by Lee Bond
The Sheet said the next Prote-O-Matic nearest him was in one of the security sections, so that was his next destination. For his own safety, this time he was going to use the machine as intended.
Sort of.
Chadsik Makes Landfall and Makes a Freaky Meat Puppet
Bolobo allowed the wave of relaxation to crash through him. The drugs were finally doing their job. Head lolling off to one side, he saw Rey pacing nervously by the doorway. In theory, she was there to keep unwanted visitors from entering the medical station.
In fact, Bolobo imagined she was keeping just as much an eye on him. In her drug-addled state of stimulant addiction, Reywin was having a very difficult time separating fact from fiction and was currently operating under the belief that the two of them –more her than him, naturally, as the addiction progressed- were the last two loyal Latelians left in the entire system.
Pointing out the obvious signs of loyalty covering every square inch of Densen Air Base –from banners and signs, logos and saluting soldiers- put Reywin into a rampage. Bolobo had no desire to deal with the brunt of her wrath again; she’d questioned his loyalty every five minutes, demanding proof or quotes from previous Chairpeople until he’d managed to hack Penzengraaf personnel files. It was maddening. Now that they were in Penzengraaf, her paranoia and lunacy was no less strident.
Reywin stopped pacing and lurched over to Bolobo’s side. “Did you do it properly?”
“Wh?” Bolobo tried to answer but couldn’t. The medical avatars had drugged him into next Tuesday, and little wonder; with his injuries being untreated for so long, it was amazing he was still alive. He mewled unhappily when Reywin picked him up by the collar of his stolen flight uniform, groaning sadly when she started slapping him conscious. “Go ‘way, Rey. ‘m hurt.”
Actually, it’d taken the last of his conscious effort to program the avatar from alerting a living doctor to remove his arm at the elbow. Rey’s insistence that they couldn’t go to a hospital for an obvious defensive wound and refusal to steal modest supplies for self-treatment had brought his wounds to the very edge of gangrene. Even if the autodoc’s ministrations worked half as well as possible, there was still only a one in four chance he’d be able to use his fingers properly.
No more hacking for Bolobo, he thought miserably. Not now. He was happy she’d finally relented to an autodoc, but again, he suspected it was more because she didn’t want to deal with a corpse than out of anything like loyalty.
Reywin slapped Bolobo so hard across the face that her own cheeks stung in sympathy. “Did you do it properly?” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Bolo. The hack.”
Head lolling backwards, Bolobo fought to regain consciousness. If he didn’t, Reywin would almost certainly do worse than refuse him the right of medical aid. The thought of being unable to protect himself from her … from her turned his stomach to ash. Tongue thick as cotton, Bolo spoke. “I’m … I’m … pretty sure, yeah.”
“Pretty sure?” Reywin demanded with quiet anger. “We are surrounded by anti-Latelian terrorists and you’re only ‘pretty sure’ you did your job properly? We have got to get this man down to the planet without anyone knowing about it and you’re ‘pretty sure’. That sets my mind at ease, Bolobo. When our heads are severed from our necks and the god-minded heathens drink our blood, I’m pretty sure we’ll die.”
“Actually,” Bolo shot back, shoving Reywin away clumsily, “I’m certain that if we have our heads chopped off, we’ll definitely die. Also, could you shout a little louder? I’m sure the OverCommander’s personal staff didn’t hear you clearly. Now if you don’t mind…”
He passed out, his last thoughts of momentous terror.
xxx
Reywin leaned against the autodoc’s control panel. “Well?”
Bolo looked at the sutures on his arm. His stomach lurched riotously. To his very unpracticed eye, the work done by the autodoc was … messier than expected. “What the fuck?”
“Oh. Right.” Reywin kicked the autodoc with her heel. It clanked hollowly. “Halfway through the operation it told me there wasn’t enough healthy tissue along the edges of the wound. It told me it wasn’t smart enough to perform a skin graft without the assistance of a medical professional, so I told it I was one. Best I could do, sorry.”
“Sorry?” Bolo looked at the wound again. The skin and tissue was a raw mass of poorly applied skin grafts, capillary reconstruction, and nerve repair. “Sorry? My arm looks dead from shoulder to wrist!”
“Well, if you hadn’t passed out like some kind of rampant drug addict, Bolobo, you could’ve maybe hacked into a hospital and stolen an avatar, right? The autodoc was incapable of providing you with proper service. It would’ve called in a regular doctor but you programmed it to think you and me were the only two people on the base.”
Reywin popped another stim into her mouth and chewed happily. The doctors didn’t want you to know, but there was a point when the foul taste of stim-chemicals actually became quite tasty. And they didn’t want you to know, because when it got to the point where the gum was tasty you got smarter. You could see things you’d missed before, you could think thoughts that a slower mind couldn’t even dream of. Thankfully, the storage locker the autodoc drew its medicines from had been stocked recently. She had enough stimulants to see her through to the end.
“Only because you would have killed anyone walking through the doors!” Bolobo snapped.
“True.” Chewing maniacally, Reywin caught Bolo’s gaze. “Well?”
Bolo threw his hands up in the air, ignoring both the shock of pain and the hideousness of his arm. When the job was done, he could buy himself a new one. He was going to have to. “Fine. Did I do the hack properly? I can’t say, Reywin. Since I was close to passing out from the pain and dying from infection because you’re stark raving paranoid, we must assume my hacking skills aren’t at their legendary best. At a guess, since we’re not being shot at by God soldiers and automated defenses, either they missed it completely or they haven’t gotten around to checking the logs.” He smirked. “Best I could do, sorry.”
Reywin contemplated shooting Bolo, but held off out of expediency; the only thing keeping him alive was his usefulness. She’d never tell the little man, but a half-functional Bolobo was worth three fully functional agents. When this whole thing was over and finished, though… the man knew too much to live. She couldn’t be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life.
“Excellent.” Reywin nodded professionally, bustling with efficiency and expertise. “Come. We’ve got a transpo to Penzengraaf. Leaves in ten. Can you walk without lurching around like an idiot?”
Bolobo gagged as the stench of Reywin’s destructive stimulant abuse wafted towards him with all the subtlety of a naked God soldier. If she spoke to anyone, they’d know once their sinuses cleared that she was a stim junkie. Everyone in the military used stims rightly enough, but addiction at Reywin’s level was dangerous. You got paranoid –as he already knew- but then you started suffering from delusions of grandeur. Not usually something you could afford to go through when you were in the military. “Sure, fine, don’t worry about me. Reywin, ah, your breath smells like stims. I think you should find some mouthwash or avoid talking to people.”
By way of reply, Rey stuffed another piece of stimgum in her mouth. She opened the door with one hand and shoved Bolobo through it when he got close enough.
xxx
Bolobo shifted nervously over to the left to avoid having to touch Reywin. It was childish, but he couldn’t help himself; every time he felt her presence, his skin crawled. Just as bad as her addiction, if anyone saw him flinch or otherwise pull back from his ‘commander’, the game would be over.
The two of them were sitting in the back of a transport carrier shifting much needed personnel from Densen to Penzengraaf; apparently someone designing the strategy for dealing with industrial shipments hadn’t understood a single word of what they’d read, leaving a skeleton crew of four
th graders to run the hastily repurposed port. As far as boons went, it was a great one, because with the amount of problems swamping the place, nobody was likely to stare too hard and long at hastily forged papers or the two buffoons flashing them all over the place. There were hundreds of military grunts shuffling in from all over the planet. People were being pulled out of retirement to fill the rosters at Penzengraaf, so two more odd ducks wouldn’t be noticed.
Being around Army made Bolo nervous. Trained by OverSecretary Terrance to be loyal to his particular point of view, the black ops hacker distrusted the intellectual capacity of everyone –including non-augmented soldiers- in the God Army to an extreme degree. With the exception of OverCommander Vasily: that man was an exceptionally adroit leader, marshaling the God soldier army with nothing less than perfection.
Ordinarily, Bolobo let his seniority and rank as ‘special agent’ smooth the way when dealing with the notoriously protocol-bound greenskins, so his skills at blending in were … well, nonexistent. There was a time and place for being smug and superior, and trying to pass as Army while surrounded by the bastards wasn’t it. Neither he nor Reywin walked, talked or acted like Army, and he was sweating so badly that he was sure the interior of the transpo would flood before they made it to Penzengraaf.
Reywin, on the other hand, was having the time of her life. Secure in the knowledge that she was smarter than every other person on the bus combined times two, she babbled merrily about anything striking her fancy. Since most of the army personnel on the transpo had just finished a twelve-hour shift and were now expected to do a minimum fourteen hours more in properly setting up Director Kamagana’s work models, they too were wired to one degree or another on stims. Everyone nodded and chatted and cracked jokes like there was no tomorrow.
What luck! He was on a bus full of stimheads. Bolo found himself precariously wondering if someone out there was messing with him.
All noise stopped the second the Quantum Communicator stuffed into Bolobo’s rucksack chimed with its instantly recognizable sound. Reywin turned slowly away from the handsome telecommunications officer she’d been chatting up to gaze into Bolobo’s rigid, white face.
The alert noise sounded again. Paralyzed by terror, Bolobo couldn’t move. Reywin couldn’t speak, afraid that she’d suddenly fuck up and spoil the whole deal.
The telecom officer broke the silence, snapping his fingers in front of Bolo’s nose. “Hey, sa, your Quey’s going off like a madman in a hoorhouse.” He looked at Rey. “What’s wrong with this guy? Hey, fella!”
“Hm? Oh. Oh. Heh.” Bolobo slapped himself upside the head. “Yeah, sorry. I was thinking about the Game … Ex… excuse me for a minute, everyone.”
Everyone -including Reywin, that insane bitch- went back to their conversations, albeit at a quieter volume to allow the Q-call to go through unimpeded; nobody present wanted to be slapped with a reprimand for conversations taking too long because they were being too noisy.
Bolobo hauled the ‘Quey’ out of his rucksack and staggered his way to the front end of the transpo. There were less people there, giving him privacy. The Q-comm shrilled loudly and he almost dropped it on his big toe. Bolo sat down quickly and accepted the call.
“’oy!” Chadsik al-Taryin shouted angrily, his antiquated accent sounding thin and distant through the small speakers. “Wot in the fuckin’ ‘ell does you fink you is doin’, makin’ me wait, eh?”
“I … I…” Having never seen the original data provided by Jordan Bishop, this was the first time Bolobo understood exactly why they were taking the suicidally dangerous risk of infiltrating a converted military base. If the man looked as bizarre as he sounded, Chadsik al-Taryin stuck out like a sore thumb. No. Worse than that. He stuck out like a man with half an arm that looked like death warmed over.
“Speak up, my son, I is ‘ard of ‘earing stupid, and you, my china, is defin’tly stupid.”
Bolo cast a discreet glance down the transpo corridors. No one but Rey was paying any attention, and amazingly enough given her narcotic fueled state of paranoia, she was doing a fairly good job of being secretive. “Sorry, sa. I’m not exactly in the best of locations.”
“Lissen,” Chad replied loftily, “I is early, sonny Jim. Turns out you fellas don’t ‘ave speed limits along the milit’ry lanes of travel, which is a good fing. Bein’ as I is mostly cyborg, wot that means is I traveled very very fast, yeah? I is on approach vector now. This is very good news for ya, right? Wot is you going to do about it?”
Bolobo couldn’t help himself. He looked at Reywin, an expression of utter panic on his face. She lurched out of her seat with a hastily applied apology and made her way hurriedly over to him. “What’s the fucking problem over here, Bolo?” she whispered venomously.
Bolo cast his eyes to the partially concealed Q-comm. Under his breath, he whispered, “He’s on approach vector now, Reywin. Not in a week. Not even in five days. Now.”
“Oh fuck me sideways.” Reywin muttered angrily. She’d heard Garth use it a few times and it suited her problems to a tee. This was a level of difficulty they’d never had to deal with. There was just no way they could infiltrate Penzengraaf quickly enough to assist Chadsik. Not safely. They were going to attract attention from all quarters.
Chad’s voice was full of cheer. “An’ I feels compelled to tell you lot I is not exactly overjoyed at the thought of landing at wot appears to be a milit’ry spaceport. I is not ‘Army friendly’, if you follow. It has been a long trip and I is finding myself very … clear. We … I is not liking this feeling.”
Reywin addressed Chadsik. “We’re on our way there now, sa. Delay your landing by …” She looked at Bolobo, who gestured the minimum time with a flash of his hands, “thirty minutes. Give us time to get into place.”
“Thirty minutes. I suppose we … I … could suffer some sort o’ engine malfunction or summink. After all, I is traveling somewot quicker than normal. An’ if you lot are typical of what we … bugger me sideways you filthy old twat … I is dealin’ wiv, I is avin’ no problems pullin’ a fast one.”
Reywin released a pent-up sigh of terror. “Good. Good. Excellent. When you land, we’ll be there to greet you.” She leaned in to whisper. “We’re dressed like Military Intelligence operatives right now. They don’t have any idea we’re sneaking you off.” Reywin winked broadly at Bolobo before wobbling back to her telecom friend.
“Wot’s wrong wiv your friend, mate? Sounds a bit, I dunno, off her rocker.”
“Stims.” Bolobo replied sadly. From the odd-sounding accent and the occasional difficulty with personal pronouns, it was a good bet Chadsik al-Taryin was ‘off his rocker’ as well. “Lots and lots of stims. And then some more on top of that. And probably some other stuff I don’t know anything about. Or want to. Send your identification signal and ship specs to this Q-comm, please. I’ll need to be able to show we knew of your arrival before they did.”
“Righty-ho.”
The Q-Comm relay echoed with senseless noises. Bolo thought certain he heard Chadsik talking to himself in two wildly different accents and closed his eyes miserably. The man they were sneaking onto the planet was also a lunatic. It only made natural sense.
The Universe was out to get him. Bolo just knew it.
“Oy, son, ‘ave a word wiv your lady-friend. See if you can score old Chad some o’ them stims or summink, yeah? I ‘aven’t ‘ad a good nod since I launched. Drugs is more or less bad for space flight, right? And, well, I … we …. Fuck … I is not liking the fings we … fucking ‘ell … I is hearing, yeah?” There followed four seconds of solid steel cursing and then the signal ended.
Stowing the Q-Comm back in his rucksack, Bolobo wished for the first time in his life he’d learned to play the piano instead of how to hack into computers. Instead of being in cahoots with a stim-addled agent on her way to sneak a cybernetic freak into Hospitalis, he’d be in a music conservatory writing a concerto. Fantastically boring, yes, but also virtually guaranteed to
keep his hands and fingers where they belonged. From the rucksack, sounds of downloading files reached his ears.
Bolobo closed his eyes and tried to catch a few minutes sleep.
Madmen and drugged-out agents flashed against his eyelids until he passed out.
xxx
A lowly private monitoring the Hungryfish as it made its descent through the atmosphere felt a thrill of panic as she saw it was moving at twice the legal limit. Fingers hovering above the firing buttons that would activate the rail cannons, she breathed slowly, calmly. Her fingers trembled, but didn’t move any closer; weapon-sensor avatars shrieked restlessly in her ears that the ship carried four or more Hand of Glory missiles and that destruction of the ship, alien and bizarre in its own right, would almost certainly result in activation of the planet-busters. Just one of those Glory missiles would demolish the planet for a lifetime. Four would crack the world into quarters like an egg.
There'd been warnings that the ship was coming, that it had permission to enter the system directly from OverCommander Vasily himself. Nevertheless, training was hard to ignore. Her fingers started moving closer to pushing the buttons that’d send thousands of kilograms of duronium pellets upwards in a metallic storm. Regardless of whether the pilot was cleared for entrance into the system or not, whoever was in the Hungryfish was a definite threat to Hospitalian security. Training, training said to protect the system at all costs …
“Private!” Someone shouted loudly in her left ear. Thankfully, it was also loud enough to draw her from an irrevocable course of action.
“Sa, yes, sa!” Private Aames leapt out of her chair and slammed into a picture perfect salute. The other privates tasked with monitoring ships paused only briefly in the execution of their duties before turning back to the dull chore of herding cocky merchant-pilots downwards without crashing into other ships; they were new at this ceaseless herding of vessels, and terrified they’d screw up. No one wanted another port disaster and as it turned out, avatars were positively useless at telling ships where to go.