Nighthawks at the Mission: Move Off-World. Make A Killing.

by Forbes West

  “Look, I’m not going to waste your time, give you a little pep talk. That’s not my style. I’m not going to waste your time with anything metaphysical or make-believe hopeful. You can go home, you can go back on the mono, back onto the Queen or maybe the Duke of Lancaster, and you can forget this whole thing—but you will go back with a definite loss and not with a potential profit. But you work with me, you may make enough money in one night to start building a new life. You can wipe away whatever happened here and back there with money. Money isn’t everything, but it is a real tool to get somewhere. That is reality, not fantasy.”

  A couple of tears trail down your face and you speak up. “That’s why I wanted to come out here.” You think of your sister for a moment, the sister you knew, the sister in your dreams as well.

  Guy doesn't say anything for a minute. His face is totally expressionless. His words, put on or not, have an effect on you. The thought of returning back home to your mother and admitting that you are weak and helpless and nothing like your sister makes you want to vomit.

  “So, so how do we do this?” you ask.

  “Well, let’s do a little milk run...” Guy leans back and smiles.

  * * *

  You put on a blue Network windbreaker over your NASA flight suit and wait on the couch until it’s nice and dark outside. You snooze for a little bit, both fascinated and scared about this opportunity that you’re jumping into.

  You take the elevator up to the lobby floor. Stepping out, you see the dozing form of Robert Fuller snoozing away at your desk. Your footfalls clack loudly in the emptiness of the lobby. Walking past him quickly, you go to the front doors. They open from your side, allowing you to go out. The doors lock behind you.

  Past the heavy ornamental wooden doors separating the lobby from the outside world, you cross the driveway of Mission Friendship and stand in the grass field surrounding the entire colony. You blow out a breath. It's a little cold outside, so you see your breath fade away like a puff of smoke. Your instructions were to keep walking, and you do just that.

  A motor whirs in the distance—far off at first. The seven moons light up the entire area around so you figure nothing can just sneak up on you out of nowhere. The motor sound is getting louder but you haven’t seen a car or headlights flash anywhere. The sound is now almost right behind you. You turn, and coming over the top of the Mission is one of those airships you saw back at Solomon’s Bay. This particular airship is maybe eighty feet long, and if it wasn’t for the fact that there are ropes tying this ship to a blimp-like balloon that hovers above it, it would look just as at home on the ocean waves of the seventeenth century as it does floating in the air over the Mission. Two propeller engines are stapled to the back of the ship’s body, pushing the machine along. The main body of the airship looks to be a relic from the great age of sail, except for its wheelhouse, which looks suspiciously like the front half of a flat-nosed bus from back on Earth that has been chopped and slapped onto the back part of the wooden superstructure. It’s descending, the Coleman lanterns tied to its sides pouring direct light onto your face. A couple of cars—two old 1965 Ford Mustangs in rust and primer paint—hang from steel hooks suspended from large girders that project out the side of the airship. Their headlights have been kept on, providing more night-time illumination for the ship.

  At first the tires settle onto the dirt, and then the entire ship itself sinks onto the grass. The words S.B. Crue are painted onto the side along with a logo that seems to be a drawing of a seal’s skull.

  You swallow a bit before you see a familiar face on the deck. It’s Tek, the Ni-Perchta you know from the Benbow. You walk over to the airship, amazed. A slightly greenish glow emanates from the wood. It’s very faint, but it’s there. Tek picks you up telekinetically with his ori-baton and brings you on-board so quickly you barely register that you were just flung through the air. Immediately the ship ascends. In the distance you hear the sound of a European-style police siren.

  Tek has retreated to the wheelhouse and sits behind the wheel, steering the ship to its unknown destination. All lights are off now except for one Coleman lantern hooked to the rope you grab near the ship’s railing. You look over the railing and see the ground retreat away from you. A Mission Security car comes onto the scene a few minutes later.

  Chapter Eleven:

  The Temple of Kern

  Tek says nothing on the way over, not a single thing. Besides the breeze and the whir of the motor, there is no sound but the odd cry of an off-world bird passing near the airship. He seems to be following, from a few thousand feet up, a long black highway covered in reflective yellow Xs that span from shoulder to shoulder.

  You see the city for the first time far in the distance, its lights blinking through the haze and the increasing darkness from the storm clouds overhead. It is obviously a futuristic city of some sort; a futuristic city in absolute ruin.

  There is a burning between your shoulder blades; you are sure it is a warning that you are in someone’s gun sights. Despite the feeling, you keep looking straight ahead and being afraid for your life while trying not to show it. Trusting a stranger is not your nature but something strings you along. A certain unknowable something.

  Twenty-five minutes have passed since Tek picked you up on the front lawn of the Mission. The airship seems to be slowing down. You can see more now: decayed towers that hit the top of the clouds, a heap of broken buildings. A large sign covered with green reflector paint, like something you’d see over any freeway in America, states in English and Ni-Perchta hieroglyphics SUPER SARGASSO-3 (Antediluvian Abandoned City). Another sign says: Warning, Unlicensed Salvers Will Be Prosecuted by Ephors and Mission Security. Watch for Flash Storms AT ALL TIMES. The blue and white Venn diagram of the Network is stamped on one side of the sign.

  You feel a chill as Tek lowers the ship back down to the ground, turning on the lights in all the lanterns and the two hanging Ford Mustangs.

  “You go meet,” he says as he steps out of the wheelhouse. “Goen Meet. Goen Meet.”

  You nod, just about understanding what he said, and step down the side via a metal ladder from the airship’s deck, wondering why you couldn’t have just used this before and not have been thrown on-board by Tek. As you step off the last rung and wipe your hands on your flight suit, you look back at Tek, who has immediately gone back inside the wheelhouse and taken off again, his ship drifting into the night. He yells something unintelligible to you as he motors the airship away.

  “Oh, oh, oh...” you say, and think what the hell. You look to the disappearing airship and then back to the city. There is mostly stone and concrete rubble all around, but there are some actual buildings—little squat houses and pill box-shaped structures. Asphalt streets lead straight into this post-apocalypse. Octopus-like creatures, each covered by one blanket-like wing, stare at you through open places in the buildings, looking evil with dead black and white eyes but doing nothing except watching you pass. Bent street lights emit a ghoulish glow from their ancient bulbs. How they’re still on years after the fall of the Antediluvian civilization is a mystery to you.

  Guy Farson emerges from the shadows. Dressed in a gray and black jumpsuit with elbow and knee pads, a used riot gear helmet with visor, thick black rubber gloves and combat boots, he looks to you like a low-rent Ghostbuster. He raises his helmet’s visor. “Sorry for the cloak and dagger shit but we had to make sure that a couple of Spitfires didn’t come up behind you guys and put a few into the blimp. How’d you like that? A bit different from the usual back on Earth, right? Beats the hell out of driving on the four oh five, am I right?”

  “It’s so magical,” Treena says in an odd, dead pan voice. “Mag-i-cal.” She comes out of one shadow.

  “Uh huh,” you say. “I get a cool helmet too?”

  Winniefreddie, who is carrying a bunch of things in a rucksack, pulls out a crappy, banged up helmet and tosses it to you. She’s emerged from the shadows as well and, like Treena, is dres
sed the same way as Guy. The two of them have yellow boxes strapped to their chests, the size of small microwaves, each with rubber handles and a large dial on top. A viewfinder sticks out of the top of each box.

  “Smells like ass, so I suggest a shower afterwards,” Winniefreddie says, gesturing to the helmet.

  “Welcome to the night side of life, Sarah,” Guy says. “We got a little and beautiful milk run of a mission to go onto—a search and retrieval at the locked up Temple of Kern in the southwest. You got your little book there, do you? Good. This is a good warm up for what we all should be doing together in the future.”

  Watching his surroundings carefully, Guy hands you a cheap Casio watch that you put on without hesitation. Treena hands you what she refers to as a folded up Sub-two thousand nine millimeter semi-automatic rifle. She’s carrying one as well. Winniefreddie has a pump action sawed-off on her, and Guy has what looks like a bolt-action rifle sawed-off and made into a pistol. As you look on in confusion, Treena unfolds the carbine for you and shows you how to take the safety off. You instinctively know how to do this but your nerves make it harder than it should be.

  This frightens you a bit but you bite your lip and just listen carefully. It’s the first time you’ve ever held a gun in your life where you would use it for something other than target practice.

  After strapping the gun across your shoulder, you take the book out of one of the zippered pockets in your flight suit. Treena and Winniefreddie start talking about the weather and flash storms in hushed tones. Each looks fearfully to the sky.

  You can see that a set of pages has become illuminated in a pale green light; you flip to them. They’re the map pages. There is a tiny, red flashing dot on a drawing of the city streets. Everything is labeled in Ni-Perchta hieroglyphics. The symbols seem to float off the page, and when your hand touches the characters, they change to English. The city you are in is next to a giant sea called the Super Sargasso Sea, and the city is next to something called the Sargasso region. As you walk forward a little, you see that the red dot moves just a tiny bit. You walk with the book in hand, and the red dot moves along with you.

  Messing with the page, you find that you can zoom in and out of the map. The red dot is far away from three boxes flashing blue. One box is a city block listed in hieroglyphics only; another of the small blue boxes has no name next to it. The last one has the words Temple of Kern written on it in English.

  “There’s a Temple of Kern listed to the north,” you mention to Guy, who nods and then whistles for Treena and Winniefreddie to stop gabbing and shut up. Without them talking, you hear nothing but a breeze and the sound of something falling off a building—like a piece of masonry that’s chipped off and fallen down onto the street below.

  “Just like that? Just like that I can…” Guy is looking at the book with no recognition.

  “You can’t see anything? Really?”

  Guy shrugs. “Just that neat green light. So it actually says Temple of Kern?”

  You bite your lip. “Yeah. In English. Quite the book I have.”

  “Quite the book,” Guy agrees. “Alright ramblers, let’s get rambling. Where to?”

  You look at the book and point straight ahead. “Forward a city block, then right.”

  Guy jogs up ahead on point, and takes out his ori-baton. You pull yours clumsily, snapping it out.

  “Stay behind me at least a hundred feet. Never bunch up, Sarah. You’ll give potential toe-cutters easier targets and get us all killed and look like an asshole afterwards.”

  Feeling burdened and sweaty with your new gear on, and realizing that Winniefreddie was right about the helmet smelling bad, you walk after him, hand on your small rifle.

  You finally arrive, after what must’ve been a mile, to sit down on an old crumbling stone bench inside some empty temple lobby. Dark statues with knocked-off heads tower above you from every angle, it seems, and a fountain still leaking water stands behind where you sit. A projection of a woman dressed in a thin, almost transparent black cloak, dancing under the seven moons, plays on the ceiling above you; a constant but quiet loop.

  Everyone looks around anxiously.

  “Sarah,” Guy says. “If you see anything at all, the littlest shimmer or distortion, you’ll tell us first thing, okay?”

  You nod.

  “Thank the good Lord you’re here. I didn’t feel like lugging this thing around in dark corridors and peeking into it every five seconds.” Treena sets the yellow microwave box down with a clunk. So does Winniefreddie.

  “What is that?”

  “Schufelt ray. But you are going to be telling us all about the hologram traps, right?” Winniefreddie says. “Riiight?”

  Guy shakes his head. “Pick those up. I still want you to peek into them now and again.”

  “What…what are you…” you ask desperately. “You guys are really throwing me for a loop. What traps?”

  Guy pulls out what looks like a serrated floppy disk and presses a tiny tab that sticks out from the top end of the disk.

  You sit inside that temple for another moment, waiting for the next step, but none of your friends are speaking. They’re just watching the entire area. You start to walk away when the temple comes alive. Five ten-foot tall holograms of women in black cloaks tower above you. They chant something harshly as you stand there. Guy turns to you with a smile on his face.

  “The defense key seems to work,” he says. “The Old Man at Midnight knows his shit.” He looks at the chanting holograms with amusement. “Antediluvians, God bless ‘em. Now, these aren’t the traps we’re talking about, Sarah. We can all see these. ”

  “That hologram on the right looks like a young Demi Moore,” Treena says, popping her bubblegum. “You ever seen Blame it on Rio? That’s a disturbing ass movie with her in it. It’s all about Michael Caine banging his friend’s teenage daughter who tries to kill herself. It’s all sorts of strange. But it's supposed to be a comedy,” she continues, looking you up and down. “Are you trembling?”

  “Oh,” you say. The five tall holograms scream something and then disappear into whatever projector spat them forth. For just a passing moment there is a terrible image—a bearded head, fire flashing from its eyes, a half-man, half-snake creature with viper coils for the lower half of its armored body. The temple becomes empty again and the only sound is the wind passing through the crumbling stone and broken facade. You scream as the others look on in mute fascination at your behavior.

  “Just the Storm King,” Winniefreddie says, breathing heavily. “Jeez-us.”

  “You hear that?” Guy whispers.

  You strain to listen, unsure what he is talking about until you hear the constant scratching sound, like a hundred hands scraping themselves against stone. Your stomach tightens. “What is that?”

  Moments pass. Guy farts loudly. “Do you smell what The Rock is cooking?”

  Treena smiles and stomps the stone floor. The scratching noise stops for a moment, then continues. “Antediluvians—the original people of this city. In a shelter underneath the floor. There’ll be hundreds of those once-human vampire mummies below us. All those thousands-of–years-old creatures straining to get out, having spent centuries feeding on each other and going mad long ago after they ran out of fresh blood.”

  “We’d better get in and out quick in case the shelter seal breaks here. I’d say fifteen minutes,” Guy says. He points to what looks like a set of carved stone doors that has opened in the back wall of the temple. He loads his sawed-off bolt-action gun with a few rounds and then lights a cigarette.

  “Now, Sarah, we are the first to go into the temple, for, well, let’s say a long time. What we need from you as our tetrachromat is to watch for a few, uh, anomalies.”

  “Anomalies?” You furrow your brow and lick your lips, unable to imagine just what he’s talking about. “What anomalies?

  “Examples, uh, any blinking lights, especially purple dots. If we step on one, it’ll send out a bolt of lightnin
g that can kill all of us. If you see a red circle that expands and contracts, that’s a disintegrator, which means exactly what you think it means. It’ll make you disappear if you step into it. If you see shimmering—like that sort of air shimmer you see on metal on hot afternoons—just scream “Shimmer!” and we’ll all stand still. If anyone moves, we are dead, since it’ll rush and burn us alive. It should go away after thirty seconds. There’s also laughing ones—shadows that move in front of you and make a high-pitched laughing sound. You’ll see ‘em before us—they look like red outlines of people on the walls.”

  You breathe heavily, so nervous and scared now because of Guy’s words. “Guy, I don’t know about this.”

  He puts a hand on your shoulder and squeezes. “The girls still have the equipment. And we already turned off the security. This should be a piece of cake and what I said is just a precaution. Take a breath. Breathe deep.”

  You do that, smelling the must and decay of the place really deeply for the first time. “Okay. Okay, then.”

  Treena sneaks up to you and hands you a pill. “Have this. It's a treat,” she says.

  “What is it?” You swallow it with a gulp of water from Winniefreddie’s canteen. “Some ancient super pill? Something to keep nice and alert?”

  Winniefreddie shakes her head. “Adderall. The law student’s little helper. Enjoy!”

  Guy takes out a small cylinder that has a wire connected to a thin box. It chirps a bit. He clips the assembly onto his jumpsuit and leaves the box on. “Geiger counter,” he says. “If it starts banging away—run out.”