The Proteus Bridge

by M. D. Cooper

  Humanity doing what it does, it also meant that Cruithne quickly became a center for grey market activity between Mars and Terra: quasi-legal operations, shady research and, ultimately, piracy. Cruithne’s ring, clinging to the five-kilometer asteroid like a junkyard fused into something semi-organized, was home to thousands of various organizations, all with competing interests and desires. It was a hell of a place to grow up, especially without a family and a support system.

  Mama Chala had always been more interested in using him than creating a productive member of Cruithne’s twisted society. Or maybe that was the point.

  Growing up on Cruithne, the crowds, the people, the smells and gestures, had created something like a sensor implant that constantly monitored Ngoba’s world. He could tell immediately when a place or a situation was about to go bad, or someone didn’t belong, or somebody wanted something from him.

  At least, he thought he could. Most of the time, Ngoba understood what was going on around him. He picked up the lines connecting people with hunger or hate or both.

  Riggs didn’t have that sense. He could rewire a drone or hack a credit terminal, but he barely knew when someone was looking his way. Mama Chala, she knew how to make others do what she wanted, knew how to twist and turn them so they felt guilty for disappointing her. This might have been the best Cruithne power of all. That kind of power was what started crews, grew syndicates, and reached off-station.

  But Mama Chala had no ambition beyond controlling the kids in the Squat.

  She wanted sweets and cuddles and little knick-knacks that made her laugh. And she wanted her rent, so she could buy those things when her minions let her down.

  Ngoba frowned to himself, thinking about Mama Chala and her doughy fingers. It was a mixed feeling that he didn’t always know how to define for himself. He loved her and hated her all at the same time. The debate made him feel weak, and he hated that.

  He had lost sight of blue-haired Slarva, so he started pushing his way toward the platform, a good twenty meters away. The crowd was beginning to thin, breaking into clots of conversation and hot arguments as those who had been there for the actual bout debated the various fighters and their abilities. Mobile bartenders like Tithi moved among the groups, pouring shots. Beer sloshed and splashed on the floor. Drunks bent over to retch on people’s shoes.

  Right next to Ngoba, a thin woman in a shipsuit jabbed a man in the paunch, and he doubled-over, gasping. A circle immediately formed for the fight.

  Ngoba couldn’t stick around to watch. He wove between more knots of people, reaching the two chairs where the players sat with the wired controllers, now locked in a square cage at the base of the platform so they could be seen but not touched. Several admirers were studying the black plastic contraptions. Even from a distance, Ngoba could see how worn they were, the plastic as shiny as seashell or agate. Between the controllers sat a cup with ‘TEARS’ scrawled on it in what might have been blood.

  As he stood with the fanboys cooing over the controllers, Ngoba glanced around until he found Slarva at the edge of the platform. The tall man’s red cape still swirled around his ankles. He was talking to a group of vid producers with glowing eye implants. Most of them were nodding along with whatever Slarva was saying, but the one standing closest to him kept trying to put his hand in the promoter’s face.

  Slarva slapped the hand away like a fly, shouting, “Naughty! Naughty!”

  Ngoba eased closer along the edge of the raised platform—which, up close, was just painted concrete—until he could hear what the group was saying.

  Slarva had his hand over his heart. “There is no way a hacker could infiltrate our system,” he said with the conviction of a preacher. “The console is legit, my friends. Legit. It came from Earth on the pleasure yacht of a corporate enthusiast, bought at auction in a factory-sealed package salvaged from a department store that spent four hundred years underground, until it was unearthed during a building project in Jerhattan.”

  “Where in Jerhattan?” the closest interviewer demanded, eyes bright like a lemur’s.

  “New Jersey, I believe,” Slarva said, brushing the front of his suit. “We’ve shared the serial number, my friends. The manufacturer still exists! I believe they build guidance systems now, but maybe one of you enterprising reporters can track down their inter-company records to verify our console?” He raised a finger. “Now that would be an interesting story.”

  Slarva cleared his throat and directed his voice to the crowd behind the interviewers. “These unnecessary inquiries into the validity of the console only weaken what’s most important about Crash!”

  He waved a hand at the crowd, and a passing drunk shouted, “Piss off!”

  Slarva smiled like these were his people. “We’re here to create an experience, my friends. A battle larger than life, a slice of history, drama, spectacle, heartache. I don’t condone or endorse illegal betting of any kind.”

  “You keep saying that,” an interviewer asked. “Betting isn’t illegal on Cruithne.”

  “We all know that,” Slarva continued in his preacher’s voice. “But it brings with it the stink of cheating. You think I’m manipulating Crash for some crass purpose like profit, and I’m telling you that I’m here for the spirit of the game, to make something worthwhile for the people of Cruithne, who have had so much taken from them.”

  An interviewer laughed. He waved a dismissing hand and turned to disappear in the crowd. The others soon followed, except for the lemur-looking man, who kept trying to jab Slarva in the chest.

  “That’s exactly it!” the interviewer said, his voice getting higher. “You say you love Crash, and my viewers live for Crash; we made you what you are. And you’re selling us out to the bookies. We can’t trust anything that happens on the platform.”

  With his audience disappearing, Slarva’s patience immediately seemed to dissipate. He looked at the remaining interviewer like he was some form of giant cockroach.

  “Look,” he said. “It’s a closed system, in a shielded cage, running ancient software with no modern connectivity. We both know this. If you’re going to fake up views with this non-existent drama, why not focus on the players? I’ve got some great ones this time around. Hax is a basket case. Cherry can’t keep her hands off geriatric men. Charles—” Slarva shuddered. “Well, I don’t even want to know what that guy’s into. I bring in these characters for you, weirdos who can actually fight, and all you want to do is make up conspiracy theories about the game.”

  Realizing a few drunks from the crowd had stopped to listen, Slarva raised his voice. “The game is just a backdrop, just a stage, my friends. The players bring the drama. You all bring the passion! It’s Crash!”

  “How do you respond to rumors that your console has been hacked, and the outcome of every bout is determined by the Rack Thirteen syndicate?”

  Slarva’s face went feral. “We’re done here.” He grabbed the interviewer by the collar and lifted him off his feet. “You’d better watch yourself,” he spat.

  Several onlookers shouted, “Whoo!” and someone threw a mug half-full of beer toward the platform. Foam splattered Slarva’s cape.

  The promoter dropped the gasping interviewer and pushed his way into the crowd. People closed around the interviewer, stumbling into each other. Avoiding the puddle of beer on the floor, Ngoba wove around the drunks and followed Slarva.

  It wasn’t difficult to hang back and watch the tall, blue-haired man make his way through the crowd until he reached a set of double doors at the edge of the hangar. There he nodded to two guards on either side of the entry, and one opened the door for him.

  The door didn’t appear to be locked. Ngoba looked around quickly for something to distract the thugs, whose heads looked like bowling balls, sunk halfway into their thick shoulders. To his left, he spotted a mobile bartender serving beer out of both wrists to a pair of stumbling drunks that looked like freight handlers and waved plastic tankards.

  He slid up besi
de the drunks just as their mugs were overflowing and grabbed their handles. Ngoba spun with the cups in his hands, sloshing beer, as all three of the people now behind him started yelling in surprise.

  Without waiting, he launched the tankards in the air, aimed at the heads of the two thugs. A yellow arc of beer followed each cup. He flashed obscene gestures at the drunks, waited for them to swing at him, then dashed for the door.

  The move didn’t work perfectly. Only one mug hit its target, dumping foam and beer all over the left thug’s scrunched face. The other mug banged against the door, but the beer following it fell across the guard’s face and chest.

  Ngoba glanced over his shoulder to ensure that the two drunks were on his heels, then broke for the space between the guards. Darting between the spluttering thugs, he got his hand on the door latch, opened it and slipped inside just as the drunks hit the guards. He then pulled the door closed and slid to one side, quickly getting a look around.

  Two thuds hit the wall behind him, followed by shouts and a clear, “You wot, mate?”

  He’d expected a bare corridor, but found a small warehouse stacked with crates. Slarva’s beer-soaked cape was draped over a nearby metal box. Ngoba didn’t see the tall man anywhere. Thumps on the door behind him made it sound like the guards were still occupied, but Ngoba didn’t want to wait for them to follow.

  He quickly moved through the room, only recognizing a few of the origin markers on the crates. He reached the door on the other side of the room and put his ear against it. Hearing nothing, he eased it open and peeked through the crack to find an empty hallway. He slipped through the door.

  Jogging down the hallway, he checked for maintenance hatches along the way, spotting two in the ceiling. This looked like some old freighter bulkhead bolted onto the side of Night Park. It was wide enough to accommodate mining equipment and might have dated from the first excavations on the asteroid. He’d heard stories that Night Park had actually been a staging area for the massive boring machines used to turn Cruithne into Swiss cheese. Otherwise, there was no reason to make a space that big on a station.

  These were the kinds of details Riggs noticed. Ngoba hoped his friend was doing all right. He supposed Riggs would be pissed at him later, but they needed the credit.

  Thinking about the credit led him back to Fug and his claims of already having hacked the console system. No, not the console system. The controllers themselves. Ngoba was no hacker, but he supposed something as simple as gumming up one of the buttons to send its information milliseconds slower than an opponent’s might be enough to throw a match. As long as the players didn’t notice.

  At the end of the tunnel was a heavy door that looked at first like it might open on vacuum. Ngoba checked its lock mechanism, tried to orient himself on where he was in relation to Night Park and the edge of the ring, then tried the lock. The door creaked open, and through the gap came the sounds of a bar, muffled through a curtain.

  Ngoba pushed the door open further, revealing a heavy curtain of blood red material. Live music and the low murmurs of conversation came through the fabric, mixed with laughter and clinking glasses. He eased closer to the divider, then slid it carefully to the side until he could see the room beyond.

  It was a bar he didn’t recognize. Obviously a high-class place, with a red cloth on every small circular table, similar curtains on most walls, and what looked like a real wood bar with a huge mirror. Filament lights twinkled from the dark ceiling, and a three-piece band played on a small stage opposite the bar.

  The place was packed, every table crowded with people leaning in close to each other. At first, it looked like everyone was having the deepest conversation of their lives, until a woman moved her head, and Ngoba caught sight of the flower in the middle of the table. The woman threw her head back, her face a mask of ecstasy, her cheeks yellow-red with pollen dust.

  The flower, with its orchid-like petals and long, spaghetti shaped stamens, reached for each face thrust close to it and dusted them with pollen.

  Laughter and high moans floated through the air. On the other side of the moaning woman, Ngoba spotted Slarva inhaling deeply from the flower in front of him, mouth already drooping in a goofy smile.

  “What the hell is this?” Ngoba asked out loud.

  “Bree-ki,” a strange voice squawked next to him.

  Ngoba nearly fell back through the door. He froze, heart pounding, and looked in the direction of the sound.

  On the other side of the curtain, nearly hidden, was a tall cage with a ruffled grey parrot inside. The black-beaked bird was nearly as long as his forearm, with bright, yellow-ringed eyes. Its tail looked like it had been dipped in crimson paint.

  “What did you say?” Ngoba asked, wondering abruptly if the parrot was a sophisticated security drone.

  He’d probably be dead already if that was the case.

  “The plant is bree-ki,” the parrot squawked again. “Bree-ki.”

  “Briki,” Ngoba repeated, recognizing the name. “It’s a drug den, then.” He gave the parrot an appreciative nod.

  “I like apples,” the parrot said, its rough voice rising and falling almost syllable by syllable. It stretched one wing at a time and puffed out its chest feathers.

  “Apples, huh,” Ngoba said quietly. “What’s your name?”

  “Crash,” the parrot said. “I’m Crash.”

  “Who keeps you in that cage, Crash?”

  “Slarva,” the parrot said in a sort of growl. The parrot jerked with what looked like anger at Slarva’s name, then calmed and scratched his neck with a claw, saying, “Pretty Crash.”

  “You sure are, my friend.”

  Crash rotated his head in jerky motions, watching Ngoba with one yellow eye, then the other. He raised his head to click his beak.

  “Have any apples?” he asked. “I like apples.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  Ngoba sat back on his heels so he wouldn’t break the silhouette of the standing cage, and settled in to watch the room. After a few minutes, he glanced up to find the parrot watching, working his beak on the closest metal bar. When Crash saw Ngoba notice him, the parrot bobbed his head up and down like he was pleased.

  “What’s your name?” Crash asked. “What’s your name?”

  “I know what you’re going to do,” Ngoba said. “You’re going to go around saying my name to all your buddies out in the park, and I’ll never hear the end of it. Literally.”

  Crash tilted his head to the side so his beak was nearly horizontal. “What’s your name?” he asked again. “Can we be—friends?”

  “Damn!” a deep-voiced man shouted out in the room.

  Ngoba looked up to see someone falling out of their chair, face covered in red streaks like he had been bawling blood.

  The sound didn’t faze Crash. “Please?” he begged and hiccupped a squawk.

  “Fine,” Ngoba said, knowing he was going to regret it later. “My name’s Ngoba.”

  Crash bobbed his grey head with what looked like joy.

  Ngoba spent nearly two hours hiding behind the curtain, watching the groups at the tables laugh themselves into stupors before collapsing with their heads in their arms. Slarva rubbed noses with the various people at his table before moving to another table with a group that appeared slightly less intoxicated. Beside the flowers, his hair looked like a spiky collection of their undulating stamens. Eventually, Ngoba and the bartender were the only two people awake in the club. It didn’t look like Slarva was going to go anywhere. He’d already passed up invitations from two people to go back to their quarters.

  “Good night, parrot,” he whispered.

  “Ngoba!” Crash squawked. “Good night, Ngoba!”

  The bartender glanced their direction, and Ngoba froze. He eased his hand toward the TSF pistol.

  The man stared at Crash for a few minutes before shaking his head. “I suppose you’re starving over there, aren’t you, Loudmouth?”

  “I like apples!�
� Crash crooned.

  Ngoba relaxed. He wiped his sweaty hands on his pants and straightened painfully.

  “Goodnight, Ngoba,” the parrot squawked again, with an unnerving amount of intelligence in its eyes.

  “Sweet dreams, Crash,” he whispered.

  “Sweet dreams! Sweet dreams! Crash has sweet dreams!”

  As the bartender dug in a cabinet for what Ngoba assumed was food for Crash, he reached for the hidden door and turned its lock. Easing the door open with the barest creak, he slipped back into the corridor, pulled the door closed, and then ran like hell. He was about to piss his pants.

  GETTING SQUAT

  STELLAR DATE: 03.22.2956 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: TSF Storage Area

  REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol

  Ngoba hesitated before opening the old bulkhead door that led down to the TSS Squat. He hadn’t had the energy to go looking for Riggs, and figured he was either still holed-up with that generous bartender, Tithi, or already come home to face Mama Chala’s wrath.

  If Riggs had already taken the brunt of her anger over the botched warehouse job, then Ngoba could slip in and probably get to bed with minimal slaps to the back of his head. If Riggs hadn’t come home yet, well, he was in for it.

  He flexed his hand, getting his game plan together. He could tell her the missile had backfired and the overpressure had blown the external airlock on the cargo container. That would mostly match what had actually happened. She had insisted he take the missile launcher, an idea that seemed pretty good at the time. Now that he had actually used a missile launcher inside a space station, even a wreck like Cruithne, he understood that had been a terrible idea.

  Maybe he could tell the story in a funny way? Get her laughing about what a joke it had been to fire a TSF missile so close to vacuum, how they had nearly blown themselves out into the space. Once he had her rolling with belly laughs like she did, he could slide into the information about the container being empty—then keep his distance to avoid her meaty arms as she inevitably tried to grab him for one of her tough love cuddles.