. Next time, don’t let me fall in it.”
“What, you don’t like looking up to us?”
Fred snickered. “He’s already short enough for that, Jim.”
“I wonder if a dog and a real robot would be any less annoying than you two. Probably make less of a mess.”
“But they wouldn’t dig holes nearly as good.”
Harry joined the circle, still dusting himself off. “Harry Somerfield, I present to you the rest of Boggart, Barkes, and Bot; Fred and Skinny Jim, respectively.” After the introductions and handshaking—Harry was somewhat reluctant to shake hands with a Reboot at first—were over, Humph instructed everyone to gather up what little there was in the shuttle; they had to get out of the area and find a new place to hunker down and plot their next move.
“Way ahead of ya, boss. But, I’ll warn you,” Jim said. “It’s not the Ritz.”
“More like the ‘fritz,’” Fred admitted.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Humph asked, raising an eyebrow.
“You’ll see when you get there.”
***
&n
bsp; It looked like a World War II bunker. Literally. Superficially, at least, it didn’t look as if there was a single piece of modern tech in it—or at least, hadn’t been brought in by someone else. Right now, the light was being supplied by portable lamps. Living conditions were pretty basic. Six metal-frame bunk beds bolted to the floor had been made up with surgical precision, and Humph was damn sure the linens were some form of military surplus. They just had that look to them. There was a kitchen area with a stove that apparently ran on fuel cells; a couple of metal tables were also bolted to the floor. There was a bathroom at one of the far ends with an incinerating toilet and a water-recycling shower. The bunker looked as if someone had welded spaceship hull-plates together into a pair of square tubes, put the thing together in the form of an X, and buried the whole thing. Most of it was taken up with storage; food in the form of concentrates, water, other supplies.
“The hell,” said Humph, once he’d climbed down the ladder and surveyed the place. “How in the name of all things dark and dangerous did you find this place?”
“Bought it,” Fred said. “For cash; Furs never trust Norms. This is a standard bug-out bunker you can pick up on the black market virtually everywhere there’s a planet. Well, we don’t call ’em bug-out bunkers, we call ’em emergency dens. We make sure they’re off the grid and off the radar. Some Furs even go so far as to hand-dig their dens, or put ’em in cave systems.” He pointed to a single thin wire running up the wall, and from there, up the access tube with its ladder that led to what looked like a standard city utility hatch. “That’s our sole connection to the outside. I found a planetary data-node and wired into it. Otherwise, we could bolt the hatch and not come out for a year if we didn’t feel like it. That’s how Furs can go missing for years, decades at a time.”
Humph whistled. “I like how you think,” he said.
Lori dropped down onto one of the bunks. “It’s more comfortable than it looks!” she said, with a look of surprise.
“Standard ship mattresses. We figure on hibernating if we have to go under. Saves consumables.” Fred went over to the stove and fired it up, emptying a couple of pouches into a pot and adding water. “You don’t want to hibernate on a bad mattress.”
“I don’t suppose—” Lori began.
Fred nodded toward the storage. “One-size-fits-most T-shirts and pants. Hot water in the shower module.”
Lori got up quickly and headed for the storage crates. Clean clothing clutched to her chest, she edged past them and disappeared into the bathroom. Humph sniffed appreciatively. Maybe the stuff in that pan was also some form of military ration, but after the last several days, it smelled like a gourmet dream.
Lori came back out some time later, hair wet and bound up on the top of her head, face innocent of makeup, just as the food was ready. Fred divided it equally among all of them except for Jim, who waved at the bowls and said “I ate already.” Humph wasn’t going to argue or inquire as to how Jim had eaten; instead he dug into whatever-it-was—some sort of casserole—and damn near licked the bowl clean. He noticed that neither Lori nor Harry were any more fastidious than he was about doing the same. They hadn’t gone hungry, but the adrenaline had rendered them all famished. Fred passed around coffee, or what passed for coffee, when they were all about halfway through.
“Short story,” Fred said, collecting the bowls and stacking them in the little sink. “We got about two minutes’ warning before all hell broke loose on the office. And that was only because they cut off all our comm just before they hit. We used the emergency exit, headed for one of the safe-houses, discovered it wasn’t so safe after all, and I declared FUBAR and hauled Jim here. All we did was monitor what was going on after that. Sorry, Boss, but the best thing we could do was not to go after you, but to disappear. We needed to drop completely out of sight first and let them figure we’d bailed on you.”
Humph nodded. This couldn’t have been Skinny Jim’s plan, but it made perfect sense for Fred. The Fangs had reverted to their old medieval arrogance after the Great Uncloseting, but the Furs, it seemed, had retained a lot of their old paranoia. Good thing they had.
“That’s where I started tracking you,” Skinny Jim said. “I bet it isn’t going to shock you in the least to hear that most of the people after you aren’t law enforcement.”
Lori had already curled up on a bottom bunk, but wasn’t looking sleepy. Humph stayed where he was, in the metal chair. It wasn’t comfortable, but he wanted to keep a little distance between himself and the Lorelei. “I was beginning to think along those lines, yeah,” he admitted.
Harry had hoisted himself up into a top bunk, and was watching them all like a superfan following the ball at a tennis match.
“If anything, the law was reacting to what was going on after the fact,” Jim continued, pulling his bot-head off and putting it on the table. “Take the raid on Jeanpaul’s place. That wasn’t cops. The cops only showed up after the shooting started. Radio chatter started and they were pissed, then suddenly the radio chatter stopped dead, and the only thing that came over the freqs was an order to withdraw.”
Humph nodded. That fit in with a growing suspicion in his mind. He turned to Harry. “OK, kid,” he said, gruffly. “Spill me some beans. Who’d you call when you bugged out on us and those goons grabbed you?”
“My mother,” Harry said, sheepishly. “Or—actually, the head of Company Security.” He frowned then, thinking. “Or, actually, I tried. It was the right number, but I didn’t recognize the voice of the person I talked to. He cut me off and told me to stay put, and it wasn’t more than a minute later that those thugs turned up and—”
“And I saw the rest.” Humph cut him off. He patted his jacket, then retrieved a cigar, the last one in his case.
“Not down here, boss; don’t want to tax the ventilation system any more than we have to.”
He shook his head. “Naw, I’m not going to smoke it, just chew the hell out of it while I think. This entire mess has more twists and turns than a Medusa on a bad hair day.”
“Well,” Jim said, after a very long pause. “Elephant in the room. I can’t think of any multi-planetary business that can push local law enforcement around the way we’ve been seeing. I very much doubt even the Mafias or Tongs could do it. So, that leaves us with—?” Jim had learned to signal a lot with his voice alone, since what was left of his face didn’t have hardly any expression to speak of.
“What, Feds?” Fred shook his head. “How does that make sense? We’re not exactly all that high on anyone’s wanted list, at least before this fiasco started. Whoever these goons are, they seem to want Harry, but for what? He’s just a rich kid with too little sense.” He held up his hands. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Harry replied.
“Anyways, we’re all small-time in the grand scheme of things. And even if it were the Feds, which ones? Planetary? Earth-gov? One of the alliances out on the rim?”
“Fred, you and me, we watched a lot of old vids and movies. I know Humph has. When it isn’t who you are that’s dangerous, it’s what you know.” Jim tapped his metal-encased finger on Harry’s head for emphasis. “And that’s doubly true when you don’t know what you know. When you were in the right place at the wrong time, for instance.”
Humph stopped chewing on his cigar to speak. “I’ve been thinking on that. I don’t think it’s anything that any of us know; we’ve dug up stuff for all sorts, and hell knows that we’ve trudged through enough crap to maybe get a whiff of something we shouldn’t have. But it’s nothing earth-shattering; if it was, we’d have been able to suss it out by now.” He looked at everyone in the group before settling on Harry. “Which leaves just one person that this could be about, though it doesn’t make much sense.”
Harry put up his hands in frustration. “We’ve been over that, though. I really don’t know anything, nothing that could bring this kind of trouble.”
There was silence for a few moments. Humph jabbed his stogie in the d
irection of Jim. “While you two have been off the radar, have you been keeping at the digging I told you to do for this gig before it blew up in our faces?”
“That’s a 10-4 chief,” Jim replied. “Incentive and boredom, don’cha know. Harry has been a very naughty boy, haven’t you, Harry?”
“Well, yeah. I already told Humph about all of that, though. Sure, I was embezzling, but that’s small potatoes, right?”
“That alone isn’t enough to draw down this kind of thunder, that’s for sure. There’s something else to it, though.”
“When is a raven like a writing desk?” Fred said, suddenly, as if something struck him out of the blue.
“I have not been smoking the Caterpillar’s hookah, nor eating and drinking things that say Eat Me and Drink Me,” Lori put in, crossly. “And my name isn’t Alice.”
“The point of that riddle, because it was nonsense, was to make children try and figure out a way that a raven could be like a writing desk,” Fred explained. “Turn the reasoning around. We’re sitting here assuming that there was nothing Harry could possibly have gotten into to bring this kind of attention down on him. Turn it around. Assume there must have been something he did, and start looking for it from the back end.”
Humph turned in his seat, looking to Fred and Jim. “Did anything stick out to you two when you were digging around Harry’s misadventures in economics?”
Reboots: Diabolical Streak Page 10