ftp.ee.pdx.edu/2014.02.ftp.ee.pdx.edu.tar/ftp.ee.pdx.edu/pub/frp/stories/harrison/har24

Text File | 1993-01-04 | 32KB | 684 lines

               Copyright 1992 by Jim Vassilakos
                      All Rights Reserved

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---------------------------------------------------------------



                           Twenty-four



It smelled like Achellios, that uncanny sweet fragrance that made
his stomach want to churn forth copious quantities of bile and
phlegm. He was just an ordnance officer back then, a mere pawn in
the essential game of life and death. Those were sweet days of
youth, his only home a small tiger class tac-boat, the armament
she bore, his personal toys. He remembered his first run and how
giddy he'd been, his skin all tingly with excitement, like a
virgin preparing for the unknown. Their work had been heralded a
police action by the Imperial One, a war of compassion and honor,
of duty and determination, and so they carried out their tasks
with all the emotions fitting the dimwitted and brainwashed
soldiers they were.
   He'd been lucky on that first run, and after the stench of
what he'd down soaked over his senses, the sickness came. It was
the only time he'd lost control. To his credit, he'd managed to
hold down his cookies until they'd returned to base. It wasn't
until he was in the shower, safe from the eyes of the enlisted
men, that he succumbed. He threw-up all over himself, and no
matter how hard he scrubbed, he could never wash off the smell.
It went everywhere with him after that, at least until the war
was over.
   The work became easier with time and experience. The whole
crew had gelled together, each person falling into place like a
piece in some grand jigsaw puzzle. Their bombardment runs were
the finest, or so they'd boasted. Administering cover for the
marines, transporting prisoners or casualties back to orbit, and
incessantly attacking, again and again, enemy strongholds,
industrial targets, it didn't matter what. They always pumped out
the missiles like they were going out of season, serving a dish
of slaughter with every run. Such godless butchery, day in and
day out, that he'd thought he'd seen it all: death by titanium-
tipped steel, death by chemical incineration, death by gas of a
hundred varieties.
   Brooks shook his head, trying to keep his boots out of the
sticky, red puddle coating most of comm-hardware's floor. These
past few hours had been like an instant replay, condensed and
freeze-dried for his personal convenience. And the smell, it had
followed him too, so long ago that he thought he'd forgotten.
Ensign Nguyen's mech-man finally forced the storage room's door.
A crewman lay inside, hog-tied and on his belly, trying in vain
to gnaw through the make-shift gag. They tore the duct tape off
his face, taking a bit more leisure with the electrical cable
around his wrists and ankles.
   "Ow! Easy guys."
   Brooks let the crewman get to his feet, patience slowly giving
way to some absurd impulse to burn a hole in his skull.
   "Bernard Hartley? Petty officer, first class, comm spec?"
   "Yessir."
   "There's a blind man on his way to sickbay, mister."
   "Sir?"
   "And four others, dead. I understand that you aided the
enemy."
   "They had a gun on me the whole time, sir."
   Brooks gripped the iridium trophy in one hand, patience
dissolving into the sweet stench. He settled his impulse by
kicking the man in the face. Bernie's nose made a squashing sound
when the boot landed, and then he fell backwards, dazed and half-
conscious.
   "You two... take this gutless piece of trash to the brig."


                          *     *     *


"You panicked, Jo."
   "N... no."
   "Ye... yeah. What's the matter? Never been shot before?"
   "F... f... uck you, Har... rison."
   "Another time, perhaps. C'mon, get up."
   "I'm s... so c... col..."
   "Cold... I know. You've lost a lot of blood."
   "...co... cold."
   Mike felt a kick to his thigh. One heavily laden Cecil stood
to his rear, a camera in one arm and a rather aggravated cat with
very sharp claws in the other.
   "Is he coming or not?!"
   "Dunno yet."
   "Leave him or drag him. We can't wait."
   Mike hauled the Draconian over his shoulder, ducking into a
public fresher at the end of the hall. Cecil followed with
camera, cat, and grav tray, not the least bit satisfied as to
their present direction.
   "This isn't safe, Michael!"
   "Ssshhh..."
   "We're going to be captured unless we find some place to
hide."
   "We?"
   "Fine. You'll be captured. Or more likely killed. Happy?!"
   "Overjoyed."
   Mike felt himself getting sick again, sweat forming in patches
along his forehead and cheeks.
   "Look. You go scout around. If anybody sees you, they'll just
think you're some blind guy who got lost. Tell 'em your camera's
on the fritz."
   "And what about you?"
   "I'll wait here. Cross my fingers."
   "Dumb."
   "Don't argue. It's a waste of time."
   Cecil dropped the cat to the white, polyvinyl tiles, a
pathetic grimace forming along his lips as it began stalking the
shadows from stall to stall.
   "Wish Cecil luck?"
   "I'll think it over."
   After he was gone, Mike pulled Johanes against the wall and
helped him into a sitting position, injecting him with a cylinder
of some generic, short-term stimulant, the last of their supply.
Jo finally looked up, his eyes sunken and heavy.
   "Y... You're right."
   "About what?"
   "Never been sh... shot."
   "Well, there's a first for everything."
   Johanes looked down between his legs, still holding his
shoulder as though his hand could do some good there.
   "They'd never... trained us to get wounded. It was always
assumed... you get shot, you die."
   "Yeah, well, that's sometimes how it works."
   "Th... thanks."
   "What for?"
   "Not letting... me die."
   Mike smiled, "I didn't stick you full of chemicals just to
listen to you get mushy. What the hell is going on, Jo?"
   "Cecil... didn't tell you?"
   "He told me some. He didn't elaborate on engineering."
   "Ah... you don't... want to know that."
   "Yes I do."
   Mike could see him smile, as though he had some mischievous
plan racing through his mind, something to do with a hammer and a
big, sealed pot of chocolate-chip cookies.
   "Stop grinning and just tell me."
   Johanes shuffled a small object from his pocket, something
yellow and scratched-up like it had on the receiving end of a
very long cat fight. Mike picked it up, looking at it from three
different angles before he realized that it was a holocrystal
recorder, smaller than any he'd seen in a good long while, and he
was supposedly proficient with such devices.
   "Where'd you get this?"
   "Calanna... in the Louise."
   "Sule's? Her interview with Erestyl?"
   "You... catch on fast."
   "So where's the crystal?"
   Johanes dropped his smile, eyes widening as though he had
something particularly profound to lay out. Then he shrugged and
looked back to the white tiles, an expression of desperate
futility and total confusion.
   "Meow..."
   At least he had the cat's affection. Mike wondered if he'd
been sneaking it munchies.
   "C'mon, Jo. You must have some idea."
   "I thought I did..."
   "Tell me."
   "Torin's safe... went boom... maybe you'd heard," he smiled,
as though it were a secret joke.
   "Yeah, I heard. I imagine the whole ship did. You think the
crystal was somewhere else on-board?"
   "Possible."
   He pulled about a dozen holocrystals from the same pocket,
laying them on the deck between his knees one by one. Mike
regarded them all with a mixture of fascination and contempt.
   "Which one?"
   "These are blanks... Unformatted."
   He peeled the little stickers off several. Mike figured that
he must have found them in the same vicinity as the shouter.
Johanes nodded, as if reading his mind.
   "Such things... have a strange way... of arising from the
grave."
   "Jo..."
   "Cannot be left to chance... must find the one."
   Then he started shivering again, and Mike felt a sudden urge
to prostrate himself before the temple to the proverbial
porcelain god. A few dry heaves later, he found Johanes fast
asleep. It was just as well. It would give the regen a chance to
do its work. Mike pilfered the Draconian's hypo gun, loading two
darts and seating himself, cross-fingered, on the floor beside
the entrance.
   "Meow?"
   "Don't worry PD. Cecil knows what he's doing."


                          *     *     *


Cecil didn't have the slightest idea what he was doing, at least
in his own not-so-humble opinion. Luckily, however, he looked
about as witless as he felt.
   "Hey you!"
   The guard's face had a fuzzy feel to it, probably something to
do with the overgrown moustache.
   "You're blind?"
   "Eh?"
   And fairly deaf, or so he'd opted to pretend. The guy he'd run
into seemed to take genuine pity on him, speaking slow and loud
and making sure to enunciate all his words with the utmost care.
   "What is your name?"
   "Cecil."
   "You get lost? What's your room number?"
   "Eh?"
   "Room number."
   "Forgot."
   "Okay... c'mon."
   His team had situated themselves outside the stairwell not
thirty meters from the fresher. One of them must have been a
vending machine custodian, because they sat, passing cards,
around a pile of choc-bars, sluice sticks, and fruiti-pops, all
low-end hacker-sustenance. The guard who found him nudged Cecil
gently in the right direction.
   "Hey guys. Meet Cecil."
   "Smell foodage."
   "He's lost."
   The officer in the group looked up from his cards, a curious
expression forming along the rims of his eyes.
   "Well, he came to the right place. Have a seat."
   "You'll have to speak up. He can't hear too well."
   Several scooted to either side, freeing-up some floor space.
The game was "Chaos", all luck and no brains, so it didn't really
hurt too much that he couldn't see his cards. Of course, it
didn't help much either. Cecil let the lieutenant look over his
camera, getting various close-ups of his nose and eyes and the
dimple on his chin.
   "I don't see anything obviously wrong. You getting anything
from it?"
   "Fuzzy."
   "Might be a problem with the cord."
   He disconnected it, and for the first time in a good while,
Cecil felt truly blind. They continued the game for several more
hands, Cecil picking up a fruity-pop and scarfing it down in a
flash. He heard the lieutenant's laugh amidst the shuffling of
cards.
   "So what are you doing out of your cabin, Cecil? Aside from
looking for free food."
   "Need my pill."
   "Pill?"
   Cecil sent a nod signal down the line to his camera, waiting
several seconds while somebody sneezed before he remembered it
was no longer connected.
   "Steev, you better take this guy up to sickbay and see if they
know what he's talking about."
   "Sure, you guys gonna be here when I get back?"
   "We're not going anywhere until we hear from Brooks."
   Steev didn't bother reconnecting him, but he could hear the
long cord scrape against the steps every now and then as they
climbed up the stairwell. Cecil found the handrail to be more
than just a convenience. Without vision, it was sheer necessity.
He was also pleased with the stairwell's lowered gravity, the
next best thing to divine assurance that should he somehow
stumble, no harm would come to him.
   A minute later, the echoes of agonized moans off cold, smooth
linoleum dominated his senses. Steev found him a seat and told
him to wait. It was one of the non-enhanced variety, nothing more
than a soft plastic pad to cushion the tush. Meanwhile, the
traffic of footsteps and miscellaneous voices crowded his ears,
none of them particularly discernable, and just as he was about
to slink in the direction he guessed the exit to lie, one voice
caught his ear, a voice he recognized, though he had never met
nor even seen her except for a single digitized mug-shot in the
personnel files.
   "...the hell were you trying to accomplish?! We've got six
more dead, and another nine hanging on by prayers and regen!"
   "It was important to..."
   "...to find out more about Harrison?"
   "Absolutely. The Commodore wanted him alive, right?"
   "Brooks... just forget about him."
   "Forget about him?"
   "There's a certain holocrystal in my cabin that I'd like you
to take a look at. But call off this search."
   "What are you talking about?"
   "C'mon... it's a long story."
   Cecil froze as their voices passed in front of his nose. Then
he got to his feet and made toward the exit as best he could
manage, bumping into one or two people along the way.
   "Hey, watch where you're going."
   "Thousand pardons."
   "Hey Cecil! Where ya going!?"
   He gritted his teeth and allowed himself to be turned in the
direction of the cyberoptics lab, also doubling as a morgue from
the smell of things.
   "How pleasant."
   "Oh, don't mind them. They're gonna be moving along any
minute."
   "Moving?"
   "To a shuttle."
   Cecil raised an eyebrow as Steev found him another seat.
   "I've got to get back to my team, but a doctor will be here
any sec. You just hang tight, okay?"
   "Hang tight."
   "Good."
   The door slid shut, leaving Cecil in a room full of corpses,
not the most scenic location to keep a patient waiting, but then
scenery didn't matter too much to blind people. He stood up,
pacing slowly about the chamber and feeling underneath the
plastic bed sheets for a skull with jacks. Spokes was quite dead,
sure enough, laying on his grav-stretcher so freshly slain that
rigor mortis hadn't even set in. His toes stuck out the end where
the sheet wasn't large enough and bobbed slightly as Cecil
brushed against them. He finally found a stretcher of his own,
laying himself on top and then pulling its plastic cover over his
body.
   A moment later he heard the sound of a door sliding within its
grooves. A woman's voice said, "Hello?" to all the corpses, as if
expecting one of them to mysteriously rise from the dead. Then
there was only silence. Several such minutes passed in dark
solitude until the door slid again and he found himself on the
move, the gentle hum of gravitics taking him away from sickbay
while the footsteps of some unknown passage bearer clacked
monotonously against the deck. With assured anonymity, the person
began to whistle, at first off-key, until slowly and quite
unexpectedly the tune evened itself into a pleasant if impromptu
melody. Cecil kept still, daring to breathe only in silent and
measured whiffs, listening, absorbed in the music as he imagined
the rest of his fellow corpses to be, until it crept ever so
carelessly into the realms of some ancient lullaby, its gentle
threads cut only by the sliding noise of powered doors and the
steady drum-roll of the whistler's footsteps. After several
minutes, they came to a halt, and the footsteps and tired
whistling receded softly into the distance from whence they came.
   He waited with the silence, a mixture of relief and
disappointment finding shelter within his mind as he strained his
ears for any sound of the whistler. Finally, casting aside all
semblance of death, he threw the plastic off his body and toppled
from the stretcher to the floor below. The place was cramped, so
full of other stretchers that he couldn't walk so much as a step
without bumping into one or another, sending them jiggling
against their neighbors until the quiet was consumed by a
cacophony of clacking noises.
   Cecil finally resorted to crawling on his hands and knees
until his head tapped against something solid. The wall's
metallic surface betrayed nothing of interest until he'd edged
his way against what seemed to be the door of an airlock, its
distinctive, hexagonal frame shunning all entrance. Blindly
fiddled with the lock's controller switches, he found the bolting
mechanism as much by chance as by design. Then the beast opened,
and he crept forward to the second door, finding the override
switch and opening it as well. For all his technical expertise,
Cecil had never claimed to know much about starships or creeping
around unseen inside one, but so far, he had the definite
impression that somebody out there was wishing him luck, a
gatherer's luck to be more precise, and a kindly, generous sort
it was proving itself to be.


                          *     *     *


"Actually, just finding it was a stroke of good fortune. You sure
you don't want a drink?"
   Brooks accepted the holocrystal with tentative apprehension.
If it really was from the Louise, it would be ISIS property, and
even knowing of its existence could prove rather unhealthy.
Viewing it seemed more and more like a declaration of insanity.
   "You've actually played the whole thing?"
   "Most of it. Why?"
   "Uh... I think I'll take that drink."
   She left as he loaded it up, and from the kitchen, he could
hear the soft sound of her footsteps and the clink of two glasses
meeting carelessly. Other strange noises seemed to reverberate
off the tile floor, until her voice rose above them.
   "Was that OJ or JJ?"
   "JJ."
   Jungle juice, any mixture of multiple intoxicants, and doctors
always stocked the best. His finger still lingered over the play
button as she re-emerged. She carried a smile with his drink, as
though she had something funny to say.
   "You know... you might want to save your sobriety while this
is playing. Some of it gets fairly technical."
   "Opinion noted and logged," said with all the sincerity of an
amphisbaenic snake. At least he'd could fall back on drunkenness.
They'd understand.


                          *     *     *


Mike didn't understand. It had been in the whereabouts of an
hour, and Cecil still hadn't returned.
   "Meow?"
   "I know."
   He almost fell over from surprise when the door finally slid
open. Cecil was the first to enter. Behind him a stranger
followed, the look on the man's face one of astonishment.
   "Shoot."
   "What the?"
   And that was about all he managed to vocalize between the time
the darts hit his chest to the time he hit the floor. Cecil
reached down and dragged him the rest of the way inside, then
groped his way to the wall.
   "Lost my camera."
   "Obviously. How did you know I had a gun?"
   "Intuition."
   Mike breathed an aggravated sigh, "Whatever. Did everything go
okay?"
   "Oh... perfectly. Got caught twice. Had to sneak my way out of
sickbay with a bunch of corpses."
   "Corpses?"
   Cecil nodded, "You know... cadavers, carcasses, stiffs, dead
people. Oh, Spokes was there. Said hi."
   "Spokes? He was......."
   "Dead... yes, you need a definition for that also?"
   "No... I'm familiar with the concept. Did you find a place we
can hang-out?"
   "But of course. There's a shuttle docked off loading bay
twelve, deck seventeen. Doors are wide open."
   "Good work."
   "There's more. The holocrystal."
   Mike blinked, "What about it?"
   "So Johanes told you."
   "He told me enough."
   "It's in Hunter's cabin. Deck three."
   Mike smirked, not sure how to take the news. Even given the
knowledge, he was surprised that Cecil would mention it. More
than surprised, he was fairly amazed.
   "How did you find out?"
   "Overheard a conversation in sickbay. It's astounding what
people will say in a room full of strangers."
   "Well, I guess I'll meet you at the shuttle. If I'm not there
by the time we're out of hyperspace, you can assume I won't be
showing up."
   "No problem."
   "You're not gonna try talking me out of it?"
   Cecil shook his head, "Would you be hurt terribly that we
spared ourselves the formality this once?"
   "Not at all," Mike stripped the guard's holster, communicator,
and ballistic vest, throwing them on more as a means of disguise
than protection. "Well, maybe a little. Just tell me... why the
sudden change of heart? Don't you love me anymore?"
   Cecil winced, "Passionately, darling. It's just that... didn't
Johanes tell you about engineering."
   "He told me about the holocrystal."
   Cecil nodded, "It's important that it not fall to ISIS."
   "Obviously."
   "Sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures."
   "What did you guys do to engineering?"
   "Only what was necessary. Just get the crystal. If not, then
none of us are making it out of here. There's just too much at
stake. Kapesh? C'mon lazy boy. Time to wake up."
   Johanes still lay crumpled beneath a haze of healing slumber,
moaning slightly as Cecil shook him back to semi-consciousness.
Mike watched as his old friend hauled the Draconian to his feet,
not a mean task considering where Cecil had been during the past
year. Under other circumstances, the two of them might have a
made a comical sight, one blind, the other so lame he could
barely walk.
   "This boy needs a jolt."
   "I already used the last upper."
   Cecil made a curious expression, as though he couldn't quite
get his facial muscles to cooperate.
   "On Jo, not me," Mike clarified.
   "Ah... sorry. Just had difficulty picturing you taking
stimulants. Depressants perhaps. They're more your style."
   Mike smiled, uncertain as to whether or not he should counter
the slam.
   "You're not exactly a barrel of chihuahuas yourself, Cecil."
   "Yes... well, knowledge brings despair."
   It was one of their old college proverbs, one of many Cecil
had collected and archived somewhere inside that diabolic
database in his skull.
   "What sort of knowledge?"
   "Obstacles, tools, and moral qualms, the last of which are
being temporarily suppressed."
   "Talk galanglic."
   "We have to kill the guards. They're blocking the stairwell."
   He pulled a small, clear canister from the grav tray. White
powder occupied one end separated from a pint of clear liquid by
a thin, transparent barrier. Mike regarded it with as much
enthusiasm as he could muster.
   "Say that isn't what I think it is."
   "Afraid so."
   "Cecil..."
   "You want to get out of here?"
   "Yes."
   "Then we have no choice."
   Mike shook his head, "There's always a choice."
   "Such as?"
   Mike scowled, certain there had to be another way. Then he
noticed his hand resting on it. The communicator fit nicely on
the holster. Mike withdrew it from its sheath, and examined the
dial.
   "Turn off the shouter for a sec."
   "What are you planning?"
   "Just trust me, okay?"
   "I'm blind, remember?"
   "That's a weak excuse, and you know it."
   Mike reached over to the grav-tray, finding the shouter's
power switch without too much difficulty. He pressed the bell
button on the communicator a moment later, and the line snapped
open as if on cue.
   "This is Flowers."
   Mike blinked, "Uh... status report."
   "We're positioned at the stairwell on deck five as ordered.
Why haven't we received any instructions?"
   "There's been some trouble with the comm system. We need you
to check out a disturbance on deck six. Go downstairs and run a
full sweep immediately. Bridge out."
   "Hold on... what sort of disturbance?"
   Mike closed the channel before they could ask any more
questions. Then his communicator began beeping. He switched the
shouter back on and hauled the guard into one of the stalls.
   "They're probably calling their friend here. Get into a stall,
quick."
   Cecil pulled Johanes and the grav tray into hiding. A few
seconds later, the door to the fresher slid open.
   "Steev!"
   "Meow?"
   "There's just a cat here, man. C'mon."
   Mike waited, heart still pounding, as he slowly counted to
fifty. Hopefully they'd think their friend had switched off his
communicator. By the time Mike poked his head back out the door,
the coast looked clear, nothing at the stairwell accept a mess of
cards and few stray fruiti-pops. He was back at the fresher in a
flash.
   "It worked."
   "Meow?"
   Cecil emerged, a little shaken.
   "That's right, Pooper. He says congratulations on almost
getting us all killed."
   "Hey, what are you complaining about? It worked, didn't it?
   "Barely."
   "Don't bitch."
   "I like to bitch."
   "You gonna have any trouble making it to the shuttle?"
   Cecil frowned, hauling Johanes back to his feet, "As long as
Mr. Sleepy here keeps his eyes open, none whatsoever. C'mon Jo."
   "Huh..."
   "Good luck, Cecil."
   "Same to you, for all its worth coming from hacker. And try
not to get yourself killed for once, eh?"
   Cecil offered him the canister, finally reaching over when he
wouldn't accept it voluntarily and securing it with blind but
uncanny accuracy into the communicator sheath on Mike's holster.
   "There you go. Little starburst in the hole."
   "Thanks... but I'd really prefer not to have this."
   "I'd prefer you to have it. Just twist the top, and when you
hear it start bubbling, don't breathe for the life you."
   "Cecil..."
   "Don't argue. Just go, and don't get comfortable for even a
moment."
   Mike smiled, though his friend couldn't see the expression.
   "Don't worry. I'll be fine."


                          *     *     *


He'd grown very comfortable, his head leaning against the corner
of the room as though it were rooted to the spot, deriving all
its essential nourishment from the pale, waxen moonlight
trickling from the window, cool waves of starlight splashing
across his weary, pallid face. With eyes dashing to the curtains
and dwelling upon some distant star, he'd remark on parameters of
composition, luminosity, bolometric magnitude and various other
statistics. It was a diversion, nothing more, and as the night
continued and another injection was administered, he seemed ever
more pleased to answer her queries, his withered voice now
picking up to the rhythm of his mind, tossing out fragments of
speech as quickly as he tongue could fashion them.
   "The problem with organizing anti-gravity into a self-imposed
matrix had always been conceptual, like chasing the speed of
light... just as space had been the enemy prior to interweave
technology, so too did time become our enemy. The trick was not
in over-powering it, but rather in learning its true nature. Such
a fundamental breakthrough is significant, not only for gravitics
technology but for other disciplines also."
   "What sort?"
   "I'm no an expert on such matters, but I imagine that
communications technology could benefit. If it is possible to
rotate gravitational fields inside of stighmi-time, sending
quantum pings across great distance should also be possible. It
is just a guess, of course. There will be have to be tests in
order to delineate the probability amplitudes for optimal space-
time paths, and we will have to re-define the entire theory on
imaginary time, more than a standard lifetime of work, but at
least now there is a place to begin."
   He went on like that, talking at one moment about spontaneous
photon emissions, then about the time-symmetry of subatomic
processes, then about systemic discoherence and recoherence and
on and on and on as though they were the most fascinating
subjects ever conceived. She listened to him ramble about the
requantization of gravity with its functional integral over
space-time geometries, watched as he described unitary evolution
operators, nodded off while he discussed the essentials of
gravitic matrix propagation. In short, he was talking gibberish,
yet miraculously, it all seemed so clear to him, as though he
were simply explaining what happened to him at the market or how
he'd stubbed his toe while climbing a flight of stairs.
   Sule's mind began to swim just trying to keep up with the
words, let alone trying to grasp their meaning. She finally gave
up and just let him talk, until he seemed to wind about on
himself, mulling over the same words in different combinations,
again and again, like some preacher talking about god. She would
interrupt with a question every now and then, usually sending him
off on a whole new tangent. She finally decided that she had to
find some way of breaking the subject so his mind would flow to
where she wanted it without questioning her intents.
   "Did the Clio understand all this?"
   "Clio?" His voice suddenly lost its budding vitality, and he
stared down, sunken eyed, at the mauve carpet. "Poor Clio. She
had a great mind."
   "She still does."
   "You honestly expect me to believe that?"
   "Why not? Why would anyone want to hurt her?"
   He shot back an incredulous scowl. Sule leafed a hand across
his shoulder, letting her fingers brush lazily along his neck and
then down his gaunt chest. It was a mistake to bring up her name
again. Everytime he thought of her, he grew more careful with his
words.
   "Trust me, Erestyl. Her mind is far to valuable to put under a
mind-scanner."
   "Perhaps, but what use is it, unless it is willing to
cooperate?"
   "If you thought she was going to die then why did you leave?"
   His face contorted into a pained and desperate expression, as
though aching to curl upon itself and disappear. Sule edged
closer, resting a hand on his shoulder, letting her fingers brush
lazily along his neck. She knew she'd already blown it. Better to
just give rake him over the coals, she thought to herself.
   "Was it difficult, Erestyl? Leaving her to face the scanner
alone?"
   He sat there, unable to answer, one moment the babbling idiot,
and the next, a very laconic one. Sule could see him resisting,
the strain in his eyes, bulging against the suggestion Alister
had implanted.
   "She didn't know... did she." It was a statement, not a
question. "Poor Clio. She never did have much of a memory for
formulas. She could weave them like nobody I've known, but she
couldn't remember much of anything, even when she wanted to.
That's what happened, isn't it? Your scanner devoured her mind
for nothing? For nothing, Sule? A difficult thing it is to
capture one's intuition. And when I die, she'll rest in peace.
Does that scare you?"
   Then he held his breath. She'd seen him do it numerous times,
forcing himself to pass out over and over, until finally his body
would slink quietly toward death. Such was the extent of his
will. Given enough time in solitude, he would have his way. But
we wasn't in solitude now.
   Lucky guy.
   She put a fist in his stomach, forcing a gasp of breath. It
was a game they would play, until she'd prepared another
injection and gummed-up a bit more of his short-term memory. Then
she would try again. It was only a matter of time.
   *Ding*
   Hunter raised her chin.
   "Computer, open channel, visitor."
   "Error... cannot route channel."
   "From one side of the wall to the other?"
   *Ding*
   She lifted herself off the cushi-bag, opening the door with a
flick of her finger. She didn't realize it was a mistake until
she was on back the floor, her nostrils spitting forth a heady
stream of the red stuff. Brooks dropped a moment later, hand
still on his holster as he sluggishly tried to draw the weapon.
By the time Hunter climbed to her knees, she found the last
remaining hypo-dart pointed at her chest. Mike stepped fully
inside, letting the door slide shut behind him.
   "Hi Doc. Remember me?"


           _   /|
           \`o_O'          Jim Vassilakos
             ( )     <---  [e-mail]
              U            [e-mail]
           Aachk!

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