“I’m positive that’s not how a contractor’s triangle is supposed to work,” Electra said. It was typical Jun’Tar nonsense. Their entire society was built around inefficiency and waste. They built things but typically found a way to make it take forever and cost a fortune. Why the Chamber kept employing them was a mystery to almost everyone. Still, she thought she could use their love of inefficiency against them. “Um…oh! How about this… I already ran into one of your other collectors, Sempa, the Glott raider. We totally got in each other’s way. It was a textbook example of too many people trying to do the same work and tripping over one another in the process.”
“Labor redundancy!” Cog 2 said. “It is one of the pillars of good Jun’Tar contract management. Yes, you are right. More collectors should be added—as many as we can get until you’re constantly stumbling over one another, grinding the whole process to a screeching halt.”
“I remain skeptical of this designated course of action,” Dr. Baarqua said.
“Dr. Baarqua, you’re a human specialist, right? Who would be better suited to find Earth artifacts than an honest-to-goodness Earthling?” Electra said.
“You are not an Earthling. Earth-born humans have not existed in millennia,” Letterman corrected her. “Bort is not even from Earth, and he is almost two thousand years older than you.”
“Close enough, closer than you’re going to get elsewhere,” Electra said.
“Have you had the pleasure of poring over the guidebooks provided most generously by the Chamber?” Dr. Baarqua gestured grandly to a dusty old set of dark blue books locked away behind an impenetrable repulse field. “Behold the Encyclopedia Britannica, fourteenth edition, circa 1961.”
“I can’t say that I have, but I’d be super eager to try to read all those really dusty, really thick, really old books,” Electra lied.
“Then I shall procure a digital copy and have it transmitted to your ship’s computer posthaste!” Dr. Baarqua exclaimed. “Mr. Cog 2, I must insist, most vigorously, that this woman be employed by Bi-MARP.”
“Again, we find ourselves in complete agreement, Dr. Baarqua,” Cog 2 said. “Welcome to the team, Captain Rex.” Cog 2 snapped to one of his assistants and pointed at Letterman. “Pay this woman’s enforcement bot the twenty billion units she is owed.”
A blue bar on the front of Letterman’s core stretched less than a third of the way across the large, black display of her debt. At the end of the blue, a tiny sliver of red light appeared.
“What’s the red?” Electra asked.
“That is an operational line of credit to continue your repayment work,” Letterman said. “It must be paid back at ten percent variable interest compounded weekly.”
“Great, a little red rope to further hang myself,” Electra said.
“You are the great Captain Electra Rex, earthling and human expert, while I am lowly middle management,” Letterman said. “Apparently, you’re also willing to sell your fellow humans into a circus in exchange for a pink spaceship.”
Electra knew Letterman was incapable of inflecting his voice to indicate any sort of emotion, but she recognized a cutting remark when she heard it and Letterman’s words sliced straight to the bone. No, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to do that, and she was increasingly unhappy about leaving Bort with Bi-MARP. She didn’t know if she’d be able to help Bort, but she knew she couldn’t if she became part of the menagerie.
Chapter Five
Against Dr. Baarqua’s objections, Cog 2 had Bort Thompson thawed right then and there. Electra watched the conclusion of the Bort Pod retrieval job with a case of thoroughly jangled nerves. She’d already been paid and the contents of the pod were more or less known, but it could be a frozen corpse and she’d be back to being the last human. She’d already adopted and adored the idea that there was at least one other, and she didn’t want that lovely, reassuring notion to thud dead on the floor at her feet.
The ice melted, warmed, conducted an electrical pulse to start Bort’s senses again, then drained out of the bottom of the pod across the floor. Electra initially thought it was water, but it was too viscous to be water and it smelled funky, like slightly off milk or strong cheese.
Bort came around slowly and began to urinate involuntarily. The floor was already thick with the gross fluid that probably would have gone down a drain port on the original ship. Since the pod had been disconnected and flown a third of the way across the galaxy, the fluid drained straight onto the floor and mingled with the long-held contents of Bort’s bladder. He finished peeing ages before his senses returned to him, which seemed fortunate to Electra. Knowingly peeing in front of a room full of aliens, a strange woman and an enforcement bot would probably be difficult for most men, and after sleeping for seventeen hundred years, Bort probably wasn’t in charge of his need to urinate at the moment.
“I’m here,” Bort mumbled. “The promised land of…” His eyes cleared and he got a look out the window at the planet he probably assumed was the destination point in the Andromeda Galaxy that he’d never reached. “Shii-it, why am I orbiting Earth?” He rubbed his eyes with his fists, blinked like he was waiting for the bleariness to clear and took another long look at Earth, possibly willing the planet to transform into something else. “It’s worse. How is it even worse? Damn! Damn! Damn!” Bort stood around six feet tall with a slender build, short black hair and a ruddy, tan complexion.
Electra looked to Dr. Baarqua first, who stared blankly, then Cog 2, who…she didn’t really know how to read Jun’Tar body language and they didn’t have faces, so his inaction in that crucial moment stood as the only indication that he hadn’t prepared anything to say after thawing Bort. Bad planning all around. Not that Electra had any helpful words, but she hadn’t known what was in the pod until a few minutes ago. Not really enough time to write a, ‘Hey, welcome back to reality, a bunch of shit has changed,’ speech.
Bort sprang into action, apparently unconcerned by the other inhabitants of the room. First, he leaped back into the pod and frantically tried to close the lid. Either the Jun’Tar technicians had damaged the pod while opening it or the chamber was only meant to be used the one time, because the door flatly refused to close. He next rushed to the window and pounded on the glass with his fists, cursing people, governments, religious deities, himself and a name Electra suspected belonged to an ex-wife, based on context clues. Whoever Nitzi was, she had done some things Bort wasn’t remotely ready to forgive, and he’d really counted on waking up in an entirely different galaxy than her.
Having a wet, angry, naked man rushing around a room in front of a hapless audience was easily the most awkward thing Electra had ever seen. Dr. Baarqua was first to avert his eyes from the uncomfortable spectacle. Soon the dozen or so Jun’Tar in attendance did the same. Electra wanted to follow their lead, but she couldn’t. It was too compelling, too enthralling, too absurdly human. Impotent rage was just something humans had or did or were inherently prone to. In all her travels, the only other species she’d seen exhibit impotent rage was the Appdurpins, and it was extraordinarily rare. The emotional tempest that flowed from Bort was easily the most impotent of all rages in human history. She decided another human should bear witness to it, if only for the sake of posterity. He was almost two thousand years removed from his time, in the wrong galaxy, completely naked and there wasn’t anything he could do about any of it. The shine wore off quickly, however, and she realized one of the two remaining humans should try to behave reasonably and she was far too frivolous for it to be her, so Bort needed to get his shit together.
“Stop it,” Electra finally said. “You’re embarrassing humanity and there aren’t enough of us left for it to go unnoticed.”
The statement, of course, made things worse—or might not have been understood, since she doubted Bort had a universal translator implant. Electra could only hope he hadn’t understood her. He didn’t know humans were on the brink of extinction or that he was the sole survivor of the ship he’
d flown on. Finding that out by having it shouted at him by a complete stranger probably wasn’t the best way to break the horrific news. Eventually, Dr. Baarqua produced a tranquilizer and Bort was sedated. They’d have to find a fabricator to get him clothes, as Jun’Tar only wore hats and Appdurpins didn’t normally wear clothes at all. Dr. Baarqua was kind of an odd duck for donning a lab coat. Electra assumed he wore it as the eccentricity of a human expert working on a project to restore Earth.
After the head of Bi-MARP and the assigned human expert had allowed the thawing process to devolve into a grand display of public urination and impotent rage, Electra thought the least they could do was calm Bort, clean him up and give him a less chaotic environment to adjust to. She shot scolding glances at Cog 2 and Dr. Baarqua.
“Most unsatisfactory,” Dr. Baarqua said, once the sedated Bort had been removed on a stretcher. “There is a prehistoric human proverb. ‘We have thoroughly defecated in the slumbering apparatus.’”
“Yes, yes you have done that,” Electra said.
“This is not your kerfuffle to ameliorate, and you have already been compensated,” Dr. Baarqua said. “It might be best if you took your leave.”
“Now, wait a second,” Electra argued. “I was hoping to talk to him some when he isn’t so naked and angry.”
“Perhaps later. For now, I have an admired colleague, a doctoral candidate to be precise, who has studied an astounding multitude of cultures through computer simulations,” Dr. Baarqua said. “He has graciously offered to share his data with me, although he is justifiably concerned about transmitting it via the galactic network for fear it might be purloined by rival researchers. This is an item of immeasurable import to this project, and thus worth a vast quantity of compensatory units. I would implore you to dedicate yourself next to its delivery, as I feel many of the other collectors do not have genteel enough demeanors to interact fruitfully with academics and their delicate constitutions.”
“Go get the data from your friend and bring it back without freaking out the scientist involved? Not a problem,” Electra said. “Incidentally, what’s the payout? I don’t have my list yet.”
“Nearly a billion standard units, nine hundred eighty million, for precision’s sake,” Dr. Baarqua said.
“For some saved files from a computer game?” Electra said. “Consider it done, Doc.”
“You are so gracious, Captain,” Dr. Baarqua said, letting out a long sigh of relief. “I trust I can count on your utmost discretion and decorum in this matter.”
“Trust away. I’ve got this.” Electra patted the good doctor on the arm and left smiling from ear to ear. With payouts like that for simple retrieval or delivery jobs, Bi-MARP could clear her debt in a few years or months instead of the several lifetimes that she’d feared it might take. “Take care of Bort, will you? He’ll be lucky if his brain doesn’t melt out of his ears while trying to wrap his head around…everything.”
“I will proceed cautiously,” Dr. Baarqua said. “As should you.”
Chapter Six
Simulation data, an easy ‘go there, come back, get paid’ proposition. Apparently, Dr. Baarqua only knew the head scientist on the simulation project from some discussion board about historical versions of string theory or cheese-making or string-cheese-making theories. Electra had kind of tuned out the droning Appdurpin scientist during the details. She tuned out a lot of people, an invaluable skill in her old line of work as a professional party guest. She needed to work on that, especially when someone like Dr. Baarqua was trying to help her. He was boring and longwinded, but, unlike the party guests she used to listen to, he actually had valuable things to say, like what the scientist’s name was. She hadn’t been paying attention during that part.
White sands made of magnesium powder, purple oceans of liquid argon and peculiar electrical storms that Ivy said had to be avoided at all costs greeted Electra when the Cadillux descended through the atmosphere of the planet Amphiorae. The exterior temperature was in the negative range that would kill her instantly, so a walk on the beach wasn’t in her future. The Amphio home world was lovely after a fashion, at least on the surface, but that was not where Electra was headed. A massive crystalline structure, smooth and intricate with the appearance of flowing despite standing perfectly still, registered on the head-up display as the target location. Electra guided her ship toward it, even as a section writhed out of the way to create an opening.
The Cadillux slowed upon entry, thumping its repulse engines off the walls and floor in pounding waves to keep the ship well away from anything solid enough to harm it while in atmospheric conditions. In space, the repulse engines created oppositional gravity forces to keep debris from hitting the hull, and largely had little to push against while flying through a vacuum to the point of being completely unnoticeable. Inside the tunnel leading under the argon oceans of Amphiorae, the engines created a thunderous noise and strange pressure waves that made the air wobble.
Eventually the tunnel opened into a massive subterranean chamber that still dripped with dark purple liquid. To either side of the cleared, crystalline landing pad, an ocean of liquid argon was held back by an unseen field.
Electra landed the ship on the illuminated platform within the ring of white lights that dimmed upon touchdown. The exterior temperature readings said that particular section was chilly, on the verge of uncomfortable, but not the freeze-all-the-liquids-in-her-body-instantaneously kind of cold the surface boasted. When the gangplank lowered, Letterman brandished the lien tether at her before she could step out of the door.
“No need for that,” Electra said. “You’re coming with me to assist in whatever I need assistance with. What would you call a bot designed to assist someone?”
“Uninterested in your attempts at goading,” Letterman answered.
“So touchy,” Electra teased. “Maybe you need a vacation.”
Letterman switched out the tether clasp on the end of one of his arms with a stun gun of sorts. Electra wondered if he was wary or excited or annoyed or whatever at having to go with her. Letterman was too smart not to have an opinion, but enforcement bots didn’t have expressive features or unshielded sensors to indicate mood. They were immune to flash attacks and emotional appeals—largely silent, always looming and unnervingly constant. In Letterman’s specific case, also extra irritating.
At the edge of the platform, an Amphio scientist greeted them. The Amphio hovered in a purple globe of liquid argon contained by an invisible field emitted from a circle of white light emanating from the crystal floor. The sphere of purple liquid was a little wider than Electra’s total arm span and twice as big as the Amphio floating inside.
“My name is Paul,” said the glowing translucent cephalopod within the sphere. It wasn’t an octopus or squid like the cephalopods on Earth described in the Encyclopedia Britannica, since it had dozens of tiny arms and no eyes, but still, it was pretty close to the pictures of octopi in the Bi-MARP guide.
“Nice to meet you, Paul,” Electra said. “I’m Electra and this is Letterman, who is mostly here to annoy me. Mind if I ask…Paul?”
“My real name is a series of light flashes,” Paul said. “It doesn’t translate to auditory languages or galactic net message boards. I adopted the name of my favorite Beatle from the simulation I’m about to show you.”
“Beetles are small insects,” Electra said. “They’re on the Bi-MARP list of things to collect. I don’t suppose you know where some are?”
Paul guided Electra and Letterman into a soft, white tunnel. The air was chilly and very high in oxygen content as Electra’s head began swimming and a vague sense of euphoria descended on her. She immediately recognized the feeling. High oxygen concentrations were a common way for many species to catch a buzz at parties. She wondered if that was Paul’s intention or if he simply didn’t know how much oxygen a human needed to breathe when he’d set up the chamber.
“Ah, a common misconception. It’s a trick of spelling,” Paul s
aid. “I speak of a musical group called the Beatles, spelled differently than the insect. As for the creatures the band was somewhat named for, I’m afraid I do not know of any Earthling insect colonies, although the subject of these recent simulations is apparently not a fan of them or anything she deems a ‘bug’. This dislike was a constant throughout all fifteen cycles—most fascinating.”
Within the laboratory proper, several strange stasis chambers along the walls contained dozens of different test subjects from a wide variety of species, both extant and extinct. Each one was suspended in a globular sphere of cloudy white gel with several crystalline probes dipped in around the edges. When Paul floated past, a display of what was happening within the simulation projected onto the outer surface of the gelatin and slowed to a speed comprehensible to Electra, making her believe this was done for her benefit rather than just a standard function of the research apparatuses.
“This is highly impressive,” Electra said, genuinely amazed by the setup, even if she didn’t understand what possible use the data could serve. “When Dr. Baarqua said simulations, I assumed he meant computer programs running theoretical subjects through mazes or something.”
“Thank you. A life’s work collecting centuries’ worth of sociological data from multiple species and I’ve nearly supported my dissertation adequately,” Paul said.
“What is your hypothesis, if I may ask?” Letterman asked, surprising both Electra and Paul.
“That betrayal is a tool rendered most often unto the greater good,” Paul said. “It’s a counter theory to one of my academic rivals. He’s a horse’s ass, to borrow a popular term from the human simulations.”
“So this isn’t a Chamber-funded project?” Electra asked.
“Oh, my goodness, no.” Paul floated to a stop outside a gelatin sphere containing a nude human woman barely visible within the murky suspension. “It’s supported by private grants and public money from the university I attend. It is my sincerest hope that this discovery will finally allow me to complete my doctoral studies.”
Electra Rex Page 5
