by B. V. Larson
“Uh-huh,” I said, standing squarely between him and the open door of the tram.
“Looks like you hurt yourself,” he said, noting the way I held my burned arm.
“Something’s wrong with my tapper,” I said, “now Dad, if I could just—”
“But if your tapper isn’t working, how did Della call you?”
He had me there. I was running out of lies.
“Uh…” I said.
Then he caught sight of the body slumped over in the backseat. He lowered his voice.
“Is that Della?” he asked. “I get it…”
“Sure… she’s tired out.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “You never quit, do you boy?”
“I try not to, sir.”
“Well, okay… Don’t ding it up or fill it with hamburger wrappers this time, okay?”
“You got it, Dad. It’ll be better than new when I get home again.”
Shaking his head with the air of a man who’d heard such promises before—because he had—he turned and headed back toward the house.
I climbed into the tram and tore out of there before anyone investigated further. I saw the lights go on all over the house as I reached the corner. My mom was probably buzzing my busted tapper with a thousand queries. Before she could think to bomb the com-box on the tram, I shut that off, too.
But the part about my tapper being dead was true. It had been burned to scrap. I was relatively free and off the grid.
Humming to myself, I took the tram to the puff-crete expressway, put it into automatic, and laid back to take a nap.
The dead man in the seat behind me didn’t bother me a bit. Sure, he stank a little. All the dead do. But that was a smell I was well familiar with.
I recalled something they’d taught us in our early legion history classes. An ancient Roman by the name of Alus Vitellus had once said: “A dead enemy always smells good.”
Today, I had to agree with old Alus.
-7-
When I woke up, I took stock of my situation. I had Claver’s body, and I had a squid jump-suit. The question was, how could I parlay these two items of dubious value into the most points possible with Central?
Normally, I’d have taken the whole mess directly to Nagata. He was my patron saint among the brass. He was also on the very short list of officers who’d believed in me enough to promote me.
But Nagata had apparently been permed. That fact made things tricky from my perspective. I wasn’t sure who was left that I could trust.
Sure, I knew Turov and Winslade pretty well, and they had rank. But those two were snakes on the best of days.
No, I didn’t trust any officers—not even Graves. The problem with Graves was he was too straight of an officer. He’d probably turn me over to Central, playing it by the book, and possibly get me screwed in an entirely new way in the process.
In the end, I fell back on my enlisted buddies from Legion Varus. They weren’t exactly cub scouts, but they knew me, and we’d all trusted one another with our lives in the past.
With a wince, I contacted Carlos from a public com-box in Greenville. I’d decided not to use the tram’s com-box because that would be too easy to trace.
“Whatever you’re selling, I don’t fucking want any of it,” he announced when he finally answered.
“Carlos? I need help.”
“Who is this?” he demanded.
“Don’t screw with me. I’m calling in a favor.”
He was quiet for a second.
“You don’t have any of those left,” he said at last. “In fact, you couldn’t buy one with your last credit coin.”
Carlos had never been easy to deal with, but he always came through in the end. You just had to know how to get his mind focused on what you wanted.
“I’ve got something new,” I said. “Something alien.”
“Alien? Did you screw a squid chick?”
“That’s a pretty close guess,” I said, “but I’m talking about new technology. Something that’s never been seen on Earth before.”
He paused again.
“You’re in Mid-Atlantic Sector. What the hell are you doing there?”
He’d traced me already. That made me grimace. If people had set up alarms on the net for any contacts I made, they were probably scrambling to this spot right now.
“I don’t have much time. Are you interested or not?”
“I notice you’re not pulling rank. You’re just asking. That means this is as illegal as shit.”
“Are you in?” I demanded.
“Promise I get to die? Lots of times?”
“Probably,” I admitted.
“You tease… okay, I’m in. Where?”
“Central City. Our favorite bar. Give me ten hours to get there.”
The connection closed. He’d shut it down without saying goodbye, which was probably a wise decision.
I drove for another three hours before I made similar calls. The gang all agreed to come meet me. None of them seemed really happy about coming, but they were game. They were always game.
When you live and die with a group of people over and over again, you form a tight bond that’s difficult to describe. I mean, hell, my own momma had yet to watch me die, and she’d only presided over my birth once. These people had done both a dozen times each.
Della was the center of my attention, mostly because Kivi and Carlos were an item. She was long of leg and easy on the eyes. I could feel myself being drawn to her, and we’d had a number of flings before. Unfortunately, our get-togethers didn’t always end on a happy note.
The key member of the crowd, the one I really wanted to see the most, was Natasha. She showed up late, and the rest of us were a little drunk by then. I’d spilled credits on the bar tab, and they hadn’t been shy about taking me up on my generosity.
“Adjunct McGill?”
I spun around and saw Natasha walking up to me. She ignored the greetings of the others. She eyed me seriously.
She had a soft-spoken manner, but she was the smart one in our group. Her cheeks were perfectly shaped, and she had eyes that disappeared when she smiled.
Sadly, she wasn’t smiling now.
“Hello girl,” I said. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“Are those bars on your shoulders real?” she asked.
“All gold and nanites, love,” I said.
“Don’t call me that. Why did you call in your chip? To get us drunk and celebrate your promotion?”
“Nope, I’ve really got something, just like I said.”
The group had quieted somewhat, and they scooted close to listen in. The team was small: just Della, Kivi, Carlos, and Natasha. All the people I trusted most in the world when it came right down to it.
I’d thought about calling Harris, but passed. He was still upset that I’d been promoted over him. Seeing me make adjunct had been his greatest fear, I think, since our first campaign together on Steel World.
Natasha looked over the group. She was the smartest person in the bar, and we all knew it. I needed her if my plan was to have a chance. I think everyone else knew that, too.
“Okay…” she said. “I’m here, so I might as well find out why.”
She sat down. I ordered her a booze and tonic, and we huddled up even tighter.
As I laid out my story, they were amused at first. But slowly, the seriousness of the situation began to sink in.
“I knew it!” Carlos proclaimed. “I knew the second I saw Central on fire that James McGill had to be involved somehow. I said that, didn’t I babe?”
He said this last to Kivi, who nodded. Kivi and Carlos had been romantically involved on-and-off again over the last year or two. They were both shorter than average, but Kivi was voluptuous while Carlos was kind of chunky. If I had to guess, I’d say she was thinking about dumping with him again.
“I was just a victim of circumstance,” I explained.
Della rolled her eyes. The others looked bem
used or disgusted, as was per their personalities.
“But it’s true,” I said. “I just wandered into Nagata’s office and caught Claver red-handed.”
“There’s no way I’m buying such an obvious line of bullshit McGill,” Carlos said.
I was starting to get angry, but Natasha put her hand over mine.
“Think about it,” she said. “Who sent you in to meet Nagata at that moment?”
“Uh…” I said, not wanting to say Turov’s name. Natasha was jealous of Galina Turov. She was a demon as far as all these people were concerned.
Natasha caught on. Her hand leapt up off of mine like I’d burned it.
“Turov?” she hissed out the name. “You’ve been seeing that witch again?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Yeah right, McGill,” Carlos hooted.
He was the only one that seemed to think this was all funny. The three women looked pissed off. That might have had something to do with the fact I’d been romantically involved with all of them at one point or another.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just listen to the facts. I walked in there to talk to Nagata. He and I have had… discussions, recently. He’s the one who personally gave me the gold bars to make me an adjunct. I counted him among the few people in the world I could trust. But when I got to his office, he was dead, and Claver was searching the place.”
Natasha nodded slowly.
“Okay,” she said, “so Turov sent you in there to catch Claver. That’s what you’re claiming. Let’s assume you’re right.”
Of course, that wasn’t what I was saying at all. But now that I thought about it, it did make a certain kind of sense. The timing did seem oddly precise, after all.
“So,” Carlos said, leaning in, “Claver was obviously looking for something he thought Nagata had. Maybe he found it, maybe he didn’t. Later on though, another party came looking for the same thing.”
“The squid commando, right,” I said.
“Just one agent?” Kivi asked. “Why wouldn’t the cephalopods send an army?”
Natasha answered that one. “Maybe they only have a few of these suits. Or maybe it takes a lot of power to generate the transportation effect.”
“Any theories on how they might be doing that, by the way?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Entanglement theory? A one-man Alcubierre drive system? I don’t know. I’d have to see one of these units.”
My eyes must have shifted. Della caught that.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What?” Carlos demanded.
“He’s got one,” she said. “That’s it, isn’t it James? You’ve got one of these alien jump-suits.”
My eyes ran over the group. “Yeah. It’s in the tram outside. Keep it down.”
“Holy testicles!” Carlos exclaimed.
Natasha’s eyes were alight. Her hand, which had leapt from mine like I’d bitten her a few minutes before, slipped back to touch me again.
“I want to see it,” she whispered hotly.
I smiled. I had them. I had them all. They were hooked.
The best part was I hadn’t even told them about Claver’s body yet.
We couldn’t very well reveal our discovery in a bar or a parking lot. Della lived close to Central, so we went to her place.
The group had traveled using public transport to make it harder to be traced. I was the only one with a private vehicle on hand.
We piled in, and the complaints began. The girls were upset about having to cram into the back with Claver’s body. As experienced legionnaires, they were hardly squeamish, but they could still get disgusted.
“He doesn’t smell right,” Della complained. “Did you burn his flesh?”
“A little,” I admitted.
“I thought you said you killed him with a machete,” Carlos pointed out.
“That’s right, but I was still pissed off after that. I beamed him in the throat to be sure.”
“Have you got his pistol?”
I reached under my seat and handed it over.
“Hmm,” Carlos said. “This is illegal.”
“So sue me.”
“I mean it’s unregistered, non-standard, and you don’t have the right license to possess this weapon on Earth.”
“It’s probably a squid weapon. You calling the cops, Carlos?”
“I’ll let you off with a warning this time.”
When we reached Della’s place, we were immediately disappointed.
Her apartment was on the fourth floor. Instead of taking the elevator, she insisted we climb the fire escape. She ran up the ladder like a monkey, and after admiring the view for a second, I sighed and followed her, hauling the corpse with me.
The alleyway where we’d parked had the look of a place that had seen more than one murder before. We covered Claver with a tarp from the little trunk anyway and grunted our way steeply up to the fourth floor.
“No elevator?” Carlos complained as he stepped into the window. “What century is this?”
“There’s an elevator,” Della said, “but it has cameras. There are no cameras on the fire escape.”
“Oh yeah…right.”
When we’d gathered in Della’s starkly furnished place, we examined the suit. Carlos was the bio, so he was given the job of removing Claver from the suit and examining him. His lip stayed slightly curled during the exam, but he did his job.
“He looks human enough. The squids didn’t do anything especially weird to him. According to my med kit he’s been breathing off-world air, but that’s hardly a surprise.”
“This suit was definitely constructed for a cephalopod,” Natasha said, her eyes shining. “The fabric used matches their known materials, as well as the anatomical formation. There’s a power unit, a control box and some instrumentation. It’s kind of simple, for what it does.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I thought. It doesn’t seem possible that a thing like this could transport itself around the cosmos.”
“Maybe there’s, like, a squid fortress right under Central,” suggested Carlos. “And maybe they’re not really coming from their home planet. Maybe they’re just popping in from a short distance away and attacking us that way.”
“That’s actually not a bad theory,” I said.
Carlos beamed. He rarely got compliments of any kind, so he had to make the most of it when he did get one.
We fooled around with the suit for several minutes, taking readings, photos and making observations. Della and I stayed quiet throughout most of this time, as the others had more training in bio science and tech than we did.
But along about two hours into the investigation, something happened that changed everything.
“What the hell…?” demanded Carlos. “You touched it, didn’t you?”
He pointed at me, accusing me of something.
“Touched what?”
“That button—dial—whatever. You—”
He trailed off, as the suit began to shimmer. The room darkened, and my vision blurred. I knew all too well what that meant.
“Get away from it!” I shouted.
But I was too late.
Natasha had always been fascinated with tech. She’d been in trouble for creating artificial life since college, and there’d never been a toy made by an alien intellect she didn’t want to dismantle and play with.
Unsurprisingly, she was the last one to remove her hands from the surface of the suit. She wavered when the effect reached its zenith, like everything around us.
When the blurring effect ended the suit was gone… and so was Natasha.
-8-
After we got over our initial shock, we crept closer to the spot—and stared. We must have looked like a pack of monkeys trying to figure out a mouse trap.
“Poor Natasha…why’d it have to be her?” Kivi asked.
“Why her?” Carlos demanded. “Because she had her hands into those sleeves a meter deep. She’s always be
en too curious for her own good.”
“You dick,” Kivi said. “She’s been permed, and you’re making jokes?”
“Permed?” Carlos asked.
I glanced at both of them and slowly nodded.
“Yeah,” I said. “Kivi’s probably right. Natasha might well be permed. If I can’t find a way to get her back, that is.”
“Why?” Carlos demanded. “They’ve got the data core working again. We’ll just tell them she was vaporized by an experiment gone bad. They’ll pop her right back out of a revival machine by morning.”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so. We’ve got no body. If we show them the vids and sensor data on this suit, they’ll know she’s been transported somewhere else. No body, no revive. You know the rules.”
“That’s bullshit…” he muttered weakly.
“We have to get out of here,” Kivi said. “This place is no longer safe.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The enemy will have this apartment zeroed soon if they don’t already. I’m sure they must be able to tell where the suit came from. They’ll trace it back to this place.”
“What enemy?” I asked.
“James,” she said, “you don’t think this suit is a secret? You don’t think whoever made it will try to come here and make sure we keep quiet?”
“You want to bail out of here now?” Carlos asked Kivi. “What if Natasha comes back? What if she figures out how to get the suit to transport her home again? She might need our help.”
“I’ll stay,” Della said. “I’ll watch the place discreetly. If she returns—or something else does—I’ll contact you.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Okay, I think we have no choice now. We have to take this to Graves at least. It’s gone beyond anything we can handle.”
“Graves will screw us,” Carlos said.
“Yeah, probably. But that’s the only chance we have of getting Natasha back.”
The group grumbled, but we loaded the newly unencumbered corpse of Claver back into his tarp and headed down the fire escape. After sort of forcing Claver to fold in half, we found he now fit neatly into the tiny trunk of my folk’s tram. Carlos helped me lean on the lid until it latched, and we piled into the seats. Della stayed behind.