“Forget about her,” someone said.
I looked over my shoulder to see a bespectacled black guy around my age, sucking on a lollipop. He removed the lollipop and pointed it in the direction of the amber-haired girl.
“That one over there with the fine hair I meant by the way. The one you got hungry eyes for.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied.
“C’mon, ace. A blind man could see it,” the black kid whistled. “Gonna start calling you Duran, Duran, ‘cause you are hungry like the goddam wolf.”
I’m sure you’re probably wondering why the hell the black guy referenced a group whose members died at or around the time I was born. Well, beginning in the early-2020s, the creative folks in the country seemed to lose their spark. They started pumping out remakes of remakes for the big screen and a never-ending stream of crappy pop music, so people naturally got bored. I mean, how many times can you see another “reboot” of “Spiderman” or “Transformers” or listen to Taylor Swift’s daughters’ songs, before you put a gun to your head? Anyway, as a result of the lack of creativity, people drifted back to the decades before, when there was a tad more diversity (and originality) in films and music and whatnot, which is why people of my generation had a familiarity with groups we might otherwise have forgotten, like Duran Duran.
The black dude popped the lollipop back into his mouth and extended a hand. “Dexter Jones by the way.”
I shook his hand. “Danny Deus.”
“That your real name?”
“If my parents are to be believed.”
“Well, it’s a righteous handle. I’m thinking you’re new here, Danny.”
“How’d you know?”
Dexter smiled. “Only a newbie would know that it ain’t wise to try and come between Simeon and his lady friend.”
“What’s lady friend’s name?”
“Baila and the two of ‘em are like peanut butter and jelly. They’re a package.”
“Boyfriend and girlfriend?”
Dexter sucked on the lollipop. “Sure, yeah, maybe that, but more importantly they’re two of the lead operators.”
“For what?”
Dexter grinned. “The Boomslangs.”
He grabbed up his tray and moved away from the line as I followed after him, trying like hell not to spill my small mountain of food. “What’s a Boomslang?”
I sat down next to Dexter at an unoccupied table as he cast me a wary look. “Seriously? Boomslang is a nickname for a mech, dude. Exactly what section have you been assigned to?”
I shrugged. “I’m supposed to meet a man named Richter later today.”
Dexter grinned. “If you’re hooked up with Mister Richter, then you’re a junkineer.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You source the parts that keep the ‘slangs operational if they encounter any problems during the training protocol.”
I shoved a serving of bread pudding into my mouth. “What about you?”
“I’m a gamer, brother. I’m one of the good people with mad skills that keep Distant Windows open for business.”
“What’s a ‘Distant Windows’?”
Dexter swallowed what he was eating, then held up security badge with a giant, orange “G” in the center. “You see this?”
I nodded.
“You have one of these, Danny?” Dexter asked.
“No.”
“Then I can’t tell you what Distant Windows is.”
“Nobody tells me anything,” I said.
“Have no fear, brother,” Dexter said. “All will be revealed in time. I mean, you just don’t happen upon a place like The Hermitage. Somebody thought enough of you to bring you here.”
“Vidmark brought me here.”
Dexter whistled. “Then you’re one of the elect.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Like I said, give it some time. Things have a way of moving slowly around here sometimes. I imagine you’ll get back-briefed in the not too distant future.”
We finished our meals in silence and then Dexter rose and said he’d see me around. I watched him exit the mess hall, then turned my attention to a screen on a faraway wall. As a result of the invasion and occupation, there was only one TV station now, and it was operated by the government. There’d been a bunch of tzars and a viceroy running things for a while, but a new President had apparently been elected while I was in prison and the reports said this person promised, like all politicians always do, to make the country great again.
I watched images of several men and women soundlessly walking through the rubble of various cities accompanied by military folks in uniforms, which were juxtaposed with shots of new military equipment, jets, tanks, and mechanized fighting machines (although nothing as impressive as what I’d seen in the hangar). The one thing that stood out was the age of the soldiers in the footage. They all looked like kids. I realized that Vidmark was right. Most of the adults had been killed during the invasion and occupation. People like me were all that was left. Distraught at this thought, my gaze turned back to the table with the cool kids. The amber-haired girl was staring at me. We shared a look for a few seconds, and then she turned her eyes from me, and I stared at my food, wondering what the hell Distant Windows was and what exactly was going on in The Hermitage.
13
Later that afternoon, I headed back to the hangar, to what I’d taken to calling the “Mech Recovery Room.” There was a broad-shouldered man visible inside, bald as a stone, wearing one of those back-support belts I used to see furniture movers wear in the days before the invasion. I assumed it was the head junkineer himself, Jack Richter. He was standing beside a utility vehicle that resembled a golf cart on steroids, rooting through one of the bins that were filled with robot parts. His movements were stilted, but he was able to lift several sizable pieces of warped metal and toss them into the bed of the utility vehicle.
“You gonna get over here and lend a hand or stand there playing with yourself?” the man boomed without looking over.
“I wasn’t playing with myself,” I answered.
“Sure, looked like it to me.”
I strode forward. “Are you Mister Richter?”
“My father was ‘Mister Richter.’ You can call me Jack,” the man replied.
I moved toward him, and he looked up and appraised me. He was older than I’d originally thought, probably staring down the barrel of fifty although he had the muscle-quilted frame of a much younger man. He extended his hand, and I shook it.
“You Dengus?” Richter asked.
“Deus, sir. Danny Deus.”
He snorted. “The guy Jonas brought back from the dead, right?”
“He helped me to walk again,” I answered.
“Difference without much of a distinction,” he huffed.
Richter moved over to the utility vehicle and grabbed another back-support belt which he flung to me. “We’re gonna see how good of a job he did on that back of yours.”
He gestured at alarmingly large hunks of metal and alien alloys that he requested I help stack and sort.
“Exactly, what are my duties and responsibilities, sir?” I asked.
“You’re to do as you’re told, Deus, which is both a duty and a sacred responsibility.”
“What is it that we’re going to be doing here?”
Richter groaned. “You need to know it’s not going to be like this, kid.”
“Like what?”
“You asking questions and me answering.”
“You mean conversation?”
Richter grimaced. “You’re gonna learn that I don’t do conversation.”
I didn’t respond, and he looked me up and down, the kind of expression on his face that a scientist has when studying an insect. He sighed. “Here’s the quick and dirty. The mechs get broken. We help to fix ‘em. It ain’t rocket science.”
“How do they get broken?”
Richter scowled
. “You know how there are people who are authorized to receive certain kinds of information?”
I nodded.
“You ain’t one of them,” Richter said. “All you need to know is that sometimes they get broken, and we help repair them. Now let’s get to work.”
I watched him turn and cup his hands around his mouth. “We’re gonna need a little help out here, young lady! You done back there?!”
A woman’s voice echoed from the very rear of the room, the space hidden behind the bins and containers that blocked my view. “I’m coming!”
A clicking sound echoed, and I peered up and saw her.
Saw Richter’s other assistant.
A woman.
My jaw dropped. I knew her.
It was Jezzy!
Standing and studying me, balanced on a prosthetic leg.
14
I was too shocked to react at first. The prosthetic leg, which was one of the curved ones made of special metals and polymer that had been so popular with athletes in the past, was jarring. But aside from that (and it was a difficult thing to overlook), she looked good, the same old Jezzy and I was overjoyed to see that she was alive. I probably shouldn’t have said anything, and definitely shouldn’t have overreacted, but I couldn’t help blurting out, “Jezzy!”
Richter looked from me to her. “You two know each other?”
Jezzy glowered. “Unfortunately.”
“We worked together during the occupation,” I said, tossing a smile to Jezzy that wasn’t returned.
“Worked as in … worked for the resistance?” Richter asked.
“Not exactly.”
“The military?”
I shook my head, and Richter’s face fell. I could tell he was thinking that if we weren’t working for resistance or the military, we were probably working for ourselves which meant one thing: we were lowlifes, thieves most likely.
“Somebody much smarter than me said we are made wise not by our recollection of the past, but by the responsibility for the future,” Richter said. “Translation: whatever happened in the past is in the past. Comprende?”
I nodded, and Jezzy did as well, icing me with a nasty look. I was grief-stricken about her leg and had a million questions for her, but she looked like she wanted to give me that punch to the throat she’d mentioned back on the hoversurf. Richter trudged off, and Jezzy breezed past me. The only words that fumbled out of my mouth were, “I’m sorry.”
“Piss off,” she hissed.
* * *
Over the next few hours, Jezzy and I agreed to a ceasefire and assisted Richter in selecting certain parts and pieces that he said were vital for repairs to the mechs and other machines housed in the hangar. I never saw a single drone that needed to be fixed, but Richter was adamant, rattling off areas on the machines that needed to be refurbished as if he had a set of blueprints in his head.
After the materials were collected, we transported them to a workshop nearby where a small army of male and female rough-necks fired up welding gear and fabrication machines to heat and bend and shape the materials into recognizable forms. These were the folks who’d helped build most of the mechs for the other operators.
The heat from a blast furnace in the workshop was intense, so I stood at a distance, watching mammoth legs and arms being bent and manipulated. I spied the formation of titanic turrets, and the creation of chain guns and rocket pods, and the modification of internal engines and power sources.
I shuttled around the back of the room and watched more workers in hardhats using hi-tech mini-cranes and power suits to move huge metal containers that housed the material used for most of the modifications. The containers, which overflowed with this material, limitless amounts of translucent tubes, were poured into hoppers that were connected to industrial-sized 3-D printers via a conveyer belt.
Grinders inside the hopers made quick work of the tubes, pulverizing them and extruding a gel-like substance in long ropes that was fed down the conveyor belt. The gel-like substance, what I overheard one of the workers referring to as a kind of nano-tube extract, mixed with a silver liquid sprayed from a series of nozzles, the slurry disappearing inside the printers for several minutes. Then a door on the printer opened to reveal expertly crafted pieces of what looked like parts of a mech. I saw semi-metallic hands, feet, and sections of torso that I imagined would later be welded together to form the exterior of one of the fighting machines.
Jezzy was nowhere to be seen, so I headed back to the Mech Recovery Room. I wandered down toward the end of the dimly-lit other end of the room where the larger pieces of fabricated metal were stacked. I turned a corner, and that’s when I saw it.
A nearly intact mech, maybe thirteen or fifteen feet tall, propped against a wall. This wasn’t one of the shiny, newer models of mechs I’d seen before. Oh no, this one looked closer to the mech I’d seen on the Mech Command website that was linked to Vidmark’s text. The mech was downright primitive looking, with tapered legs that ended at clawed feet, and a bulky turret the size of a van that was completely rusted. It had tiny, T-Rex like arms that ended in dual cylindrical cannons, both of which appeared capable of firing small-arms ammunition. At the left side of the turret was a pod that I reckoned could also fire miniature rockets.
I moved over and ran a hand down one of the mech’s metal legs which were filthy and warped in several places. There were scorch marks on the exterior armor and holes and indentations in several areas. In short, it looked as if this machine had seen some serious combat. Something crashed behind me, and I shuffled back to find Jezzy stooped over an equipment bin.
She heard me approach and shook her head. “Don’t – do not talk to me.”
“How can I apologize if I’m not allowed to talk?”
“So, you’re gonna apologize, huh?”
“I was strongly considering it.”
“And you think what? That that’s gonna make it all better?”
“No, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry about what happened, the crash, your leg, pretty much everything. I don’t know what else to say other than I’m sorry.”
She stood. “I told you we shouldn’t have done that deal with Alpha Timbo.”
“You were right.”
“I was always right.”
I nodded at the truth of this. She’d been more right than wrong in all of the time I’d known her.
“I’m gonna make sure I apologize to him too,” I said.
“Him … who?”
“Who do you think? The Spence-meister. First chance I get to see him, I’m gonna tell him how wrong I was.”
She paled. “Jesus – I … you didn’t hear?” she whispered.
“Didn’t hear what?”
“Spence. He’s dead … he died during the crash. For God’s … I thought you knew.”
No. God no, I didn’t know. I reeled, feeling like I’d been elbowed in the gut. I couldn’t breathe for several seconds and felt like I was going to pass out. “You – I – that’s a l-lie,” I stuttered. “That’s – there’s no way Spence is dead, Jezz.”
The look on her face told me that it was true. “Vidmark and some of the others said they’d tried to save him. They told me they even shot Spence up with “Lazarus—”
“What?”
“It’s a drug they got from the aliens,” she said. “Supposedly it can bring people back to life in certain situations as crazy as that sounds. They tried it on Spence, but by the time they got the drug into him, it was too late.”
I slumped on the ground. My vision filled with all the memories I’d shared with Spence. All the times (and there were far more good times than bad), and the adventures we’d had over the years working for Buddha Blades and the six or seven months when we’d freelanced. I’d known a shit-ton of people over the years and the really good ones—the ones you could trust with your life—could be counted on one hand. Spence was one of those people. He was up there with Frank, and now he was gone too. Tears filled my eyes, and J
azzy’s perpetual scowl slipped away. She laid a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Danny. I know you guys were tight.”
“He was it,” I said softly. “He was the best one of us.”
She answered with silence and a slow nod. A few seconds passed, then my gaze found hers. “What are we doing here, Jezzy?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m focusing on my job. I mean, Vidmark and the others helped me out after the crash. They brought me here, saved my life, and fitted me with this,” she said, tapping her prosthetic leg. “I owe them big time.”
“They did the same for me,” I said. “I was paralyzed in the crash.”
“I heard,” she said.
“They did something with my spine.”
“And now you’re right as rain.”
I held her look. “I’m not a hundred percent, but I’m getting there. So … what about us?” I asked.
“There is no us anymore.”
“But we – we were always a team, right?”
A sad expression gripped her face. She took a liking to her leg. “Look at me. Even if I wanted to, I can’t be part of anything anymore. All I can do is putter around in here and sort and stack these mech pieces. The bottom line is, I’m not on anybody’s team. I’m just a grunt … a gimp. Like you.”
“But … we were friends weren’t we?”
Her face hardened. “We were business partners, Danny. That’s all we ever were.”
And with that, she hobbled off toward the far end of the room.
15
I was depressed about Spence and Jezzy, so when my shift with Richter was over, I decided to go for a walk. Heading away from the main cluster of buildings, I strolled past herds of office workers who were in pairs or small packs. I’d begun to identify people by the clothes they wore. I could tell some of them were office types who worked in the Darth Vader buildings while others served food or worked in the hangars. I’d always considered myself a bit of a loner, but standing there, I realized just how strong the pull is to be part of a group. Who the hell wants to be on the outside looking in? I felt awkward and very alone at the moment (especially after my confrontation with Jezzy), watching the others breeze by in what seemed like slow-motion, laughing, trading secrets, engaged in conversation.
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