by Lee Bond
Bolobo sniffed imperially at Aames. He pointed at the monitor bank displaying Chadsik’s approach. The ship was screaming its way into their atmosphere. Sensors were working overtime to highlight the endless parade of weapon systems, indicating that the Hungryfish was just as dangerous as its pilot was. He groaned mentally. They were helping this loon onto the planet! “Please tell me you weren’t in the process of destroying that vessel, private.”
“Sa.” Since Aames knew she’d been about to do just that, she couldn’t rightly deny it. Her eyes wandered of their own accord over to the si who’d come in with the Military Intelligence Officer; she was lounging scruffily against a bank of monitors, poking into directories and looking generally seedy.
“Private …” Bolobo peered at the private’s nametag, “Private Aames. The Offworlder aboard that vessel is here to broker the sales of those Trinity weapons to us. Do you want me to believe that you would rather destroy one Offworlder rather than acquire technology sufficient to destroy a billion? We wouldn’t even need to send in God soldiers with the tech behind Glory missiles, private. We could conquer worlds without losing a single life.” Behind him, Reywin giggled. His ‘repaired’ wound ached fiercely beneath the restrictive fabric of his uniform. Reywin blew him an air kiss. This was all so fucked up.
“N…no, sa.” Aames fired off another salute. Her prote chimed. It was the Offworlder. “Sa, if I may?”
Bolobo flicked his hand, sending the private back to her chair. He looked over his shoulder and tried to get Reywin to stand next to him, but she was pointedly ignoring him.
“Offworlder vessel Hungryfish, this is Private Aames, aerospace traffic control. Please decrease your entry speed to specified limits.”
“Makin’ you nervous, eh, my dove?”
“You are in violation of the law, Hungryfish, please decrease your speed.” Aames was all too aware that the MIO stood directly behind her. “Please?”
“Fine, my poppet, fine.”
Aames heaved a sigh of relief as the tension in her shoulders drained away; on-screen, the Hungryfish, which was now being tracked by cameras, slowed to the proper speed and began angling itself for vertical landing. Behind her, Bolobo muttered thanks. To Aames, the angle of descent was too steep.
“Aerospace control, w… ha, I is lookin’ for a man wot should be there.” Chadsik’s voice drew curious stares from the other control privates. “Dunno ‘is name, but ‘e should be some sort of mil’try fella-me-lad.”
Bolobo tasked his prote into Aames’ netLINK. “I’m here, Chadsik. You are cleared for landing at pad …” he took the flash from the private, “four seventy-three. Decrease speed further and maintain your current heading. My associate and I will greet you at … in the … room.”
Chad grunted. “Wot’s this hooraw about me ‘avin’ to spend some time in ‘quarantine’?”
Bolobo looked over his shoulder at Reywin, who shrugged. It was something neither one of them had had the time, skill or patience to accomplish in the short while they’d been on Penzengraaf. On base for twenty minutes, they’d barely had time to make it to Flight Control, let alone secure a way for Chadsik to bypass standard procedures. About the only thing they’d been able to accomplish during the mad dash down corridors was verify that –horrifyingly- OverCommander Vasily was already aware of Chadsik’s presence in the system. The only thing keeping the whole ‘mission’ on track was the blatant fact that no one, not even the OverCommander, had the authority to jeopardize Latelyspace’s relationship with Jordan Bishop. Whether or not the military commander accepted the falsified documents concerning the Offworlder’s reasons for visiting, Bolo and Rey had had no choice but to continue.
“We … we will handle necessary entrance protocols onsite, sa.”
“Bugger me, mate.” Chad’s irritation crackled and hissed through the speakers. “I is finkin’ that don’t sound at all wot like I wanted to ‘ear. Shit and piss and fuck, if we is expected to sit in a fuckin’ little room wiv nuffink to do whilst you all jerk each uvver off, we is demanding prostitutes, drugs …”
“Safe landing, sa.” Bolo terminated the conversation, ears glowing hotly. To make sure Chadsik al-Taryin didn’t take the opportunity to call back and continue the tirade –mixed pronouns and all-, the agent blocked all incoming communication requests. It was tricky, since he had little experience with Latelian/Trinity hybrid technologies, but he thought it’d last. The man was an unsubtle torrent of filth.
“Private Aames.” Bolobo barked with an authority he didn’t feel. “Inform security at the landing site that we are on our way there, and that our guest is to be shown courtesy and respect. They are not to engage him in any way, shape or form. He is to be held, and held with courtesy.” He blinked at how stupid he sounded, especially since he’d repeated himself, but all in all, he thought he was doing a fine job. He just hoped with every fiber of his pain-riddled body that no one looked at or spoke with Chadsik al-Taryin in any way that the Offworlder might find offensive.
“Yes, sa.” Aames hastened to do exactly that, immensely relieved when the two officers left the room.
xxx
Chadsik al-Taryin was enormously happy to be on solid ground. Although his journey from Trinity to Hospitalis had lasted only a few weeks, he was at heart a groundpounder. Trapped on a small ship with nowhere to go and nothing to do was never any fun and there was always the problem of … the problem.
Ever since he’d escaped from Offworld abduction, he’d been of two minds. Literally. One of those minds was the one he was used to, the one he’d grown up with sloshing around inside his skull and he knew it was crazy. He was crazy. You had to be, to escape Arcade City in the manner he’d done, and he was just fine with that. That wasn’t the issue.
The issue was the other mind. The one who made him talk funny, the one who made him do things he’d rather not. It was crazy, too. Except differently. Chad had tried to explain it to one of those brain doctors, but he hadn’t understood. He’d just said that Chad suffered from extreme psychopathy and that had been that, as they say.
Chad knew he was insane. It was an unpleasant fact, and one that he readily accepted every morning when he woke up. What he didn’t like was having to listen to someone else who was insane, especially when that crazy person was inside his own head. The human skull should only have room for one brain. He’d done hundreds of scans of his noggin through the years in search of that second brain and nothing ever showed up. He knew it was in there. You couldn’t be crazy enough to be two different types of crazy. That was an impossibility.
Drugs helped, obviously. Great loads of drugs in all manners. Chad spent most of his time burying that crazy bastard voice under tons of narcotics and he counted himself lucky it worked as well as it did. The things the Voice made him do …
Flying from one system to another medicated to the eyeballs and back again and fighting the urges towards self-destruction that being that high generated was unwise. Space was full of stuff, a lot of which seemed intentionally harmful to peaceful cyborgs, so when he traveled, he traveled dry.
The Voice loved that. The Voice ran rampant during space travel, didn’t it just?
If it weren’t for the hundred million dollars offered by Jordan Bishop for the timely departure of the laughably named ‘Garth Nickels’, Chad knew he wouldn’t’ve left Ground Zero. A hundred mil was a lot of dosh.
So Chad had the mother of all Joneses going on and if any of the motherfuckers standing guard gave him the fish eye, the stink eye or any kind of eye at all, he rather doubted his ability to keep from killing them, drain on his artistic skills such murders would be or not. The Voice was painting a lurid picture in their spilled blood, and his fingers itched to create the palette.
In order to keep the Voice amused and his hands from doing any accidental murder, Chad was crouching on the table in the middle of the room, croaking like a particularly deranged crow. Any second now, one of the soldiers would look over his shoulder….
Chad flapped his black trench coat and crowed loudly while peering sideways at one of his armed guards; a simple trick with some internal machinery had turned his eyes lidless, black and reflective. The Voice cackled merrily, using his throat.
To his vast pleasure, the soldier shivered uncontrollably and edged a few inches further away. Chad laughed as well, enjoying the sight.
The door opened. Two lanky Latelians –whom he assumed were his contacts, as he hadn’t seen anyone else but the guards- stormed into the room, snapped off some impressive sounding commands that sent the soldiers guarding him scurrying, then shut the door. The fella heaved a ridiculous sigh of relief as he monkeyed around on his fancy wrist computer. The girl did nothing but stink of severe stim abuse and madness.
He hopped amiably down from the table and set his eyes back to normal. He flicked his cloak ends about, enjoying the sounds. “Forty-two minutes, free and one ‘alf seconds, my son. That is an awful long time for me to sit about croakin’ like a bird.” He made no mention of the Voice. New friends never understood.
“You’re lucky we were even able to get this far, sa.” Bolobo muttered angrily. “We had some difficulties passing security at the final stages.”
“He touched me.” Reywin piped up, arms crossing defensively. “You know they’re all spies and traitors and he touched me. Can’t get the traitor germs on me. I’m smart enough to know that’s how they get you.”
Chad stared at Reywin, head tilting from one side to the other as Reywin shuffled nervously from foot to foot. “Good Christ, son, she’s a lunatic. Wot in the ‘ell is goin’ on around this place?”
Bolobo dug a spare proteus out of his pack and shoved it at Chadsik, studiously ignoring the man’s cursing. “There’ve been … complications. Lots of them. Put this on and follow us.”
Chad held the offending piece of hardware between two fingers, glaring at it with glittering emerald eyes. “Wot the fuck is this?”
“A prote.” Bolobo went over to Reywin and looked deep into her eyes. She kissed him soundly on the cheek and threatened to kill him. When Chadsik didn’t respond, he continued. “You need it to receive data.”
“Oh.” Chad stuck the device to his leg, ignoring Bolobo’s look of confusion. “Why din’t you say so.” He breezed past Bolobo and the madwoman, booted the door open and wandered off in search of their car. He muttered, in a distinctly different accent, “Bunch of lunatics.”
Reywin laughed. “You’d better hurry up, Bolo. He’s a crazed killer.”
xxx
The moment she was comfortable Bolobo wasn’t going to burst through the door, Reywin turned to the cybernetic assassin, a cold, calculating look on her face. “I want more money.”
Chad, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room pecking away at the quaint proteus attached to his ankle, completely ignored her. The chances of anyone asking him for more money simply did not exist. It was unthinkable. There was his money, and there was their money. Two different things.
Reywin strode across the room and plunked down in front of Chad. “Did you hear me?”
Chad stopped playing with the proteus. It was a cute little gadget, he supposed. If you were child. “Is this all the information you’ve got on this fella?”
“What?” Reywin resisted the urge to scratch at her arms. The man’s voice didn’t play fair. It kept changing accents, sometimes in the middle of words. Sometimes it used full words, other times it did that funny thing where it was part words. How crazy did you have to be for that to happen?
Rey hoped she was smart enough to keep from catching Chadsik al-Taryin’s madness.
Chad pulled the proteus apart with his fingers and began flicking the pieces into a corner of the ramshackle room they’d rented. As far as hideouts went, it was piss-poor.
“Well,” he replied, “it seems to me you and your friend as was ‘ired to watch this fella Nickels so that when I got to this stinkin’ piss hole I would find it simple to kill ‘im. If I understand ‘ow you all count your days and monfs and whatnot, wot you’ve given me ‘asn’t been updated in a long time. Busy chewin’ up all those stims, eh, eh? Come on, lass, tell me the troof. What have you been up to?”
“I want more money.” Reywin persisted, driven by chemical courage. “Do you understand how difficult this was? Can you possibly …”
Chadsik moved sinuously to his feet in a whirr of articulated joints. “Love, I don’t give two shits in a forest for how difficult it’s been. The moment you and your crew –don’t think I’ve missed the fact that where there was four there’s now two- went off the reservation for a piece of the pie was the moment you stopped getting to care about things like ‘hazard pay’ and ‘difficulty’. Do you understand? You were hired to watch this person, and you have not done a thorough enough job, technically, to warrant payment at all. Now,” Chadsik continued with perfect honesty, “it isn’t that much of a problem for me. I am perfectly all right in doing my own study, but I would check your greed at the door. Jordan Bishop doesn’t negotiate with employees.”
“You can give me some of yours, then.” Reywin pointed her gun at Chad’s head. The other voice, while sounding more reasonable than the weirdly accented FrancoBritish one nevertheless terrified her to the bones. Worse still, it seemed like he wasn’t even aware his voice had changed. The man was a stark raving lunatic! The whole world had gone mad! Luckily, she was still sane. “Or you can die.”
Chad blinked, and laughed at the weapon. The Voice had had a bit of a run there for a moment, but he gleaned the situation quickly enough. “Love, I fink your stim usage ‘as got you all soft in the melon. Pointin’ a gun at me ain’t too much bovver, but … askin’ a lad for ‘is piece o’ the pie? That’s just not done, dear. It isn’t polite.”
Reywin squeezed the trigger as Chad advanced…
xxx
Bolobo, voted most likely to succeed in scoring Chadsik the pharmaceutical equivalent of chemically assisted suicide without being arrested in the process, walked up the stairway leading to their hideout toting the bag of drugs he’d been dispatched to acquire.
He was not in the best of moods.
Dealing with Reywin while high was hard enough. Bolobo knew he wasn’t capable of handling an assassin who refused to do anything until he’d had an opportunity to ‘go on the nod, nudge nudge wink wink’. The fact that their assassin friend had implied that he was less homicidally dangerous while high was a frightening thought.
Morose and overwhelmingly regretting his decisions in life, Bolobo rapped out their secret knock before shoving into the one bedroom apartment.
No amount of preparation could’ve prepared him for what came next.
Chad sat in the middle of the room, spattered from head to toe in drying blood. Shoved over his left hand was Reywin’s head, which he operated like a puppet. Chad was having a conversation with the head. Chillingly, when the dead woman’s mouth moved up and down, Reywin’s own voice issued forth.
“Hello, Bolobo. I am a stupid woman. I tried to kill our esteemed guest with a gun that shoots honest-to-goodness antique bullets.” Reywin’s dead eyes gazed impassively at Bolo, who couldn't move from the front door. “I see that you have gotten him the drugs that he asked for. Please be so kind as to as bring them over.”
Chad winked. “’allo, my son. ‘ow was your trip to the corner store.” He pointed at the bag with his spare hand. “Wot did we manage to get, eh? I ‘ope it ain’t them stims wot your partner likes. They are foul.” To prove his point, he indicated the pile of drying, half-chewed stimulant littering one of the only blood-free spots on the floor.
Bolo couldn’t move. Instead of heeding ‘Reywin’s’ suggestion, the agent swiveled his head slowly from right to left, cataloguing the scene. There were parts of his old friend and mentor everywhere; one of her legs below the hip was sticking out of the couch, while its mate was stuck into a lampshade. Her hands �
��just her hands- were resting, politely folded, on the table, a lit cigarette jutting out between two fingers. The arms were nowhere to be found, but a steady stream of blood leading off into the bathroom suggested they were performing some hideously normal bathroom act. It took a couple of minutes, but eventually Bolo found Reywin’s torso; Chad was using it as a cushion.
There was blood everywhere. On the floor, the ceiling, the walls … everywhere.
“What in the hell happened here?” He was barely mindful of his own epithet.
Chadsik blew some smoke rings. “I thought you people had a thing against words like ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ and ‘Jesus loves me this I know’.” The Voice chided. It did so love to point things like that out. “Yet there you are, cursing like the faithful.”
Chad slumped his shoulders and sighed woefully, all too aware that he’d just spoken with the Voice just then. The quicker the Voice was buried the better. He couldn’t go on like this. It was going to affect his ability to kill Garth Nickels in a timely and artistic fashion.
Bolo shifted the bag full of drugs. He heard himself responding quite rationally. “It’s considered the height of profanity to use one of the abolished words. Adds impact.”
Chad flicked ashes onto the floor. He made the Reywin-head speak. “Bolobo, I thought I asked you to bring Chad the drugs. Please do so. He needs them quite badly.”
“You heard the lady, my son. Bring us the drugs.” Chad jammed the cigarette he was holding into the corner of his mouth to accept the tote full of narcotics. Working deftly with the one hand, he started rooting through the contents, more or less satisfied with what he saw. As expected, certain other people inside his head had retreated a bit; it knew what was coming and thought that by keeping mum, it’d be ignored. “Very good, my sonny Jim. This makes me ‘appy. Now, ‘ave a seat and we can talk about wotever is pressin’ on your mind.”