Geezer set to work putting up firewalls and security measures to make sure that the Reluctant didn’t get infiltrated. He was adamantly opposed to having to tell Captain Harr that the ship was now a member of the religiosity. This was barely possible since there weren’t any Jelboobah’s Witnesses on board—at least not that Geezer was aware of. It would take someone with extraordinary skill, or in Geezer’s case, luck, to make the tech work anyway.
And if he could get this thing functioning as he’d hoped, it might help him locate and convert Frexle’s tracking device.
Three hours into the integration, Sandoo stepped into the room. “Have you heard back from Ridly and Jezden?”
“No, but I’ve not really been paying much attention.” He spun to the datapad and saw a message from Ridly. “They clipped the wires. We’re all good.”
“Great,” Sandoo said, but he didn’t leave. Instead, he was just sort of milling around.
“Something else?”
“No, no. I’m…well, yes. I hate being cooped up on this ship while the captain is down there. He could be in trouble.”
“He can take care of himself.”
“I know, but it’s embedded in me to protect the captain of the ship.”
“What about everyone else?”
“I suppose that they have to protect him, too,” Sandoo said with a shrug.
“No, I mean do you care about the others on the ship?”
“Oh, right. Yes, of course I do. It’s not the same, though. My duty is first to the captain.”
Geezer turned the final screw on the connection and opened a port to the operating system. He started working on the particulars of what he wanted this little evangelical Ridgway Converter to convince the transporter to do. If this worked, he’d be able to do all sorts of cool tech.
“So,” he said as he coded, “if I were to be made captain, you’d feel that way about me?”
“I suppose so.”
“What if Jezden were captain?”
“I’d resign.”
“Smart,” Geezer said with a nod. “You know, the best way you can keep the captain safe is to make sure the Reluctant is in tip-top shape when he gets back.”
“Why would that matter?”
Geezer paused his work and gave Sandoo an odd look. “You were here when Frexle called. Someone in the Overseer group doesn’t want us to succeed, and that means that they’re going to do everything they can to make sure we don’t. Remember what happens if we fail?”
“They’ll destroy us all,” Sandoo said with a grimace.
“Yep.” Geezer picked back up on his coding. “That includes the captain.”
“How am I supposed to protect the ship from that?”
“I’d say by helping the only person—other than the captain—on this crew who is capable of thinking outside of the box.”
“You?”
“Me.”
“Ah,” Sandoo said slowly. “I’m now starting to see why you thought you were so highly ranked on this ship.”
“Because I should be?”
“Precisely.” Sandoo clapped his hands together and sighed in a very human way. “Okay, what can I do?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Oh.”
BATHROOM BUGS
Captain Harr was standing in Dr. DeKella’s bathroom. He hadn’t had to actually go, which was great because he still wasn’t quite sure how to navigate having a tail. That’s when he noticed that the Kallian commodes weren’t like Segnalian ones. These had no tank attached to the back. Rather, they had a channel, that he assumed was for a tail, that ran down the back of the seat. Interesting.
Why he’d really entered the bathroom, though, was because he felt that it was time to tell the good doctor what was really going on. She probably wouldn’t believe him but, in the event that she did, he had to make sure that nobody else could overhear the admission. That meant he had to check for bugs, and that meant he had to contact Geezer to ask how exactly he would go about doing so. Ridly and the other androids were able to do this without using a wristband; Harr wasn’t. So he needed some privacy before contacting his engineer. The only logical place ended up being the restroom since he had hopes that nobody would stick listening devices in there. If they did…well, that would be very disturbing indeed.
He pressed on his armband and activated the microscopic ear piece that Geezer had affixed to his eardrum. Then he put a call out.
“What’s up, chief?”
“Hey, Geezer,” he said quietly. “I’m in Dr. DeKella’s bathroom at the moment.”
“Kind of an odd place to call from.”
“It’s the only place I could go where nobody can hear me.”
“Well,” Geezer said pedantically, “I’m not much on human psychology, but I think one of the main reasons that you guys created the can was to give you a place where you could go without people hearing you.”
“What are you talking about?” Harr said, but quickly realized precisely what Geezer thought was going on. “Oh, no, that’s not what I meant. I don’t have to relieve myself. I was looking for privacy because I need to make sure that Dr. DeKella’s house isn’t bugged.”
“Ah, okay,” Geezer said. “Glad to hear that, to be honest. I mean, I know we’ve grown kind of close since you jumped on the Reluctant, but—”
“Geezer,” Harr interrupted, “how do I check for bugs?”
“Right. Well, activate your armband and scroll down through the list until you see an option that says, ‘check for bugs’ and then click it.”
The font was so tiny that Harr had to squint through each item.
“Is there any way to zoom the text on this thing?” Harr asked.
“Actually, there’s a really cool thing where you use your fingers in a pinching motion to zoom-in and zoom-out, but there’s a galactic patent on the code so I couldn’t use it.”
“Great.”
There were an incredible amount of options. Unfortunately, Geezer hadn’t bothered to put them in any sensible order.
* Signal for help
* Get the local time
* Find a restaurant
* Locate a lady of the night
“Locate a lady of the night?”
“Jezden.”
Harr should have guessed. He scrolled to the next item.
“Find a pint of oil?”
“Unlike the rest of you, I need lubrication from time-to-time.”
“Ah.” He scrolled again. “You have a duplicate here, then.”
“What?”
“You had ‘Find a pint of oil,’ right?”
“Yeah.”
“The next item is, ‘Find lubrication.’”
“Oh, that’s another one of Jezden’s.”
Harr groaned and kept scrolling. Finally, he found the item and clicked it.
“Scanning…” the armband said in a female version of Geezer’s voice. A tiny light moved back and forth along the band, changing from blue to green to yellow to red and back again. “There is an ant behind the toilet and a small collection of termites in the wall next to the shower.”
“What?”
“Oh, sorry, chief,” Geezer said. “You have to find the one that says, ‘Check for surveillance bugs.’”
He did.
“Scanning…” The lightshow resumed for a few seconds longer this time. “There are no listening devices in this room.”
“Sounds like it’s clean, honcho.”
“Indeed,” Harr said. “Now I just have to figure out how I’m going to check the rest of the apartment.”
“All the armband needs is a crack in the door and it’ll scan, big cat.”
Harr dropped to the floor and crawled over to the little gap under the door. He pressed the button and put the band as close to the opening as possible.
“Scanning…” He waited a bit longer than the previous two times. “Oh, yeah,” the band said eventually, “that room is slammed with listening devices.”
“Great,” Harr said as he got back to his feet. “I guess I’ll just have to get her to come in here. I’m sure that won’t be awkward.”
“Can’t help you there, prime.”
Getting her into the bathroom would be a trial, but once she realized everything that was going on, it would be brushed off. Hopefully. Part of him didn’t like the idea of letting her in on what was really happening. He could just do the job, get out, and let her wonder for the rest of her days about why he’d disappeared. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. But he also knew that telling her that they weren’t the actual inspectors was going to put a damper on their evening.
“Well, what’s going on up there?” he asked Geezer.
“Where to start?” Geezer replied with his robotic sigh. “We tracked Vool like you asked. Sure enough, she was up to no good. Placed some charges in the lab. Ridly and Jezden have already disabled them.”
“That’s good.”
“Sandoo and I got into a big discussion about the ranking structure on the ship. Turns out I’m on par with Jezden. That was disturbing to learn.”
“Only if you look at yourself as a soldier,” Harr pointed out.
“Same thing Sandoo said, which has made me decide not to look at myself as a soldier. Though, frankly, I don’t much look at Jezden as one, either.”
“Tough to argue. What else?”
“That guy Frexle called to let us know that he thought Vool was planning to sabotage our plan to sabotage.”
“He did what?”
“Yeah,” Geezer replied. “We were perplexed as well. Apparently, Vool and some other Overseers want us to fail at this little mission, but Frexle is hoping we’ll succeed.”
“That’s interesting.” He hadn’t expected any of them to really be on Platoon F’s side, but it was nice to know that their boss was currently behind them. “Did he give us any useful insights?”
“Not really, other than it’s becoming more and more obvious that a lot of their technology and vernacular seems to be paralleled in a number of Segnalian television shows.”
“That might prove useful, especially since you appear to be an expert on many of those programs.”
“I do love a good yarn, cap’n.”
Harr was trying to think of a way to let Dr. DeKella get the full force of what was happening here. It could be that she would just take him at face value, but somehow he doubted that. More likely, she’d think he was nuts.
“Hey,” he said with a snap of his fingers, “how’s that beaming technology coming along?”
“That was next on my list, chief,” Geezer replied. “I did some studying and found that I could hook in a Ridgway Converter.”
“You mean that damn thing that made all the soda machines on Segnal attempt to convert you to a Jelboobah’s Witness?”
“Same one.”
“I hope you have safeguards in place.”
“Unless we have any Jelboobah’s Witnesses on board, we should be safe. You tell the Ridgway Converter what brand of theology to sell, after all.”
“Oh.”
“Still, I put up a few blocks, just in case.”
“Good. So it’s working, then?”
“Seems to be. Haven’t tried it on anything too large, but I sent out a box of tools and brought it back without any issues.”
“Think it’ll work on lifeforms?”
“Can’t see why not.”
Harr put his hands on the vanity and looked at himself in the mirror. That damned superhero chin of his was just as ridiculous as it had been when Admiral Parfait had commissioned it. At some point he would have to invest the time to have that corrected. The problem was that if he set that back to normal, he’d have to fix other things, too—most notably the wide jawline. That wouldn’t be fun.
“Here’s the thing,” Harr said with a sigh. “I have to convince Dr. DeKella to help us. That’s not going to be easy from here, but if I can transport her to our ship, she’d have no choice but to believe we’re for real.”
“I hear ya, honcho. It should work.”
“You don’t sound all that confident.”
“My confidence level is moderate, I’ll admit, but it’ll improve a heck of a lot if you guys make it up here alive with all your parts in the right places.”
“Swell.”
UPDATING VELI
Veli was ravenous. Of course he was always ravenous. Even after a full meal of whatever creature he could sink his teeth into, he was always left wanting. It was in his nature.
What he was currently craving was to eat that traitor, Frexle. If only he could prove the worm to be a traitor, that is. Frexle had demonstrated himself to be very slippery indeed. It could be that he was actually innocent of the charges that Veli thought befitted the man, but somehow Veli doubted that. Frexle had pushed just a little too hard on this HadItWithTheKillings agenda. It was fishy, and Veli didn’t like fish.
That thought made his stomach grumble again, reminding him that he did indeed like fish.
The phone rang. Veli glanced over and saw that it was Vool.
“Status?” he said after activating the call.
“Charges placed,” she replied. “Ready to blow the crap out of this planet.”
“Excellent,” Veli said, his hunger somewhat sated by the promise of violence. “We’ll time it with the start of their test so it seems like an accident.”
“Why does that matter? They’ll all be dead anyway.”
“The accident angle, Vool, is for the benefit of Frexle and his friends.”
“Oh yeah, right. Damn liberals.”
“Exactly. We should eat them all.”
“What?” she said while wrinkling her nose.
“Kill them all,” he amended quickly. “I meant that we should kill them all.”
“Oh.”
“Where are you going to be when you activate the charges?”
“In the building, obviously.”
Veli blinked in disbelief at the screen. Not that she could see him. He never allowed anyone to see him. Being the Lord Overseer was a risky proposition at best, but offering would-be assassins—such as Vool—to see what he looked like was akin to signing your own death warrant. Plus, if the rest of the Overseers knew what Veli truly was, they’d not likely want to keep him in power. So, he stayed ever in the shadows, and never in the spot where a shooter would expect him to be, either.
“I’ll leave right before I hit the boom button.”
“Oh,” Veli said. He’d hoped that she wouldn’t catch on to the fact that by being in the building during the explosion, she was sealing her own fate. He shrugged. “What are your plans until then?”
“I guess I’ll watch some television or something,” she said with a shrug. “I’m sure it’ll be boring. What I’d like to do is go out and do a little hunting.”
“Now, now,” Veli cautioned, “I need you to hang tight, Vool. We don’t want to tip our hat too soon. Remember, tomorrow you’ll have the lives of billions at your fingertips. Just hang on to that for tonight.”
“Whatever.”
“Any news on the tech on that ship?”
“No, that metal dork wouldn’t give me any information on it.”
“Metal dork?”
“Yeah, that walking dishwasher that works in engineering.”
“Damn,” said Veli. “Well, once you get through blowing up that measly little planet, you can focus on getting me that intel.”
AIDING JEZDEN
Try as she might, Ridly couldn’t keep focused on her studies. She knew it was silly, since the technology was doomed to fail anyway—that being the purpose for Platoon F’s arrival to Kallian—but she couldn’t help but be interested in how the warp tech worked. It was clear that whoever handled Ridly’s programming had added a healthy dose of curiosity to her code.
Silly or not, it was pointless to even try to comprehend what the Kallians were doing because all she could hear was Jezden’s constant moaning and groan
ing.
“Okay, okay,” she said, slamming down the massive book she’d been reading, “stop the sighing already. It’s getting on my nerves.”
“Sorry,” he said with another sigh. “I guess I can’t even do that right.”
She rolled her eyes and then glared up at the ceiling. “Ugh. All right, out with it.”
“What?”
“I’m trying to study here,” she said, motioning toward the desk, “and you’re making that impossible, so just get whatever it is off your chest so I can get back to work.”
He looked away. “It’s not important.”
“It’s the small-tail thing again, isn’t it?” she said. “You know I’m just giving you crap about it so that you can get a dose of your own medicine, right?”
Platoon F: Quadology: Missions 6, 7, 8, and 9 (Platoon F eBook Bundle 2) Page 15