“Yes, sir.”
And the son of a bitch left me there completely baffled.
*
At this time, I was surprised that they hadn’t discharged me already. All the health indicators were coming up to normal, and I could almost walk without a cane, just limping a little bit. When I asked, they told me to wait a few more days. Until eventually I wrote a letter. But never got an answer.
It wasn’t as if I had somewhere to go. I would go home, I’d expect, my mother’s home, but after that, who knew? Still, I was sick and tired of the hospital (no pun intended). I needed to get out of there, and I needed to get out of there soon.
*
For the past few weeks, Nurse Eiste had been missing our implicit Thursday-night standing date. I didn’t know why it stopped. But as I also didn’t know why it had begun, that wasn’t a big surprise. I expected she had found some other lucky idiot to have fun with.
That night, however, I was awoken by a familiar touch. I felt her hand crawling underneath the sheets. Caressing my leg. I looked at her. She smiled. Her naughty blue eyes finding mine in the duskish light. I felt her fingers on my testicles and jumped inside, becoming rigid. I wanted to say something, to welcome her back, but we’d never spoken in these encounters, and it felt strange and bothersome to say something. I lifted my hand and rested it on her round buttock, and that was the best I could do to acknowledge her.
I felt her moving, down there, and started to breathe deeper and faster. But I don’t know why this time I wasn’t up to a cold mechanical encounter. I raised my hand up to her waist and pulled her to me. She resisted at first, but then she raised herself and was looking right into my eyes, her breasts sitting on my chest, her mouth close to mine. She had beautiful eyes. Eyes get me every time. Her hand was still moving down there, but I stopped her and pulled her further. She didn’t want to kiss me, I don’t know why, but finally, she did. We kissed. Gently. I smoothly sucked her upper lip, then the bottom one. Then we separated. She was still resisting.
I felt something strange, then. My hand was on her waist, her right hand was now supporting her on the bed, but I felt the left arm moving, doing something. She looked into my eyes and noticed I noticed it, so she kissed me hard and passionate. I kissed her back, but now my attention was focused on the movement of her arm. She was doing something. She was distracting me while her left hand was doing something below my bed, underneath my mattress. What was she doing?
We kissed for a few minutes, and finally, she smiled awkwardly, kissed me again with a bit of tongue, then backed away and left.
I stayed awake for a while, looking at the dark ceiling. In part, I was satisfied and even a bit elated. The making out had been more satisfying than a hand job would have been. On the other hand, I was sure it had been awkward. All of it. It had been very awkward. Even more than usual. What was she doing with me? What was she doing in my bed? What was she doing underneath my bed? And did I care?
Finally, I made a decision, turned around in the bed and searched with my hand beneath it. It took me a while, but finally, I found it. It was a small compartment in the metal, in the structure of the bed. It had a tiny sliding door, and there was something in there. I took it out. In the dark, I could barely perceive it, but it was a black piece, some kind of chip, some kind of memory chip. That was strange. That was very strange. I thought about it for a long time, but in the end, I put it in my pajama’s pocket and went to sleep. Whatever this was, it was way over my head.
*
Friday morning, Erbay took me to the Admiral once again. I asked the old man:
“Do you know Nurse Eiste?”
He nodded.
“Your Thursday-night hand job?”
Son of a bitch! How the hell did he know that?! I braced myself and kept quiet, not to give him the satisfaction. Son of a bitch! But I did have something he didn’t know about. I was sure. I took out the memory chip and showed it to him.
“Yes, my Thursday-night booty call,” I said. “Turns out she was hiding this little thing in my bed.”
He raised his eyebrow. I had surprised him.
“You should put it back.” He said.
“Know what it is?”
He looked straight at me, which meant it was serious.
“Nurse Eiste’s real name is Nina Zauer, she’s an enemy spy. That little thing you have there, is a chip containing a top-secret level 1 Navy code. She’s hiding it until she is able to get it out across the Dark Sea.”
What the hell!? My mouth opened wide and I was speechless. Who the hell was this old man!? How did he…? An enemy spy? A top-secret code? What was this? This was dangerous. I looked around, making sure no one was listening.
“What the hell, sir!”
He smiled.
“Don’t worry. We’re secure here. Erbay is making sure of that.”
I looked at him.
“Who are you?”
He laughed.
“I’m still a Navy Admiral, lieutenant. But they’ve put me in charge of a special unit no one really talks about.”
“A special unit?”
“Navy Intelligence. We call ourselves The Farmers.”
“You mean… I…” I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the black chip in my hand. “You want me to put this back?”
He put a cigar in his mouth.
“Don’t worry, lieutenant. It’s not a real code. It’s a fake one. And it would be very interesting to see how Nurse Eiste intends to take it to the enemy.”
I looked at the chip, and then back at him.
“So… You’re here because… Your liver…”
“No. I’m really sick. I didn’t have to come all the way here for my treatment, of course, but my sickness is real.”
“Why The Farmers? Because you seed things and see them play out?”
He laughed again.
“No, nothing so fancy. They’ve set up our HQ in a farm somewhere in Ollory, that’s all. We’ve been The Farmers ever since.”
“Is Erbay one of yours?”
He nodded.
“One of the best. He’s in charge of the whole operation, really. I’m just here to oversee and, well… to meet you, in truth.”
I thought for a bit, then I raised the chip in my hand.
“So I put it back?”
He nodded again.
“I’d appreciate it. Discreetly, if you don’t mind. And fast.”
“Very well.” I got it back to my pocket. “You’re putting a lot of trust in me, telling me all this.”
He smiled.
“I’ve been studying you for a long time.”
Oh… Now I understood what he was doing.
“So you’re recruiting me? Is that it?”
He took his cigar to his mouth, smiling widely and reminding me of Mira.
“Pretty much, yes.”
I thought about it for a bit. He just smoked the cigar and waited, the old fox.
“I don’t think I’m secret agent material,” I said.
“You are, but that’s beside the point: I don’t need you as an agent.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You don’t?”
He clicked the button on his intercom.
“Let’s do the following, shall we, Byl? You go put that chip back, and we’ll talk again after that, what do you say?”
Erbay showed up. The Admiral was going to leave me hanging, as usual.
“Off you go.” I joked. “Work the land, milk the cows, harvest the crop…”
Erbay raised an eyebrow, uncomfortable with my impertinence, but the Admiral laughed.
“Sunrise to sunset, boy! Sunrise to sunset!”
*
I went back to my bed. I didn’t immediately return the chip to its hiding place because it was the middle of the day and there were many people around, wide awake and active. I had to wait for a moment when nobody would notice my action, of course.
But I didn’t have the chance.
Yohan was a nurse I
didn’t know very well. He was detached to a different ward, and he seldom came by. Which was why I was surprised when he showed up with a wheel chair.
“Byllard Iddo, right?”
“Yes. Lieutenant.” I didn’t know him well enough to let him ignore my rank.
“Right. Come.” He unfolded the chair.
He was a big guy. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark face. He was fit. Navy fit. And very physical.
“Where are we going?” I asked, as he pushed me through the corridors.
Silence. He didn’t say a word. I started to feel alarmed, somehow. Where the hell were we going? Finally, he turned the chair into an empty corridor and then into a mid-sized almost empty storage room. He stopped in the middle and waited. I was ready to get up, but he calmly but firmly put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t have to wait long, anyway. After a few seconds here came Nina Zauer a.k.a. Nurse Eiste. Now I really wanted to get up, and now I really knew it wouldn’t be that easy. I looked at Eiste. She did look good in that nurse’s uniform, heavens help me. She had lipstick on. I’m serious. Red lipstick, the slut.
She showed me the little device. It was a Star-Thrower. A small two-barrel pistol that shoots two heavy star shaped slow moving round bullets. The beastly thing wasn’t able to hit an elephant further than 15 to 20 palms away, but it could devastate what it hit.
“Know what it is?” Eiste asked.
I nodded.
“Know what it can do to you?”
I nodded again.
“Your insides get torn apart.” She explained anyway. “Not a pretty thing.”
I waited. She smiled coldly.
“Know that tiny black thing I hid in your bed?” She asked.
“Tiny black thing?” I said with fake naïveté.
“You took it, and I need it back.”
I thought for a bit, trying to figure out how to play this. But I finally took the chip from my pocket and gave it to her. She inspected it.
“What is it, anyway?” I asked.
She just nodded at Yohan with intent and then left without even looking at me. Yohan started pushing me again, in the opposite direction.
“Don’t even try to get up.” He said, with a grave voice. “Or I’ll kill you right here.”
I believed him, so I stayed still, looking for an opening. Before it came, we went through a door saying ‘Crematorium,’ and I got cold sweat all over.
The room was mostly dark. There were about six stretchers with dead bodies on them, covered in white sheets, just there waiting for something, and a large oven with huge yellow flames illuminating the place.
“What are we doing here, Yohan?”
Yohan didn’t answer. He guided me to the center of the room and locked wheels. And then everything happened in a flash.
I tried to get up, but he grabbed my shoulder. I put my knee down, slipping off the chair, rotated over the knee, grabbed his arm and pushed his elbow towards his ear as I got up, unbalancing him against a stretcher. He was surprised by my skill, but quickly recovered and threw me a potent hook with his right fist. But I was expecting it since my unbalancing act left him with only one direction to strike, so I ducked clean. Exactly as I wanted! As I ducked, I closed my left hand in a praying-mantis fist and fired it into his liver. My body wasn’t really in the proper position to be accurate, but I knew my craft, and I compensated in a split second. A strike to the liver is something brutal. Yohan didn’t even shout. His knees shook. His face was a mask of pain. I knew he wouldn’t be thinking right at that point. He wouldn’t even be seeing right. And before he could recover, my right hand’s palm crashed violently against his nose. He stumbled back and fell on his knee. He was near unconsciousness already. I jumped forward. He tried to catch my arm, but I slapped his hand away. I grabbed the hair on the top of his head firmly and pulled it back, while I pushed his chin with the other hand, he was unbalanced again, and I rotated my hips pushing the head and pulling the chin, and when I freed him, he was sent flying a dozen palms away. He crashed into the open oven door, and his head exploded into a pool of blood. Just like that, he was dead. And worst of all, his hair caught fire. It was so gruesome and stupid that I immediately pulled a sheet from one of the dead bodies and attacked the flames like a madman until they were out. And fuck, fuck, fuck! It was over…
I sat on the ground next to the body. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths for a moment. I calmed myself down. When I opened my eyes, I looked around. The whole place was a mess. What should I do with the body? I had to make Yohan disappear. I knew that. It was important that Eiste didn’t know that he was dead and I was alive until she left. I knew that. But I wasn’t sure of what to do. I could burn the body, clean the place with the sheet, burn the sheet. But what if I did something wrong? What if I left clues all over the place? They’d charge me with murder, wouldn’t they? The best thing was to get help. The best thing was to get Erbay. He would know what to do.
I dragged Yohan’s body and hid it behind a metallic counter. I put the sheet over the body to hide it a little more. Just enough so it wasn’t noticed right away by somebody who’d come by or something. I didn’t touch the blood. I just thought I would create a bigger mess if I tried to clean it up.
I walked out of the Crematorium trying to figure out how to find Erbay. I could try and ask somebody to call him. But that might alert Eiste or somebody else if they happened to hear it. And who could I trust? I decided instead to wander through the corridors until I find him. With hindsight, that was even dumber. I could have been spotted by a number of enemy agents if they were there. Finally, I passed a room that had an oxygen bottle and a mask. I snatched it, put the mask on, so I would be a little more disguised, and sat down in a corner of one of the main corridors, waiting for Erbay to come by. It took at least half an hour. I spotted him and called him up. He looked at me, and looked at the mask and asked: “What the hell are you doing?”
“Something happened,” I said, mysteriously.
He raised his eyebrow.
“Come. Let’s talk over there. And leave the damn bottle, will you?”
He took me to an empty room, and I told him everything.
“Show me.” He said.
I took him to the Crematorium and showed him the body. Despite my fears over the last hour, nobody seemed to have found Yohan while I was gone. Everything was exactly in the same place as before.
“What do we do?” I asked.
His face betrayed no emotion.
“You will go back to your bed and lay low. I’ll take care of this.”
I tried to protest.
“I could help y…”
“I’ll get to you when I get to you.” He interrupted.
“But I just…”
“Go.”
His finger was indicating the exit. His eyes left me with no doubt that I’d better go. And so I went… As simple as that. Like nothing had happened at all. Like I hadn’t killed a man or something. Like I hadn’t almost been killed myself or something. Just like that. Just back to my bed and look at the ceiling. Fucking spooks.
*
The next morning, Erbay took me back to the garden.
“Good job.” Said the Admiral, playing with his cigar.
We were next to the fountain, and I had my hand in the water, playing.
“Is she gone?”
“Yes.”
“Are you following her?”
“We have a tracking device.”
“Won’t they scan the chip?”
He smiled.
“It’s not in the chip. We know what we’re doing, lieutenant.”
I lowered my eyes.
“Sorry, sir.”
He coughed a little.
“What were you thinking of doing after this?”
Here we go…
“Back to my mother’s house, I guess. I’m not going back to convoys, that’s for sure.”
He sniffed.
“Your father died when you were… what? Sixteen?”
“Yes, sir.”
“An accident?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You killed him in training?”
I stopped. That wasn’t a real question; he knew the truth. But it hurt to hear it out loud. It felt like a burning iron coming out of my gut.
“Yes, sir,” I whispered.
“You blame yourself?”
I had thought of it for years. Nothing I could have done. I’d done what my father ordered. And I’d done it well. However…
“I don’t, and I do, sir.” I sighed.
“Your mother blames you?”
He was relentless.
“She doesn’t, but she does.”
He chewed the cigar.
“Tough spot, aren’t you? Guilt is a bitch. So the Navy became your family, did she?”
“I guess so, sir.”
“The big dark Space lured you in, did it?”
“I suppose so, sir.”
“It hurts you, and it squashes you, but you can’t leave it, can you?”
My fingers played with the water in the fountain. There are no fountains in Space. There’s nothing in Space. It’s empty. And that’s what gets you; it has space for you.
“Come work for me.” He said finally.
“Doing what, sir?”
He blew some smoke into the heights.
“The Silent boats are being able to cover the entire Dark Sea not because they have that kind of functioning range, but because they have ways of re-supplying deep in Space. There is this ship… We call it The Mother. It works as a hub for the sharks: it supplies them and in a way, commands them. It’s a fake merchant, well armed and big enough to be nasty. It travels the Dark Sea somewhere near the Pirate Zone. It works with two or three other supply Silent Boats that can make it even more efficient. So what the SB’s have is not a functioning range but an operating range enabled by this bitch. If we can find her and kill her, we cut their range in half.”
“I see… So…”
“Yes. Your Nurse Eiste will be going to the Pirate Zone, probably land in Fumu itself. But then she will arrange transport to The Mother. That’s how valuable she thinks her product is. That’s how valuable the enemy thinks her product is. Erbay and his team will follow her all the way. I have procured a ship and a crew to take him there and do the dirty job of destroying that fucking monster, and I would very much like for you to command her.”
Fighting the Silent (The Dark Sea War Chronicles Book 1) Page 13