Electra Rex

by April C. Griffith

  “Not in the slightest,” Letterman said while they rushed down the hallway back toward the ship.

  “I’m ambivalent about that news.” Electra jumped, far too late to actually dodge the bullet that had ricocheted off the floor and Letterman’s casing to skip off the wall to her right. Blind luck and one of Letterman’s arms kept her from being hit. “On one hand, I don’t want to pay for a scratched chassis. On the other hand, I’m essentially your prisoner, and if you were damaged beyond repair here, I could be free.”

  “The lockdown on the Cadillux becomes permanent if I am destroyed,” Letterman said. “Another lien enforcement bot would have to be dispatched to this location to remove it and would not arrive before you were enslaved.”

  “I’m no longer ambivalent.”

  The elevator to the ship lowered on their approach. Electra waited for a lull in the barrage of lasers and projectiles to peek around Letterman’s side. Once they were ready to be lifted, she fired a glob into the void of the doorway they’d come from. It would take a while for the pirates to blast their way through, and she didn’t need much time.

  “Keep the Bort Pod in your central storage,” Electra told Letterman once they were aboard. “Protect that twenty billion units like…”

  “I am a Lien Enforcement Technology…”

  “I know you don’t need to be told, but I’m telling you anyway, because stating the obvious to technology that doesn’t care is something humans do.”

  She shed her helmet and suit along the way, hopping and bouncing off the walls awkwardly to try to reach the cockpit without slowing down to turn corners. From the last stair on the way up, she vaulted herself to land in the chair, spun back to the console, and readied the escape plan she’d formulated on the fly while running through a derelict ship to flee Glott pirates. The ship rotated to slide out of the crack in the doors. The engines powered up to full thrust. The repulse setting focused entirely front and back at max power. Then she punched it with the coordinates for the wormhole spawn ready to load the second she cleared the cargo hold. The Cadillux shot between the doors. She hit the activation for the full repulse engine thrust, which sent the Cadillux skittering forward even faster and spun the derelict ship into the waiting Glott pirate vessels.

  “Ivy, power up all weapons and fire on the derelict ship,” Electra said.

  “Whhhhiirrrrrring noise, pewpewpewpew, bzzzzzzzap, kaboom, Miss Electra,” Ivy said.

  “This ship doesn’t have weapons, does it?” Electra asked.

  “No, Miss Electra.”

  “Someone programmed you to do that if anyone tried?”

  “Yes, Miss Electra, at the factory where I was produced.”

  “Was that the first time you ever got to run that routine?”

  “Yes, Miss Electra. None of the previous owners seemed unsure of whether a luxury vessel contained military grade weaponry or not.”

  Electra shrugged. It was pretty funny. Nicely done, whoever wrote that little line of code into Ivy. The coordinates for the wormhole spawn kicked in and the ship was gone before the pursuers could figure out what had happened.

  Electra smiled at her shaking palms. Adrenaline. So much lovely adrenaline. That was the real flying she’d always wanted to do—the one percent of piloting work that made the drudgery and math worthwhile. It wasn’t something they’d wanted to teach her on the Embarker fleet, but she’d managed to sneak in more than a few evasive maneuver modules while learning to fly.

  “Tell me about Sempa, the Glott pirate, Ivy.”

  Ivy showed pictures, a couple newsreels, audio commentary from a documentary on alien subspecies and organized crime that was trying to prove Glott pirates weren’t true Glotts. It was all pretty much what Electra had expected. He was a powerful-ish pirate of modest renown. The creditors breathing down her neck for their seventy-nine billion were far scarier and had a lot more reach in the form of a nearly impervious enforcement bot on her ship and an almost limitless army of collection drones and bots if she tried to run. Still, from what the galactic net said, Sempa seemed to hold a grudge, had a violent temper and she’d given him reasons to focus both on her. Not the best outcome, but also not the worst.

  “You have made a dangerous enemy,” Letterman said.

  “I did, but the alternative of giving him everything I had and becoming a slave would prevent me from paying the debt you’re enforcing. Shouldn’t you be happy I didn’t take the deal?” Electra asked.

  Letterman stood unmoving for several seconds. “Carry on.” He pivoted and spun back down the stairs and out of the cockpit.

  Chapter Four

  Getting to the Sol System took several long wormhole jumps on a narrow path only recently cleared for travel again. Signal markers along the way proclaimed the reopening of the Pilgrim Trail courtesy of the Chamber and Bi-MARP. Electra asked Ivy to run a search on Bi-MARP but no results returned.

  The Pilgrim Trail was something Electra already knew about in theory. Sentimental humans from centuries past made the journey back to the Sol System to see the dead worlds that had spawned humanity. Earth had died before humans could be sponsored by the Appdurpins into spacefaring society. There were large colonies on Mars, a few inhabited stations orbiting Venus, a handful of holdouts on Luna and quite a few growing settlements on the moons of Jupiter when humanity was finally brought into the galactic society. Over the centuries, the Sol System faded, the colonies dwindled and humans became nomadic to take advantage of wealth and opportunities along more established trade routes. The Sol System hadn’t had permanent human residents in almost six hundred years. People returned to the toxic surface of Earth to poke around for maudlin purposes on their pilgrimages, since the resources of the planet had been long since spent and nothing of actual value remained. The atmosphere was still highly acidic, and so even prepared pilgrims couldn’t stay on the surface for long without risking life and limb. The Chamber had shut down the Pilgrim Trail decades before, citing safety concerns. With no humans, excepting herself, left to make the pilgrimage, reopening the route seemed like an odd move.

  The wormhole spawn dropped the Cadillux on the star side of Neptune’s orbit. The planetary guide on the star-chart said she’d have to wait in place for sixty or so years for the planet to make its way back around if she wanted to see it without chasing it down. She plugged in the most direct route to the Bi-MARP headquarters in orbit around Earth. On the straight line, she’d manage only a quick glance at Jupiter when she zipped past. The Sol System was the genesis point of her species, yet she didn’t feel particularly compelled to see the sights. She was an Embarker, not an Earthling, and she wasn’t schmaltzy about any of it.

  Her curiosity lay in the mysteriously named Bi-MARP and what they might want with a Bort Pod. She planned on trying to stick around until they opened it to see what was inside. A special Earth plant or animal was her best guess, maybe corn or some fish.

  The closer they got to the sun, the less Electra saw in the whole thing. It was a G-type main-sequence star, mostly white, but maybe a little yellow with some filters. All in all, it was pretty bright for a star its size, but nothing spectacular. She thought she should feel some sense of awe. She simply didn’t.

  On approach to Earth’s orbit, she spotted hundreds of Jun’Tar construction rings working on a space station intended to encircle the entire planet like a high-orbit silver hula hoop. Electra chuckled and rolled her eyes. If the Chamber was entrusting the Jun’Tar with the Bi-MARP contract, they must not care if the job was done fast, cheap or well.

  “This is Bi-MARP airspace control,” a nasally voice said over the long-range communication array. “What business do you have in the Sol System, Cadillux 59?”

  “This is Cadillux 59,” Electra replied. “Inbound with a Bort Pod delivery to fulfill a Bi-MARP requisition contract.” Under her breath, she added, “for twenty mother-fucking billion units.”

  “Airspace control transmitting landing coordinates.”

  “Do you
r thing with the coordinates, Ivy,” Electra said on her way down the stairs out of the cockpit. “Don’t get too comfy. I’m already sick of this graveyard.”

  “I’ll keep the engines running, so to speak, Miss Electra,” Ivy replied.

  Electra banged her fist on the side of Letterman’s armored body on her way past the enforcement bot. “Let’s get paid.”

  While they waited for the docking sequence to complete, Electra swayed a little front to back, drummed her hands on the tops of her thighs and made popping noises with her mouth. Twenty billion units sat in the enforcement bot to her left and she wasn’t going to get any of it. The whole thing made her itchy and anxious. The airlock doors slid open after three warning chimes. Two Jun’Tar security guards stood ready on the other side.

  Jun’Tar were tall, nearly ten feet, but their height came almost entirely from the three slender bird legs, which pointed down from the hard, egg-like carapace of their body, which was roughly the size of a large watermelon. One hand and one eyestalk usually dangled about halfway down their height on the same slender limb-type as their legs. The security guards wore strange metal rings on their ashen spindle legs and orange helmets over their carapaces.

  “Captain Electra Rex at your service,” Electra said. It was a Chamber project. There was no reason to think she wouldn’t get paid, yet she didn’t like being there, not so near to Earth, and she couldn’t name a single reason as to why.

  “This way, Captain,” the guard on the left said.

  Electra followed the guards down the long, tall, exceedingly narrow hallway. Letterman struggled to keep up, barely fitting between the walls. Indeed, if Electra stretched her arms straight out to either side, she could place her palms flat against both walls and still have a little bend in her elbows. The fact that Letterman was scraping at every slight turn made her smile—big tough enforcement bot struggling because the walls were too close together.

  Eventually the hallways opened up onto a large observation room. Earth was clearly visible outside the station. The planet was brown, dead, glowing in places from volcanic fissures and black in others for reasons Electra couldn’t deduce. A Jun’Tar bureaucrat and an Appdurpin scientist approached, easily identifiable by the yellow fedora the Jun’Tar wore on top of his carapace and the white lab coat the Appdurpin sported.

  “I am Cog 2, lead supervisor of Bi-MARP, and this is Doctor Baarqua, our resident human specialist,” the Jun’Tar wearing the fedora said.

  “I’m Captain Electra Rex, this is my assistant, Letterman and here is the Bort Pod you ordered.” Electra banged her fist twice on the front of Letterman’s core. Everyone waited expectantly. Nothing happened. “That means open up and give them the Bort Pod,” Electra growled at Letterman.

  “That was hardly made clear to me.” Letterman opened up, all the same. “And I am not your assistant.”

  “You’re assisting me in this, so technically you are,” Electra said.

  “I’m supervising your repayment of a debt, which makes me—” Letterman began.

  “Middle management at best,” Electra said, “and you’re slowing down this whole process with your yammering.”

  Two Jun’Tar technicians rushed over with modified hand-trucks to accept delivery of the large metal container. Electra stared expectantly at Cog 2. She wasn’t running a pod retrieval charity.

  “This is most serendipitously unexpected,” Dr. Baarqua said. “A marvelous happenstance.”

  Electra rolled her eyes. Appdurpins were bloviating doofuses as far as she was concerned. Appdurpins stood around nine feet tall and were covered in shaggy, bright blue fur, with three of almost everything—three eyes, three nostrils, three fingers per hand, three toes per foot, three nipples, etc., and they fancied themselves the experts on damn near everything, but most especially humans. They were apes, much like humans, which was probably the primary reason they had sponsored humanity all those years ago. The particular Appdurpin in question was looking at Electra, not the prized Bort Pod she’d brought. Star-struck, most likely. She was slightly famous among human-fanciers.

  “What’s Bi-MARP, anyway?” Electra asked as she meandered toward the Bort Pod and the technicians working to open it.

  “Bi-Millennial Apocalypse Reconstruction Project,” Cog 2 said, “a co-venture between the Chamber and the Jun’Tar Tri-Crown Construction Concern.”

  “Uh huh, but what does it do?” Electra asked, her eyes widening as the Bort Pod’s shell opened a crack.

  “We’re reconstructing Earth according to the guidebooks,” Cog 2 said.

  The metal casing of the Bort Pod fell away to reveal an ancient cryo-stasis chamber with a glass door. A dark, fuzzy shape rested in suspended animation, encased in faintly blue ice. Electra let out her bated breath in a disappointed flapping of her lips.

  “Pff-ft, it’s just some weird ice,” Electra said.

  “Ice containing a perfectly healthy human male,” Dr. Baarqua corrected her. “Bort Thompson of Mars.”

  Electra rushed over to the ice block and tried to peer into the milky surface to the hazy shape inside. “So, he’s alive? A real person and not a ‘for display only’ type of thing?” She couldn’t decide if her excitement was from maybe not being alone in the galaxy or if she wouldn’t have to carry the burden of being the last human anymore.

  “When we thaw him, yes,” Cog 2 said.

  “Yeah, that’s worth twenty billion units or even more,” Electra said. “Let’s get him out and wake him up!”

  “You’re worth a substantially grander sum than that astounding amount to us,” Dr. Baarqua said. “50 billion units if you will remain on the station.”

  “Say what now?” Electra asked.

  “A breeding pair,” Cog 2 said. “You and Bort shall be the mother and father of a new generation of humans. Before you answer, let me remind you this is a Chamber-sponsored project and we have the power of eminent domain to compel you to stay, even if you aren’t swayed by the fifty billion units.”

  “Really? You mean it? I can become a fifty-billion-unit baby mill for you, with or without my consent?” Electra asked, dripping the words with sarcasm. “There are a couple problems.” Electra walked toward Letterman first. She kicked the front door on his armored shell closed. “Problem one—this bulky bastard won’t let me. I owe seventy-eight billion units and change. Even with the money for Bort and the extra for me to stay, I’m still short of paying my debts.”

  “The Cadillux and all items aboard could be liquidated to discharge the rest,” Letterman unhelpfully offered.

  “Marvelous!” Dr. Baarqua exclaimed.

  “Problem two.” Electra ran to the Bort Pod and swiped her hand across the front to clear the condensation that had gathered over Bort’s nether region. “Me and the dude-cicle have the same genitals.” She waved her hand grandly over her own package, prominently displayed by the Utopalex pants, and Bort’s, which was even more obvious, due to his complete nudity.

  “Is that a problem, Dr. Baarqua?” Cog 2 asked.

  “I…I am unsure of the ramifications of such a revelation,” Baarqua stammered.

  “Let me break it down for you,” Electra said. “Who came up with the price list for a human male at twenty billion but a human female at fifty billion?”

  “The Chamber,” Cog 2 said, “with our standard contractor markup percentages, of course.”

  “Of course, but you didn’t stop to wonder why a female was worth more than twice as much?” Electra asked. When neither the bureaucrat nor alleged human expert could answer, she continued. “You have two producers of the cheaper part of the required equation for creating a human baby. The egg and womb are thirty billion units more valuable than the sperm.”

  “With markups,” Cog 2 added.

  “And you mean to edify us with that revelation because…?” Dr. Baarqua began.

  “Keeping me here against my will and selling my ship to cover the rest of my debt won’t get you any closer to creating a human baby, s
ince he and I have the same piece of the reproductive puzzle. And, if I’m being completely honest, I’m not totally sure mine throws genetic material, so I may not even be worth the twenty billion that he is. Not every human is fertile or potent. Lot’s of reproductive non-participants in my species.”

  “That does complicate things,” Dr. Baarqua sighed.

  “Problem the third,” Electra said. “Two people can’t make a viable population. Embarkers have known the minimal viable population for centuries. Anything under a hundred and sixty is going to fail.”

  “We know. We’re more interested in the commercial draw of a baby,” Cog 2 said. “Tourists love baby animals.”

  “Okay, that’s a messed-up thing to do to a kid,” Electra said. “Regardless, I can’t carry a child, even if I wanted to, and I don’t. But I found the Bort Pod and delivered it unscathed, didn’t I? Maybe I can find a fertile human woman and talk her into going along with this whole forced breeding program. I could find other stuff too. I have a really good eye and nose and other sensory organs when it comes to old human junk.” She didn’t actually think she could, nor was she all that thrilled about selling out her species to settle a debt that wasn’t hers, but she would tell them almost anything they wanted to hear if it meant leaving with her ship and freedom intact.

  “There is a master list created by our scholars based on the guidebooks,” Cog 2 said. “We’ve given it to a few select subcontractors already. One more might become problematic.” Cog 2 produced a display laser from beneath his fedora and drew a green triangle in the air. “For you see, it’s the classic contractor’s triangle.” He wrote ‘fast’, ‘easy’ and ‘cheap’ on the three points. “Jobs cannot be done fast, easy or cheap, so adding another independent collector to the roster could speed up the job, creating undue speed, which would result in unwanted cheapness when the contract finished ahead of schedule and under budget. Don’t get me started on the ease that might result from your apparent skill.”