Shock Diamonds

by E. R. Mason

  Wilson never goes anywhere without the good stuff.

  Although we still had our slave selection meeting in the morning, it did not appear we would get much sleep. People began to retire to their quarters around 1:00 A.M. That finally allowed R.J. and me to meet on the flight deck with Danica.

  “So you understand what I’m thinking then? What I have in mind?” I asked.

  “My gut feeling is that it will work,” replied R.J.

  “So his full name is Akai Naktu. You have the coordinates down there.”

  “I’ll keep the skull in my sleeper cell with the crystals. When you signal, I’ll shut myself in and try to link sitting upright on the bed. No one except the three of us should be aware that anything is happening.”

  “If it looks like anything has gone wrong, I’ll send Wilson into your cell to pull you out of it.”

  “There is a possibility they may detect the signal from your hidden transmitter when you call up here,” said R.J.

  “Yeah. Let’s keep it as short as possible. I’ll tap the transmitter and say the word 'proceed,' then tap it off immediately.”

  “Maybe a one-second transmission. I’d be surprised if they pick that up.”

  “If you do get control of Akai’s body, give me a wink so I know, okay?”

  “This is going to be a trip.”

  Danica said, “I still don’t believe in that thing, but if anything goes wrong I can leave the flight deck long enough to help.”

  “Yes, we’ll use you, but only as a last resort,” I answered. “Now that we’ve scanned the interior of Emma’s building, we need to keep an especially close eye on the long-range and orbital radar. If they figure out we’re not who we say we are, the first sign will probably be another ship showing up. If that happens, you should break orbit immediately and hide the Griffin any way you can. Then contact us whenever possible.”

  Danica twisted in her seat. “That’s an ugly little scenario. You’d better go over it again for me. What happens after tomorrow morning’s visit to the surface?”

  “If it all goes well, we finish our personnel selections, sign the contracts for the estate, and tell the Chancellor we will maintain orbit waiting for our payments of gold to arrive. Then, if everything looks okay, you will drop Wilson and me on the surface in the early morning darkness, and we will quietly attempt to find and extract Patrick’s daughter. We will then depart this place in great haste.”

  “My favorite part,” said R.J.

  “Danica, you’re a little overdue for your six. I’ll take over here and use my shift to finish memorizing the floor plans of the building.”

  “You know, this all better go well, because beginning tomorrow night you’re going to start losing your blue, Adrian,” said R.J.

  “All the more reason to make this plan work. I do not want another pill.”

  The next morning, Danica, R.J., and I carefully went over the plan to steal slave data. Afterward, I gave custom-programmed scanners to Patrick and Catherine and told them only that it was in case a special need arose.

  On the planet’s surface, the Chancellor was his magnanimous self, promising to deliver some of the completed contract documents in short order. Inside the Personnel Resource Center, we were again required to leave our scanners and com units on the lobby table. Our computer operator, Xana, the most volatile element in my plan, was waiting with the personnel selection station already up and running. She had even called up the last page from the day before. As we took our seats, she left us and went to her station.

  With Catherine slowly scrolling through the faces of slaves, and Patrick dutifully recording one now and then, I tapped the back of my ear and made the call to R.J. “Proceed.”

  In keeping with the plan, he did not acknowledge.

  Chancellor Akai had gone to his office and left the door open, exactly as he had the day before. From my position, I could see his hands on his desk, tapping at a display terminal. Three or four minutes passed and nothing changed. I began to have doubts.

  All at once, a curious thing made me pause and stare. The Chancellor’s hands had stopped moving in mid air. They were frozen there, the left hand about to point to something, the right ready to punch a key. After an excruciating thirty seconds of motionlessness, the hands withdrew from my field of vision. Seconds later, the Chancellor appeared at the door. His expression was the very same one I had grown accustomed to seeing on R.J. when he was confused or perplexed. He looked around the room, spotted us, and winked. Keeping Xana in the corner of my eye, I gave a slight nod.

  The Chancellor nodded back.

  With a slight awkwardness, he went to the lobby door and exited. He was gone no more than two or three minutes, and returned. He went to the mainframe computer door, paused for a moment, then placed his hand on the wall palm reader. Yellow lights flashed, turned green, and the door slid open.

  Xana looked up and stared, but remained in her seat.

  It took all of ten minutes. At last, the Chancellor appeared again and went directly back to the lobby. He returned moments later to his office, took his seat, and placed his hands back in the position they originally had been. There was another long pause of motionlessness, and abruptly the hands resumed the work they had been doing before the trip to the lobby.

  We continued our charade for another forty-five minutes, and were finally interrupted by the Chancellor holding several sheets of clear paper with engraved gold print on each.

  “Ready for your signature, at your convenience, sir,” he said, looking directly at me.

  I gave a gracious bow of my head, accepted the queer-looking pen from him as an added gesture of respect, and signed in gold on seven sheets. There was a great sigh of relief from the Chancellor and he scurried away back to his office.

  Our commitment to buy fully formalized and staff selection complete, we were escorted to the waiting Griffin where we conveyed our profound appreciation, paused for a few moments to give the impression we did not wish to leave, then boarded and lifted off for orbit. In our pockets, Patrick and I carried the fully loaded scanners R.J. had used to upload the data from the Personnel Resource Center mainframe computers. There was no doubt the deed had been done. The scanners read empty during descent and were now flashing "memory full." I could only hope there were no ill effects from R.J.’s secret possession of the Chancellor’s body.

  Once on orbit, we gathered around the engineering stations as Wilson and R.J. transferred the stolen data to ship’s computers.

  “I still don’t get how you got this stuff,” said Wilson.

  “Sleight of hand, you might say,” I replied.

  “Okay, but someday you got to explain the trick to me,” he replied.

  R.J. cut in. “As expected, it’s encrypted. It will take a very long time to decipher it.”

  “Maybe not. We memorized Emma’s page, so we have a Rosetta stone, so to speak.”

  “That may work if we can find the right data block,” answered R.J. “But their password system might still hang us up.”

  “You want to begin transmitting this stuff back to Earth?” asked Wilson.

  “Not yet. Don’t want to accidentally attract any unwanted attention. Let’s sit on it for now.”

  Patrick began to whine. “I should be going with you, Adrian.”

  “No, Patrick. You’re a doctor, not a soldier. You want the best chance for your daughter? Stay here.”

  He grimaced and stormed off.

  After a quick raid of the galley, Wilson and I left the others and took refuge in the aft airlock to begin staging for the morning’s extraction. We sat for a while and drank a beer, an extravagance that would require the taking of an anti-tox tablet afterward to nullify the effects. We watched all the scan data on the small airlock monitors and took note of each individual within the target building and on the grounds around it. The place was heavily manned during the day. We expected very few in the early morning hours when we would visit.

  The down-faci
ng camera views showed the area to be yet another garden of beauty. The building was pristine and colorfully decorated. The lawns around it were equally well maintained and elaborate.

  Closer analysis of the interior scans combined with monitoring of the building's communications suggested the place was actually a house of horrors. It appeared that the Labor Relations and Receiving section was there for the purpose of bringing in and processing new slaves. The bio-waste management section of the building was much smaller. Whatever kind of bio-waste they were handling was processed on the west end of the first floor. The waste products were shoveled into chutes that took them to the basement. From there, large horizontal underground tunnels carried the stuff away to destinations unknown. The basement collection area took up most of that floor. A narrow strip was sectioned off for housing of the building’s workers. Those living there had private rooms, barely the size of a walk-in closet. It was impossible to tell if the rooms were actually cells.

  We would not achieve invisibility on this mission. There just was not enough time to learn the locks and checkpoints. We would carry plastic explosive, laser cutters, and no-nonsense weaponry. The mission would need speed to take the place of invisibility. Wilson and I suited up and practiced mimicking the imaginary route we would take, stopping to pretend to burn locks or set charges, rehearsing our lucky find of the captive, then bringing her out to the pickup point. From there we went on to contingency planning, until we knew for certain what each would do under any of the many possible circumstances that might arise.

  As drop time approached, everyone on board tried too hard to appear confident and casual. I kept to business. Wilson, as always, was actually confident and casual. While the rest of the crew strapped in, he and I met in the aft airlock to load up.

  “This ship is really something else,” said Wilson. “I love the way the engineering stations are set up. R.J. and I mapped every radiation source. R.J. wrote a program that will make us a vacuum cleaner for radar. We’ll suck it up and feed it back as though nothing has been reflected off of anything. By the way, Danica will glide us down in as tight a circle as possible so there will be minimum ground coverage. The only thing anyone could pick up would be a silhouette or a little bit of wind sound. I went around and warned everyone no communications unless it’s an emergency. By god, Adrian, I love this ship. It’s a special ops dream.”

  “With you on that. Now if we can just get back to her.”

  As we dropped out of orbit, the Griffin became alarmingly silent in its death dive. In the aft airlock, the two of us became weightless, leading me to worry about the artificial gravity’s ability to adjust, and the ship’s pressurization system to react, but knowing Danica, I had to believe she had already taken those into consideration.

  Holding on to anything available, we rode out the steepness until our falling bodies were able to catch up to the falling ship. Nearing the surface, we suddenly went from zero weight to heavy, and as Danica put on the breaks, we became even too heavy to stand, crumpling to our knees against the side wall panels. I had planned to pop the airlock door open early. My timing was off. Before I could tap the big red button, the door slid open from a flight-deck command issued by Danica. The woman is scary smart.

  We pulled ourselves to the open door and stared out into the night as we continued down. It was 04:00 A.M. XiTau time, but there were lights everywhere. On the well-lit roadways, no traffic at all was visible, nor did we see any signs of life in this section of the government facilities.

  She stopped the Griffin so abruptly it almost felt like we had hit the ground. Wilson and I rubbed shoulders jumping the eight feet to the dark ground. We fell and rolled, and lay on our backs for a moment watching the Griffin shoot back up into darkness, wondering how Danica could have cut it so close. Wilson signaled me toward the nearest cover, well-trimmed hedges a few feet away.

  The drop seemed to have been perfect. We were near the rear of the target building. When wearing blackface and carrying weapons, rear doors are generally more desirable. I looked down at my suit. It was not only dark green, it had the same design as the hedge. I glanced at Wilson. He also looked like an untrimmed section of it.

  Our plan was to decode the door lock. As luck would have it, we did not have to. An elderly female in a gray janitorial outfit came galumphing out the door pulling a small cart with an overflowing collapsible waste container. She was not human but she was humanoid. There were so many contour lines in her face, it would have been impossible to guess her age except for the familiar hunched-over, labored movements she made. Her dark eyes were slightly large and slanted upward. The crown of her head was pointed, with additional pronounced crowns on either side of her skull. Her earlobes were profoundly wide with the same type of contour lines. She had a flat mouth, heart-shaped upper lip, and a contoured nose that ended in a point. Her four long fingers were webbed.

  She labored to dump trash into a large tube sticking out of the ground by the door, then paused to catch her breath. She lumbered back to the door, entered a key code, then braced the door open with one oversized foot, jockeying around to get the cart back inside. As it swung closed behind her, Wilson sprinted the ten yards across the lawn, caught it, and held it so that it looked closed. He scanned side to side, then motioned me all clear.

  I crossed over and joined him, and just as we were about to make entry, the sound of the com squelching on gave cause for a momentary spike of fear. It was not to be used except in emergency.

  There was panic in Danica’s voice. “Adrian, large spacecraft approaching on long-range radar. Too late to jump. Gonna hide on the other side of the planet. Danica out.”

  I exhaled in exasperation and shook my head. Wilson nodded in agreement and motioned to the door. We slipped inside.

  There was a foul-smelling hallway, tiled from floor to ceiling with dirty brown matchbook-sized tiles. The sound of janitor lady’s rickety cart creaking along somewhere ahead. The smell was so rancid it made you want to spit. The gritty, shady hallway was a perfect contrast to the beauty of the building and grounds outside.

  Wilson motioned us forward. We took a left at the first intersection, entering another hallway so far-reaching you could not see its end for the shadows. There were occasional dull echoes from forward and behind.

  As expected, we came to a wide four-way intersection. A left would take us to the elevators and staircase. Wilson edged cautiously to the corner, his back against the wall. He slowly leaned forward to take a look but jerked back at the sound of janitor lady’s cart suddenly starting up and heading our way. The nearest door was next to me. Wilson joined in and we pushed through just in time to avoid being seen.

  We found ourselves in an alien restroom. On one side, a long counter with running water. Opposite it, four open toilets in a row, no booths. The first may have been for humanoids. It was a narrow rectangular seat. Beside it, four feet away, the next was a bowl attached directly to the floor with a chrome shaft rising out of its center, ending in a queer-looking bulb shape. Beyond that, the next one was a flexible hose sticking up out of the floor with a suction cup atop it, and finally, a barrel-shaped thing suspended above the floor with a door in its side.

  Wilson stood by the door listening. He stared at me with his head cocked and his ears tuned to the hallway. He had a look that said, “She can’t be coming in here.”

  But she was.

  We heard the cart bang against the door. I was the lucky one. I made it to a corner at the back of the room and in final desperation pulled my hood over my face and swung my weapon behind me. I became the dirty tiles on the wall. Wilson tried but only made it as far as the first toilet. He stepped behind it, stiffened against the wall, and pulled down his hood. From my vantage point, he made quite a good imitation of tiles, but he was no more than four feet behind the humanoid toilet.

  In she came, drearily pulling her cart along. She did not bother to look up, stopped at the waste bin in the wall by the door, and emptied it into her
s. Then, to both our horrors, she left her cart, went to the toilet in front of Wilson, and began removing clothes. To Wilson’s great dismay, she adjusted herself on the toilet and stared straight ahead with the thousand-mile gaze. A series of loud booms began that sounded like a car backfiring. I could not see Wilson’s face, but I could tell it was turned away, probably with an expression of utter indignation.

  Janitor lady finished up, dressed, and slowly ambled out of the restroom, banging her cart as she went, never bothering to look up at all. From my position, the room’s bouquet had been significantly degraded. I was surprised Wilson was still standing.

  We departed the bathroom with haste, pulling our weapons forward as we went, preferring a fire fight to remaining in that room a moment longer. The hallway was again empty, except for the distant clanking of janitor lady’s cart heading away.

  Back at the main intersection, we managed to get a look around the corner and spotted the service elevator and a heavy metal door nearby. In all four directions, the place was desolate and eerie, an endless blanket of tiled walls. We crouched and hurried to the door nearest the elevator, but by the time we reached it, it felt like we were hiding from nothing. There was not a sound to be heard or a creature to be seen. The rancid smell in the air persisted.

  The black, iron-wrought stairs beyond the heavy door were unusual. Instead of a standard stairwell, these wound down into darkness. They rang like a giant tuning fork when you stepped the wrong way. Like everywhere else, the stairwell was devoid of the feeling of life. At the bottom, we met our first resident, something very much like a rat, dirty dark fur, no visible legs, long oily tail, pointed face with spiked teeth. It was a large rat, and it did not like us. It scurried away into the shadows. We pushed through the dark gray metal door at the bottom and into a new maze of dirty tiled corridors.