The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

  “Something else is going on here,” I said. “It’s not adding up.”

  “I agree,” Forno said. “Everything that’s happened has been done to lead away from the real truth. Plenko’s implicated. The Consortium is implicated. The NIO is implicated, the Kenn, maybe even the Memors, the MSA—”

  I looked up at Forno. “We can’t trust anyone in NIO. Any one of them could be … altered. Like Tim Jim.”

  “It’s the same reason I can’t trust anyone on my end, in the Kenn. Crowell, they could be anywhere. Anyone.”

  “Could they have President Nguyen?”

  Forno shrugged. “Maybe. Can’t know for sure. What about Plenko? You were on the Movement commission.”

  “He was a law-abiding citizen, and even ran for office on Ribon. Intelligent. DNA-lock expert. Contracting with big business and big government. His whole Movement is probably a by-product of this larger conspiracy.”

  Whatever was going on, it had reached a crisis point. New Venasaille’s “soldiers” might enter the fray soon.

  I looked again at the cot. The man still had not moved. “What happens if these victims don’t get the procedure?”

  Forno shook his head. “If we managed to free some of these people? The extreme RuBy addiction, the sudden loss of the drug—it would kill anyone human or Memor. Helks might survive.”

  So who was really behind everything? Who had the power, who had the desire, to do something on such a large, destructive scale? I still couldn’t buy the Consortium. I stared hard at the man on the cot, wondering about his fate.

  Forno got up from his sitting position and crouched. “What do you think?”

  “The Consortium is the logical choice if we’re talking about new science, but I don’t believe they have the motive.”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

  “Then all we have to do is figure out who does. Who would create this in order to do serious harm on a galactic scale?”

  I waited for Forno to say “no clue,” but he just stared at the cot.

  The real Plenko could be alive, but deep down I thought it unlikely. Which other “originals” besides Plenko were out there? “Plenko had nothing to do with the Conduit disaster?”

  Forno looked a bit surprised. “No, of course not. Why would he sabotage the very thing that made him? Experts who’ve looked at the crash vid now say it was a servo-robot that reprogrammed the ship midflight. The damage to the robot was extensive, but they might still find evidence of who might have tampered with it. But it’ll be covered up by the NIO, or Temonus Authority if they’re compromised as well.”

  “So someone else knows about the Conduit’s true purpose? Tried to destroy it?” At a high cost, I thought, thinking of the civilians killed, the damage done to East City.

  “No clue.”

  “And after all that, the Conduit’s still working, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t know that either. It doesn’t seem possible, with the current state of the tower, but I’ve not been able to get close. It could be working well enough, which is why you need to find and warn your partner.”

  “Unless it’s too late.”

  Forno paused a moment. “Yes. It would be better to completely take out that tower.”

  “If I could trust the NIO, trust anyone, it would be as simple as calling and getting an Ark to Temonus to finish the job.”

  Barely audible, I heard the unmistakable whine of a reverse thruster. Some kind of ship was making its way to the area. The wind had picked up a little too, the tent ruffling a bit. The flapping of the tent canvas reminded me of sailboats in the breeze during lazy days as a teenager at the Hammond Marina on Flathead Lake. But here, in this tent city of pain and death, the snaps and pops sounded like distant gunshots.

  “We’d better go,” Forno said.

  I stood. Took one last look at the man on the cot. “There’s nothing we can do for him? For any of them?”

  Forno shrugged. “Some of them, maybe, if they’re not too far along.”

  “All right,” I said, taking one last look around the tent. I picked up a handful of red squares and slipped the RuBy into my pants pocket. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Forno poked his head out the tent door for a moment, then said, “C’mon” as he disappeared outside. I followed right behind him, keeping up. It was late afternoon. The man and woman who’d been standing in the aisle of tents had gone. We backtracked around the tent and headed up the small hill. A cold wind now blew steadily, spring’s foothold in the last gasps of winter weakening. I couldn’t wait to get back to the shelter of the ship.

  Shouts from below interrupted my thoughts. Forno looked back an instant before I did, then said, “Trouble.”

  About two dozen people, presumably all refugees who weren’t totally flipped out on RuBy, had left the perimeter of New Venasaille, in pursuit, flanked by two armed and uniformed Helk guards. They were too far away to tell what clan they were.

  “Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse,” Forno called over his shoulder.

  “We’ve got enough distance on them!” I yelled, and we ran faster, scrambling up the icy slope, no longer worried about stealth. I had my blaster, and Forno had his stunner, but there wasn’t any reason to open fire yet. I had my finger caps, fully charged, thanks to Forno, but those only worked in close proximity. Once we made it over the top of the rise, we no longer saw them, but I didn’t believe for a second that they’d stopped following.

  We entered the trees, heading for the clearing where we’d left Forno’s flier. I glanced back again before the trees enveloped us, and they still hadn’t crested the little hill. At least the flier had a quick start-up sequence; I felt confident we could at least get off the ground before the pursuit reached us. After that, I had no idea. Did they have any anti-aircraft weapons? Something other than the datascreen to warn off uninvited guests? None had been in evidence on our arrival.

  The trees thinned as we neared the clearing.

  “We’ll make it!” Forno yelled.

  I took a deep breath as I pushed myself, inching closer to Forno. Even without my workouts lately, I was in good shape, and the run felt almost exhilarating. We burst out into the clearing. Once we got out of there, we just had to figure out who we were really dealing with, find them, and head off their invasion somehow. Easy.

  Forno had stopped dead in his tracks. I nearly ran into him.

  “We did in fact park here, right?” he said.

  “What?” I looked around his body, which had been blocking my view.

  The flier was gone.

  “That,” Forno said, his voice distant, “is bad.”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” I said, my eyes automatically scanning the clearing for a sign of the missing flier. My own voice cracked a little. Heart pounding, I felt the blood drain from my head as I stared in disbelief at the empty clearing. No way out of here.

  The mob from the tent city came into the clearing behind us, and we turned and froze. They stopped at the tree line, and the Helks, unflinching, looking quite huge next to the refugees, aimed their stunners at us. I guessed they were Second Clan. No time to make a run for it, no chance to get to the far side and try and lose them somewhere in the trees.

  “Now it’s my turn to say it,” Forno said, looking at me. I raised my eyebrows, then he shook his head and said, “Helk snot.”

  I didn’t even smile. “What was it you said earlier about things not getting any worse?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he confessed.

  Someone grunted behind us, then began to laugh. A woman’s laugh, mocking and caustic. “It just got worse,” she said, and the air went out of me. I felt like a total fool, because I knew right away who it was.

  I turned around slowly, as did Forno, and I stared hard into the smug, self-assured face of Jennifer Lisle. She had come out of the trees on the other side and now stood there, her defensive posture absolutely textbook perfect.

&nb
sp; Her NIO-issue blaster aimed at my head.

  Twenty

  Dorie Senall seemed on the verge of bursting into tears. Could he blame her? Brindos would have found his own death pretty hard to take. He felt guilty thinking it, but he was glad someone else had to process this heavy shit for a change.

  Then again, maybe he had died, thinking again about his Helk suit.

  Still leaning against the brick wall, he relaxed in the warmth of the second dose of RuBy starting to take hold, even as Dorie struggled with the news about her fall from her balcony in Venasaille. She closed her eyes, fighting the emotions, then he closed his, welcoming the RuBy relief. None of them spoke for a while, and during the silence Brindos’s memories solidified. Mentally, he felt like himself again. When he opened his eyes and looked back at Dorie, her eyes were already open, and a new hardness had set in them, as if she had passed off her death as a momentary loss, something she’d practiced plenty of times. Now that she’d dealt with it, she was ready to move on.

  But he doubted it would be that easy.

  “It happened to me and I didn’t even know it,” she said, almost whispering.

  And yet Brindos was sure she must have wondered. Her Plenko had vanished, she had lost time, woke up here in Midwest City, and now the Terl Plenko who was not her Plenko had appeared to her.…

  Then Brindos showed up: Brindos/Plenko.

  He couldn’t imagine how anyone could have accomplished such a thing, but the Dorie who fell to her death on Ribon had been a double.

  “That time before I woke up here,” she said. “That’s when it happened.”

  “You were … copied.”

  “And you are a copy, Mr. Brindos,” she said.

  “But not a copy. I’m still Brindos inside, thanks to you.” Should he tell her he was NIO? She had a link to Plenko and the Movement. One Dorie was dead, but this one still dealt regularly with Plenko and the other Helks.

  “Don’t thank me yet. They’re still planning on using you somehow.” Dorie lowered her eyes. “As I’m still being used.”

  “This invasion you talked about.”

  She nodded. “A lot of people are being changed. Altered. Even the Plenko who hangs around here is being used.”

  “Used by whom?”

  Dorie shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  She didn’t know, he didn’t know, and he wondered where Crowell was, and if he knew. If this was the kind of trouble Brindos had managed to get himself into, what sort of craziness had Crowell found on his end? Probably dealing with his own doubles. Brindos had no way of knowing, because his code card had disappeared after the run-in with Tom Knox, before meeting Plenko and Joseph. Joseph. When Joseph had done his thing—

  Fingers glowing white.

  Joseph was not human. How could he be? It couldn’t have been some parlor trick. He wasn’t a Helk. He wasn’t Memor. So who was he? What was he?

  Brindos leaned forward, away from the wall and closer to Dorie’s penetrating dark eyes. He decided he’d tell her about the NIO and let whatever happened happen. The NIO he once knew didn’t matter much right now anyway. They were part of the problem. “Dorie, I was contracting for the NIO before all this happened.”

  She nodded. “I figured it had to be something like that.”

  He relaxed a little, knowing she had intuited some of it already. “Will you help me? I’ve got no other way to go here.”

  “Yes, of course. I was willing to help you even before I knew who you were.”

  Right to the point then. “Do you know how the copying is being done?”

  “Something to do with the Conduit.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “I don’t quite know. From what I’ve gleaned, they have a scan or a pattern of Plenko, and they use it to create copies of him out of other people—like you.”

  “And they have a scan of you, and they made a copy of you.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you know anyone or have you seen anyone around here who calls himself Joseph? Or Joe? I was here with him. We ate, and Tom Knox was our waiter.” He winced at the memory. “Or so I think. Knox attacked me outside in the back alley. Did a hell of a number on me.”

  Dorie was silent for a time. Then she shook her head. “I don’t recognize the name.”

  He closed his eyes again. Thoughts were still catching up to his Brindos self. The RuBy kept the pain manageable, but didn’t do him much good when trying to think cogently.

  Okay, so after his run-in with Tom Knox, aka Jordan Dak the waiter, he woke up at the Orion Hotel with eighteen hours of his life missing, perhaps in the same way Dorie had lost time and ended up in Midwest City.

  So had he been scanned then? Prepared for the process somehow? Maybe. But now he was a copy of Plenko, and that happened after Joseph knocked him out. After the Conduit disaster. That meant the device still worked, even with the tower down. He didn’t even want to think about how that was possible, considering the differences in their sizes. Crowell had the better head for science, but he doubted even he could figure this one out.

  Most likely Tom Knox was a copy of Jordan Dak. Somehow. It was Dak who took their orders that night. Tom Knox happened to be at the Restaurant, in the so-called authentic Helk area, or this very storeroom, and had listened in somehow and heard his name. Or, more likely, considering what happened to Brindos later, he had been waiting for him. Knocked him unconscious in the alley and Jordan Dak kept waiting his tables, oblivious. Dak came out to the alley ten minutes after Knox and found Brindos unconscious. Concern for his own safety could have made Dak pull a knife. Brindos must have woken and saw Dak/Knox with the knife and panicked, thinking Knox was going to finish the job. Used his finger caps in order to get the jump on him, then used Dak’s own knife to kill him. Joseph said he’d seen Brindos attack and kill the waiter. That was possible, but he didn’t remember any of it, including their escape from the alley and the subsequent hours at the hotel.

  But the timing: the body wasn’t discovered until midnight.

  Tom Knox must have gone back to wait on Dak’s tables for an hour. Long enough to allow Joseph to do what he needed to do to get them back to the hotel. He’d concocted a whale of a story when he asked what happened.

  He rubbed his temples, opened his eyes.

  Dorie stared, lines creasing her forehead. “You doing okay, Mr. Brindos?”

  Managing a smile, he nodded, then sat down again. “So you don’t recognize the name Joseph.”

  “No. Is he someone the NIO wants?”

  “The NIO may want him, or they may already know about him.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Tall skinny man. Older, maybe in his sixties, early seventies. I don’t know his last name, but he put me out cold somehow. Plenko was there, and he called Joseph his One. Then Joseph did something with his fingers. Something … alien.”

  “Alien?” she repeated, her voice taking on a tone of disbelief. Then her face brightened. “Wait. I don’t know if it’s him or not, but on several occasions I’ve seen an older gentleman with silver hair talking to Terl here, in the authentic portion. A tall man, quite thin, shabby clothes.”

  Brindos perked up a little, suddenly hopeful. He had a lead on Joseph. “That sounds like him.”

  “I don’t know anything about him. Just thought maybe he was a restaurant supplier or something.”

  “When I met him, he was a concierge at the Orion Hotel.”

  “That’s a nice place,” she said.

  “I have to go back there.”

  “You can’t.”

  “If he’s still there, if I figure out who he really is—”

  “He could be a copy.”

  He blinked at her.

  “Or,” she said, “the person who put you out could be a copy, and the Orion concierge could be the original.”

  Had Brindos in fact been dealing with two different Josephs all this time? If, as Dorie had suggested, there was an original and a cop
y, he could’ve talked open-air baseball with Joseph one day, and found himself knocked senseless by a different Joseph another day.

  “But,” he said, “if he’s alien…”

  “He looked human, right? He could have copied himself to blend in.” She shook her head. “What are we talking about here? Am I actually believing you when you say new, unknown aliens are trying to take over the Union? I’m not even high on RuBy anymore.” She managed a small smile.

  “You’re the one who mentioned invasion.”

  “I just didn’t think it would be … aliens.”

  “I have to find out,” Brindos insisted. “The Orion is the only place I know where to look.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I must.”

  “Look who you are! You’re not Alan Brindos on the outside. Terl Plenko can’t just waltz into a posh hotel in the middle of Midwest City! There’s a price on your head.”

  He stood quickly, startling Dorie. She leaned back, even though he circled right, hand on his smooth forehead, thinking. Difficult, though, with the RuBy haze muddling his brain.

  She was right, of course. He wouldn’t have a chance getting to the Orion Hotel. He couldn’t walk up to the main lobby and ask for Joseph.

  But Dorie could.

  He stopped pacing, having made a complete circle, and stared down at her, the idea already buzzing.

  It must have showed in his eyes, because Dorie shook her head emphatically. “No, no, I can’t. They watch me like—there’s no way Terl’s men will let me out of the Helk district.”

  “There must be a way,” he coaxed.

  “They escort me from The Restaurant to the house two blocks away, and back again for my work shifts.”

  “I’ll help you get past them.”

  Dorie smirked. “How are you going to do that?”

  “Just going to do a little of what you do. Play act. If you can convince them that I’m your husband, I can convince them, as their boss, to do something that will keep them out of the way.”

  “Such as?”

  “The Helks who brought me in here said I’d been gone a week?”

  “Yeah, around there.”