Several Jun’Tar security guards rushed into the room and began whispering frantically to Cog 2. Strange tremors and groans of metal buckling ran through the station.
“If you’ll excuse me, there is an important, non-pirate related matter I have to attend to,” Cog 2 said before rushing from the room with his security attaché.
“Sounds like there might be a pirate-related matter.” Electra grinned.
“What did you do?” Dr. Baarqua asked.
“I can’t let her stay here,” Electra said. She shook her head grimly to Dr. Baarqua, tightened her grip on the souvenir baseball bat and swung as hard as she could at the center of the glass wall separating her and Treasure. The electrified security glass rejected the baseball bat and its swinger, sending the wooden club clattering across the metal floor and Electra tumbling ass-over-teakettle nearly half as far. From her newly seated position in the center of the room, Electra shook out her stinging hands and groaned. “I don’t know why I thought that would work.”
“This ruse of yours… I can assume it will result in calamity for the station?” Dr. Baarqua asked.
“A lot. A full kettle of calamities,” Electra said. “I think that’s a human idiom…kettle of calamities? Sounds like a thing.”
Dr. Baarqua sighed and shook his head. He walked to a panel on the wall, pressed his ID badge to it, entered a code pattern with his fingertip and the glass lowered. Treasure and Bort at once looked to the opened wall from their perspective. Treasure ran from the kitchen, hurdled the couch on the way and threw herself across Electra, who was still seated on the floor after her multiple backward somersaults.
“Dr. Baarqua, what’s happening?” Bort asked, emerging from the enclosure in a much more casual manner.
“It would seem the visitor center is prematurely closing for the…day, is it, Electra?” Dr. Baarqua said.
“Um…probably a little longer than that.” Electra managed to peep amid the shower of kisses Treasure was raining on her.
“Did it work? Are you crazy famous?” Treasure asked.
“It did, I am and was this your plan all along?” Electra said.
“Like you would really leave me here after all we’ve been through,” Treasure said. “I never doubted for a second you’d come rescue me…again.”
“It’s true,” Bort said. “She’s made it quite clear she did not intend to stay and breed with me.”
“It’s not you…” Treasure said.
“It’s okay, Trish,” Bort said. “My feelings might’ve been hurt if the first words out of your mouth to me weren’t ‘I’m desperately in love with someone else, so don’t get any ideas, Martian.’ Hard to get one’s hopes up after that sort of introduction.”
“Come along, my boy,” Dr. Baarqua said. “We are still men of science and there is much yet to be done in the Sol System.”
Dr. Baarqua put his hand reassuringly on Bort’s shoulder and guided him toward a service entrance. Bort looked back only once. Electra spotted the quick glance, but Treasure never did. Her eyes were focused solely on the love who had thrice rescued her.
“So, what’s the plan?” Treasure asked giddily.
“Plan? I thought you had the plan!” Electra said.
“My part of the plan worked already,” Treasure argued. “You’re famous and hopefully debt free. Getting us out of here is all on you.”
“Ah, well, I suppose I could improvise something.” Electra stood and helped Treasure to her feet. She beckoned the Letterman shell over and tapped out a few command lines on the side panel. “Get the ship to the rendezvous, Ivy. The macros can handle the package delivery from here.”
“Yes, Miss Electra.”
“So that’s not Letterman?” Treasure asked.
“It was Ivy for a little while, but it’s not anyone anymore.” Electra tapped the final command prompt and the Letterman shell rolled deeper into the visitor center. Before passing out of sight, its one functional arm opened the front panel and turned the nozzle for the gas feed. A putrid yellow fog began to leak out of every crack in the seams of the shell, even as the tentacle arm closed the front door. “Things are going to get extremely unpleasant in here. So we should probably take our leave.”
“Where’s your ship?” Treasure asked.
Electra consulted with her datapad. “About halfway to the moon by now.” Electra grabbed Treasure’s hand and dragged her back through the displays. Ahead, people screamed, weapons fired and alarms blared. Sempa and his pirates were doing a marvelous job of crashing the party. On the way through the human culture exhibit, a strange impulse overtook Electra.
She retrieved another keepsake baseball bat from the souvenir stand, braced herself for failure and swung it at the glass surrounding the Carmen Electra display. The bat crashed through the glass without triggering the same level of security. Thank goodness for the Jun’Tar propensity for cutting corners.
“Holy shit, that’s why you look familiar!” Treasure exclaimed.
“Yeah, my transition was apparently somewhat patterned off her and my name half stolen,” Electra said while grabbing the standee from the exhibit. “Was she pretty famous, important, revered, a woman of high society and respect?”
“She hosted spring break stuff on MTV and posed naked for Playboy,” Treasure said. “So, no, not really.”
“Not a world leader or competitive champion of some kind? That’s a letdown.” Electra positioned the standee in the middle of the room, scribbled a note across the front of a baseball jersey and wrapped it around the cardboard Carmen Electra. “Oh well, less to live up to, I suppose.”
“Bygones?” Treasure read the hastily scrawled message.
“It’s for Sempa,” Electra said. “Hopefully he’ll get what it means.” Again, they were on the move, stopping only briefly to consult a visiting center map on the wall. The closest emergency exit was near the main entrance to the docking bay that bore Electra’s name.
“I saw the statue, by the way,” Electra said while they ran. “That was so sweet of you.”
“Did you like the chrome? I thought you might like a statue in chrome.”
“I loved it!” Electra said. “I’m told it’s anatomically correct, although I have my doubts after seeing a few of the galactic net renderings of me.”
“Hey, I tried to give my input on your body, but they weren’t interested. The physical features are based on a security scan of you, sweetness,” Treasure said. “That’s you to double scale, no embellishments needed.”
Electra’s cheeks and neck felt hot with a flattered blush yet again. They ducked into the hall ahead of the docking bay just before an oncoming throng of tourists blocked their path. She thought she heard someone in the mob scream, “What the hell is that stench?”
In truth, Electra had no idea what the full chemical composition of the stink bomb was. Station 111 had proprietary rights to certain mixtures and she hadn’t cared enough to pry. If it worked—and for what she’d paid, there wasn’t any question it would—they could keep their formula secret.
“The pirates were more than enough of a distraction,” Treasure said. “So why the mobile stink emitter thingy?”
They arrived at a long, curved room filled with triangle portals along the wall leading to escape pods. People were starting to file in, eager to flee the rampaging pirates and aggressively odorous cloud spreading through the station. Jun’Tar security attempted to keep the lines organized and succeeded to a degree. What a polite bunch, Electra mused. She almost felt sorry for ruining their little party…but not really.
“Partly, a backup plan in case Sempa didn’t show up,” Electra said. “Mostly, I’m pissed off at everyone in the Chamber and Bi-MARP right now. They were willing to buy and sell human beings. They’re not being honest with anyone, least of all you and me, and they’re turning a tomb into an amusement park, which is all just fucked up crap. Obviously, I’m happy about meeting you and getting out of debt, and I’m aware neither wonderful thing would h
ave happened without Bi-MARP, but being conflicted has never stopped me from acting rashly before, so—”
“Wait, they aren’t actually going to restore Earth?”
“Not in any meaningful way. I think they want to open the surface to tourism eventually, but no humans will live there. Even if they could make it the way it was, I don’t think humans deserve it,” Electra said. “We had a perfectly good planet and we fucked it all up for stupid reasons. Then we didn’t do anything to warrant having it fixed for us. Even the Chamber can’t undo what we did, not truly. It’s a graveyard of twenty billion people down there and it should stay the way we made it. Fuck ancient Earthlings, fuck Bi-MARP and fuck the Chamber.”
“After seeing the Chamber display of Earth’s destruction…I’m with you. You know I am,” Treasure said. “It’s sad, but you’re right, and there aren’t people left to go back anyway.”
“There are, but I’ll explain that later.” Electra dragged Treasure into one of the pyramid-shaped escape pods and closed the hatch behind them. A quick splice into the power supply and Electra had her homing beacon bleeping away for Ivy to find them amid the hundreds of similar escape pods all being sent to the moon as the emergency landing zone. “With any luck, Sempa and his buddies will stumble around the stench-filled station for hours looking for me.”
In a hard lurch, the pod launched and suddenly they were shooting through space, one shiny pyramid amid a buzzing swarm of other little pyramids. The moment they left the artificial gravity, Electra and Treasure began floating around the enclosed space, giggling at the weightless sensation.
“I have been in space for weeks, and this is the first time I’ve actually felt like an astronaut,” Treasure said.
They spun and clung to one another, ignoring the pleading of the onboard system to sit down, buckle up and behave reasonably. Electra couldn’t remember a time where she’d wanted to behave reasonably, and she wasn’t about to start because a low-level safety VI said she should. There would probably be blowback, consequences, perhaps even legal ramifications for what she’d done, but it was all worth it. She was young and in love with her Treasure.
Epilogue
A month later, Electra was back on Authrillia, but not in the tiny apartment she’d barely managed to pay rent on and not as a professional party guest scraping together jobs from galactic net postings. Treasure was the breadwinner, designing and coding replicas of human structures, furniture and food to sell fabricator licenses for. She called it her ‘Intergalactic IKEA’, a concept involving home assembly and meatballs that Electra still couldn’t wrap her head around. They had a home, an honest-to-goodness house, something Electra had never had in her life. It was a small cottage by Authrillia standards—seven interconnected domes set on a hillside overlooking a beach in one direction and the village of Linjay on the other. The one-way mirrored exterior of the domes allowed panoramic views of the ocean, the beach, the crystalline forest to the north and the small municipal star port to the south where her Cadillux was docked.
Treasure spent much of her time in their new home decorating. Most of her complaints about their abode revolved around a complete inability to put furniture flush against the curved walls or hang pictures anywhere, since all the walls were concave glass. Electra tried to explain that the architecture on Authrillia was almost entirely Panaeus, telepathically floating, shrimp-tailed humanoids, so most of the furniture was globular and free floating. Treasure definitely did not want floating, globular furniture and vowed to design a new, human-friendly house. She was a former architecture student, after all.
“I really want to tell people what you did,” Treasure said. “It was so cool the way you saved me, and everyone is getting it wrong.” She was reading the galactic-net-news articles again. Every morning, Treasure woke up, made coffee and read the news. Sometimes she even checked outside the front door for a newspaper before settling into the familiar routine. Treasure explained that was how news used to come to people’s homes—rolled up and thrown at the front door by a kid on a bike.
Electra laid her face down on the cool metal of the kitchen counter she’d been leaning forward on and let her hair fall in a curtain around her head. They’d been over it again and again. There was nothing to gain and a lot to lose by telling the truth. The authorities had determined Sempa had held some grudge against Bi-MARP for removing him from the top ten list of treasure hunters, uninviting him to the grand opening and swindling him out of a Carmen Electra standee he cherished. That was the galactically accepted explanation for why he’d attacked the visitor center. The Glott pirate captain had been apprehended while staring at an oddly placed cardboard cutout of 2004’s ‘Best Kiss’ award winner. Electra still wasn’t sure if she had any legal liability when it came to Sempa, especially if someone found her video ‘invitation’ to the grand opening. She’d thought it best not to correct anyone who laid the blame entirely on Sempa’s infamous reputation for being quick to anger and long to hold a grudge.
“What would you tell them?” Electra asked.
“Maybe nobody needs to know about your catty fake invitation to Sempa. Still, the galaxy needs to know about your plan to have Ivy tether us into the cargo hold of the ship when our escape pod was mid-flight,” Treasure said. “That was beyond clever.”
“You mean the part of my shit plan that didn’t work at all?”
Apparently, Ivy had a collision failsafe that Electra hadn’t accounted for when programming the flight behaviors for the rescue. The cloud of escape pods was deemed far too dangerous to fly through by Ivy’s risk-reward algorithms, so the rescue task in her activation queue was lowered in priority until such time as the search field was clear of obstacles. Electra and Treasure had landed on Earth’s moon with everyone else. Their escape pod had tumbled across the dusty surface, bounced off a few other pods, and was then scooped up by a giant, rolling collection bot a while later, and they’d been brought back to a small lunar station in the first batch of refugees. It’d taken hours just to get to the landing zone where there wasn’t a ship waiting for them. Ivy didn’t have a command line for returning to the moon’s secondary station, so she’d flown circles around the moon after the sky was sufficiently clear, looking for an escape pod that had already been emptied and dismantled hours before. They’d had to hire a tether-bot to retrieve the ship, and it hadn’t been cheap, considering the Sol System only had Jun’Tar contractors available, adding even more debt on Electra’s account that she didn’t have gainful employment to repay.
“Yeah, that was kind of a tedious nightmare of inefficiency,” Treasure said. “What about the baseball bat and the cardboard standee and… That doesn’t sound all that heroic, hearing myself say it. You essentially broke a window and moved some furniture.”
“It was a pretty big window, and I broke it even though it was only the second time I’d swung a bat,” Electra said. “The first time didn’t go as well.”
“The stink bomb in the lien enforcement bot was a stroke of evil genius,” Treasure said. “People would get a kick out of that.”
“People would go to prison over that, and those people would be me,” Electra said. “I contaminated a ton of Chamber-owned property using an illegally modified bot that wasn’t mine to begin with. You really were correct back on Transition Island when you said most of my plans succeed in spite of me.”
In a remarkable stroke of dumb luck, Letterman’s automated shell spreading the stink gas around the station had fallen into a vat of experimental decontaminant while it still had some of the secret stench formula in the tanks. Electra didn’t know what the decontaminant was or what stinky aerosol the Station 111 chemists had whipped up, but the two things did not get along at all. A highly energetic and foamy reaction had followed, filling a whole section of the ring with iridescent yellow bubbles. Bi-MARP had ground to a halt until the Jun’Tar could figure out what’d gone wrong, and they weren’t exactly rushing into the disgusting foam to find the source. Why the bubbles hadn�
��t popped over time was still a mystery.
“What does that leave?” Treasure asked.
“The way Dr. Baarqua helped break you and Bort out,” Electra said, “but that wasn’t heroism on my part, and telling people what he did would definitely land him in prison.”
“How are they doing?”
Electra shrugged. “Being boring science-guys together, observing banal human behavior in the colony on Europa… I really only skim messages the Doc sends me. Did you know Bort is also a doctor?”
“Yeah, he’s a gastroenterologist. We had plenty of time to talk about his medical practice in the habitat, so if I never hear about Martian irritable bowel syndrome again, it’ll be too soon,” Treasure said. “Maybe we need to make new stories for me to tell, because my head is too full of incredible things to say about you and my inbox is full of requests for interviews that I’ve been ignoring for weeks. It’s hard, though. Two galaxies at our disposal, the most amazing ship ever to fly around in and all I want to do is spend the day in bed with you.”
“The ship has beds, you know.”
“Problem solved! But seriously, I don’t want to go anywhere.”
“I know what you mean.” Electra walked to the dining room table, sat around the corner from Treasure at one end and wormed her foot into Treasure’s lap in hopes she might caress it. “Do we spend the rest of our lives making love, sleeping late and reminiscing about the good old times back when we were interesting? I feel like humans have a reputation to live down and we’re not going to do it with two thirds of the spacefaring population being homebody hedonists.”
Electra Rex Page 22
