Horseplay

by Cam Daly

  “Understood. What can you offer to improve your situation?”

  “I will give you my complete records of the human field project and you will scatter your remotes, so that I know you cannot perform your long range attack again. You will allow me to leave unhindered.”

  The Louse was moving north, but still leaving its body oriented east-west. It was giving her winglet group a slightly better angle of attack, which meant that it was prioritizing lining up its main weapon with a target. She extended the lines of its main laser array and connected the dots to…here. In a few seconds it would be far enough north to fire through the exterior wall next to Broaalg’s ship.

  And hit her.

  She sent new commands to the winglets outside, and hovered closer to the hidden doors to Broaalg’s ship. It bought her another few seconds as the Louse slewed farther north. If she fired the standoff cannon at it, he would escape while it recharged. If she tried to break into his ship, he would presumably use the Louse to try to block her standoff shot and then escape. She might be able to stop him with her gravitic fields, but that might also kill him. She wanted him alive.

  She leaned against the doors, letting her sensors study their internal structure. She understood now the appeal of the Keryapt Zess approach. If you were just faster, or tougher, or somehow better than your opponents, you could just float from moment to moment and kill anyone in your path. Keep things simple.

  But if you weren’t, and didn’t, then new strategies were needed. Sometimes it paid to think things through. To plan in advance.

  She looked at the timing projections on the Louse and her winglets. The narrow window of survivable space for her was getting smaller very rapidly. She needed more time.

  “Are you sure you want to do things this way, Broaalg?”

  #

  Sousa was practically screaming. “So in fifteen minutes, the world is going to end?”

  DeVries peeked out the blinds covering the prep room windows. “If you want the staff here to be able to focus on saving Susan, don’t do that again.”

  “Rafael, Kery has control over it. She can stop it.”

  “Then why doesn’t she? You and her lied to Susan and I before. You said she was going to rescue us, but she was just a head! She didn’t have a damn body! Why should we trust you now?”

  DeVries positioned himself between the two younger men. “Sousa, calm down. Connor thought he was doing the right thing. He thought I was the bad guy. But he knows better now. It’s actually very fortunate that we are here together. The three of us are in the middle of all this. We can work together to stop this catastrophe.”

  “You - you’re right. We’re in the middle. Connor, you were just doing what she told you, right? And they would have done this to Park anyway, but it was Kery who got her out.”

  DeVries looked momentarily annoyed by that version of events. “How we got here isn’t as important as what we do next. We need to make sure that Stopgap isn’t used against us. Kery is fighting Broaalg right now. If she dies, we all die.”

  Connor looked back and forth between them. “So, what, I ask her to share control with Ormlan? She wouldn’t ever do that.”

  “No, not Ormlan. Mezerello. She is one of Keryapt’s fellow Actives. And you have to realize - even if Keryapt doesn’t want to use it, her superiors might, if they get back in contact with her. They are the ones you should be most afraid of.”

  Sousa pulled a buzzing phone from his pocket. “It’s my cousin!” After a brief conversation in Portuguese, he had more. “He’s safe. There’s a hole in the middle of the street, but his family is okay.”

  “That’s great news.” Connor meant it, but was distracted by the decision he had to make. Could he convince Kery to share control of Stopgap?

  He brought up the number she had recently used to call his phone. “I’ll try to get her to give Mezerello control.”

  The ghost of a smile appeared on DeVries’ face for a moment. Connor was too focused on his phone to notice.

  #

  She was squeezed all the way up against the hatch to Broaalg’s ship. The red line, superimposed on her vision by her combat control system, hung a few centimeters away from her head. The Louse’s targeting system would be using supplemental sensor data from Broaalg’s ship and sanctum, but she couldn’t find any active sources to hit with her countermeasures. She ignored Connor’s call for the moment.

  “Broaalg! I know what you’re doing. You need to understand one thing before this goes someplace we can’t get back from.”

  “I havvvve no idea what you are talking about. But I am listening.”

  “It is important that you don’t overreact when you see them. Look very carefully.”

  “See what? That makes no sense.”

  “It will.”

  Two winglets emerged from the conflagration on the top floor of the next hotel over. They were the overloaded stragglers from the collider complex. Each carried a metallic disc slightly larger than itself.

  There was a brief moment of quiet.

  “Zess…”

  “Yes?”

  “You…”

  “Yes?”

  “ZESSSSSSSS!”

  “Good. You understand. Each of them is loaded with a hundred micrograms of antimatter.” The magnetic traps had been prepared for shipment at the collider facility. She hadn’t possessed any means to verify how much AM was actually in them, but doubted that the Molu or Craven wanted any uncertainty over exactly what they were transporting. Each one was enough to bring the building down, despite whatever structural reinforcements Broaalg might have included.

  As the two winglets finished crossing the distance to the Eternal Night’s 66th floor, she turned her attention to the main group.

  “And you won’t be needing that security blanket any more, will you?”

  She remotely fired her cannon in standoff mode again, blowing a gigantic hole through Broaalg’s remaining Louse. The winglets quickly restacked and she fired again. The second shot was slower, but still effective. The Louse’s only response was to spiral down and out of the sky, trailing a jet black cloud of toxic smoke. The red targeting path disappeared from in front of Kery’s face.

  She stepped away from the hatch. “Believe me when I say that I have a lot to lose. Come out here so that we can discuss what happens next.”

  Still nothing.

  She raised a fist to bang on the hatch, but stopped. There was a faint vibration coming through the floor, in an irregular pattern.

  She listened.

  He was singing. Or, to be anatomically correct, stridulating.

  She knew what this was. “I’ll give you two minutes. Come to your central chamber.”

  She checked in with her winglets inside the tower and flew to his biolab. For a moment she hoped that she might be able to find or even synthesize the Tumorish counter-agent, but all the chemical stock had been mixed or poisoned into useless sludge. There were labels on some of the specimen containers in the Craven language and she set her database to determine their usages.

  Finally the hatch to the escape ship opened. She watched through her winglet’s sensors as Broaalg himself rolled out. He was not as large as she had suspected, a little under two meters tall. His body was an armored black disc a half meter thick which rolled along its flattened rim, like a giant wheel. He had fourteen arm stalks, seven evenly spaced on each side, placed symmetrically so they could push in pairs as he rolled. At birth he would have been a tiny disc the size of her palm, barely sentient, with three stalks on each side.

  She had intentionally positioned herself a good distance from his ship for a few reasons. First, she wanted to be far enough away to let him finish his song. Secondly, she wanted to reinforce her dominant negotiating position by making him come to her. Finally, she wanted a chance to study him before he could see her. Craven grew more stalk pairs as they aged, so she could tell that he was mature but far from the oldest known examples of his species. The stalks themse
lves were chitin-covered appendages, jointed in three places and angled back along the edge of the rim.

  Like most Craven adults, his body bore extensive signs of damage and cyborg augmentation. His roll was still perfectly symmetrical, which spoke to the quality of his modifications and indicated high social status, but several of his limbs were either partially or entirely replaced by dark metallic members. Extra tools or weapons were clearly visible on those parts and her combat control system began an automatic analysis of their potential danger to her. By the time he arrived, she would have a visible map of their firing arcs, ranges and lethality.

  He made his way to her location slowly, delaying the inevitable meeting. The incessant movement of his stalks would remind a human of some bizarre cross of a centipede and the oars of a rowboat. The rubbery carpet-like coating on the ramps muted the sounds of his passage, but a separate raspy drone was audible as he approached. As he rolled along each pair of legs was rubbing together just after it pushed. Much like an earth grasshopper, the legs were rigid enough that they would make a grinding noise which varied with the strength and direction they were moved.

  Broaalg was singing his dirge, a final song that revealed the most important details of his probably brutal life.

  He was one of a hundred siblings, each almost mindlessly battling the others for food and shelter in a harsh environment. Only a few newborns survived long enough to become fully sentient, intellect growing with each new pair of stalks, until the strongest and smartest found their way out of the birth swamps. The memories of that desperate struggle would forever motivate them to do whatever it took to survive.

  The dirge was complex, with different legs playing different parts simultaneously, but there was one recurring theme. Debt. Broaalg was a gambler in a society that used lifespan as its only currency. He had been worth a thousand lifetimes, then nearly bankrupt. If he ever truly had nothing, then killing him wouldn’t even be a crime. He had come to Earth desperately poor, then bet everything on the possibility of the human field.

  And he had won. The Craven government had given him millions for the technology. Leased him ships for protection. Given him permission to convert the entire human population if warranted. But then, the Fleet woman came. He had to buy the Lice and other mechs, pay to have the other aliens in the system killed, license experimental conversion technology.

  Then before he could betray the Molu, she had set them against each other. Expensive ships were destroyed, and it became obvious that his human field technology was incomplete. Defective. He lost more, and had to borrow to stay alive. Now he had to get the secret of the human field location technology from the Molu, or else go bankrupt. Right at this moment, his debtors were competing for the rights to broadcast his death.

  He rolled to a stop on a platform opposite her, a few meters above the indoor swamp, and his song ended. Dim artificial light spilled down from behind plant-like coverings on the ceiling, giving the entire room an oppressively terrestrial feel. He waited for her to speak.

  “So, Broaalg, we meet at last. I know of the treacherous attack by your people on mine, and I know of your broken alliance with Ormlan and the Molu. I also know that they are besting you here in this system. Once their attack ships are done destroying your ships in the belt, they will kill you here.” She wasn’t sure about that part, but presented it as fact.

  His stalks rasped against each other again, creating patterns which combined to sound like human speech. “Yessssss.”

  “Their target location technology will mean the end of both my Fleet and your people if the Molu alone possess it. We must take it from them. In exchange for my assurance that I won’t kill you, I want three things.”

  “I can not stop the attack on your Fleet. That is beyond my control. Do not demand it of me!”

  She had already assumed as much. She also knew that any agreement she made would only last as long as he felt that his life was in jeopardy.

  “First, you will give me all of the research you have on the human field and the location technology. Remember that I have been through the collider base and know a great deal. If anything you provide doesn’t match that, your life is forfeit.” He could give her that without his people ever knowing. That was an easy decision for a Craven.

  While she did a cursory check of his data, the analysis of his biolab came back. Most of the samples were Tumorish material, in various concoctions for delivery to humans. But some of the variants had nothing to do with human cellular chemistry. It was Molu.

  “Second, I want to know exactly how many Tumorish and other combat units there are in San Francisco. Specifically, I want you to include how many of Ormlan’s members you managed to infect.”

  Broaalg jerked as if an electric current had gone through him. In his surprise he rolled backwards and crashed into the wall, denting it.

  “That’s why you’re in a stalemate at Alcatraz.” And why Ormlan wants me there so badly. “You have taken over a few of his family, inside his familycraft, and he can’t deal with them himself. But you don’t want him dead, you want his knowledge of the location field technology. So each side is trying to avoid damaging his body while the battle goes on inside it.”

  Everything suddenly made sense - why neither side was using heavy weapons there, why Ormlan was so distracted. Fleet had no clue that the Craven had managed to create a strain of Tumorish that would work on the Molu.

  “Not just Ormlan. His child-team Farley also battles the eternal. But after you entered this tower, command of all eternal was taken from me. I cannot give you safe passage.” He uploaded a map showing the forces at Alcatraz, then paused for a moment. “What is the third condition?”

  “How do you feel about double or nothing?”

  His response sounded like a million fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard.

  #

  Sousa’s phone chimed with another message from his cousin in Las Vegas. He read it to Connor and DeVries.

  “Las Vegas PD are calling for the immediate evacuation of anyone within three blocks of The Eternal Night hotel and casino…due to a massive gas leak and explosion hazard. Emergency crews are ordered to stay back as well.”

  DeVries looked thoughtful for a moment. “The police department wouldn’t be relaying information to first responders through the emergency alert system. They’re all on the same radio frequency. Someone else is ordering the humans to evacuate.”

  Connor had a guess who the ‘someone else’ might be. “Kery mentioned at one point that police and military systems were hard to crack on short notice. Maybe the emergency alert network is easier? I think something is about to happen at the Eternal Night.”

  A knock came at the door. Connor peeked out and was immediately annoyed at the cheerful look on the doctor’s face. “What is it?”

  “Good news, for Jason. Your people are recovering from the…rabies.” Dr. Meade clearly still didn’t buy that diagnosis. “On their own.”

  “What?” Connor almost jumped at how close DeVries had come without him noticing it, and turned to the taller man to order him back to his seat.

  “They were prepping them for the injection, but they started to show signs of regaining consciousness on their own so we held off. Two of them.”

  Connor froze.

  Sousa tried to get past him to the door. “Is Susan getting better?”

  Connor pulled his pistol out. “Wait. Which two?”

  “They are wearing security guards uniforms. A stocky black woman and a taller, red haired man.”

  “Oh shit. Shit!” Connor shoved Sousa towards the back of the room.

  A pair of quick ‘pop’ sounds came from down the hall towards the ER entrance, then shouting and screaming. Meade took a half step in that direction then looked back at them.

  A second later there was an extended brrrrrrrap of automatic weapons fire. Then less shouting but a lot more screaming.

  Connor hauled the doctor into the room. DeVries shut the door then l
ooked at Connor as they all crouched. “They converted already.”

  Meade was clearly at a loss. “Converted? Who?”

  Connor’s knuckles whitened on the pistol grip. “The Tumorish.”

  INTERLUDE

  Clang. Clang. Clang.

  “Father! Please! The hatch can’t hold much longer!”

  The young Molu’s voice was barely audible over the constant hammering sound. She had only just begun transmissions from the backup communications node in the Farley familycraft when the pounding started.

  “Daughter! I hear you. We have your craft immobilized but can’t remotely open the main port. Can you get out the emergency port?”

  “I - I don’t know. My brother…”

  “Don’t think about him. We didn’t know that they could do this. Focus! Can you cycle the emergency port open?”

  “I think so. But - they have control over Farley. They will crush me when I get out!”

  “No! This craft is heavier, and stronger. I think we can keep him still. But don’t open the hatch yet. I think I can…”

  A third Molu voice broke in. “Pilot! What are you doing? We can’t dock with the Farley craft. We don’t know how many in there have been converted!”

  The Pilot’s voice was heavy. “You’re right, Navigator. I’m sorry, daughter. You will have to swim away on your own. If you can-“

  Suddenly the incessant pounding stopped.

  “Daughter?”

  “I’m still here - I don’t know why he stopped. I don’t know how many there are or what they are doing.”

  “Where did they strike? How did it happen?”

  “There was a woman in the ESWAT office who had been on assignment for a few days. We hadn’t seen any converted human females, so we weren’t suspicious enough. She hit the Farley craft with a weapon that pierced the outer hull and spread the toxin throughout engineering. After that I-“

  CLANGCLANG. CLANGCLANG. CLANGCLANG.

  “Father! Help me!”

  The hammering was back, almost completely covering her cries.

  The Pilot stabbed a blue hand at his control panel, all hesitation gone.