Horseplay

by Cam Daly

  “Pilot, what are you doing? I’m locked out! That override is for emergencies!“

  The Frank Ormlan familycraft shifted and moved, dragging itself a few centimeters to align the ports.

  “I’m sorry, everyone. My wife is crippled and my son is lost. I can’t sit by as my daughter is taken too.”

  “Pilot, please! Stop and think!”

  The ports were aligned. “Mating complete. Daughter! Open your hatch!”

  He cycled his. The armor plates and waterlock doors opened.

  “Father! Thank you.”

  The Pilot only had a moment to realize that there were three of them in there, not just his daughter. All three were leprous gray-blue. Then they were on him.

  “We are eternal.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The shooting stopped after a few seconds. Now a pair of harsh voices barked orders. Connor flipped off the lights, but enough spilled in from the window to the emergency room area to let them see each other. DeVries’ voice was low and urgent. “They just took out the SWAT team. Meade, how many were there?”

  Connor replied before the doctor. “What SWAT team?”

  “The one that was here to take you out. This is Texas. How many? What kind of weapons?”

  The doctor eyed Connor but seemed to trust that DeVries knew best. “Only four. Assault rifles, mostly. They were getting set up in the private counseling rooms off the main waiting room.” That was right down the hall.

  Sousa moved towards the door. “We have to get Susan in here.”

  Connor struggled to hold him back. “Wait!” The winglet was up at Connor’s shoulder, apparently ready for action. He gave it a glance. “Can you take out both of them without hurting anyone else?” It waggled its wingtips up and down. A shrug?

  DeVries asked it the next question. “Can you jam their communications?” An affirmative nose up-and-down motion seemed to be ‘yes’. “They will fortify their location, take more hostages and try to contact Broaalg. If he has any clue that Rafael or Susan is here, he will send anything he has left in the area this way.”

  Connor understood. “So we have to stop that from happening. That includes the hospital’s phone system.” He turned to the winglet. “Cut or jam everything. But don’t let the Tumorish see you.” He pulled the door open a crack. “Go!”

  Its gravitic field ramped up as it left, pulling the handle out of Connor’s grasp and slamming the door shut. The others all stared accusingly at him for a moment.

  DeVries turned back to the doctor. “Did my people have any equipment with them when they came in? Anything like a curved silver pistol?”

  “No, nothing. Just uniforms.”

  Sousa edged towards the door. Connor hauled him back by his hospital shirt. “Dammit, you can’t just go out there! If they recognize you, they will know that we’re here. Same for DeVries. And…”

  Sousa stopped struggling for a moment at Connor’s pause. “And….what?”

  Connor closed his eyes. Released the scientist, rubbed at the bridge of his nose for a few seconds. “And…they saw me at the collider. With Mason, another one of them.” He grimaced, realizing the best way to get close enough to deal with them, then opened his eyes to face the group. “They think I’m one of them.”

  DeVries, Sousa and Meade all spoke hurriedly at the same time but Connor wasn’t really listening. His failed attempt in the collider control room to fool Mason would have been his death, if not for the timely arrival of Horseplay. Kery wouldn’t be around to rescue him this time.

  #

  The connection to Ormlan came to life. His synthesized voice sounded normal, but the message was terse. “Fleet. We are giving you direct contact with Mezerello to expedite your arrival. We are monitoring all communication protocols. Only use spoken human english, normal speed. Only discuss operational planning. Do not try to convince her to disobey our orders. Do not come into physical contact with her. She knows all of these rules. What she does not know is that there is a bomb in her skull which we will use.”

  The contact ended without any chance for Keryapt to question the exact phrasing of ‘we will use’ and ‘bomb in her skull’. Clearly the Molu were focusing on their internal battle and communication was a distraction.

  Mezerello came on the line, sounding only vaguely interested in what was happening. “Keryapt Zess? I was a big fan of yours. It would be great to be able to go on an actual mission with you, but I guess a simulation of a mission with you is as close as I come. Where are you?”

  Kery let herself laugh out loud. The absurdity of two Actives talking this slowly and casually during this situation suddenly struck her as the funniest thing ever. “Entering California, 642 kilometers east of you. I’ll be entering San Francisco from the south in six minutes. What are we up against?”

  Mezerello confirmed what she had already learned from Broaalg, that there were four Photuris flyers and at least fifty Tumorish with hand held weapons. Nothing they had was as powerful as the Lice’s X-ray lasers, but there were two defensive turrets to plan for. They would be the most challenging part.

  She studied the details of the Stopgap system while Mez droned on. There was a fail-deadly mode which would make them slow and wait for further commands, but they would only stay that way if they received the correct signal every few minutes.

  For all practical purposes, the system was designed to be a gun that fired once and hit its target, without much thought to repurposing. The fuel load was enough to get the missiles to Earth but not anywhere else in the system. Without defensive systems they would be easily destroyed once they were detected. At the moment there was no strategic value to the Fleet in letting the missiles strike their default targets, but she couldn’t bring herself to waste an asset which might still be of some use.

  “Kery, Ormlan wants to know what happened in Vegas. Tell me and he will listen.”

  As expected, the Molu had an active side channel with Mez. “Not much to tell. As soon as I got close, the Craven revoked Broaalg’s command authority over the Tumorish. My winglets got inside, but he had destroyed all his equipment.”

  “So, what, you just left him there?”

  “He is still there, yes. But I didn’t just leave him alone. I’m far enough away now…tell Ormlan to check his satellite view.”

  #

  Connor crept slowly out of the darkened prep room and into the ER proper, pistol out but held low. Park lay comatose on her gurney, monitoring machines flashing and beeping contentedly around her. None of the nurses or other staff were immediately visible - hopefully they had escaped the area. Connor was afraid what he would discover down the hall, but the winglet hadn’t returned and there were still shrieks of fear and agony coming from that direction. He might be their only chance. DeVries had been only too happy to have him go, but Connor had elicited a promise that the taller man would follow him a few seconds later and stay out of sight nearby.

  There was a series of small, interconnected offices on either side of the hallway, but no one was visible within. Connor passed them and approached the final corner to the ER waiting area. He had been wracking his brain for the last few minutes, trying to remember all the details of his interrogation yesterday at the entrance to the collider complex. So much had happened since then that he wasn’t confident in his memory.

  He peeked around the corner in what he hoped was an appropriately military fashion. Things were worse than he had imagined. There were a dozen or more apparent hostages kneeling side by side in a semi-circle near the center of the room. They were bound at the wrists to each other and many were splattered with blood. There were at least a half dozen motionless bodies on the ground around them, most in police or hospital security garb. The pair of Tumorish were inside the ring of hostages. The taller, stocky figure was standing there staring at the screen of a phone. The dark skinned woman was crouched, peering down the sights of her rifle towards something outside the shattered windows. Neither one had seen him.

  Con
nor wasn’t sure he could make himself move forward. He was about to retreat back to the others when both Tumorish suddenly turned to stare at the TV in the corner of the room. The screen showed a tall burning building which suddenly disappeared in a ball of bright light, then the image went dark. The image was repeated several times from different distances and angles, each version going dark or jerking around wildly after the massive explosion. The captions below the images read ‘Las Vegas’ and ‘Live’. Where Kery was. He ducked back behind the corner and pulled out the phone.

  Tried to connect directly to her. Still no answer. The decoherence field must still be working.

  He was about to try the other number she had used in Las Vegas, but there was no cell signal at all - his winglet must be at work.

  Another peek around the corner showed the detonation in Vegas from yet more vantage points. But there was no live feed from the city. Her plan must have failed. She had been killed, the city destroyed.

  His knees buckled and he slumped against the wall.

  Kery was dead. Stopgap was on its way. She had asked him to protect Park, but they had no way to halt her conversion now. Even if he abandoned the people in the lobby to their fate, he would still have to deal with her soon. Sousa, and Meade, and even DeVries would try to stop him. He might have to shoot them. And he had no idea where the damn winglet was.

  But why did it matter? So much of what he had done was to make himself feel like his life had some purpose. And deep down he knew part of it was to impress Kery. But with her dead and Stopgap about to fall, it wouldn’t matter if he just ran away and let events take their course. Nothing mattered now.

  He cursed himself for not listening to DeVries earlier, then cursed himself again for listening to the man at all. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t-

  “Mama?”

  The tiny voice had called out from somewhere in the lobby. It was barely louder than any of the other moans and cries coming from there, but Connor heard it.

  “Mama? I scared.”

  He inhaled a great shuddering lungful of air. Tried to hold it in, but it rushed out again.

  The Tumorish woman barked an order at someone. “Quiet your runt.”

  Connor inhaled again. Held it. Wiped the snot and tears off his face with a tattered sleeve as he rose.

  “Mama!”

  A deathly quiet settled over the waiting area, and in the near silence he distinctly heard a weapon cock. The Tumorish wouldn’t issue a warning twice.

  It wasn’t love, of Kery or some idea of a future with her, or fear for his own life or of failure, that got him up and off the floor. It was hatred. Hatred of the goddamned motherfucking son of a bitch Tumorish.

  Before conscious thought could freeze him again, he walked around the corner. He couldn’t just start shooting wildly, they would kill him long before he accomplished anything. He had to get closer first. He had to convince the pair that he was one of them too.

  “We are eternal!”

  They both whirled and trained their weapons on him. The larger man had a rifle adorned with scopes and gadgets just like the woman’s. There was a huge dark bloodstain on his abdomen.

  If Connor hadn’t been moving, his adrenaline-fueled trembling would have been immediately obvious. “I wasn’t expecting you. Where did you come from?”

  The woman held her pose but the man lowered the weapon to his side. He looked off into space like an extremely dangerous school boy about to recite an especially hard lesson. “Chartoupfel, Perlesc. Umm…Bliau 2.” He paused and blinked a few times. “The Frozen…something.”

  Connor finished for him. “City. The Frozen City.” He hadn’t remembered one of the others and was very glad that he had been able to ask them before they asked him. “How many are you? What weapons do you possess?”

  The woman stood as well, lowering her weapon a few degrees. “Just the two of us. I’m Taylor, this is Bremmer. He is very raw, and injured. He should probably be recycled. I am unharmed. We have five long guns, six pistols and eight concussion grenades but no functional communications. What is the situation here?”

  Connor was close enough to pass around the edge of the semi-circle of hostages and study his ‘allies’. He forced himself to ignore the wails of the injured and desperate men, women and children.

  There was a bandage of some sort under Bremmer’s shirt, but it was soaked through with blood. Taylor was uninjured, although the hospital staff had clearly been preparing her for the ‘rabies’ injection. There was a series of tubes and syringes taped to her shirt and arm.

  Each of them had grenades clipped to their belts. The rest of their arsenal lay at their feet. Connor stopped a meter away from them, trying to conceal his twitchiness by checking different directions around them. The TV was hysterically babbling about a giant explosion in Las Vegas, somewhere downtown. He forced himself to ignore that too.

  “We need to establish communication and can’t do it here. There is one thing I need to take care of before we leave.” He put his pistol in his own waistband then picked up a shotgun from the floor.

  It had several rounds clipped to the outside, and he checked the action to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire. He brought it up to waist level, just barely aimed to Taylor’s right, and rested his finger on the trigger. Just as he had been taught not to do. Under these circumstances he was sure his range safety officer would forgive him.

  “You two should proceed along that hallway.” He gestured back where he had come from. He had originally planned to get them outside, but he thought he had seen movement in the parking lot and didn’t want them near more people. “It leads to the ambulance bay. Go there and secure a vehicle. Leave your weapons here - they would give us away.”

  Both of the Tumorish turned to stare at him.

  #

  “Wow, Keryapt. I’m watching your handiwork off a social news feed. Where’d you get the AM to use on Broaalg? How much was that?” Mezerello sounded impressed.

  “A hundred micrograms, from the VSE collider complex. Unfortunately I don’t have any more with me.” Technically, that was the truth. She didn’t have any more with her. Not that she would have hesitated to lie to Mezerello to get the message to Ormlan. “You’re at Hyde and Lombard?”

  The conversation with Mez was tediously slow, but she used the time between messages productively. Connor’s phone had lost its connection to the human cell network, but she left a message for him that she had been far from Eternal Night when the antimatter detonated. She didn’t want him doing anything rash.

  “On the southwest corner of the intersection. But why here? If you’re planning to carry me from here to Alcatraz, their air support will most likely detect our gravitic signatures before we even clear the city. They won’t be able to target us perfectly but-“

  “We won’t be using AG to get there. It will make more sense when I arrive in a few minutes. Do you have a sniping weapon?”

  “Yes, one of the Tumorish dropped one a few minutes back. So, you have a jetpack hidden somewhere around here? Even that would show up on infrared.”

  “I don’t have any other assets in the area. It’s just me and you. Keep that weapon, drop everything else.”

  “Who put you in charge?”

  “I did.” Keryapt decided that she could play along with Mezerello’s simulation just as well as Ormlan. “I’m the real Keryapt Zess, running this simulation with you. This is a test of how quickly you adapt to changing circumstances.”

  “Ha! Nice try. The real Keryapt stopped being an Active twenty years ago.”

  “Actually, it was more like ten years ago. It took me the ten years before that to get back from my last mission.”

  “Oh, come on. I never heard any of that. How does it take ten years to come back from a mission? Did you walk?”

  “I wish that I could have. I didn’t have a body. My brain…”

  The younger Active still believed this was a simulation being run by the Fleet. Kery had to shake Mez ou
t of it before she could fully trust her, but needed to do it in a way that Ormlan didn’t suspect or understand. Only by revealing something that made Mezerello question the Fleet itself could she hope to succeed.

  “Your brain was…what?”

  Kery was on the verge of violating a direct order from the Admiralty by telling more. Even her own children didn’t know the truth. It felt wrong that Ormlan would learn all this before they did, but she couldn’t let that stop her. She had to tell Mez what really happened, what her own people were really capable of, if she was going to free her.

  “I’m going to tell you a story. A very important story, which will seem unbelievable but is absolutely true. For ten years, my brain was the only cargo of a crewless ship. I couldn’t control anything. Not even my own mental processing rate.”

  “Ten years? Too bad you couldn’t slow your brain down, to make time go by faster.”

  “It wasn’t ten years for me. I wasn’t running at biological baseline. For me it was closer to a hundred.”

  Silence for a few real seconds. “A hundred?”

  “Yes.”

  “But…who did that to you? How? How did you not go insane?”

  “I kind of did. But the real question you should be asking is ‘why’ someone would do that.”

  Before the younger Active could decide if that was a question she wanted to ask, a positional alarm reminded Keryapt that she had to prepare for the approach to San Francisco. She gathered two of the eight remaining fully functional winglets to herself and shut off their gravitic drives. The other six divided into three groups of two, and each pair vectored off to a slightly different approach. She swung more to the south and west than the most direct route towards the city and Alcatraz.

  Ormlan hadn’t said it, but with what she knew from Broaalg, the Molu probably only needed one Active to reach him intact. The Interloper or Horseplay would be fast enough to take out the Tumorish infected members in his familycraft. Ormlan didn’t need both of them. But Keryapt needed the Interloper body intact, for its biolab, to save Park. There was a bomb in Mezerello’s head which would destroy the biolab if it went off nearby.