“You fucking mook! You nearly gave me a heart attack!” he accused.
Romney continued to snicker and he soon felt himself being shaken violently by his partner in a vindictive rage, but he didn’t care. He had been scanning people’s likeness ever since their arrival into ground zero, especially the paramilitary commanders organizing operations and he had been biding his time to unleash that scare on Eddie for days. It was worth it.
Chapter 22 – Stolen Valor
A series of linked bare cables lined their way across the wreckage of the Sky Command lifeboat and back to the running micro fusion engine of the all-terrain tank parked outside. Push button activation was a hell of a thing that paramilitary always seemed to go for when ordering their vehicles and it may have had something to do with the fact that most of their grunts couldn’t be trusted with such burdening responsibilities as holding onto a set of keys. Romney also had the pleasure of putting on a show in the guise of one of the commanders and got a couple of the investigating mercenaries to set up some ladders for Eddie to work on. Romney was about half as quick with his lying silver tongue than Eddie, but even that was a cut above the average guy. It didn’t hurt either that Romney had actually been a military commander back in the colonial wars, so he slipped into the role with a seamless grace. He knew well enough to bark orders, be outright condescending towards questions asked by his inferiors, and to give as little detail about the outcome of the task at hand as humanly possible.
The end result was some easy access for Eddie to work his magic in privacy from a couple of guys that got suckered into some bitch work and told to take a hike afterwards. Eddie was no engineer, but Romney was good for giving him instructions as he acted as the hands and feet of the operation and it wasn’t long before Eddie got his first terminal blinking to life.
“Hey, hey! Check it out, we’ve got a signal,” Eddie said feeling rather pleased with himself.
“Good,” Romney said approvingly. “Now get me up there and for god’s sake, don’t drop me or there will be hell to pay later.”
“You know… If I left you out here, I doubt anyone would be able to tell your head from the rest of the scrap heap,” Eddie said with a dangerous grin.
“Don’t even joke about that,” Romney said dejectedly. “Whenever we do this, that is a legitimate fear that I have in the back of my mind at all times.”
“Lighten up,” Eddie said dismissively. “You know I wouldn’t do that to you.”
As Romney was jacked in to the terminal and his world flipped upside down, or right side up given that Sky Command was upside down to begin with, he let out a tired sigh. “I know you wouldn’t do it, but a few bullets to the chest may force your unwilling hand, if you catch my drift.”
“Jesus… If I knew I was partnering up with Debbie Downer all those years back, I would have just left you at that bus stop,” Eddie fumed.
Romney let out a laugh. “Maybe you should have. My wife left with the kid out of the blue to go god knows where and then to add insult to injury I’m tasked with babysitting you.”
“Who’s babysitting who here?” Eddie asked with casual smugness. “You were broke and balling your eyes out in the middle of the street when I took your sorry ass in. I gave you my favorite couch to sleep on, a few hot meals, and a job to pull your shit together. It’s your own fault for sticking around for as long as you have, and how is it you repay my generosity? Sass and snide remarks? For shame Romney. For shame.”
“You needed someone to split the rent with,” Romney added.
“H-hey! I had it covered.” Eddie defended.
“Sure, I believe you,” Romney said dryly.
The two continued their passive aggressive banter as they checked the consoles until they finally found a couple that still had some working hard drives. The boring waiting game was the worst part for Eddie, because he had to stand at the top of a ladder with Romney’s metal head in his hands as he went through the archives and sifted through information. By the time Eddie became fidgety, Romney was irritated with him again, but couldn’t find a reason to blame the guy. The data was rushing through him so fast that he nearly skimmed over a bit of information that was devastatingly crucial.
“Whoa…” Romney let out in a breathless tone.
“What?” Eddie asked. “Did you find an old surveillance feed?”
“Not yet, but check this out. It’s a command log.” Romney sent the data to Eddie’s PDA and highlighted the lines that were important.
Eddie’s eyes went wide and a satisfied smiled etched its way across his face. “Well, would you look at that? Major Tom’s name is in the Sky Command registry, but not on the list we received. Isn’t that something?”
“That’s only half of it,” Romney said excitedly. “Look at what else I found.”
Eddie’s PDA vibrated in his hand again and after a few seconds of reading, Eddie let out a small laugh and a whistle. “Holy fucking shit… No joke?”
Romney was so gleeful with what he had found that he forgot that he had no ability to nod excitedly at that moment. “No joke. Major Tom had premium Sky Command clearance. He’s flight crew and the one that put in the codes and used his retinal scans to dismantle the station. Erin Wilco never engaged anything. It was all Major Tom.”
“Son of a bitch…” Eddie said with an unhindered giddiness. “I wonder why that Erin chick would lie about that?”
“Maybe she wasn’t and was simply misled,” Romney said perceptively. “Get a load of this.” He didn’t bother with the email and simply put up a holographic display in front of them. “There is a record of someone within Sky Command going through an override process to release the safety protocols, and since Erin Wilco was the only one left alive in here, I think it’s safe to assume it was her, but there are no inputs from within Sky Command to begin the dismantling process of Sky Base 10. Like, at all. Not even a system check for years and years.”
Eddie furrowed his eyebrows in a questioning nature. “So, what the hell brought this city sized bitch down? I thought you just said that it was all Major Tom. What gives?”
“You’re not listening, Eddie,” Romney scolded. “I said no inputs were made from within. The dismantling process was performed remotely from outside of Sky Command a few moments after the safety systems went down. The signal to dismantle came from outside of the station in the form of a hacked network.”
Eddie looked down at Romney with an even further confused expression. “Wait a damn minute. You just said Major Tom used retinal scan clearance to set the whole thing in motion. How could he have done that from another location if he was in Sky Command with that Erin chick? You heard the latest recording. Her and Tom were pinned down in a firefight until he was pulled away by the gremlins. At that point, the station had already begun the dismantling process. Was she lying about that too?”
“Doubtful,” Romney admitted. “Doctor Singh had her on a truth serum cocktail for days on end. What Misses Wilco said is her dead honest unfiltered memory of events, which leads us to a couple of uncomfortable solutions…”
Eddie followed the train of logic and gave Romney a nod with a grimace. “Either the bitch is completely nuts, or…”
“We’ve got an imposter hiding in the shadows,” Romney finished.
Eddie looked around and checked his watch. They had been going hard for 27 hours straight and he was feeling the fatigue start to wash over him. The constant twilight of Dusk had messed with his perception of time once again and he had to wonder when he had lost track of it. “How’s your battery doing?”
“Better,” Romney said with a sound of relief in his voice. “I’m back up past 50 percent.”
“Good. Last stretch, alright? We’re on the verge of a breakthrough here, I can feel it.” Eddie said with tempered determination.
“Same here,” Romney said with anticipated pride. “Plug me into everything you can find. All we need is a single frame of footage to show us exactly what happened in this control ro
om and we are set.”
When Romney absently sent two emails of the data that they had collected thus far, one to the office computer and the other to Doctor Singh, he never anticipated that Doctor Singh had an easy solution to their issue of Tom’s identity. She read through the email and sipped her coffee calmly as the theory of an imposter made its way onto her screen and she immediately had an idea. She went online and pulled a picture of Major Tom looking formal in his uniform and medals and printed it out. She then took the dusty picture frame on her desk containing her sister’s recent wedding photo and replaced it with the picture of Major Tom. Since Erin was refusing to speak to her, she paged Nurse Hisaishi to her office and gave him a task when he arrived.
“Could you do me a favor, Joe?” she asked.
“Sure, what do you need?” he offered.
She handed Joe the picture and cleared her throat. “I want you to offer this to Misses Wilco and watch her reaction. I only just realized that she has been speaking about Major Tom this whole time, but we have never actually shown her a picture of him. You are more socially delicate than I am and she will believe that this is a gift from the heart if it comes from you.”
“Uhh… Sure,” Joe said awkwardly. “You uhh… you still don’t think she’s of sound mind?”
Doctor Singh shook her head with a calm demeanor. “She is clearly traumatized, but I believe she will make a recovery in that aspect of her health. This new experiment is simply a piece of curiosity needing to be sated on my part.”
“If you say so… You don’t think she’ll freak out again, do you? Her bindings have been removed,” Joe reminded her gently.
“I am sure that you would be able to outrun her if she rolls off the bed again,” Doctor Singh said cruelly. “Take a guard with you if that will make you feel better.”
Joe wasn’t happy about the suggestion and left a little angrier than he had arrived. Doctor Singh had been agitated about something ever since she had removed that grey mold from Erin’s head and he wished that he knew what it was that had put her in that state. The grey mold was shocking enough, but there was something else and Joe knew it. She had clammed up tight and was holding a secret close to her heart and he had to wonder if it was because she knew something he didn’t or if she was protecting the hospital in some strange way. The quarantine had been reinstated a mere day after it had been lifted and there were murmurs of mutiny heading towards the director of the institute. Even Erin’s guards were getting jittery with being stuck in florescent hallways day after day and it may have only been a matter of time before one went into Erin’s room with a loaded gun and a lie about how she had found a way to break out. Those Kyva Corp security guards had an entirely different level of authority and the scary part was that no one was really sure where the boundaries of that authority resided. They were purposefully vague about it as if daring the staff to step out of line and make a move against them whenever tensions were high.
Joe made his way into Erin’s room and found her sitting up on the edge of her bed with the television remote in her hand. She looked more bored than she normally did and by the way she slid her eyes towards him and back at the TV, he could tell that they still weren’t on good terms. She had been betrayed and forced into an action against her will and it was clear that she felt violated on some level.
“I’m not in the mood to answer questions,” Erin said with a cutting edge of hostility.
“I… I just came by to give you something,” Joe said weakly.
“You mean Doctor Singh has you running errands again,” Erin corrected. “I heard her page you a few minutes ago, and suddenly you show up in here. I’m not stupid.”
Joe saw no point in lying and he simply let out a defeated sigh. “Yeah, she did.”
“Well, it’s nice that someone has the balls to speak honestly with me. Fine, what do you have for me?” Erin asked in a bored tone.
Joe handed Erin the picture frame with Major Tom’s photo in it and scratched the back of his head nervously. “We thought you might like to put that on your bedside table.”
Erin stared at the picture and her expression became increasingly furious. “Is this some kind of fucking joke?”
“N-no,” Joe said in slight shock. “We figured it would be nice for you to have a picture of an old friend.”
“Old friend?” Erin asked mockingly. “Don’t fuck with me. Who is this? What does Doctor Singh know? How did you get this picture?”
Joe looked at Erin with a dumbfounded expression. “That’s Major Tom, Erin.”
Erin shook her head as her thumb pressed into the glass and cracked the frame. “No, it fucking isn’t and you know it. Who is this man and how did you get this picture? Just tell me and stop lying. I’m sick of these goddamn games.”
“I’m not lying, Erin,” Joe pleaded. “I can show you on my PDA. That’s Major Tom.”
Joe did an image web search and handed her his PDA. She snatched the thing out of his hand and worked the image viewer as well as going to several web pages to verify Joe’s claim and confusion only continued to roll across her features. She shook her head in denial and looked ready to throw Joe’s PDA against the wall.
“But that’s not him…” she said weakly. “That’s the man that he kept in his wallet.”
“Wait, what?” Joe asked quickly.
“The picture in his wallet,” Erin said with tears in her eyes. “Whenever Tom thought no one was looking, he would pull out a photo from his wallet and look at it as he cried. This isn’t the same photo, but it’s the same man from that picture, I swear it. What the hell is going on here?”
Doctor Singh sat in her office as she watched and listened to the live feed from the hidden camera and she leaned back wondering what it all meant. She quickly ended the recording and sent an email back to Eddie Knox’s personal assistant to let them figure it out and proceeded to go back to work on Erin’s blood disease. The removal of the mold and computer chip from Erin’s head had made extracting the substance possible and though that was a curious thing to happen, it brought her no closer to eradicating it from Erin’s bloodstream. The once benign pathogen had begun to agitate and move within Erin’s system causing minor complications. As far as she could tell, the microchip had been suppressing Erin’s condition in some way and by removing it she may have signed an early death warrant for her patient.
Chapter 23 – Final Impact
Eddie and Romney were staring at the footage that they had managed to dig out of Sky Command’s archives and though Doctor Singh had beaten them to the punch with the testimony from Erin, it was a whole different feeling when it came to viewing the actual footage. The events leading up to Sky Base 10 dismantling were just as Erin said, and they both winced internally when a Kyva Corp security officer sunk a slug into her chest and watched her die. What Erin didn’t see after she blacked out was a man in an enviro suit getting up painfully after being shot himself and pulling a pin on a grenade that he had stashed away in his pocket. The room was cleared with the threat of him loosening his grip upon the release and he was able to seal off Sky Command using nothing more than a bluff. He chucked the grenade off to the side and it never went off, meaning that it was a dud and he already knew it. Up until that point, both Eddie and Romney assumed it was Major Tom in the enviro suit, but as soon as he took off his helmet the game changed.
“That ain’t Tom,” Eddie said.
“That he ain’t,” Romney agreed.
“I’m going to assume that you’re already running a scan on his face,” Eddie said.
“And you would be correct to assume that,” Romney replied. “Reception is bad out here and this footage is shit, so don’t expect any results right away.”
The two continued to watch the footage as the mystery man went to work on Erin to bring her back to the land of the living. The guy was a well versed multi-tasker seeing as he was dialing in a communication number on the radio, while also performing some one-handed trench warfare surgery
on Erin. He made a call on the radio and spoke briefly with someone over the communication network, but then he heard something that gave him pause and fury rushed through him as he threw the headset in frustration.
“Hey Romn…”
“I’ve already gone through the log,” Romney said quickly. “He contacted a channel used by the Riggs Palmer mining company. Nothing specific beyond that though.”
“Well, this just keeps getting better and better,” Eddie said with his wide grin. “I can’t wait to figure out this tangled web of bullshit back at the office.”
The two watched in silence as Erin was brought back to life and events continued to unfold in the way that she had spoken in her ranting nightmare fueled dream, but neither Eddie nor Romney were expecting the gremlins to actually show up. That was the one idea that neither one of them could even consider as real without evidence and suddenly there they were getting an eye full of it. It was as she said it had been; little grey crawlers forcing their way out of the vents and tearing apart the security crew.
“Are those little grey men?” Eddie asked in the hope that he was hallucinating.
“Those are little grey men,” Romney said in mild disbelief.
The two were so transfixed on the video in front of them that Eddie’s eagle eye nearly missed something crucial. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up a second Romney. Did you just see what I saw?”
“I think I missed it,” Romney admitted.
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