Her Last Run

by Michael Penmore

  The man looked back. Ramsey and Moon stopped. Moon said, “What is it?”

  “He’s wanted! There’s a bounty on his head! Hundred thousand cosmos!” Crawley kept on shouting, stuffing up the numbers in the process. They had to believe him. His life depended on it. If they took him down to Rockwall, it was going to be the last planet he’d set his foot on.

  “Hey, private! Where are ya going?” Ramsey doubled back towards Crawley’s catch. Thank goodness. But the man kept moving. He broke into a run. What if he escaped? How could he! By refusing to stop, he was risking Crawley’s existence! He really was an extremely dangerous criminal! Crawley hoped Ramsey and Moon would catch him and bring him to justice for the anxiety he caused to the Specialist.

  “Hey! Stop! Moon, go after him, ya lump of lazy!” Ramsey shouted. The two EEFers ran after the fugitive.

  Crawley was left alone, forgotten, a prisoner of no significance. He could run too if he wanted. But where to? He would get lost and found by his captors. The reward for attempting escape would be a bloody beating. He really, really just wanted to get back to his cell now and sit there in peace and quiet awaiting some kind of resolution. Crawley was not an action man. He was a non-action blob.

  With no reason to run and no way of knowing how to get back to the ship’s brig, he traipsed without direction, head down low, until he walked straight into a big black-and-white vending machine that made a loud and hollow sound on contact with his scalp.

  “Ouch!” Crawley rubbed the top of his head and inspected the reason for his pain.

  The glorified snack dispenser activated and said: “Hello. Would you like a bar today?”

  Crawley cocked his head. He realised that he was indeed hungry with the gnawing sensation of stomach wrapped in anxiety and distress. The vending machine looked friendly enough with its sleek curves and a big slot located in the lower half. Its voice was warm, of a persuasion that couldn’t easily be identified as male or female. It wasn’t going to poison him, right? “You know what? Why not. Hit me with your best.”

  “I am not programmed for violent purposes,” the machine assured him with an inflection that channelled an eager to please but not overly intrusive hotel restaurant host. “Please help yourself to your daily dose of protein.” There was a small bleep and something dropped into the dispensing slot

  Crawley hesitated for two seconds, scratching his pate which still felt the effects of contact with the machine’s robust plastic shell. Then he reached down and pressed his hand into the slot. It came back holding a rectangle wrapped in silver-like film. Crawley read the label and his face contorted with a selection of grimaces, none of which expressed satisfaction.

  “Tofu flavour?!”

  “You are welcome. Have a nice day,” the machine chirped happily and deactivated itself.

  “Blah!” Crawley stuck out his tongue in disgust. He examined the rustling wrapper again and, after a few moments of uncertainty, came to the conclusion that it couldn’t be worse than anything he had had in his life. He ripped off the top and squeezed the contents slightly. They were white and spongy. He took a testing bite and, as he had suspected all along, the flavour didn’t hit him. Rather, it crawled all over his mouth like a bland, fat caterpillar. He spat the piece to the floor, but the taste didn’t subside. “Typical Earth nonsense! Can’t even get a candy bar right!”

  Being a docile forty-something, Crawley rarely showed any emotions with intensity. Now his long-forgotten teenage angst reappeared in the form of a spiteful kick against the lower side of the vending machine.

  The automaton rang out with a big reverberating sound. It didn’t like that treatment. Flashing lights appeared all over it, and the voice came back, channelling an upset parent with a penchant for machine learning. “Unauthorised attempt to extort contents. You are only allowed one protein supplement a day as per regulation EDS44-3/1. Vandalism will not be tolerated. I have notified security. Please remain in place until the officers’ arrival.”

  Crawley diminished into a ball of antsy. Concern crawled across his chest from left to right like a family of ants marching in a long line. “Woah, woah, woah! I didn’t mean it, OK? Tofu is good. Tofu is good!”

  The machine reacted by keeping on flashing. The Colonial Army Specialist propped his back against its casing and slid down to the floor, awaiting come what may for his one act of defiance. He shimmied along the equipment’s side until he found himself at the back, facing a wall. It was quite cosy and dark, just the kind of hole he needed right now.

  With his stomach churning on and on, he looked down on the bar still sitting in his hand, shrugged, and tried another bite. The taste of sponge and paper grew on him as he compared it with the repetitive prison grub he’d been getting of late. Tofu was a feast, actually, as his next meal was likely to be jail food again.

  * 10 *

  They hadn’t made sixty yards out of that control station when the wheel started to turn. It began with Nadie getting the shivers at the sight of two EEF regulars escorting a prisoner in tattered clothes. The rags barely resembled a Colonial Army uniform. Isabel had to focus and forcefully yank Nadie by the hand to stop her from doing something rash.

  “Pull yourself together, girl. We can’t save every Colonial in distress we cross paths with. We’ve got a task to carry out, remember?”

  Nadie nodded. Her pacification was superficial though, as evidenced by the knots on her forehead and the bite in her jaws. But then Dreyfus stepped out as a weirdo. The jarhead broke into a dash from his position at the back. “Run!” came a frenetic shout as he bolted past Isabel and Nadie.

  His anxiety turned out to have some justification. Those EEF regulars were running after him. “Stop! We just wanna have a little chat with ya, plonker!” one shouted, but the way he formed the invitation didn’t make it sound entirely honest.

  “Scuds!” Nadie cussed with admirable restraint and followed in Dreyfus’ footsteps. Her nimbleness was somehow steeped in an automaton-like rigidity. It underlay every move she made. Isabel, still unsteady on her feet, slapped her forehead as she joined in the mad escape dash.

  “He’s useless!” she moaned to Nadie as they bounded after the ex-marine. Dreyfus reached a fork and, instead of going straight to reach the elevators like they were supposed to, made a left turn. The girls jumped after him. Nadie bumped into his back and Isabel into Nadie’s. “Hey! What’s the holdup?”

  “Dead end,” Dreyfus panted like a fox chased by a pack of hunting dogs. Indeed, the way ahead was blocked by a tangled wall of multi-coloured cables reaching from ceiling to the floor and running through the side walls too.

  “What the hell, Rhys?! I thought you knew this ship!” Nadie erupted like a volcano coming to a volatile wake up after a long sleep.

  “Only the bare schematics!” he yelled back and tried to push his arms through the cables at random places, hoping to find a gateway leading to the other side of the wall. He had barely started looking when the hard boots of the EEFers rang in their ears.

  Isabel threw her own looking skills into the bargain. With the help of her augmented glasses, she scanned the walls, the floor and the ceiling but an exit wasn’t forthcoming. She didn’t have time to scrutinise every square inch and the galloping migraine made her question what she actually saw. “Useless. Just useless,” she cracked a commentary, not about anything specific but to sum up the whole lousy situation.

  Nadie got tired of standing aside and took matters in her own capable hands. “Stand back!” she barked like an eight-foot mastiff from hell. Her arms unslung that Earth plasma rifle she’d been lugging on her shoulder until this time. For a girl who despised everything Earth-made, she didn’t seem all that bothered about spinning a fan of green fire into open space between two walls.

  “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!”

  The battle-cry was raw, deafening and primordial. It left no room for doubt that Nadine Chu had some deep-rooted issues with the universe at large and that she was attempting to p
ull the roots out and disturb the soil in a way that would put the entire world order into disorder and chaos.

  Isabel’s headache increased tenfold. She started seeing green. At first, she thought it meant she’d damaged her brain. Ultimately, she realised it was the colour of the flame Nadie was using to scorch the hallway. If Isabel was troubled, it must have been like the end of the world for the EEF regulars caught in the shooting end of Nadie’s gun.

  “Hahaha! Gotcha now, ya stupid- GAH! GET DOWN, MOON, YA HUBDUB!!!” That was the shorter guy. He hit the deck right after the larger one had already done so. The EEFers crawled and rolled on their way back behind a wall. The way they evaded Nadie’s bolts of indiscriminate destruction was a minor miracle.

  The shooting was no longer necessary, but it didn’t stop yet. Corporal Chu was clearly in the world of her own, trying her best to empty all the plasma energy amassed in the rifle. Isabel reeled back, covering her ears. Dreyfus approached Nadie, careful not to get shot, and shouted in her ear:

  “Nadie! Calm down! It’s over! It’s done!”

  She needed three seconds before the words finally reached her. The end of shooting didn’t follow abruptly. Instead, Nadie’s face gradually pulled back from a fiendish snarl-to-end-all-snarls to a mildly irritated death stare; her trigger finger acquired a twitch which replaced the continuous barrage with four shortening bursts of plasma until the rifle muted at last and went to rest at the side of her leg.

  Silence quickly filled the resulting void, but it was deafening somehow. Isabel covered her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, and just waited for her world to come to a standstill. Until then, she pressed against a wall with her back and eavesdropped like a fly on Nadie’s exchange with Rhys.

  “Yeah. It is done.”

  “What happened to we don’t kill anyone?” Dreyfus flailed his arms about, signposting his displeasure.

  “They didn’t die.” Nadie’s words dripped with acid. She very clearly wouldn’t mind if they did.

  He attempted to talk back but when Dreyfus opened his mouth, what dropped on everyone’s ears wasn’t his masculine, slightly emotional voice, but a series of shrill sounds of alert. They were coming in from everywhere, surrounding them and stabbing Isabel’s ears, lacing her earbuds with pain.

  The gunrunner dropped off the wall. The automated warning sobered her up a little, and she hissed with all of the discomfort she felt, “Why does it always have to be sirens? They could use a polite concierge telling us what exactly we did wrong.”

  Dreyfus listened so hard his ears seemed to stand up on ends. “I’ll tell you what went wrong. That’s sensors picking up fire discharges. Unauthorised fire discharges,” he glowered at Nadie.

  “Stop being so overly dramatic. Let’s move.” Nadie shouldered past the jarhead and led the renewed effort to find a path leading out of the EES Higher Power. She stepped through the junction she had made black and steamy. The bulkheads still stood but the place needed to cool down and get a new coat of paint, pronto.

  They heard it before they saw it. On their left - the direction they were supposed to take before Dreyfus made an ill-fated detour - something heavy made a dull thud against the floor. Through the swirling fog of Nadie’s making, they saw a sturdy blast door fall into place, cutting them off.

  “Hello. You’re a very handsome door. Nice to meet you,” Isabel quipped through the headache of a lifetime.

  “Double back,” Dreyfus suggested. They whirled to where they had come from and hurried in the other direction. After clearing a cloud of vapour, the two EEFers who had pursued them became visible. The soldiers reached a different blast door and rolled under its descending slab before the barrier slammed into the floor and sealed off the other end of the corridor. The short, talkative EEFer produced a shout:

  “Got ya cornered now, ya flabber-“ The door drowned out the rest of his yapping but it didn’t mean blissful silence yet. The alert was still going on, its volume reduced to something just below the border of human tolerance.

  Isabel rubbed her temples, grateful that it wasn’t blasting but suffering from a low throb. When she retracted her fingertips, her skin felt like it was still being rubbed. That was a good sign; her synapses hadn’t melted away. They were just sluggish to pick up the impulses.

  “We’re trapped,” Dreyfus huffed, pacing in one direction, then the other, like a wolf on the prowl inside a hunter’s hole.

  “You think so, fuzzy?” Isabel squinted her eyes in focus. She pivoted back to face their original direction. “Can we use the rifles? Blast our way out?”

  Nadie shook her head. Her thin lips narrowed even more as she pressed them against each other before speaking. “There’s a reason they call them blast doors. Hand weapons won’t cut through them.”

  Isabel winced, both from the physical pain in her meninges and the snub her idea had received. “Have you got a better plan?”

  Dreyfus and Nadie looked at each other and at her, grievously silent. The three of them stood in the hallway, helpless. Then a thin, timid voice reached out from one of the bulkheads and snapped them to attention.

  “Umm... I might have something?”

  Isabel whirled one hundred and eighty degrees, but the corridor behind her was empty. She glanced over one wall but didn’t notice anything except a swanky-looking vending machine. Her brain slowly churned out simple questions: AI? In a water bucket?”

  “Show yourself, stranger!” Dreyfus hollered much louder than needed. Isabel wanted to elbow him under the armpit when the voice returned.

  “Promise not to shoot me? That girl with hot Asian looks seems like she’s gonna shoot me. I don’t wanna be shot. I can’t stress that enough. No shooting when I come out, OK?”

  The voice definitely came from the vending machine and it annoyed Isabel. She felt like using her own rifle and shooting it in the leg stands. Instead, she snapped Nadie on the arm, “Nadie is not going to shoot you. Right, my friend?”

  “Right. All right. I’m not gonna shoot you.” Nadie paused for half a second and then added, “Unless you’re an Earther shnitzfagel.” Isabel stomped on her foot. “Oww! What was that for?”

  “That didn’t sound very reassuring,” the voice quivered.

  “Don’t listen to her. Just come out,” Isabel brought out her hand and waved the vending machine over. She was calling a vending machine to come to her! Maybe her brain was damaged, after all.

  “I think I’ll stay here. I think I may be better off with the EFF?” the voice didn’t sound very confident of itself.

  “GET YOUR STUPID BUM OUT OF THERE AND SHOW ME YOUR MUG OR I PROMISE YOU I AM GONNA SHOOT YOU REALLY HARD!” Nadie changed tack. It worked.

  “Oh. Ok then. I’m coming out. No shooting!”

  The vending machine started to jangle. For a moment, Isabel thought it would get legs and traipse over to shake hands and give them its name. Then something wriggled out of the shadows. It was slow, short and plump. Its shoulders slumped, eyes half-closed in a pudgy face like they were expecting a punch to meet them. The lump of a man was clutching tatters that looked like a feral cat had been playing with them until it got bored with play. They still bore some resemblance to a grey Colonial Army uniform. Skin beneath them was evident, very pink, baggy and squishy.

  The plump man raised his hands to just below his chin in a primitive guard manoeuvre. They were bound together with chunky metal handcuffs. He tiptoed to the distance of about four feet from Isabel and stayed there. The dim light revealed his shudders. “All this fuss about a tofu bar?” he muttered incoherently. A wrapper with something white inside it stuck out of his hand.

  “Come out here. No one’s gonna hurt you,” Dreyfus moved towards the prisoner, playing at being all nice and avuncular. He stopped just a yard away and stretched out his arm, which gently touched the prisoner’s shoulder. Dreyfus’ head snapped back towards Isabel, eyes shut tight, nose desperately trying to curl itself outward. A distinct whiff of unwashed body floundered in Isabel�
��s nostrils.

  She did her best to ignore that and snorted towards Nadie. “Whadda ya know? Turns out we can save some Colons after all!”

  “Who are you, what unit?” Nadie took on questioning.

  “I’m Crawley,” the prisoner spoke in a squeaky and shaky voice. Then he chewed off a chunk of something he’d been holding in his hand, grimaced and spat it on the floor. “Do you have any food? This isn’t even worth stealing.”

  “Later. How did you end up here?”

  “I’m...” the man battled with himself. He took in some wheezy breath, stayed inflated like a puffer fish, then breathed out. “I’m a Specialist in the Colonial Army. Earthers snatched me from a beacon and put me here. You’re not EEF, are you? You’re escaping? Do you have a way out of here? Please, please, please take me with you?” His eyes and entire face shone with hope.

  Isabel nodded. With her headache subsiding from exploding to just splitting, she said, “I’ve got a ship primed and ready to leave this cage. But first, we need to get past this,” she indicated the blast door. “You said you might know how.”

  “I can get you through,” Crawley nodded his head so vigorously it barely stayed attached. He was desperate to please.

  “What’s stopping you?” Nadie asked with a hint of scepticism.

  “This. Can you take them off, please? They’re hurting the skin of my wrists worse than that yellow soap I once tried in the barracks.” Crawley raised his arms and the chunky handcuffs jangled.

  Isabel lowered her rifle to aim. “Not gonna hurt a pinch.”

  Crawley quickly turned his back to her. “Nononono! Not like that!”

  “Just kidding, gummy bear. Step right up so I can see what I’m dealing with.” Isabel pulled Crawley’s wrists up to see clearly. He bleated very much like a petulant goat. “Stay still.“

  “Have you done this before?” Crawley fidgeted on the spot.

  “Once or twice.” Isabel identified the culprits - two quite standard broad metal cubes with barely the space to accommodate human limbs. She brushed the bottoms of the shackles and they clattered to the floor.