The Ultra Thin Man

by Patrick Swenson

  Both Plenkos glanced at Forno. Dorie Senall kept her head down.

  “Well now, I don’t know you,” the second Plenko said through his breather mask.

  Forno glared at him.

  “But I know you, Dave Crowell,” Plenko said. The voice, even muffled, boomed in the quiet of the clearing.

  “I guess I thought I knew you,” I said.

  “You know who I am.”

  “Well,” I said, inching a little closer to them, “since there are two of you, I’m not quite sure I do know you. You seem to be holding the other at gunpoint, so that tells me a little.”

  Plenko nudged the first one with his weapon. “Tell him.”

  The Plenko in gray looked back for a moment, then down at the ground. He didn’t look well; his hands shook.

  “It’s me, Dave,” he said. “Brindos.” He looked up at me. “Alan.”

  I stared at him so hard my eyes watered. “Bullshit.”

  “I sent you the crossword. Told you about the key.”

  I waited for him to say something more, something more telling.

  “You sent me to Temonus to find Tony Koch,” he added. “You told me before I left that the inflatable Plenko Halloween costumes were quite lifelike, and you had one just my size.” He managed a weak laugh, throwing out his arms to announce his Helk presence. “Well, here I am. Didn’t think it would happen so literally.”

  “Alan,” I whispered.

  “Son of a—” muttered Forno next to me.

  “It is indeed Brindos,” the armed Plenko said. “The process to create a Plenko from a much smaller human is not without its side effects, and it is slowly killing him, although I could keep him alive for an indeterminate time with the proper treatments. Certainly not forever.” He moved directly behind Brindos, his stunner buried in his neck. I thought of Cara at Snowy Mountain, of the not-Brindos there who had murdered her. He had stood behind her in much the same way Plenko now stood behind my partner.

  “It’s true,” Brindos said. He narrowed his eyes at me, tilting his head ever so slightly. “I’m a dead man no matter what. Plenko and some others made a deal, helping the Ultras get the mortaline, make the Conduits—”

  “Ultras?” I asked. “That’s what you call them? Who are they? Where are they from?”

  Plenko smiled. The look on his face was almost reverent. “You’ll never know. You can not know. They’re beyond scrutiny. Can you believe that just a handful of them have put the Union on the brink of revolution?”

  “But why?” I asked. “Why are they doing this?”

  “They want to learn from us.”

  “Learn? Are you kidding me?”

  “They are One with us. They can mimic our thought patterns, understand our physical superiority, and weed out our mental deficiencies. They can rebuild themselves by tearing us down and re-creating us.”

  Brindos was faltering. Swaying a little, his face contorted, he cast a desperate look toward me, then to Dorie Senall. I seethed, wanting to get to Plenko right then. Brindos said nothing.

  “You’ll never know them, never find them,” Plenko said. “Never understand them.”

  Riddles. Still riddles, even at this point in time, with everything on the line.

  Brindos grunted then, folding his arms around his stomach and bending over slightly. He mumbled something, words that I understood, but in an order that didn’t make any sense.

  Sweet mother of Memory, but he was dealing with excruciating pain. It seemed to emanate off him in waves. He was dying.…

  “No one will trust anyone,” Plenko said, “and so we will continue to build the Thin Men, and the Ultras will come to our worlds in greater numbers, and soon we’ll be free, and soon we’ll have peace.”

  “We had peace!” I yelled. “Before this all started. You turned everything upside down, and for what?”

  Plenko put more pressure on Brindos’s neck. “I will live, you will not. It’s simple. Your weapons. Throw them far away from you.”

  I looked over at Tem Forno. His hand clenched his weapon so firmly I thought he might crush it. For a moment, I wondered if he might be able to use his super speed and surprise Plenko.

  Plenko expected to win. He could have stayed in the shuttle, but he was brimming with confidence, firm in the belief that things would go his way. Because he thought he was immortal?

  Because he knew he had the upper hand. He was a Helk. Ruthless. Quick. He could shoot Forno before I even took a step in the Helk’s direction, and he’d have that stunner locked back on me in a split second.

  I frowned as I realized what had to happen here. I caught Brindos’s eyes—his Helk eyes—and stared long and hard. It didn’t matter that he didn’t look human. I could tell that was my partner in there. My friend in there.

  When Forno looked my way, I gave him a nod. He frowned and shook his head.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. Plenko needed to know we were complying.

  “Over the shuttle,” Plenko said.

  Forno took his time, but he finally threw his weapon in a high arc that took it up and over the shuttle to the other side and out of sight.

  “Now you, Crowell.”

  “Let my friend go,” I said, “and I’ll surrender mine.”

  Plenko looked at me with pity. “You don’t really expect me to be that stupid, do you? I certainly don’t expect you to be that stupid. Do you think I’m alone? That I came here without other Thin Men? You don’t have a choice.”

  My heart raced faster, as if someone had simply turned up a control knob. Other Thin Men where? In his shuttle? I didn’t think so. He would’ve come out with them.

  At the vault, maybe.

  Or he was bluffing. A handful of Ultras, he’d said. Maybe a good number of copies made, but where were they all? Scattered around the Union? Could the Ultras, through Plenko, possibly get a large number of the Thin Men together in one spot—on a ravaged planet hard to get to by normal means—to help secure the metal they needed for their takeover plans?

  Brindos and I, we’d just been a couple of borrowed hounds on the run, even included in their plans to discredit the Movement and heap praise on the NIO and draw away attention from what was really happening there and around the Union. Why would the Ultras think they needed to worry about us?

  Then Dorie surprised me as she turned and stepped away from Brindos. “Terl, you can kill these guys all you want, whenever you want, but how about something for me first?” She came up quite close to him.

  Plenko seemed startled. “Dorie—”

  “You have some, don’t you?” She patted the pockets of the rain jacket. “Just a square is all I need. My head really hurts. I won’t give any of it to Brindos.”

  Plenko pushed her away. “I have none.”

  I thought then I understood what Dorie was doing. She had taken herself out of the line of fire. I remembered the squares of RuBy I had taken from the tent in New Venasaille. “I’ve got plenty in my pocket, Dorie.”

  She looked at me with glassy eyes, that haunted look of a RuBy addict, but I realized it wasn’t the drug making her glaze over. She had tears in her eyes.

  “Crowell!” Plenko yelled. He aimed his stunner at Brindos’s head. “Your weapon.”

  There was an interminably long pause while we stared each other down. I shifted to Brindos, and in his eyes shined the torment of the moment, like the eyes of the thousands of churning, tormented bodies aching to be free from the mortaline sculpture.

  Brindos smiled the briefest of smiles, made a barely perceptible nod.

  I knew what he wanted. I steeled my resolve, knowing I couldn’t think too much about it, or the moment would be lost. I lifted my chin and gave Terl Plenko an icy stare.

  Plenko clicked something on his stunner, the buzz of a power-up, a killing pulse to come.

  “I’m not giving in to you,” I said, hoping to keep my voice from cracking. “Not to you. Not to the Ultras. There’s only one Thin Man I’m giving in to.”

>   A second passed, Plenko and I frozen like chess pieces, waiting. But it was just a second.

  I whipped up the pulse rifle and shot Brindos in the chest. Alan Brindos, my friend and partner, fell to the ground like a lead weight.

  Terl Plenko did what I expected. He watched Brindos fall, stunned by what I had just done, his weapon tilting toward the ground. By the time he realized what had happened and came back to the reality of it, I had the split second I needed to fire again.

  The blast threw Plenko backward into the shuttle behind him. I fired three more times before he slipped down to the ground in a heap and lay still.

  Thirty-eight

  And now the pain changed.

  Crowell’s pulse rifle had ripped that other pain from him. Brindos was a Helk, physically, and his heart wasn’t where the sonic beam ripped into his chest.

  But it was close enough. Enough for Crowell to get the jump on Plenko. Enough for Brindos to get the hell out of there and leave all the pain and suffering behind.

  “Goddamned Plenko,” he said as Crowell scrambled to his side.

  “He’s dead,” Crowell said.

  “I meant me. Look at me. Shit of a way to go out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no.” Brindos caught Crowell’s shoulder with his hand. The movement brought a new dimension to his pain and he waited for the chaos inside to die down a little. “We have the key. Dorie found it, Plenko found us—”

  “We’ve got it now,” Crowell said.

  Dorie came up beside Crowell, pulled RuBy squares out of his pocket. She rolled several squares quickly, then placed them on Brindos’s tongue. “This will ease your way,” she whispered into his ear.

  “Dorie,” Brindos said. He swallowed, the cinnamon of the RuBy coating his throat, the fog enveloping him once more.

  “We’ll finish this for you, Alan.”

  “Union bright?” he asked, fighting back tears.

  She smiled as she leaned over, her teeth like pearls, shining as if streaks of sunlight illuminated them. And indeed, at that moment, rays of Ribon’s sun bathed the clearing in light.

  “Union bright,” she said, and kissed him.

  Crowell held onto Brindos’s shoulder for another few minutes. All the while Brindos watched Dorie’s face. Soon, he turned his head and saw Crowell. One corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile.

  “This borrowed hound hopes you kick Tim Jim’s ass,” Brindos said.

  Crowell smiled back and said, “You can count on it. Rest, my friend.”

  And then Brindos was gone.

  Thirty-nine

  We put his body on the shuttle we’d take to the vault. He’d had no family, but we couldn’t just leave him on Ribon. Also, Dorie took us to the police station where we found Thomas’s body. He deserved a ride home too. Plenko had shot him point blank multiple times with his stunner. I looked away at the misshapen corpse while Dorie and Forno found some body bags inside the station. We wrapped Thomas in one of them and Forno carried the body back to the shuttle without too much trouble. Dorie carried the extra Helk-sized body bag for Brindos. Eventually we had both bodies in the back of the shuttle.

  It was Dorie who said Brindos hadn’t expected to live long enough to get to the vault and that she should cut off his finger for the DNA lock, so Forno found a laser knife and took one of Terl Plenko’s fingers. I didn’t give a shit about Plenko. The rest of him could rot down here for all I cared.

  After rounding up weapons—Plenko’s stunner and the blaster given to Thomas—we lifted off in the shuttle Forno and I had come down in. Day had come to Venasaille, a ghost city, largely intact, although some buildings had been damaged or had collapsed, probably from earthquakes, heat, and fire. Dorie held on to Terl Plenko’s sculpture the whole way, and at that point it seemed like an army of Helks couldn’t have wrenched it away from her.

  She explained to us who she was. The mate of Terl Plenko. How she met Brindos on Temonus, about the run-in with Plenko in the Helk district, meeting Joseph, Melok the writer, and how they’d worked together to get to Ribon.

  “Your friend was a good Helk,” she said with a smile.

  I smiled back. “He was a good human.”

  She nodded. “Physically he was Terl, of course, and for a while he was on his way to becoming a true copy of the Ultras, but I helped him find himself. In the end, he was Alan Brindos.” She paused for a second, thinking. Remembering. “He was a lot like the Terl I married. I felt something for him, and I think he felt something for me.”

  “I’m guessing so.”

  “It was hard to tell because of the pain he was in.”

  We left the conversation hanging there as the shuttle cruised low. I could only imagine the emotions streaming through Dorie Senall upon seeing two Plenkos, so like her husband, killed in front of her. I kept quiet, and left her alone.

  We were looking for the large triangle-shaped building of Ribon Provincial. The vault was several miles away in an underground building. The only way to get in was via a kiosk that marked the vault. No one had access to the kiosk except the top brass on Ribon, and I wasn’t sure we’d have any luck with this strategy either.

  The shuttle flew over Ribon Provincial about ten minutes later. I pointed Forno toward the kiosk visible behind the building’s south triangle point.

  “It’s damaged,” I said, seeing jagged shards of metal jutting from the sidewalk.

  “Someone’s been here,” Dorie said.

  “There’s a Memor transport a half mile down,” Forno said, pointing it out. It was spherical, five landing struts extending outward from the sleek surface, making the ship look like a beetle. It was colored a deep orange.

  “Plenko said they knew where the vault was,” I said, “so we might indeed have company. I would expect, even if their numbers were few, they wouldn’t leave it all to Plenko.”

  “They’re waiting for the key,” Forno said, “and we’re bringing it right to them.”

  I knew that. It was a risk I was willing to take. We could take what we knew back to Earth, but who could we trust? Certainly not the NIO.

  I said, “We can’t just take the key and leave that metal there.”

  “Any plan yet as how we’re going to get rid of it?” Forno asked. “If we can even get close to it? You didn’t think there’d be much of an army down here—”

  “And you said it would only take a few of them to take us out. I know.”

  “Seriously, though, how are we going to destroy that mortaline?”

  I didn’t answer and peered straight ahead at the kiosk.

  Forno sighed. “I’ll land us right in the street. Might blow out a few windows, though.”

  “No one to care,” I said, and gathered the weapons and breather masks.

  We were up for a fight, but we didn’t find one outside the kiosk.

  After landing, the three of us secured our breathing masks and checked our weapons. I left the pulse rifle in favor of a blaster. Not as much firepower, but more accurate in close quarters, and easier to carry. And easier to hide, if need be, in my newly acquired flight jacket.

  I made sure Forno had Plenko’s finger with him and he did, wrapped in plastic and secure in the gray coat Brindos had worn. Forno had asked Dorie if it was all right to wear it. Dorie carried the mortaline sculpture in one hand, blaster in the other.

  The building containing the vault was quiet and completely empty when we climbed down the ladder ourselves. I took this as a good sign.

  Three access doors that would’ve required force to open had been blown apart. This I took as a bad sign.

  We continued down the last passage, weapons drawn, until we came near the end, and a sharp corner to the right. I motioned Dorie and Forno back a few steps as I peeked quickly around it.

  Twenty paces away, a heavy glass wall and door blocked the passage, and visible on the other side of it was the vault. As far as I could tell it was locked tight, the huge steel door glinting in the spotlight
s overhead.

  That was the good news. The bad news was the presence of three First Clan Helks on the left-hand side of the vault door, and two Memors and two humans standing on the right-hand side. They wore breather masks, and they all gripped weapons.

  Another man sat in a chair right in front of the door, and I blinked, surprised, wondering if I was seeing things. The man was not wearing a breathing mask. His eyes were closed, but he was alive. He moved his head from side to side, purposefully, but so slowly that it freaked me out more than a little. He was an older man, with wispy white hair and a rumpled old suit that looked like it had come from an earlier century. He was holding something long in one hand, what I thought might be a cane. But not a weapon.

  “Shit,” I whispered after I pulled my head back. Putting a finger to my lips to keep Dorie and Forno quiet, we backed up the passage some more; I suspected we wouldn’t be heard with the door between us and them.

  “Company,” I said quietly. “Behind a glass door, next to the vault.”

  Forno looked down at me, concerned. “How many?”

  “Eight, including three First Clan Helks. All armed except one old man, who’s sitting there without a mask.”

  Dorie breathed in sharply. “Old man?”

  “Seems old. Gray suit, white hair.”

  “Oh no,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Old and white hair. It must be Joseph.”

  “Joseph. Who’s Joseph?”

  “The concierge at the Orion Hotel on Temonus.”

  It meant nothing to me.

  “Well, he’s actually not the concierge,” she said. “The Joseph who helped us was the concierge. This must be the Joseph that Brindos said was Plenko’s One.”

  I felt a little shudder pass through me.

  “The same way Landry was Jennifer’s One,” Forno said. “An actual alien presence inside.”

  Dorie slipped past me and inched along the passage wall.

  “Careful,” I said.

  She took a quick look herself, then turned back to me and nodded.

  Oh, Christ.