by Simon Archer
Unfortunately, Clem was not faring so well with his opponent, another shipper in equally grimy brown leather clothing. All the off-land shippers looked like that, with five o’clock shadows and longish hair. The guy had his own gun pointed to Clem’s head as my friend tried to wrestle out of his clutches.
I quickly found the trigger on the gun I had taken from my victim and shot it at the guy. He fell to the ground in a splatter of blood against the floor.
“Now!” I screamed, and the foxgirls all leapt out of their crates to lunge at the remaining three shippers, while Iggy stayed safely out of the way in the back corner of the area, against the side of the ship. Still no sign of Malthe and Lin. They hadn’t had an opportunity to sneak away yet.
So I ran at the remaining shippers, forcing them around another set of crates until they were safely hidden away from Malthe and Lin’s crates. Then I heard the remaining lids moving and knew that my remaining teammates were on their way to search for clues about the outside world.
“Grab that guy’s gun!” I yelled at Clem as I ran. He whipped his head around before he realized what I met. Clem grabbed the fallen shipper’s gun for himself and came running after me, the foxgirls following close behind him.
The foxgirls and I moved as one against the remaining shippers. It was no contest, really, us versus three guys without much to defend themselves now that we had guns, too. Cindra quickly wrestled away a gun from one of the guys and gave it to Kinley, who shot another in the head and tossed that gun to Kira, who was engaged in a fistfight with the remaining shipper. I ran over to help her as Clem fought the other one with Cindra.
The shipper’s gun had been knocked to the ground in the scuffle. I grabbed it and handed tossed it over to Cindra so that she would have one, too. I heard another shot ring out and looked over my shoulder to see that she’d shot the other remaining shipper dead. Leaving the one sparring with Kira and me the only one who we could try to get information from still.
“Step back,” I instructed Kira and stood looming over the much shorter shipper, pointing the gun I had stolen from one of the man’s crewmates straight at his forehead.
“What… what do you want?” the guy stammered, staring up at me with fear is his eyes.
“Your buddy seemed to recognize us before,” I said flatly. “Why? From where?”
“From… from the TV,” he stammered, and all I could do was blink at him. Out of all the possible answers, I had not expected this one.
“What do you mean?” I asked him, shaking my head, incredulous. “What are you talking about? The TV?”
“What’s a TV? Do you get Termina news stations here?” Kira asked, kinder and more straightforward than I was in that moment of confusion.
“Um, sort of,” the man said, and now he was confused. “It’s more of a reality show than a news program.”
“A… reality show?” I repeated, and it was my turn to be confused. “What’s that mean?”
“You know, we just watch and see about your lives,” the man said, wincing as the words came out as if he was afraid I was going to smash his head in at this news. But in order to be angry enough to do that, I would need to have understood what he meant, which I still didn’t.
“What?” I asked, shaking my head in disbelief. “What do you mean you watch our lives? That doesn’t make any sense!”
“If you just go downstairs, I can show you,” the man said, and I bristled at this as he made as if to move forward.
“Don’t you make a move without my say so,” I snapped, brandishing the gun over his head again.
“Okay, okay,” he said, holding up his hands in the air. But then, in one swift motion, he surprised me by darting off to the side of the ship and jumping over the edge and into the raging water below.
I stared open-mouthed down at the waves as they washed over his body. He flailed at first, but then the current pulled him under.
“What… the fuck just happened?” Cindra asked, following close behind me and peering over the edge after the shipper like I was.
“I have no idea,” I said, shaking my head, “but they’re all dead now. Come on, let’s toss the rest of them overboard, too.”
The rest of my team then helped me gather up the other shippers’ corpses and throw them off the side of the ship. Iggy just stood there and watched us, open-mouthed like I had been. Finally, when all of the shippers were gone, he spoke.
“I… it’s like they knew who you were,” he said. “I don’t understand…”
“Yeah, me neither,” I said, turning to him. “But do you understand now why we need to be here? Why we think something weird is going on?”
“Uh, yeah,” Iggy said, nodding faintly, but still dazed and looking like he’d seen a ghost or something. “Yeah, I think I get it now. I’m not supposed to tell anyone about any of this when I get back home, am I?”
“No, you’re not,” I said, “except Semra and the rest of the TelCorp board. You should tell them, but everyone else is off-limits, including Jami. When you get back, sail along the north shore instead and call for Semra when you anchor in the harbor there. She’ll tell you what to do, give you some kind of plan, and cover for you. Just tell her we sent you and everything that happened here today.” There was another period of silence after this.
“Okay,” Iggy said at long last, shaking his head to clear it and looking straight at me for the first time since the battle began. “That’s something, at least, I suppose. I won’t have to keep it all to myself, anyway. And if I can avoid the south side docks, that’d probably be best for everyone. I don’t know how good I’ll be at lyin’ to my friends.”
“That’s understandable,” I said, giving him a small smile and remembering how awful it had been when I’d had to lie to Clem and Lin about the tunnel people at first, for fear Achilles had infiltrated our ranks somehow. “But just remember how important it is to keep this quiet. Can you imagine what the reaction would be if everyone in Termina suddenly knew all this, and I wasn’t there to do damage control?”
“Oh yeah,” Iggy said, and I saw in his face the realization dawning over him just how bad this could become. “People would go totally nuts if they haven’t already. And that’s not good for anybody. We’ve seen that before.”
“Exactly,” I said, nodding to him. “So you get it now?”
“Yeah, I’m on board,” Iggy said, though he still didn’t look all that happy about it, which was understandable at least.
“Okay,” I said. “Now, can you sail this ship for us? How long do you think it’ll be before we get to the shore?”
“I dunno,” Iggy said, scratching his head as he peered out at the waves in front of us. There was no sign of land on the horizon. It occurred to me once more that this was the closest that Iggy had ever been to the continent. So there was no way he could know how long it would take us to get there.
“Right,” I said. “But do you think there’s a way you can sail the ship?”
“Oh yeah, that’s no problem,” Iggy said, waving away the notion that he couldn’t. “I just don’t know about gettin’ there and dockin’ in the port and all that stuff. I don’t know what their process is there. And what if they’re waitin’ to arrest us or something?”
“Yeah, that would be a problem,” I said, setting my mouth in a thin line as I thought this over. “And it is a possibility… Hey, there are lifeboats on here, right?”
“Oh yeah, all the ships have ‘em,” Iggy said with a shrug, clearly not following my meaning.
“No, Iggy, I mean, we can take one of the lifeboats,” I said excitedly. “That way, we won’t have to worry about you and this bog ship.”
“Oh, kids, you shouldn’t take one of those little things all the way into shore,” Iggy said, clearly horrified by this idea. “You could drown right quick that way!”
“Okay, so you take us in until we can see the land ahead, and then we head down into the lifeboat, and you turn around and go back to Termina,” I offer
ed. “Does that sound like something you could do?” Iggy thought about this for a moment and then nodded.
“Sure thing, Mr. J… I mean, Nic,” he said, correcting his old habit of addressing me formally quickly. “That’ll work for me.”
“Excellent,” I said, grinning. “So you head the ship up here, and we’ll go down and see what Malthe and Lin have found if anything. Let us know when you see the land up ahead, okay?”
“Will do, kids,” Iggy said, saluting us and making his way up to the front of the vessel. “Man, this really has been a day…”
17
The ship was designed similarly to the one Iggy had, but it was larger and didn’t look quite so archaic. We found the stairwell down to the cabins easily. I kept expecting to find more bodies somewhere, or run into Malthe and Lin fighting more shippers, but that never happened, and we mercifully found them sitting on a couch in one of the cabins.
But they didn’t look so hot. Not like they’d been in a fight themselves, but like they were shellshocked somehow. They were just staring at the opposite wall, their mouths hanging open, not speaking to one another.
“Uh, guys?” Clem asked, wrapping his knuckles on the refurbished wooden door next to us. “What’s goin’ on?” As if in a daze, Malthe turned to look at us, while Lin remained mesmerized with whatever she was looking at.
“Just… I… look…” he managed, pointing lazily at the opposite wall. I crossed over to where they were sitting and stared where he was pointing. To my surprise, what I saw was a holovision. Well, kind of. It was sort of like a holovision, but not quite.
It was a giant screen, almost the size of the wall itself. It had a black rim, and the screen itself showed… well, it took me a moment to register that part. But I finally realized that I was looking at Semra. She was in Parliament, talking to Lucianus Halit, the Prime Minister, right in front of the main Parliamentary chambers, where the members held their meetings and votes.
“I’m telling you, Prime Minister, we have this handled,” she was saying, and there was more than a twinge of annoyance in her tone. “You don’t have to worry about anything. Not yet, anyway. We’ll talk more when Nic and the others get back. They’ll have some kind of lead on him by then, but if they don’t, that’s when we worry. Not now. Not yet.”
“It’s just… this is all so very sudden,” Lucianus said back, shifting on his feet and practically refusing to meet Semra’s eyes. “Why did Mr. Joch fail to notify me of this himself?”
“That’s because, for the umpteenth time, it was very sudden,” Semra said, practically through gritted teeth. “Look, Halit, I have more important things to do than stand around here all day trying to make you feel better about this situation. It’s a shitty situation. But we have to make the best of it and freaking out when it’s not yet warranted is frankly the opposite of making the best of it.”
“What… what is this?” Cindra asked, drowning out Semra and Halit’s voices with her own. “The picture… it’s clear as day. And it’s not holographic.”
“Is this what that guy called a… Tee Vee?” Kinley asked, searching for the word.
“I… maybe,” I stammered, shaking my head at the moving images. “But is this real? Is it really them? Is it actually happening right now, or is this some kind of recording…?”
“But it’s been over two weeks!” Halit cried, and I jumped in surprise at the unusual force of his tone. “This isn’t normal! It’s taking forever! Where are they? Why can’t they come up for air every once in a while?”
“As I explained to you before, Prime Minister…” Semra began with what little patience she had left, and then she went on to give her sales pitch about us immersed totally in exploring the tunnels like she’d done with the reporters.
“It definitely seems like it’s real,” Malthe said, snapping out of his daze.
“Yes. Yes, it does,” Lin said, shaking her head to clear it and returning her attention to the world in front of her. “It looks exactly like them. It can’t be actors.”
“Could they be animated somehow?” I asked, turning to Malthe.
“I guess it’s possible, but they look like real people to me,” Malthe said with a shrug. “This thing seems kind of like the tech they had before holovision, but updated somehow to be bigger and clearer.”
“So, they are stuck in the last century?” Clem asked hopefully. I had to laugh at that.
“Does this look like the last century to you?” I asked, pointing at the screen. “They can see what we’re doing when we’re doing it. That’s some crazy high tech shit right there. And they’re feeding it right into people’s homes.”
“Maybe it’s not like that,” Kira said cautiously. “Maybe it’s just the shippers that can see us.” I had to laugh at that, too.
“Do you really think so?” I asked. “I mean seriously, this guy called us a reality show. That means we’re being used as entertainment! Not some kind of surveillance, we’re a laughingstock.”
“Reality show?” Malthe asked, looking at me questioningly. “Where’re you getting that term?”
“That’s what the last shipper told us before he fucking killed himself,” Clem said darkly.
“What?” Malthe and Lin asked in unison, incredulous.
“Yep,” I said, popping my lips on the last syllable. “It’s been a wild ride, this day. So have you been watching this the whole time?”
“Yeah, it was on when we came down,” Lin said. “We’ve been watching since we got here. We didn’t run into anyone else on the way down.”
“Well, that’s good, at least,” I said. “So was there something else on before this, or was it just Halit and Semra?” The two of them were still arguing about us on the screen. Halit may be a coward, but he was a smart guy. I wasn’t surprised he wasn’t quite buying our story, but he would keep quiet. He was on our side this time, I’d made sure of that.
“Yeah, they showed some night club owners freaking out about their business before this,” Lin explained. “And before that, there was some richy rich party in your apartment building, a couple of floors down from you.”
“So it’s not just TelCorp they’re watching,” I said, running a finger across my upper lip as I watched the ongoing fight between Semra and Halit on the screen. “Interesting.”
“They haven’t shown inside TelCorp at all,” Malthe said. “Just Semra at the Parliament building. Wait, something’s happening. The screen’s changing.” He pointed at it and leaned forward in anticipation.
He was right. The screen panned away from Semra and Halit and to some kind of logo spelling out ‘Termina.’ A woman started talking, and the screen shifted again so that it was half the logo and half her face.
“We’ll be back after a twenty-minute commercial break to show you more of the events on everyone’s favorite island,” she said, flashing an excessively bright set of teeth at the camera. “We’re still working hard to get our cameras back up and running in the TelCorp building and in the foxgirl projects… now housing extravagant mansions instead of slums!... but in the meantime, continue to enjoy the rest of the drama going down in Termina! We’ll be back soon, don’t go away.”
Then the screen panned to some kind of advertisement for toothpaste.
“What even the fuck!” Clem exclaimed.
“Yeah, I think that about sums it up,” Kinley said darkly. All our eyes were still glued to the screen. I shook my head to clear it and then turned away as the advertisements continued to run.
“Okay,” I said. “So we know they don’t have access to TelCorp. And they probably haven’t since we took over after defeating Elias Berg. That explains how Achilles never knew what we were up to after that, and clearly, they don’t have cameras in my apartment. Otherwise, they would’ve known about that, too, when I first started helping you girls.”
“So we know my skills are still top notch,” Malthe said, looking rather pleased with himself.
“Well, that’s good, at least,” Clem
said. “Can you hack into their system now?”
“Maybe,” Malthe said, pursing his lips as he thought about this. “I don’t want to risk it quite yet. Let’s try to figure out what we’re up against first.”
“Agreed,” I said, nodding to him. “So to break it down… We’re basically holovision, or whatever they call it here, stars to the rest of the world. That’s why they recognized us. But that still begs the question of why that guy killed himself and why they said ‘that’s them’ when they first saw us break out of the crates.”
“Well, wasn’t that just because they recognized us from this thing?” Clem asked, pointing at the screen again.
“Maybe…” I said. “But I think it was more than that. If they thought we were just far-off… reality stars or whatever it is that guy called us, then they would’ve been a bit more shocked to see us, wouldn’t they?”
“They seemed pretty shocked to me,” Lin said with a shrug.
“Taken off guard, sure,” I relented. “But shocked? I wouldn’t go that far. They said, ‘It’s them,’ like someone were warned them that we might be there.”
“So they probably have cameras in the docks,” Cindra finished for me, her expression dark as we locked eyes. “They saw us talking to Iggy before. So they knew we might come. They just didn’t know where or when, so these shippers were taken off guard. But they knew it was a possibility that they might run into us.”
“My thoughts exactly,” I said, and I could almost feel the energy sap out of my teammates. I could literally feel it with the foxgirls through our bond.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Clem said, looking from me to Cindra and back again. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”