by C H Gideon
Podsy nodded. “Fine. How long have I got?”
“Kochtopussy will be available in three hours,” Koch replied. “After that, she’ll be indisposed for about two days. If I don’t have my suit by then...” He left the remainder unspoken.
“Yeah, yeah.” Podsy waved him off as he turned to leave. “I’ll get it done.”
“You’re good people, Podsednik,” Koch said before amending, “actually, you’re the most degenerate knuckle-dragger in this battalion.”
“Yeah,” Podsy called over his shoulder, “but I’m your kind of degenerate, Cock.”
“It’s Koch, you numbskull,” the lieutenant snapped.
“That’s what I said.” Podsy turned mid-stride, splaying his arms innocently to either side. “Cock.”
Koch’s back was already turned, which meant that the male-bonding banter was at an end.
It was time for Podsy to get serious about finding that enviro-suit.
“Which leaves us with two options,” Podsy explained after breaking down the situation for Xi.
“We aren’t waiting,” Xi said adamantly, “so there’s only one option.”
“Of course we’re not waiting,” Podsy said dismissively. “But there are two options. First, we cut a deal with Murdoch’s Wrench, Chippy, since she’s the only one who gets round-the-clock access to his bunk aboard Flaming Rose. Odds are the old paper-pusher won’t even notice in the three days it takes for Fleet to drop reinforcements in and begin evacuating us off this rock.”
“Are Murdoch and Chippy sleeping together?” Xi asked.
“What?” Podsy made a distasteful expression before shaking it off. “Not to my knowledge. Why would that matter?”
“If they’re sleeping together then she’s not going to betray him, even over a suit, for any of the crap we could offer her,” Xi explained with an emphatic eye-roll.
“I think you might overestimate the emotional entanglements formed by sometimes bunkmates,” Podsy snickered.
“And I think you might overestimate your understanding of women,” Xi retorted.
He paused, then shrugged, “Yeah, you’re probably right about that, but that just makes me a regular guy, right?”
Xi laughed mercilessly. “You’re many things, Podsy, but ‘regular’ isn’t one of them.”
“True enough,” he agreed with a mischievous grin.
“So what’s the other option?” she asked.
“What?”
“The other option—” Xi rolled her eyes again. “What is it?”
“Oh, that? Yeah, you were right. There isn’t another option,” he snickered.
“Then what the hell?”
“I mean to say that there isn’t a second option yet,” Podsy explained. “See, the reason I doubt Murdoch and Chippy are doing the horizontal mambo is because, well…he’s not her type.”
“I can’t imagine Captain Murdoch is any woman’s type,” Xi scoffed.
“You misunderstand,” Podsy sighed. “I’m sayin’ that you’re more her type than Murdoch is.”
Xi glared at him. “If you’re suggesting I...”
“Of course not,” he interrupted hastily, “but I do happen to know there’s a few Pounders that might be to her liking. But Chippy… Well, see, Chippy’s not personable. She’ll need someone to help break the ice for her.”
“Fine, go ahead and be her ice-breaker.” Xi shrugged.
“I ain’t exactly their type, remember?” Podsy said dryly, causing her to clench her fists in anticipation of what he might say next. “Besides, attractive as you are, you’re not likely to get their motors revving.”
“What?” she asked in confusion. First she had felt insulted that he suggest she use her body in order to get Lieutenant Koch a fresh enviro-suit, and now she felt insulted by the intimation that she was somehow not attractive enough to succeed even if she tried! Then she had a thought. “If this is some kind of sick, reverse psychology, I swear to God, I’ll...”
“No, no, no, nothing like that,” he assured her. “See, these people are mostly xenophiles with more than a few misandrists sprinkled in for good measure. And rumor has it that Chief Styles has the most…” Podsy hesitated, becoming visibly uncomfortable as he spoke, “robust collection of ‘exotic imagery’ in the battalion. And I’m talking hundred percent, all-natural recordings, none of that computer-generated garbage, starring every permutation you can think of. Arh’Kel, Vorr, Jemmin, you name it, he’s got it.”
“I don’t want to know how you know any of this, Podsy,” Xi scowled before sighing. “Fine, so we’ve got to give Chippy some of Styles’ sicko alien porn so that she can get in for a few rounds of fun with the Pounders. What’s Styles going to want?”
“Oh, that?” Podsy chuckled. “That part’s easy, he just wants you.”
“Podsy,” she snapped, standing with a fist cocked in preparation for her first attempt at rhinoplasty.
“He assures me it’s not like that.” Podsy held up his hands in mock surrender, though from the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, it was clear he was enjoying this far more than he should. “I mean, he also assures me that nothing would make him happier.” She fired a left hand at his face, but her blow was blocked by his crossed arms. He laughed as she slammed a few more half-hearted punches into his defensive shell, before he finally turned serious. “He says he thinks you two knew each other from before you were arrested.”
She stopped mid-punch and drew back in alarm. “That’s impossible. We’re from totally different worlds,” she said in flat denial.
“I know, I know,” Podsy assured her, “but he said that if I could get you to come see him, he’d owe me one. It’s the only way I know how to get Koch to help us replace Elvira’s leg.”
Xi was surprised, but more than that, she was curious. She considered the situation for a few minutes before finally relenting. “Fine, I’ll go see him. But if this is a trick…” she warned.
“If it’s a trick, I’ll deal with him myself,” Podsy assured her with chilling severity.
No one knew exactly why Podsednik had been in prison when Jenkins’ recruiting drive had come through. On Podsy’s native Terra Australiana, sometimes called ‘New Australia’ by Terrans, the local government did not make public a prisoner’s crime, only the severity of it and the sentence terms. It was deemed to be a protection of privacy that was often lauded by one side of the political spectrum and lambasted by the other.
As a result, a guessing game had come into being with people betting on the nature of Podsednik’s actual crime. Long story short, Podsednik had denied every single theory until, strangely, someone half-heartedly accused him of multiple counts of necrophilia.
Even stranger than the accusation itself was Podsednik’s uncharacteristic hesitation to refute it.
So the battalion had quickly decided he was a necrophiliac, and wave after wave of low-brow jokes at his expense began making the rounds. Podsy seemed to encourage these theories, but Xi was completely unconvinced.
Xi had been with him every single day for six months prior to deployment on Durgan’s Folly, and the more time she spent with him, the more she came to suspect he had been convicted of murdering a superior officer. Podsy brushed her off whenever she attempted to broach the subject, which did nothing to dissuade her from this line of thinking.
“Fine,” Xi grimaced. “I’ll go talk with this alien-porn-collecting jackass.”
“Good.” Podsy nodded. “I’ll go see about a few other loose ends in the meantime. If I’m lucky, I might be able to get the missile launcher on Devil Crab, make that Elvira II,” he corrected with a grin, “back up and running. Let me know as soon as you’ve gotten the stuff from Styles.”
Xi moved to the quarantine area where Styles was still rooting around in the Arh’Kel corpses. At first, she had thought the task would be universally considered a gruesome and distasteful one, but after learning of Styles’ porn collection, she was beginning to doubt whether he was displeas
ed with the assignment.
She came to a perimeter established by a detail of Pounders, who interdicted her passage. “Authorized personnel only, Lieutenant,” said one of the lightly-armored troopers.
“I’m here to see Chief Styles,” she explained.
“He ordered us to prevent disturbances,” the trooper denied with a firm shake of his head.
Xi hesitated. She very much disliked the notion of being in such close proximity to a weirdo like Styles. As the only teenage woman in the unit, she had become the instant target of all kinds of lewd commentary. The fact that she could hold her own in hand-to-hand combat, owing to lifelong training and her impressive, athletic physique, seemed to do little to dissuade the mostly good-natured displays of camaraderie disguised as sexual harassment.
But Podsy had gone through a lot for her, including donating his own cerebrospinal fluid in order to get her back on her feet. She owed him. And the entire Ponzi trading scheme was to get Elvira back to full combat readiness, and that was the effort she could throw her full weight behind.
She sighed. “He’s wanted to see me since we set down on this rock. I haven’t had the time before, but now I do. Let him know this might be the only chance he gets.”
The Pounder hesitated before making his way to Styles’ side. The chief warrant, stooped over a seemingly undamaged Arh’Kel corpse, tore his attention from the work at hand after the Pounder relayed Xi’s message. Styles waved her over, and the Pounders at the perimeter gestured for her to proceed.
The Arh’Kel, somewhat surprisingly, didn’t stink nearly as badly as she thought they would. They had a distinctive odor, like a faint trace of rotten eggs buried beneath something metallic, like fresh blood. But considering the several tons of carnage they had brought back for study, the smell was far from overpowering.
“Lieutenant Xi,” Styles greeted, wiping his hands on a nearby cloth as he stood from his gruesome autopsy, “what brings you here?”
“Podsednik said you were interested in speaking with me,” she replied, looking down at the carefully-dissected Arh’Kel corpse. “And he said you’ve got something I need, so this seemed like a good opportunity for mutual satisfaction.”
At saying that last bit, she gritted her teeth in annoyance with herself. If he makes some off-color comment, I’ll knee him in the groin.
Styles cocked his head in confusion before realization dawned and he laughed. “That makes sense, I guess,” he chuckled.
“Why?” she demanded defensively. “Why does that make sense?”
He held up his hands in mock surrender. “I didn’t mean anything by it. No.” He shook his head, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “I don’t think you’re into that kind of thing. It’s too degenerate.”
She cocked her head in guarded confusion. “I’m starting to think this was a mistake.”
Before she could turn and leave, he said, “I think you and I frequented the same virtual communities. Never at the same time, of course,” he added hastily, “since instant communication between the Terran colonies is still impossible, but I’ve seen your work. I know why you were imprisoned. It took me awhile to figure it out, but after I did, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself,” he explained, offering a mostly-clean hand as he said, “I’m not baroque or gothic enough.”
She furrowed her brow in confusion. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He laughed. “Okay, you probably knew me better as N609E.”
She gasped and took a step back.
“Perfect.” He grinned triumphantly. “See, that’s what N609E stands for: ‘Not Baroque Or Gothic Enough.’ You were one of the only people on Terra Han that actually fed back into our little community of virtual miscreants and rebels.”
She eyed him warily, considering whether or not she should incriminate herself by acknowledging that she was, in fact, extensively familiar with N609E’s work. During her criminal trial, prosecutors had tried to make her flip on the underground virtual academy that N609E and his allies had established. She’d inadvertently given up some information about them, but the fact was that she had been too peripheral to know much of import.
“How do I know this isn’t some kind of trap?” she asked warily.
Styles looked around and chuckled. “Lieutenant, look around you. We’re stuck on an inhospitable world, surrounded by rock-biters and running low on supplies. Not to mention that we’re both convicts. The systems chewed both of us up and spat us out.”
She nodded slowly as she wrapped her brain around the situation. “Why tell me this? Why reveal yourself to be one of the most wanted data criminals in the Republic? They still think you’re at large.”
“They do,” he agreed, “since I, and everyone else in the network, had contingencies set up that would keep my work from being compromised should something minor, like incarceration or death, befall me. Freedom of information is the only battle truly worth waging, as far as I’m concerned. Well…” He smirked, casting a wayward look at the rock-biter corpses surrounding them. “Maybe not the only one.”
Xi was still dumbfounded by what Styles had just told her. N609E was a legend in the underground information community. He had singlehandedly cracked government databases considered uncrackable, and used data gleaned from them to expose hundreds of high-level officials for political corruption, and even mass murder on one particularly memorable instance.
Frankly, it defied belief.
“I’m skeptical,” she said after thinking long and hard about it. “I never had direct interactions with N609E. I only ever accessed some of the files he uploaded.”
“Files which you then strategically spread across your home world’s public data nets.” He nodded approvingly. “You knew where to put it so it would have maximum impact, like the upload to the weather broadcast servers,” he added matter-of-factly, a crime which the government had never formally brought against her. “And it did have maximum impact, which led to your prison sentence. I’m not going to apologize for that, either.” He shrugged. “You did what you thought you should with that data, and it saved lives, thousands of them. You made me, all of us, really proud, especially the way you stood tall under fire.”
She shrugged. “I never fit into the big, wide world. Prison didn’t seem like it would be a bad thing.”
“Was it?”
“It was…different than I expected,” she said hesitantly. “Being cut off from the feeds was the hardest part, but I was never a coder or architect, so it wasn’t about not expressing myself. It didn’t bother me to be denied access to the information, but not being able to send that information to others who could use it…that hurt more than I thought it would.”
He nodded solemnly. “I understand…completely. It’s why you and I jumped at the chance to have our sentences commuted through public service. Both of us care about the big, wide world, even though it doesn’t care about us.” He looked around the plateau, his eyes skipping over the Pounders and snagging on the various mech crews working to restore their platforms to fighting strength. “I think that’s about the only thing that unites the people in this battalion, or at least those of us who weren’t military before the commander started recruiting,” he added sourly as his gaze lingered on Flaming Rose, where Captain Murdoch stood directing a full repair team.
“What a jackass,” she muttered.
“You said it,” Styles agreed. “He got nabbed for diverting supplies, and not even for money or career advancement, those motives I could understand,” he said with a derisive snort. “No, he was diverting supplies so that he could get a cushier assignment. Too bad for him that his benefactor fell under investigation and had to flip on his many co-conspirators in order to walk out with his pension, let alone his freedom. He put the lives of servicemen in jeopardy so that he could get a more comfortable chair to sit in while he rides out his service contract,” he said through gritted teeth. “He’s what’s wrong with the bureaucracy.”
Xi suddenly took Styles’ meaning, “You exposed him?”
“Yep.” Styles smirked. “One of the last things I did before they nabbed me. I tried to dissuade the commander from bringing him aboard, but there weren’t any other command-level officers available. It was probably the right call bringing him aboard,” he allowed, “but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
He shook his head and looked out at the perpetually-setting sun, causing Bao to do likewise. After a few seconds, he reached into his breast pocket and handed her a small data storage chip. “Here. I think this is what you came for, right?”
Snapping her focus back to the here and now, Xi recalled why she had come to see Styles in the first place and nodded. She scrunched her face up in disgust as she plucked it from his fingers. She deposited it into her hip pocket and nodded. “Thank you, Chief.”
“Any time, Lieutenant,” he chuckled. “Just see that it’s returned to me after Podsy’s gotten what he needs from it.”
She hesitated before asking, “Why do you have this…filth?”
He shrugged indifferently. “They need their fix just like the rest of us. And since nobody was harmed in producing that ‘filth’ and it’s likely to come in handy scratching someone’s itch out here on the front-lines, I’m not going to be a power-mad prude and deny them a back-scratcher just because I can. These people need reasons to fight and, if necessary, to die. The way I see it, they’ve earned the right to be weird just by lacing up those boots and doing their bit for their fellow Terrans. Still, I don’t like hanging onto that crap any more than you do. It makes my skin crawl...” He rolled his eyes exaggeratedly. “Fucking degenerates.”
Xi laughed in spite of herself. “All right…thank you, Chief.”
“Any time, Lieutenant,” he replied with a nod before returning to his grisly duties. “Oh,” he called out as she turned to leave, “and if you’re up for some trolling…”