Set'em Up

by A N G Reynolds

  ReHy stations also subject ships to standard antibiotics and other treatments to ensure no new space pathogen would be introduced to Earth’s ecosystem. While humanity had been traveling both its own system and the Centauri for thousands of years now and had developed innate immunities to most interstellar pathogens, there was still a chance a plague could be introduced that could wipe out most life on Earth, organic structure and human alike. It was always better to be safe than sorry.

  I listened carefully, trying to make out any of the words Ariadne and Ottoman were exchanging with the station master. The interview seemed to go one slightly longer than usual, which was not a surprise. Ariadne was talking very calmly to the station master, probably convincing him that the broken rib was not in any danger of becoming worse. The station master finally signed off, and after many minutes of radio silence and no sudden course changes from the Lilstar to pull her out of the queue for an inspection, I presumed that the ship was given the all-clear to descend to Earth once the ReHy station had done its job.

  Entering the ReHy station felt like nothing, which was always surprising. It looks like a big mouth inhaling ships, but since there isn’t any significant atmosphere in space, nebulous gases being too light to be considered a real atmosphere, there isn’t any pull from the station as there would be if it was actually taking a big, deep breath. Of course, given the bathroom was windowless, I couldn’t even see how dark it got once the mouth closed and the Lilstar, with probably a dozen or so other ships of varying sizes, sat patiently inside the station’s mouth, waiting for what was basically a spa treatment.

  It was an incredibly long set of hours sitting in one place as the sauna did its job. I spent most of those hours licking the tape off my mouth.

  “Phoo,” I said, finally free to speak. Of course, my companion was a strung-out druggy who mostly just moaned incoherently and twitched on occasion.

  “Hey,” I said, tapping Set’s foot with my toe.

  “Hush,” he said, almost coherently.

  “No. I will not hush. I will never hush so long as your evil doppelgänger is holding me, my friend, and my friend’s ship hostage!” I stated in an angry whisper. Set rolled a baggy, blood-shot eye toward me.

  “You look like a unicorn,” he said unhelpfully.

  “Would you stop it with the unicorns? What does that have to do with anything?!” I asked him incredulously.

  “Your thingie,” Set continued, pointing slightly to my forehead. “It looks like a horn kind of thing.”

  “You mean, the thingie that has the potential to kill all of us?” I asked, a little incredulous.

  Set actually smiled as he nodded in reply. He had the expression of a five-year-old who had just stepped on his younger sibling’s paper crane.

  I stared at the man for a good long minute, trying to figure out exactly what to say next. How does one hold a conversation with a person who wasn’t all there by choice?

  “You’re missing more than a few bones upstairs, aren’t you?” I said.

  “It’s better that way,” Set said in a tone that sounded very honest but a little sing-song. “I was worse than him, before.”

  “Adams rot your brain out,” I commented.

  “That’s the idea. That’s why I take them. At least now I’m not quite so…violent,” Set said. “Actually, it was Ottoman’s idea. They were going to kick me out until the adams calmed me down. Mill Hew doesn’t handle failures. Not even ones with brothers.”

  The drug addict’s eyes began to well up as he brought his knees up to his chest. I internally removed myself from the situation completely, like I had a million times before when someone violent decided to cry in front of me. Whether or not Set was trying to manipulate me or was genuinely crying about the situation was irrelevant.

  “Don’t make me pity you,” I said quietly.

  “Did I ask for pity?” Set sighed. “I don’t need pity. I don’t even care about it.”

  Unfortunately, I did pity him, as much as neither of us wanted that. It wasn’t for the addiction, however, but more for whatever events had led to it. I glared at the addict for a long time as he sat there, weeping silently. I tried to think of a way I could steer the conversation to my favor. The addict had a lot going on and maybe just enough of a conscience, evidenced by his crying fit, to make something work.

  Of course, at this point I also realized that Set was just lucid enough to make tricking him difficult. He was less of the bumbling idiot he had been when we first met, probably an effect of being off the adams for at least a week.

  “At least you seem remorseful about the whole deal,” I commented.

  “Ottoman regrets things, but he won’t give himself up for emptiness,” the addict said. “He’s always been afraid of it, of being empty. I was always afraid of spiders.”

  “I’ve always been afraid of not being able to protect people,” I said truthfully. My brother, for example; he went away without even the slightest chance of me saving him. I didn’t need to be a hero, I just needed to be a guardian. “Like right now.”

  Set shrugged.

  “I ‘spose it’s not really my problem,” he said.

  “Of course, if Ariadne messes something up and I get my brains fried, you’ll undoubtedly come with me,” I reasoned.

  “Imagine how empty that’d leave me,” the addict said wistfully. This conversation was going in the wrong direction.

  “Don’t make me kick you in the face.” I gave up trying to reason or persuade the addict into sense.

  “I saw you trip over the deck for no reason the other day. I doubt you have that much coordination,” Set said, after eying my wrists-bound-to-the-floor position.

  I growled.

  Given the fact that I hadn’t yet been fried by my hostage keeper, I could reasonably assume that everything was going according to the sociopath’s wishes. And since there hadn’t yet been an inspection, it was also reasonable to assume that they’d deemed the Lilstar safe for descent, meaning the next best thing for Ariadne and me to do was wait until we finally landed.

  “Do you know where we are going?” I asked the addict. Set gave another annoying non-answer in the form of a shrug.

  “Ottoman doesn’t tell me anything. Some things, but not something like that,” he said.

  “Where do you usually go on Earth?” I pressed.

  “Somewhere in the Olds. Ottoman has a…” Set’s voice trailed off as he eyed me. “I don’t care if you escape. I don’t care if you die. I just want Ottoman to keep breathing.”

  “I can probably make that kind of deal,” I said, trying not to feel too hopeful about making a deal with a strung-out addict who, purportedly, was even more dangerous than my ex-captive/now-captor. “If you’ll help me and Ariadne escape.”

  “I dunno if I want to make that kind of deal.” Set laughed weakly.

  “Will Ottoman kill us when we land?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then I’ll have to kill him first.”

  “I don’t think you can do that,” Set said, although he looked me over warily.

  “Of course I can,” I said, building up confidence it the idea. Believing what you are bluffing about is incredibly important. Although I would kill Ottoman if he threatened either Ariadne or myself in any serious way, I wasn’t as bent on the idea as I pretended to be. “But I don’t have to if you help me.”

  “I’m just kidding, I don’t care if Ottoman dies,” Set said the words easily. Unfortunately, he was a bad liar.

  “I doubt that. You care about Ottoman, and you don’t want me to kill him,” I said. Set swallowed loudly enough for me to hear it as he looked at me. “He’s the only person in this world that might understand you.”

  Set silently watched me until the Lilstar was finally underway for descent. His face was dull but worried, the kind of worry that I knew was gnawing his brain even more than any adams ever could. He really did have an affection for Ottoman, just like the sociopath seemed to care for hi
m. It was the twins/clones’ only really obvious weakness. That and maybe spiders.

  It wasn’t until the Lilstar entered the rocky upper atmosphere that he decided to say anything.

  “Fine. But Ottoman lives through this.”

  Fifteen

  “How are we doing, Set and, well, you?” Ottoman said, the ‘you’ rolling out of his mouth with a great deal of disgust. At least it was better than an expletive. The Lilstar had landed a few minutes ago and, from what I could tell, it was raining heavily outside. It had been a rough descent with the ship’s tender rib, and on more than one occasion, I could hear Ottoman and Ariadne yelling at each other about whatever technical problems arose. Still, it was a better landing than that one time I was on a 97-year-old cruiser which had a pulmonary blockage halfway down to the planet’s surface. The poor ship managed to hold on until about ten feet above ground, after which it bounced painfully for about a hundred feet. Always wear your safety belts, kids.

  “Mhmmph,” Set said, pretending to doze better than I could have. I merely glared at the sociopath.

  “Wake up, Setesh, we need to get moving.” Ottoman’s coo was a little more urgent than usual, although it still took a great deal of prying to get the addict out of the shower. When Ottoman finally succeeded in that task, Set was upright, but remained bleary-eyed and a little wobbly on his feet.

  No doubt about it, the addict was an excellent actor.

  I growled low in my throat for show.

  “Tsk, tsk; so unhappy,” Ottoman said, producing the shock device controller for me to see. “No worries; we’ve landed and will be disembarking in just a moment. You and Miss King will, unfortunately, not be coming with us.”

  He almost grinned at me as he pressed the shock device’s button, frying my entire nervous system and leaving me a smoldering corpse on an abandoned ship, a testament to my complete and utter failure as a skiptrace and the greater failure of the skiptracing community to train and prepare their newest skiptraces for the villainous ruffians they might encounter. It was an entirely philosophical situation that could cause lasting repercussions across the whole of the system and even into Centauri space, but would be traced back to one solitary moment where a barely-trained skiptrace got her brains scrambled by her overzealous, venom-packing quarry. It could, for certain, eventually lead to the downfall of the skiptracing community as a whole, leading to rampant lawlessness across the whole of humanity.

  Except none of that happened. The shock device didn’t fry me to a crisp and the greater skiptracing community was not held liable for my failure. I gave Ottoman my evilest grin, which of course he couldn’t see because my mouth was still taped.

  As with most people, his first reaction was to press the shock device button again, and then hit it a few times in his hand in frustration. Just before he gave up on the Centauri device and slashed my throat with one of the many knives I knew he had, Set came up behind his twin/clone and with a surprising amount of skill, wrapped his arm around Ottoman’s neck in a sleeper hold.

  Ottoman was, of course, irate and attempted to plead and fight off his compatriot, but Set refused to yield until the sociopath was unconscious. Actually, he held on a little longer than that. So long, in fact, I thought he’d actually kill Ottoman. Although Ottoman’s bounty was probably closer to alive-or-dead than just plain old alive, I really didn’t want to open that particular can of worms at the moment. Besides, Set was scaring me. At least Ottoman had been blunt about his murderous side, Set was letting his get away with him.

  “Stop!” I shouted under the tape. It proved to be just enough to break whatever bloodthirsty trance had come over Set, and he dropped his slightly-purple but still breathing twin/clone.

  Set removed his twin/clone’s knife from its scabbard and cut me free of the ship. I ripped the tape off my mouth quickly, getting out of the shower and going to the medicine cabinet.

  “I thought you wanted him alive,” I said, turning back to Set. The addict’s eyes were hollow.

  “Me too,” he said. I swallowed painfully and offered my hand to shake. He took it, falling asleep almost immediately as the dermal patch went to work. I breathed a little easier as he slumped to the floor.

  “You’re never going to learn that trick, are you?” I muttered, taking the epidermis slats that had been holding me to the ship and securing both the Lees to the bathroom floor. I could move them later.

  I walked into the cockpit, finding Ariadne slumped over in the pilot’s seat, at least eight dermal patches covering her arms and face. I ripped them off as quickly as I could, thankful she was still breathing and her pulse was strong and steady. One patch was guaranteed for a full night’s sleep; eight were guaranteed to stop your heart in about half an hour.

  “Wake up, princess!” I said harshly as I removed the last patch. Ariadne blinked many times, trying to speak repeatedly but failing. Finally, after becoming very frustrated, she tried again.

  “They’ve got—”

  “Shh!” I clamped a hand over her mouth for a minute, hearing voices outside. It was difficult to pick up because it was obviously in the middle of a fairly impressive downpour, but these guys were being loud about whatever their discussion was.

  Finally Ariadne pried my hand off her mouth.

  “Friends! Marcie, Ottoman has friends! Those friends!” she said, panicked.

  “How many?” I whispered quietly, wishing the Lilstar’s opaque eyelid was open.

  “I dunno. Probably more than we can take. Especially if they are like the Lees,” Ariadne said, trying to look through the eyelid too. The voices were getting closer.

  My thoughts ran around loudly inside my head as I tried to figure out the next best move. I collected the shock device, flipping the toggles on the pads back to the ON position. The Centauri were definitely creatures of safety, designing the shock pads with independent ON/OFF switches to prevent any accidental use of the device. Given that, I surmised the device wasn’t really a weapon, but that was ponderings for another time. I handed Ottoman’s knife to Ariadne and we crouched by the door, prepared to run out like our lives depended on it.

  “Ready?” Ariadne asked in a whisper. The voices seemed to be coming from directly in front of the ship, which was both good and bad. Good, because that meant the princess and I could exit the ship’s only hatch without being directly confronted. The bad was that whoever was outside would be able to see the ship’s door opening, and probably see which direction we were traveling.

  “Wait,” I said, walking back into the ship’s living quarters. I plucked my favorite pair of jeans off the bunk and tied them around my waist.

  “Is now really the time for these kinds of fashion choices?” Ariadne asked in an almost rude and very impatient voice.

  “These jeans just might save our lives someday,” I whispered harshly. The princess didn’t counter. She counted down on her fingers, pressing the mechanism for the door’s iris promptly once she’d reached three. I barely waited for the iris to open fully before I leapt out, landing a little roughly on the shipyard’s concrete pad. I scrambled back to my feet and set out in a dead run as far from the Lilstar as I could get. I heard some shouting, but I ignored it.

  It was almost impossible to see anything through the fact that it was nighttime and raining. Not even the Centauri-grade floodlight that seemed to beckon me forward could fully pierce the deluge. I panicked slightly when I heard footsteps behind me, which in turn made me miss a whole, nasty pothole in front of me. My foot went out from under me and I landed solidly on the ground.

  “Ow,” I muttered a curse as the footsteps got even closer. By this time, however, I recognized it as the princess.

  “Get up, you ninny!” Ariadne cried, as she helped pull me to my feet.

  “This way!” she shouted, and veered off to the right.

  It was about a minute of blind jogging before we made it to the enormous organic building. Light could be seen from a few glass-implant windows and, thankfully, the door
was open.

  I couldn’t even begin to imagine what we looked like, two damp and bruised sprites suddenly entering a warm, clean, and semi-bustling terminal. It wasn’t as packed as I would have liked for escaping, but it was better than tromping around the airfield all day.

  “Ladies room is this way; we can dry off and take a breather,” the princess said without really stopping inside the door. I continued to follow.

  We wound our way past the main public area and toward the innards of the building that I wasn’t so sure we should actually be in. I didn’t argue with Ariadne, however, who seemed to know exactly where we needed to be. Besides, there were very few people around, and those who were didn’t seem to care about the two of us, lost children though we might look.

  The building itself went on for a lot longer than I thought it should have, but the biggest kicker was the fact that it was made like a bunker. It was a clearly-visible fusion of Earth and Centauri technologies that made it little less than a cyborg. Electronic touch screens decorated the walls, and metal shunts, designed to be flexible and manipulative to a degree, stuck out from the layers of epidermis like a bad piercing. I doubted this building had any true nerve endings left, just as much as I figured it would have armor plating, both metallic and super-dense falsebone, covering the outside.

  After we passed the sixth uniformed officer, a deer-eyed junior lieutenant if I knew the insignia on her shoulders, I began to get a sneaking suspicion about this place. I held my tongue until we’d arrived at a ladies’ locker room, a hormone-sniffer locked room complete with showers and a sauna. The sniffer lock was just impressive enough to keep any male, including our ex-captives/ex-captors out, meaning Ariadne and I could take all the breather we needed.

  “Where are we?” I asked the princess point-blank as she went to go pillage a stack of new towels.

  “Carlion’s Foremost Pilot’s Academy, Olds III,” she said, not really looking me in the face.

  “A military base?” I asked, voice squeaking in disbelief. That would explain all of the uniforms and the fact that the building was an incredible abomination to organic craft.