The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

  He didn’t know if Crowell would be able to read it. If his partner didn’t have his code card, the message would just get lost in the ether.

  So he took a chance and copied it to Jennifer Lisle. The last he’d seen her, she’d been in the hospital on Ribon. Whether she’d been copied or not, he didn’t know, but he had to risk the communication. Only one of her would have a code card, and he hoped the original would be the one holding it. Crowell being with her and the message getting read at all was a longshot at best; it was unlikely anyone could decode the message without his input. Crowell would have to procure the crossword kit from the DataNet, because Jennifer Lisle certainly wouldn’t have it.

  Melok had access to the M.W.C. airport with his Cal Gaz credentials, and more important, access to the press sector. Most press shuttles were operated by TWT pilots, who contracted with the various news organizaions and pulled in their extra freelance duty from DataNet files.

  Joseph still had his contact to get him clearance and past the lockouts and grid bypass routines. They entered the airport without mishap and entered the public parking area next to the TWT terminal. They pinpointed the press sector, and the private press-only access point. Brindos made himself as small as he could in the backseat. Melok leaned across Joseph and revealed his credentials at the gate attendant, who peered in Joseph’s window. The flash photo and holo ident expanded to viewing size as the attendant reached across and swiped the surface of the membrane.

  The attendant let the car through without a glance at the backseat. Airport security didn’t seem too concerned about mayhem happening in the press sector. There was no way a blaster or a Helk stunner would’ve made it past the perimeter, even with lockouts disabled, so Brindos hoped they’d get aboard the shuttle without the weapons. He also hoped his size would dissuade the heroics of any zealous Authority cop.

  “There it is,” Melok said, pointing to the launch circle hosting the press shuttle. They parked as close as they could to the shuttle without raising any suspicion from the two Authority cops standing nearby.

  Brindos hoped TWT hadn’t heated up the landing circle perimeter with electronic hot zones and virtual deterrents. Holo-signs hovered around the circle every few feet warning about trespassing, listing the consequences in pulsing letters.

  This is where Joseph would leave them.

  “I still mean what I said about that baseball game,” Brindos told Joseph as they readied to leave the concierge’s car. “Next time you’re on Earth.”

  “It’ll be a pleasure,” he said.

  “Good-bye, Joe.”

  Joseph shook his hand. Brindos, breathing hard, focusing on ignoring his hurt and climbed out of the car, Dorie and Melok close behind. As soon as they were out, Joseph sped away and was gone in an instant.

  “Here we go,” Brindos said. “Be ready.”

  Melok slipped to the front, and Brindos fell back, once more wrapped in the big gray coat and wide-brimmed hat Dorie had given him. The pain ratcheted up, and it made Brindos double over. He stayed bent down to minimize his size, breathing through his nose, every step an effort.

  By the time Melok stopped at the front of the shuttle, Brindos could barely stay on his clubbed feet. He concentrated on the surface of the landing circle and watched the embedded warning lights of the outer ring pulse and zip along like a marquee.

  “Hey, folks,” one of the Authority cops said, his body padded with blaster protection gear, “you shouldn’t be here. Shuttle’s not due to go out for a few more hours and this is only for the press.” He kept a hand poised over his blaster.

  “Cal Gaz,” Melok said, holding his credentials high. “We have a pressing need to board. No pun intended.” He smiled good-naturedly, but Brindos imagined the man was more than a little nervous.

  “A Helk newspaper? You expect me to buy that?”

  “Does this look like a human or a Memor behind me?” Melok said, pointing back at Brindos, who hunkered down some more and tried not to growl as he clamped down on the pain that had turned his legs to jelly and his head to mush.

  The cop acknowledged Melok with a nervous nod, and Melok began a spiel about Crasp, a Helk sickness that, as Melok described it, could turn a Helk’s insides out. Bullshit, of course. Crasp was real, but it was hardly a killer, more like a heavy-duty flu, and humans were immune to it.

  “And her?” the cop asked, pointing at Dorie. The other cop, younger, the protection gear hardly fitting him, situated himself to the right of Brindos and Dorie, inching slowly behind them.

  “She’s his handler,” Melok said.

  The cop nodded, glaring at Brindos’s hat, then reaching out with his arm toward Melok for a better look at his credentials.

  Melok started to give the card to him, then dropped it inches from the cop’s hand. At that moment, Brindos tested his super Helk powers, hoping his constant pain wouldn’t limit its effectiveness. He slammed his elbow into the face of the younger Authority cop, who’d come up closer to check them out. The cop fell backward even as Brindos yelled out, the blow heightening the waves of nausea crashing through him, heavy, throbbing pain traveling down his arm into his chest.

  Heart pumping too fast. But Bindos didn’t hesitate. He moved.

  The older cop, who had started to bend slightly to retrieve Melok’s card, had no chance, even though he straightened and went for his blaster.

  Brindos got there first and simultaneously wrenched the weapon from the cop’s grip and pushed him back into the door of the shuttle. The cop grunted when his head hit the hatch, the air wheezing out of him, then he fell sideways to the landing circle and didn’t move.

  “Take this,” Brindos said, and gave the blaster to Dorie. “I can’t even grip it.” He grimaced, his hand and fingers cramping up. He could hardly use the thing anyway, not being able to get his large hands around the firing mechanism. To Melok he said, “The other weapons.”

  Melok retrieved blasters from the other two cops as the hatch opened, the pilot emerging to investigate the disturbance.

  Dorie waved the blaster at him. “Stop there.”

  The pilot, a skinny wisp of a man, immaculately dressed in his dark blue TWT uniform, saw the blaster, saw Brindos towering over him, and stopped abruptly, his hands high.

  “Name,” Brindos ordered. “Now.”

  After a beat, the pilot replied, “Thomas.”

  “Inside, Thomas.”

  The pilot nodded, backed up into the shuttle, and Dorie followed. Brindos entered the hatch door next, and nearly had to fold himself in half to get through the opening. Melok came in last with two extra blasters. He took a moment to get his bearings, and while Dorie kept her blaster trained on the pilot, he set the weapons on an acceleration couch near the back.

  “What’s the deal here?” Thomas said. “This is a press shuttle. There’s nothing here you want.”

  “Relax,” Dorie said. “We’re not here to steal shit.”

  Melok needlessly flashed his credentials at Thomas as he came back up front. “I am with the press. Cal Gaz will add to your contract for this,” he lied to the pilot. “No questions. No alarms. You don’t have to believe me when I tell you this is a Union matter of utmost importance, but this is what it is. You can cooperate, or I’ll turn my Helk friend loose here.”

  Thomas flicked a nervous look at Brindos, who didn’t even have to act upset with the constant agony shooting through him. Brindos knew the pilot couldn’t see his Helk face too well, perhaps only seeing it black and twisted by the pain, maybe deciding it was a look of contempt. The pilot showed no sign of recognizing Plenko.

  “You’ll disable all the shuttle’s countermeasures and trackers,” Melok said, “as well as the outgoing comm and DataNet link. I know these shuttles well; more than a few pilots have helped me get to where the news is. I’ve had many lovely tours of shuttles, cruisers, and you know as an off-world journalist I’ve had schooling in the jump slots. So you will not mess with me by trying anything funny. Understood?” />
  Thomas nodded quickly.

  Melok said, “Good. You’ll see that we get safely to Solan Station.”

  “Solan? But—”

  “And from there through the slot to Ribon.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “Off-planet mode. You know the settings. The press shuttles pop up to Solan all the time, it’s not unheard of.”

  “But through the slot. And Ribon is off-limits—”

  “Cal Gaz will pay for any damages,” Melok lied again. “Cover funeral expenses and provide for your family if need be. Everything else doesn’t matter. You have no choice.”

  Thomas visibly gulped, but he nodded.

  Dorie gestured with the blaster. “Fire it up.”

  Brindos inched up behind Thomas, who coughed nervously. Thomas quickly moved to the front and sat in the pilot’s seat, Brindos staying close, trying to stay upright.

  Thomas ran a hand through full, curly black hair, pulled at the collar of his TWT uniform, then reached out and accessed the bubble controls. The engines cranked.

  Melok kept a steady eye on him. After a moment, he said, “And the slot tracker.” He pointed at a node pulsing blue along the upper arc of the bubble.

  Thomas touched it and it stopped pulsing. “Without the slot tracker we could—”

  “I know what it means,” Melok said. “You can worry about getting lost if you get lost. You know all the insertion codes?”

  He nodded.

  “Morph the code to Ribon. Now.”

  Brindos looked on in fascination as Thomas’s fingers whispered along the bubble until a portion of it pushed out like a glop of black gel and formed into a clear plastic rectangle the size of his hand. Traces of light whirled around its edge as the insertion equations morphed into the plastic, and nodes emerged along the surface. Thomas touched the nodes, almost randomly, but the rectangle soon darkened and the holo-image of Ribon appeared, embedded into the plastic.

  He leaned to the right of the bubble and with his thumb, pushed a cheap-looking resin panel that protruded from the control board. DNA-locked. But now the panel snapped into place and a flash membrane not much bigger than a square of RuBy emerged from a slot below the panel. Melok released it, the membrane flashing and scrolling with data, and handed it to Dorie.

  “That’s the lockout. Once he’s engaged, none of the nonflight settings can be changed, including lockouts and countermeasures, except by someone outside the bubble.” He pointed to the steady-blue node. “The shuttle’s proximity to the jump mechanism, plus the preprogrammed insertion code Thomas configured to Ribon, means we’ll be automatically slotted. Once we’re in the jump slot, we reinject the slot tracker back below the panel and we’ll be fine for any return trip.”

  Dorie nodded, then glanced at Brindos, who was breathing down Thomas’s neck.

  Brindos understood the look. She knew as well as he that they couldn’t afford to take Melok with them. “Melok,” he said with as much force as he could, “you’re not going.”

  Melok ignored him and said to Thomas, “Engage the bubble and take off.”

  “The takeoff protocols—”

  “Forget them.”

  “They’ll query my status.”

  “Ignore them. You can’t respond anyway. The comm is set one way. Now, engage.”

  The pilot rubbed the controls in front of him and the bubble fully engaged, engulfing the pilot in a transparent film. Brindos backed away from the pilot’s chair just in time.

  “Melok,” Dorie said.

  “After all the trouble you took to get me here, you want to leave me behind?” Melok asked. “Too dangerous for me, huh? No big ending for Stickman?”

  Brindos smiled. “You’ll have it. We’ll bring it back to you. You can do more for us by keeping up appearances here. If we don’t succeed, you’ll need to—” He faltered. “Well. I don’t know what you’ll be able to do.”

  They remained silent a moment as the press shuttle whined, preparing for launch. Brindos waved his weapon at Melok. It wasn’t a threatening gesture, he didn’t think. Melok wouldn’t resist. It was time for the reporter to clear out.

  “Good luck,” Melok finally said.

  “Thanks for this,” Brindos said. “You’re a regular Stickman.”

  Melok frowned. “Please. I don’t even have Strech-O mode.” They said good-bye, and Melok left the shuttle.

  They strapped in to acceleration couches near the front so they could keep track of Thomas. Only one Helk-sized couch was positioned in the front row, so Dorie took a human couch right next to it. Brindos scrambled into his, groaning as the sides of the couch dug into his torso, aggravating his hurt. His legs hung slightly over the end. Probably designed for Second Clan. His head spun with vertigo, the needles of pain contantly poking at him.

  The pain had often come upon him randomly, had often been inconsistent in strength and intensity, and attacked his body at will. He assumed something about the copy process, something about the rejection of his Helk self, had caused the abnormal pain.

  But that had changed, and it plagued him constantly now.

  Dorie had run out of RuBy, and he had nothing to counteract the missed treatments. Very little of his body, inside or out, escaped the raging pain. Every little movement he made triggered an avalanche of agonizing side effects.

  Thomas went through pre-flight procedures quickly, totally at the whim of the bubble, the lockout now seeing to his cooperation.

  Thanks to Brindos’s groans, the never-ending grimaces that twisted his facial features, and his bulky coat that covered a lot of him, he was pretty sure Thomas still didn’t know he was Terl Plenko, the pilot not having had a chance to get a good look at him, but he sensed the pilot wanted the Helk off his ship as quickly as possible. He wondered what the pilot was hearing from the port, those flight directions ignored because Thomas couldn’t confirm them.

  The pain in Brindos’s gut twisted so violently that he barely held back a scream. A moment later, Dorie reached over from her couch, and wiped blood from his nose.

  “It’s starting,” she said over the shuttle’s engines.

  Brindos waited for the pain to subside a little, then wheezed out, “How long now?”

  She shook her head slightly, put a hand to his forehead, which was sweaty. Her small hand felt good on his leathery skin. “I don’t really know, not having seen something like this actually happen to anyone.” She glanced away for a moment before continuing, her eyes finding his face once again. “But it can’t be long before—”

  Brindos stopped her by placing a finger on her cheek, the motion causing his insides to twist and his head to pound even harder. “I’ll have long enough. And if not, you’ll have to do your best to finish for me.”

  “I don’t know if I can—”

  “Promise me.”

  She hesitated, then gave a slight nod. “Union bright, Alan.”

  He didn’t know how to say what he really felt. All his Brindos thoughts about her converged into the center of his brain, and he wanted to coax them to his mouth. To tell her that above everything else that had happened, meeting her seemed more than an accident. He wanted to make her understand what he felt as Brindos, not as Plenko. But even that contained deeper, unintentional regret.

  He wanted to say he cared for her.

  But he didn’t. It was a complication she didn’t deserve.

  “Just channel the bad Dorie and you’ll do fine,” he said instead, pushing back the other thoughts.

  Just then the pain caused him to turn away and cough violently.

  The shuttle took off with a roar, and the pressure caused Brindos’s skin to prickle as if from hundreds of needles. This time, he wiped away the blood from his nose and mouth himself.

  Thirty-one

  A sculpture.

  That’s what all the fuss had been about. The only thing standing in the way of a cache of metal needed to complete a device capable of creating thousands of doubles to penetrate the Union�
��s positions of power.

  I had seen it, Brindos had held it.

  Now I had to go get it.

  Docking at Heron Station was the easy part, due to the NIO clearance Jennifer Lisle’s shuttle gave us. Getting to a jump vessel? That was not going to be easy. We hoped that it would be minimally guarded. The fact was, not a lot of jumpslot travel passed through Heron Station on any given day, unless it was the middle of the ski season when the snow was at its best. But even then, the station had nothing on the Egret Station at Earth, or, until the Coral disaster, Swan Station above Ribon. The number of TWT officials needed to run Heron Station varied with the known flight schedules, but it was conceivable that a handful of armed men and women could overrun the place. If they knew the layout, and if they had a plan.

  We had neither, and there were just three of us. Two of us, once Jennifer hightailed it back to her shuttle, which wouldn’t happen until she knew we had found a jump vessel and a pilot.

  Things would’ve been a hell of a lot easier if Jennifer’s shuttle had jump capabilities.

  “Three TWT guards at our door,” Forno said when the shuttle had docked to the umbilical.

  “Ready to sweep the way and marshal us to knavery,” I muttered. Through pursed lips, I added, “Let it work.”

  Forno stared at him, the question in his eyes.

  “Hamlet,” I said.

  “To be or not to be,” Forno said. He shrugged when I looked at him. “That’s all I know.”

  I checked the pulse rifle and nodded to Jennifer and Forno to do the same with their blasters. Earlier, we’d loaded up the weapons and stuffed extra ammunition packs wherever we could stuff them.

  Whoever stood in our way would be fair game. We couldn’t afford to miss this opportunity. If the TWT had been compromised as well, then we would do what we could to counteract their plans.

  “Blow them at the moon,” I whispered, false bravado keeping me from panicking.