by B. V. Larson
Turtle felt wisps of exhilaration coming to the surface followed by a quick wave of omnipotence. His hand reached out, and Braxton mistook the gesture as a desire to shake hands.
Turtle sucked in a breath through his clamped teeth and squeezed. The ensign’s bones grated together in his palm.
“God dammit!” Braxton bellowed. “Let go, you bastard!”
“Sorry,” Turtle said. “It was a muscle contraction. I can talk now.” He felt like getting up and kicking Braxton’s ass, actually.
At the foot of the bed, the nurse gazed at him, still wearing her weird smile and keeping her fingers on the valve. She made him uneasy.
“How you feeling, breather?” Braxton asked, rubbing his injured hand. He manufactured a concerned look and waved the nurse out of the room.
“Glad to be alive, I guess.”
“Always a plus. Modern drugs are wonderful, aren’t they? Make you feel like living even when you shouldn’t.”
Turtle was feeling increased hostility toward him. He imagined working on Braxton’s face with both hands—but he controlled the urge. “Why are you here? What do you want?”
“I just wanted to show you some good will,” Braxton said. “I’m your supervisor, so of course I wanted to come by to see how you were doing.”
“Who does the maintenance on the outputs?”
“Why do you want to know that?” Braxton’s innocence and good cheer began to fade.
“Why not? Is it classified information?” Turtle asked.
“I’m just curious why you’d want technical information so soon after this near-tragic accident, given your delicate condition.”
“I’m never delicate,” Turtle said. “Who does the maintenance?”
Braxton shrugged. “Lt. Gomax. It was his team, I guess.”
Turtle was going to ask who Gomax was, but something was happening to Braxton. A flatness had come into his expression and his eyes were riveted on the pink memcube Jamison had left on the white sheet on Turtle’s chest.
With twitchy jerking movements, Braxton took up the cube with all ten of his fingers and turned it over and around as he held it close to his face and examined it. He dropped it back onto the bed and moved with quick short steps to the opposite side of the room. There, he picked up a comb, studied it, broke several teeth out of it, appeared to try to taste them, spat them out, quick-walked to the window and fingered the louvers. He sniffed at them, spun one-eighty, ran his fingers across the surface of the thermoplast wall, then turned again. Now he stood with his face only centimeters from the drip bottles that fed into Turtle’s legs.
The pseudo-psychosis, Turtle thought. Even Braxton’s getting it.
He watched the man’s face as his expression changed yet again, as he started to come out of it. The ensign was probably wondering why he had found himself staring into a drip bottle.
Ensign Braxton stepped back, huffed, and waved an arm for emphasis: “In short,” he said loudly, “you have two days.”
“Two days for what?”
“This is no idle threat, Turtle.”
“I think one of us missed something.”
Braxton sneered. “Don’t play sick with me. You think I don’t know malingering when I see it? I’m looking at it.” Then, more confidentially, “You’re going to be back at 906 in forty-eight hours to do another scum-run on that place. We know those bugs have something, and we want to know what it is.” He nodded at the drip-bottles and smiled malignantly. “Keep your valves open, son. You want to heal up fast.”
“Let a machine do it,” Turtle suggested. “Let a machine get flashed.”
“Captain Stattor thinks you psychonauts can still be heroes. That’s why we’ve gone to the trouble of giving you more control over the probes, which is what you psychos wanted, am I right? We give you more control, and we see to it that the opinion networks get the story. Then everybody’s happy again. Right?” Ensign Braxton leaned over him. “Right? Either you’re at 906 in forty-eight, or you get a grade-ten damage report. Try living with that.”
A grade-ten would get him confined on some mid-deck hospital for vegetables. By the time he worked through the bureaucracy to convince them he was functional, he could be old.
Turtle showed his teeth. His eyes were slits. He looked like an animal when he was angry, and the ensign must have sensed that browbeating this one wouldn’t work. In fact, it could be dangerous.
“Look,” Braxton said paternally, his huge eyebrows high on his forehead, “I’ve heard the rumors about defective parts, and there’s nothing to them. That would be self-destructive, and United Tarassis protects its assets. We’ve been taking a lot of heat since the stories came out about how you guys were for show. Our budget has been shot to hell—but we keep the outputs operating with the best available parts. It’s in our own best interests, right? Or am I right?” He forced a grin and absent-mindedly picked up the memcube from where he had dropped it on the sheet. “Forty-eight hours, son. Get well quick.”
Turtle tried to sit up, but everything was shot through with pain. Whatever go-juice drug the nurse had given him, it was fading now.
Braxton put the anonymous memcube back down on the sheet.
“What’s that?” Turtle demanded, eyeing it.
“That’s a little incentive,” Braxton told him. “Something to help you understand your place—or lack of it—on the upper decks.”
Turtle glared at him. He wished he wasn’t messed up—but then, he’d probably kill the guy and get kicked back down to one-fifty-four.
“Go harass someone else. I’m not going anywhere,” he told the ensign. A wave of vertigo came and went, and for a moment he didn’t know where his hands were. Maybe his motor centers were damaged. What if he couldn’t feed or take care of himself? He let himself slump back on the bed.
“Turtle, you were a smart guy when you came here. You’re more than the typical meatball thug. You buckled down and did your work, unlike your little rich-bastard classmates. But then you went and grew a bad attitude. You let public opinion get to you. It’s my job to correct that attitude.”
Turtle had no idea what he was talking about, but he knew he hated the guy.
Ensign Braxton picked up the pink memcube again and began rolling it from one hand to the other. Finally, he gripped it in his right hand and pointed a finger into Turtle’s face. “So here it is, short and crusty: I want you precisely because you are damaged. If you get a terminal flash, what’s United Tarassis lost? And if you find out what those ants are hiding, I’ll be happy, UT will be happy, and we’ll dial us all back to normal.”
“I could refuse and file a grievance.”
“Don’t make me laugh! I just had lunch. Now, be good and do as I say, or I’ll take everything you have that I want and piss on the rest.” He seemed pleased at the prospect.
“Give me some time to think about it.”
“You just had it, and I’ll take that as a yes. See you in forty-eight.”
Braxton turned toward the door.
“Did you know you zerked out about five minutes ago?” Turtle asked him. “That’s why you ended up looking into my drip-bottles.”
Braxton turned back toward him, slowly.
“Bullshit,” he said. But his face looked troubled.
“No bullshit. You zipped around like a low-grade on amphidrine.”
Braxton’s face went red with anger. “So that’s your play? You’re going to tell some lieutenant that I’m losing it? Nice try. Actually, a pathetic try. I wasn’t going to show you this… but here you go.”
He put the memcube into a slot and touched the controls of the playback console. “Enjoy. Have some entertainment. Rest, reflect, and revise. You’ll get one more shot to get the goods on those bugs. Do it right, and I might let you take a couple of days off to go home to that nice apartment of yours. Ciao.” He grinned and waved like an old friend as he left the room.
Beside his head, Turtle could hear the console click, hum, and begin p
rojecting. At the foot of the bed, in the middle of the air, sheets of light gathered and shaped into Lonna’s face. She smiled sleepily.
“Hi, baby,” she said, half voice, half breath.
Turtle was puzzled: Was Lonna doing something that could be construed as “considerate”?
She seemed to be rocking back and forth and for a moment. Turtle didn’t know if his vertigo had come back or if something had gone glitchy with the memcube.
She seemed to be on her hands and knees. Her image was close enough that he could see only her face and damp hair.
“Guess what I’m doing.” Her voice was a low slur and suddenly her head jerked a half-dozen times. Her hair fell around her face.
“Guess what’s new.” She looked up, grunted and closed her eyes. “Give it a guess.” She made two little grunts with her teeth pressing her lower lip.
His throat tightened, and he felt his stomach clench. He tried to move his arm to the controls, but his muscles felt like they had sharp-edged grit in them and his whole side raged with pain.
Lonna smiled and then began hard, fast breathing as the camera began a long slow pull-back.
Her bare shoulders were sheened with sweat, and under her hanging breasts, there was the top edge of someone else’s body.
Turtle strained to reach the controls till he saw black curlicues in front of his eyes.
He let his arm fall back, closed his eyes, and tried not to hear her voice.
“This is what it looks like, honey, and it doesn’t look like you, does it? Does this make you want me?”
The call-button... he couldn’t find it. “Nurse!” Turtle yelled, his eyes pressed shut. “Nurse!”
“What I’d love,” Lonna said, “is to just lie back and take it for hours.”
The thin nurse in white linen appeared in the doorway. “Yes, Mr. Turtle?” Her inflated-lip smile faded to officious severity when she saw the image of Lonna and her friend at the foot of the bed.
“This is not healthy,” she said, staring at him. “This is not good for you now.”
“Please turn it off,” Turtle said, still not looking at the thrashing image.
“Was the excitement painful?” she asked briskly. Her black hair glistened in the light as she glanced at the image and then glared at him. “Now you see what you get.”
“Just turn it off.”
She stood beside his bed with her arms folded. Her lips twitched independently. “Now you see.”
Lonna was gasping. “I just wanted... to say... hi... honey.”
Turtle started to say Please again, but the nurse had leaned close to his face and spoke loudly. “Next time you need help, don’t shout.” She reached down and turned off the memcube. “Use this.” She picked up his left wrist, pointed to the call-band around his wrist, and let his arm drop. It hurt. She turned up the corners of her lips. It was a threatening smile. “Are we ready now to recover without excitement?”
Turtle was going to say he was ready, but she had already turned and was halfway to the door. Her little buttocks bounced officiously as she disappeared into the hallway. She wasn’t a synth, but she was as twitchy as one.
Psychonaut Turtle—rescued from the garbage dumps, hero to breathers everywhere, someone who used to sign autographs. Now, he was abused by whoever wanted to stop by. Lonna was just a synth, but she was his synth. She had been for months now.
Turtle felt a deep anger growing in him. That wasn’t good. Scarn would have urged him to lighten up.
These upper-deck types are different, Scarn would say. They aren’t serious like breathers. They like to play, that’s all…
But Turtle knew he wasn’t going to lighten up. For what reason? These upper-deck pricks were too snooty, too thrilled to rub a man’s nose in the fact he wasn’t really one of them.
First Graff, now Braxton. That qualified as a list.
Turtle knew he was becoming dangerous. He could feel it. He wondered if a rabid dog felt like this just before it went mad.
Chapter TEN
There was a note taped to his hand when he woke up the next day.
He had to wait for his eyes to clear. Finally, he could read the note: “Glad you’re not dead. —Scarn.”
Turtle called him. It was a four-word conversation.
“Turtle?” Scarn asked.
“Come get me.”
Turtle cut the channel after those words. When he moved his legs, the dangling tubes at the foot of his bed looked like flexible question marks.
Part by part, he moved his body, gently flexed his joints, and wondered, Why me? He knew Scarn’s answer would be Why not?
He sat up, pulled back the sheet and looked at the valves and connections. It was time to see if he could live on his own juice.
Ten minutes after Scarn had arrived and helped him into his Spang suit, he was on his feet and acclimating to being vertical. The tight fit of the suit was comforting to his aches.
In the however-many hours he had been in and out of consciousness, Turtle had considered the elements and purpose of his life. A.) He had come up with some ideas about the bugs, and B.) He had decided that at his first convenience, he would deal Braxton some payback. He would show the ensign how breathers joked around with each other.
Turtle had spent time imagining how Scarn would handle the situation. Whether starving or bleeding from the ears, Scarn would follow the same cold-blooded procedure: Waste no time, cut through the crap, gut the issue, and haul ass out of town.
But this had to be done with finesse, because Turtle didn’t want to get sent back to the One-fifties and have to give up his apartment, his cheating synth, and his status as a guest. Eating garbage again would be tough now that he’d gotten used to real food. With his physical equilibrium feeling solid, just before leaving the room, Turtle checked himself over in a mirror.
“You don’t look good,” Scarn said.
“I’m good enough.”
Turtle walked like an old man, holding to Scarn’s shoulder or the corridor rails when no one would notice. The distance to the lifts had never seemed so long.
Finally, they reached a zero-G zone that took the weight off his bones, and he could take a deep breath. Using a drop-shaft, they moved from the medical deck back upward—outward, to Probe Lab Alpha on the outer rim of Tarassis.
Despite getting Turtle out of the hospital, Scarn was not brimming with optimism. “You know, you could get killed doing another run at that bug planet. Just like the last guy. It wouldn’t even be for any kind of good reason. You should find an excuse to flake.”
“I got plans. Besides, I don’t care if I check out early. Non-existence is only scary to a worrier. The dead don’t mind being dead.”
Scarn eyed him. “That doesn’t sound like you, Turtle. Use caution. Your brain may have been affected. I’d be pissed to lose you because you did something stupid.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Stupid can be complicated.”
Turtle made no response. The drop-shaft had brought them to the upper crust of their asteroid home. Scarn looked after him a moment, but then turned and went on his way to his workstation.
Turtle walked back into the 900’s, trying not to shuffle. He was under the full weight of gravity again. It felt like a curse.
Most of the output booths Turtle passed were occupied. Down the passageway, in neat rows, psychonauts sat at their stations. They were wired up, experiencing god-knows-what, risking their lives to hunt down anything that could be of use to United Tarassis.
Turtle sat down at 906. He hadn’t even settled in before Ensign Braxton appeared. Standing near him, the ensign had sweat around the edges of his face. He looked uneasy and nervous.
Turtle ignored him and began plugging in his Spang suit, setting up and testing the retrieval units.
“You have something you want to say to me?” Braxton asked. It was a challenge.
Turtle took his time with the pre-op tests. “Nope,” he finally said. If a calm exteri
or annoyed Braxton, he wanted to keep doing it.
“You sure?” Braxton waited for an answer. When there was none, he grunted. “Then get on with it. When you’re done, we’ll check over your run ninety different ways, so don’t try to fake anything.”
Turtle hadn’t seen Braxton like this before, defensive, tense, and cutting back on his meanness. He kind of liked it. The man was expecting some kind of angry, jealousy-ridden response, and when it hadn’t come, he seemed edgy.
Was that his game? To get Turtle to punch him, or worse? If that was it, there could only be one reason: He wanted to get Turtle kicked back down to the lower levels.
“What happened to Jamison?” Turtle asked in a neutral tone. “Why isn’t he hovering around?”
“Crewman Jamison has advanced. He made petty officer,” Braxton said in a surprisingly civil tone.
“A promotion? He seemed like a dumbass. He likes to watch slave movies on the equipment.”
“What do you care?” Braxton demanded, his neutrality evaporating again. “You’re not crew. Get your ass in gear.”
Turtle eyed him, and he felt the hostility between them rising again. Screwing another man’s synth… that was just a prank to an upper-deck type. But Turtle wasn’t an upper-deck man. He was out of his element and he was not reacting well.
But then, Braxton was out of his element too. He didn’t know how the mind of a breather like Turtle responded to arrogant insults and cruel jokes.
“So Jamison has private sex with slave fantasies while on duty, and now he’s a noncom? That’s how you crew people operate? Scarn told me the privileged were different.”
Turtle finished with the codes and while they waited a few seconds for the ensign’s clearance, Braxton leaned down toward Turtle’s face and gave him a flat smile.
“Have fun,” he said. “Don’t drown, or let the bugs snip your neck again, or fall into a volcano, either. I’d feel real bad if you did.”
The output started chattering. Ensign Braxton’s eyebrows lowered till they half-covered his eyes. He turned and stalked away.
Turtle tried to focus on the mission, to forget about Braxton’s petty games—that was for later.