Romeo Delta 2

by Taylor Rikkinen

  When her heart was restarted with a sudden electric shock from a pair of defibrillators, she gasped painfully and coughed as air filled her lungs once more. The thing in her head also came back to life and for the first time since she woke up after her twenty days of dormant slumber aboard Sky Base 10, she was finally able to pinpoint the little bastard. Doctor Singh was working over her with a large bruise on her cheek while Joe was standing across from her and aiding in any way he could. Erin wanted to tell Doctor Singh where it was, but her words were stifled. The thing in her head did not want anyone else to know that it was there and so it silenced her. It wanted her dead so it could command her corpse just as it had been trying for months. She attempted to lift her hand to point where it was, but she was restrained once more by a strong grip holding her in place and she began to struggle.

  “Erin, don’t!” Joe snapped at her. “They have orders to shoot you if you break your restraints again.”

  Erin moved her lips confusedly, but once again nothing came out and her mouth suddenly felt too dry to speak. It was repressing her again and trying to stay hidden, but she knew where the little bastard was hiding and she was finally the one who was in complete control. She could not speak its name, but she could give instructions.

  “Joe…” she moaned desperately. “I found it. Help me get it out. Help me, please help me.”

  Joe’s attention was grasped and he looked unsure. “We are helping you, Erin. You need to trust us. You’re going to be ok, I promise.”

  Erin shook her head and the sound of a gun being armed was heard when she made the motion. She tried to ignore it and looked at Joe with pleading eyes. “No, it’s inside of me. It’s killing me. It’s trying to trick you. Scan me. Scan my head. Open it up and rip the fucker out,” she begged with a slurred tone.

  “She’s hallucinating,” Doctor Singh said dismissively. “She thinks she’s still aboard Sky Base 10. Keep her down and do not let her move.”

  “No, I’m here. I know I’m here. The Milo Medical Institute. Just let me point,” Erin begged with tears in her eyes. “I can’t say it, but I can show you where it is. Please let me point to it. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to end up like Dale and all the others. Just let me point and I promise to be silent.”

  Joe felt a tugging at his heart as he listened to Erin beg and cry and he gave Doctor Singh a questioning look. “Doc… maybe we could just let her… you know… show us. I’ll hold her wrist the whole time. I won’t let go.”

  Doctor Singh looked at Erin’s erratic vitals with a calculating eye and then at Joe. “Fine, do it, but be careful. She possesses an excellent right hook.”

  Joe nodded and silently undid the restraint on Erin’s wrist and replaced it with his hand. She gave him a silent thanks and trailed her fingers along her scalp until she found the place that had been nagging her for months ever since she had woken up after the meltdown. There was a tiny bump on the back of her head that was covered by a patch of hair that had not been singed in the fiery wreckage of Sky Base 10. She gently held Joe’s hand and guided his finger to the point that she had found.

  “Right there. It’s been hiding there this whole time,” she said in a whispered fear.

  Joe touched the tiny bump and it was mildly resistant to the pressure he applied. “I know I’m not a doctor, but even I can tell that this is just a small head cyst. Maybe even an ingrown hair or something.”

  Erin shook her head with a terrified expression and squeezed his hand tightly. “No, you’re wrong. Cut it out, please cut it out. It’s trying to kill me.”

  Joe slid his eyes up to Doctor Singh with a questioning look and she let out an irritated sigh as she examined what had been found. “Misses Wilco, Nurse Hisaishi is correct. I’ve seen hundreds of these in the past and it is nothing to concern yourself with. You are working yourself up over nothing, now focus on staying awake. Your heart has stopped twice in the last ten minutes and I need you to be calm.”

  “I’ll be calm when you fucking cut it out,” Erin said with a seething desperation. “I don’t need an anesthetic or even a disinfectant. Just cut this goddamn thing out of my head!”

  A silence fell around the sealed room as Doctor Singh and Joe stared at each other. Joe’s eyes eventually rolled down to Doctor Singh’s clipboard and he chewed his lip nervously.

  “Have you concluded your psych evaluation, doc?” Joe asked with a worried expression.

  Doctor Singh considered it carefully for a few moments and then gazed into Erin’s soul with an unearthly penetrating stare. “Yes… I have deemed her legally sane by definition of the law. She has passed the base requirements of the evaluation and now has the right to further medical treatment. We now have the legal authority to seek a cure for her condition.”

  Joe let out a sigh of relief. “Can we start by extracting that cyst? Her heart rate needs to come down and I don’t think it would be a good idea to pump her full of anymore drugs for a while.”

  Doctor Singh nodded at him stiffly. “I agree. I will begin as soon as her restraints are reapplied. Though the patient is legally sane, she is still a convict and there are regulations stifling us. Please keep that in mind as we proceed forward.”

  “Understood,” Joe said in a professional tone.

  The two went to work on calming Erin’s nerves as Doctor Singh prepared a numbing agent and blade while Joe did everything in his power to make Erin comfortable within her restraints. Erin had tears in her eyes the whole time she was waiting and it felt as though her heart was skipping beats in a willful attempt to frighten her and send her towards the edge of hysteria. She held it all together and nearly sighed in relief when she felt the slight numb pressure of Doctor Singh’s knife slit a razor line across her flesh. The usual vile muck of filth poured out of the bump on Erin’s head and the built-up pressure released a certain tension that Erin felt, but the deeper that Doctor Singh went, the stranger it became. At first it was normal with a mixture of blood and pus coming out in droves, but soon there was something black coming out and Doctor Singh’s eyes went wide. The more she squeezed out, the more it dawned on her that it was the grey dust that Erin had described in her drug induced ramblings over and over again.

  “Joe, I want you to leave this room and maintain the quarantine,” Doctor Singh ordered with a steady glare at the wet grey dust coming out of Erin’s head.

  Joe was momentarily dumbfounded before he found his words. “What is it?”

  Doctor Singh slid her eyes up towards Joe and gave him a dark look. “Erin wasn’t lying. She has mold growing into her skull.”

  “Holy shit…” he let out breathlessly.

  “Indeed,” Doctor Singh agreed. “Bring me all of my scanning equipment and computer and leave it in the airlock. I want nobody entering or leaving this room after you return, do I make myself clear?”

  Joe nodded with a full understanding of what Doctor Singh was asking him. “Crystal. Should we scan ourselves as well?”

  “To be safe, yes,” she said stiffly. “And remember, Joe… Do not cause alarm or panic. A mutiny now would be cataclysmically disastrous and I believe that we are both aware of who the first victim will be if that happens.”

  Joe looked at a terrified Erin with sympathy and he squeezed her hand gently to let her know that he was on her side. “I will not let that happen.”

  Chapter 21 – Scandroid

  Eddie Knox and Romney were on day three of their expedition into the fragmented archives of Sky Base 10 and though there were little nuggets of information unveiled, they were coming up nearly empty handed. Erin wasn’t lying at all about the would-be Napoleons taking over the station and becoming petty despots in their own rights. Romney had compiled a side by side comparison of one section that went from a gentle residential suburb to a hideously cruel concentration camp of tribal warfare. Eddie’s gut was telling him that something didn’t seem right while he watched the sped-up footage. He could understand tensions becoming high, but many sections se
emed to devolve within days of the nuclear meltdown and what was stranger was that no two sections appeared to devolve in the same way. In the audio recordings, Erin Wilco said that it had taken a few months for her section to finally self-destruct and if that was true, then she was luckier than she realized.

  Day four came around and the two were thinking about packing it in due to Romney’s life support being woefully low on energy, but the two had a bit of luck when they found a friendly handyman in the working camp that jury rigged an extra battery for Romney. That good fortune alone bought them a bit more time before Romney would be forced to go into a low power mode, but it was looking like a waste of time. Sky Base 10 was too large and expansive to do a rush data collecting job on and they were running out of time. Doctor Singh had been giving them small updates here and there, but by the nature of the messages it was clear that she was holding something back seeing as she had redacted certain observations within her own photographed notes. The last update came with a message about the quarantine having to be reinstated after a brief lifting and that Doctor Singh had dug something troubling out of Erin’s head.

  “Sweet mother of fuck,” Eddie said with a wide smile. “Are you reading what I’m reading.”

  “Yes,” Romney said peevishly. “I am the one streaming it to your PDA.”

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist,” Eddie said equally as peevishly. “I’m just having a hard time believing what I’m reading. This is some next level tinfoil hat conspiracy shit right here. It makes me glad we’ve been reduced to the tabloids, otherwise no one would pick this story up.”

  “I agree,” Romney said. “Finding that grey mold burrowing into Misses Wilco’s brain was one thing, but adding a computer chip implant into the mix… If this wasn’t from Doctor Singh and didn’t have a video of her extracting the damn thing, then I’d laugh this off in a second. What do you think this all means?”

  “The hell if I know,” Eddie admitted. “But what I do know is that some chick with some weird grey fungus growing in her brain next to a surgically implanted Kyva Corp microchip, brought down an entire space station with a man that doesn’t seem to exist. It makes me want to run straight to the Milo Institute and have you scan that chip to see what it does.”

  “Jesus Eddie,” Romney said indignantly. “Just because I have a CPU processor these days doesn’t mean that you get to stick any mystery hardware you want into me. That thing could give me the android equivalent of AIDS or Ebola.”

  “Well, what’s the robot equivalent of a condom?” Eddie asked.

  Romney thought about it for a second and he seemed somewhat stumped. “I guess a firewall or something…”

  “Do you have a firewall?” Eddie asked.

  “Well… Yeah, it would be idiotic to not have a…”

  “Then what’s the problem?” Eddie asked with another irritating question.

  “Consent,” Romney said in slow agitation.

  “Well, that took an unexpected turn,” Eddie admitted. “Now I feel like a scumbag for suggesting it.”

  “As you should,” Romney said stiffly. “Mysterious computer chips and android mind rape aside, I’ve finished collecting the data from this port. We’ve hit another dead end. I can’t find Erin Wilco, Major Tom, or the little grey gremlins anywhere in this footage, but it’s so broken and most of these places are too far away from where the action took place that it comes as no real surprise. We will need to get inside Misses Wilco’s residential section somehow or else…”

  Eddie waited for a few seconds to hear the end of Romney’s sentence, but when it never came he gave Romney’s head a shake. “Hey, did you fall asleep again?”

  “Gah?!” Romney shouted in fury. “Yes, I did, but it doesn’t mean that you have to shake me. I hate it when you do that.”

  “Well learn to sleep on a normal schedule then,” Eddie said coldly. “Just because you can read upwards of 200 books a night, doesn’t mean you should. You’re overworking your brain again by keeping it overclocked all night and getting mental fatigue. It always sneaks up on you like that and I’d hate for it to happen in the middle of a crisis.”

  “But I get bored,” Romney said with a sulk. “I only need an hour or two of sleep every day and besides, you snore like a ripsaw when you sleep and though I can disable my hearing, I cannot disable the reverberating vibrations you send through my chassis.”

  Eddie glared down at his partner. “Why do I get the feeling that there is something deeper to your bitchiness?”

  Romney narrowed his large solitary eye on Eddie with a condescending annoyance. “You try being detached from your limbs for days on end and see how well you fair. Every time we do this I’m constantly reminded of how bad I feel for quadriplegics.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Those poor souls,” Eddie said with clear disinterest. “What were you saying before? We can’t get into that Erin chick’s old residential block due to it being a giant ball of molten steel, so what else do we got?”

  “Well…” Romney chimed with tempered hesitance. “I know it’s heavily guarded and all, but Sky Command was essentially build to be a life boat as well as a command center. From what I read in the initial reports, Sky Command was smashed, but not entirely ruined. Apparently, Misses Wilco managed to strap herself into one of the seats before impact and that’s one of the reasons she survived the crash. If you can get past security and hook me into a line, I think we can watch the final scene for ourselves. It’ll be risky though…”

  Eddie let his wide smile weave across his face once more and he looked down at Romney with a smug expression. “What’s life without a little risk?”

  Romney’s red cycloptic eye became half lidded and he let out an audible sigh. “Just try to remember that I’m here as well and that I really really don’t want to be caught.”

  “Really really?” Eddie asked mockingly.

  “Very really,” Romney replied warningly.

  The two dodged their way down ruined back alleys of twisted steel walls, all while keeping a look out for any mercenaries with guns. The general mood of the cleanup teams as well as the hired security forces was lax at best. Eddie remembered wanting in on a piece of the Sky Base 10 scoop a month previously when it happened, but his and Romney’s original run out into the dust fields had been met with abject hostility where government forces had easily beaten them to the scene and suppressed any form of media getting too close to the action. It was fairly typical procedure in the event of a disaster and Eddie didn’t think much of it at the time, but ever since Doctor Singh had hired them to look into things to legitimize Erin’s story, they had been hitting unforeseen roadblocks at nearly every step of the investigation. Luckily, time was on Eddie and Romney’s side and after a month of the mercenaries working ground zero, those hired guns wanted out of that stinking pit badly and had gotten lazy. Most of them were veterans from the colonial wars and those jittery jarheads in armor had learned to distrust any form of signed contracts coming from Kyva Corp.

  There was a general perimeter set up around Sky Command and even a heavily armored all terrain tank parked outside, but no one was around and from the looks of it, Sky Command had become nothing more than a parking lot and loading area for paramilitary forces. Eddie hopped over the weak fence with Romney hidden in the bottom of his bag and proceeded to use a tactic that had only served him well as an investigative journalist and retired detective. He walked boldly towards the ramp leading into a savagely blown out hole in the side of Sky Command and acted like he owned the place. He was glad to be wearing his breathing mask because even after a month of airing out, Sky Command still smelled like a burning cesspit full of decaying bodies. The place was a mess and it took Eddie a few moments to realize that he was walking on the ceiling of Sky Command and that all the control consoles were above him.

  “Son of a bitch…” Eddie sighed in annoyance. His PDA vibrated in his pocket and he didn’t even bother looking at the message. “Yeah, it’s clear. Just keep your voice
down, this place has kind of an echo effect in here.”

  “Will do,” Romney said in a delicate tone. “What’s the matter?”

  “See for yourself,” Eddie said dully.

  Eddie showed Romney around Sky Command and the twisted burned state it was in. He noticed the upside-down nature of the command center immediately and began scanning for ports and wireless signals. Everything was dead and the power had long since run out, meaning that the two were shit out of luck once more.

  “Damnit!” Eddie snapped furiously. “It’s one brick wall after another.”

  “Indeed,” Romney agreed. “However, there may be a solution.”

  “Oh?”

  “How much do you want to bet that one of those vehicles outside has some jumper cables?” Romney asked slyly.

  Eddie looked around the command center skeptically. “You really think a tank can power this place?”

  “Oh, heavens no,” Romney clarified. “But it would easily be able to power individual stations. Plus… I’m kind of due for another recharge. We’ll be hitting that scary braindead moment soon if I don’t get some juice.”

  “Right…” Eddie said moodily. “I’m just worried that we’re going to get caught trying to steal a tank. Something tells me there ain’t no laws within this dome and nobody is going to miss a couple of stiffs.”

  “I already have a plan for that,” Romney said smugly. “Truth be told I was kind of waiting for my moment to shine.”

  Eddie sighed. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t surprise me.”

  “What are you doing here?!” a gruff military voice shouted over Eddie’s shoulder.

  Eddie panicked and turned around to see one of the meanest, most intimidating mercenary commanders he had ever come face to face with and to top it off, the guy had a battle rifle pointed at him. Eddie backed away with one hand in the air and the other holding Romney tightly. Eddie began working his silver tongue fast, but after a few moments of being dogged by the commander, he flickered out of existence and Romney was left giggling like an idiot under Eddie’s arm. A few more moments passed before Eddie realized that he had just been chased by one of Romney’s holographic projections and the indignation swiftly over took him.