The Henderson Helios: A Sci-Fi Adventure Novella

by Beatrice Crowl

  I brushed down my shirt after that rigorous hug. Jagcoop was packing heat—a gun on either hip. “Who you working for now?”

  “Was about to ask you the same. You got a booth?”

  “Nah.” This was an opportunity. “But a friend sent me down to fetch something from storage. You know where Sev Tech’s assigned?”

  His eyes lit up. “That’s my employer. I was just coming back from break. Here, I’ll take you.”

  The world depended on naive stupidity to keep running. I felt bad taking advantage of an old friend, but…well, no, screw Sev Tech. Jagcoop could find a better employer.

  He chattered while leading me through a maze of twisty partitions, dodging workers and robots and the odd dog or two. In the meantime, I got filled in on Jagcoop’s hapless series of romances. Guy never had a clue how to make things work. And unlike me, he kept trying.

  “So then, Keala tells me that I should shower. Every day! As if that’s not a waste of time and water, right? So I walked out on him, ‘cause I could do better.”

  Smelled about right.

  After telling me about his sixth unsuccessful tryst—a Resalian that Jagcoop had insisted on calling “Lizzie”—Jagcoop stopped at a modest-sized elevator tucked away in the back corner. I wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t slapped the door upon arriving.

  “Personnel chute,” he said. “Cargo’s got another access point.” He put his thumb in his mouth before plopping it into a thumb-slot on the wall. Ugh, I hated thumb locks. Germ enclaves.

  The door whooshed open, and I was in. Through blind luck, I’d gotten access to the restricted basement.

  Said basement was less cluttered but not any better lit than its less eminent counterpart upstairs. A hallway stretched into darkness, two doors dotting the wall about ten meters down. Big-shot companies got way more space and privacy than the small vendors.

  Hopefully, I could get in and get out. I already had a data tab clutched in my hand to grab whatever was on their comp and run. I knew that the plans may not be there, but I didn’t have any other options. I had to assume the plans they were.

  Jagcoop thumbed the lock to gain entry to one of the doors. The room was massive, larger than my garage. A vacant space in the middle marked where the engine had been before it was dragged up to the presentation. The far wall was dominated by a garage door, currently closed. Probably some cargo backway. A small office with glass windows snuggled against a wall. Inside, a woman was watching vids with the volume turned way up. It sounded like some Extreme Spacing show.

  “I’m back, Erly.” Jagcoop made an awful hocking sound before launching a loogy onto the floor.

  The woman thumped the glass in acknowledgment. She didn’t turn around.

  “What was it you were looking for?”

  Already sited. I jerked my head towards a portable computer terminal in the corner. “Found it. I’ll just be a minute.”

  The data tab was a thumbnail-size hunk of silicon with a hacking program pre-installed. Once plugged in, different routines were implemented to break through security procedures and plunder the computer’s contents. I always had one handy, just in case. No, it wasn’t legal, but it was useful. At the very least, it could backup files from a failing system on the quick.

  As Jagcoop checked in with his colleague, I plugged the data tab into the port and waited. The time needed for the program depended on the security features of the target computer. It could be anywhere from twenty seconds to ten minutes. I was hoping more for the former. Yeah, I had gotten into this room, but every second spent here risked discovery.

  The screen blinked, and a drive somewhere whirred. I tapped a foot on the floor. The only other sound was Jagcoop and Erly arguing about something on the vidscreen. So far so good.

  It was too easy. Far too easy. And so some law of the universe forced a correction. Footsteps sounded outside from the personnel elevator. More than one person, headed down the hallway. I looked at the screen. Still stuff happening. Drives still whirring. Couldn’t pull the tab yet.

  Jagcoop emerged from the office and hooked a thumb behind his shoulder. “Hey, El, this bozo thinks the Green Spacer is Iltai. Remember, the one that got eliminated in the first episode? Can you believe that?”

  I shook my head, distracted. My hand hovered over the tab as the footsteps approached. Something was copying over, progress bars popping up and vanishing in a hamster wheel of data. I was grabbing some shit. Hoped it was good shit.

  The door opened.

  Brassard stood framed by the doorway, and some weedy tech guy shifted beside him. They were both backed by a rousing chorus of four beefy security personnel. Brassard’s attention was all on me. Did he know the plans were mine? He had to.

  I covered to give the tab a few more seconds. “Brassard, there you are!”

  Brassard frowned. “Henderson.”

  The new muscle swept around Brassard and his colleague, two lunkheads heading straight towards me. Time to grab. I spoke while doing so to divert attention from what my hands were doing. Like a magician. “I saw your new engine, and I was so excited, I came down here to talk to you about it some more.”

  Jagcoop blinked. “Weren’t you fetching something?”

  The tab was out of the port and in my palm behind my back. It was time to talk my way out of this.

  “So we didn’t expect you,” Brassard said while looking at me. He jerked his chin about three meters to my right. “Her, we expected.”

  The other two bodybuilders reached behind a shelving unit and yanked Myka Benton into view.

  So I figured out why Glezos had sent Myka to the expo. If the contract worker was fazed, she didn’t show it, even as a muscular woman stripped her of her weapons—two pistols and a knife.

  Jagcoop’s jaw dropped. “Boss, I didn’t see—”

  “Shut up, Jagcoop.” Brassard glared.

  Jagcoop shut up.

  The tech dweeb, a short guy with mechanic’s optical implants, looked past me at the computer. “She got a hack program run through it.”

  Brassard held out a hand like an exasperated parent. “Give me the data tab, Henderson.”

  My not-brilliant infiltration plan was crumbling. “Data tab?”

  “You can make this easy or hard. Take your pick.”

  One of the toughs stepped toward me, fists clenched in preparation for the hard option.

  I panicked. I was not a fighter. More of a runner, except there was nowhere to run. So I did the only thing I could think of to keep the data tab from being taken by the Sev Tech goons.

  I swallowed it.

  Plopped it in my mouth and swallowed, casting it down my throat and into my stomach. Wasn’t sure at the time if that was safe, for either me or the data tab, but it was a solution of some kind, wasn’t it?

  Brassard gaped as if I’d just pulled a rabbit from my pants. I raised my hands pointedly and shrugged.

  Myka was shoved to my side by the warrior woman. Once there, she assessed me, no doubt accommodating to an unplanned variable in her mission.

  “So,” Brassard said. “I guess we’ll have to wait for that to come out the other end before we let you go.”

  “Seriously?” It was my turn to gape.

  “Frederic.” He spoke to one of the bullyboys. “Go get some laxatives. We’ll speed this along.”

  “Listen, Brassard, it’s my design. You know that. I’m just taking what’s mine.”

  He graced me with the look he probably bestowed upon the Becker exam assessors. “World’s not fair, Henderson. It may have started out as your design. But it’s Sev Tech’s design now.”

  Myka stuck her neck out. “It’s actually the intellectual property of the Cadinoff Corporation, as I’m sure everyone here is aware.”

  “I designed the damn engine!”

  Brassard ignored me to nod at another brute. “Cuff ‘em together while we wait.”

  Said hunk of muscle unfurled metal handcuffs as he stomped towards me and Myka. The
handcuffs were those fancy ones with techlock as opposed to a cheap mechanical locking mechanism. Highest quality. He clamped one cuff over my right wrist before hooking Myka’s left wrist with the other.

  “You’re seriously gonna dig through my shit to find this data tab?” I held up my cuffed wrist, yanking Myka’s arm along with it.

  “I’m not,” Brassard said. “Jagcoop is.”

  Sweaty Jagcoop clutched his chest.

  “Jagcoop brought you in. He can deal with the consequences.”

  The plan was apparently to force laxatives down my throat, then wait until I shit—while cuffed to Myka of all people—then have Jagcoop dig through the shit to unearth the data tab. I hadn’t set myself up for a pleasant night.

  But they wouldn’t be doing all this if there weren’t a possibility I’d actually gotten the design on my data tab. That meant I had a chance to still get out of this with my design. I just needed to get out of this basement, detach myself from Myka, and get my tab to a secure system.

  Myka. She was going to try to grab this tab when it…emerged. It was harder to play keep-away from her given our current predicament. A techlock couldn’t be broken with standard cutting tools, but I had some equipment back at my shop that could separate us. Downside, I’d have to take Myka to my shop.

  Eh. She knew what was in there anyway.

  As the Sev Tech troop huddled, I tugged at Myka’s cuffed hand to get her attention. She looked at me with those big, brown eyes, and it was a struggle to keep my focus for a moment.

  “We’re gonna need to work together.” I kept my voice to a whisper.

  Myka didn’t respond. She physically looked away as if in rejection. Welp, this partnership wasn’t off to a great start.

  Then a boom shook the room. Muffled but still noticeable. We’d all been through the war. We knew an explosion when we heard it. Something was going on up top.

  I leapt on it. “That sounds bad.”

  Brassard glared, but he was already directing his security personnel. After all, the engine was still up there. Within a minute, he’d swept out with three of the ruffians. This left Jagcoop, the vid-watching Erly, the dweeby tech, and the muscled woman. Better odds.

  The tech dweeb had that scared bunny look that always put me on edge. His gaze darted from the remaining guard to Myka. Why was he looking at Myka?

  I didn’t have time to think it through because Erly burst from the office with a roar.

  Erly was, apparently, what one might term an Amazonian woman. Big. Burly. Brown curls wild around her head and broad shoulders. She was…well, she looked like she could kick my ass on accident. And right now, she looked real mad.

  “The fucking explosion knocked the vid out.” She glared as if we were responsible. “Right in the middle of Ultimate Galaxy Champion.”

  Jagcoop gulped audibly. “We’ll get it hooked back up. Cable knocked out or—”

  Erly noticed the handcuffedness of me and Myka. “Hey, why are those two handcuffed together?”

  The tech dweeb moved fast. Apparently, his scared bunny resemblance extended to darting speeds because I had only just processed the phenomena that was Erly before he was halfway across the room. The muscled woman—the one left by Brassard—must’ve been similarly distracted as she remained rooted to the spot. The tech dweeb slammed a button by the garage door, making it rise.

  My brain was still catching up with this burst of activity as Myka yanked me under the opening door into the cargo backway. I followed without thinking. Yells echoed behind us, interrupted by the grind of the door screeching to a halt.

  I yielded to Myka in her flight through a shadowy corridor punctuated with closed garage doors. She was incredibly fast. I built engines for a living so I didn’t have to be fast. My arm stretched painfully as I created a drag on her mad sprint. Eventually, she careened us across the hallway into the shadows. I yelped. Thought she was gonna smash us against a wall, but instead she shouldered through a door. Once through, she pulled a card out and swiped. Red lights on the door handle blinked.

  I gulped heaving breaths at the pause. A grated stairway crawled upward to the ground level. A ridiculous conveyance that my knees did not at all approve of.

  “We have some lead time, but we need to hurry before they recover.” Myka took the first step. She wasn’t even winded.

  I pulled at her. “Wait. The tech dweeb was working with Cadinoff?”

  “What happened, happened. Let’s go.” She tugged back.

  I had to give her the victory in this tug of war. Our vertical dash began with Myka performing remarkably well for someone wearing a knee-length skirt. At least she’d traded out the heels for athletic shoes. Me? I was a sturdy—and frustrating—anchor on her climb. My lungs had adapted to smoking and engine fumes, not exercise. Myka yanked me every few steps, threatening to pull my arm out its socket.

  A door marked the end of the stairwell, presumably our finish line. Myka didn’t hesitate to pull us through onto the expo floor. Smoke blossomed in the far corner, a clear sign of a bombing and a marker that this expo was now a corporate battlefield. Attendees must have already run for the exits as the surrounding area was empty of people. Rhythmic thuds promised the presence of corporate merc units, though. Not great.

  Myka didn’t pause. We’d emerged near the hanging gondola, and she hopped the barrier, somehow not embarrassing herself in her short skirt. The same barrier momentarily dug into my gut, forcing her to an annoyed stand-still just long enough for me to drag my inferior body over it, legs aching.

  I spoke my thoughts out loud. “Should we be getting on this while explosions are going off?” Especially as the route of the gondola went straight towards the smoke.

  Myka just yanked me into the car like an unwieldy bag of luggage. She slammed a button, and the gondola motor burst into churning life.

  “Duck down.” She dropped to her hands and knees.

  I mimicked her. “Seriously, why are we dangling on a rope when explosions are going off?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  A jolt of gunfire hit the side of the gondola car, rocking us back and forth.

  “This is dumb.” I hit the door button, and it whisked open to display a field of smoldering booths crawling below us.

  Myka pulled. “What are you doing? This is part of the plan!”

  I held up the handcuff. “Is this part of the plan?”

  She pursed her lips, which gave me my answer.

  I peeked over the edge. The drop wasn’t so bad. I mean, worse than what any reasonable person would want, but not as bad as to pulverize our bodies upon impact.

  “Cadinoff is waiting at the end of this little gondola trip, isn’t it?”

  Myka kept a passive face. “Cadinoff is waiting to recover its property, yes.”

  Right. So I’d walked into the middle of a big corporate showdown. Good for me.

  Like fuck was I gonna get caught by Cadinoff again.

  I shook my hand, which shook her hand. “We’re gonna take a time-out. To negotiate.” I glanced down. “Now.”

  I tilted my body and let gravity do its thing. My dead weight pulled her along with me. The fall was swift and the landing a full-body punch. I crashed through the edge of a booth, tumbling to the floor with Myka falling atop me. Then I was trapped between hard linoleum and the warm, outraged body of Glezos’s lackey.

  Oh, yeah, the breath got knocked out of me, too, so I wasn’t moving very fast.

  Myka had a softer landing, and she immediately began to squirm to get off me. The handcuffs made such extraction difficult, so she wiggled like a newbie mechanic in the maintenance shaft of a RX-851.

  Finally, Myka plopped to her butt beside me and huffed. “That was the stupidest thing…”

  I tested my limbs for any serious damage while panting. I was gonna be bruised to hell, and I might have messed up my leg. No spine or head injuries though.

  After my diligent self-check, I looked at Myka. Her hair and clothes w
ere mussed in a strangely enticing way, her impractical skirt shuffled up her thigh a few centimeters. I had an uncomfortable moment of attraction to her before I put that to the side. Not the time or the person.

  The abandoned booth advertised some sort of “revolutionary” bedding company. ‘Cause bedding was notably at the forefront of technological innovation. A gunfight provided a steady background track, but it was distant from us. We had a moment of safety, and I was gonna use it.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now take a second and explain what the fuck just happened.”

  “We don’t have time.” Emotions were so strange on her face.

  I rested my chin on my non-handcuffed hand. “I can hold a shit for a long time.”

  It was fun to see the unflappable Myka be completely flapped.

  She huffed. “Yujab—the ‘tech dweeb’—and Erly both got paid off by Cadinoff.”

  Right. So they were providing a distraction in case Myka was discovered. Then Myka would sprint up here, jump on the gondola, unite with the Cadinoff mercs, and sail off to hand my engine plans to Glezos. At the end she’d probably get a medal.

  “What’s gonna happen to them now? Sev Tech won’t be happy with them.”

  “They’ll be taken care of.”

  That was a wiggly phrase. “‘Taken care of’ in a nice way or like, whacked over the head taken care of?”

  “We’ll make sure they aren’t hurt.” It looked like it pained her to say.

  Good enough. “Add Jagcoop to that list.”

  Her look of exasperation was delicious. I rattled our cuffed hands.

  “You’re gonna have to work with me, here.”

  She didn’t look happy about it. To be fair, I wasn’t happy either. Working with Myka was far down on my to-do list.

  “Fine. We’ll protect Jagcoop. Assuming he can keep himself together tonight.” She raised her eyebrows. “Can we go now?”

  I tugged at the cuffs. “Go where?”

  “Cadinoff —”

  I made a buzzer sound. Her mouth snapped shut. “Try again.”

  “You understand who I work for, right? I’m taking you to a Cad—”