by V R Tapscott
Olive sat back in her chair a bit. “I suppose you’re right. But anyone hurting Jane, it just really disturbs me on a quantum level.” She sighed, “Deep built-in programming, I suppose.”
I got up and went over and hugged her and kissed her forehead. “You’re more human than most humans, dear. Give yourself some credit.”
I sat back down on my bench, looked all of them and said, “So, I guess we follow him and harry him until he either seriously attempts to kill us, or until he runs out of power and we can capture him. Either way, we’ll know what the real story is.”
There was silence for a bit. Then Olive said cooly, “So, we wait for him to kill you, Jane? So we know he’s serious?”
I looked straight at her so she knew I was talking to her. “Yes, we are going to try to help him, Olive. Help him regain his sanity. Because he’s human inside until he proves he’s not. And I truly believe that he’d not have left that jack o’ lantern if he didn’t have some humanity.”
In a flat voice, she said, “I hear and obey, Jane Bond.”
“Thank you, Olive.”
She didn’t reply. But she nodded.
There was an awkward silence around the table. I doubt anyone but Bailey knew what had just happened. I’d pulled rank on Olive and she’d swallowed it without a lot of grace. But everyone could feel the tension in the air. I stuck out my tongue at Olive and after a beat she stuck hers out, back at me. We both laughed and it seemed to break the silence and everyone started talking again.
Cai had been standing clear of the wrangling, but spoke up now. “Is there a better way of going in than we just did in New Mexico? We can hardly allow it access to our ship or its computers again, I feel it was a lucky thing indeed that Olive managed to shoot down the saucer before the intelligence could make better use of what it had. It must have had confidence that it could overwhelm our position before we could come back to defend it. Olive’s quick relexes with the teleport was likely a surprise action, and we will not be given that opportunity again.”
Olive’s skin coloration didn’t permit much in the way of blushing, but I could hear a blush in her voice. “I’ll turn in my badge if I ever get caught out like that again. It was inexcusable for me to lose my ship on its maiden voyage. With all my friends along, to boot. I won’t live that one down for several lifetimes. Any future outings with a ship of any sort will have extremely high security which should disallow any possible repurposing of said ship.“ At the end of this monologue, she seemed to realize that she’d dropped her accent and added, “Y’all understand me here?”
Everyone nodded as she looked around the crowd.
Bailey spoke up, saying, “So, this means we’ll be taking another ship out to Siberia to look for whatever location it’s come up with?”
Olive said slowly, “No, that won’t be necessary. I already scouted the place and I got location. We’ll take the elevator.”
We all looked at her.
She looked back, then said, “What? There’s no point in spending the resources to create another ship when it was easy to just go take a look around. I tracked its energy signal from our last trip and was able to find it in the Siberian wastes.”
I said, “But what if something had happened to you, Olive? You’re irreplaceable here.”
She looked down at the table. “I’m not irreplaceable. The Command Module would recreate another Olive and we’d go on as before.”
“The Command Module could reinitialize a new Olive, but she’d be a new Olive. With none of your memories or thoughts or feelings.”
She looked at me, “Would that be so much of a bad thing? I almost got you killed on the moon. I could have gotten you killed at the Yucca site, and of course, I could have gotten you killed back here when it was shooting my ship’s laser beams around. I’m a complete failure at taking care of you, Jane.”
I rolled my eyes and psh’d at her, “I’m still alive, you silly goose. I’d say you’re doing an excellent job of keeping me alive, and have been the entire time you’ve known me.”
She shrugged, “Well, that’s just how you see it, though, not how I see it.”
I smiled and raised an eyebrow, “But I’m the only one that matters.” I made a google eyed face at her and stuck out my tongue. We seem to communicate in stuck out tongues.
She tried to hold onto her sad, but she’s not really made that way. She broke into a smile, and laughed, and said, “I love you, Jane.”
“Ditto, you crazy woman.”
Georgia said, “Hey, does that mean she’s up for grabs?”
I said, “No, I’m ... “
Georgia cut me off, “I don’t mean you, silly. You’re as straight as a yardstick. I mean Olive!”
I smirked, “I don’t think Olive really cares.”
Georgia came back, “I care, but not about that.”
I shrugged. “Not my department. Take it up with Olive.”
Olive bounced back with, “Hey, I’m right here. I can hear you, you know.”
Mom spoke up and said, “Um, ever hear of TMI? I don’t care much either way what you all do, but I want to go take a nap.” And she walked off to the stairs and vanished down them.
We all looked at each other. I shrugged again. “I want more breakfast instead of more bed. Anyone with me? More bacon?”
Chapter Fourteen
Metamorphoses
Olive, Bailey and Georgia stepped out of the door of the RV that Olive had constructed.
It was quite a device, covered with stainless steel birds, bees and hummingbirds and all sorts of that sort of creatures. As it moved, every part of it moved in some way, each piece linked together in some way with fine wires, bicycle chains, or even fans that interacted with wings. It was a true work of art, and when Olive parked it, it had been mobbed with people just looking at it in general.
Olive had built it all by hand, a labor of love that she’d put together in the last year. She’d actually started with the concept of having it ready for the Burning Man plans for the previous year, but so many things had happened that she wasn’t able to finish it in time. So, her theme was a bit off, but the work was so amazing that if anyone noticed, no one said anything. Of course, some would say that even though her theme was from the previous year, it followed the current year’s theme even more closely, being a show of how the interaction of all things creates life. Whatever it was, all art seems to be welcome at Burning Man.
The girls had thrown themselves into creation of costumes that were as brief as possible and yet covered all of them completely. Olive had designed fabrics that adapted to the weather and sunlight, so while they all appeared to be nearly naked, they were so wind and weather resistant that they could stand in a sandstorm and be just as content as sunning on Jane’s deck. Essentially, an invisible skinsuit with wings.
So, as they walked, they each resonated with each other’s costumes and with random brushes against other people, their suits reacting with ripples of color and texture that you would have had to have been dead to ignore.
The Burning Man festival has been covered in enough magazines and journals across the world that it’s pointless to say much about the event itself.
Of course, the function of a costume is to be eye catching to other people and usually you don’t even notice your own costume after putting it on and being in it for awhile.
A woman on incredibly tall stilts walked past, her pantlegs flopping around her bird-sized legs. Olive remarked, “Did you see that one? She has to be 20 feet tall. She must have had to practice for weeks just to learn how to walk on those!”
“Uh huh. And the people driving a kaleidoscope. And the giant bike.”
They rode off into the desert on matching bicycles, looking at the giant Burning Man construction being readied for its conflagration. Each year being burned and each year being reborn from the ashes of its construction from the year before. Metaphorically speaking, of course, since one of the main points of the festival every yea
r is to leave nothing behind.
Olive gave a giant grin to Georgia and Bailey. “I’m not sure we’ve ever really gotten to the point of painting the town red, but this is a great memory to add to all of our attempts!”
And neither of them could disagree as they threaded their way through the wonders of what is the Burning Man.
Chapter Fifteen
Siberian Tiger
Me, Georgia, Olive, Cai and Bailey were all gathered in the garage. Jeannie stood with us, but once we left, she’d head back to the house where she’d monitor our mission from the safety of her room. No one seriously thought that it would attempt another attack on my house, but better safe than sorry.
Olive had registered her complaints with the group about all of us going again. She thought it was pointless and it would be much better if she went alone. This was shouted down in general and logic aside, I was pretty sure that she was happy to have everyone along with her. The last mission had changed Olive’s outlook a little, and she seemed to have gotten more comfortable with being human.
So, here we were, all suited up in our matching skinsuits. Olive had been working with some different designs though, and our suits seemed to be glowing with some sort of energy that resonated with each other and the outside world. It was very pretty, having all of us erupting in various colors. Olive assured us that she’d turn it off once we got to Siberia, so the possible distraction was not there.
The Tunguska explosion of 1908 had never officially been fully explained, but by now it was fairly well accepted that it was an ice and stone meteor that had blown apart over that part of the Siberian waste. It had leveled miles of trees, killed animals and in general been a mess. People had not been able to investigate because of its remote location, and it had taken nearly 20 years to have people onsite. Nothing was found in the area to explain anything and there was no crater.
Olive had her own pet theory about the explosion, merely pointing to the bit of asteroid dust clinging to the skin of Kit’s survey ship, and the resultant explosion. It was her assumption that one of the bits of asteroid from the original collision with the former planet had found its way to earth millions of years later. Of course, it was also not a stretch from there to see the that the ship part I’d pulled out of the moon could have been part of the debris that blew up over Tunguska, and that it had been blown to the moon. I know, that sounds just too much like an ancient sit-com, but it is what it is.
I have a feeling our rogue intelligence had created his latest den there because of the history surrounding it, once again showing more than just a hit and run mentality. It was beginning to excite me to think about being able to talk with him finally when we caught up to him. However, I had no illusions about this being the time it would happen. The pumpkin gift left in the last location had been an obvious plant – no pun intended.
The upshot was, here we were filing out of the elevator high in the frozen tundra of the Siberian outback. Since we were about 30 miles from the nearest town of any real size, we didn’t need to be especially worried about being seen out here. For one thing, the area was either frozen or a mud bog, depending on the time of the year. Right now, we were heading toward it being the mud bog, but it was still very cold. Not that it made much difference to us, as our skinsuits made us very weatherproof.
Olive made her way along the frozen ground, picking her path carefully past holes and junk lying about. It wasn’t a very pretty area of the world, at least to a human.
She pointed at the dark area in the rock ahead of us. “That’s the hole we’ll need to go in. It’s very small, we’ll have to go one at a time. It gets larger inside, but I don’t want to take a chance on blowing this entire area up if I put the elevator inside and miscalculate by half an inch. So, we do this the hard way.”
All of us were armed with the same set of Olive’s guns she’d doled out before. They were kind of ungainly, being equipped with two sets of barrels. The firing pattern reminded me a bit of the Death Star, as they came together a bit from the tip of the barrels and combined, then fired the resulting photon torpedo. Sorry, it just seems like the best way to describe it.
We walked up to the hole and as we neared it, we realized it really was just a hole in the ground. Since it was only big enough for one person at a time, I volunteered to go in. After the resulting argument, I still went in. I’m only nice when I want to be.
I slid through on my back and came out inside. Once in there, the terrain changed a lot, being more like a sidewalk than a cave. There was a large enough area for us to gather, and then we would walk into the darkness with no more space than side-by-side. Of course, we had very nice headlights and such this time. It’s always best to be prepared, isn’t it? Or at least to be prepared for the things you can be prepared for.
Bailey came through next. We hugged and stepped aside. Cai, then Georgia came through, and shortly after, Olive.
I said, “Well, that wasn’t too hard. How deep does it go, Olive?”
“It’s not deep at all, which makes me feel almost for sure that it’s another blind. Another art exhibit, probably.”
She sounded disgusted and sarcastic, but I knew that most of that came from her fear of something happening to me and the rest of her friends.
“Well, then it should be fairly easy to find, then. Shall we move on?”
Bailey said, “Sounds good. How about if Cai and I take the front? How’s your heart, Cai?”
I could almost hear the eye-roll in Cai’s voice. “I’m fine. You have to admit that you do not find things much more stressful than having one of your best friends blown up in front of your face and having to find a way to save her. I do not expect any issues with my heart.”
Olive, darkly, “Yeah, well, we never expected Jane’s lungs to be blown out the first time either and look what happened.”
There didn’t seem to really be a reply to that, so we ignored it and started walking. Bailey and Cai took the lead, Olive and Georgia next, and I brought up the rear.
To begin with, it was silent, with all of us breathing quietly and the scuffing of our feet on the dirt was the only noise. We’d only progressed about a hundred feet when we started hearing … music. Specifically, “The Ride of the Valkyries”. Once we realized what it was, we stopped and looked at each other. I said, “Bugs Bunny” at the exact second that Georgia said, “Apocalypse Now”. We both laughed, then it hit us where we were standing, and we shut up. We started forward into the cave again.
The music got louder as we got closer, and we began to hear enough that I knew I was right. He was playing a Bugs Bunny cartoon for us. We came around a bend and there was a big-screen TV set up, Elmer and Bugs on the screen. The dramatic scene came to an end, and looped again. Evidently it had been sitting here playing for however long it took us to arrive and see it. Once we got into the room, the Bugs loop stopped and a simple melody started playing, a large arrow pointing to what looked like an iceberg. It sat like that, the loop playing the music, but the arrow was a stationary item.
I said, “Well, it looks like he’s pointing out where we should go next. That takes some chutzpah, huh?”
Cai stood with his hands on his hips, and said, “I can’t come to grips on this. Is he trying to tell us something but we’re just not figuring it out? Or is he lulling us into a false sense of security so he can kill us all and take what we have?”
Olive huffed in irritation. “He’s being damned annoying, that’s what he’s doing. But I admit there’s something here that we’re not getting yet. I’ll have to do some more research to find where he’s pointing at, but I assume it’s relevant, somehow. I’ve begun to agree with you all that he’s thinking, not just reacting. And perhaps we’ve given him reason to not trust us, so he’s using these odd messages as ways to get us to do what he wants us to. Still, what would it be?”
I frowned. “Well, what does the Yucca Mountains and this site have in common?”
Bailey said, “Having been to both sit
es, I can’t think of places with much less in common. But they both have something to do with things being blown up. At least to some extent. The Yucca Mountain site was for nuclear weapons, and commercial nuclear waste disposal. This site is at the center of the explosion from 1908.”
We all looked at her.
She grinned. “And you thought I was just another pretty face with an MBA.”
“It sounds like it could be the thing. But what in the world does these two sites have to do with a chunk of iceberg?”
Olive said, “Well, I guess we’ll find out when I find the iceberg site.”
We all filed out and, still being very careful, made our way back up the tunnel and to the end of the cave where the hole was.
This time, Olive said, “I’m going first. Don’t even try to stop me.”
And with no other commentary she shoved her way to the head of the line, and out the hole. After a couple breathless minutes, she stuck her head back in and said, “It’s all clear.”
I confess to a momentary letdown as we all pulled our way back out through the hole and stood in a cluster, waiting for an elevator. In the middle of the frozen Siberian tundra. Nothing odd about that, is there?
Chapter Sixteen
Just a hole in the ground
It’s been a couple weeks since Georgia’s arrival, so I took a drive along with her down to her house to take a look. Apparently, she’d gotten bad news about her house and needed some hand holding. Since I’ve been known to need some hand holding myself, I went along for moral support.