Planetary: Mercury, page 25
It took me all of ten seconds to pop off the lid and tell the computer to “scan” records in its own memory. The sensors thought they were active, but had only done a computer search. It was so easy. How did other people not walk in from off the street whenever they liked? What was it like in the funny little brains who only had an IQ of 160, like Sean?
The door for the ugly brick building started to open, and I smiled. “Open says-a-me.”
The gate swung open, and the target building was directly ahead. Fe’eshar moved in first, followed by Sean. I toddled along behind, wondering exactly what we were going to do once we had penetrated the front door. The building wasn’t a warehouse, more like a small transport hangar. Even if we somehow managed to find a crate of missiles, and used that to destroy the whole building, the resulting explosions would probably destroy the surrounding kilometer. I didn’t even want to think of what would happen if we accidentally cracked the dome. Death by spacing was bad, but at least there would be a body left—I didn’t want to be flash-fried by Mercury’s 800 degrees.
When we made it to the storage unit we wanted, the next lock was slightly more complex than the one on the outer perimeter. I looked it over, and was about to get to work when Fe’eshar ripped the door off.
I gave them both a look. “Well, that was subtle. If you were going to set off every alarm in the building, why did I even bother picking the first lock?”
Sean smiled. “You needed to feel useful somehow. Besides, there’s security personnel inside anyway.”
I blinked. I didn’t know how he did it, but I assumed that he had gotten that information from the info we recovered at the bar fight. I hadn’t looked at the thing myself.
Sean rushed in, and the Touri and I charged in after him. I had no idea what they were doing, or why. We just followed him to the central corridor…the main storage room. There were enough crates there to fill the cargo hold of a large shuttle. I didn’t even want to imagine how much time it took to bring it all in.
The lights went on a few seconds later.
“Gee, Sean,” I muttered behind him. “You invite me to all the really cool parties, especially when the hosts have automatic weapons.”
There were a few armored Soivan, a few scaled Touris, like Fe’eshar, and a scattering of other races, with the only thing they had in common were their armaments, and the fact that they were all on the high ground on the catwalk above us.
And there was Levin, the bartender, smiling at us.
“I regret to inform you gentlemen,” Sean declared in a crystal clear brogue, “that you are all under arrest. If you come quietly, there will be no need to kill you.”
Levin beamed. “Ah, and what would be the fun in that?”
Sean leaned up against one of the large crates next to him. “And tell me exactly how you’re going to kill us with automatic weapons while I’m standing next to a box of rockets? Or is it that your people are really good sharpshooters?”
The bartender blinked and said, with a little less cheer this time, “You’re not exactly a small target.”
Ryan smiled, raising a finger to emphasize that Levin had hit upon an important point. “Ah, ’tis true, yet you have a little problem. I’m not the only target you need to hit.”
“The Touri is even bigger, you fool!”
The one that no one had noticed—me—moved from behind the larger and wider Sean Ryan, then around and behind the other crates in the room. By the time the two of them finally finished jabbering, I had already parked myself underneath the catwalk—and the guys with the automatic weapons—with two fresh thermal grenades I slipped from a weapons crate. On Levin’s last growl, I hurled both grenades up on the overhead catwalk, aiming for its support structures.
The entire catwalk collapsed, taking the gunmen with it. I leaped out of the way, pondering in retrospect whether or not that had been the best idea I had ever come up with.
Whether or not it was, I survived it. The humans on the catwalk hadn’t made it. The Soivan and the Touri gunmen had gone down in a tangle of claws and armor. Sean and Fe’eshar sprang into action the moment the catwalk fell. Ryan had dropped to one knee, pulling out an old-fashioned projectile weapon with armor piercing bullets that would penetrate Touri scales and Soivan exoskeletons—though Sean didn’t try so shoot through a Soivan ribcage, just the lower organs. Fe’eshar didn’t even bother with a weapon, just slashed and hacked his way through the others before they could fully recover.
Sean yanked me to my feet after the entire fracas was over. I brushed myself off and sighed. “Can’t you leave anyone alive?”
Ryan smiled. “When they stop trying to kill me, I’ll see what I can manage.” He looked to the side. “Fe’eshar, you okay?”
Fe’eshar rose to his feet, talons retracted. “I am fine, thank you. Do we have all of them?”
“Not quite all, but there aren’t any gunmen here, if that’s what you mean.”
I blinked, looking at Sean’s newly acquired backpack. “What did you do, steal a fusion bomb from their arsenal?”
He laughed. “No, that would be silly. Besides, I couldn’t get the crate with the fusion bombs open.” He shrugged. “It isn’t like I could have smuggled one in my carry-on luggage. Now, come on, we should get going before the leader shows up.”
He scanned the area while I pondered his statement. If Levin wasn’t the ringleader, which made sense, then who was? I could only come to one conclusion, but it didn’t make any sense.
“Whoa,” I heard Sean say. He held a small black box with a keypad on it. “An M22 charge…think of it as a low-grade nuke without the radiation. When this goes off, we should be about a hundred yards away. It’ll vaporize all the weapons without setting them off.”
Sean took the backpack, and I couldn’t figure out what was in it that he was so interested in taking it with us.
We made it outside the main building, heading for the perimeter wall at a run. Sean kicked open the gate, and we spilled out past the stone cut walls…
And we ran right into a hoard of gunmen, led by their ringleader.
Jeistar, the Buddha of the Bar, his smile ever serene, held a pistol by his side.
“About time you showed up,” Sean muttered. “I’m surprised you sent Levin in the first place.”
Jeistar blinked, almost surprised that Sean had known it was him. Then again, so was I. Though I guess it made a certain kind of sense.
Sean smiled. “Of course I knew it was you—who else other than Levin practically lives in that bar? You were either in on it, or knew about it—and since Levin wasn’t the brightest Dwarf Star in the sky, he needed someone else. That left you.”
“Unlike Levin,” Jeistar said softly, “I have no urge to gloat. Kill them.”
The gunmen raised their SHP rifles and fired without hesitation.
At that point, the hydrogen discharge from their weapons exploded as soon as it left the barrel, destroying hands and weapons, burning faces, and setting fire to clothing.
It occurred to me that a magnetic field disruptor could also have been considered a weapon for sale by Levin and Jeistar—I just didn’t know that they were small enough to be carried in the backpack Sean had lifted.
Jeistar blinked at the suddenness of the explosion, and didn’t even have time to react when Sean shot him in the leg. We ran by him, Sean scooping up Jeistar’s fallen pistol as he passed.
Ryan dropped the backpack as he ran. Calling over his shoulder, he said, “Thanks for the magnetic field disruptor. Nice toy.”
We ran as fast as our legs could carry us, and that was pretty dang fast. Most people were content with medical technology that allowed them to have relatively low body fat with minimal work. The three of us were more interested in being able to run away from trouble.
Even though I didn’t even look back, I can imagine what went through Jeistar’s mind next. I could almost see the Buddha of the Bar blinking as the three of us just ran. It wouldn’t matter if every last one of his gunmen were killed that evening, he was still alive. Besides, he had one warehouse destroyed, but he could get more supplies. There would always be another shipment, as long as he was alive.
Jeistar would have smiled then, because, after all, letting him live was stupid mistake on our part, right?
He should have considered that we hadn’t.
But Jeistar couldn’t have known that we were running because the clock on the M22 charge was counting down.
I believe I heard Jeistar laughing at us just before the warehouse and the surrounding hundred-yard radius went up in a ball of white-hot flame.
The fireball had stopped about twenty meters behind us, but we were still running. I was scared stiff that we might have breached the dome and killed us all, but apparently, Sean had thought about that in advance. Surprisingly, the three of us didn’t even have our adrenaline spike when we had guns leveled at us, but a fireball that vaporized solid matter, that’s a little different.
We finally stopped about two miles away ten minutes later. The fireball was going to call enough attention to itself that we should have probably gone straight to the spaceport, but that would have been problematic.
“Jeistar,” I puffed, once we had taken a few minutes. “Interesting. Logically, he makes sense as the last open option. Improbable, but not impossible, sure. But who would have guessed?”
Sean smiled. “Come on Peter! It’s Mercury, the planet of the trickster. You should have realized, especially after the fight in the bar, Peter, that appearances are deceiving.”
About the Author
Declan Finn is the author of over a dozen novels. His urban fantasy quartet, Love at First Bite, has been nominated for two Dragon Awards for best horror. He is the coauthor of Codename: UnSub, which was a finalist for the Dragon in Best Apocalyptic novel. He is currently hard at work with Silver Empire Press to rerelease his Pius Trilogy, which stars an ancestor to Sean Patrick Ryan. Other short stories of his can be found with Lyonesse short story services, and Superversive Press’ Tales of the Once and Future King, and MAGA 2020. The general insanity Finn refers to as his life is well documented at his website www.declanfinn.com
MDNA
Misha Burnett
It was one of those days. My cats had found something in the walls of my place, or thought that they had, and kept scratching and yowling, usually just as I was drifting off from the last time they’d woken me up. So morning found me grumpy. I made coffee and found that the cream had gone bad after I poured it. Then I had a cyst burst in the shower and had to deal with stopping the blood from running down my legs while I was getting dressed. I got to work late and in a foul mood.
And naturally my boss was having a wonderful morning and wanted to get all chatty. “Good morning, Topaz, you look great today (a blatant lie), how are you doing?”
I gritted my teeth and didn’t say, Dying, just like the rest of us.
Instead I made some vapid chatter and asked if I could pretty please get my assignment because I’m just raring to go today.
My donor was Mr. Frederick, and he was one of the friendly ones, which on another day would have been great. The donors tend to come in two categories—the ones who get horribly embarrassed about the process and don’t look at you, don’t talk to you any more than is necessary, and try to pretend you don’t exist. That would have been fine, since I was trying to pretend I didn’t exist that day.
But no. Instead I get the other kind, the sort who like to flirt and act like it’s some kind of freakin’ date or something. Some days I like that, I’ll play along—well, as best I can. It’s not like I can know anything more about the process than I read about or watch other people doing.
I got to his house and rang the bell, doing my best to approximate a smile for the camera. He came to the door in a robe, his salt and pepper hair all bed-tousled and looking like he’d just had a great night’s sleep followed by a real breakfast that included coffee with cream that hadn’t gone bad. I thought to myself, I hate you, and handed him the collection tube.
Now, we have to watch. We have to be able to verify that the collection was in fact provided by the donor of record. This is a high stakes game we’re playing—the future of the human race, like they keep telling us. Even so, I was sorely tempted to tell him to just fill the damn thing and I’d wait outside. Maybe I should have, but rules are rules.
So he sits down on the couch and I have a seat in a chair across from him. He’s got a big screen on his desk. It’s facing away from me, but I can hear the soundtrack—the usual animal noises. At least there wasn’t any peppy jazz playing along with it. He’s watching the screen and doing his thing with the collection tube, and out of the blue he says, “I wish you looked more like a girl, darling.”
And I lost it.
I shouldn’t have. Yes, his remark was out of line, but as my boss likes to say, being out of line is pretty much what the donors get paid to do. The process puts them in a mindset that causes some weird stuff to come out of their mouths. It wasn’t the worst thing a donor had said to me, not by a long shot. But it hit me at exactly the wrong time.
I said, in a voice colder than the transport freezer in the back of my van, “Mister, my body doesn’t produce estrogen because I have a mass of malignant tumors where my uterus should be.”
And I then I broke down in tears.
Not, as they say, conducive to the process.
In fact, it was the kind of thing that could get a girl fired.
I hadn’t said anything that he didn’t already know, of course. Obviously his entire lifestyle was a result of the fact that he is one of the lucky four percent of the population that isn’t effectively sterile. But bringing it out like that—not to mention following it with a crying jag—killed the mood deader than the European Interior.
He pulled his robe closed and put the damned collection tube off to one side and got to his feet—I was just sitting there making those damned stupid hiccup noises you make when you’re trying to stop bawling your eyes out—and came over close to me. He didn’t touch me, instead he squatted down a little so his head was next to mine and said, “I’m so sorry. That was insensitive of me. I shouldn’t have.”
And the whole time I was thinking that I shouldn’t have and him being all noble and understanding right then just made it all worse and I was a hell of a mess just then. Plus I really needed to make this collection and that meant getting myself back under control and him back into the groove.
But I couldn’t stop crying. So I got up and ran to the bathroom. I had been there often enough that I knew where it was. I ran the water and washed my face—my sobs finally dying down—and seriously contemplated just drowning myself in the toilet right then and there.
Instead I talked myself down off the ledge, dried my face. I looked blotchy as hell, but then I always look blotchy as hell. I get squamous cells by the double handful. I didn’t look any worse than usual, anyway. I sucked it up and stepped out of the bathroom.
He was still in his robe, but it was closed and belted and he was at his desk, reading the screen and looking like any executive who works from home. He glanced up at me, gently concerned, and got to his feet.
“You want something to eat?” he asked. “I have some biscuits from breakfast. They’re still warm.”
“No thank you,” I said in my professional voice.
“Coffee?” he asked.
I started to shake my head, then thought, screw it, I’ve already messed up. “Please, that would be lovely.”
He headed to the kitchen and asked over his shoulder, “How do you take it?”
“Cream,” I said. “Lots of cream.”
He got about three steps towards the kitchen door when the giggles started. Him first, with a muttered, “sorry” and then I started laughing, too. He fled, and I took my seat, trying to stifle the laughs and making little squeaks that made me start laughing all over again. What the hell was wrong with me?
He brought two coffees and a plate of biscuits. We were both fairly calm by then. I sipped coffee and it was excellent, and I had a biscuit. Two, even.
“I can call to reschedule, if you want,” he said.
“No,” I said quickly. “Please. It would be better if we could… stick to the schedule.”
Then a horrid thought struck me. “I mean, unless you want me to go away. They’ll,” I swallowed hard, “send someone else.”
Yeah, this was definitely going to be a career-ender. Well, there were other delivery jobs. None that paid this well, of course.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want them to send somebody else.”
Then we just sat there for a moment. I was trying desperately to think of something to say or do that would get him interested in the process again, but everything that came to mind would have been just… pathetic.
“This is really a strange situation,” he said thoughtfully. “You know I’m still a virgin, technically. I’ve got twenty-six children but I’ve never actually, you know, done it.”
He seemed to be talking more to himself and I’d already said too much, so I kept my trap shut.
“Not exactly what I expected my sex life to be when I was a kid, you know?” he went on.
“What did you expect it to be like?” The question just popped out. I knew that men and women used to do things together, things that were preserved on video and—it was rumored—carefully staged live performances for very select audiences. But it wasn’t a subject that had ever interested me much, work notwithstanding.
He had to have been born before the wars, which meant he was at least ten years older than me. He would have known about those things growing up. Being viable, he’d probably expected to have his own woman and their own children when he grew up. It was a different world back then.
“Oh,” he gave a laugh. “Something more romantic, I suppose.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
He looked up at me, to see if I was mocking him, but I was serious.
