I pointed to a room over in the distance, one that had once been full of toys and random playsets. “That was the daycare where all of us young ones hung out when our parents were busy working.”
“It seems odd that they would bring children here, considering what you have said about the economic situation. Young ones are supposed to be a symbol of prosperity, yes?”
“The initial program actually encouraged people to bring kids anywhere between thirteen and up so they could help in the fields and other chores. Kinda like free labor. Then, once the colony proved viable, they were encouraged to have babies. There was never a lot of us, maybe ten or so a year in a city of three thousand, but there was always some.”
“…interesting. You make it sound as if you were a renewable energy source.”
“That’s because we were. We were raised on colony life, and we were assigned roles that we were supposed to be for the rest of our life. Well…most of us were.”
“I take it from your tone that you were not?”
I shook my head, gesturing to another set of doors we were passing. “If you go down that hall and to the next building over, that would be the school. I did okay on some subjects, but most of my teachers gave up teaching me. I was a lot different then. I didn’t talk a lot, I was overwhelmed easily, and I understood humans even less than I do now. Opinions on me ranged from weird to brain damaged, and that didn’t exactly make things easy.”
“That…sounds difficult.”
“It wasn’t the easiest. But for a long time, I just assumed that was how it was supposed to be. It wasn’t really until I met you that I realized that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be treated that way.”
“I…” She seemed to falter with her words for a moment, which was unusual for her. “I am glad that I have helped with that revelation.”
She fell silent again as we went down the final staircase leading to the community center.
“I thought I had read that human parents have stronger relationships with their offspring. How did your parents feel about this different treatment?”
“Honestly…a bit guilty.”
She nodded. “Perhaps if they were not on the colony, you might have had a better life?”
“Oh, nothing like that, but on Voss everything was about survival and making tomorrow better. I wasn’t contributing anything to the colony and everyone assumed I never would. I was just a drain on resources, and they felt guilty for taking away from supplies.”
I sighed, the memories all flooding back. “But that was also probably why they didn’t fight me when I left. Normally, anyone leaving the colony was a huge scandal, but they seemed happy to see me go. At the time, I thought that they were proud of me for making something of myself, but now… Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say.”
“I do not understand that phrase,”
“Ah, human vision is measured with a bifocal ratio between one through twenty, with one number referring to the right eye, and one referring to the left.”
“I see.” She seemed to be thinking again, so I just waited while she put together her words. Which worked for me considering that I was feeling a bit talked out at the moment. “And you have not talked to your parents since?”
“No. Never felt the need. I figured if they wanted to find me, they would.”
“I… I am sorry, Higgens.”
“For what? You didn’t do any of this.”
“No, but it makes me wish that we had met sooner.”
“That would have been nice.” Now it was my turn to squeeze her hand. “But I might not have been ready to meet you.”
“That is fair. Maybe things happened exactly as they were meant to.”
“I would like to think that.”
It certainly made everything that had happened before seem a bit better. Maybe I needed to endure all of that to survive everything I was going through now.
Or maybe sometimes people were just needlessly cruel. In the edges of my vision, I could see the other children running off to play and leaving the ‘stupid one’ behind. I could feel the pitying looks from those with a shred of compassion, and the dismissive looks from those who just saw all the food I ate and oxygen I inhaled, counting me as a loss. They stung, but they held no power over me. Every one of those feelings, or specters of the life I once led, were all in the past, and even though I could feel them hanging heavy in the air around me, I could take comfort in the fact that I had moved on. They no longer dictated my life, and if we weren’t physically there, I probably would have never give them a second thought.
I was no longer little Hjarta, the strange, slow boy that everyone endured. I was Higgens, and I liked who I had become.
5
Firefight at the Voss Corral
I stood at the top of the comm center, a flurry of movement going on behind me. It seemed that almost everyone had something to do, but I was unassigned.
Mimi and I had helped with all of the barricading, but that was pretty much done, leaving me with not a lot to offer.
I knew enough about engineering that I could help restore the comm systems, but they had more experienced people on that, like Ciangi and Bahn. The hackers were obviously busy spreading whatever net rumors they needed to in order to catch the eyes of the crime family, while Gonzales and the others were setting up plans for what to do in the ambush, and when we finally got back to Earth.
I was relatively useless, which was unfortunately close to how I felt when I was a kid, but I wasn’t going to let myself sink back into those feelings.
Or at least that was what I told myself.
“Any update, Lim?” Gonzales asked, coming around to the systems that Babel and she had hooked their tools up to.
“So far no bite.”
“What if they never bite?” the demolition man asked. “What if we’re doing all of this for nothing?”
“Have a little faith,” Gonzales said, clapping him on the back. He didn’t look like he appreciated it and she didn’t look like she cared. “If I know one thing about the rich and greedy, it’s that they won’t pass up an opportunity to make some serious bucks.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I got a hit!” Babel cried, pumping his slender fist in the air.
“Wow, I couldn’t have timed it better if I tried.” Gonzales bent down next to the hacker. “Spill the deets. What’re you pulling up?”
“It’s just a feeler, but the encryption on it has the crime family’s signature all over it. Let me see how to play this.”
“Um, excuse me, since when did you have permission to negotiate the whole pitch?”
“Since I got the bite. Just trust me, Gunner, this isn’t my first black-market deal.”
“First of all, if you ever call me that again, I’ll unplug you from so many things until you and your breather have an ethernet connection and that’s it. Second of all, tone down the cockiness. If you botch this, the whole plan means absolutely nothing.”
“I gotcha. And trust me, I take the situation seriously.”
“Good to know. Just…be careful, alright? And if you aren’t sure of something, ask.”
“Righto.”
By then, a whole group had gathered around and we were all waiting tensely. I had to admit, Babel was handling things pretty well, inputting this and that.
It seemed like an eternity before he looked up, blinking as if he didn’t realize how many of us were there. “We have a go.”
“Holy crap! We do?” Gonzales asked.
“Yup. They’re sending a so called ‘expert’ to look it over and make sure that it’s legit. If that ain’t our scammer, I don’t know what would be.”
“Yes!” Suddenly everyone was high-fiving each other and celebrating. I thought it was a bit premature, but I guessed it was good for morale.
“Good job, Babel. Now how much time do we have?”
“They said they were going to hit our drop-off point in exactly twenty-four hours.”
G
onzales gave a determined nod. “Then let’s all get ready, folks. It’s time to put on one hell of a show.”
“So why exactly are we stuck up here?” Ciangi groused, spinning in a chair that used to be for the relay lieutenant back when this place was fully functional.
“Are you really complaining that we’re not the ones who are going to be involved in a firefight?” Bahn asked dubiously, leaning forward in his chair to look down into the valley below us.
There was still another hour or so until the crime family was supposed to land, but everyone had pretty much gotten into positions just in case. The last thing we wanted was for them to send some sort of scout or envoy and have none of us be ready.
“Well…no, but it just seems kinda weird that all of us ended up here.”
“You think so?” Gonzales said nonchalantly, busy working on something I recognized as a long-range pulse rifle. “Because the way I see it, all of us are pretty famous, and if I was trying to run some sort of covert ops that involved tricking my target long enough for them to reveal their highly valuable personnel, I wouldn’t want a famous—or infamous—person within a hundred yards of it.”
“Huh, I guess I never thought of it that way,” Ciangi muttered. “That rock star feeling wore off pretty fast when we were betrayed and imprisoned for months.”
“It is funny to hear you say that,” Eske added from where she was sitting at another set of controls. As far as I knew, the engineers had done something with that too, but they had trained the maintenance worker specifically for it, so I wasn’t sure what it did. “Because to me and my family, you were so incredibly famous. Right now, it feels as if I am saving the day with Sir Isaac Newton, or Madame Curie, or Kailani Batara.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Gonzales joked right back. “But we are pretty cool…”
That brought a smirk up in me and I checked my datalog for what had to be the twentieth time. I was in charge of the two small, deployable drones we had that were equipped with a smoke screen, and some sort of chemical powder that was supposed to cause sleep. One of our medics below was waiting with injectors if one of the men had a bad reaction to it, but I was nervous.
What if I messed up? Or gassed the wrong person? This wasn’t one of our harebrained, slapdash plans anymore. This was a true, military venture with a dozen other people involved. Which was pretty crazy to think about considering our whole adventure started with just Mimi and me.
It seemed completely out of nowhere when our comms suddenly buzzed and Lim’s voice came over the line.
“I’m reading a small ship doing scans of the planet!”
“How big of a carrier is it?” Gonzales asked.
“I’m picking up about twenty life signs. They’re probably going to send half that in a landing party and have the other half stay as gunnery and escape back up in the ship.”
“Good. Sneak Team, you hear all that?”
“Is that really the name we’re going with?” I heard a masculine voice argue.
“What is it with all of you and questioning names?” Babel wondered aloud. “Is this a new net-trend I missed?”
Lim’s voice cut back through the noise. “It seems like their scans are completed. Everyone, get ready to initiate the plan!”
“Oh, is this the point where we get an exciting drumroll?” Gonzales joked. I knew that she did it to relieve her tension and boost morale, but I wasn’t entirely sure all of the rebels knew that.
To everyone’s surprise, Eske suddenly began to slap her console in a specific and escalating beat that almost sounded like it could come from the instrument itself. When she finished, she crossed her arms and looked sheepishly at us.
“Ta-dah.”
“Now that’s just impressive. Don’t let that go to waste, everyone. Assume positions, lock and load, then assume comm silence unless it’s an absolute emergency. And if there is an emergency, make sure you’re encrypted.”
There was an echo of affirmative noises and then an eerie sort of silence settled over us.
This was it.
The smog and clouds parted, revealing the red-hot underbelly of the ship. I wasn’t sure how we were avoiding its scans, but it had something to do with the helium and other neon gasses, as far as what I had heard from the other engineers.
I really needed to get my head on straight. Being home again had me sinking to the background like the nobody I used to be. I had told myself I was a new man now, so why was I letting myself act like the old me?
There were probably a lot of reasons behind that, enough to fill about a dozen sessions with a therapist, but the ship was landing. I pushed those thoughts away to deal with another day.
It almost seemed like everyone was holding their breath as the ship lowered its door and a party came out.
All I could think was… Wow, the men were equipped.
There were four on each side of their procession that wore heavy armor and had guns as big as my upper torso. One lead the way with a more stylized armor and the type of recombinant gun I remembered being invented soon after we first introduced Mimi into the world. It could switch from a wide blast, to a precision sniper beam, to a short sort of SMG type of spray. It was certainly potent, and I didn’t want to be caught by one.
Lastly, right in the middle of it, had to be the scrubber.
He was smaller than I thought he would be, about Ciangi’s size, or maybe even slighter than that. He wore a heavy, sort of patchwork jacket that seemed to dwarf his frame that much more. He wore a thick hat on his head, and a scarf over the bottom of his face, making it so I wouldn’t be able to tell his features even if I was up close instead of at a distance. Although he wasn’t shackled or bound in any way, he had the mannerism of someone who was always watching out for something. It was interesting to watch him move, and I wondered at what this little gambling black-market genius must be like.
Well, if everything went well, I would be finding out shortly.
I watched from our position as the squad moved forward, marching almost like military. I had to admit, I had never had much experience with Earth’s crime family, but I had been expecting them to be more like the ancient flick I had watched. I didn’t want to say I was disappointed, because romanticizing gangsters was stupid and silly, but…I was kinda disappointed.
I saw movement to the east and sure enough, it was the four that we had picked to be our own little smugglers. One was the gunslinger who we had met up with in the prison and was there for the final leg of our escape.
One was a large woman, in both height and weight, who looked like she might be able to crush a skull between her thick thighs in one moment then snuggle someone against her bosom the next. She reminded me of an old comic character that I had a crush on in my teenage years…
I shook my head at that, moving my attention onto the others. I recognized the demolition man, and then the fourth as the silent woman who had rescued us with Gonzales.
The gunslinger was the one holding the containment unit that our bogus part was supposed to be in. I was impressed at the nonchalant way he held himself. I knew that if I was down there, I would most likely be sweating and stuttering. Even after all this time, lying and trickery were not my strong suit, and I was pretty sure that everyone knew that too.
The two groups approached each other, and I was reminded of the ancient spaghetti westerns that they used to show us sometimes in class. They had been meant to be a way to see how the old Earth celebrated violence and divisions, but honestly, I thought they were the coolest things. Stories of good, or not-very-good, men going up against incredible odds and beating the bad guys? That was always my cup of tea. So much so that apparently, I had let that affect my life a whole lot more than I thought I had.
Huh.
The two finally met and I could see the stylized armor guy talking to Gunslinger. It was intense, but not aggressive, and for the life of me, I wished that I could hear him. But using the comms risked that one of the signals might
make it through the helium and neon haze the engineers had harnessed, tipping off the bad guys that they weren’t alone.
Then again, we were the ones literally planning on kidnapping a human being. So maybe there were no good guys here and just a whole bunch of morally gray characters.
That wasn’t very Western at all.
I heard the slightest three beeps on our comms, and only from our vantage point were we able to see our covert team sneak up the lowered ramp onto the ship. Hopefully, they would be able to imprison everyone quietly and efficiently. In a perfect world, no alarms would be set off and nobody would have to die.
Of course, we lived in far from a perfect world.
Just as the scammer was moving forward to take the containment unit, a loud shriek sounded from the ship behind the scene. All the crime-soldiers jumped into action, with four of them finding cover and taking aim at our guys, and the other four running back to the ship. Our comms suddenly blazed to life—the jig now up—and a flurry of voices called out to us.
“Lay down suppressive fire! This was a setup! The whole thing’s a setup!” That had to be the voice of the enemy leader down there. I could see him diving behind cover and having his gun reshape itself into a form I didn’t recognize.
“The ship has been taken. We have light casualties on their side, but I’m going to need a medic!”
“Let’s make sure there’s no friendly fire, alright? I don’t like most of ya, but that doesn’t mean I want you dead!”
It was a maelstrom of stimuli and I felt myself getting overwhelmed. My eyes scanned over the entire area and I just happened to catch sight of the scammer as they ran for cover.
Wait.
No.
They weren’t running for cover. They were running in the direction that we had hid our ship. But that couldn’t be… There was no way that he could have detected them…right?
I stood up, watching him as he beelined and I suddenly knew that was exactly what he was doing. Well, that was no good. If he escaped, then all of this would have been for nothing.
Mimic Changes the World Page 3