The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

  Yes, more mortaline. The problem was getting to it.

  “Not true?” Dorie asked, staring.

  Brindos came out of his reverie. “I’m not sure if I even have enough life in me left to do this, but we definitely need a ship now. I know where there’s a stockpile of mortaline. On Ribon.”

  “Ribon,” Melok said. “You’re kidding, right? The planet destroyed by its moon?”

  “Not destroyed, of course, but mostly uninhabitable.” The constant pain ratcheted up a notch and made Brindos second-guess his own knowledge. “There’s a DNA-secured vault in Venasaille, near Ribon Provincial, and currently it holds the last mortaline mined from Coral. It’s valuable, like gold.”

  “Wait,” Joseph said. “Then why haven’t the aliens, bad guys, Plenkos—whomever—taken this metal from the vault already? I mean, if it’s there—”

  “I doubt they know where it is. It’s underground. Impenetrable, made of steel-flex several feet thick. The Big Bang wouldn’t open it. A failsafe lock was installed within the last year,” Brindos said. “DNA coding, of course, and a special locking mechanism only workable under the right conditions, and with the right hardware to boot it.”

  “Who did the coding?” Joseph asked.

  “Someone on Ribon. Someone contracted with the NIO to do the work.”

  Brindos heard Dorie’s indrawn breath of surprise. “Dear God. The key.”

  “They want the key to the vault,” Brindos said, nodding. He was immediately sorry, because all the loose things in his brain spun around and seemed to impale every square inch of his head.

  Knees weakened, he put his hands on his thighs to keep from falling to the floor.

  “Alan,” Dorie whispered.

  He waved a hand at her. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Alan, I’m out of RuBy.”

  As a person fighting an alien-induced pain, Brindos did not like this news one bit.

  Still, he imagined his Helk physiology was helping out a little. He couldn’t imagine trying to combat all this in his human body.

  “Melok,” he said, “we need to get on a press shuttle, and you need to help us.”

  Melok shook his head. “You can understand why I don’t like that idea much.”

  Brindos said, “Think about Stickman.” Brindos paused for dramatic effect and grinned, making Melok sit up slightly in his chair. “Think of the story you could tell. You’d have a hell of an ending, and we could give you some first-hand information.”

  Melok put his elbows on his knees, then rubbed his face with his hands.

  “What do you say?” Brindos asked. “Is it possible? Can you get us on a press shuttle?”

  “I don’t know. I was fired—”

  “Do you have your credentials?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of meaning you have them, or sort of meaning you could wing it?”

  “Wing it with what I’ve got. Cal Gaz didn’t get everything back yet.” He stood slowly, keeping a hand on the arm of the chair, as if to steady himself from his uncertainty. “I don’t see how you’re going to do any good, even if you can get to Ribon. Even as a Helk. Even as Plenko, how can you save the Union?”

  “We can work that out if we get that far. But we don’t get that far if we don’t get on that shuttle, and as a Helk, I’m not getting on it without some help.”

  Melok shook his head. “You have to have more of a plan than that.”

  “The press shuttle to Solan Station.”

  “And from Solan?”

  “I was thinking about taking the press shuttle through the slot.”

  Melok blanched, eyes widening.

  Brindos noticed Melok’s fear. “It’s been done, and you know it. Most off-world reporters have to have some jump slot training.”

  “It’s not that I don’t know how. But the shuttle isn’t equipped with all the failsafes. It would be like taking a fishing boat across the ocean.”

  “No choice,” he said, “unless you know someone with a cruiser we could borrow that’s docked at Solan.”

  Melok was quiet a moment. “Then what?”

  “Destroy the mortaline,” Brindos said quickly, with no doubt in his mind now. Without the mortaline, the Conduits could not be built or rebuilt. No more copies. They could gain control of their worlds, root out the copies and alien intelligences.

  “What else can we do?” Joseph said, breaking his silence. A wisp of his gray hair fell across his forehead and he flipped it back with a veined hand.

  “We have to do whatever we can to take the mortaline out of the equation,” Brindos said.

  “Maybe you can get to that vault, somehow,” Melok said, “but how will you open it? You don’t have this key everyone’s looking for, do you?”

  Brindos stared at Melok a moment before answering, the edge of pain insinuating itself into the silence. “No,” he said. “But we know who installed the DNA lock. Dorie’s mate, the real Terl Plenko.”

  Dorie was frozen in place, disbelief on her face.

  “You know it’s true, Dorie,” Brindos said. “You told me he was an expert. You two were on Coral. He disappeared. The hunt for the key began.”

  “My god,” she whispered.

  “I’ll pass for Plenko,” Brindos said, feeling the skin of his face ruck and wrinkle as he pushed back the needles of anguish coursing through him. “With the key, I can open it, and I have to do it before the Plenko copy does.”

  “Why open the vault?” Melok said. “Maybe that’s what the aliens are hoping you’ll do.”

  “That crossed my mind,” Brindos said. “But to make sure the metal is not used we have to open the vault. I have to try, because that metal has to be eliminated. Completely.”

  “So what the hell is the key?” Melok asked.

  Brindos looked at Dorie.

  She shrugged. “Like I told you, Plenko never said. He thought I knew something, but I didn’t. He wouldn’t give me any specifics.”

  “Whatever it is, how’d it get lost?” Melok asked. “How’d it get away from the NIO? I mean from the bad guys?”

  “I don’t know,” Brindos said. “Dorie’s Plenko did something with it. Probably realized what was going on with the mortaline, and hid the key.”

  “Plenko asked for it and obsessed over it,” Dorie said. “Even he didn’t know what it was. He doesn’t have all of my mate’s memories.”

  Brindos caught his breath, realizing something important. He fought off nausea and a millon pinpricks inside him to put words to his thoughts. What an idiot he’d been. Plenko. Goddamn Plenko!

  Brindos said, “He was a DNA lock expert.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And an artist.”

  She frowned.

  Shit. Brindos had held the key in his very own hands. A key that even warned about the alien threat.

  “Joe, if there’s any way I could get a coded message off planet through the slot, I’ll buy the hot dogs and Cracker Jacks at that baseball game.”

  Joseph raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know about strictly encoded but—”

  Brindos turned to Melok. “We have to get on a shuttle now.”

  Melok stayed where he was, unmoving. “Because?”

  “Because I know what the key is, and I know where it is.”

  Twenty-nine

  Although it was the last thing I wanted to do, we left Cara’s body with the resort’s ski patrol. Jennifer Lisle might have had enough pull to work out the details with them but who could we trust?

  We loaded into the shuttle after Forno brushed off the ski patrol doctor’s attempts to get him to a hospital. If he’d been human, he would’ve been seriously hurt, the injury severe enough to threaten his life, but his Helk physiology had saved him.

  “I’m taking you to Heron Station,” Jennifer said once we had left Snowy Mountain behind, “and I’ve got to do it now before I lose my clearance completely. It’s not usual for an NIO shuttle to make a trip directly to orbit. And there’s n
o telling what the alien copies have access to.”

  I nodded, distracted for the moment from thoughts of Cara. “You’ve arranged passage for all of us?”

  “A special Union Pass. An open ticket, good to anywhere the jump slots will take you.”

  We had reached the upper atmosphere, the sky darkening as the shuttle slowly transitioned to space.

  “I looked into our deceased, Kristen,” Jennifer said. “Katerina Parker.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What did you find out?”

  “She was a friend of Dorie Senall.”

  I shot a look at her. “Dorie?”

  “Katerina replaced Lexianna Shumann at the Flaming Sea.”

  I nodded. “Sexy Lexy, they called her.”

  “Right. We were watching Katerina Parker because she was Movement, as far as we knew.”

  “Do we know who killed her yet?”

  Jennifer sighed, glancing at me for a moment before returning her attention to the front screen. “Cara.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Flaming Sea surveillance caught it. You know we’re talking the bad Cara here. Right?

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Just—” I paused a moment, flustered at the thought of the alien imposter. “Call her Landry.”

  Calling her by her last name seemed right. I needed to distance myself from the cold reality of Cara’s death.

  Jennifer nodded. “Landry must have thought Katerina had the key,” she said.

  “Which means Landry thought Katerina had obtained it from Dorie before she died,” Forno said.

  “Yeah, but Dorie died on Ribon,” Jennifer said.

  “Just before the Coral Moon disaster,” I added.

  “The key could have been there, then.”

  “Possibly. But where?”

  “Her apartment? The Towers? A place to start, anyway.”

  Forno cleared his throat. “May I remind you both that Ribon had Coral pieces slam into it? It’s probably off-limits. Not to mention uninhabitable.”

  “That’s going to stop us?” I said.

  He shrugged. “It’d stop a lot of folks from trying. Maybe even our bad guys.”

  “Do you still want to find your partner on Temonus?” Jennifer asked me.

  I thought a moment, weighing the decision amid the recent turmoil. If Alan was still alive, if he’d learned the truth about what was going on, if he wasn’t just another copy looking to kill me, then maybe he’d come up with the same conclusion.

  A lot of ifs.

  “I can trust the real Brindos,” I finally said. “If I can find him.”

  Jennifer nodded, and Forno grasped my shoulder sympathetically.

  “I don’t suppose that open ticket is good for Ribon,” Forno said.

  “Why not? You’ll just have to talk the folks at Heron station into it.” She jerked her head behind her. “I found some items to help you do that.”

  Forno scrounged through the storage locker behind Jennifer and pulled out a few blasters and a pulse rifle, cradling them in his arms. He raised his eyebrows. “Will this be enough of an incentive to get the station to accept our Union Pass?”

  “Jesus, Forno,” I said. “These weapons are your Union Pass.”

  He looked down at me and stared a moment before he got it.

  “This might help too,” Jennifer said. She reached in her pocket and pulled out her code card. “We can’t use it to communicate with anyone on our own, but it’s good identification.”

  “As long as the Heron Station staff isn’t compromised,” Forno said.

  I stared at her code card, wishing I still had mine.

  The shuttle hit space and we were silent for nearly five minutes. And then Jennifer’s code card chortled, a wavering sound of short pulses and whistles.

  “What’s that?” Forno asked.

  “Incoming message,” Jennifer said.

  My mind started ticking off the code card’s communication capabilities. Anyone with a code card on Aryell or in Aryell’s space could track an agent on the other end, but messages sent through the jump slots, although rare, could not contain tracking cobwebs. There wasn’t any way to tell where the message was coming from until the agent toggled the DNA-locked activation node.

  “Hit it,” I said.

  Jennifer looked long and hard at me, then palmed the node. She stared at it for a moment before holding it out for me. “Does this mean anything to you?”

  It was a crossword puzzle. It meant a lot.

  “It’s from Alan,” I said, my hand shaking a little at the realization. The real Brindos. I had no doubt. “He’s alive.”

  “How do you know?” Forno asked.

  “You’ve a DataNet connection here, yes?” I asked Jennifer, ignoring Forno.

  “Sure.”

  “I need you to download a little crossword program.”

  “Crosswords? Now?” Forno laughed. “Is there a comics flash too? Stickman back issues?”

  Jennifer hesitated a moment, then said, “A cipher.”

  I nodded. “And as soon as I have the puzzle kit, I can decode it. It’s a message. Sent to you, the only NIO agent Alan spoke to before going to Temonus.”

  “He visited me in the hospital on Ribon,” she said to Forno in answer to his puzzled look.

  Jennifer went to work with her code card and a few minutes later had the crossword kit I needed downloaded to memory. “Ten minutes to Heron Station,” she said as she passed the code card to me.

  The message was short, I could tell, so it wouldn’t take that long to decode. I expected to have the message before we made it to the station. As it turned out, I had only minutes to spare. “Ribon,” I said, reading the result. “Venasaille police. Mortaline.”

  Jennifer frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “Mortaline,” Forno said. “That’s what the Conduit wire is made of.”

  I smiled. “The key is too.” The five spokes of Heron Station had appeared in the viewscreen. “Get ready, everyone,” I said, snagging the pulse rifle from Forno’s armload of weapons. “Brindos knows what the key is, and where it is. We’re taking a trip to Ribon after all.”

  “Do you know?” Forno asked.

  “Yeah. It’s a goddamn sculpture.” I turned to Jennifer. “Can you send a message back?”

  She nodded. “You have time to crossword a message?”

  “No. Send this,” I said, pronouncing very carefully. “‘We have the crossword. Understand the key.’ But spell it this way.”

  I spelled it out.

  Jennifer looked up at me, her brow furrowed. “What the hell is that?”

  “Now who’s laughing about all those antique Earth books I love?” I said.

  She shrugged, clueless.

  “It’s Pig Latin,” I said. “There’s nary a Helk or alien alive in the Union who will know what Pig Latin is.”

  Thirty

  Brindos had seen the key. He’d held it.

  The planet-shaped sculpture with the thousand tormented faces screaming on its surface. He was sure of it. Created by one Terl Plenko. He’d watched the holo-vid of Dorie and Jennifer recorded at the Tempest Tower, then left with Branson of the Venasaille police department to the crime scene. Found the sculpture in a cubby under the vid, Plenko’s DNA all over it. Plenko the artist. Plenko the DNA lock expert.

  No one else besides the deceased Dorie had known where the key was before the Tempest Tower incident. The real Dorie had never seen it, but she had known Plenko was capable of sculpting something like it. She knew his work.

  Jennifer Lisle’s cover had been blown when the image of Dorie’s apartment appeared on the vid screen, transmitted by the marble camera Jennifer had placed there. Brindos still didn’t know who’d betrayed her, and maybe he’d never know—some NIO agent, he was sure—but the important thing was that Plenko’s key, the mortaline sculpture, was in Venasaille, most likely in some evidence locker at the police station.

  Other than Captain Rand at the Venasaille statio
n, Branson had said no one else had seen the recording. Maybe the brass had transferred the sculpture somewhere, but he truly doubted it.

  One city. One specific place to look on an entire world shredded by its moon. Brindos liked the odds, but it depended on the extent of the damage to Venasaille. He took time to tell Dorie where to find the police station, how to find Ribon Provincial, and how to locate the vault. Just in case.

  It depended on if he had time. He fought back nausea. He fought back pain.

  Every bone ached, every muscle seemed to fire with debilitating agony, but he mentally threw it away, holding on to the task ahead of them. He explained everything to Dorie and Joseph while Melok, who had finally made the decision to help them, went looking for the press credentials he hoped could get them on that press shuttle.

  Flying that shuttle to Solan, prepping the ship for the slot to Ribon—it remained to be seen whether they could pull that off.

  It turned out Joseph had something valuable to offer as well. Valuable beyond what he’d already done to help the cause, of course. His comm-phone from the Orion had the ability to send messages through the jump slots to any of the other worlds, a perk given to many major hotels and businesses throughout the Union so they could stay in contact with clients and partners. Apparently use of the comm-phone by concierge staff was strictly prohibited. By allowing Brindos to use the comm-phone to send a message to Crowell, Joseph had, for all intents and purposes, given the hotel evidence to terminate his employment, since every call or message sent out, although untrackable, would register on the hotel’s records. Joseph had checked the phone out. The time stamp would incriminate him for sure. Joseph didn’t care, and offered it without hesitation; he wanted to help.

  He told them, however, that he wouldn’t go with them to Solan Station. “I’m an old man,” he said, and not for the first time. “Living is enough of an adventure for me.”

  Brindos went with tried and true, putting together a cipher in the guise of crossword clues, descriptions for down and across. Keeping the message short to keep the decode time down to a minimum, he keyed it into the comm-phone and sent it on its way.