by Bloom, A. D.
“Like a book, baby. I'm in. But that slimy little Padre Pedro belongs to her Hi-ness, got it?”
“Sorry, your Hi-ness,” Carlos replied, “We're supposed to snatch the Buddha and kidnap the slimy Padre as well, but hey, you still get to ruin his day.” Turning back to Bonnie and Catherine, Carlos asked, “So, are you In?”
“I don't have much choice.” Catherine said flatly.
“And the ex-operator?” Carlos needed to hear her say it. “Are you in, Bonnie?”
“Yeah, yeah, I'm in. Fuck it, I'm in.” Of course I'm in, she thought. In like Flynn.
Casper was very surprised, indeed, when Carlos turned to him and asked, “So, Casper, you want a job, man?”
-22-
The Grand Exposition of the Great Leap Forward was a celebration of the New Secularism and the Global Secular Alliance that made it all possible. Every major city constructed a fantastic see-through dome out of XinClair, a material like glass but with a more ordered crystal structure that was similar to the XinCryst of the Ziggurats. The domes were constructed from the native soils of each city, fused into a crystal, and each had a slightly different tint. The Baccha Bay City dome was, like Baccha Bay City's Ziggurat, tinted a smoky pink.
For two years, children from the Baccha Bay City school system and the surrounding area toured the Grand Exposition. While marveling at the dome itself, they viewed exhibit after exhibit detailing religion's crimes against humanity through the ages. They learned of the Inquisition. They learned about the Crusades and the Jihads. They even learned about the 17th century, Japanese slaughter of Christians in an exhibit that, in a revisionist redistribution of guilt, split the blame for the massacre of tens of thousands of people between the killers and the victims. Such was the logic of the Global Secular Alliance.
The historical accuracy of the exhibits was second to the primacy of mankind's future, meant to be assured through education of the youth and reeducation of the older generation. Many parents were sent for reeducation after being reported to harbor secret religious fervor by their very own children, who had learned, under the spectacle of the Grand Exposition's dome, how religious thought-crimes against humanity were responsible for every war and every one of mankind's miseries throughout history.
After two years, the entire regional school population had visited the Exposition's pavilions, and the Baccha Bay City dome was sold to the highest bidders. The structure had been remodeled, expanded with basement levels, and six months later, it opened as Baccha Bay City's biggest sex club.
Power Of Pleasure, or POP, as it was known, was a favorite with Baccha Bay City's tourists and residents alike. They filled the Power Of Pleasure club seven days and nights a week, in a nearly non-stop orgy of stimulant and erection-pill-fueled self-worship.
Within two years, it fell into the hands of organized crime. Within another two years, the mob's power had waned in the face of the religious insurgents who branched out into the criminal operations that had kept organized crime fat and, therefore, powerful.
Now, it was secretly owned and operated by the Morituri who, by their espoused doctrine, despised the POP club and all it stood for, but saw quite clearly how the income stream POP generated enabled all manner of weapons procurements, bribes, and expensive operations directed against the Global Secular Alliance.
Deep underground, past the nearly million-square-yard mix of stages, dance floors, and orgy parks, past the specialized environments for play on the second level down, and behind the strange, primordial, neutral-buoyancy-lube grotto, were a series of white walled corridors, pump rooms, control systems, and maintenance areas. There were storerooms, too. Here, the alien jungle gyms of the orgy parks that rotated weekly were kept in a disassembled forest of aluminum armatured, rubber coated, dildo-studded parts. In one of these storerooms, strapped to a wheel that, every time he was struck, rotated him from upright to inverted, and back to upright again, was four-foot-tall Alvin D. Ellis. Nobody here called him Alvin. They called him Freak, Abomination, and sometimes the Buddha.
Padre Pedro stopped the rotation of the wheel on which Alvin rotated, and the terrorist priest confessed to him, “Do understand that I believe this setting demeans us both. We only remain here because you continue to refuse to give me the answers to the simple questions I ask you. I had hoped that you would show us both mercy by telling me what I need to know quickly so that we could both be free of this wicked palace of sin.” Padre Pedro held an absurdly large black rubber phallus in his right hand and a cigarette in his left. His Morituri bodyguard filmed the interrogation with a high-quality holographic imager so that it could be viewed later in three dimensions by his superior, Friar William.
“I told you already,” Alvin said. “There is no way I could know what you asked me.” Padre Pedro drew his right arm back across his body and delivered a backhanded dildo slap upside Alvin's head that literally made Alvin spin. Alvin thought he was in some sort of twisted, sado-religious porno production as he spun around twice on the vertical wheel's frictionless bearings, growing nauseated.
“Names, you know names, and I need to know them, too. Tell me the names of those Morituri whom...no, wait... who... whom... who... aaargh... who you have corrupted, infected with the blasphemous espousals of your anti-faith. Tell me names, little Buddha.” He slapped Alvin with the black rubber phallus, and Alvin spun again.
While the world spun, Alvin thought about the circus he'd never worked in and tried not to hear Padre Pedro's words. “The Secularists... at least they believe in greed. You... You believe in Nothing. Nothing! Your non-belief spreads like a disease of the soul.” The wheel began to slow in its rotation, and Padre Pedro stopped it, rotated Alvin to a position where his oversized head was once again on top of his undersized body, and asked him again, “Who! Tell me which of my people you have infected with your disease! Who now carries the anti-faith you spread? Tell me and we can both be free of this terrible place.”
“I... I don't know... I don't,” Alvin said, while both his tormentor, the lights, and the room spun.
“Lying Buddha!” Padre Pedro drew his arm back and struck at the Buddha with the black rubber phallus once more.
-23-
Casper, Bonnie, Hi-5, Catherine, and the Dark were all crammed into the second van with their gear and guns. It was crowded.
The Dark stole three Vietnamese delivery vans, and they all smelled like food, reminding Casper that he was still hungry. Bonnie had eaten the second half of his noodles. She'd just taken them quietly from his hands, without asking, and he couldn't stop thinking about it. To assume that he wouldn't mind was to assume an intimacy between them. Casper couldn't see it quite that clearly in his head, and though he didn't have a name for it, he felt the intimacy. He sat next to Bonnie, in the back of the stolen delivery van, wearing borrowed body-armor, and he was still thinking about it. He was afraid to look at her, but it seemed like his chest felt broader, and he was sure that if he stood up he'd be taller.
Otis misread the expression on Casper's face, and he said, “Dude, check out Casper, man. Hey, Casper, you look like you feel all badass in that spider-wool n' kevlar combo.”
“Yeah, man,” Singh interjected, “but even if the bullets bounce off, he's so skinny he'll get knocked into next week!”
“Is that true?” Casper asked Woojay, who wasn't any broader than Casper. “Nah, man don't worry,” Woojay advised, “they prolly got armor-piercing shit in their clips.”
“Everything goes the way it's supposed to, then we shouldn't have to even shoot anyone,” Otis said. “Shooting people is Fritz's 'n Irving's job. We're the snatch team.” Otis laughed at the name he'd given them. “Hehe, snatch team.” Bonnie rolled her eyes.
She leaned forward and looked through the windshield at the delivery van in front of them. Bonnie wondered if the jokes were better up there. That van was driven by Carlos, and carried only Fritz and Irving, two independent contractors the Dark had hired for the job at Club POP.
; Fritz and Irving were walking tanks. These days kevlar was commonplace and so were armor piercing rounds, but the bulky, full-body, helmeted urban-assault suits that Fritz and Irving wore were anything but common. They were custom made and constituted a Restricted Mod that was felonious to craft, sell, or own. Each of the suits had been designed and handmade by the duo and they'd tested their design with every combination of ammunition and firearm they could get their ballistics-loving hands on.
Impermeability was the obvious design goal, but distribution of the bone crushing force delivered by contemporary firearms was equally important. Their triple layers of kevlar had been augmented with overlapping metal plates, molded with a honeycomb pattern that, unlike their ceramic predecessors, did not shatter to distribute the foot-poundage delivered by an impacting projectile, but distributed the force to their neighboring plates, allowing the wearer to withstand multiple ballistic impacts in the same area. The overlapping, triangular plates had rounded corners, and they varied in size depending on where they were placed. In the areas of the central body mass, they were nearly the size of a man's open hand, and in areas of greater curvature, such as the sides of the body and the arms, they were much smaller.
The helmet covered the entire head and was made of a similar materials but the outer layers were covered a high-density iron shell. The helmet alone weighed almost fifty pounds and was not supported by the wearer's head, but rested on the shoulders. The helmet didn't turn, but inside there was enough room for the wearer to turn his head and peer out a set of thin slits cut 270 degrees around the helmet. These were protected by two inches of bullet-resistant plastic.
Altogether, the full-body assault suits weighed over one hundred and sixty pounds, and it took a large and powerful man to even don one and lumber slowly into combat. This made the ability of the suit to withstand multiple ballistic impacts especially important because if a man wearing one was taking incoming rounds, there was almost no possibility of evasive movement. The best option for a wearer under fire was not to evade, but to eliminate the threat.
Among the other, numerous operational disadvantages of the suits was the fact that, due to bulky, somewhat inflexible protection over the arms, it was difficult to employ a weapon designed to be aimed and fired using both hands, so Fritz and Irving each used a box fed machine gun that had been modified to become a heavy caliber machine pistol by removing most of the barrel. The addition of custom forearm braces helped to control recoil and support the weight, but accuracy suffered. Since the suits were only intended for use in a close-quarters setting, Fritz and Irving considered sending a fusillade of rapid-fire, heavy caliber rounds into a two-yard-wide circle at thirty yards to be accurate enough fire to eliminate most threats.
Fritz and Irving each kept a conventional machine pistol holstered across the chest for left-handed use, and they kept a sack of grenades over their shoulders, with the grenade pins attached to the interior of the bag for easy, one-handed arming and deployment.
It cost a lot to hire them, but if you needed close-quarters badasses, then you couldn't do much better.
In the back of Carlos's stolen delivery van the six-foot-four and six-foot-five Fritz and Irving sat in nylon web harnesses that suspended them from the roof, and the ceiling sagged in the areas where Cheese had pierced the roof to bolt the harnesses in place. Carlos was glad the front door of the Power Of Pleasure club had a ramp leading up to the entrance instead of stairs because the van was carrying two walking tanks whose combined weight was well over eleven hundred pounds. He drove slowly and took turns even slower because Carlos doubted the van would stop easily, but he thought he could probably flip it on its side without too much trouble.
Shelby drove the third van and brought up the rear of the formation by herself. It only held Shelby and a concussion bomb she'd built. The bomb was intended to produce what, by explosives standards, would be a mild, non-incendiary shock wave and flash. The non-incendiary part was the trickiest, not because of the flash producing elements, but because if the shockwave was big enough and moved fast enough, then it would compress the air in the blast zone to the point where it ignited.
The van's single, explosive passenger sat on the floor, held safely in-place by nylon webbing that connected to the van's sides from eight different angles. Shelby wished she'd got to ride in the van with everyone else, but there was just no way she could ride with them; this was her baby in the back. If one of her babies was going to the party, then Shelby insisted on driving it there herself.
-24-
The Colonel in charge of the primary operations center hated bringing Oskar Delvaux bad news. Despite Delvaux's tendency to micromanage and his unusual penchant for walking his own holographic projection through the Colonel's men, it was better when Delvaux stayed holo-present in the ops center. Then nobody had to tell him bad news because he was there to hear it as it developed.
The Colonel hit a large, OLED button in the Ops center that served as the equivalent of a doorbell for holographic projections. Delvaux's ghost, fizzling with occasional bursts of Gaussian noise up and down his transparent body, appeared in front of the Colonel, and the Colonel's projection appeared in Delvaux's office. “Sir, I've been made aware of some unusual activity that has some very... unsettling implications for the security of our current operations.”
Delvaux was calmly staring out the XinCryst wall at a smoky, pink-tinted vision of the Bay. The last of the sun's rays glinted gold-red, and they reflected back off the shallow waves that the wind generated and blew across the water. Delvaux watched the long, blackish, green shadow cast from the Ziggurat's towering, blocky mass grow longer across the shimmering bay. Without turning around, he asked, “What have you discovered, Colonel?”
The Colonel wished Delvaux would turn around because, in the ops center, the Director's projection was only a yard in front of him with his back to the Colonel, and speaking to the back of a hologram made the Colonel look like an ass in front of his staff.
He walked around Delvaux's phantasm, and even though Delvaux was obviously not looking at the Colonel, at least they were face to face. “Sir the communications techs were having some trouble with the pulse laser array used for secure line-of-sight coms. It's basically a giant pulse laser array mounted on the roo-”
Delvaux cut the Colonel off, “Yes, Colonel, I am aware of what it is. What's the problem with it?”
“There seemed to be some major issues with the software earlier today. The PL-6500 Secure Coms System appeared to be malfunctioning and wasn't responding to control requests from the techs.”
“Exactly what was the nature of the malfunction, Colonel?”
“Well, Sir, the pulse laser was actually firing within expected operational parameters, but it seemed to be firing randomly into the clouds above the city for a period of just under two minutes. It wouldn't respond, and the techs were about to cut power, but then the system just shut down and rebooted. They've been running diagnostics all day, and there isn't anything wrong with the system.”
“If there's nothing wrong, then tell me why we're having this conversation, Colonel.”
“One of the techs dug deep into the subsystems that run the actual servos used to move the laser array about on its mountings. From the pattern of overwrite in their random access buffers, he's quite sure the PL-6500 array wasn't malfunctioning at any point but was hijacked. He's quite convinced that someone, somehow, and we don't yet know how... someone took control of it, Sir. During the two minutes we were locked out, some unknown person hijacked the pulse laser array and used it to send a message.”
“Fascinating!” Delvaux spun around to look at the Colonels projection as he exclaimed, and in the ops center below Delvaux's projection turned to face away from the actual Colonel. The Colonel hated that, and he wondered if Delvaux did it on purpose. “Tell me more, Colonel, tell me more,” Delvaux's excited voice exhorted.
The Colonel readjusted his position and said, “Our tech was pretty tenacious, Sir
. He stripped the memory modules out of the servo controller computers and actually pulled rank on a forensics tech to make him examine them under an electron microscope. He hoped to reconstruct the pattern of the pulses and discover what the message was. The pulses meant nothing in standard PL coms protocols, but where it fired during those two minutes did tell him something, Sir.”
“And?” Delvaux said impatiently.
“Assuming the hijacker of the pulse laser was projecting onto something at about the height of the local cloud cover at the time, our tech was able to reconstruct a sequence of three characters he thinks the laser was projecting like a message.”
“Well, Colonel, don't keep me in suspense!”
“If I may, Sir,” the Colonel in the ops center tapped his own data-wand and sent information directly to the variable scale, holographic model of Baccha Bay City located in Delvaux's office. Delvaux eagerly watched as the Colonel shrank the model city and rewound time until a few minutes after noon, when a gray, broken cloud cover hung overhead.
“Sir, if you will observe this area here, please,” the Colonel directed Delvaux's eye to a projection of a cloud hanging over the Downtown District. The cloud was fifteen feet above the Director's head. As he looked up at it, he saw that it stood out quite distinctly from the others around it because it had writing on it.
Characters blinked there in succession for Delvaux to read, “3... 8... 8...”
Delvaux, without saying another word, removed a single, paper-wrapped chocolate from his pocket and unwrapped it. In the guarded palm of his cupped hand, he wrote on the wrapper with a ballpoint pen. Delvaux folded the wrapper around the chocolate again, saying only, “Excellent work, Colonel. Please enjoy this chocolate in private. It is for you and no one else, and my guards will bring it to you right away.”
