by J. S. Morin
“Magic,” she replied as if it were the most natural answer in the world. “None of it’s real, you know. The grass is imaginary. The lake is a dream. The row of cottages is empty storage space in my mind. Because that’s where you are. This is my domain.”
“You’re… we’re… I’m dreaming?” Carter asked, trying to piece the woman’s story together.
“No. I am,” the wizard replied. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced, though the name of this place might have been a clue. I am wizardess Esper Theresa Richelieu, apprentice of Mordecai The Brown. You are my prisoner now, and I can do anything I want with you.”
“Anything?” Carter ventured cautiously. He still remembered the feel of her body pressing against his. If she wanted to make him her plaything, there were worse fates for a man in his position. Getting flushed out an airlock was at the top of that list.
“Anything,” Esper confirmed cheerily.
The grassy landscape vanished.
Carter experienced an instant of terror as the universe around him ceased existing, only to find himself on solid ground again before he could draw breath to scream. But where he found himself, he screamed anyway.
The terrain around them was dull gray except where it was split by the orange glow of lava fissures. Boulders and outcroppings of rock made the area feel claustrophobic and threatening like the planet was preparing to crush Carter in its grip.
And yet, there was Esper, strolling around in that petticoat dress with her parasol like nothing was wrong.
“Where—?”
“Still my mind,” Esper said with a tight smile. “Don’t like it?”
Carter shook his head. Despite the wizard’s contention that this place was all in her imagination, he couldn’t trust her on that. The broker covered his nose and mouth with the sleeve of his shirt in case the air was toxic.
“We can fix that,” Esper said.
Again, the world around them disappeared. This time, no planet came back. Instead, Carter found himself in a metal pod with a single window. The stars outside tumbled by at a dizzying rate.
As the bile in his stomach began to rise, Carter saw an asteroid flash past. Then another.
Esper had thrown him into an asteroid field.
“Get me out of here!” Carter shouted, his voice muffled in the confined space. There wasn’t even room to extend his arms overhead.
A speaker panel in the wall blared with the wizard’s voice. “I’m willing to send you back to the real world if you tell me how to get into that computer of yours.”
Carter snarled at the speaker. “So that’s your game, is it? Ramsey sent you here to play games with my mind? Well, tell your captain that I’m not going to break. No matter what you do to me. No matter what you threaten me with.”
There was a rapping at the window. Carter tore his attention from berating the speaker to see Esper floating outside his escape pod, starscape still whizzing past behind her.
“Really?” she asked. “That’s a shame. I guess I’m just not scary enough.”
The escape pod vanished.
Carter found himself weak-kneed but standing once again. Esper sidled up beside him, taking Carter by the arm and hoisting him upright.
She wasn’t wearing the dress anymore, which had been the lone highlight of this psychedelic trip. Instead, she wore plain slacks and a button-down pink shirt with a logo on the back that read “Holy Bowly,” accompanied by a picture of a bowling ball scattering pins.
“What is this place?” Carter asked, putting the pieces together even before Esper replied.
The lighting was a disquieting fluorescent. The floors slick and polished wood. Long alleys of an even glossier wood were bordered by gutters and ended in stands of bowling pins.
“It’s a bowling alley,” Esper replied.
They weren’t alone. Half the lanes were occupied by groups gathered at the near end as competitors took turns rolling balls down the lane at their targets. Carter had never been to a bowling alley, but he’d seen them in holovids set in Early Data Era Earth.
“What are we doing here?” Carter asked as he allowed Esper to tow him along. It seemed safer than defying her. There was room to breathe here, at least, even if the air had a curious odor of floor polish and antiseptic spray.
His steps slid, and Carter looked down to notice that he was wearing shoes striped an ugly tri-tone of red, orange, and blue, all faded to barely recognizable. The soles had worn smooth as he imagined the wizard’s skin beneath those clothes of hers.
“We’re here to meet someone,” Esper replied. “Him.”
As she pointed, a scruffy older fellow looked up and gave them a cockeyed scowl. He was dressed like Esper in a bowling shirt and slacks, with a similar pair of shoes to the ones Carter discovered on his own feet.
“What’s that one doing here?” the scruffy bowler demanded. Something gruff and harsh in that voice set the hair on Carter’s neck rising.
“Howie Carter, I’d like you to meet Mordecai The Brown,” Esper said as they approached.
Carter had his hand extended as Esper began the introduction but shied away as he discovered whose hand he was about to shake.
Mort looked down at his hand. “What? I don’t even need to piss in this place. Not like I didn’t wash up afterward.”
Carter tried to back away, but Esper blocked his path. Throwing her arms around him, the prettier wizard pressed him forward until he was within arm’s reach of the deadly renegade.
“I… I heard you were dead,” Carter replied with a meek smile. “Nice to see I was mistaken.”
“Oh, you’re not,” Esper insisted. “He’s a dust pile in my quarters. This is a copy left over in my mind.”
“Am not,” Mort retorted indignantly. “And why in blazes did you bring him down here? I’m just getting in a little practice before tonight’s tourney.”
“Well, you seemed to think it would be simple to get answers out of him,” Esper said, shoving Carter forward toward the lion’s maw. “Take your best shot.”
“What’ve you tried so far?” Mort asked. “I imagine you’ve already tried setting him on fire.”
“Nope,” Esper replied lightly.
Despite Mort’s insistence that he didn’t need to piss in this place, something warm and wet trickled down Carter’s pant leg.
“Disemboweling?”
Carter clutched at his suddenly churning guts.
“Nope,” Esper replied.
Mort scratched at the stubbly beard on his face. “What about a giant rolling pin, cracking bones one by one, from toes to collarbone? That’d get him to talk.”
Carter felt faint.
“Ew and no,” Esper shot back. “Why would I even think of something so horrible?”
Mort shrugged. “Gotta get him to talk somehow. Leave him with me a few years, and I’ll get him to incriminate his own wife and kids.”
“I’m… I’m… I’m…” Carter stammered. “Not married.”
“Shame,” Mort said with a sigh. “Going to have to work extra hard on this one then.”
Carter had heard enough. With no other option presenting itself, he ran.
The polished floor and tractionless shoes had led to a few slippery steps before the broker got up a head of steam. Patrons of the imaginary bowling alley cursed and jostled him as he forced his way through the gatherings at the end of each alley.
There was a counter with a bored-looking lady standing before a warren of shoes for rent and a miniature flatvid arcade. Carter flew past, not pausing at the soft drink vending machine or the hardcoin claw game for fishing stuffed animals.
Carter had only one goal in his sights—a pair of double doors with old-timey push bars just ahead. The sign above them read “Exit” in backlit red letters.
Hitting the push bar with both hands as he ran full speed, Carter burst through to freedom.
# # #
The world shattered. Literally.
All around Cart
er, pieces of the illusionary dream world rained like broken glass until nothing remained but a featureless void.
Carter woke with a gasp. Esper had one hand snarled in his hair and the other lifting his chin. The wizard’s staring eyes were vacant.
As Carter tore himself free of her grasp, Esper groaned and clutched a hand to the side of her head.
Now was his chance.
Howie Carter didn’t think of himself as the sort of guy to hit a lady. In addition to his distaste for personally involving himself in violence, it just seemed unsportsmanlike. But this Esper woman, for all her softness and curves, was a wizard. She hardly counted as a lady anymore.
Carter’s fist came up and connected with Esper’s jaw. There was a clack as her teeth closed with the impact, and her head snapped back. The wizard slouched against the wall, and as she slid down to the floor, the interior console for the airlock was accessible—and no longer locked out.
Esper slumped limply out of the airlock as the door opened. Flexing a hand that felt practically broken from the impact, he admired his handiwork. He’d never knocked anyone out with one punch before.
“Would been fun if you’d’ve played it straight, the way you came in,” he muttered to her limp form.
With a sudden pang of conscience, he knelt and put a pair of fingers to the side of her throat. From down close, he noticed the blood on her lips. Either she bit her cheek or her tongue from the impact. Couldn’t say which. But there was a pulse.
Esper was surprisingly lightweight. He rolled her onto her side to bleed onto the deckplates. Better than her drowning in her own blood—though, with a twinge of common sense, he wondered why he cared. After all, he was the prisoner. She got what she had coming.
But there wasn’t much time. Sooner or later, someone would come down here, either to check on him, to look for her, or just because this was still the cargo bay of a cargo ship.
“Weapon… weapon… weapon,” he murmured to himself as he scoured the cargo bay.
The door above opened, and Carter ducked beneath the stairs. The metal, grated stair treads offered no cover and scant protection. But who looks down through the stairs they walk every day of their life?
“Esper?” a woman’s voice called out. It was one of the raiders who kidnapped him. “Esper? Oh, my God!”
The dark-skinned techie with the datalens hammered down the stairs, steel ringing with each step. She rushed to Esper’s side.
That was when Carter saw it. As the techie bent over Esper’s limp body, the back of her shirt lifted, revealing a pocket-sized blaster pistol tucked into the waistband of her pants.
Tiptoeing forward, Carter managed to come up behind the female crewman unawares. In one quick motion, he drew the blaster pistol and pressed it against the techie’s back.
“What the—?”
In a panic at the thought that she might scream for help, Carter fired. The woman’s spine muffled the muzzle report. The next words from her came out as a pained gasp. Jamming the pistol against the base of her skull, Carter looked away and fired again.
He had to move.
Ramsey wasn’t going to have any mercy now. If Carter got captured again, he was going for a swim out that airlock.
Mindful of the noisy stairs, Carter crept up toward the main compartments of the ship.
The crew lounge was quiet. There was a mini kitchen and holovid theater—cushy digs for a freighter. But no one was around. One of the side doors to the lounge was open, and Carter ducked inside for a look.
Cables and electronics ran everywhere. This must have been the techie’s quarters. Chained to the bed by data cables like some sort of computerized pleasure slave was Carter’s entire professional life.
“Come to papa,” he cooed to the computer core.
Tucking the blaster pistol into the back of his own pants—and noting the guilty warmth of the muzzle—he began unplugging the cables running into every port.
With the computer under one arm and the blaster in hand again, Carter headed for the cockpit.
“What the hell!” Ramsey exclaimed as he rose from the pilot’s seat. The brigand pilot reached for his blaster, a clunky but well-worn personal protection weapon.
Carter had to admire both the quick reflexes and the instinct to fight. But the wisdom of the man rumored to be one of the greatest liars in the galaxy? Not so impressed.
Even a desk pilot like Carter could squeeze a trigger before the fastest bio-enhanced gunslinger could draw his weapon and bring it to bear. Fast as Ramsey was, he wasn’t that fast.
The captain of the Mobius collapsed mutely into his own co-pilot’s chair.
“Expected better out of you, Ramsey,” Carter muttered to the body.
It only took a few taps to get the ship’s crew roster. Aside from the unconscious wizard, there was only that overstuffed rhino to deal with—it was something called a stuunji.
Carter pried the higher-powered blaster from Ramsey’s hand and turned the power output to max. It’d blow its power cell in just a few shots now, but that’d be enough to punch a few holes in the vital organs of that rhino. As a bonus, that massive thing would never sneak up on him.
Looking for long-range comms, all Carter could find were open-channel systems. “What the hell, Ramsey? How’d you stay in business this long, broadcasting in the open?”
It wasn’t as if it took long to set up proper encryption. It was just that this Stone Age pile of bolts wasn’t trustworthy. Carter entered the DNA-keyed access code for his computer core, having entered it so many times that it was more muscle reflex than conscious memory.
As the system came online, he started connecting cables to the ship’s systems. Suddenly, a wave of dizziness washed over the broker.
“What’s… happening… to me?”
# # #
Carter awoke again, back in the airlock.
He blinked away the spinning sensation and brought up a hand to remove something heavy from his throat.
The broker’s vision came into focus, and Esper was there, centimeters away. The obstruction to his breathing was her forearm pressed under his chin, forcing him against the airlock wall.
Carter gasped for breath to beg, to apologize, to explain. All that came out was a croak.
With a shove that nearly collapsed his windpipe, the wizard in the sweaty t-shirt pushed herself back and out of the airlock. As Carter coughed and tried to catch his breath, she retrieved her pink sweatshirt from the airlock floor.
None of this was making sense. The techie’s body was gone from the cargo bay floor. There was no blood on Esper’s lips or any puddle of it on the floor beside where he’d killed the techie.
“I don’t,” Carter said between gasps. “Understand.”
“Thanks for the access code,” Esper said coldly. “I almost went easy on you after you were such a gentleman about knocking me out. After that… well, let’s just say if we didn’t need your DNA for that access code, I might be tempted to press the wrong button on purpose.”
Esper scanned the rows of buttons. When she hit the one with the two arrows that pointed together, some part of her wished that it was the button to crush the contents of the airlock.
Instead, the door closed, sealing Howie Carter inside.
# # #
Esper knocked.
Yomin’s door had been closed since Carl chased her in there. As best Esper knew, Archie was inside with her—he only left to watch holovids, as far as she could tell.
“Busy,” came the reply to Esper’s knock.
“Too busy to input an access code?” Esper asked through the door.
Seconds later, the heavy steel door swung out. “What did you say?” Yomin demanded.
“I was wondering if you were enjoying your gizmo adventure, or whether you’d rather just have the answer.”
Mort stood aside, watching with arms crossed. He gave Esper a grunt and a satisfied nod.
“You’re not messing with me?” Yomin asked, narrowing
the eye that wasn’t obscured behind a datalens. “This legit? How’d you get him to tell you?”
Yomin looked Esper up and down, possibly searching for evidence of clothes donned in haste, or maybe for signs of blood. Either way, Esper felt the blush in her cheeks.
“Probably some kind of magic,” Esper replied with feigned haughtiness.
Yomin backed away a step. “You… took the access code out of his mind?”
Esper bit her lip. “No… I don’t think that’s the right way to put it. I tricked him into thinking he was free and watched him poke it into the computer.”
“Poke it?” Yomin asked, glancing side to side before leaning close. “Poke it how?”
“With his finger,” Esper said, gracing Yomin with a scowl. “Do you want to know it or not?”
“Anything to get Captain Grumpy off my ass,” Yomin replied, stepping aside to let Esper into her quarters.
Archie raised a hand and fluttered his fingers in a wave as Esper entered. “She’s been insufferable, you know. Her and Carl—it’s like the pot calling the kettle Tin-Face.”
“Who’s ever heard of a tin pot?” Yomin snapped. “You drag out these archaic phrases that no one’s said since Shakespeare.”
Archie shrugged as if Yomin had made his point for him.
“He mentioned a DNA lock,” Esper warned. “Not sure if he has to put his finger on the reader directly, or—”
“I’d cut off that weasel’s hand if I had to,” Yomin cut in. “But we’ve already collected a blood sample while he was out cold. Skip to the access code.”
“Get ready,” Esper said, taking a deep breath.
Yomin nodded and held Carter’s computer core at the ready.
In a tiny office inside Esperville, a prim and proper young lady in a frilly pink crinoline dress waited with parchment in hand. By the light of the morning sun over the lake, she read off the list of letters, numbers, and bizarre characters that she’d watched the dream-world Carter input.
Esper merely repeated what the dream Esper spoke in her head.
Yomin kept up, hesitating when Esper described non-standard characters that she suspected weren’t quick to find. But that was technology—not her problem.
At the end of the list, Yomin deflated. “Phew. What kind of paranoid bastard requires a 128-key cipher from the unlimited character set just to open his text comms? I’d swallow my SlyTek by the third day working with this thing.”
