The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

  “Let’s go, sweet prince,” Jennifer said, and she slid the shuttle door open.

  The fingers of my right hand curled around the pulse rifle’s trigger, and my eyes moved, locating the three guards as we stepped out of the shuttle. They were waiting at the end of the umbilical, weapons holstered.

  They didn’t know who we were, seemingly, but I noticed them tense a little when Forno appeared.

  We walked out in a line, Forno in front, shielding us from view. A blaster in a Helk’s hand probably looked like a toy, so I hoped that would buy us a little time to edge closer to the TWT boys.

  “Idents, please,” said one of the guards, a young man probably in his twenties. He said it in a nervous tone. Not that he was expecting anything; I’m sure it was just the presence of Forno.

  We were close enough now to fan out and surprise them.

  “Right here,” I said, going left of Forno. Jennifer peeled off to the right.

  The TWT guards moved simultaneously, reaching for their weapons as if on the same remote control, but Forno shouted “Don’t!” in his loudest, most menacing voice. They froze, and we got to them an instant later, Forno knocking two of them down with one powerful arm while Jennifer and I covered the third.

  “Drop it and be smart,” I said. He did.

  Forno pulled the blasters from the downed guards, then picked up the third weapon.

  “Up,” I said to the two on the floor, and when they were vertical I motioned all of them into the corridor that was the outer hub of Heron Station. “No noises now,” I said. “Walk ahead of us.”

  “Who are you—?”

  “No questions,” I said. “Just walk. You know this station. We want the nearest jump vessel, but it needs to be one you know will be slotted soon and has a pilot. Understood?”

  The one who had asked for our identification nodded, then we told them to turn around and walk in front.

  “Big happy tourists now,” Forno said, and he took the rear.

  We had our weapons ready but held low. I wasn’t sure how many others we’d come across on the outer hub, but it was likely there would be more than these three. Likely, too, that shooting would commence.

  The next umbilical came up, but no ship was docked there. One guard stood at the entrance, and he waved at his fellow guards, then frowned when he saw us trailing them.

  “Where—?”

  Forno didn’t hesitate. He fired his weapon and the guard dropped. The other guards spun around, but Dorie and I showed them our weapons and told them to forget it. I read a little more fear in their eyes now. This definitely was not anything they’d signed up for when joining TWT.

  “We have no qualms about shooting anyone,” I told their backs. “Now can we get to a ship with as little bloodshed as possible?”

  “Next umbilical,” the young one said. “Ship’s scheduled to go in ten minutes.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “But,” he said, a nervous flutter in his voice, “as a matter of protocol, all TWT officials are outfitted with a sensor system that automatically sends a panic signal when we use our weapons—”

  “Which didn’t happen,” Forno reminded them.

  “—or we leave our assigned area without a call-in.”

  I closed my eyes and thought a moment, but one of the other guards chimed in then.

  “Hidden cameras too. You were spotted the moment you came out of your shuttle.”

  We rounded the bend and saw the jump vessel docked at the next umbilical. A medium-sized cruiser, glistening white and yellow in the station’s lights, looked ready to be slotted for jump any moment. Heavy flowing script across the ship’s bow read TWT VOLANTIS. I saw passengers through most of the cruiser’s tiny windows. Perhaps twenty, maybe thirty. This was our ride, but these passengers certainly were not expecting to go to Ribon. We’d have to get them off the cruiser.

  At the junction of hub and umbilical were four Helks with stunners, two First Clan in front, and two Second Clan in the back.

  Between the First Clan Helks stood the alien, Landry. I could tell immediately by the firmness of her face, the coldness in her eyes, and the fact that she just stared, no emotion, saying nothing.

  The Helk on her right was one of the Tony Kochs. I also recognized a Tam Chinkno to her left. Somehow, they had tracked us after all that had happened on Aryell.

  Landry didn’t say anything, but now it seemed like she wanted to. Was trying to. Her mouth moved a little, an eerie gesture that only made her alien nature more threatening.

  What did she want to say to me?

  I’d seen Cara murdered in front of me. Thoughts flashed through my mind now that I was seeing this alien version again. How could I forget what I’d witnessed at Snowy Mountain? How could I forget that Landry was an abomination? Could I act without hesitation?

  Hell yes, I could.

  The Koch looked at Landry before he said in a gravelly voice, “This is where it ends.”

  “For her, maybe,” I said, and in an instant, I stepped to the side of one of the TWT guards, brought the pulse rifle up, and shot her, left side and high.

  Doing it without warning, I hadn’t given Jennifer and Forno much of a chance to react, and although Landry fell unceremoniously to the floor, four armed Helks still stood facing us.

  The Helks immediately raised their stunners, but Jennifer and Forno brought up their own weapons. I got off another shot just before I slipped back behind the surprised guard and grabbed him by the neck. I hit the Koch with another pulse, but he fired right afterward, stunning the guard I was holding before falling to the deck. The guard became dead meat and I couldn’t hold on to him.

  Unprotected like that, I should’ve slipped in quickly behind Forno, but I saw Landry on the floor, her body motionless, her eyes open and staring at the bulkhead.

  I blinked back the frozen moment just as Jennifer edged out from behind the second guard and aimed, fired, and hit the Helk closest to her. Chinkno. Forno simply picked up the third guard by the neck and rushed the other two Helks, screaming as he did so, his own blaster raised. The guard took the damage from the nearest Helk’s stunner just before Forno threw the body forward. It landed on the Helk’s head and shoulders, and Forno took advantage of the confusion to zip the Helk three times in the torso with his weapon.

  All this happened in slow motion, and I looked up in time to see the fourth Helk fire before anyone could train a weapon on him. I heard Jennifer grunt, then saw her fall.

  Forno and I fired at the same time, marking the last Helk in the heart on his left side. Forno sidestepped to the bodies and shot two Helks who were still moving. Just like that, nine bodies littered the deck.

  One of them belonged to Jennifer Lisle.

  Thirty-two

  Nothing could be done about the blood.

  The light-brown fur of Brindos’s forearms and wrist were now stained red with the constant wiping of his face. He didn’t know if Helks had allergic reactions, but the blood on his fur made his arms look as if they’d broken out with splotchy rashes.

  When he wasn’t wiping at his nose or mouth, Dorie reached across from her couch and held his hand.

  At some point, the pain reached a crescendo and he couldn’t even begin to handle it.

  He passed out.

  He saw light, Dorie’s voice urging him awake. Saw black space. He was weightless, held down by something, and the hurt did not diminish.

  Dorie said something, but it trailed off into the fog as he lost consciousness again.

  Awake, with lights, and movement. Dorie above, jostling him.

  “Stay awake now,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  He did, and nodded.

  He was flat on his back in the couch, the blood tracking his face making him more hideous than ever, he was certain. He tasted blood on his tongue and it pooled in the back of his throat. The pain was less, but maybe that was because his body had become numb with it.

  “Thomas?” he whispered.


  “He’s nearing the jump slot,” Dorie said. “Remember? He has the insertion code, and we’ll take our chances through the slot. No one’s trying to stop us.” Her voice sounded distant, barely there. “He’s taking us to Ribon.”

  Going to Ribon? Brindos remembered something about that. Something important. The planet not quite right. He centered on an image, a metal planet, a thousand faces screaming and writhing, trying to tear themselves out of there.

  “Are you with me?” Dorie said.

  “I am a thin man now,” he wheezed.

  “You’re Alan Brindos,” she said. “You’re human, you hear me?”

  Do you love me, Dorie?

  “You need to stay conscious,” her voice said from somewhere. “Keep awake.”

  He fell asleep.

  Thirty-three

  I had never completely understood how Helk stunners worked, but then again, I’d never come across that many until thrown into the contract work investigating the Movement of Worlds. What I knew was that stunners were all about paralyltic disruption and turning muscles to oatmeal. An energy pulse that hit a critical area could, in an extended burst, cause organs to burst. Invisible death.

  Rushing to Jennifer’s side, I feared the worse. She grimaced at me, but she was not screaming in pain, which is what I’d expected her to be doing.

  She’d taken the pulse in the left leg. Serious, of course, but treatable in most cases. The leg bent at an odd angle, and was misshapen, some of the muscles damaged, possibly paralyzed.

  Jennifer tapped her leg. “Same leg Dorie got with her blaster. Nerves are all shot, so I’m not feeling much pain.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Not a chance. Unfortunately, damage done.”

  She couldn’t get back to her shuttle and fly out of here, so we had to take her with us. Maybe there would be medical help on the Volantis.

  “You have to go,” she said.

  I nodded. “But not without you.”

  “You have to—”

  “Be quiet,” I said as I positioned myself to lift her.

  “You can’t,” she whispered. “You’ve got to get those passengers off and get out of here. You don’t have time for me, and—”

  “No.”

  “—I can get help here. Someone will come.”

  “You don’t know who is going to—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said.

  Forno came up to us, fresh worry in his eyes. “Something’s going on with Cara.” He looked at me. “With the alien.”

  The air whistled with a sound I only then realized had been building slowly. “What is it?”

  “There’s this glow around her,” Forno said.

  Glow. Like the glow around her fingers when she’d knocked them out back at New Venasaille. Looking in her direction, I saw Forno was right. A soft whiteness surrounded her like an aura.

  Jennifer held out one arm.

  I pulled her to a sitting position, and she checked her code card. She made a few swipes across the surface and pulled up an alert. She stared at it a moment. “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “Something’s setting off the radiological alarm.”

  “Radiation?” Forno said. He crouched low, but I still had to crane my neck to look up at him.

  “Actually, no,” Jennifer said. “Something else. Something I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Is it that glow?” Forno asked.

  Jennifer took a moment before answering. “Yeah. An energy spike. Negative particles. A trace of—”

  An audible, strident pulsing issued from her code card, and I recognized the sound.

  It meant get the hell out of there now.

  “Gamma rays,” Jennifer said, putting out her arms so Forno could pick her up. She stood on her good leg. Her ruined leg I tried not to look at.

  “Like Ribon,” I said, realizing what the presence of gamma rays meant. “The detonation on Coral.”

  Jennifer looked at me, face grim. “Antimatter, Dave. She’s got some kind of antimatter core.”

  I jerked my head to Landry’s prone body, the glow around her almost too bright to look at. “We’ve got to go now!”

  I ran to the umbilical, and Forno followed, carrying Jennifer.

  “What about the passengers!” Forno yelled, having a difficult time navigating the cramped umbilical.

  Risking a glance back at the hub, I saw only a bright, pulsing glow where Landry lay.

  “We can’t leave passengers here,” I said. “The place is going to go to shit any moment.”

  “What about the key?” Forno said. “The mortaline. Finding your partner?”

  The Volantis’s main door was open.

  “We’ll do all that,” I said. “But it looks like the passengers are coming with us to Ribon.”

  Panicked passengers streamed out the ship’s main door, running the best they could through the umbilical, but my blaster, my assurances the place was going to blow, and Forno’s size—as always, a good deterrent—pushed them back.

  The scene at the door was chaos, but somehow we managed to talk them—or in Forno’s case, scare them—back inside.

  The TWT pilot needed no urging to disengage from the berth and prepare the Volantis for the jump. His own radiological alarm had gone off and he understood what was happening.

  “C’mon!” I yelled as the pilot engaged his navigation bubble. I held the blaster outside the bubble so he could see it, and forced him to reprogram the insertion point from Barnard’s World to Ribon. The pilot’s hands flew over the controls, gel forming, equations morphing, nodes activating. Soon, a holo of the planet Ribon appeared, slightly hazy and unfocused as I saw it from outside the bubble.

  We were a dozen cruiser-lengths away when the antimatter blew. Bright white mushroomed and overtook the berth where the Volantis had been minutes before.

  I couldn’t tell how much damage Landry’s death dealt to Heron Station, but the destruction didn’t follow us out toward the jump slot. A few minutes after the glow died down, as we scrambled into our acceleration couches, the ship reached the insertion point and slotted, taking us, and more than twenty passengers, to the ruined world of Ribon.

  Thirty-four

  When Brindos awoke next, Dorie sat on her couch next to him.

  After all the urging from Dorie to stay awake, he was surprised to be alive. Surprised that he was even able to waken. Surprised that the process that had made him Helk had not run its course and put an end to him.

  “How?” he said, his mouth barely working, body fighting the pain that burned like hot irons branding every inch of his skin. He stayed as motionless as he could on the floor.

  “Thomas,” she said. “Our pilot. He had RuBy, and I talked him out of the few squares he had on him. They were enough to revive you, but the time you have—”

  Brindos made a slight motion with his head, signifying, he hoped, a nod. The slight movement still set off ice picks in his head. He could still taste blood in his mouth.

  “We’re on Ribon,” she said. “We punched through the jump slot a little while ago, and I ordered Thomas to take us all the way down, bypassing Swan Station.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s here. He’s okay, don’t worry about him. I told him what was going on. I had to, in order to get his cooperation. He doesn’t have much choice, stuck here with us on a nearly dead planet.”

  “Okay,” Brindos said. “Venasaille?”

  “Venasaille. It’s mostly intact. Not a lot of structure damage, since the big pieces of Coral came down halfway around the planet, but it’s hard to tell, as it’s nighttime here.”

  “We close to the police station?”

  “Big park one block away.”

  “Can we breathe down here?”

  Dorie shook her head. “We’ll need breather masks. Only one problem though—”

  “No Helk-sized ones.”

  Dorie set her mouth in a grim line.

  �
��Probably no suit either,” he added.

  “No.”

  “Then you have to go on your own.”

  She looked panicked at that. “I don’t know if I can find it.”

  “I told you what it looks like, Dorie, and you know your husband’s work better than anyone.”

  “I know.”

  The fuzz of the RuBy eased up, and more of his Helk pains took advantage. He fought through it. “Go to the police station. You can find it.”

  “Yes, but where?”

  “Go through everything in there. Storerooms. Evidence lockers. Filing cabinets.”

  “Then we’ll go to the vault?”

  “Then the vault.”

  “Across town from the police station, you said.”

  “There’s a fortified entrance we’ll have to get through.”

  “The vault’s DNA locked. We’ll need you to open it.” Dorie frowned, her face going pale. “You can’t make it to the vault without some kind of mask.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then how—”

  “My DNA is good whether dead or alive. Cut off my finger.”

  “No!”

  “Dorie, I’m one dead Hulk, any way you look at it.”

  She was silent as Brindos closed his eyes, pain distracting him, the RuBy wearing off.

  Thomas stood nearby, he noticed when he opened his eyes again. He looked frail, his TWT uniform loose on his thin frame. “It’s quiet and dark out there. If you’re going to go, you better go. Don’t want to stay down here much longer.”

  Brindos reached up, carefully, slowly, and held Dorie’s arm. The pain had numbed his body. It was almost bearable. He thought, but did not say, Union bright.

  There were two extra blasters that Melok had retrieved from the downed guards, but could he trust Thomas with them?

  Something was wrong. Thomas and Dorie were frowning, looking off in different directions.

  “What?” he asked, slowly, painfully, working his way into a sitting position. Dorie steadied him the best she could.

  At that moment, he heard what they were hearing. The unmistakable whine of reverse thrusters.