Soldiers of Misfortune: Parasite Lost

by Kyle Aho

  Chapter IV

  Dante sat in the glossy waiting lobby of the penthouse office of MediSyn headquarters, a corporation devoted to advanced pharmaceutical and biological pursuits. The largest of its kind in human controlled space, MediSyn held a virtual monopoly on all pharmaceutical drugs and synthetic biological components such as cosmetic and performance enhancing surgical procedures. This included lab grown organs, genetic modifications, and even cybernetic hardware and software. They also trained and ‘leased’ the best medical professionals money could buy.

  A fairly new practice, MediSyn trained willing participants in advanced medical procedures for free under the stipulation that they work privately for the company a certain number of years at a reduced pay rate. This allowed companies like MediSyn to access a wide variety of professionals and advance their own research for drastically reduced costs. MediSyn pioneered this program, dubbing it the Aceso Initiative, and gained a reputation for having the best medical staff money could buy. A large team of loan officers, lawyers and other gatekeepers were employed around the clock to judge who is worthy of this staff, an unfortunate reality for those less privileged. Despite the high barrier for entry MediSyn continued to be the leading company for any medical solution imaginable. It also happened to be the company that Dante’s father, Sirus Opulen, built from the ground up.

  An attractive woman dressed in a way that suggested she was very comfortable with her figure approached Dante with a tray of refreshments. “Excuse me sir, would you like a drink?” she asked. Glowing purple eyes and the soothing metallic timber in voice identified her as an android.

  “No, thank you Sia,” Dante said with a dismissive wave.

  “Do let me know if there is anything I can-”

  “I know, I know, go away.”

  Sia, incapable of taking offense, bowed her head and went back to the desk in the corner of the room that also doubled as a charging panel and entered standby mode. Dante tapped his foot while he waited. He was uncomfortable for a multitude of reasons. The fact that his father’s waiting chairs weren’t made for men of his substantial height and brawn was somehow more irritating than the fact he was called to be there in the first place.

  Sirus and Dante never had a very good relationship and as a result Dante avoided contact with his father whenever possible. As a teenager his father’s response to making the winning point of the planetary youth gravball division was that the sport was for ‘worthless, brain-dead meatheads with no future’. When Dante earned his first medal of honor his father told him ‘good men had died to make sure he could get home safe and collect that trinket’. It was hard to impress a man who became a multi-trillionaire by the time he was twenty-five standard years old.

  Dante squirmed and shifted his weight while playing out various conversations in his head. He thought of what he would say and how his father would react. He tried to come up with a response or reaction to every possible outcome because he knew his father was an experienced negotiator and diplomat. He had to be prepared.

  The office door slid open with a hiss. Dante’s father was sat at a large bloodmaple desk at the back of the room beyond.

  “Come in,” Sirus said as he stared into the eyes of a hologram floating above his desk. Dante stood up, much to the relief of the chair he was in, and walked into his father’s office. Dante tried to sit down but was promptly reminded that this chair was specially designed to be uncomfortable for people that actually did fit in it, let alone people twice their size. Sirus enjoyed making anyone who met with him physically uncomfortable so he had a psychological advantage over them before the meeting even began. Dante abandoned the idea of sitting and stood up, waiting for his father to finish his conversation.

  “You have company?” the disembodied head of an older man chewing on a cigar asked.

  “No, it’s fine. I told you if you want tickets to the gravball finals you just had to ask!”

  “I know, it just feels weird asking you for favors.”

  “I’m asking you for one aren’t I? Send me your guy and I’ll send you the tickets.”

  “Much appreciated Mr. Opulen,” the man smiled and the scars on his face stretched.

  “Keep in touch,” Sirus said as he ended the transmission, “what do you want?”

  “You were the one who called me.”

  “Oh, right.” Sirus looked at his tablet and navigated through some files. Dante forced himself to remain calm.

  “Could you at least look at me?”

  Sirus looked up from his tablet with a scowl. Dante cleared his throat.

  “I run a pretty tight ship Dante, I pride myself on that. Honestly, I’m surprised it went unnoticed this long,” Sirus began, a note of disgust in his voice. Dante already knew what he was going to talk about and his heart sank.

  “I should have suspected as much. You never could accomplish anything without my help.”

  “What do you want?” Dante asked, anticipating some kind of blackmail.

  “I want to maintain your spotless reputation in the public’s eye, that’s all. I would hate for the five-time Holo-film Academy award winner and decorated war hero to be shamed throughout the system. I’m pretty sure stealing billions of dollars worth of synthetic performance enhancing organs, genehancements, and bionics wouldn’t look good for you. That also means you not only stole from me but also that you used my company resources to grow said organs and probably bribed one of my surgeons to implant them. Those are all planetary offenses. Ones that normally I would hire a hit squad for.”

  “What do you want?” Dante asked again.

  Sirus glared with such intensity that Dante thought he might have to physically defend himself. Sirus looked back down at his tablet and a moment later the lights in the office dimmed, followed by the materialization of a hologram from the desk.

  The floating digital screen had several windows open including a map of a research facility, a satellite photo of the facility, a few news feeds, and a contract. “One of my remote research facilities is having some technical difficulties. They asked for help not long ago but have been silent since and the media coverage on their planet is making the situation very ugly.”

  “Technical difficulties?”

  It was normal for Sirus to speak cryptically. He had honed that skill from years of business and political arguments. Dante was used to reading between the lines.

  “If you want me to forget about you stealing from me, forget about you bribing my staff, and forget about the company property that is implanted within you then I suggest you do as I ask and visit my facility to sort things out.”

  “Why not just set up a CivOp contract and get some professionals to take care of it?”

  “I already have. I’ve found some candidates that would be good for the mission and I want you to accompany them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are free. And you have a history. If you solve this problem you will no doubt get some positive media coverage, which means I will get positive media coverage. I know you have the special skills required for this mission and I want someone I can trust to protect my interests around such a sensitive facility.”

  Dante wanted to ask why his father thought he could be trusted since they had never been on good terms but Sirus continued before Dante could speak. “If you don’t do this, I will freeze your assets and expose your theft of my property.”

  “I have my own money and a well paid PR team.”

  “I will also hire a squad to repossess said property. I’m sure your lovely Athene and the boys would be very upset about that.”

  Dante swallowed hard. His father was never a man to pull punches, literally or figuratively. He nodded and waited to be dismissed. Sirus looked his son up and down, curled his lip and waved him away. As Dante approached the exit Sirus called out, “Are you sure you’ve still got it?”

  He stopped and turned around to face his father. “I think I’ll be all right,” he said. Dante turned again and l
eft the office. Once he had stepped into the elevator he realized that both of his hearts were pumping abnormally fast.

  A courtesy drone equipped with an umbrella sheltered Dante from the rain as he walked out onto the landing pad with his hovercraft. His pilot fired up the engines once he saw Dante. Thanks to his unnatural size Dante’s shoulders were getting wet despite the courtesy drone’s best efforts, an inconvenience he was used to. He brushed off each shoulder before stepping into the craft. The thrusters beneath adjusted their energy output and whined in protest. With a flick of his wrist he slid the door shut and the pilot soon took off.

  A soft chirp alerted Dante that his data tablet had finished downloading the mission details. He sat down and watched the courtesy drone hover back to its charge station as he pulled out his data tablet. He swiped a finger across the screen and sifted through mission data, stopping and reading things that caught his eye. Fortunately the specifics were as ambiguous as most high profile jobs so Dante didn’t have to read much. The gist of this mission was pretty much what his father had already told him. A top-secret project had gone bad and a CivOps bounty was put out for anyone willing to clean up the mess. There were no details on what the project was because it was classified. The location of the mission would only be revealed en route. Even the cleanup was cryptic, stating only that all hostiles were to be neutralized and all information was to be confiscated at any cost.

  Dante checked the Erythria Examiner, a popular tabloid feed on the planet, and discovered that there was an outbreak of some infection that originated from the facility he was to infiltrate. Footage of the infected was disturbing. Many people were vomiting blood, the first sign of infection, and some were dying from the resulting blood loss. Vicious attacks became a routine problem and the local population was on edge.

  So basically he had to go some backwater planet to do something dangerous he wasn’t aware of and kill everything trying to kill him in between. Then he would have to bring back information he did not know about in order to get a fat paycheck that he would not receive because his own father was blackmailing him. Fantastic.

  A loud crack came from the cockpit and the hovercraft jerked. Dante radioed to the pilot via his earpiece but received no response. It was probably just a communication error; maybe they hit some turbulence and the pilot’s headset came loose. It still wouldn’t hurt to check. Dante unbuckled from his seat, stood up, and walked to the cabin. He tried the door but, of course, it was locked. Dante knocked on the cabin door. A quick glance out a nearby window revealed that the hovercraft was pitched down at an uncomfortable angle, something Dante hadn’t noticed before because the hovercraft’s VIP passenger equilibrium plates had shifted to compensate.

  With a swift kick the deadbolt sheared and the cabin door ripped from its hinges. A gust of wind assaulted him as pressurized air in the passenger cabin got sucked out through the bullet-sized hole in the windshield. The pressure change and cacophony of rushing air disoriented him for a moment. He stumbled as the craft jerked violently toward the starboard wing. Dante whipped his head toward the impact and watched a damaged antennae array tumble end over end cracking windows as it struck the side of the building. He turned back to the cockpit and saw the pilot sitting in a pool of his own blood.

  Dante leapt forward to grab the controls at the co-pilot’s seat and worked to steady the hovercraft. He had taken the reins of an aircraft several times while campaigning with the Human Liberation Army but that didn’t make it any less nerve wracking. He pulled up on the yoke to adjust his pitch and steady out the vehicle. With a flick of a switch he engaged the autopilot and issued a distress beacon, hoping that law enforcement in the area would come to his aid before this obvious assassination attempt turned out to be successful.

  Roaring wind prevented Dante from hearing the system’s multiple warnings and damage reports but a list of malfunctions started to float around the cabin space to compensate. A quick wave of his hand threw all the data floating around him back onto the nearby monitors where he could conveniently ignore it. Dante wasn’t a coroner but the fist-sized chunk of skull missing from the pilot’s head was a clear indication that nothing would bring him back. Two large black hovercrafts descended on either side of Dante’s ship, no doubt law enforcement entities coming to his aid. He glanced over their vehicles but couldn’t see the To Reprimand and Reform insignia that Vytal law enforcement was known for, or any identification for that matter.

  Passenger doors slid open on each vehicle and two men on either side of him armed with military grade assault rifles took aim. Dante dropped to the floor and used the doorframe as a handle to drag himself back into the passenger cabin as bullets ripped through the fuselage and tore into the operating machinery. Automatic gunfire shredded the main controls and the hovercraft’s VIP equilibrium plates shut down. Dante fought against the descending pitch of the craft as gravity took hold of him and pulled his massive body toward the nose. It wouldn’t be long before the unpiloted craft ran into something or, even worse, the ground.

  A brief lull in the firing signaled that the assailants were reloading and he had only a few seconds to save his own life. He let go of the doorframe and allowed gravity drop him through the cabin and out the broken windshield. Dante grabbed on to a section of the fuselage and wedged his feet on the nose of the hovercraft. He adjusted his footing and used the micro pistons in his legs to launch himself toward the nearest enemy craft.

  He couldn’t help but smile as he saw the utter shock and amazement on his assailant’s faces as a bear-sized man flew through the air like a spider monkey toward their hovercraft. One man was so shocked he dropped the ammunition he was reloading and frantically searched for another magazine. An involuntary glance down reminded Dante of the other traffic whizzing around them and the many buildings they were over, not to mention the long drop to the pavement. Dante collided with the aircraft and slid down the side before he latched on to the landing gear with his hand. His newly added weight forced the entire vehicle to dip until its pilot steadied them out once more.

  Dante reached up for anything he could hold on to so he could enter the hovercraft. His hand latched onto something warm and meaty. A quick jerk later and Dante watched a man plummet towards the city streets below. He shrugged and reached up again. His hand grabbed hold of a seat frame and with a grunt of exertion he hauled himself into the craft and came face to face with the man who dropped his magazine seconds earlier. Dante punched the man with such force it drove him back into a fire extinguisher and sent him to the floor in a daze. As the man came to, Dante had already dragged him to the edge of the hovercraft. He barely had time to scream before Dante threw him out to suffer the same fate as the first assailant.

  Dante heard a loud explosion. A shower of glass erupted from a nearby building and sparkled as it reflected plumes of fire. His personal hovercraft had collided with a building and the fuel reserves ignited, causing a spectacular explosion. Dante cringed as he thought about the lives that may have just ended as collateral damage to this assassination attempt. He turned and walked toward the cabin door. With a swift kick the cabin door flew off its hinges and revealed a terrified pilot. The pilot flicked a switch next to his seat and reached between his legs to grab a handle and give it a quick tug. Dante was once again assaulted by wind as a panel in the roof of the vehicle shot open and the pilot ascended through the opening as his seat ejected. Dante grabbed the controls and looked over at the second aircraft that had up until now refrained from firing on him to avoid friendly casualties. They opened fire.

  With a flick of his wrist, Dante banked the hovercraft hard to avoid an incoming barrage of bullets. He flew toward the enemy craft, gaining altitude at the same time and engaged the autopilot before heading back into the passenger hold of the craft. Air whipped around him as he looked out the cabin doors and down on the top of the other craft. He jumped and landed on top of the second enemy craft, hunkered low to keep his balance. Once he was stable, Dante crawled over
to the edge of the hovercraft and gripped a hunk of metal that he assumed was an expensive piece of communication equipment. He used it to swing down into the passenger hold feet first like a gorilla swinging from a branch.

  The fancy dress shoes he’d worn to impress his father connected right into a would-be assassin’s chest with such force it shattered his rib cage and slammed him across the interior of the hovercraft and into the opposite wall. The man clutched his chest gasping for air. A burst of rounds from the second and final assailant hit Dante square in the chest. Dante looked at the man, down at the wound, then back up to the now terrified man before punching him so hard his neck snapped like a dry twig. Dante picked up the gun his attacker shot him with and broke open the pilot’s cabin. He stopped the pilot from ejecting by smacking him in the back of the head with the butt of his newly acquired rifle. Using one hand Dante grabbed the unconscious man by the back of his neck and yanked him from the pilot’s chair and tossed him out the cabin door before settling into pilot’s seat.

  Dante flew the hovercraft down to street level and stopped next to a homeless man. He took the ignition card and climbed out to approach the homeless man who was squinting through thirty years of alcohol and street drugs. His eyes widened.

  “Dante Opulen? Ish ‘at rilly you?” he asked, rubbing his eyes in disbelief.

  “It’s all yours buddy,” Dante said, gesturing to the hovercraft and tossing him the ignition card.

  “Sureiously?! Wow, thanksh Dande, I rilly ‘preciate it!” the man said, overjoyed momentarily before he noticed the gaping chest wound Dante didn’t seem to care about. “Wudda hell happened t’you?” the man asked. Dante ignored him and walked off, letting his second heart compensate for the damaged one as he made his way home. “Wudda hell happe’in here?!” the homeless man shouted after him.

  Dante bought a hat and a coat from a nearby shop to at least try and keep a low profile after such a debacle. He felt like a character from one of his early movies hiding in plain sight with a poor disguise that somehow fooled the surrounding populace. He wanted to hail a cab and go home but his data-pad must have fallen during one of his jumps because it was no longer in his pocket. A few hundred credits later and he had a new one.

  “Want headphones for your new d-pad sir?” a teenaged boy near the vending machine he had procured his data-pad from asked. The kid was obviously down on his luck and trying to make a few extra credits selling used junk. It looked like the headphones were his own.

  “Nah, I’m good kid. Thanks,” Dante replied.

  “Are you sure? Some of the po-po around here get cranky about their noise ordinances.”

  Dante ignored him.

  The newly acquired device needed a data plan so Dante had to pay for a two year contract and wait long enough to establish a connection before he could hail a cab. Once the cab arrived Dante threw the new data-pad in the kid’s lap and asked the cabbie to fly him up to the top level of the hive so he could go home.

  He used needle-nose pliers to pull bullets out of his chest and had just enough time to clean up his wounds and toss the bloody rags in the garbage before his wife, Athene, and their two boys came running in from gravball practice. Dante slipped on a shirt to hide the dressings, confident that they would be mostly healed in a matter of hours.

  He walked out into the living room as his kids greeted him half-heartedly and ran over to the holo-pict screen to play a videogame. Dante gave his wife a kiss and asked about her day, not really listening as he looked for his spare data tablet.

  “Honey, are you listening to me? You seem a little distracted…” Athene asked, her voice warm and comforting like a meal cooked without genenhanced produce.

  “Yeah baby, I’m sorry. Can I use your tablet? There was an accident on my way back from seeing dad, I just want to see if VCN is streaming any details.”

  She handed him her data tablet, “Of course, was everyone ok? How is Sirus anyways?”

  Dante took the tablet and logged into his personal profile. A blinking icon informed him he had a new message. He went to his message box. The message was from his father, sent only moments ago and flagged as important.

  He opened it up and read the message. Had to make sure you’ve still got it. Dante pursed his lips and deleted it. “He’s the same crazy ol’ bastard as always.”