“Some is more than enough,” Helot finished the thought. He closed his eyes and felt his hands ball into fists, fingernails digging into his palms. If he had needed a reason for leaving these people behind, he was getting one.
§
“Well, shit,” Bruce said, looking across the lobby. “You were right.”
They were on the fourth floor of the security base, as far away from the riot as they could be. Stein had guessed there would be fewer guards up here and had been proven correct — the lobby was empty.
“It seems your distraction is still fairly distracting.”
“That’s too bad,” Bruce said. “I was kinda wanting to shoot my way out.” Bruce had come armed, pistols for both himself and Stein, rounded out with a pair of stun grenades. Stein’s hand touched the weapon on her hip, fingers flicking away as soon as she did.
“Still might get the chance, buddy.” They didn’t have to take the same way out of the aft that Bruce had taken in, and indeed would have had to fight their way through a semi–naked melee to do so. Bruce still had his tools with him and could open any of the bulkhead doors he wanted. They just had to get to one first.
Stein walked across the lobby towards the front door, Bruce trailing just behind her. The doors slid open, and she stuck her head out, looking north. No bulkhead doors there — just one of the security checkpoints a block away, a half–dozen officers set up behind plastic barricades.
“Think they’ll notice us?” Bruce asked, just behind her.
“Well, I don’t want to go back inside,” she replied. “So, let’s find out. Be cool.”
“Got it. I am inconspicuous,” Bruce declared. Stein did a double–take at the big man with the too small security uniform and a robot strapped to his hip. She took a deep breath, then set out across the street.
They hadn’t even made it halfway before they heard shouts of recognition from the barricade. Breaking into a sprint, they crossed the rest of the street at a run, rounding the intersection out of sight.
“They were looking for us!” she shouted.
“No, you were too conspicuous!” Bruce shouted back. They reached the next block, a side street, Stein turning north to the closed bulkhead door there. Bruce grabbed her on the shoulder to stop her. “No way. We’re not gonna have enough time.” He jerked his head south. “Come on.”
So, they ran south, footsteps and shouts behind them. Stein followed Bruce as he picked his way through the smaller streets and hallways, finally realizing he was taking them to one of their old haunts, a pressure boosting room, from where they could access a variety of mechanical areas. Stein ducked inside the room, dominated by the massive air plenum. Bruce locked the door behind her. “Think we lost ’em?” he asked.
“No. Not at all,” she replied. It wouldn’t take long to track them down here. She turned to face the plenum, where a fan boosted the pressure on one of the ship’s main arterial ducts. Her eyes followed the ducting out of the room, trying to remember where it led, where there were better places to hide. She stifled a chuckle. “You know what we’re close to?”
“Death?” he guessed. “Or were you being sentimental? Each other?”
Stein squinted. “M. Melson’s studio.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ve figured out everything there is to know about that guy, Stein.”
“Yes, but that guy’s studio is a better place to hide than here.”
Bruce looked at the ducting and groaned. “You’re right, but fuck you for it.”
Stein opened a hatch on the plenum, exposing the filter chamber, making way for Bruce to step through before following him, closing the hatch behind her. This was a narrow space, a spinning fan blade behind a grate on their right, a screen of cellulose filters on their left. Stein selected a filter at waist level, and lifted it from its slot. She crawled through the gap, then got out of the way, allowing Bruce to enter somewhat less gracefully, before carefully replacing the filter behind him. A series of smaller ducts were arrayed in front of them, screened by a set of dampers. Selecting one of these ducts, she turned sideways and easily slipped through a pair of damper vanes. Bruce simply bent one of the vanes out of the way then back in place. Beyond them, the duct soon narrowed, forcing them to begin crawling and Bruce to begin moaning.
Ten minutes later, Stein was over the spot where she could look down into M. Melson’s studio. “Oh, Bruce, you sprightly fucking gazelle,” she said, seeing the evidence of her friend’s previous visit to the room, a damper hanging open and the ceiling laying in splinters on the floor below.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Bruce asked from behind her.
Lowering herself through a little more gently, Stein examined the room. There were the removed ceiling tiles and the gash in the ceiling that Bruce had found. Which meant there must be a disconnect directly above the room. The conspirators must have known that one was going to jam, and cut through it before they attempted to separate. Nearly blinding a wayward intruder as they did so.
Bruce entered the room behind her, easing himself down from the vent with his powerful arms, landing on both feet with surprising grace. “Nailed it,” he said, adding a bow. Stein shook her head, then entered the closet in the back of the studio. She bent down to open the access hatch, interrupted by a groan from behind her. “No way that’s going to happen,” Bruce said. “I’m not going to fit in there. We’ll hide here.”
“I know. Just considering our options.”
From the studio was the sound of a door opening. Bruce and Stein turned to see a surprised–looking naval engineer staring back at them, carrying a massive bulky object by its two handles. Dark goggles hung around his neck. “Hey, guys. Just here to cut the clamps.”
Stein nearly choked in surprise that two ill–fitting security costumes had fooled someone at close range. “We know,” Bruce said, thinking slightly quicker than her. “We were just clearing the room for you.”
“Huh,” the engineer said. “Okay. But you guys will probably want to clear out of here.” He fingered the goggles hanging around his neck. “This thing gets pretty bright.”
“Oh, we know,” Bruce said with a smile.
The engineer looked at him curiously. “Hey, why are your pants so tight? Wait. Who are you guuuMPH…”
His question was cut short by a fist to the nose, sending him tumbling backwards, the massive tool falling down on top of him. “Careful!” Stein yelled at Bruce, still advancing on the engineer. Bruce realized the danger, leaping back just as a bright blue blade erupted out of the fusion torch. Stein was staring right at it, immediately blinded, stumbling backwards into the closet. Again the letters VLAD danced in the center of her vision. The hiss of the fuse torch filled the room until it was cut off by another thump and strangled cry.
Stein opened her eyes again, blinking rapidly. “Balls! That is bright,” Bruce said, somewhere off to her left. Her vision slowly returned to normal, the ghostly, misshapen VLAD slowly fading from view. She looked over to see the engineer on the floor, fuse torch beside him, Bruce standing over him, doing his own blinking.
“What’d you do?” she asked.
“Kicked him in the face.”
Stein got to her feet. “Good.” She crossed the room to examine the fuse torch. “Hey, did you see anything…funny…when that thing came on?”
“What?” Bruce asked. He bent down to pick up the fuse torch. “I saw you falling backwards on your ass. That was kind of funny, in a very rudimentary slapstick way. Why? What’d you see?”
Stein shook her head. “It’s nothing.” She looked up at the ceiling, ignoring Bruce’s suspicious gaze. Her eyes traced out the scar in the ceiling, where the fuse torch had first shown her VLAD. “He must have been here to hack away at the disconnect again. I guess one or more of them jammed.”
Bruce turned the fuse torch over in his hands. “Think we can use this for anything?”
“I think we can use it for cutting things.”
“Okay. But do we need t
o cut anything?”
“Ah. I can’t think of anything we need to cut, no.”
“Well, I don’t want to lug it around.” Bruce said, smashing it against the wall. Various pieces of the torch rained down at his feet.
“You ever wonder if maybe those things explode when you do that to them?” Stein asked. “I mean, it is a fusion torch, right?”
“Seems to be safe,” Bruce said, dropping it on the floor. He then started feeling the engineer’s pockets, patting him down. Finding something, he pulled out a terminal. Seeing Stein’s expression, he said, “What? We are terrorists now.”
“We already have terminals.”
Bruce grabbed the unconscious engineer’s hand and slid the terminal into its grip. The screen flashed to life with what the engineer had been looking at. Bruce examined the screen and smiled. “But now we have all his notes.” With a couple of taps, he instructed it to begin copying files to his own terminal.
Stein pursed her lips. “How’d you know that’d work?” she asked, looking at the engineer’s limp hand on the terminal. “Never mind. Not the first time you’ve punched someone in the face.”
“Hopefully, not the last, either.”
Stein looked down at the unconscious engineer on the floor. “Someone’s going to notice him missing before long.” She looked back to the closet and the hatch over the crawlway access.
“Don’t say it,” he said.
“It’ll work,” she said. “You’ll fit. It will suck, but it’ll work.”
Bruce looked at the closet unhappily. “I am going to get stuck and die down there.”
“I’d come back to feed you.”
§
After an hour of scraping and crawling and bitching, Stein and Bruce emerged into the light. Stein pulled herself out into the open and turned around to watch the little maintenance robot get pushed out of the tube behind her. A few seconds later Bruce emerged, looking not unlike an overused pipe cleaner.
Following a minute of stretching, knee massaging, and complaint ignoring, Stein got to her feet. They were in another pressure booster room, a massive fan dominating half the room, connected to another arterial duct. She crossed the room and opened the filter chamber, peering inside. They would hopefully have lost the trail of any pursuers by that point, but the plenum would still be an excellent place to hide. Pulling strongly on the hatch to open it against the negative air pressure, she stepped inside the plenum and through another filter wall.
“Jesus, it’s hot in here,” Bruce said, dripping sweat as he stepped through the filter wall behind her. A damp man in many conditions, Stein knew he wouldn’t react well to their new hiding spot. Thanks to a reheat coil on the other side of the fan, the air here was much hotter than in the other artery, which is why it was such an ideal place to hide. He dropped the little robot on the floor and sat down beside it.
“Good place to hide from IR scans,” she said. “Though I now wonder if they’ll simply be able to smell us in here.”
Bruce nodded and stripped off the upper portion of his uniform, fanning air under his upstretched arms. “So, what’s the plan?” he asked.
“Don’t have one.”
“Good, me neither. Wanna play cards?”
Stein smiled and nodded sleepily. Whether it was the temperature, or the adrenaline wearing off, she suddenly felt very tired. She sat down against the thin metal wall of the ducting and slumped back, letting her eyes close. “So, you think we’re safe here?” he asked.
She tipped to one side, lying down on the floor, head resting on folded arms. She could hear him messing around with the little robot, distracting himself with his hands. “Are we safe anywhere?” she responded, before drifting off to sleep.
Previously
Sure you could, but why would you want to?
Harold turned off the display and rubbed his eyes. Another dead end. The message from the fabrication clerk cut right to the heart of the matter: there was no legitimate reason anyone would possibly want to print disposable bits of plastic on the Argos. Every bit of information that anyone could possibly want to see could be displayed or distributed far more readily on a terminal. Everyone had one of those; they were practicably disposable themselves.
Three months had passed since Allan Eichhorn, the Argos Extreme editor, had been found strangled. The second murder in a year had attracted surprisingly little attention in the press, most of that from Argos Extreme itself. The other feeds had been faintly dismissive of the story. Harold got the sense the dead editor wasn’t widely liked amongst his peers. And with other, more pressing events rolling around — mandatory genetic screenings, wide–scale gene tinkering, the Turn — Eichhorn would have had to have died multiple times a week to stay on the feeds.
Harold didn’t know how the young editor had been discovered by the conspirators, but he could guess. Security was monitoring the network, scanning it for copies of whatever information Kevin had stolen. That in itself was a gross abuse of their powers, but not a surprising one, at least when considered in light of the gross abuse of their duty to not murder people. The lesson to take from it was clear: anyone who put that information on an active terminal ended up dead. Which was strangely comforting; all of his paranoia and precautions had not been in vain.
“And that is why, Mr. Fabrication Helpline, I can’t simply send out an e–vite,” Harold said to his desk. He sat up in his chair and stretched, back arched, hands grasping at the air behind him. The pamphlet angle had seemed like an ideal solution. He couldn’t tell one person at a time — that just seemed to result in one person getting brutally murdered at a time. He needed to tell a lot of people, all at once. Without using the network. Handing out pamphlets on a corner was a laughably inefficient solution, but that in itself might be an advantage. It meant security probably hadn’t even considered it. Harold could get flyers into hundreds of people’s hands before security found out; he’d even drummed up a couple of cloak and dagger schemes for distributing them semi–anonymously. But if he couldn’t even make the flyers in the first place…
His terminal flashed, alerting him of an incoming appointment. Harold yawned and stood up, grabbed his lab coat, and left the office. The gene tinkering was going on around the clock and had been since the captain and mayor had agreed to make genetic screenings mandatory for every person on board the ship. It had taken a few months for Dr. Kinison to sign off on Harold’s automation scheme for the gene–tinkerers, a delay which frustrated Harold no end. Although a bureaucracy of only two people, it was still, somehow, incredibly inefficient. But it was the law: gene tinkering was a fussy technology, prone to concurrency errors, overwriting problems, and a host of other spooky issues. However frustrating, the multiple layers of oversight were a necessary part of the work.
As he walked to the operating room, he examined his next patient’s chart, refreshing his memory on the man’s condition. Martin Stahl, 26 years old. 3.4 X 105 Denebs off baseline, across all major organs, higher variances in the liver and testicles. Not the worst he had seen. But not that great either. Mr. Stahl’s life had been shortened by ten to twenty years without his permission. And he had no chance of procreating, at least not on this ship. Harold entered the operating room, “Hello, Martin. My name’s Dr. Stein.”
“Hey, Doc.” Martin looked up from his spot in the comfy chair. The big padded chair which sat in the center of the operating room was a pleasant surprise for most new gene–tinkering patients. Whether the patient was relaxed or not turned out to have little effect on the tinkering process, but after the comfy chair had been tried once during an early trial, it had proven so popular that it soon became a tradition.
The only other furniture in the room was a desk set against the wall and a small, wheeled stool. Harold pulled the stool over to Martin and sat down. “So, I understand you’ve absorbed massive amounts of radiation,” he said, smiling at his patient’s suddenly enormous eyes. “Relax. It’s entirely treatable.”
Martin nodded, h
is throat clenching up and down. “The nurses said it was no big deal.”
Harold smiled. If it had been no big deal, Martin wouldn’t be sitting here. A simple system of screenings and pre–screenings had been set up to sort out the simple cases from the bad ones, and with a couple of decades of experience poking around in the genome, Harold didn’t get tasked with the simple ones. “It’s not.” Harold said. “In fact, we’re almost done.”
“But I just got here. I mean you just got here. I got here about an hour ago.”
“I’m sorry about the wait,” Harold said, lying. “And the reason we’re almost done is because I’ve been working on your course of treatment for the last three days.” That was mostly true — he had started the process three days earlier. But most of the work was automated, the nanobot programming determined algorithmically, based on the statistical analysis of the patient’s current genetic variance and the baseline genome kept on each patient’s file. Harold only had to review the work. His main role was simply being human, a living mind to ride herd over the nanobots, a bit of technology that humanity still felt a bit uncomfortable around. Laws on Earth and the Argos ensured these machines were only let out of their cage under the close supervision of someone who possessed several degrees and was capable of passing regular sanity tests.
“Basically, we’re just going to need you to ingest a couple pills, and then enter quarantine for about four weeks while the tinkering takes effect.”
Martin looked at the clear plastic bottle Harold produced from a pocket and the large gray pills inside. “Are these nanobots?”
Harold smiled warmly. “They are. Don’t worry. It’s completely safe.” Seeing Martin look unconvinced, he added, “They almost never drive anyone around like a puppet anymore.” A pause. “I’m kidding, Martin.”
A choked mockery of a laugh slipped from Martin’s throat. “Thanks, Doc,” he eventually wheezed out. “I guess I owe you one. If you ever need anything, just let me know.”
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