by Joseph Lallo
“Yeah, I know. That’s what this whole trip was about, but I came up with nothing.”
“It is impossible to come up with nothing. The passage of time inevitably brings information. You may simply not realize the usefulness of the information that you acquired, or perhaps the sparseness of the information is making connections between facts unclear. It is important to interpret information as a whole.”
“These are very ‘computer’ answers you’re giving, Ma,” he said.
“‘Human’ answers have thus far been unfruitful.”
“Good point.”
“I suggest that you present your dilemma to Karter. When a problem interests him, he often fixates on it to the exclusion of all else until it is solved, and he is quite skilled in problem solving. I am similarly skilled with data indexing and processing.”
“... Yeah. What the hell. It isn’t like I’ve got any other options. It can’t hurt, right?”
“Actually, Karter was exceedingly displeased with your lack of punctuality regarding the return of his ship. His actions are likely to reflect his displeasure. However, as your pilot privileges are hereby revoked on the Delta Astro-Recon, Type D, you will need to meet with him to attain ownership of your repaired ship if you intend to leave the planet.”
“You aren’t filling me with confidence, Ma.”
“Forewarned is forearmed, Mr. Alexander. To that end, please be aware that the external temperature is negative twenty-five degrees Celsius, and do not forget to prepare yourself for local gravitational intensity.”
Lex looked down at his desert gear.
“The next time I embark on a planet hopping jaunt, I’m packing a suitcase.”
“That is advisable.”
He spent a moment working up the nerve to sprint to the open door of the bus, then repeated the process when he arrived at the lab. Ma lit a path for him that led down a few floors to the Hall of Rejects. There was the distinctive sound of an impact wrench buzzing through the halls like a mechanical duck. The lights were still indicating his location, but it was hardly a challenge to locate him. The inventor was standing in the middle of one of the larger workshops, bolting on the cowling to some sort of turbine.
“Karter?” Lex said.
His host’s head snapped toward him, and in a flash he fumbled for a hammer on a nearby work cart and whipped it at Lex’s head. The pilot only just managed to pull out of the way.
“What the hell!?” Lex exclaimed, jumping aside as a wrench twirled toward him.
“‘What the hell’ is right!” Karter jabbed, stalking toward Lex and grabbing a crowbar. “I said seventy-two hours. Seven two. You were supposed to borrow that ship for three earth days and bring it back to get the replacement.”
Lex backed away, hands raised in placation. Karter wasn’t screaming. He was griping in a manner that, frankly, seemed appropriate for the minor infraction that had been committed. The tone of voice was about two dozen notches of intensity below his actions, which were positively homicidal. It was more than a little unnerving.
“Whoa, hey!” he objected, pulling his head out of range of a few angry swipes, “So I was a little late!”
“A little late? Come ON, Lex. How long was he gone, Ma?”
“Three hundred and fifteen hours.”
“That’s four and a half times as long as I said!”
“4.375,” Ma corrected.
“I was rounding,” he groaned, swiping the hook of the crowbar at Lex’s leg.
The nimble younger man managed to avoid getting his thigh skewered, but Karter got the hook behind his knee and pulled his leg out from under him, sending him painfully to the floor. With a terrifyingly tranquil look in his eye, he raised the bar.
“Seems to me that you were trying to steal it. You were welching on a deal.”
“Mr. Dee, stop that.”
“Stay out of this, Ma,” he snapped, stomping a boot on Lex’s chest to keep him from escaping, knocking the air out of him in the process. “I told him seventy-two hours.”
“No, you told ME seventy-two hours. I told him.”
“… Still! He should have been back for the exchange on time.”
“At no point did you indicate that he was to return your ship within that time frame.”
“Well he could have assumed. It was obvious!”
“You cannot murder someone with a pry bar for failing to adequately interpret an unspoken agreement.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Mr. Dee, if you murder him, he will not be able to give you notes on the ship you’ve created for him.”
He considered the words for a moment.
“Fine...” he said, like a spoiled child reluctantly marching off to brush his teeth. He reached down and hauled Lex from the ground. “You’re lucky she likes you... By the way, why do you like him now, Ma? Didn’t you hate him last time?”
“He illustrated that he was willing to treat me with appropriate regard.”
“Pff. Suck up. Come on, Lex. I’ll show you the ship.”
“You,” Lex croaked, still gasping for air, “You tried to kill me!”
“I didn’t try very hard, you big baby.”
“Are you crazy!?”
“Yes, actually! You wanna see the certificate?” Karter replied, a spark of mischief in his voice.
“Uh...”
Karter dug out an old fashioned leather wallet and fished out an ancient and nearly disintegrated piece of paper. It had been folded and refolded so many times it was ready to fall apart at the creases, but the bizarre fellow carefully unfurled it and handed it to his guest. It looked fairly official. The small, plain type of a legal document formed neat little rows of very official language.
“After thorough psychological and neurological examination,” Lex read, “it is the considered opinion of the staff of Westmooreland Psychiatric Treatment facility that the patient, Karteroketraskin ‘Karter’ Dee, is mentally and emotionally unfit for service in the armed forces in any capacity and more so represents a significant danger to himself and others if unsupervised. Due to borderline sociopathic tendencies, clear obsessive behavior, and early symptoms of developing schizophrenia, it is the recommendation of the committee that he be remanded to a suitably equipped and staffed institution for treatment, indefinitely.”
“Neat, huh? That’s not the real one, of course. I’ve got it filed with my degrees. It is about time to print out a fresh copy, I guess. Ma! Get on that! You can keep that one.”
“Uh... I sort of thought that ‘certifiably insane’ was just a phrase.”
“Nope, they actually hand them out. Not to the patient of course. That’s for the folks in charge of the meds and stuff, but I snagged it on the way out. After all, I earned it. But anyway, ship, this way.”
The lunatic was perfectly calm, as though his earlier violence had never occurred.
“You take medication?”
“I did, for a while. I never bothered to refill the prescription after a while. It gave me dry-mouth.”
“It also regulated your violent outbursts,” Ma pointed out.
“I fail to see the necessity of regulating violent outbursts.”
“It is for that precise reason that you were prescribed the medication,” the computer said.
“Nag nag nag. You sound just like Dr. Connors,” Karter said, entering the elevator.
Lex hesitated.
“I’ll take the stairs,” he said.
“Suit yourself. Ma, don’t let him get lost,” pressing the button and letting the doors close.
When he could no longer hear the elevator, Lex clenched his fists.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was a lunatic!?” the freelancer raved, wishing he had a face to address.
“I had warned you that his actions were likely to reflect his displeasure.”
“I didn’t realize that in this case displeasure was a synonym for homicidal tendencies.”
“Reactions such as that are rare. The degree of hi
s displeasure was unanticipated. I think that he was excited about showing off the ship.”
“Oh, so he wasn’t murderous, he was just feisty.”
“I don’t appreciate your tone, Mr. Alexander,” the computer said sternly, as the lights redirected to the stairwell, “I wasn’t the one who tried to kill you.”
“A little bit of a warning is all I was looking for. You could have said he was a psychopath. This came out of nowhere.”
“He is a wealthy recluse who lives alone on a planet, builds weapons of mass destruction, and crafts living creatures for the purpose of wordplay.”
“... Okay. There were signs. I’m sorry,” he said, not anxious to get on the computer’s ‘S-list’ again, “It’s just that it’s been a while since I’ve dealt with a group of people that didn’t have at least one person in it who wanted to kill me.”
“I can appreciate how that would raise your stress levels. Would you like a sedative?”
“Thanks but no thanks,” he said, pushing open the doors and starting down the stairs. “I dumped about a half gallon of rum down my throat and it didn’t help, so I’m reluctant to turn to pharmaceuticals... Except for that hangover stuff I took on the way over. Whoever invented Sobrietin deserves a medal.”
It was a few flights of stairs to the lab’s hangar. Lex took his time and tried to mentally delete his host's little ‘episode.’ The simple fact of the matter was, even if he was a maniac, Karter was certainly the only person with the resources to give Lex a chance at either finding a way out of this mess or at least finding a place to hide. That meant he was going to have to play nice, at least for the time being. He pushed open the door and followed more lights until he came to the little vehicular intensive care unit that had formerly contained his battered ship. Karter was standing, arms crossed, just outside the doorway to the repair bay.
“Took you long enough. You ready for the reveal?” he asked, grabbing the door latch.
“I guess,” Lex replied.
“Right, behold!”
He opened the door. What it revealed was remarkable. There was a ship that appeared to be an entirely stock version of the CAII frame that Betsy had been built upon. Without the extra engines inexpertly grafted on, it was a much prettier piece of machinery. The cockpit looked less like a barnacle clinging to the hull of a cluster of engines and more like the control center it should be. Like the DAR, it had the sweeping, smooth lines of an aircraft despite the fact it did almost all of its travel outside of an atmosphere. From above, it would look almost like a squid, minus the tentacles. Flattened fins flared on either side of the cockpit. In the center it bulged around the power plant, which was hooked now to a long, narrow engine bank sporting the twin engines the designers had intended. Along the belly there was a single nub near the nose and one each on either side of the power plant, anti-grav modules that would have been landing gear on an older craft. These nubs had been one of the reasons Lex had always loved the CAII. They let it whip along the ground as nimbly as a hoversled. Various surface details were scattered over the ship, most notably the array of heat dissipation fins along the rear half. Everything about it seemed as though it could have just rolled off of the assembly line, except for the color. Cantrell tended to give the civilian models flashy paint jobs, and the law enforcement models usually were emblazoned with the various logos and warnings of the appropriate department. This one had every square inch painted plain flat black.
“Where did-” Lex began.
“Shh! I’ll give you the rundown,” Karter shushed, “First off, you’ll recall that the design goals were speed and stealth. To that end, I did a ground up rebuild of the entire power and propulsion system. You had six engines on there, but from the pieces I could find, they were pretty lackluster. Surplus, factory seconds, junkyard rejects. The power plant was meaty, but poorly optimized. Now you’ve got a custom class A reactor and a pair of purpose built drop in replacements. Something like twice the power output for a little bit less than one third the mass, which boils down an acceleration that beats basically anything on the market. The reduced engine count reduces the surface area, and as a result reduces the heat dissipation, so I threw in a cryo-shunt and a few heat dumpers.”
He tapped at a control panel and a section of ship above each engine lifted out of place, extending vast sheets of cooling panels that blossomed outward like a flower.
“The shunt will be able to store a pretty massive amount of waste heat, then when you get a chance you can deploy the heat dumps to shed it off. You should be able to keep her running at, oh, 180% for a good seven hours before risking an emergency shutdown. The matte black paint helps with heat dissipation, too. Plus, it makes you pretty much invisible to visual scanners. Black ship in deep space? Black on black. If you’re running at anything under 100%, switching on the cryo-shunts will regulate the emission signature to match background radiation, so you’ll be invisible to thermal sensors, too. The whole thing is radio shielded, so EM sensors will have a tough time with you, and I’ve got a nano-coating on there that will scatter active radar. Basically, in low power mode you can become completely undetectable for pretty much forever. When you are in motion, at 85% you can get about three minutes of undetectability before people directly behind you will start picking up your engines, but even then it’ll look more like a sensor blip than a ship.”
“Wow. I’m surprised you didn’t just put a cloaking device on there,” Lex joked.
“Bah. Cloaking devices are useless. Sure, they mask you from all of the usual stuff, but the device itself has a distinctive meson emission pattern that you can follow, and they eat power. Sure most people don’t carry meson detectors, but the sort of people who you might actually try to cloak to avoid DO, so they are effectively pointless wastes of power and space. This rig does almost everything almost as well, and it does it all with passives or by dual purposing other modules. Saves power, saves weight. Okay, what else? Oh! I rolled some offensive capabilities in as well.”
“But I said-”
“QUIET! Here’s the deal. If you set your engine to 98.6%, then double tap the switch for the hull lights, your engine will start belching out wide-band radio noise. That’ll jam communications for the area, but it will be indistinguishable from an engine malfunction... because technically it IS an engine malfunction, just one that you can trigger on demand. Also, popping the heat dumpers while you’ve got that going will give you a rear oriented directional EMP pulse. Double tap the lights again to deactivate. You’ve got the sensor array from a recon-satellite we got dumped here a few weeks ago. Not top of the line as satellites go, but head and shoulders above anything you’ll find on a ship, civilian OR military. I routed some extra juice to your tractor beam, so you should have a lot more grip strength and range, and holding down the release button while flipping on auto-locking will bring up an offensive mode that will let you pump out shearing pulses with the approximate destructive power of a middle of the road disruptor cannon. Wrapping the whole thing up is a military grade deflection shield system and reinforced plating made from alternating laminate mono-crystal titanium with interspersed carbon polymer sheeting. Here are the benchmarks.”
Karter handed a printout showcasing the results of a suite of tests. Normally, he’d be fascinated by the data. Vehicle performance was sort of “his thing.” The litany of technobabble had gotten a little difficult to follow toward the end, though, so he was a bit distracted trying to figure out precisely what some of it meant.
“I said no weapons,” he said.
“I didn’t ADD any weapons. I just gave you the ability to use standard civilian equipment AS weapons. There isn’t a single piece of hardware that is illegal or overtly offensive. They’d have to do a full hardware AND software scan, AND beat my encryption, AND run simulations to even suspect you of naughtiness. So calm down. On the other hand, I left in all of the stock weapon mount points, so if you decide to quit being such a pansy and give this thing some teeth, your options are w
ide open.”
Lex shook his head and looked over the numbers.
“This is... this is very impressive.”
“Yes, it is.”
“And this is just mine? No strings attached?”
“I retain duplication rights to the design, but this particular ship is yours. That was the deal. And unlike SOME people, I honor my agreements. Now name it, get into it, and get out of here.”
“I can’t.”
“Oh, but you can. And you will. I’m done with you.”
“No, I can’t name it until I’ve flown it for a while. I don’t know what sort of character it has.”
“Fair enough. Get into, get out of here, THEN name it.”
“But... I have something here that might interest you,” he said, holding up the case.
Karter immediately snatched it and forced it open.
“A pile of papers. How very interesting,” he said flatly.
“Well LOOK at them at least.”
The unstable inventor grabbed a handful of the pages and let the briefcase fall to the ground, spilling the rest. As Lex scrambled to gather them up again, Karter leafed through.
“Stellar mass, average temperature... Support struts, signal filtering modules... What exactly is supposed to interest me about all of this?”
“I don’t know, but it must be good, because that is the reason I got shot down here in the first place. Something in those pages has got VectorCorp trying to kill me, and it was enough to get the MOB shooting at me yesterday right before I came here.”
“The mob.”
“Yes.”
“As in organized criminals.”
“Yes.”
“And they were shooting at you.”
“Yes!”
“While you were escaping.”
“YES!”
“In MY ship.”
Lex froze.
“… Maybe?” he said, holding up the case defensively.