Hailey's Comet Anthology

by Selma J Lewis

  There was something wrong about him. Never before had she dealt with someone like him. Rich people, yes. Obnoxious people, yes. Horny people, yes. But Artie appeared to have satyriasis; he was never satisfied. His excessive – maybe uncontrollable – sexual desire was an affliction she’d never encountered in her years of travel and service in the Empire. Perhaps it was not his fault. Perhaps a chemical imbalance somewhere in his body made him hypersexual.

  More disturbing was what she heard behind the closed door earlier that day: a kind of tyrannical power he exerted over his partner. Hailey searched her TDN for any information on aberrant sexual behavior. There wasn’t much; she had never needed that information before, so had never read anything about it. Unfortunately, if she didn’t put the information into her brain, she could not extract the information from her brain.

  She did run across an applicable quote: “Everything is about sex, except sex. That’s about power.” She found it interesting because it seemed to describe Artie to a T. Did he feel powerless in other aspects of his life – under his father’s judgmental eye, perhaps – so that he sought power over those more shallow or insecure?

  Hailey could hear Laura’s voice in her head: “We’re a psychologist now?” Hailey smiled internally. Laura always addressed Hailey’s tangential investigations in that way: “We’re a detective now?” on NSI; “We’re a journalist now?” on Io; “We’re a critic now?” in New Hollywood. Haily laughed. OK, Lucky. I’ll drop it.

  She checked her implanted chrono. It was past time for them to be on the surface of DN5714. She commed the pilot. No one answered. She removed her helmet and asked a passing crewmember what the hold-up was about.

  “What ‘hold-up’? We’re not scheduled to reach the T’skala Nebula for another three days.”

  Hailey stared at the man and accessed her TDN. The T’skala Nebula was far from any inhabited UOE worlds. Knowing the crewman would not have the answers she required, she left him and went straight to the bridge, only to find she was locked out – a normal precaution on space vessels. She pushed the comm button to speak to someone on the other side of the door.

  “Bridge. Gandapala here.”

  “This is Agent Ramirez of SWORD. I want to speak to the captain,” she replied, fully expecting everyone on the bridge to know instantly that she outranked all of them. She waited a full minute for anyone to speak to her again.

  The lock on the door beeped and clicked open. She slid the door to the side. “Agent Ramirez, welcome!” a man said. He wore a uniform that Hailey recognized. It was the same kind as the one the captain of the luxury commercial space liner, Fantasy, wore: a quasi-official looking thing that carried no real rank with it.

  “Are you the ‘captain’?” she asked.

  “At your service. How can I help you?”

  “I’d like a name, please.”

  “Captain Trevor Zula.”

  “What is our destination?”

  “The T’skala Nebula, ma’am.”

  “Why was I not told about the change of destination?”

  “Change? There’s been no change.”

  “Where is Kinkade?”

  The captain looked at one of his bridge crew and nodded. The crewman ran a scan of the ship. “Mr. Kinkade is in his quarters.”

  “Is there anyth—” the captain started to say. Hailey was already gone.

  She knocked firmly on Kinkade’s door. After some time and shuffling noises inside, the door slid open. In the second before everything went dark, Hailey wondered why Kinkade was wearing a gas mask, smelled the foul odor of isoflurane, cursed him inside her mind, made a grab at his mask, and felt her body fall to the floor.

  How to Damage a Wraith in one Millisecond

  “She’s not responding,” a male voice said from the darkness.

  “What the hell happened to her?” another voice whispered.

  “I don’t know. Mr. Kinkade said she just keeled over.”

  “I think it’s ventricular tachycardia. Damn, what’s with the suit? I can’t do compressions on her chest through this thing.”

  “Take over the respirator. I’ll get the defibrillator.” A few seconds later, “Charging. Hands clear!” the man put the wands on the sides of Hailey’s suit and an electrical current ran over the outside of the armor, arcing off to the floor in some places. Hailey’s body was not affected at all.

  With a curse, the man looked up and down the suit for a way to open it but couldn’t find one. “Try on the neck. At least the pulse will travel on the inside of the suit instead of the outside.”

  The man placed the wands near the base of Hailey’s skull, the lowest point he could find skin. “I hope this doesn’t scramble her brain,” he said.

  “People have survived electroshock therapy. Put something in her mouth, though.”

  With a wad of sterile bandage material, the man protected Hailey’s tongue from being bitten off and prepared to administer the electricity. “Hands clear,” he repeated. With an audible zap, Hailey’s body went rigid, then relaxed again in unconsciousness.

  “Got a regular heartbeat. Don’t do another one.”

  The one who administered the shock sighed. “We should really bring a doctor along on these cruises. A little bit of field medic training isn’t gonna be enough one day…”

  Hailey awoke but didn’t open her eyes. She had a terrible headache and her body felt sore all over. She was on a cot, she could tell, but that was all she could tell. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. After several seconds of blinking, she looked around and found she was in a small sleeping quarter in a prefab building – but where? She attempted to sit up, but the headache was so bad, she felt… sick? She had not been sick since she arrived at the Scabbard at age fourteen. She had forgotten what it felt like to be sick.

  She pushed through the pain and sat up, turning to drop her feet to the floor. A weird rush of disorientation ran through her mind, then a feeling she hadn’t experienced since she was eleven: fear. She accessed her limbic monitor, thinking she had somehow pushed on it accidentally, letting her emotions run free, but she couldn’t find it. She accessed her hippocampal chronometer to determine how long she had been unconscious. That, too, was missing. Likewise, the parietal micrometer and synaptic hyperlinks were malfunctioning. The fear grew in her mind and started to send adrenaline to her heart.

  Hailey immediately tried to send a mayday message to SWORD through her cingulated cortical uplink, but… no access. Panic threatened to overtake her nervous system, but she was enough in control to turn to her yoga lessons: breathe, calm, think.

  Breathe. The fear subsided. Hailey’s mind began to settle as her body flushed out the epinephrine.

  Calm. Hailey told herself that she was alive, physically undamaged – with the exception of her electronic enhancements – and had lots of training that would compensate for her loss of implants. She knew when she got back to SWORD, they would fix her.

  Think. Hailey tried to puzzle out what happened to her. Her TDN was on the fritz, but she still had her brain. She struggled to remember the most recent memory she had. She was on the bridge. The captain told her… what did he tell me? she asked herself. He said… our destination was the T’skala Nebula. She remembered that she was on her way to Kinkade’s room to demand an explanation, but she couldn’t remember if she had gotten there or not.

  She stood and stretched her whole body toward the ceiling, then bent over to touch the floor. A new wave of nausea hit her, so she stood up again and tried to settle her stomach. When the worst had passed, she looked around the room. A light fixture in the ceiling, an air vent next to it, and the cot: a complete inventory of the small space. It was a prison cell, essentially. She tried the door. She was about to open it when it was opened by someone on the other side.

  “Hailey, I’m glad to see you up. I’ve brought you something to eat. And drink. You must be desperate for water at this point.”

  “I’m desperate for answers,” she said
threateningly.

  “What answers do you need?” Kinkade asked, frustratingly calm.

  “Where are we?”

  “Ah, that’s right. I neglected to inform you that I already own a rock in space.”

  “In the T’skala Nebula,” Hailey filled in.

  “Exactly. Got the prefabs set up last year. It’s not terraformed yet, so we can’t go outside. We’re quite well stocked though, which is good.”

  Hailey put a hand to her throbbing head. “Why’s that?”

  “Because it’ll be at least a week before my ship comes back with some friends of mine.”

  “Finished with the last set of friends?” Hailey asked, trying to hide her anxiety about being stranded in the T’skala Nebula for the next week or more. Kinkade said nothing. “What are you doing, Kinkade?” Hailey asked.

  “Bringing you a meal. It’s been at least four days since you’ve eaten.”

  “Where’s everyone else?”

  “On the ship, heading back to Ganymede.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Well, except you and me.”

  “What’s your game, Kinkade?”

  “Game. That’s an interesting word. I guess you could call it that. I like games. I like to win games. I like to win, period. Games, contests, bets.”

  “Spoiled rich boy,” Hailey muttered. “You don’t have enough? You need to conquer people to feel good?”

  Kinkade lost his smile, but Hailey had trouble reading what replaced it. She couldn’t hear his pulse and she couldn’t see his temperature. Her face changed, too, as a result.

  Kinkade had no trouble reading her expression. “What’s frustrating you, Hailey?”

  “Agent Ramirez.”

  “On my world, you are not Agent Ramirez.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “What will you do? Beat me into submission? My body guards are right outside.”

  “What’s your game?” Hailey asked again through gritted teeth.

  “My game is my secret, Secret Agent Hailey. But it’s not the challenge I had in mind before your implants got scorched.” Hailey’s eyes betrayed a wish to know how that happened. He seemed to possess the answer, but didn’t share. Instead, he continued his own train of thought. “Maybe it’ll be a better game now, if not as challenging.”

  Hailey’s self-control was wavering. Kinkade set the tray on the cot and made motions to leave. He opened the door widely, not seeming to care that Hailey could easily follow him out into the hall, which she did. Instantly, a dozen rifles took aim at her head. Kinkade had an army. Not a normal army, but an army only a very rich person could buy.

  Lining the hall were twelve Autonomous Coaction Marine Emulator robots, usually purchased by people who wanted an artificially intelligent security guard to patrol their property. The ACMEs were built to the buyer’s specs: simple alarm system all the way up to lethal enforcer. The fact that Kinkade had twelve of the lethal variety pointed out how incredibly wealthy he was. “Meet my guards,” he said with a malicious smile. “They are programmed to shoot you if you come out of that room. I doubt that even a fully-loaded Wraith could get by them,” he warned, infuriatingly self-congratulatory. “And you, my dear, are ailing. I wouldn’t try it.”

  “You’re a sick coward, Kinkade.”

  “Sentries,” Kinkade called out while locked in a staring battle with Hailey. Every one of them switched on a blue light indicating readiness to receive orders. “If the target calls me anything but Trip, shoot it.” He paused, then added. “If the target uses defamatory language, shoot it. If the target makes a noise louder than sixty decibels, shoot it. Acknowledge.”

  The twelve robot sentries switched on green lights. Kinkade turned and strode down the hall. Hailey was stunned. How did the monied fool get the upper-hand over her? She took a step back over the threshold of the small room, and the rifles lowered in perfect synchronicity. She began to step forward out of the room and the rifles, once again, pointed at her head. Each sentry lit a red light. She took one more step forward. The red lights began to blink.

  She tried in vain to access her TDN and look up all the specs she had ever read about these ACMEs. Without more information, she assumed a flashing red light was a warning, and she backed off.

  Her stomach growled. She returned to the cot and sniffed the food. Kinkade is capable of anything, but he probably doesn’t want to poison me, she reasoned. He could’ve killed me any time before now. She began to eat the much-needed food and drink the essential water. It helped alleviate the headache somewhat, which helped her to think more clearly.

  She sat on the cot, studying the room, not getting nearly as much information about it as she was accustomed to getting from a simple sweep. Four walls, each as long as the others; the cot, barely fitting along one of them; the wall opposite the cot, twice as wide as the door built into it. With the door swung open, as it was, it blocked her view of the remainder of that wall.

  She closed the door carefully, despite her intense desire to slam it. Then she put a hand against the wall, then the other three. The wall with the door that led to the robot-lined hallway was warm, while the others were chilly. No atmo on three sides, no escape on the fourth.

  She still wore her suit, but her helmet was missing. She could not break through a wall and be exposed to the vacuum on the other side without her helmet. She was about to punch a hole in the fourth wall out of frustration when she remembered that she mustn’t make a sound above sixty decibels, the volume of normal human speech. Instead, she used her brain – what was left of it.

  While in the hall with the robots, she had noticed several doors. There were five other quarters running down the left side of the hall; she was at the end. If she could get through those five rooms, maybe she could get past the ACMEs and get her hands on Kinkade.

  With no better plan coming to mind, she began to tap lightly on the wall between her room and the next, searching for the thinnest or hollowest section. Her suit had been stripped of its obvious weapons, but a non-Wraith would not know about all the hidden holsters for knives and drug patches. Unfortunately, Hailey had not brought much along for a simple scouting EVA on an uninhabited asteroid. Nevertheless, there was one small knife that was always tucked away in the suit, one multi-tool, and a few knock-out patches.

  Hailey unfolded a thick, sharp hook from her multi-tool and pushed the point into the metal prefabricated wall. The outside walls were built double-thick to withstand the pressure differential between the mechanically maintained atmosphere inside and the complete lack of atmosphere outside. The inside walls, though, were thinner and a little bit flexible. Hailey pushed hard on her hook-knife until the point penetrated the wall. Her well-conditioned, muscular arms served her well as she rocked the cutting hook up and down. The knife slowly sliced the wall open. “Damn,” she muttered. If she had her parietal micrometer, she’d know exactly how far to cut the wall in order to push the slit open enough to crawl through. Now, she would just have to estimate. Then, trial and error.

  Because the inner wall was flexible, especially when structurally compromised as Hailey’s wall now was, she was able to pull one side in and push the other side out to create a gap big enough to squeeze through. Hailey was careful to proceed quietly. The sounds of flexing metal, she thought, were probably not over sixty decibels. “Damn,” she said again. If she had working aural implants, she’d know exactly how loud the noise was. Now, she’d just have to estimate.

  Slowly, quietly, she pushed and pulled on the metal and put a leg through the gap. She used the adjoining gluteus to hold the panel as she threaded her head and body through. Finally, she pulled her other leg through and gently let go of the metal.

  Breathe. Calm. Think, she ordered herself. That effort took about forty minutes, she estimated. If she had a functioning hippocampal chronometer, she’d know exactly how long it took. She bit back the curse that wanted to get out. How do people live like this? she wondered.

  Her mind went back to th
e marines on Harvest, her last mission. This must have been how they felt when she cleared out the rebels for them. Or how the Sector Security forces on NSI felt when she berated their marksmanship. Useless, she thought.

  Kinkade’s voice next door shook Hailey out of her spiraling bad disposition. There was another voice. He said we were the only ones here. She put her ear against the wall opposite the wall she had cut open. She could just make out the conversation.

  “Trip, this room is a dumpster compared to the room I had on the yacht.”

  “Well, all good things must come to an end, angel.”

  “Then take me home,” she demanded.

  “No can do, sugarplum. The ship is gone for a while.”

  “Don’t touch me! What do you think you’re doing?”

  “What? You’ll only shag me in a nice room?” Kinkade asked nastily. Hailey heard a slap. Then a much harder slap, followed by a thud on the floor. “You need to be a pleasant guest, like you were before. Make nice with me when I come to visit you,” he said condescendingly.

  “Trip,” the woman sobbed, “what’s going on?”

  Kinkade opened the door and ordered one of his sentries to enter the room. “Now, both of you listen carefully. A-nine, show this person your weapon.” The robot designated A-9 lifted its weapon to put it in full view of the woman on the floor. “A-nine, stand in the corner and await orders.” The robot retreated to the corner. The woman cried openly.

  “Now, pet, we’re gonna enjoy each other’s company for a while. And you’re not going to cry – unless I tell you to,” he added with a chuckle. “Get up and give me a kiss,” he ordered. Hailey took her ear away from the wall. She couldn’t listen anymore. Sadness filled her chest and spread, weakening every muscle in her body. She slid down the wall and sat, defeated, on the floor. She couldn’t help someone who was being attacked just three meters away from her.