The Jolo Vargas Space Opera Series Box Set

by J. D. Oppenheim

  “You want I should push real hard right here? See what shakes loose?”

  “No!” screamed Katy.

  The woman lifted Katy’s shirt and Katy felt the leathery hand on her flesh. The woman took a look, moving so the torchlight illuminated the subject. She pulled down Katy’s shirt and grunted. It wasn’t what Katy thought. The woman looked at her body like she was a patient at a hospital, or a piece of meat.

  “There’s the toilet,” the old woman said, pointing to the corner under the torch. “Usually we recycle all waste, but I’ll make an exception in your particular case.”

  “Ain’t nothing particular about me,” Katy yelled, so angry she didn’t mind squatting next to the woman to do her business.

  “Oh, I think you got something going.”

  “Ain’t got nothing going!” And she started to get angry again.

  “Are you such a fool child you don’t know?”

  And then Katy realized. She knew.

  “How did you know?”

  “That’s what I do, Child. Breedun’s my use. Hazuki says ev’rybody gotta have a use. Even if it’s jus’ feedin’ the Bitch.”

  “But you’ve got no monitors. No data.”

  “I got my eyes, Girl. And I got data: nausea, fatigue, frequent urination, tender breasts with dark areolas…” And for a moment the old woman sounded almost clinical.

  “You were a doctor before!”

  “No!”

  “Yes, you were!”

  “Be quiet.”

  “You don’t know if I’m pregnant. Anxiety and stress can cause nausea!”

  “You got nuttin’ to be stressed about. You gone live! You got a womb and some tits. Rejoice.” And the skinny, gray-haired woman with rags for clothes held up her hands and did a little dance.

  “Then why the hell you still here?”

  “Cause Mr. Hazuki need me!” She jabbed a finger at her chest. “He need me to help with the breeeedun’! He keep me around cause I find you and I know. None of them other idiots gone know what I know. They gone try to plant their seed in you but I know better. He listen to me!”

  “No seed goin’ in me!” Katy screamed.

  “Ha ha ha,” cackled the old woman, then broke into a cough. “Not until after that one come out.” She grabbed Katy by the arm. “See. You got a use, too. Don’t frack it up with your mouth or you’ll be in a cage down below waiting on the Queen Bitch like those dumb males ain’t worth nothing. Get a little seed from them an’ then they jus’ meat.”

  And with that they started back up the stairs.

  George

  Temperature alert at core level, subroutine alpha38f73, cron exec. @ 0023:98:00…

  Initiating cold boot, diag. Lev2…

  Aux pump C5 reroute engaged, fluid loss at approximately 240.33cc, skin graft 87.35% complete at entry and exit points.

  George sat up on the ice and stared straight ahead into the darkness. His core computer had taken control but he was granted some access to his central processor. Motor function was limited. He couldn’t move except to sit still, that and the tiny adjustments which kept him from falling over.

  If I were human I would hate this, he thought. I hate this, he wanted to say out loud, but couldn’t. But this had to be done. He’d taken a calculated risk. A shot to the head and he’d have been done for, but the man in the white coat had aimed at Barth’s chest, so the odds favored a successful outcome. His mandate was to protect Jolo Vargas, but Mr. Marco had given him nearly full autonomy to make his own decisions, even sacrificing himself to save another.

  Internal battery at 84%, reheating core.

  George knew he could lay there on the ice for some time with little damage to his system. The only issue would be if his internal battery didn’t have enough charge to unfreeze his core components. He didn’t have permission yet to access the his internal clock but it was dark so he figured he’d been there at least 5 hours. The Argossy was not in his field of view so he figured he was facing out onto the ice. The dead man should be there, but there was nothing. Nothing except a dark spot. Possibly a hole.

  Core temperature at acceptable levels, internal battery at 72%. C5 pump rerouted. Manual only.

  George stood. “Speech function test, normal levels,” he said without thinking. It was the core again. He knew at this point he should feel somehow violated, like something had taken over. But hearing his own voice was reassuring. After that the core computer finally relinquished control.

  George felt the hole in his jacket, but his skin was patched. A scar, he thought. He wanted to show Jolo and the rest. He walked back to the Argossy in the dark. A light was still on in the lab where he’d left, 8 hours 42 minutes and 12 seconds before. He plugged himself into a power jack at his seat in the lab and charged himself.

  The energy rifles in the weapons locker were gone, as were the battle suits, so he went down to the hold. Jolo kept weapons stashed all over the ship, just in case. The small energy blaster in the med lab on the top shelf was gone. So was the one in engineering under the engine. But the one hidden in the hold was still there. He pushed on a secret panel on the side of the wall behind a row of heat risers and there it was. Hazuki’s men must have had a scanner, but the hidey hole here was secure. He put the gun in his jacket and stood perfectly still.

  A sound. Or was it? He wasn’t sure. He tapped his foot lightly and listened.

  Auditory function confirmed @ 7.3 decibels. He clapped his hands. Again, okay. And so he stood in the hold not breathing, not moving. And sure enough he heard it again. It was a low vibration coming through the ground underneath him.

  Just then a temperature alert went off in his head. 4 degrees celcius and climbing. More rumbling below. 5 degrees. And then the whole ship moved. The starboard side dropped a few inches. George ran up the stairs to access the rear hatch. He had to wind it down manually. The whole time he continued to get readings. The ship was sinking and the temperature was increasing.

  At 8 degrees the ship made a sudden drop, one meter or so straight down. The rear hatch got caught in the ice, locking it at about 30% open. Chunks of ice fell into the hold as the whole ship groaned, the hull scraping against the ice as the Argossy slowly started sinking down.

  George ran to the console in the hold but it was no use. The engines would not spin up. After a few moments the ship stopped moving down and came to a rest, only to sink again, yet this time there was a grinding noise coming from below. The ship was being lowered down mechanically.

  There was no escape back up through the ice so George grabbed a large spanner, half a meter long, from Barth’s tool bench and hid himself in the large stash box under the floor that Jolo used when they were moving hot items that needed to be scan proof.

  An hour later the movement stopped and George heard voices.

  “Git two cables over the bow o’ this hunk of shite or she’ll fall right off the mover!”

  “What fer? Mr. Hazuki don’t need nuttin’ from this bucket.”

  “You ain’t paid to think, Bender. So shut yer hole awready.”

  George could hear cables snaking across the Argossy’s alacyte hull. Men grunting and yelling, one in particular, louder than the rest, supervised the whole affair. “Put a brace under the broken landing pad you stupid sots! Keep her in one piece. Knock off so much as a single heat shield and you’ll find yerself out on the ice waiting for the Queen to take you right back to worm hell.”

  “We in worm hell, Patty.”

  And this continued on for some time. George thought to wait until they had taken the ship wherever they were going to go, but what if where they were going was full of hostiles? There were three men outside and none of them knew he was there. Odds of a successful escape were high. He sneaked out of the hole and tapped on the hold console. The Argossy still had some battery power left but it was still a mystery why she wouldn’t spin up. George turned on the outside cameras and watched the men finish securing the ship to a giant mover.

  T
here were four men: the supervisor, two workers and a man standing off a bit with an energy rifle, which looked familiar. At this distance, George couldn’t be sure, but it looked like one of three Fed issue rifles from the Argossy’s weapons cache.

  George pulled out his energy blaster and suddenly it looked small and weak. But I am George, he thought. And they are but slow, dumb humans. He took a deep breath and straightened his jacket, because that’s what Jolo would have done.

  Then he went to the back hatch. It was still open at the top. He jumped, grabbed the edge and pulled himself up, and waited. The voices were on the other side, still arguing about how exactly to secure the nose of the Argossy. So George slid through the opening and dangled there ten meters or so off the ground, listening, watching.

  And satisfied that no one was underneath him ready to shoot him again, he let go and lightly touched down onto the metal grate surface of the mover. It had giant tank wheels underneath like ice harvesters and the whole thing looked to be a one-off made from junk parts.

  He jumped down onto the dirt and hid behind one of the giant wheels at the rear of the mover. He could see the Argossy above him through the metal grate floor.

  “I heard somethin’,” said one of the men.

  “Just yer imagination. Ain’t nobody inside the ship. They done been et by now.”

  George didn’t feel pain in his heart, but he felt something close to it. What would he do if the crew was gone? What would he tell Mr. Marco? An android who could not save his friends is no good to anyone. He wanted to feel sadness. But instead he felt what he could, namely urgency. And then a piece of good news.

  “Naw. Queen fed earlier on the dumbass, motormouth, Buster, and that pasty lookin’ piece of meat Mr. Hazuki kilt. So she ain’t gone feed agin ‘til the mornin’.”

  And now George was an android possessed. Urgency level: 9.84. Time for the offensive, he thought. “Hey, Patty, you are an ignorant, slow-witted dullard!” he yelled

  “What was that?” someone said. George, still underneath the mover, ran right to the front. He could hear loud voices again as the men ran to the back. He popped out in front and no one was there, so he ran away from the mover a bit into the shadows and then towards the rear again to get a good angle on the men.

  George was twice as fast and more quiet than any human so soon he found them at the rear staring up at the hatch.

  “Why’d you open the rear?” someone said.

  “I didn’t do it, Patty.” But Patty smacked him anyway. The man with the gun was there, too, out of position. George walked right towards them. He was perfectly situated. The man with the gun had his back to them.

  “I opened it,” said George. The man with the gun started to turn around. “Drop the rifle or you’ll regret it!” And the man dropped it. “Now throw it this way and don’t do anything stupid or something really bad will happen to you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Really bad, though your imaginations may be limited so you may not be capable of thinking of something really, really bad.” I’ve said too much, thought George. He wished there’d been time for Merthon to install the full set of colloquial speech patterns. Oh well.

  “I kin think of a lotta bad stuff,” said one of the men. “Like you an’ yer crew gettin’ et by the Queen bitch. She gonna love that fat one.” The men laughed. But George was done with them.

  “Time for you to die,” he said and aimed at Patty, the supervisor.

  But when he tried to pull the trigger nothing happened. That’s strange. The men just stood there with blank looks on their faces. George accessed his error.log file and there it was. The most recent entry.

  127.0.02.13 - merthon [10/10/2532:13:55:36 -0700] "SafeGuard /exec override XTYP/1.0" 270 2326

  Federation ship protocol. Merthon had been forced to install a safeguard so he couldn’t intentionally kill a human.

  One of the men was holding a long spanner to tighten down the winch cables. He raised it high and started to come down on George’s head.

  But the synth was too fast. In a flash, George snatched the spanner from the man’s hand and came down across his knees. The man cried out and fell into a clump on the ground. The man who was carrying the rifle made a move for it, but George shot him once in each leg. The other two stared at him, eyes big and scared.

  “Don’t shoot, Mister,” a skinny man said. Patty smacked him on the head.

  “Don’t talk to him,” snarled Patty.

  George shot Patty in the knee and the man fell to the ground screaming. Now there were three men rolling around on the dirt moaning and screaming and spitting curses at George.

  The skinny man’s crotch suddenly had a dark, wet spot and his breathing was fast and panicky.

  “You shot me,” said George. “You dragged my people off. Tell me where they are and I won’t shoot.”

  “Don’t talk, you coward,” wailed Patty again. So George shot him in the other leg. “If you talk we’ll go in the cage!”

  George grabbed the rifle and motioned for the man to walk to the front of the mover. They stood there under the nose of the Argossy.

  “Where are my people?”

  “The men are in the cage. The female is in the hotel.”

  “Female?”

  “Yeah. You know. One of them’s ain’t got a tool between they legs.”

  “Yes. I know that but why not woman?”

  The man did not respond.

  “How do you people survive here? The biological evidence suggests this planet cannot support even plant life, much less humans.”

  The man just stared at him, blankly.

  “Okay,” said George. “What do you eat?”

  The man reached into his pocket and produced a small bag. Inside was the same stuff that Koba had found right before Hazuki came. Hurley had eaten it.

  “This is not logical. Obviously there are some variables I have not considered. Is the black stuff the only source of food?”

  “It eats ok,” he said.

  George took a deep breath. “Okay. Take me to the cage. We’re going to set my people free.”

  “Cain’t do that,” said the man, wiping the wet spot with his hand.

  “Hide and watch,” said George, motioning with the small blaster for the man to walk. And he followed the man deeper into the large cavern.

  The Cage

  Jolo stared down into the massive, Argossy-sized hole where his ship had crash landed a week earlier. He was hoping it would be there. It seemed like years since he’d been in it. Since he’d seen Barth and the rest. Katy. The sides of the hole were wet and glistening but the hole was too deep to see all the way down. He threw a rock in and it hit bottom with a dull thud like it had found dirt, not the hull of his ship.

  “What’s at the bottom?” Jolo said to the tall boy named Korley, who was still clinging to the rifle with one bullet.

  “Mr. Hazuki and dem’s with more and better guns.”

  “Where’d they take the ship?”

  “Dey put it on da pile,” he said, grinning. “I show you.”

  Thirty minutes later and Jolo was back in the room behind the bookstore. Greeley called it the Rat Hole.

  Korley and Jolo sat down in the center of the room and the boy pulled out a dirty plastic bag. “Y’ain’t never seen nuttin’ like dis. Shiny paper like magic.”

  Jolo watched as the boy reached into the bag and produced a small piece of paper. It said Welcome to the Altam-- Underground Mall and Convention Center at the top in script. The Altam part was cut off just after the “m”. There was a picture of a giant storefront with two big trees on either side. There were shiny colored metal boxes with wheels everywhere in front. Jolo guessed these were automobiles, human transport before space travel or even terrestrial hover craft.

  The boy unfolded the paper and on the other side was a map. He pointed to a black X that said Book Emporia. “Dat’s us.” He ran his finger down a main hall to the end and tapped his finger on the Kawasaki
Grand Hotel. “Dat’s where dey keep the females. Dat’s where Oleman found us.” Near the hotel he pointed to several smaller shops: a place called Pizza Paco’s, and a small place called Genki Grille. “Dat’s the cage. Down one level. Used to be on the map but it tore off.”

  Jolo saved a snapshot of the map in his memory chip. “Where are the guns?” said Jolo.

  “You cain’t get ‘em. They down the street from here in a big building and you cain’t get ‘em. Go dere and die.”

  “How about the power? Where’s the power coming from? You can’t generate a gravity field big enough to suck down a freighter without a power source. Where they hiding it?”

  The boy just stared at him, then he carefully folded his map, placed it gingerly into the plastic bag and ran off to hide it.

  “I don’t know where the power comes from,” said Riley. “You, uh, feel it when they turn it on, though. Things get real, uh, floaty.”

  Jolo looked over at Greeley. The big man was asleep, but still not ready to go. He tossed and turned and moaned all day. Only waking to drink some water and yell at the boys. Jolo’s next move was going to be all alone.

  Korley came back. “Where you goin’?”

  “More guards at the hotel, huh?” said Jolo.

  The boy shook his head up and down.

  “Okay. Then we hit the cage first.”

  The boy shook his head side to side. “Cain’t do it.”

  “Then what do we do?” said Jolo.

  “Eat da black, stay low and live, Olemantwo.”

  “You’re a fool to go like this, Vargas,” said Riley. “There’s too many of the bastards.”

  Jolo smiled. “They haven’t gone up against me yet.”

  “Ain’t gone up against me neither,” said Greeley, his voice gravelly. He stood for a moment and rocked side to side, one hand on Betsy and the other reaching for something to hold on to. “Well, shite,” he said, and fell down. “Frakkin’ Earth. Shite idea.”