Konto nodded. He had. It was not something he’d ever forget.
“Then you understand.” He sucked on his mustache for a moment, then folded his arms across his round chest. “It’s unfortunate, you know? That you’re not the Magister. See, I met him once. You know, with the armor on and everything. It was on a station much like this one, but a little further out by the Remnants.”
“Look, we don’t have time for—”
Howlanzer raised a hand, gesturing for silence. “The station was under attack. There was a fire on one of the decks. Smoke everywhere. People screaming. I remember trying to get through it, you know? The flames. But the heat. The heat, Mr Garr. It was … I couldn’t …”
He looked down, just briefly, steadying his voice. “I could hear them, through the fire and the smoke. My children. I could hear them, but I couldn’t reach them.” Howlanzer’s face lit up with the memory. “And then, there they were. There he was. Bounding through the flames, my children – just babies then – in his arms.”
The captain rubbed a hand across his face, trying unsuccessfully to disguise the fact he was wiping tears from his eyes. He cleared his throat. “I never did get a chance to thank him.”
Howlanzer’s chair squeaked across the floor as he stood up. “The Bioscanner you destroyed, it processes samples faster than I can tie my boots. Transmits its finding wirelessly, too. The whole chase thing you did was fun to watch, but ultimately pointless.”
Konto clenched his jaw and silently cursed modern technology.
“I don’t know who you are, but you aren’t Konto Garr,” Howlanzer said. “Unfortunately, there’s going to be a system malfunction in the next few minutes and that information, as well as all security camera footage of you, and Larry’s recorded statement, are going to be irretrievably corrupted.”
He patted the cardboard box meaningfully. “If you had been the Magister, those cuffs wouldn’t pose a problem.” He glanced at his watch. “Eighteen minutes until that room is stormed.”
Konto nodded his understanding. “Is Larry safe here?”
Howlanzer shook his head, just a fraction. Konto nodded again. “Thank you, captain.”
“No, Mr Garr,” said Howlanzer, snapping off the most polished salute he’d managed in years. “Thank you.” He smiled. “Justice strikes like a meteorite.”
“He never said that. It’s a myth,” Konto protested. “Seriously. It sounds so dumb. Why would he ever say something like that?”
Howlanzer shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know.”
Crisply lowering the salute, the captain about-turned and left the room, taking care to not quite close the door behind him. It took Konto a little under three seconds to lose the cuffs, then less than one to get up from his seat and flip open the flaps of the box. There, neatly wrapped in evidence bags, were the blaster, whip, tracker, comm-device and grenade he’d been carrying when the security team had arrested him. The folding knife was there, too, the blade scorched and black.
Tearing open the bags, Konto attached everything to his belt, then hurried to the door. He listened for a moment, before easing it open. The corridor beyond was empty of cops, but a solitary figure sat on a chair across from the interview room door.
“Hey kid,” said Konto, stepping into the corridor. Larry looked up. For a moment, he looked shocked, then a smile spread across his face. “You ready?”
6.
The elevator hummed gently as it glided upwards. Konto checked the charge in the blaster pistol for the third time in as many minutes, then tucked it into the back of his belt.
“I still don’t get it, Mr Garr,” said Larry. “Why did they let us go?”
“Because we hadn’t done anything wrong, Larry.”
“What about all those people you killed?”
“They were bad people, and they attacked us first. That’s allowed. Encouraged, even.” He thought about this for a moment. “No, allowed. Anyway, the captain … owed me one.”
Larry shrugged. “OK. So what’s the plan? We just jump out and start shooting?”
“No, that’s a terrible plan. We’re not taking the elevator all the way. We’ll get off on the floor below and—”
The elevator jerked to a stop with such force, Larry and Konto were both slammed against the ceiling. They hit the floor again just as the comm-device let out a squawk.
“I trust you are bringing the boy to hand him over.”
Konto recognized the voice. It was the metal-armed guy from the video. Ranock, he thought.
“Please wait where you are. I have sent some men to retrieve him,” the voice continued. “If you could possibly refrain from killing these ones, I’d appreciate that.”
Konto looked around, cursing himself. A tiny camera, no bigger than his thumbnail, was mounted in the corner of the elevator car, angled so it gazed down on them. Whipping out the blaster, he used the butt to smash the camera from its mounting, then crushed it underfoot.
Ranock tutted several times over the comm-device, like a parent telling-off a child. “Such needless destruction. We already know where you are. That achieved nothing.”
Konto raised the device to his mouth. “I guess you already know there are shock-troops on the way. You have maybe fifteen minutes until they storm the place. If I were you, I’d spend that time praying.”
Ranock let out a dry chuckle. “Oh, really? And tell me, friend, what should I pray for?”
“That they get to you first,” said Konto, then he snapped off the communicator, shoved it into his pocket, then slammed a fist against the elevator’s ceiling. A square hatch flew open on its hinges.
Larry peered up into the dark void beyond. “Whoa. How did you do that?”
“Maintenance hatch,” Konto explained.
Larry frowned. “Huh? Elevators don’t have maintenance hatches.”
“Well, clearly they do,” said Konto, gesturing upwards.
Larry puffed out his cheeks. “Mr Garr, I have been in hundreds of elevators, and not once have I ever seen one with a hatch in the ceiling.”
“Well, I’ve been in thousands, and they’ve all had hatches in the ceiling,” Konto said. He jumped up and caught the edge of the opening. “How else are you supposed to climb out and shimmy up the cable?”
Larry’s frown deepened. “Uh, cable?”
Hanging from one arm, Konto beckoned Larry closer with the other. Catching the boy’s shirt, he tried very hard not to show how much effort it took to lift him up through the hatch.
“Yeah, the cable. As in the thing that moves the elevator up and down.”
As Konto shoved Larry through the hatch, the boy suddenly became lighter. Much lighter. This was unfortunate, as Konto was still pushing with the same amount of force needed to lift Larry’s previous weight.
Larry flapped frantically as he sailed upwards, his shirt slipping through Konto’s fingers. “There’s no cable, Mr Garr!” Larry yelped. “It works on anti-grav.”
He bounced off one of the elevator shaft’s walls, and began to flip lazily as he soared up through the darkness. “Help!” he cried, his voice echoing around the narrow passageway.
“Oh, shizz,” Konto muttered. He caught the other edge of the hatch and heaved with both hands, launching himself upwards through the gap. The anti-gravity effect pulled him through, and he soared upwards. “Try to grab onto something, kid.”
“Trying, Mr Garr,” said Larry, grabbing uselessly at thin air as he spiralled slowly upwards. “But I don’t feel so good.”
“Larry, don’t you dare!” Konto barked. “I mean it, don’t even think about—”
Brrrwoooaaaaak!
The puke emerged from Larry’s mouth as a series of chunky brown and yellow bubbles. The force of their ejection, and Larry’s angle at the time, propelled the blobs downwards.
“Ugh, fonk.” Konto grimaced, then shut his mouth as he soared through the oncoming assault of barf bubbles. A few of them bounced wobbily off his face and upper body, their gloopy, ge
latinous contents quivering from the impact. The others sailed past him, and he was able to catch Larry’s arm and steady him before the boy could throw up again.
“Th-thanks, Mr Garr,” Larry croaked.
“Don’t mention it, kid. Now hold on while I—”
There was a high-pitched whine that seemed to come from the air itself. The anti-gravity effect ramped up sharply, almost wrenching Larry from Konto’s grip before they both shot upwards at eye-watering speed.
With his free hand, Konto grabbed for the walls of the shaft, but every viable handhold was just beyond his reach.
“Do something, Mr Garr!”
“I’m trying!” Konto barked. “Just hold on and don’t throw up!”
Scrabbling at his belt, Konto unhooked the whip. He snapped it towards a door mechanism as they raced past, but the anti-grav threw his aim high.
Another story whistled by. Konto cracked the whip towards the next door. It wrapped briefly around a lever, then uncoiled.
“Shizz!”
They had to be past the floor they had been aiming for now. The roof of the shaft was maybe twenty stories above, and closing fast. Konto snapped the whip out again. This time. Please.
He jerked to a stop. Larry’s hand slipped from his, but then the boy caught Konto’s legs, almost pulling off his pants. The anti-grav was still trying to drag them upwards. Konto’s muscles strained with effort as he tried to pull them closer to the door.
There was movement from below. Konto groaned as dozens of vomit-filled bubbles rocketed towards him, then bounced off his face and arms. Through the bubble storm, he saw another movement, too. Two Xandrie were in the elevator, peering up through the hatch. One of them said something into a comm-device and, a moment later, the elevator began to climb towards them.
Veins bulged in Konto’s neck as he tried to pull against the force of the anti-grav generator above them. It was no use. He was too weak. Too old. His shoulders burned and his hands ached, and no matter how hard he pulled, they were going nowhere.
“The bad guys are coming, Mr Garr!”
“I know, Larry.”
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know, Larry!”
There was a moment of silence. “I know what the Magister would do,” Larry said.
Konto groaned. “No, you really don’t.”
“I do, Mr Garr. He’d do this.”
Konto felt something jerk from his belt. He turned his head just enough to see Larry yank the grenade free, flick the switch, then toss is down towards the approaching elevator.
The grenade soared almost a full two inches downwards, before the anti-grav caught it and pulled it upwards. “Oh,” said Larry. “On second thoughts, maybe he wouldn’t have done that.”
Konto tightened his grip on the whip. “Larry, hold—” he managed, before the grenade hit the top of the shaft and detonated.
Several things happened at roughly the same time. The explosion, with the anti-grav working against it, was a low drama affair. Or at least, it was until the anti-grav equipment itself was damaged, at which point the flames erupted like an angry demon.
Almost simultaneously, gravity welcomed Konto and Larry back into its bosom and they swung down, then slammed against the wall below. Larry’s grip slipped again, but Konto managed to lift his legs and contort himself enough to catch the boy with one hand, while the other kept its grip on the whip.
Below them, even as they started their downwards swing, the elevator plunged downwards. The screams of the Xandrie inside started loud, faded quickly, and then were cut off by the crash of a metal box hitting a metal floor at tremendous speed.
With a lot of heaving, scrabbling, the odd bit of cursing and a worrying moment when it looked like Larry might throw up again, Konto got them both onto the narrow ledge on the shaft-side of the doors.
Digging his fingers into the gap between them, Konto heaved the doors apart. He and Larry both fell through together into a dimly-lit room. A handful of people were watching a two-headed figure standing on a small stage. The heads were taking it in turns to sing into a single microphone, their eyes flitting left to right as they read the words from a screen.
Ugh. A song bar. Konto almost considered throwing himself back into the elevator shaft and taking his chances.
Instead, he grabbed Larry by the arm and pulled him along, searching for the exit. On stage, both heads had a bash at a warbling harmony, failed miserably, then bowed to the muted applause that followed their performance.
“Lovely stuff!” echoed a man’s voice from the speakers. “Now, who will our next act be? How about you, sir?”
A spotlight illuminated around Konto. Without breaking step, he drew the blaster pistol and shot out the bulb.
Song bars. Kroysh, he hated song bars.
They found the exit quickly and hurried out onto the plaza. It was low-market bars and restaurants as far as the eye could see, their frontages plastered with animated neon and the odd flickering hologram.
Konto spotted three elevators within easy reach, but they couldn’t risk that again. The Xandrie obviously had some level of control over the transport system, and Konto wasn’t about to give them the chance to take advantage of it again.
“You,” he barked, pointing to a shifty-looking man with a face like a startled sky-weasel. “What floor is this?”
“Um, um, what?” the man stammered.
“Floor number. Hurry.”
“F-four … four-six-eight.”
Larry’s eyes widened. “Four-four-six-eight? I didn’t even know it went that high! Well, there is no way I’m climbing all those stairs.”
“Four-six-eight,” Konto said, barging past the man and pulling Larry with him. “We’re six above them. Come on.”
They hit the stairs. Larry didn’t complain this time, largely because they were going down, instead of up. He did open his mouth to say something as they began their descent, but Konto gestured for silence. They tiptoed down a few flights, Konto holding his blaster lowered, but ready.
The door leading out to four-six-three had been welded shut. The floor below – where the children were being held – was the same.
“Fonk. They’ve barricaded themselves in,” Konto muttered.
“Can we break it down?” Larry asked.
“Maybe, if we still had the grenade,” Konto said, slightly more accusingly than he meant to. He caught Larry’s expression and almost apologized, but there was no time. He took out the tracking gadget and realized he’d been too scared to look at it until now, when there was no other choice.
The sense of relief when he saw the life-sign data from Deenia’s tracker took him a little by surprise. Of course he was happy, he’d been expecting that. What he hadn’t expected were the tears pooling at the corners of his eyes. He blinked them away, zoomed in on the floors around them, then set off up the stairs again.
“Uh, where are you going, Mr Garr?” Larry whispered. “Shouldn’t we be trying to get through?”
“Can’t, it’s sealed shut. The blaster won’t make a dent in it,” said Konto. “But I have another idea.” He quickened his pace, and Larry hurried after him. “I just hope we’ve still got time.”
Floor four-six-four was mostly designated parkland, with lots of grass, a small lake, and a rainbow of different colored flowers that thrived in the UV glow of the artificial sun. The sights and the sounds and the smell of it stopped both Konto and Larry in their tracks.
The world they’d come from was just on the right side of being a barren, inhospitable dustbowl. The air was dry, the soil was rocky, and the flora was mostly limited to a variety of thorny or poisonous plants, trees and bushes.
Here, the air was heavy with moisture. Fat, furry insects flitted lazily from flower to flower. A soft breeze, pumped in through hidden vents, rustled the bright yellow and green leaves of the towering trees.
Picnickers on blankets dotted the grass. In the distance, a child threw a ball for her pet theeg. There
was a faint paff as the animal teleported ahead of the ball, and the girl fell about laughing when the ball bounced off the back of its head, causing it to spin on the spot and start chasing its tails.
It was, by quite some margin, the most beautiful place Larry had ever seen. It didn’t even make Konto’s top fifty – sure, it was nice, and a world away from what home was like, but he’d seen far more of the galaxy than most people – so he recovered from the surprise more quickly than Larry, and quickly marched on across the grass.
As he walked, he studied his scanner. It led him in a zig-zag pattern past picnickers, around the lake, and over to a dense copse of trees standing along the deck’s curved outer wall. Winding through the trees, Konto found what he was looking for.
Having quickly acclimatized to the natural, organic feel of this deck, the metal door and illuminated sign above it seemed almost offensively out of place.
“Emergency exit,” read Larry, panting slightly with the effort of keeping up. “Is this another staircase, Mr Garr?”
“Not quite, Larry,” said Konto. The door worked on a simple mechanical lever. Konto pulled it, releasing the lock mechanism, then pushed through into a room that was completely unlike the deck they’d just left.
It was a cavernous, yet spotlessly clean room, with banks of equipment and shiny chrome lockers lining the walls. Low, calming music lilted from hidden speakers, and soft lighting painted the whole area in a comforting fuzzy glow. It had the feel of a warehouse, but one that probably had an exceptional record for health and safety, and record-breaking levels of employee satisfaction.
Illuminated strips along the floor pointed the way to the room’s far wall, where scores of escape pods sat nestled in their launch tubes. Larry gazed at them for a few moments, trying to figure out what they were. When it clicked, his eyes went wide.
“Wait, we’re not running away, are we, Mr Garr?”
Konto shook his head and made for the closest locker. “Of course we aren’t.”
Space Team: A Lot of Weird Space Shizz: Collected Short Stories Page 9