The Cryonite Caper

by Felix R. Savage

  I met Dolph’s eyes for a moment and saw he understood, too.. Our initial blunder had been to assume that someone had iced Risk against his will. He had arranged it himself.

  And Irene had helped him. I glanced at her and found her fixing me with an expression of fierce pleading.

  “You were to package him up and ship him to … where?” The Ur-Ek directed the question to Parsec.

  “San Damiano,” Parsec said glumly.

  “Of course. To retire in comfort on his homeworld, he wishes. But he needs a ship to get him there with no questions asked, and that is where you come in. You agreed to ship him to San Damiano in exchange for a cut of the proceeds from selling our property. On arrival, revive him and arrange the sale, you would. This business with the cryonite was necessary because otherwise, murder him en route and take the memory stick for yourself, he thought you might.”

  There it was, the whole caper explained. It had Risk’s pawprints all over it. A classic Risk plan, including the final detail that screws everything up and sends the plan spiraling into failure.

  If Parsec had the key to the nanonic defroster, he could’ve—and would’ve—murdered Risk anyway.

  So maybe Risk had sent the key to someone he knew on San Damiano. He’d never been there to my knowledge, but every Shifter has at least a few tenuous connections with our homeworld.

  Apart from that, it all fitted. Trust the Eks to put the puzzle together correctly. There’s a reason they’re said to be super-intelligent.

  “Have anything to say, no one?” the Ur-Ek asked, dripping with contempt, as xis minions herded prodded the first bear towards a cryo-packing machine. The poor bear left a trail of yellow urine on the floor, it was so terrified.

  I threw a glance into the cutting room. Half of the saw’s width had now sunk into the Risk’s cryonite block.

  “I have something to say,” I said. “Stop the saw.”

  “What?” The Ur-Ek looked around to see which two-armed being had spoken.

  “Stop the saw!” I moved forwards, holding out my empty hands. A vast number of handguns oriented in my direction. “Your memory stick’s not inside that block!”

  The Ur-Ek issued a command to the minions in the cutting room. The saw stopped, leaving only the cryo-packing machines gurgling away in the silence.

  I continued, “That item you can see in his pocket is a tracking tag. I know where the memory stick is … and it’s not here.”

  A micro-smile flashed across Irene’s face. I remembered her words to me at Ville Verde: I know what you did.

  “I’m the only person who knows where it is.” I folded my arms. “If you want it back, you’re gonna have to let us go.”

  The Ur-Ek stalked over to me. Xe seized my shoulders in xis topmost set of hands and gave me a sharp shake. “Talk, you will!”

  “Here’s how we’re going to do this,” I said, staring up into xis hideous blue face. Fear pulsed queasily through my guts but I kept my expression stony. “You can go ahead and ice the bears.”

  A howl of rage from Parsec.

  “Also, her,” I said, pointing to Irene. “When that’s done, I give you the memory stick, you verify its contents, and myself and him—” I pointed to Dolph, who was staring at me with dawning delight— “walk out of here with ol’ fox. We’re done then. All debts and grudges cancelled.”

  The Ur-Ek’s tongue circled its lips like a black worm. “By icing the bears and the female, we would be doing you a favor, I infer.”

  “Yes, but you still get to sell ‘em to the Travellers.” I recalled how Parsec had threatened to do the same to Irene’s kids, and I felt no guilt as I observed the bears’ distress. “Do we have a deal?”

  An agonizing moment passed. “Torture the information out of you, I could,” the Ur-Ek said reflectively.

  “There are laws against that, too,” I pointed out.

  The Eks know the importance of laws. No surprise: the shrewd exploitation of laws is how they make their money. Our joint buy-in to the Ek legal accords is the only reason humanity and the Eks have managed to coexist in the Cluster this long. The Ur-Ek gave a grudging nod. “A deal we have.”

  Xe released me and extended xis middle right hand. We shook on it, then—yuck—exchanged a ceremonial Ek kiss.

  “So I’ll need to make a phone call,” I said, moving towards the pile of electronics they had taken off us, and resisting the urge to wipe my mouth on my sleeve.

  The Ur-Ek watched the screen of my phone as I dialed to make sure I wasn’t calling the cops.

  “Hello, Mike,” quacked Nanny B.

  I momentarily forgot everything else apart from my daughter. “Is Lucy OK?”

  “Yes, Mike. She is asleep. So is Mia.”

  Relief warmed me. I wanted to ask where they were asleep, as my apartment was not fit for a dog to sleep in, but I knew Nanny B would have found someplace cosy. “Wonderful. Now, I need you to do something for me. Call the Duck and tell him I need my package back. Pronto. Tell him to send it to the Nittsu Fresh cryo-packing plant on Space Island.” Good luck to the Ur-Ek if he tried to trace Craig based on no more than those words.

  “As you wish, Mike.”

  “I’ll be home later. Could you fix me a pot of herbal tea ? Thanks.”

  “As you wish, Mike.”

  Bless my nanny-bot’s imperturbable programming.

  The Ur-Ek regarded me with no more than xis usual amount of suspicion. “How will it be delivered?”

  “By courier,” I said. “Armed courier, and I’ll have to sign for it personally, so don’t get any ideas.”

  I turned to the cutting room window.

  “Now if your boys … um, girls … um, henchpersons … wouldn’t mind bringing my friend out here.”

  I was afraid of what I’d see, but Risk had not been hurt yet. The saw’s groove stopped a few millimeters short of his stomach.

  I sat down heavily on the fox-cube. The cryonite had finally cured enough that it was room temperature.

  “Proceed,” I said with a benign wave.

  Dolph sat down beside me. “Mind if I smoke?”

  So we sat on ol’ fox and enjoyed a cigarette while the Eks encased the Bad-News Bears in cryonite.

  The industrial machines mixed the stuff to a colder temperature before pouring it, so it set faster than Irene’s home pour. The bear-cubes accumulated on the floor quickly. The Eks ranged them around us like… like a crowd of frozen bears. I gazed at their frozen expressions of terror and thought about how much grief they’d collectively caused to Shiftertown. Still no guilt.

  Only four bears, including Parsec himself, and Irene remained to go when my phone rang. I asked the Ur-Ek’s permission with a glance before lifting it.

  “The courier’s here.”

  The Ur-Ek and I went out to the parking lot. Xe carried Risk in two of xis arms, leaving four free for xis guns. I showed xim my truck. Xe placed the fox-cube in the back. Then we went back into the parking-lot.

  The courier swooped down out of the hazy night sky, verified my identity by pinging a code to my phone, and handed me a soggy bundle of socks and duct tape. It looked like Craig hadn’t even opened it yet. That was the last time I gave him an important rush job. I passed the memory stick to Six Arms and watched xim plug it into a port in—I kid you not—the side of xis head. The Eks go in for cybernetics.

  Xe smiled, circularly. “You have kept your word.”

  From a launch pad on the opposite side of the island, a spaceship roared into the sky. It flooded the parking lot with light and drowned out my answer. I watched it rise out of sight, once again wishing I was on my way off this lousy rotten world I call home.

  When I looked back at the Ur-Ek, xe was pointing a gun at my midsection.

  Of course xe was.

  “Really?” I sighed. “Did our kiss mean nothing to you?”

  “Dispose of you right now, I could,” xe said.

  I didn’t move a muscle. “But dispose of me right now, you won’t,
” I said. “Because a cop behind you there is.”

  Xe spun around with an Ek oath. A spaceport police car was pulling into the parking-lot. It was the first of what looked like dozens of law enforcement vehicles. The noise and light of the spaceship launch had masked their approach.

  My final request to Nanny B had been a code phrase. I’d programmed it into her long ago, just in case. Herbal tea—a phrase I was not ever likely to use in daily life, given that I don’t drink weeds in hot water—meant Call the cops. She had traced my phone signal on the spot, a two-second task for a bot, and placed an anonymous call to the spaceport police.

  The police officers lumbered out of their ride, radios squawking. They yelled in fury as they saw the Ur-Ek menacing a human—me—at gunpoint.

  “Explain, I can!” Six Arms insisted, as the cops surrounded xim.

  “This way, officers!” I sprinted inside before they could get a good look at my face.

  I beat them into the cryo-packing plant and Shifted at a dead run, shedding my jeans and t-shirt and catching them in my mouth, so I wouldn’t leave any DNA behind.

  I loped up to the Eks and the remaining bears in the form of the same jaguar that had attacked Parsec outside Wally’s.

  It was an absolute pleasure to watch Parsec’s eyes widen in understanding and fury.

  “Squeak,” Dolph said, and cackled.

  All the other bears except one Kodiak twin had been iced. I couldn’t see Irene.

  “Shut off the machines,” I told the Eks. “Boss-man, um, boss-person, um, your Ur-Ek associate will be right back.” With half a dozen police officers, I added silently.

  I figured I had about ten seconds before the cops charged in. I gestured with a paw for Parsec to climb down from the conveyor belt.

  Once again, jaguar and grizzly bear stood nose to nose.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “You need to pay for your crimes. A one-way trip to the Core? That’s nothing like as bad as you deserve.” I let him see my fangs.

  “Bite his throat out,” Dolph said. “Or step aside so I can shoot him.”

  That’s exactly what I wanted to avoid. If only my stupid business partner would appreciate it, I was trying to save his neck. Sooner or later, Dolph and Parsec would meet again on the streets of Shiftertown, and Dolph would end up killing Parsec, or vice versa. Unless …

  “You’re going to jail,” I said, as the cops burst into the other end of the cryo-packing plant. “Seeya.”

  I snatched my phone up in my mouth and took off as fast as a jaguar can run. I knew there was another exit at the back of the cutting room, and the Eks had left it unlocked.

  As I reached it, a jackal caught up with me, still wearing Dolph’s t-shirt, and carrying Dolph’s phone in his teeth. He, like me, has more than one form.

  We bounded out into the night air. As the door swung to behind us, a lithe, black, four-legged shape darted through it.

  I said around my phone, “Irene?!”

  She was a black panther.

  No wonder she was so good at climbing trees.

  “We’re two of a kind,” she said indistinctly, around her phone.

  “No, we’re not,” I said. Not least because I was never going to be this jaguar again.

  In front of us, stone and scrub fell away to the tumbled concrete tetrapods of the shore. Mag-Ingat twinkled brilliantly across the water. A fishy breeze blew. We cleared the fence of the complex in one high bound and circled around outside it, three four-legged beasts carrying phones in our jaws. Modern technology made Shifters, but Shifters aren’t made for the modern world.

  More cop cars were converging on the Nittsu Fresh complex, self-importantly sounding off. We sneaked through the strobing shadows to my truck and leapt into the back with the fox-cube. “Drive,” I commanded.

  The cops had blocked off the whole road. When my truck started arguing with them I instructed it to pop the rear doors. “There a problem, officers?” Now back in human form, I yawned and peeked out of the blanket I keep in the truck. “Was hopin’ to sleep as far as Gamaville.”

  All they saw was a long-haul driver with a cargo packed in cryonite.

  Once we crossed the causeway to the mainland, I felt safer. I called Nanny B and told her I’d be home soon.

  “But we are not at home, Mike.”

  “What?!”

  “You instructed me not to take the girls to the apartment. I therefore took them to Mia’s apartment. My threat assessment indicates that it is acceptably secure.”

  I heard Irene chuckling in the darkness.

  Bad-temperedly, I directed the truck to Shiftertown.

  As well as the blanket, I keep several changes of clothes in my truck. Leaving Risk where he was for now, we trooped up to Irene’s apartment, clad in bargain-basement t-shirts and shorts.

  Thuggy McThug opened the door.

  “You,” I said.

  “You,” he said.

  “The lion,” I said.

  “Lucy’s dad,” he said.

  “You ran out of the apartment … and vanished into thin air.” I shook my head. “I should’ve guessed you just ran upstairs.”

  “Sorry about that, man,” he said, looking awkward.

  “It’s nothing.” My shoulder still hurt where he’d punched me, but right now, all I cared about was seeing my little girl.

  I knelt beside Mia’s bed. Lucy sprawled beside her new friend, her hair sticking to her forehead, beneath a Hellraiser Adorable sheet.

  “I’d do anything for you,” I whispered to her.

  “You took the words out of my mouth,” said Irene, coming in behind me with the baby in her arms.

  “‘Anything’ is relative,” I told her.

  “Is it, Mike? Is it?”

  I was too tired to grapple with philosophical questions. I went back downstairs and helped Rex and Dolph move Risk back into his own apartment. After that, Dolph and I decided to just crash there.

  I woke in the small hours in Risk’s fox-smelling bed. Dolph snored on the floor. My phone was ringing. I blinked sleep out of my eyes. Craig.

  “Don’t you know what time it is?” I mumbled.

  “Got a result for you,” he said cheerfully. “Are you ready?”

  I blinked again. “You sent that package back to me.”

  “Duh,” he said. “I copied it. I thought you wanted me to.”

  “But the Ur-Ek said …”

  “I reset the tamper indicator, of course. Mike, this is the Duck you’re talking to.”

  “So you’re saying you… you quacked it?” I said, waking up. I gave Dolph a kick and put Craig on speaker.

  “I’ve never heard that one before,” Craig said. “Anyway, what this is, is it looks like a bunch of Lil’ Hellraisers episodes. I guess that’s a kids’ show?”

  “It’s easy to tell you don’t have kids.”

  “I’m just lucky that way. So, sorry the files weren’t anything special. I’ll send them over now with my invoice.”

  Craig hung up.

  “That makes no sense,” Dolph said. “All this, for a few bootleg episodes of Lil’ Hellraisers?”

  I didn’t get it either … until the files dropped into my v-mail a minute later. I couldn’t play the holos on my phone, but I glanced at the file names.

  Lil’ Hellraisers Season 16 [Full Episodes]

  “Oh my crucified Lord,” I breathed.

  “What?”

  “This is Season Sixteen. We’re only on Season Fourteen now.” I actually felt slightly sick as I realized what I was holding in my hands. “These are pre-release bootlegs. They’re worth … I don’t even know.” Visions of millions danced through my mind.

  I could buy that house in Ville Verde.

  I could buy Parsec’s house.

  I could buy a new ship.

  I could buy a flying car.

  I could send Lucy to St. Anne’s, the best girls’ school on Ponce de Leon.

  “I could …”

  Dolph lit
a cigarette. Exhaling smoke, he said, “But you won’t.”

  He took my phone out of my hands. In a daze, I watched his thumb press delete. Poof went my new house, my new ship, my flying car, and Lucy’s place among the daughters of the .0001%. Delete. Delete. Delete.

  Even in that stunned moment, I knew what he was doing. Back at the Nittsu Fresh complex, I’d saved him from himself. Now he was saving me from myself.

  “Tomorrow,” he said around his cigarette, “we’ll go over to Craig’s and make sure he’s deleted his copies. He doesn’t know what they’re worth. We won’t make a big thing of it.”

  “Leave one episode,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Just one.”

  “OK,” he said after a moment, and handed my phone back to me.

  I slept the rest of the night through in an untroubled slumber. Thanks to Dolph, I had a clear conscience, despite everything I’d done.

  6

  The next morning, however, we still had a fox-cube in Risk’s kitchen.

  “I guess I’ll need to get in touch with his family back home,” I said, scratching my head. “Does he have any family back home?”

  Dolph shrugged, wrestling with Risk’s coffeemaker. “Dunno. He needs a new coffeemaker.”

  The sun streamed in the kitchen window. Risk’s holovision babbled softly on the counter, reporting on the arrest of ‘local shipping entrepreneur’ Buzz Parsec on unspecified charges. Heh, heh.

  Lucy and Mia’s voices came down the hall. They were playing on the stoop. I had asked Nanny B to keep them out of Risk’s apartment for the time being, as I was afraid the sight of the fox-cube might be traumatic.

  “No,” Irene said. “He doesn’t have any family back home.” I jumped. As usual, I hadn’t heard her come in. Now that I knew she was a panther, that made more sense.

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “It seems like I knew him better than you did.”

  She was still pissed at me for returning the memory stick to the Eks, as she thought. I wasn’t going to tell her about the copy that had died a delete-key death on my phone. That would just make her even more pissed.