by Dan Schiro
Dalaxa’s breath caught and she gazed at the living metal for a moment. “Goddamn. You have no idea how I wanted to study true E-tech… once. And now that I’m in a room with it, I never want to look through a microscope again.” She turned her head and closed her eyes.
Zovaco leaned forward. “Dr. Croy, I’m sorry to press. But are you certain it was truly Typhus the Mad Thinker?”
“Yes,” Dalaxa exploded, slapping a bio-mold cushion so hard it took an imprint of her long fingers. “Why are all politicians so relentlessly dense? He was a huge, black-haired vycart, a madman, one of not inconsiderable genius, and believe me, I would know. And, oh, yes — that’s what he called himself exactly, ‘Typhus the Mad Thinker, Grand Warlord of the Crimson Claw Empire.’ Is that certain enough?!”
Zovaco sat back slowly and cleared his throat. “We’ll consider the matter settled, then,” he said softly. “Can you remember any details about where you were, or…” he hesitated tactfully, “any of the things you told him?”
Dalaxa sat up on the couch and pulled her knees to her chest. “It was a lot.” Her face scrunched like she was feeling the pangs of a migraine. “But it’s all in pieces in my head. He was building things, but…” She sighed.
“It’s okay,” Zovaco said, his face drawn tight with disappointment. “Perhaps with time—”
“No,” Dalaxa said with a note of fury. “Typhus must have had everything he needed, otherwise he wouldn’t have shipped me away.” The s’zone put a white finger to her lips, her large eyes darting back and forth as she seemed to access some undamaged analytical aspect of her mind. “I need a board.”
Orion cocked his head. “A what?”
“A chalk slate, an easel pad, a damn stone tablet!” She threw her hands in the air. “I need a space to write. There are things you need to know.”
Orion and Zovaco exchanged stunned glances, and Orion led them into his office. Outside of Echohax Tower, the vast solar panel had drifted overhead and cast the pink-glowing Hub into an artificial night. Orion opened one of his desk drawers and rifled through the junk. Eventually he found an erasable marker he sometimes used to draw on the floor-to-ceiling windows. Dalaxa snatched it out of his hand and strode to the glass.
“Take a seat,” she told them briskly.
“Dr. Croy,” Zovaco said, “I don’t want you to overtax yourself, considering what you’ve been through.”
“Call me Dalaxa,” she said. “Doctors are meant to heal — I haven’t done that kind of thing in quite some time.” She shook her head. “My whole life is a shattered, incomprehensible story, but I can remember my science.” Her huge pink eyes flitted between them. “So, if you two wouldn’t mind sitting the hell down and shutting the hell up, I can tell you what I know he must know.”
Zovaco apologized with a slight bow and took the armchair opposite the desk, and Orion dragged his task chair around to the same side with a chagrined smile. “Is there anything I can get you before we begin, Dalaxa?”
She cast a quick glance over her shoulder, flashing the fine pink speckling that covered the back of her scalp and ran down her swan-like neck. “That’s a nice bar you’ve got back there, Mr. Grimslade.”
“Please, call me Orion,” said Orion with a smirk. “Mr. Grimslades are meant to inherit multi-trillion-credit corporations, and I haven’t done that kind of thing in quite some time.” He went to the three-tiered glass bar occupying the corner of his office. “Anything catch your eye?”
“Hiver honey spirits,” she said immediately.
“Are you sure you should be indulging?” Zovaco asked in his usual slow-to-fast language pattern. “You’ve had quite the ordeal, it might take some time to recover.”
“Worried the drink might damage my precious brain?” she spat, her glare full of sarcasm.
Zovaco raised his hands in apology. Orion poured two snifters of the thick golden liquid and shot a quick, questioning glance at the politician. Zovaco shook his head, rejecting the libation as he usually did, except when alcohol consumption was culturally unavoidable. Orion handed one glass to Dalaxa, and the two shared a wordless toast, sipping the sweet, stinging drink in silence.
After a longer drink than Orion managed, Dalaxa sighed and relaxed her slinky frame in front of the window. “I must have given him my big four.”
Zovaco nodded. “I’ve read your file, Dalaxa, but I’m not sure which projects...”
“They’re not in my file, not in any file.” Dalaxa took another deep drink from her snifter and gazed out the windows. “Project Sunkiller. Project Warflesh. Project Darkwell. And Project Cleansweep.” She sighed and drank down the rest of her honey spirits.
“Go easy, Dalaxa,” Orion said, still holding his nearly full drink. He walked around his desk and settled into the armchair next to Zovaco’s. “Can you tell us what those projects involve?”
She turned back to them and uncorked the marker in her hand. “I can give you the broad strokes, if you don’t interrupt me with idiotic questions every other word.”
“The floor is yours,” said Zovaco, spreading his hands. “Please, tell us what you can.”
She gazed at him, her pink eyes intense. “Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider that drink?”
Chapter 6
An hour passed while Dalaxa talked in a steady stream and covered Orion’s office windows with diagrams, sketches and equations. Orion and Zovaco listened carefully to her “Doomsday Devices for Beginners” lecture, only responding with nods or brisk shakes of their heads when Dalaxa asked them if they understood quantum this or relative that. Though Orion soon grew terrified that annihilation could strike at any moment, Zovaco Ralli never caved and asked for that drink.
“That’s about the shape of it,” Dalaxa concluded, capping the glass marker and tossing it onto Orion’s desk. “Or at least the pieces I can remember him ripping out of me.” She turned from the window and stared at them, her lithe body steady despite her considerable intake of insectoid-brewed alcohol. “If I gave him anything else, I can’t imagine how it could be worse than that.”
Zovaco nodded, his face unmoving. “Well then. I’d say this is something that needs looking after immediately.” He glanced at Orion.
“I’m on it.” He found himself sitting forward on his chair, his hands tight, and forced himself to relax. “Whatever it takes, I’ll find this lunatic before he can pull the trigger.”
“Triggers,” Dalaxa corrected him.
“And I’ll work the problem from my end.” Zovaco propped his elbows on the armrests of his chair and steepled his fingers. “I need to keep this quiet for now, Orion, but I should be able to shift Parliamentary funds around to get you any resources you need.”
Orion fired his trademark smirk at the politician. “Just another job, right?” He turned his attention to the s’zone woman. “From you, I’m thinking I’ll need—”
“A list of the rare components essential to my designs, yes.” She nodded. “A logical place to begin.”
“Right… well, as soon as you feel up to making a list—”
“I can dictate something to your datacube now.” She went to the bar and picked up the bottle of honey spirits. “My personal memories may be foggy, but my designs are as clear as crystal.”
Orion tossed his brass-plated datacube into the air. Dalaxa poured herself another drink and began. Occasionally she grasped for a word, cursing at herself under her breath as she tried to remember the name of a complex alloy or a specific type of nanobot. Yet despite her stumbles, she had dictated a list some 200 items long by the time she finished. To his chagrin, Orion recognized perhaps a third of the words.
“That should get you started,” Dalaxa said as she chugged back her drink. “If I can get my hands on a new datacube, I’ll update the list with anything else I can think of.”
“That should be no problem,” Zovaco said as
he rose from his chair, his thin body moving stiffly after so long at rest. “Mervyn’s made arrangements for you in the way of a discreet medical checkup and a safe place to rest.”
Orion stood and showed them out of his pink-lit office. “We’ll stop this mad bastard,” he told them confidently. “He’ll know justice for what he did to you, Dalaxa.”
The weapon scientist nodded stiffly, not meeting his eyes, and Zovaco patted her on the arm gently before he turned to Orion. “Get in touch the moment you find an effective way to pursue this, and let me know what you need — money, tech, whatever.”
“I’ve got this,” Orion said with a shrug. “This is why you pay our retainer fees.”
Zovaco and Dalaxa exited to the lobby, and soon Orion heard the whoosh of the frosted-glass doors as they left AlphaOmega. Only then did he tremble and sweat. Forcing himself to take a deep breath, he went to his bar and picked up the whiskey with the eight-legged horse on its tan label. His first slug from the bottle did little to still his hands, but the biting flavor and the warmth spreading through his chest provided a momentary distraction. He didn’t relax until his huge black dog pushed through the ajar office door and loped up to his hip.
“You’re right, Bully boy, you’re right,” Orion chuckled as he scratched and slapped at the Cane Corso’s thick head. “Just another problem to solve, one piece at a time.”
Orion stared out the windows at the pink-glowing skyline, gazing at the Hub’s great density of life and petting his stoic mountain of dog-flesh while he finished his drink. Then he turned and strode to the office locker room. After a quick change into comfortable, AO-emblazoned clothing, he left his office and headed for the executive tube. He rocketed down to the bottom floor of the towering building, and passed through the bustling Grand Plaza to get to his favorite barbershop. After all, one couldn’t solve a problem without a good haircut.
The stocky poxgane barber looked up from the wiry black mane of the temba nubu in his chair. “Orion,” said old Skagg. “You’re overdue, and you look it.”
“Well, I was a long way from the Maker Rings.” Orion chuckled, running a hand over his scruffy chin and touching it lightly to his shaggy rise of blond hair. “You don’t expect me to trust this head to anyone else, do you?”
“Smarter than you look.” Skagg’s grin wrinkled the jagged scar running over his right eye and down his cheek. “Let me finish up here,” he said as he returned his attention to the impatient temba nubu man.
A few minutes later, Orion settled into Skagg’s well-polished leather barber chair. The poxgane went to work on him with all four hands at once, snipping with scissors and comb, buzzing with clippers and shaving Orion’s face with a steady straight blade. Orion hoped the unlikely stylist whirling about his head with scissors and blade would help clear his mind like it usually did.
“You’ve got a look about you,” Skagg said without turning his dull red eyes from his work.
Orion stared into his own mismatched eyes in the mirror. “What look is that?”
“My people call it, ‘The Eyes of the Fated.’” He snipped, buzzed and scraped all at once, all with perfect precision. “No mistaking it, poxgane, human, what have you.”
Falling strands of blonde hair tickled Orion’s nose. “What’s it mean, according to your folk?”
“Lots of things,” Skagg grunted. “Could be you’ve got to do something you don’t want to do. Could be there’s something you know you’re supposed to do, and you’re running away from it. Could be there’s something coming, something too big for you.” He paused for a moment and caught Orion’s gaze in the mirror. “Ever seen the eyes of a man who knows he can’t outrun a lyonspider?”
Orion envisioned one of the colossal predators chasing him through the forests of Poxis. “I can imagine.”
Skagg shrugged and went back to sculpting Orion’s spiky blonde hair. “Anyway.”
Orion watched the prodigiously fast barber for a moment. “You’re good at what you do, Skagg.”
“Love it,” he said gruffly as he picked up a feathery brush and dusted Orion clean. “Been manning this chair for 34 years, and I wouldn’t trade a day of it.” He whisked the long, light shroud off Orion.
Orion stood and turned to face the thick poxgane man. “I bet you’ve got some vacation socked away, huh?”
“A full quarter and a half.” Skagg chuckled and folded his upper set of arms across his broad chest. “But like I said, I love what I do.”
“You should use it. Travel,” Orion added casually.
Skagg’s two free hands opened, palm up. “I work in Echohax Tower. What kind of sight-seeing measures up to that?”
“Seriously, my friend.” Orion gazed at him. “Not everyone has to stand in the path of the lyonspider.”
Skagg seemed to realize how serious Orion was, and he gave a thoughtful grunt. Orion tipped the barber generously and said goodbye. By the time Orion hit the door, Skagg was already ushering a new customer into his chair, this one a durok who likely wanted his horns filed down.
Orion breezed back out into the Grand Plaza, and for a few moments he watched the mélange of races surge around him. Scores of species intermingled as people ordered from food carts, visited shops and streamed to and from banks of gravity lifts. He milled through the crowd to the Grand Plaza’s ornate central fountain and took a seat on its edge to watch. As strange as the parade of life was, as literally alien as it was, Orion found it beautiful. And all of those fascinating, bizarre, anonymous creatures had no idea their survival could well depend on what he did next. The fountain gurgled softly behind him, a whisper underneath a multitude of accents, and Orion had the first inklings of a plan.
Swift strides took him to the nearest common gravity lift, and soon he walked into NLiten VR on the 31st floor. Orion had never been there before, but certain contacts had told him it was the kind of off-the-grid place where you could get whatever kind of VR you wanted, no questions asked. The front room’s red lights imparted a vaguely smutty feel to the greasy white-leather sofas, white shag carpet and silver-patterned walls.
“Welcome to NLiten,” said the hiver male behind a glass-block counter, pausing his projected holo-game. Like all hivers, he struck Orion as a strange mix of humanoid and insect — bipedal, with two arms terminating in something like bony digits, multi-faceted red-gold eyes, human-like mouth, small nose slits, dragonfly wings laid flat and two twitching antennae thrusting forth from a mop of thick black fibers that weren’t exactly hair. “Looking for something special tonight, boss?” His voice carried the same slight buzz as all hivers, just at the edge of hearing.
Orion cleared his throat. “Not really, I—”
“Come now,” said the hiver with a smile, his antennae standing at attention. “You came to NLiten for a reason, everyone does. No shame, boss, you’re looking for something special.” He smiled, his rows of pin-like teeth disarming.
“Look, I’m not here for gray-market datasphere porn,” Orion said, shaking his head. “I just want a burner cube, some time, and no record of me being here. I’ll pay for it.”
“Easy enough,” said the hiver with a shrug.
Orion paid NLiten’s shell company with a cube-to-cube transfer and picked out his disposable datacube. When he had it in hand, the hiver led him into a hallway on his strangely levered legs. Orion heard faint sounds from the well-insulated rooms on his left and right as they passed, some moans and some screams and some a little of both. The datacube floating beside the store manager unlocked a door halfway down the hallway, and he showed Orion into a gently lit white room with a long chair in the middle of it. “Enjoy yourself, boss,” said the hiver, closing the door on his way out.
Alone in the perfectly cubed room, Orion slipped into the bio-mold chair and felt its pads form themselves to his body. He placed his plastic datacube in the receptacle built into the armrest and waited for it to
connect to the datasphere. The one-time use device whirred and hummed as it routed Orion’s signal through dozens of shadow accounts across the galaxy to protect his location. Then he lowered the glass ring of the virtual reality visor over his eyes and plunged into the datasphere.
His golden virtual body cruised naked and sexless down the long ad tunnel. Banners and bright letters beseeched him on every side, offering Mr. Anonymous a fabulous cruise through stellar phenomena, limited-time offers on new skysleds, investment services guaranteed to double his money and alerts that lonely lockhovven housewives were desperate to meet human men. He swam through the nauseating barrage for a few minutes before he finally reached the orange-and-green virtual space of the datasphere.
Shapes and names moved in a slow swirl all around him, the thread-like current lines signifying search terms that ascended, stocks booming or busting, the latest celebrity scandal and other galactic news events. Orion wiped all of this away with a wave of his left hand. With his right, he unfurled the list of rare components Dalaxa Croy had loaded to his datacube. A large virtual sheet filled with multi-syllable terms wavered before him for a moment, and then Orion grasped the bright “search” jewel that always floated nearby in the sea-green cyber world.
He thought carefully about his parameters for a moment. “Cross-reference list one with public records of galactic commerce over the last year and illustrate findings on an astronavigation map.”
A frothy image of the Milky Way appeared looming in front of Orion, large as a dropship. A few seconds passed, and then scores of colored lines bloomed, stretching from star to star across quadrants of space to show the transport of various goods. Scores of shipment records crisscrossed the ether routes, and Orion could tug at each with his thumb and forefinger to open a text box revealing information about senders, receivers, quantities and so forth. Most shipments had moved goods for the galaxy’s major corporate players — Ogga Food, Xotica Entertainment, Phuturistic Pharmaceuticals, VeleveTech and Zanthic Munitions — from harvesting site to processing plant to manufacturing facility. Orion checked each record methodically, but he found no mentions of piracy, no hints of skimming, not even so much as a suspicious note about breakage.